Image super-resolution using deep feedforward neural networks in spectral domain

Abstract

With recent advances in deep learning area, learning machinery and mainstream approaches in computer vision research have changed dramatically from hardcoded features combined with classi ers to end-to-end trained deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) which give the state-of-the-art results in most of the computer vision research areas. Single-image super-resolution is one of these areas which are considerably in uenced by deep learning advancements. Most of the current state-of-the-art methods on super-resolution problem learn a nonlinear mapping from low-resolution images to high-resolution images in the spatial domain using consecutive convolutional layers in their network architectures. However, these state-of-the-art results are obtained by training a separate neural network architecture for each di erent scale factor. We propose a novel singleimage super-resolution system with the limited number of learning parameters in spectral domain in order to eliminate the necessity to train a separate neural network for each scale factor. As a spectral transform function which converts images from the spatial domain to the frequency domain, discrete cosine transform (DCT) which is a variant of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is used. In addition, in the post-processing step, an artifact reduction module is added for removing ringing artifacts occurred due to spectral transformations. Even if the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) measurement of our super-resolution system is lower than current state-of-the-art methods, the spectral domain allows us to develop a single model with a single dataset for any scale factor and relatively obtain better structural similarity index (SSIM) results.