Lightweight Single Image Super-Resolution by Channel Split Residual Convolution

In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks have made significant progress in the research of single image super-resolution. However, it is difficult to be applied in practical computing terminals or embedded devices due to a large number of parameters and computational effort. To balance these problems, we propose CSRNet, a lightweight neural network based on channel split residual learning structure, to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution images. Lightweight refers to designing a neural network with fewer parameters and a simplified structure for lower memory consumption and faster inference speed. At the same time, it is ensured that the performance of recovering high-resolution images is not degraded. In CSRNet, we reduce the parameters and computation by channel split residual learning. Simultaneously, we propose a double-upsampling network structure to improve the performance of the lightweight super-resolution network and make it easy to train. Finally, we propose a new evaluation metric for the lightweight approaches named 100 FPS. Experiments show that our proposed CSRNet not only speeds up the inference of the neural network and reduces memory consumption, but also performs well on single image super-resolution.