Navigating Beyond Dropout: An Intriguing Solution Towards Generalizable Image Super Resolution

Deep learning has led to a dramatic leap on Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) performances in recent years. While most existing work assumes a simple and fixed degradation model (e.g., bicubic downsampling), the research of Blind SR seeks to improve model generalization ability with unknown degradation. Recently, Kong et al. [37] pioneer the investigation of a more suitable training strategy for Blind SR using Dropout [63]. Although such method indeed brings substantial generalization improvements via mitigating overfitting, we argue that Dropout simultaneously introduces undesirable side-effect that compromises model's capacity to faithfully reconstruct fine details. We show both the theoretical and experimental analyses in our paper, and furthermore, we present another easy yet effective training strategy that enhances the generalization ability of the model by simply modulating its first and second-order features statistics. Experimental results have shown that our method could serve as a model-agnostic regularization and outperforms Dropout on seven benchmark datasets including both synthetic and real-world scenarios.

1. Introduction

Riding on the waves of the explosive advancement of deep learning technology, Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) with deep neural networks (DNNs) has greatly evolved in recent years (e.g., VDSR [35], SRResNet [38], EDSR [45], RDN [83] and SwinIR [43]), offering superior performances over traditional prediction models [21], [24], [31], [58].