FABNet: Frequency-Aware Binarized Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Abstract

Remarkable achievements have been obtained with binary neural networks (BNN) in real-time and energy-efficient single-image super-resolution (SISR) methods. However, existing approaches often adopt the Sign function to quantize image features while ignoring the influence of image spatial frequency. We argue that we can minimize the quantization error by considering different spatial frequency components. To achieve this, we propose a frequency-aware binarized network (FABNet) for single image super-resolution. First, we leverage the wavelet transformation to decompose the features into low-frequency and high-frequency components and then employ a "divide-and-conquer" strategy to separately process them with well-designed binary network structures. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic binarization process that incorporates learned-threshold binarization during forward propagation and dynamic approximation during backward propagation, effectively addressing the diverse spatial frequency information. Compared to existing methods, our approach is effective in reducing quantization error and recovering image textures. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods could surpass state-of-the-art approaches in terms of PSNR and visual quality with significantly reduced computational costs. Our codes are available at https://github.com/xrjiang527/FABNet-PyTorch.