Binarized Neural Network for Single Image Super Resolution

Abstract

Lighter model and faster inference are the focus of current single image super-resolution (SISR) research. However, existing methods are still hard to be applied in real-world applications due to the requirement of its heavy computation. Model quantization is an effective way to significantly reduce model size and computation time. We propose a simple but effective binary neural networks (BNN) based SISR model with a novel binarization scheme. Specially, we design a bit-accumulation mechanism to approximate the full-precision values, which could realize the approximation to the full precision number by accumulating the multi-layer's one-bit values.The proposed BNN-based SISR method could achieve superior performance with lower computational complexity and less model parameters. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods (binarization methods such as BNN, DoReFa-Net and ABC-Net) by large margins on 4 benchmark datasets, specially by average more than 0.8 dB in terms of Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) on Set5 dataset.