Conditional generative adversarial network with densely-connected residual learning for single image super-resolution

Recently, generative adversarial network (GAN) has been widely employed in single image super-resolution (SISR), achieving favorably good perceptual effects. However, the SR outputs generated by GAN still have some fictitious details, which are quite different from the ground-truth images, resulting in a low PSNR value. In this paper, we leverage the ground-truth high-resolution (HR) image as a useful guide to learn an effective conditional GAN (CGAN) for SISR. Among it, we design the generator network via residual learning, which introduces dense connections to the residual blocks to effectively fuse low and high-level features across different layers. Extensive evaluations show that our proposed SR method performs much better than state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and visual perception.