Deep learning-based image super-resolution considering quantitative and perceptual quality

Recently, it has been shown that in super-resolution, there exists a tradeoff relationship between the quantitative and perceptual quality of super-resolved images, which correspond to the similarity to the ground-truth images and the naturalness, respectively. In this paper, we propose a novel super-resolution method that can improve the perceptual quality of the upscaled images while preserving the conventional quantitative performance. The proposed method employs a deep network for multi-pass upscaling in company with a discriminator network and two qualitative score predictor networks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a good balance of the quantitative and perceptual quality, showing more satisfactory results than existing methods. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.