# Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08797 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08797/

## Key facts

- Cited by 799 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Feb 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 799)

- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04437/) (2022)
- [MambaIR: A Simple Baseline for Image Restoration with State-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15648/) (2024)
- [SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16518/) (2023)
- [MAXIM: Multi-Axis MLP for Image Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02973/) (2022)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)
- [VRT: A Video Restoration Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12288/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Degradation Representation Learning for Blind Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00416/) (2021)
- [Efficient Long-Range Attention Network for Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06697/) (2022)
- [Transformer for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11084/) (2021)
- [Efficient and Explicit Modelling of Image Hierarchies for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00748/) (2023)
- [Local Texture Estimator for Implicit Representation Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08918/) (2021)
- [Dual Aggregation Transformer for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03364/) (2023)
- [Details or Artifacts: A Locally Discriminative Learning Approach to Realistic Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09195/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09388/) (2023)
- [Real-World Blind Super-Resolution via Feature Matching with Implicit High-Resolution Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13142/) (2022)
- [Pixel-level and Semantic-level Adjustable Super-resolution: A Dual-LoRA Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03017/) (2024)
- [Efficient and Degradation-Adaptive Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14216/) (2022)
- [MambaIRv2: Attentive State Space Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15269/) (2024)
- [Refusion: Enabling Large-Size Realistic Image Restoration with Latent-Space Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08291/) (2023)
- [Deep Burst Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10997/) (2021)
- [ClassSR: A General Framework to Accelerate Super-Resolution Networks by Data Characteristic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04039/) (2021)
- [Intriguing Findings of Frequency Selection for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11745/) (2021)
- [MASA-SR: Matching Acceleration and Spatial Adaptation for Reference-Based Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02299/) (2021)
- [NAFSSR: Stereo Image Super-Resolution Using NAFNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08714/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Conditional Flow: A Unified Framework for Image Super-Resolution and Image Rescaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05301/) (2021)
- [GRAM-HD: 3D-Consistent Image Generation at High Resolution with Generative Radiance Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07255/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A very deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has recently achieved great success for image super-resolution (SR) and offered hierarchical features as well. However, most deep CNN based SR models do not make full use of the hierarchical features from the original low-resolution (LR) images, thereby achieving relatively-low performance. In this paper, we propose a novel residual dense network (RDN) to address this problem in image SR. We fully exploit the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers. Specifically, we propose residual dense block (RDB) to extract abundant local features via dense connected convolutional layers. RDB further allows direct connections from the state of preceding RDB to all the layers of current RDB, leading to a contiguous memory (CM) mechanism. Local feature fusion in RDB is then used to adaptively learn more effective features from preceding and current local features and stabilizes the training of wider network. After fully obtaining dense local features, we use global feature fusion to jointly and adaptively learn global hierarchical features in a holistic way. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets with different degradation models show that our RDN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods.