Real-World Super-Resolution via Kernel Estimation and Noise Injection

Recent state-of-the-art super-resolution methods have achieved impressive performance on ideal datasets regardless of blur and noise. However, these methods always fail in real-world image super-resolution, since most of them adopt simple bicubic downsampling from high-quality images to construct Low-Resolution (LR) and High-Resolution (HR) pairs for training which may lose track of frequency-related details. To address this issue, we focus on designing a novel degradation framework for real- world images by estimating various blur kernels as well as real noise distributions. Based on our novel degradation framework, we can acquire LR images sharing a common domain with real-world images. Then, we propose a real- world super-resolution model aiming at better perception. Extensive experiments on synthetic noise data and real- world images demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, resulting in lower noise and better visual quality. In addition, our method is the winner of NTIRE 2020 Challenge on both tracks of Real-World Super-Resolution, which significantly outperforms other competitors by large margins.