Image Super-Resolution With Non-Local Sparse Attention

Both non-local (NL) operation and sparse representation are crucial for Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). In this paper, we investigate their combinations and propose a novel Non-Local Sparse Attention (NLSA) with dynamic sparse attention pattern. NLSA is designed to retain long-range modeling capability from NL operation while enjoying robustness and high-efficiency of sparse representation. Specifically, NLSA rectifies NL attention with spherical locality sensitive hashing (LSH) that partitions the input space into hash buckets of related features. For every query signal, NLSA assigns a bucket to it and only computes attention within the bucket. The resulting sparse attention prevents the model from attending to locations that are noisy and less-informative, while reducing the computational cost from quadratic to asymptotic linear with respect to the spatial size. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of NLSA. With a few non-local sparse attention modules, our architecture, called non-local sparse network (NLSN), reaches state-of-the-art performance for SISR quantitatively and qualitatively.