LAR-SR: A Local Autoregressive Model for Image Super-Resolution

Baisong Guo, Xiaoyun Zhang, Haoning Wu, Yu Wang, Ya Zhang, Yan-Feng Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 1909-1918

Previous super-resolution (SR) approaches often formulate SR as a regression problem and pixel wise restoration, which leads to a blurry and unreal SR output. Recent works combine adversarial loss with pixel-wise loss to train a GAN-based model or introduce normalizing flows into SR problems to generate more realistic images. As another powerful generative approach, autoregressive (AR) model has not been noticed in low level tasks due to its limitation. Based on the fact that given the structural information, the textural details in the natural images are locally related without long term dependency, in this paper we propose a novel autoregressive model-based SR approach, namely LAR-SR, which can efficiently generate realistic SR images using a novel local autoregressive (LAR) module. The proposed LAR module can sample all the patches of textural components in parallel, which greatly reduces the time consumption. In addition to high time efficiency, it is also able to leverage contextual information of pixels and can be optimized with a consistent loss. Experimental results on the widely-used datasets show that the proposed LAR-SR approach achieves superior performance on the visual quality and quantitative metrics compared with other generative models such as GAN, Flow, and is competitive with the mixture generative model.