Infrared Image Super-Resolution via Progressive Compact Distillation Network

Deep convolutional neural networks are capable of achieving remarkable performance in single-image super-resolution (SISR). However, due to the weak availability of infrared images, heavy network architectures for insufficient infrared images are confronted by excessive parameters and computational complexity. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight progressive compact distillation network (PCDN) with a transfer learning strategy to achieve infrared image super-resolution reconstruction with a few samples. We design a progressive feature residual distillation (PFDB) block to efficiently refine hierarchical features, and parallel dilation convolutions are utilized to expand PFDB’s receptive field, thereby maximizing the characterization power of marginal features and minimizing the network parameters. Moreover, the bil-global connection mechanism and the difference calculation algorithm between two adjacent PFDBs are proposed to accelerate the network convergence and extract the high-frequency information, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce transfer learning to fine-tune network weights with few-shot infrared images to obtain infrared image mapping information. Experimental results suggest the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework with low computational load in infrared image super-resolution. Notably, our PCDN outperforms existing methods on two public datasets for both ×2 and ×4 with parameters less than 240 k, proving its efficient and excellent reconstruction performance.