Practical Single-Image Super-Resolution Using Look-Up Table

A number of super-resolution (SR) algorithms from interpolation to deep neural networks (DNN) have emerged to restore or create missing details of the input low-resolution image. As mobile devices and display hardware develops, the demand for practical SR technology has increased. Current state-of-the-art SR methods are based on DNNs for better quality. However, they are feasible when executed by using a parallel computing module (e.g. GPUs), and have been difficult to apply to general uses such as end-user software, smartphones, and televisions. To this end, we propose an efficient and practical approach for the SR by adopting look-up table (LUT). We train a deep SR network with a small receptive field and transfer the output values of the learned deep model to the LUT. At test time, we retrieve the precomputed HR output values from the LUT for query LR input pixels. The proposed method can be performed very quickly because it does not require a large number of floating point operations. Experimental results show the efficiency and the effectiveness of our method. Especially, our method runs faster while showing better quality compared to bicubic interpolation.