Low-resolution Visual Recognition via Deep Feature Distillation

Here we study the low-resolution visual recognition problem. Conventional methods are usually trained on images with large ROIs (regions of interest), while the regions and insider images are often small and blur in real-world applications. Therefore, deep neural networks learned on high-resolution images cannot be directly used for recognizing low-resolution objects. To overcome this challenging problem, we propose to use the teacher-student learning paradigm for distilling useful feature information from a pre-trained deep model on high-resolution visual data. In practice, a distillation loss is used to seek the perceptual consistency of low-resolution images and high-resolution images. By simultaneously optimizing the recognition loss and distillation loss, we formulate a novel low-resolution recognition approach. Experiments conducted on benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method is capable to learn well-performed models for recognizing low-resolution objects, which is superior to the state-of-the-art methods.