Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution

Bee Lim Sanghyun Son Heewon Kim Seungjun Nah Kyoung Mu Lee

Department of ECE, ASRI, Seoul National University, 08826, Seoul, Korea

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
[email protected], [email protected]
arXiv:1707.02921v1 [cs.CV] 10 Jul 2017

Abstract
Recent research on super-resolution has progressed with
the development of deep convolutional neural networks
(DCNN). In particular, residual learning techniques exhibit
improved performance. In this paper, we develop an en-
hanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR) with perfor-
mance exceeding those of current state-of-the-art SR meth- HR
ods. The significant performance improvement of our model (PSNR / SSIM)
is due to optimization by removing unnecessary modules in
conventional residual networks. The performance is further
improved by expanding the model size while we stabilize
the training procedure. We also propose a new multi-scale
deep super-resolution system (MDSR) and training method,
which can reconstruct high-resolution images of different
upscaling factors in a single model. The proposed methods 0853 from DIV2K [26] Bicubic
show superior performance over the state-of-the-art meth- (30.80 dB / 0.9537)
ods on benchmark datasets and prove its excellence by win-
ning the NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge [26].

1. Introduction
Image super-resolution (SR) problem, particularly sin-
gle image super-resolution (SISR), has gained increasing VDSR [11] SRResNet [14] EDSR+ (Ours)
research attention for decades. SISR aims to reconstruct (32.82 dB / 0.9623) (34.00 dB / 0.9679) (34.78 dB / 0.9708)
a high-resolution image I SR from a single low-resolution
image I LR . Generally, the relationship between I LR and Figure 1: ×4 Super-resolution result of our single-scale SR
the original high-resolution image I HR can vary depending method (EDSR) compared with existing algorithms.
on the situation. Many studies assume that I LR is a bicubic
downsampled version of I HR , but other degrading factors
such as blur, decimation, or noise can also be considered for ferent initialization and training techniques. Thus, carefully
practical applications. designed model architecture and sophisticated optimization
Recently, deep neural networks [11, 12, 14] provide sig- methods are essential in training the neural networks.
nificantly improved performance in terms of peak signal-to- Second, most existing SR algorithms treat super-
noise ratio (PSNR) in the SR problem. However, such net- resolution of different scale factors as independent prob-
works exhibit limitations in terms of architecture optimality. lems without considering and utilizing mutual relationships
First, the reconstruction performance of the neural network among different scales in SR. As such, those algorithms re-
models is sensitive to minor architectural changes. Also, the quire many scale-specific networks that need to to be trained
same model achieves different levels of performance by dif- independently to deal with various scales. Exceptionally,

1
VDSR [11] can handle super-resolution of several scales al. [30] introduced another approach that clusters the patch
jointly in the single network. Training the VDSR model spaces and learns the corresponding functions. Some ap-
with multiple scales boosts the performance substantially proaches utilize image self-similarities to avoid using exter-
and outperforms scale-specific training, implying the redun- nal databases [8, 6, 29], and increase the size of the limited
dancy among scale-specific models. Nonetheless, VDSR internal dictionary by geometric transformation of patches
style architecture requires bicubic interpolated image as the [10].
input, that leads to heavier computation time and memory Recently, the powerful capability of deep neural net-
compared to the architectures with scale-specific upsam- works has led to dramatic improvements in SR. Since Dong
pling method [5, 22, 14]. et al. [4, 5] first proposed a deep learning-based SR method,
While SRResNet [14] successfully solved those time various CNN architectures have been studied for SR. Kim
and memory issue with good performance, it simply em- et al. [11, 12] first introduced the residual network for train-
ploys the ResNet architecture from He et al. [9] without ing much deeper network architectures and achieved su-
much modification. However, original ResNet was pro- perior performance. In particular, they showed that skip-
posed to solve higher-level computer vision problems such connection and recursive convolution alleviate the burden
as image classification and detection. Therefore, applying of carrying identity information in the super-resolution net-
ResNet architecture directly to low-level vision problems work. Similarly to [20], Mao et al. [16] tackled the general
like super-resolution can be suboptimal. image restoration problem with encoder-decoder networks
To solve these problems, based on the SRResNet ar- and symmetric skip connections. In [16], they argue that
chitecture, we first optimize it by analyzing and removing those nested skip connections provide fast and improved
unnecessary modules to simplify the network architecture. convergence.
Training a network becomes nontrivial when the model is In many deep learning based super-resolution algo-
complex. Thus, we train the network with appropriate loss rithms, an input image is upsampled via bicubic interpo-
function and careful model modification upon training. We lation before they fed into the network [4, 11, 12]. Rather
experimentally show that the modified scheme produces than using an interpolated image as an input, training up-
better results. sampling modules at the very end of the network is also pos-
Second, we investigate the model training method that sible as shown in [5, 22, 14]. By doing so, one can reduce
transfers knowledge from a model trained at other scales. much of computations without losing model capacity be-
To utilize scale-independent information during training, cause the size of features decreases. However, those kinds
we train high-scale models from pre-trained low-scale mod- of approaches have one disadvantage: They cannot deal
els. Furthermore, we propose a new multi-scale architecture with the multi-scale problem in a single framework as in
that shares most of the parameters across different scales. VDSR [11]. In this work, we resolve the dilemma of multi-
The proposed multi-scale model uses significantly fewer pa- scale training and computational efficiency. We not only
rameters compared with multiple single-scale models but exploit the inter-relation of learned feature for each scale
shows comparable performance. but also propose a new multi-scale model that efficiently
We evaluate our models on the standard benchmark reconstructs high-resolution images for various scales. Fur-
datasets and on a newly provided DIV2K dataset. The thermore, we develop an appropriate training method that
proposed single- and multi-scale super-resolution networks uses multiple scales for both single- and multi-scale mod-
show the state-of-the-art performances on all datasets in els.
terms of PSNR and SSIM. Our methods ranked first and Several studies also have focused on the loss functions
second, respectively, in the NTIRE 2017 Super-Resolution to better train network models. Mean squared error (MSE)
Challenge [26]. or L2 loss is the most widely used loss function for general
image restoration and is also major performance measure
2. Related Works (PSNR) for those problems. However, Zhao et al. [35]
reported that training with L2 loss does not guarantee better
To solve the super-resolution problem, early approaches performance compared to other loss functions in terms of
use interpolation techniques based on sampling theory [1, PSNR and SSIM. In their experiments, a network trained
15, 34]. However, those methods exhibit limitations in pre- with L1 achieved improved performance compared with the
dicting detailed, realistic textures. Previous studies [25, 23] network trained with L2.
adopted natural image statistics to the problem to recon-
struct better high-resolution images. 3. Proposed Methods
Advanced works aim to learn mapping functions be-
tween I LR and I HR image pairs. Those learning meth- In this section, we describe proposed model architec-
ods rely on techniques ranging from neighbor embed- tures. We first analyze recently published super-resolution
ding [3, 2, 7, 21] to sparse coding [31, 32, 27, 33]. Yang et network and suggest an enhanced version of the residual
network architecture with the simpler structure. We show
that our network outperforms the original ones while ex-

Upsample
hibiting improved computational efficiency. In the follow-

ResBlock

ResBlock
•••

Conv

Conv

Conv
ing sections, we suggest a single-scale architecture (EDSR)
that handles a specific super-resolution scale and a multi-
scale architecture (MDSR) that reconstructs various scales
of high-resolution images in a single model.
X2 X3

Shuffle

Shuffle
ReLU
3.1. Residual blocks

Conv

Conv

Conv

Conv
Mult
Recently, residual networks [11, 9, 14] exhibit excellent X4
performance in computer vision problems from the low-

Shuffle

Shuffle
Conv

Conv
level to high-level tasks. Although Ledig et al. [14] success-
fully applied the ResNet architecture to the super-resolution
problem with SRResNet, we further improve the perfor- Figure 3: The architecture of the proposed single-scale SR
mance by employing better ResNet structure. network (EDSR).

ResBlock
3.2. Single-scale model

Conv
(X2)

X2
The simplest way to enhance the performance of the net-
work model is to increase the number of parameters. In
ResBlock

ResBlock

ResBlock
the convolutional neural• • •network, model performance can
Conv

Conv

Conv
(X3)

X3
be enhanced by stacking many layers or by increasing the
number of filters. General CNN architecture with depth (the
number of layers) B and width (the number of feature chan-
nels) F occupies roughly O(BF ) memory with O(BF 2 )
ResBlock

Conv
(X4)

parameters. Therefore, increasing F instead of B can max-

X4
imize the model capacity when considering limited compu-
tational resources.
(a) Original (b) SRResNet (c) Proposed However, we found that increasing the number of feature
maps above a certain level would make the training pro-
Figure 2: Comparison of residual blocks in original cedure numerically unstable. A similar phenomenon was
ResNet, SRResNet, and ours. reported by Szegedy et al. [24]. We resolve this issue by
adopting the residual scaling [24] with factor 0.1. In each
In Fig. 2, we compare the building blocks of each net- residual block, constant scaling layers are placed after the
work model from original ResNet [9], SRResNet [14], and last convolution layers. These modules stabilize the train-
our proposed networks. We remove the batch normalization ing procedure greatly when using a large number of filters.
layers from our network as Nah et al.[19] presented in their In the test phase, this layer can be integrated into the previ-
image deblurring work. Since batch normalization layers ous convolution layer for the computational efficiency.
normalize the features, they get rid of range flexibility from We construct our baseline (single-scale) model with our
networks by normalizing the features, it is better to remove proposed residual blocks in Fig. 2. The structure is similar
them. We experimentally show that this simple modifica- to SRResNet [14], but our model does not have ReLU acti-
tion increases the performance substantially as detailed in vation layers outside the residual blocks. Also, our baseline
Sec. 4. model does not have residual scaling layers because we use
Furthermore, GPU memory usage is also sufficiently re- only 64 feature maps for each convolution layer. In our final
duced since the batch normalization layers consume the single-scale model (EDSR), we expand the baseline model
same amount of memory as the preceding convolutional by setting B = 32, F = 256 with a scaling factor 0.1. The
layers. Our baseline model without batch normalization model architecture is displayed in Fig. 3.
layer saves approximately 40% of memory usage during When training our model for upsampling factor ×3 and
training, compared to SRResNet. Consequently, we can ×4, we initialize the model parameters with pre-trained ×2
build up a larger model that has better performance than network. This pre-training strategy accelerates the training
conventional ResNet structure under limited computational and improves the final performance as clearly demonstrated
resources. in Fig. 4. For upscaling ×4, if we use a pre-trained scale ×2
 X2 X3

Shuffle

Shuffle
ReLU
Conv

Conv

Conv

Conv
Mult
X4

Shuffle

Shuffle
Conv

Conv
model (blue line), the training converges much faster than
the one started from random initialization (green line).

ResBlock

Conv
(X2)

X2
PSNR(dB) on DIV2K validation set (x4)

30

ResBlock

ResBlock

ResBlock
•••

Conv

Conv

Conv
(X3)

X3
29.5

29

ResBlock

Conv
(X4)

X4
28.5

From pre-trained x2
28
From scratch
From scratch (Best performance)
27.5
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
Figure 5: The architecture of the proposed multi-scale SR
Updates (k)
network (MDSR).

SRResNet [14] Baseline

Figure 4: Effect of using pre-trained ×2 network for ×4 Options EDSR MDSR
(reproduced) (Single / Multi)
model (EDSR). The red line indicates the best performance # Residual blocks 16 16 32 80
of green line. 10 images are used for validation during # Filters 64 64 256 64
training. # Parameters 1.5M 1.5M / 3.2M 43M 8.0M
Residual scaling - - 0.1 -
3.3. Multi-scale model Use BN Yes No No No
Loss function L2 L1 L1 L1
From the observation in Fig. 4, we conclude that super-
resolution at multiple scales is inter-related tasks. We fur-
ther explore this idea by building a multi-scale architecture Table 1: Model specifications.
that takes the advantage of inter-scale correlation as VDSR
[11] does. We design our baseline (multi-scale) models to
have a single main branch with B = 16 residual blocks more depth compared to the baseline multi-scale model,
so that most of the parameters are shared across different only 2.5 times more parameters are required, as the resid-
scales as shown in Fig. 5. ual blocks are lighter than scale-specific parts. Note that
In our multi-scale architecture, we introduce scale- MDSR also shows the comparable performance to the scale-
specific processing modules to handle the super-resolution specific EDSRs. The detailed performance comparison of
at multiple scales. First, pre-processing modules are located our proposed models is presented in Table 2 and 3.
at the head of networks to reduce the variance from input
images of different scales. Each of pre-processing mod- 4. Experiments
ule consists of two residual blocks with 5 × 5 kernels. By 4.1. Datasets
adopting larger kernels for pre-processing modules, we can
keep the scale-specific part shallow while the larger recep- DIV2K dataset [26] is a newly proposed high-quality
tive field is covered in early stages of networks. At the end (2K resolution) image dataset for image restoration tasks.
of the multi-scale model, scale-specific upsampling mod- The DIV2K dataset consists of 800 training images, 100
ules are located in parallel to handle multi-scale reconstruc- validation images, and 100 test images. As the test dataset
tion. The architecture of the upsampling modules is similar ground truth is not released, we report and compare the per-
to those of single-scale models described in the previous formances on the validation dataset. We also compare the
section. performance on four standard benchmark datasets: Set5 [2],
We construct our final multi-scale model (MDSR) with Set14 [33], B100 [17], and Urban100 [10].
B = 80 and F = 64. While our single-scale baseline mod-
4.2. Training Details
els for 3 different scales have about 1.5M parameters each,
totaling 4.5M, our baseline multi-scale model has only 3.2 For training, we use the RGB input patches of size
million parameters. Nevertheless, the multi-scale model ex- 48×48 from LR image with the corresponding HR patches.
hibits comparable performance as the single-scale models. We augment the training data with random horizontal flips
Furthermore, our multi-scale model is scalable in terms of and 90 rotations. We pre-process all the images by subtract-
depth. Although our final MDSR has approximately 5 times ing the mean RGB value of the DIV2K dataset. We train
 SRResNet SRResNet Our baseline Our baseline EDSR MDSR EDSR+ MDSR+
Scale
(L2 loss) (L1 loss) (Single-scale) (Multi-scale) (Ours) (Ours) (Ours) (Ours)
×2 34.40 / 0.9662 34.44 / 0.9665 34.55 / 0.9671 34.60 / 0.9673 35.03 / 0.9695 34.96 / 0.9692 35.12 / 0.9699 35.05 / 0.9696
×3 30.82 / 0.9288 30.85 / 0.9292 30.90 / 0.9298 30.91 / 0.9298 31.26 / 0.9340 31.25 / 0.9338 31.39 / 0.9351 31.36 / 0.9346
×4 28.92 / 0.8960 28.92 / 0.8961 28.94 / 0.8963 28.95 / 0.8962 29.25 / 0.9017 29.26 / 0.9016 29.38 / 0.9032 29.36 / 0.9029

Table 2: Performance comparison between architectures on the DIV2K validation set (PSNR(dB) / SSIM). Red indicates the
best performance and blue indicates the second best. EDSR+ and MDSR+ denote self-ensemble versions of EDSR and
MDSR.

our model with ADAM optimizer [13] by setting β1 = 0.9, This self-ensemble method has an advantage over other
β2 = 0.999, and  = 10−8 . We set minibatch size as 16. ensembles as it does not require additional training of sepa-
The learning rate is initialized as 10−4 and halved at every rate models. It is beneficial especially when the model size
2 × 105 minibatch updates. or training time matters. Although self-ensemble strategy
For the single-scale models (EDSR), we train the net- keeps the total number of parameters same, we notice that
works as described in Sec. 3.2. The ×2 model is trained it gives approximately same performance gain compared
from scratch. After the model converges, we use it as a pre- to conventional model ensemble method that requires in-
trained network for other scales. dividually trained models. We denote the methods using
At each update of training a multi-scale model (MDSR), self-ensemble by adding ’+’ postfix to the method name;
we construct the minibatch with a randomly selected scale i.e. EDSR+/MDSR+. Note that geometric self-ensemble
among ×2, ×3 and ×4. Only the modules that correspond is valid only for symmetric downsampling methods such as
to the selected scale are enabled and updated. Hence, scale- bicubic downsampling.
specific residual blocks and upsampling modules that corre-
spond to different scales other than the selected one are not 4.4. Evaluation on DIV2K Dataset
enabled nor updated.
We test our proposed networks on the DIV2K dataset.
We train our networks using L1 loss instead of L2. Min-
Starting from the SRResNet, we gradually change various
imizing L2 is generally preferred since it maximizes the
settings to perform ablation tests. We train SRResNet [14]
PSNR. However, based on a series of experiments we em-
on our own. 2 3 First, we change the loss function from
pirically found that L1 loss provides better convergence
L2 to L1, and then the network architecture is reformed as
than L2. The evaluation of this comparison is provided in
described in the previous section and summarized in Table
Sec. 4.4
1.
We implemented the proposed networks with the Torch7
We train all those models with 3 × 105 updates in this
framework and trained them using NVIDIA Titan X GPUs.
experiment. Evaluation is conducted on the 10 images of
It takes 8 days and 4 days to train EDSR and MDSR, re-
DIV2K validation set, with PSNR and SSIM criteria. For
spectively. The source code is publicly available online.1
the evaluation, we use full RGB channels and ignore the (6
4.3. Geometric Self-ensemble + scale) pixels from the border.
Table 2 presents the quantitative results. SRResNet
In order to maximize the potential performance of our trained with L1 gives slightly better results than the orig-
model, we adopt the self-ensemble strategy similarly to inal one trained with L2 for all scale factors. Modifications
[28]. During the test time, we flip and rotate the input of the network give an even bigger margin of improvements.
image I LR to generate seven augmented inputs In,i LR
= The last 2 columns of Table 2 show significant performance
LR


Ti In for each sample, where Ti represents the 8 ge- gains of our final bigger models, EDSR+ and MDSR+ with
ometric transformations including indentity. With those the geometric self-ensemble technique. Note that our mod-
augmented low-resolution images,
 SR we generate correspond- els require much less GPU memory since they do not have
SR
ing super-resolved images In,1 , · · · , In,8 using the net- batch normalization layers.
works. We then apply inverse transform to those output
images to get the original geometry I˜n,i = Ti−1 In,i
SR SR


. 2 We confirmed our reproduction is correct by getting comparable re-

Finally, we average the transformed outputs all together to sults in an individual experiment, using the same settings of the pa-
8 per [14]. In our experiments, however, it became slightly different to
make the self-ensemble result as follows. InSR = 18 I˜n,i
SR
P
. match the settings of our baseline model training. See our codes at
i=1 https://github.com/LimBee/NTIRE2017.
3 We used the original paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04802v3) as a
1 https://github.com/LimBee/NTIRE2017 reference.
 HR Bicubic A+ [27] SRCNN [4]
(PSNR / SSIM) (21.41 dB / 0.4810) (22.21 dB / 0.5408) (22.33 dB / 0.5461)

img034 from Urban100 [10] VDSR [11] SRResNet [14] EDSR+ (Ours) MDSR+ (Ours)
(22.62 dB / 0.5657) (23.14 dB / 0.5891) (23.48 dB / 0.6048) (23.46 dB / 0.6039)

HR Bicubic A+ [27] SRCNN [4]

(PSNR / SSIM) (19.82 dB / 0.6471) (20.43 dB 0.7145) (20.61 dB / 0.7218)

img062 from Urban100 [10] VDSR [11] SRResNet [14] EDSR+ (Ours) MDSR+ (Ours)
(20.75 dB / 0.7504) (21.70 dB / 0.8054) (22.70 dB / 0.8537) (22.66 dB / 0.8508)

HR Bicubic A+ [27] SRCNN [4]

(PSNR / SSIM) (22.66 dB / 0.8025) (23.10 dB / 0.8251) (23.14 dB / 0.8280)

0869 from DIV2K [26] VDSR [11] SRResNet [14] EDSR+ (Ours) MDSR+ (Ours)
(23.36 dB / 0.8365) (23.71 dB / 0.8485) (23.89 dB / 0.8563) (23.90 dB / 0.8558)

Figure 6: Qualitative comparison of our models with other works on ×4 super-resolution.

 EDSR MDSR EDSR+ MDSR+
Dataset Scale Bicubic A+ [27] SRCNN [4] VDSR [11] SRResNet [14]
(Ours) (Ours) (Ours) (Ours)
×2 33.66 / 0.9299 36.54 / 0.9544 36.66 / 0.9542 37.53 / 0.9587 -/- 38.11 / 0.9601 38.11 / 0.9602 38.20 / 0.9606 38.17 / 0.9605
Set5 ×3 30.39 / 0.8682 32.58 / 0.9088 32.75 / 0.9090 33.66 / 0.9213 -/- 34.65 / 0.9282 34.66 / 0.9280 34.76 / 0.9290 34.77 / 0.9288
×4 28.42 / 0.8104 30.28 / 0.8603 30.48 / 0.8628 31.35 / 0.8838 32.05 / 0.8910 32.46 / 0.8968 32.50 / 0.8973 32.62 / 0.8984 32.60 / 0.8982
×2 30.24 / 0.8688 32.28 / 0.9056 32.42 / 0.9063 33.03 / 0.9124 -/- 33.92 / 0.9195 33.85 / 0.9198 34.02 / 0.9204 33.92 / 0.9203
Set14 ×3 27.55 / 0.7742 29.13 / 0.8188 29.28 / 0.8209 29.77 / 0.8314 -/- 30.52 / 0.8462 30.44 / 0.8452 30.66 / 0.8481 30.53 / 0.8465
×4 26.00 / 0.7027 27.32 / 0.7491 27.49 / 0.7503 28.01 / 0.7674 28.53 / 0.7804 28.80 / 0.7876 28.72 / 0.7857 28.94 / 0.7901 28.82 / 0.7876
×2 29.56 / 0.8431 31.21 / 0.8863 31.36 / 0.8879 31.90 / 0.8960 -/- 32.32 / 0.9013 32.29 / 0.9007 32.37 / 0.9018 32.34 / 0.9014
B100 ×3 27.21 / 0.7385 28.29 / 0.7835 28.41 / 0.7863 28.82 / 0.7976 -/- 29.25 / 0.8093 29.25 / 0.8091 29.32 / 0.8104 29.30 / 0.8101
×4 25.96 / 0.6675 26.82 / 0.7087 26.90 / 0.7101 27.29 / 0.7251 27.57 / 0.7354 27.71 / 0.7420 27.72 / 0.7418 27.79 / 0.7437 27.78 / 0.7425
×2 26.88 / 0.8403 29.20 / 0.8938 29.50 / 0.8946 30.76 / 0.9140 -/- 32.93 / 0.9351 32.84 / 0.9347 33.10 / 0.9363 33.03 / 0.9362
Urban100 ×3 24.46 / 0.7349 26.03 / 0.7973 26.24 / 0.7989 27.14 / 0.8279 -/- 28.80 / 0.8653 28.79 / 0.8655 29.02 / 0.8685 28.99 / 0.8683
×4 23.14 / 0.6577 24.32 / 0.7183 24.52 / 0.7221 25.18 / 0.7524 26.07 / 0.7839 26.64 / 0.8033 26.67 / 0.8041 26.86 / 0.8080 26.86 / 0.8082
×2 31.01 / 0.9393 32.89 / 0.9570 33.05 / 0.9581 33.66 / 0.9625 -/- 35.03 / 0.9695 34.96 / 0.9692 35.12 / 0.9699 35.05 / 0.9696
DIV2K
×3 28.22 / 0.8906 29.50 / 0.9116 29.64 / 0.9138 30.09 / 0.9208 -/- 31.26 / 0.9340 31.25 / 0.9338 31.39 / 0.9351 31.36 / 0.9346
validation
×4 26.66 / 0.8521 27.70 / 0.8736 27.78 / 0.8753 28.17 / 0.8841 -/- 29.25 / 0.9017 29.26 / 0.9016 29.38 / 0.9032 29.36 / 0.9029

Table 3: Public benchmark test results and DIV2K validation results (PSNR(dB) / SSIM). Red indicates the best
performance and blue indicates the second best. Note that DIV2K validation results are acquired from published demo
codes.

4.5. Benchmark Results Therefore, more robust mechanisms are required to deal
with the second track. We submitted our two SR models
We provide the quantitative evaluation results of our final
(EDSR and MDSR) for each competition and prove that our
models (EDSR+, MDSR+) on public benchmark datasets in
algorithms are very robust to different downsampling con-
Table 3. The evaluation of the self-ensemble is also pro-
ditions. Some results of our algorithms on the unknown
vided in the last two columns. We trained our models using
downsampling track are illustrated in Fig. 7. Our meth-
106 updates with batch size 16. We keep the other settings
ods successfully reconstruct high-resolution images from
same as the baseline models. We compare our models with
severely degraded input images. Our proposed EDSR+ and
the state-of-the-art methods including A+ [27], SRCNN [4],
MDSR+ won the first and second places, respectively, with
VDSR [11], and SRResNet [14]. For comparison, we mea-
outstanding performances as shown in Table 4.
sure PSNR and SSIM on the y channel and ignore the same
amount of pixels as scales from the border. We used MAT- 6. Conclusion
LAB [18] functions for evaluation. Comparative results on
DVI2K dataset are also provided. Our models exhibit a sig- In this paper, we proposed an enhanced super-resolution
nificant improvement compared to the other methods. The algorithm. By removing unnecessary modules from con-
gaps further increase after performing self-ensemble. We ventional ResNet architecture, we achieve improved results
also present the qualitative results in Fig. 6. The proposed while making our model compact. We also employ resid-
models successfully reconstruct the detailed textures and ual scaling techniques to stably train large models. Our
edges in the HR images and exhibit better-looking SR out- proposed singe-scale model surpasses current models and
puts compared with the previous works. achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
Furthermore, we develop a multi-scale super-resolution
5. NTIRE2017 SR Challenge network to reduce the model size and training time. With
scale-dependent modules and shared main network, our
This work is initially proposed for the purpose of par- multi-scale model can effectively deal with various scales
ticipating in the NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge of super-resolution in a unified framework. While the
[26]. The challenge aims to develop a single image super- multi-scale model remains compact compared with a set of
resolution system with the highest PSNR. single-scale models, it shows comparable performance to
In the challenge, there exist two tracks for different de- the single-scale SR model.
graders (bicubic, unknown) with three downsample scales Our proposed single-scale and multi-scale models have
(×2, 3, 4) each. Input images for the unknown track are achieved the top ranks in both the standard benchmark
not only downscaled but also suffer from severe blurring. datasets and the DIV2K dataset.
 HR Bicubic HR Bicubic
(PSNR / SSIM) (22.20 dB / 0.7979) (PSNR / SSIM) (21.59 dB / 0.6846)

0791 from DIV2K [26] EDSR (Ours) MDSR (Ours) 0792 from DIV2K [26] EDSR (Ours) MDSR (Ours)
(29.05 dB / 0.9257) (28.96 dB / 0.9244) (27.24 dB / 0.8376) (27.14 dB / 0.8356)

HR Bicubic HR Bicubic
(PSNR / SSIM) (23.81 dB / 0.8053) (PSNR / SSIM) (19.77 dB / 0.8937)

0793 from DIV2K [26] EDSR (Ours) MDSR (Ours) 0797 from DIV2K [26] EDSR (Ours) MDSR (Ours)
(30.94 dB / 0.9318) (30.81 dB / 0.9301) (25.48 dB / 0.9597) (25.38 dB / 0.9590)

Figure 7: Our NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge results on unknown downscaling ×4 category. In the challenge, we
excluded images from 0791 to 0800 from training for validation. We did not use geometric self-ensemble for unknown
downscaling category.

Track1: bicubic downscailing Track2: unknown downscailing

×2 ×3 ×4 ×2 ×3 ×4
Method PSNR SSIM PSNR SSIM PSNR SSIM PSNR SSIM PSNR SSIM PSNR SSIM
EDSR+ (Ours) 34.93 0.948 31.13 0.889 29.09 0.837 34.00 0.934 30.78 0.881 28.77 0.826
MDSR+ (Ours) 34.83 0.947 31.04 0.888 29.04 0.836 33.86 0.932 30.67 0.879 28.62 0.821
3rd method 34.47 0.944 30.77 0.882 28.82 0.830 33.67 0.930 30.51 0.876 28.54 0.819
4th method 34.66 0.946 30.83 0.884 28.83 0.830 32.92 0.921 30.31 0.871 28.14 0.807
5th method 34.29 0.948 30.52 0.889 28.55 0.752 - - - - - -

Table 4: Performance of our methods on the test dataset of NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge [26]. The results of top
5 methods are displayed for two tracks and six categories. Red indicates the best performance and blue indicates the second
best.
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