GUN: Gradual Upsampling Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

In this paper, an efficient super-resolution (SR) method based on deep convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed, namely gradual upsampling network (GUN). Recent CNN-based SR methods often preliminarily magnify the low-resolution (LR) input to high-resolution (HR) input and then reconstruct the HR input, or directly reconstruct the LR input and then recover the HR result at the last layer. The proposed GUN utilizes a gradual process instead of these two commonly used frameworks. The GUN consists of an input layer, multiple upsampling and convolutional layers, and an output layer. By means of the gradual process, the proposed network can simplify the direct SR problem to multistep easier upsampling tasks with very small magnification factor in each step. Furthermore, a gradual training strategy is presented for the GUN. In the proposed training process, an initial network can be easily trained with edgelike samples, and then, the weights are gradually tuned with more complex samples. The GUN can recover fine and vivid results and is easy to be trained. The experimental results on several image sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed network.