MFEN: Lightweight multi-scale feature extraction super-resolution network in embedded system

• Published in: Microprocessors and microsystems 2022-09, Vol.93, p.104568, Article 104568
• Main Authors: Xiao, Hang, Qin, Jiayi, Jeon, Seunggil, Yan, Binyu, Yang, Xiaomin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Deep learning; Feature fusion; Multi-scale feature; Super-resolution
• ISSN: 0141-9331; 1872-9436
• DOI: 10.1016/j.micpro.2022.104568

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved remarkable performance in super-resolution (SR) recently. However, deep CNN-based methods are difficult to be utilized in embedded portable device due to their heavy computation and memory consumption. To solve the above problem, we propose an effective lightweight multi-scale feature extraction super-resolution network (MFEN) by constructing multi-scale feature extraction blocks (MFEB), which progressively obtains multi-scale and hierarchical information. In addition, we also propose an efficient progressive feature fusion (PFF) strategy to aggregate multi-scale informative features. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation results on the benchmark datasets show that our designed method can obtain better performance than most state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the computation complexity and running time of the MFEN are significantly reduced to provide convenience in real-time image processing technology for embedded devices.