PFAN: progressive feature aggregation network for lightweight image super-resolution

Image super-resolution (SR) has recently gained traction in various fields, including remote sensing, biomedicine, and video surveillance. Nonetheless, the majority of advancements in SR have been achieved by scaling the architecture of convolutional neural networks, which inevitably increases computational complexity. In addition, most existing SR models struggle to effectively capture high-frequency information, resulting in overly smooth reconstructed images. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight Progressive Feature Aggregation Network (PFAN), which leverages Progressive Feature Aggregation Block to enhance different features through a progressive strategy. Specifically, we propose a Key Information Perception Module for capturing high-frequency details from cross-spatial-channel dimension to recover edge features. Besides, we design a Local Feature Enhancement Module, which effectively combines multi-scale convolutions for local feature extraction and Transformer for long-range dependencies modeling. Through the progressive fusion of rich edge details and texture features, our PFAN successfully achieves better reconstruction performance. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that PFAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods and strikes a better balance across SR performance, parameters, and computational complexity. Code can be available at https://github.com/handsomeyxk/PFAN.