IMDeception: Grouped Information Distilling Super-Resolution Network

Single-Image-Super-Resolution (SISR) is a classical computer vision problem that has benefited from the recent advancements in deep learning methods, especially the advancements of convolutional neural networks (CNN). Although state-of-the-art methods improve the performance of SISR on several datasets, direct application of these networks for practical use is still an issue due to heavy computational load. For this purpose, recently, researchers have focused on more efficient and high-performing network structures. Information multi-distilling network (IMDN) is one of the highly efficient SISR networks with high performance and low computational load. IMDN achieves this efficiency with various mechanisms such as Intermediate Information Collection (IIC), working in a global setting, Progressive Refinement Module (PRM), and Contrast Aware Channel Attention (CCA), employed in a local setting. These mechanisms, however, do not equally contribute to the efficiency and performance of IMDN. In this work, we propose the Global Progressive Refinement Module (GPRM) as a less parameter-demanding alternative to the IIC module for feature aggregation. To further decrease the number of parameters and floating point operations per second (FLOPS), we also propose Grouped Information Distilling Blocks (GIDB). Using the proposed structures, we design an efficient SISR network called IMDeception. Experiments reveal that the proposed network performs on par with state-of-the-art models despite having a limited number of parameters and FLOPS. Furthermore, using grouped convolutions as a building block of GIDB increases room for further optimization during deployment. To show its potential, the proposed model was deployed on NVIDIA Jetson Xavier AGX and it has been shown that it can run in real-time on this edge device.