Internal Learning for Image Super-Resolution by Adaptive Feature Transform

Recent years have witnessed the great success of image super-resolution based on deep learning. However, it is hard to adapt a well-trained deep model for a specific image for further improvement. Since the internal repetition of patterns is widely observed in visual entities, internal self-similarity is expected to help improve image super-resolution. In this paper, we focus on exploiting a complementary relation between external and internal example-based super-resolution methods. Specifically, we first develop a basic network learning external prior from large scale training data and then learn the internal prior from the given low-resolution image for task adaptation. By simply embedding a few additional layers into a pre-trained deep neural network, the image-adaptive super-resolution method exploits the internal prior for a specific image, and the external prior from a well-trained super-resolution model. We achieve 0.18 dB PSNR improvements over the basic network’s results on standard datasets. Extensive experiments under image super-resolution tasks demonstrate that the proposed method is flexible and can be integrated with lightweight networks. The proposed method boosts the performance for images with repetitive structures, and it improves the accuracy of the reconstructed image of the lightweight model.