Image Super-Resolution Using Multi-Scale Space Feature and Deformable Convolutional Network

Recent researches on image super-resolution (SR) have achieved great progressing with the great development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, existing CNNs usually adopt fixed filter structures and the convolutions just rely on the local information contained in the fixed receptive field. Above phenomena prevent high-level convolution layers from encoding semantics over spatial locations and largely limits the learning capacity of CNNs. What’s more, many methods simply used a single-size feature map and failed to consider the spatial information, thereby these results also are unsatisfactory. To address these problems, in this paper, a network with multi-scale space features and deformable convolutional (MulSSD) is presented to further improve the reconstruction accuracy. Specifically, a multi-scale space features compressed block containing the deformable convolutional layer is proposed, which can augment the spatial sampling locations and incorporate the multi-scale space compression features and adaptively adjust the sampling grid and receptive fields. In addition, the design of symmetrical combinations make the information can be smoothly propagated through multiple channels during the training, which effectively improves the training efficiency. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate that the proposed method achieves outperforming quantitative and qualitative performance. And the experimental results also proved that our proposed MulSSD can reconstruct high-quality high-resolution (HR) images at a relatively fast speed and outperform other methods by a large margin.