Closed-loop Matters: Dual Regression Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual regression network for single image super-resolution that uses a closed-loop scheme to improve learning and adapt to real-world data without relying solely on paired high-resolution images.

Contribution

The proposed dual regression framework incorporates a closed-loop constraint to reduce the solution space and enables learning directly from LR data, enhancing adaptability and performance.

Findings

Outperforms existing SR methods on paired datasets.

Effectively adapts to unpaired real-world LR data.

Demonstrates robustness in real-world applications like YouTube videos.

Abstract

Deep neural networks have exhibited promising performance in image super-resolution (SR) by learning a nonlinear mapping function from low-resolution (LR) images to high-resolution (HR) images. However, there are two underlying limitations to existing SR methods. First, learning the mapping function from LR to HR images is typically an ill-posed problem, because there exist infinite HR images that can be downsampled to the same LR image. As a result, the space of the possible functions can be extremely large, which makes it hard to find a good solution. Second, the paired LR-HR data may be unavailable in real-world applications and the underlying degradation method is often unknown. For such a more general case, existing SR models often incur the adaptation problem and yield poor performance. To address the above issues, we propose a dual regression scheme by introducing an additional constraint on LR data to reduce the space of the possible functions. Specifically, besides the mapping from LR to HR images, we learn an additional dual regression mapping estimates the down-sampling kernel and reconstruct LR images, which forms a closed-loop to provide additional supervision. More critically, since the dual regression process does not depend on HR images, we can directly learn from LR images. In this sense, we can easily adapt SR models to real-world data, e.g., raw video frames from YouTube. Extensive experiments with paired training data and unpaired real-world data demonstrate our superiority over existing methods.