Adaptive Blind Super-Resolution Network for Spatial-Specific and Spatial-Agnostic Degradations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel adaptive super-resolution network that distinguishes and effectively handles both spatial-specific and spatial-agnostic image degradations using dynamic filtering, improving reconstruction quality.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic filter network with global and local branches to separately address different degradation types, enhancing super-resolution performance.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art blind super-resolution methods

Effective in both synthetic and real-world datasets

Handles diverse degradation types with a unified model

Abstract

Prior methodologies have disregarded the diversities among distinct degradation types during image reconstruction, employing a uniform network model to handle multiple deteriorations. Nevertheless, we discover that prevalent degradation modalities, including sampling, blurring, and noise, can be roughly categorized into two classes. We classify the first class as spatial-agnostic dominant degradations, less affected by regional changes in image space, such as downsampling and noise degradation. The second class degradation type is intimately associated with the spatial position of the image, such as blurring, and we identify them as spatial-specific dominant degradations. We introduce a dynamic filter network integrating global and local branches to address these two degradation types. This network can greatly alleviate the practical degradation problem. Specifically, the global dynamic filtering layer can perceive the spatial-agnostic dominant degradation in different images by applying weights generated by the attention mechanism to multiple parallel standard convolution kernels, enhancing the network's representation ability. Meanwhile, the local dynamic filtering layer converts feature maps of the image into a spatially specific dynamic filtering operator, which performs spatially specific convolution operations on the image features to handle spatial-specific dominant degradations. By effectively integrating both global and local dynamic filtering operators, our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art blind super-resolution algorithms in both synthetic and real image datasets.