Balanced Spatial Feature Distillation and Pyramid Attention Network for Lightweight Image Super-resolution

Recently, the attention mechanism became the key issue for image super-resolution (SR) because it has the ability to extract different features from the image according to the used attention type. Despite the great success of attention-based methods, the conflict among features of different attention types can affect the SR performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient single image SR model called balanced spatial feature distillation and pyramid attention (BSPAN). The idea of BSPAN is based on the trade-off among the extracted features of different attention types. Also, we propose a balanced spatial feature dis-tillation block (BSFDB) as the backbone of BSPAN so that the network can effectively advantage from the different attention features. Two different attention types, namely spatial attention residual feature dis-tillation (SARFD) and classical attention (CA) are considered in the BSFDB to achieve a leveling between them based on the contents of the low-resolution feature map using the balancing attention block. The BSFDB block is designed to improve the SR performance and has lightweight parameters and low com-putation complexity. Moreover, to further improve the SR performance, the pyramid attention is intro-duced in the middle of the BSPAN network for extracting long-range features at a variety of locations and scales. Evaluation based on five benchmark datasets, we concluded that the balancing between fea-tures of a variety of attention types can effectively improve the SR performance. So, the proposed BSPAN model achieves significant enhancements in comparison with the state-of-the-art and superior visual quality and reconstruction accuracy.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.