Downscaled Representation Matters: Improving Image Rescaling with Collaborative Downscaled Images

Bingna Xu, Yong Guo, Luoqian Jiang, Mianjie Yu, Jian Chen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 12237-12247

Deep networks have achieved great success in image rescaling (IR) task that seeks to learn the optimal downscaled representations, i.e., low-resolution (LR) images, to reconstruct the original high-resolution (HR) images. Compared with super-resolution methods that consider a fixed downscaling scheme, e.g., bicubic, IR often achieves significantly better reconstruction performance thanks to the learned downscaled representations. This highlights the importance of a good downscaled representation. Existing IR methods mainly learn the downscaled representation by jointly optimizing the downscaling and upscaling models. Unlike them, we seek to improve the downscaled representation through a different and more direct way -- directly optimizing the downscaled image itself instead of the down-/upscaling models. Consequently, we propose a Hierarchical Collaborative Downscaling (HCD) method that performs gradient descent w.r.t. the reconstruction loss in both HR and LR domains to improve the downscaled representations, so as to boost IR performance. Extensive experiments show that our HCD significantly improves the reconstruction performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Particularly, we improve over popular IR methods by >0.57db PSNR on Set5. Moreover, we also highlight the flexibility of our HCD since it can generalize well across diverse image rescaling models. The code is available at https://github.com/xubingna/HCD.