Channel Split Convolutional Neural Network for Single Image Super-Resolution (CSISR)

Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have achieved remarkable performance for the task of Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR); however these models set huge amount of computational complexity to achieve such performance. Hence, computationally efficient and low memory models are needed for SISR if such models are deployed on resources with low-computational devices (for instance, Mobile). We propose a novel approach referred to as Channel Split Convolutional Neural Network for Single Image Super-Resolution (CSISR). The proposed work aims to create a light-weight but efficient network to enhance SR performance. It employs a unique channel splitting alongside channel reduction blocks, leading to more effectiveness with a less computational burden to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy. Further, we suggest a new strategy for Channel Attention (CA) using a combination of global average and standard deviation pooling accompanied by conventional non-linear mapping layers to improve the learning. The performance of the proposed network is validated on various benchmark testing datasets for the SISR task, which shows its superiority over other existing methods.