Edge-Enhanced with Feedback Attention Network for Image Super-Resolution

Significant progress has been made in single image super-resolution (SISR) based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The attention mechanism can capture important features well, and the feedback mechanism can realize the fine-tuning of the output to the input. However, they have not been reasonably applied in the existing deep learning-based SISR methods. Additionally, the results of the existing methods still have serious artifacts and edge blurring. To address these issues, we proposed an Edge-enhanced with Feedback Attention Network for image super-resolution (EFANSR), which comprises three parts. The first part is an SR reconstruction network, which adaptively learns the features of different inputs by integrating channel attention and spatial attention blocks to achieve full utilization of the features. We also introduced feedback mechanism to feed high-level information back to the input and fine-tune the input in the dense spatial and channel attention block. The second part is the edge enhancement network, which obtains a sharp edge through adaptive edge enhancement processing on the output of the first SR network. The final part merges the outputs of the first two parts to obtain the final edge-enhanced SR image. Experimental results show that our method achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art methods with lower complexity.