Achieving On-Mobile Real-Time Super-Resolution With Neural Architecture and Pruning Search

Zheng Zhan, Yifan Gong, Pu Zhao, Geng Yuan, Wei Niu, Yushu Wu, Tianyun Zhang, Malith Jayaweera, David Kaeli, Bin Ren, Xue Lin, Yanzhi Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 4821-4831

Though recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks with the prosperous development of deep neural networks (DNNs), the deep learning methods are confronted with the computation and memory consumption issues in practice, especially for resource-limited platforms such as mobile devices. To overcome the challenge and facilitate the real-time deployment of SISR tasks on mobile, we combine neural architecture search with pruning search and propose an automatic search framework that derives sparse super-resolution (SR) models with high image quality while satisfying the real-time inference requirement. To decrease the search cost, we leverage the weight sharing strategy by introducing a supernet and decouple the search problem into three stages, including supernet construction, compiler-aware architecture and pruning search, and compiler-aware pruning ratio search. With the proposed framework, we are the first to achieve real-time SR inference (with only tens of milliseconds per frame) for implementing 720p resolution with competitive image quality (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) on mobile platforms (Samsung Galaxy S20).