Content-Aware Local GAN for Photo-Realistic Super-Resolution

Recently, GAN has successfully contributed to making single-image super-resolution (SISR) methods produce more realistic images. However, natural images have complex distribution in the real world, and a single classifier in the discriminator may not have enough capacity to classify real and fake samples, making the preceding SR network generate unpleasing noise and artifacts. To solve the problem, we propose a novel content-aware local GAN framework, CAL-GAN, which processes a large and complicated distribution of real-world images by dividing them into smaller subsets based on similar contents. Our mixture of classifiers (MoC) design allocates different super-resolved patches to corresponding expert classifiers. Additionally, we introduce novel routing and orthogonality loss terms so that different classifiers can handle various contents and learn separable features. By feeding similar distributions into the corresponding specialized classifiers, CAL-GAN enhances the representation power of existing super-resolution models, achieving state-of-the-art perceptual performance on standard benchmarks and real-world images without modifying the generator-side architecture. The codes are available at https://github.com/jkpark0825/CAL_GAN.