Baidu USA LLC

Baidu.com Times Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd.

Tianwei Lin

Dongliang He

Baopu Li

Zhihong Pan

Wenhao Wu

Image super-resolution (SR) refers to the process of recovering high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs. Blind image SR is a more challenging task which involves unknown blurring kernels and characterizes the degradation process from HR to LR. In the present disclosure, embodiments of a variational autoencoder (VAE) are leveraged to train a kernel autoencoder for more accurate degradation representation and more efficient kernel estimation. In one or more embodiments, a kernel-agnostic loss is used to learn more robust kernel features in the latent space from LR inputs without using ground-truth kernel references. In addition, attention-based adaptive pooling is introduced to improve kernel estimation accuracy, and spatially non-uniform kernel features are passed into SR restoration resulting in additional kernel estimation error tolerance. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world images show that embodiments of the presented model outperform state-of-the-art methods significantly with the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) raised considerably.

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Shanghai, China

Tianwei Lin