Lightweight single-image super-resolution via multi-scale feature fusion CNN and multiple attention block.

In recent years, single-image super-resolution (SISR) has acquired tremendous progress with the development of deep learning. However, the majority of SISR methods based on deep learning focus on building more complex networks, which inevitably lead to the problems of computational and memory costs. Thus, these methods may fail to be applied in real-world scenarios. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a lightweight convolution network combined with transformer for SISR named as MMSR. Specifically, an efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) based on multi-scale feature fusion is designed for local feature extraction, which is called MFF-CNN. In addition, we propose a simple and efficient multiple attention block (MAB) to further utilize the context information in features. MAB incorporates channel attention and transformer to help network obtain similar features at a long-term dependence, making full use of global information to further refine texture details. Finally, this paper provides comprehensive results for different settings of the entire network. Experimental results on common used datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better performances at the 2 × , 3 × and 4 × scales than other state-of-the-art lightweight methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]