A Coarse-to-fine Approach for Fast Super-Resolution with Flexible Magnification

ABSTRACT We perform fast single image super-resolution with flexible magnification for natural images. A novel coarse-to-fine super-resolution framework is developed for the magnification that is factorized into a maximum integer component and the quotient. Specifically, our framework is embedded with a light-weight upscale network for super-resolution with the integer scale factor, followed by the fine-grained network to guide interpolation on feature maps as well as to generate the super-resolved image. Compared with the previous flexible magnification super-resolution approaches, the proposed framework achieves a tradeoff between computational complexity and performance. We conduct experiments using the coarse-to-fine framework on the standard benchmarks and demonstrate its superiority in terms of effectiveness and efficiency over previous approaches.