Automatic Search Dense Connection Module for Super-Resolution.

The development of display technology has continuously increased the requirements for image resolution. However, the imaging systems of many cameras are limited by their physical conditions, and the image resolution is often restrictive. Recently, several models based on deep convolutional neural network (CNN) have gained significant performance for image super-resolution (SR), while extensive memory consumption and computation overhead hinder practical applications. For this purpose, we present a lightweight network that automatically searches dense connection (ASDCN) for image super-resolution (SR), which effectively reduces redundancy in dense connection and focuses on more valuable features. We employ neural architecture search (NAS) to model the searching of dense connections. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on five public datasets show that our derived model achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art models.