DANS: Deep Attention Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

The current advancements in image super-resolution have explored different attention mechanisms to achieve better quantitative and perceptual results. The critical challenge recently is to utilize the potential of attention mechanisms to reconstruct high-resolution images from their low-resolution counterparts. This research proposes a novel method that combines inception blocks, non-local sparse attention, and a U-Net network architecture. The network incorporates the non-local sparse attention on the backbone of symmetric encoder-decoder U-Net structure, which helps to identify long-range dependencies and exploits contextual information while preserving global context. By incorporating skip connections, the network can leverage features at different scales, enhancing the reconstruction of high-frequency information. Additionally, we introduce inception blocks allowing the model to capture information at various levels of abstraction to enhance multi-scale representation learning further. Experimental findings show that our suggested approach produces superior quantitative measurements, such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), visual information fidelity (VIF), and visually appealing high-resolution image reconstructions.