2019/04/16 by Saeed Anwar, Salman Khan, Anwar, Saeed +3 · 5 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Image Processing Techniques #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Image Processing Techniques and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.07523
openalex publication_date 2019/04/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Deep convolutional networks based super-resolution is a fast-growing field with numerous practical applications. In this exposition, we extensively compare 30+ state-of-the-art super-resolution Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) over three classical and three recently introduced challenging datasets to benchmark single image super-resolution. We introduce a taxonomy for deep-learning based super-resolution networks that groups existing methods into nine categories including linear, residual, multi-branch, recursive, progressive, attention-based and adversarial designs. We also provide comparisons between the models in terms of network complexity, memory footprint, model input and output, learning details, the type of network losses and important architectural differences (e.g., depth, skip-connections, filters). The extensive evaluation performed, shows the consistent and rapid growth in the accuracy in the past few years along with a corresponding boost in model complexity and the availability of large-scale datasets. It is also observed that the pioneering methods identified as the benchmark have been significantly outperformed by the current contenders. Despite the progress in recent years, we identify several shortcomings of existing techniques and provide future research directions towards the solution of these open problems.