Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning for Single Image Super-Resolution

Kyle Vassilo, Cory Heatwole, Tarek Taha, Asif Mehmood; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2020, pp. 512-513

Deep Learning (DL) has become prevalent in today's image processing research due to its power and versatility. It has dominated the Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) field with its ability to obtain High-Resolution (HR) images from their Low-Resolution (LR) counterparts, particularly using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Interest in SISR comes from its potential to increase the performance of supplementary image processing tasks such as object detection, localization, and classification. This research applies a multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to SISR, creating an advanced ensemble approach for combining powerful GANs. In our implementation each agent chooses a particular action from a fixed action set comprised of results from existing GAN SISR algorithms to update its pixel values. The pixel-wise or patch-wise arrangement of agents and rewards encourages the algorithm to learn a strategy to increase the resolution of an image by choosing the best pixel values from each option.