The Ninth NTIRE 2024 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

LIPT: Latency-aware Image Processing Transformer

Transformer is leading a trend in the field of image processing. Despite the great success that existing lightweight image processing transformers have achieved, they are tailored to FLOPs or parameters reduction, rather than practical inference acceleration. In this paper, we present a latency-aware image processing transformer, termed LIPT. We devise the low-latency proportion LIPT block that substitutes memory-intensive operators with the combination of self-attention and convolutions to achieve practical speedup. Specifically, we propose a novel non-volatile sparse masking self-attention (NVSM-SA) that utilizes a pre-computing sparse mask to capture contextual information from a larger window with no extra computation overload. Besides, a high-frequency reparameterization module (HRM) is proposed to make LIPT block reparameterization friendly, which improves the model's detail reconstruction capability. Extensive experiments on multiple image processing tasks (e.g., image super-resolution (SR), JPEG artifact reduction, and image denoising) demonstrate the superiority of LIPT on both latency and PSNR. LIPT achieves real-time GPU inference with state-of-the-art performance on multiple image SR benchmarks.

DCS-RISR: Dynamic Channel Splitting for Efficient Real-world Image Super-Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution (RISR) has received increased focus for improving the quality of SR images under unknown complex degradation. Existing methods rely on the heavy SR models to enhance low-resolution (LR) images of different degradation levels, which significantly restricts their practical deployments on resource-limited devices. In this paper, we propose a novel Dynamic Channel Splitting scheme for efficient Real-world Image Super-Resolution, termed DCS-RISR. Specifically, we first introduce the light degradation prediction network to regress the degradation vector to simulate the real-world degradations, upon which the channel splitting vector is generated as the input for an efficient SR model. Then, a learnable octave convolution block is proposed to adaptively decide the channel splitting scale for low- and high-frequency features at each block, reducing computation overhead and memory cost by offering the large scale to low-frequency features and the small scale to the high ones. To further improve the RISR performance, Non-local regularization is employed to supplement the knowledge of patches from LR and HR subspace with free-computation inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DCS-RISR on different benchmark datasets. Our DCS-RISR not only achieves the best trade-off between computation/parameter and PSNR/SSIM metric, and also effectively handles real-world images with different degradation levels.