Toward Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Image Super Resolution

Model quantization is a crucial step for deploying super resolution (SR) networks on mobile devices. However, existing works focus on quantization-aware training, which requires complete dataset and expensive computational overhead. In this paper, we study post-training quantization(PTQ) for image super resolution using only a few unlabeled calibration images. As the SR model aims to maintain the texture and color information of input images, the distribution of activations are long-tailed, asymmetric and highly dynamic compared with classification models. To this end, we introduce the density-based dual clipping to cut off the outliers based on analyzing the asymmetric bounds of activations. Moreover, we present a novel pixel aware calibration method with the supervision of the full-precision model to accommodate the highly dynamic range of different samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing PTQ algorithms on various models and datasets. For instance, we get a 2.091 dB increase on Urban100 benchmark when quantizing EDSRx4 to 4-bit with 100 unlabeled images. Our code is available at both https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-Computing/tree/master/Quantization/PTQ4SR and https://gitee.com/mindspore/models/tree/master/research/cv/PTQ4SR.