Learning Steerable Function for Efficient Image Resampling

Image resampling is a basic technique that is widely employed in daily applications. Existing deep neural networks (DNNs) have made impressive progress in resampling performance. Yet these methods are still not the perfect substitute for interpolation, due to the issues of efficiency and continuous resampling. In this work, we propose a novel method of Learning Resampling Function (termed LeRF), which takes advantage of both the structural priors learned by DNNs and the locally continuous assumption of interpolation methods. Specifically, LeRF assigns spatially-varying steerable resampling functions to input image pixels and learns to predict the hyper-parameters that determine the orientations of these resampling functions with a neural network. To achieve highly efficient inference, we adopt look-up tables (LUTs) to accelerate the inference of the learned neural network. Furthermore, we design a directional ensemble strategy and edge-sensitive indexing patterns to better capture local structures. Extensive experiments show that our method runs as fast as interpolation, generalizes well to arbitrary transformations, and outperforms interpolation significantly, e.g., up to 3dB PSNR gain over bicubic for x 2 upsampling on Manga109.