Lightweight Single Image Super-Resolution by Channel Split Residual Convolution

In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks have made significant progress in the research of single image super-resolution. However, it is difficult to be applied in practical computing terminals or embedded devices due to a large number of parameters and computational effort. To balance these problems, we propose CSRNet, a lightweight neural network based on channel split residual learning structure, to reconstruct highresolution images from low-resolution images. Lightweight refers to designing a neural network with fewer parameters and a simplified structure for lower memory consumption and faster inference speed. At the same time, it is ensured that the performance of recovering high-resolution images is not degraded. In CSRNet, we reduce the parameters and computation by channel split residual learning. Simultaneously, we propose a double-upsampling network structure to improve the performance of the lightweight super-resolution network and make it easy to train. Finally, we propose a new evaluation metric for the lightweight approaches named 100_FPS. Experiments show that our proposed CSRNet not only speeds up the inference of the neural network and reduces memory consumption, but also performs well on single image super-resolution.