Single-Image Super-Resolution Neural Network via Hybrid Multi-Scale Features

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end single-image super-resolution neural network by leveraging hybrid multi-scale features of images. Different from most existing convolutional neural network (CNN) based solutions, our proposed network depends on the observation that image features extracted by CNN contain hybrid multi-scale features: both multi-scale local texture features and global structural features. By effectively exploiting these multi-scale and local-global features, our network involves far fewer parameters, leading to a large decrease in memory usage and computation during inference. Our network benefits from three key modules: (1) an efficient and lightweight feature extraction module (EFblock); (2) a hybrid multi-scale feature enhancement module (HMblock); and (3) a reconstruction–restoration module (DRblock). Experiments on five popular benchmarks demonstrate that our super-resolution approach achieves better performance with fewer parameters and less memory consumption, compared to more than 20 SOTAs. In summary, we propose a novel multi-scale super-resolution neural network (HMSF), which is more lightweight, has fewer parameters, and requires less execution time, but has better performance than the state-of-the-art methods. Compared to SOTAs, this method is more practical and better suited to run on constrained devices, such as PCs and mobile devices, without the need for a high-performance server.