Lightweight image super-resolution reconstruction based on inverted residual attention network

Abstract

In recent years, methods based on deep convolutional neural networks have made great progress in the field of image super-resolution reconstruction. However, mainstream approaches generally establish many network layers, leading to high computational costs and memory usage that are unsuitable for resource-limited edge devices. To alleviate this issue, a lightweight inverted residual attention network (IRAN) is proposed to obtain better super-resolution reconstruction performance with lower parameters and computation. The main structure of the IRAN consists of a series of inverted residual attention groups (IRAGs), which are mainly composed of several inverted residual attention blocks (IRABs). IRAB effectively reduces the network parameters and computation while extracting depth features by introducing the inverted residual structure and uses the simple channel attention mechanism to learn the important channel feature information. In addition, an enhanced spatial attention mechanism is introduced at the beginning and end of IRAG to further improve the reconstruction performance of the network. The experimental results show that compared with the mainstream lightweight networks, not only the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity of image quality metrics are better but also the parameters and the computational effort of the network are lower.