Raising The Limit of Image Rescaling Using Auxiliary Encoding

Normalizing flow models using invertible neural networks (INN) have been widely investigated for successful generative image super-resolution (SR) by learning the transformation between the normal distribution of latent variable z and the conditional distribution of high-resolution (HR) images gave a low-resolution (LR) input. Recently, image rescaling models like IRN utilize the bidirectional nature of INN to push the performance limit of image upscaling by optimizing the downscaling and upscaling steps jointly. While the random sampling of latent variable z is useful in generating diverse photo-realistic images, it is not desirable for image rescaling when accurate restoration of the HR image is more important. Hence, in places of random sampling of z, we propose auxiliary encoding modules to further push the limit of image rescaling performance. Two options to store the encoded latent variables in downscaled LR images, both readily supported in existing image file format, are proposed. One is saved as the alpha-channel, the other is saved as meta-data in the image header, and the corresponding modules are denoted as suffixes -A and -M respectively. Optimal network architectural changes are investigated for both options to demonstrate their effectiveness in raising the rescaling performance limit on different baseline models including IRN and DLV-IRN.