Single image super-resolution based on adaptive convolutional sparse coding and convolutional neural networks

Abstract The convolutional sparse coding-based super-resolution (CSC-SR) method has shown its good performance in single image super-resolution. It divides the low-resolution (LR) image into low-frequency part and the high-frequency part, and reconstructs their corresponding high-resolution (HR) image with bicubic interpolation and convolutional sparse coding (CSC) method, respectively. This paper is devoted to improve the performance of CSC-SR method. As convolutional neural network (CNN) can reveal the mapping relation between the LR image and the HR image for the low-frequency part better, we replace the bicubic interpolation with CNN to reconstruct the HR image for the low-frequency part. In addition, we propose an adaptive CSC method to reconstruct the HR image for the high-frequency part. We name our proposed super-resolution method as hybrid adaptive convolutional sparse coding-based super-resolution (HACSC-SR) method. Many comparison experiments illustrate that our proposed HACSC-SR method is superior to CSC-SR, CNN as well as several existing super-resolution methods.