Deconvolutional neural network for image super-resolution

This study builds a fully deconvolutional neural network (FDNN) and addresses the problem of single image super-resolution (SISR) by using the FDNN. Although SISR using deep neural networks has been a major research focus, the problem of reconstructing a high resolution (HR) image with an FDNN has received little attention. A few recent approaches toward SISR are to embed deconvolution operations into multilayer feedforward neural networks. This paper constructs a deep FDNN for SISR that possesses two remarkable advantages compared to existing SISR approaches. The first improves the network performance without increasing the depth of the network or embedding complex structures. The second replaces all convolution operations with deconvolution operations to implement an effective reconstruction. That is, the proposed FDNN only contains deconvolution layers and learns an end-to-end mapping from low resolution (LR) to HR images. Furthermore, to avoid the oversmoothness of the mean squared error loss, the trained image is treated as a probability distribution, and the Kullback–Leibler divergence is introduced into the final loss function to achieve enhanced recovery. Although the proposed FDNN only has 10 layers, it is successfully evaluated through extensive experiments. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods and deep convolution neural networks with 20 or 30 layers, the proposed FDNN achieves better performance for SISR.