Unsupervised Real-World Super-Resolution: A Domain Adaptation Perspective

Most existing convolution neural network (CNN) based super-resolution (SR) methods generate their paired training dataset by artificially synthesizing low-resolution (LR) images from the high-resolution (HR) ones. However, this dataset preparation strategy harms the application of these CNNs in real-world scenarios due to the inherent domain gap between the training and testing data. A popular attempts towards the challenge is unpaired generative adversarial networks, which generate "real" LR counterparts from real HR images using image-to-image translation and then perform super-resolution from "real" LR->SR. Despite great progress, it is still difficult to synthesize perfect "real" LR images for super-resolution. In this paper, we firstly consider the real-world SR problem from the traditional domain adaptation perspective. We propose a novel unpaired SR training framework based on feature distribution alignment, with which we can obtain degradation-indistinguishable feature maps and then map them to HR images. In order to generate better SR images for target LR domain, we introduce several regularization losses to force the aligned feature to locate around the target domain. Our experiments indicate that our SR network obtains the state-of-the-art performance over both blind and unpaired SR methods on diverse datasets.