CAMixerSR: Only Details Need More “Attention”

To satisfy the rapidly increasing demands on the large image (2K-8K) super-resolution (SR), prevailing methods follow two independent tracks: 1) accelerate existing networks by content-aware routing, and 2) design better super-resolution networks via token mixer refining. Despite directness, they encounter unavoidable defects (e.g., inflexible route or non-discriminative processing) limiting further improvements of quality-complexity trade-off. To erase the drawbacks, we integrate these schemes by proposing a content-aware mixer (CAMixer), which assigns convolution for simple contexts and additional deformable window-attention for sparse textures. Specifically, the CAMixer uses a learnable predictor to generate multiple bootstraps, including offsets for windows warping, a mask for classifying windows, and convolutional attentions for endowing convolution with the dynamic property, which modulates attention to include more useful textures self-adaptively and improves the representation capability of convolution. We further introduce a global classification loss to improve the accuracy of predictors. By simply stacking CAMixers, we obtain CAMixerSR which achieves superior performance on large-image SR, lightweight SR, and omnidirectional-image SR.

1. Introduction

Recent research on neural networks has significantly improved the image super-resolution (SR) quality [22], [34], [43]. However, existing methods generate visual-pleasing high- resolution (HR) images but suffer intensive computations in real-world usages, especially for 2K-8K targets. To alleviate the overhead, many accelerating frameworks [4], [19] and lightweight networks [14], [32] were introduced for practical super-resolution application. However, these approaches are completely independent without cooperation.