In this article, we address the degraded image super-resolution problem in a multi-task learning (MTL) manner. To better share representations between multiple tasks, we propose an all-in-one collaboration framework (ACF) with a learnable “junction” unit to handle two major problems that exist in MTL—“How to share” and “How much to share.” Specifically, ACF consists of a
sharing
phase and a
reconstruction
phase. Considering the intrinsic characteristic of multiple image degradations, we propose to first deal with the compression artifact, motion blur, and spatial structure information of the input image in parallel under a three-branch architecture in the
sharing
phase. Subsequently, in the
reconstruction
phase, we up-sample the previous features for high-resolution image reconstruction with a channel-wise and spatial attention mechanism. To coordinate two phases, we introduce a learnable “junction” unit with a dual-voting mechanism to selectively filter or preserve shared feature representations that come from
sharing
phase, learning an optimal combination for the following
reconstruction
phase. Finally, a curriculum learning-based training scheme is further proposed to improve the convergence of the whole framework. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world low-resolution images show that the proposed all-in-one collaboration framework not only produces favorable high-resolution results while removing serious degradation, but also has high computational efficiency, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. We also have applied ACF to some image-quality sensitive practical task, such as pose estimation, to improve estimation accuracy of low-resolution images.
Gated Fusion Network for Degraded Image Super Resolution
