Data Acquisition and Preparation for Dual-Reference Deep Learning of Image Super-Resolution

The performance of deep learning based image super-resolution (SR) methods depend on how accurately the paired low and high resolution images for training characterize the sampling process of real cameras. Low and high resolution (LR ∼ HR) image pairs synthesized by degradation models (e.g., bicubic downsampling) deviate from those in reality; thus the synthetically-trained DCNN SR models work disappointingly when being applied to real-world images. To address this issue, we propose a novel data acquisition process to shoot a large set of LR ∼ HR image pairs using real cameras. The images are displayed on an ultra-high quality screen and captured at different resolutions. The resulting LR ∼ HR image pairs can be aligned at very high sub-pixel precision by a novel spatial-frequency dual-domain registration method, and hence they provide more appropriate training data for the learning task of super-resolution. Moreover, the captured HR image and the original digital image offer dual references to strengthen supervised learning. Experimental results show that training a super-resolution DCNN by our LR ∼ HR dataset achieves higher image quality than training it by other datasets in the literature. Moreover, the proposed screen-capturing data collection process can be automated; it can be carried out for any target camera with ease and low cost, offering a practical way of tailoring the training of a DCNN SR model separately to each of the given cameras.