mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

RankSRGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks with Ranker for Image Super-Resolution

arXiv 1908.06382 ↗First posted 18 Aug 2019cs.CVcited by 145

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Abstract (arXiv)

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have demonstrated the potential to recover realistic details for single image super-resolution (SISR). To further improve the visual quality of super-resolved results, PIRM2018-SR Challenge employed perceptual metrics to assess the perceptual quality, such as PI, NIQE, and Ma. However, existing methods cannot directly optimize these indifferentiable perceptual metrics, which are shown to be highly correlated with human ratings. To address the problem, we propose Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks with Ranker (RankSRGAN) to optimize generator in the direction of perceptual metrics. Specifically, we first train a Ranker which can learn the behavior of perceptual metrics and then introduce a novel rank-content loss to optimize the perceptual quality. The most appealing part is that the proposed method can combine the strengths of different SR methods to generate better results. Extensive experiments show that RankSRGAN achieves visually pleasing results and reaches state-of-the-art performance in perceptual metrics. Project page: https://wenlongzhang0724.github.io/Projects/RankSRGAN

Key facts. Cited by 145 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2019.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 30; 2022: 29; 2023: 34; 2024: 35; 2025: 12; 2026: 5.

145 papers.

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  1. 2022Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Imagescited by 974
  2. 2022Activating More Pixels in Image Super-Resolution Transformercited by 433
  3. 2021SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 415
  4. 2023Implicit Diffusion Models for Continuous Super-Resolutioncited by 216
  5. 2023Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 108
  6. 2022Real-World Blind Super-Resolution via Feature Matching with Implicit High-Resolution Priorscited by 98
  7. 2021Blind Image Super-Resolution: A Survey and Beyondcited by 93
  8. 2023SyncTalk: The Devil is in the Synchronization for Talking Head Synthesiscited by 86
  9. 2024Towards Open-ended Visual Quality Comparisoncited by 85
  10. 2023A Complete Survey on Generative AI (AIGC): Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?cited by 84
  11. 2021Hierarchical Conditional Flow: A Unified Framework for Image Super-Resolution and Image Rescalingcited by 73
  12. 2021Fourier Space Losses for Efficient Perceptual Image Super-Resolutioncited by 72
38 more
  1. 2021Robust Reference-based Super-Resolution via C2-Matchingcited by 68
  2. 2024Deepfake Generation and Detection: A Benchmark and Surveycited by 66
  3. 2022Underwater Ranker: Learn Which Is Better and How to Be Bettercited by 65
  4. 2023HAT: Hybrid Attention Transformer for Image Restorationcited by 64
  5. 2024Diffusion Models, Image Super-Resolution And Everything: A Surveycited by 63
  6. 2023ResDiff: Combining CNN and Diffusion Model for Image Super-Resolutioncited by 53
  7. 2022Reference-based Image Super-Resolution with Deformable Attention Transformercited by 50
  8. 2021Learning Conditional Knowledge Distillation for Degraded-Reference Image Quality Assessmentcited by 41
  9. 2021Reflash Dropout in Image Super-Resolutioncited by 41
  10. 2022NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Perceptual Image Quality Assessmentcited by 41
  11. 2023DeSRA: Detect and Delete the Artifacts of GAN-based Real-World Super-Resolution Modelscited by 41
  12. 2022GCFSR: a Generative and Controllable Face Super Resolution Method Without Facial and GAN Priorscited by 39
  13. 2021Domain Adaptation for Underwater Image Enhancementcited by 35
  14. 2023HairStep: Transfer Synthetic to Real Using Strand and Depth Maps for Single-View 3D Hair Modelingcited by 35
  15. 2023Local Implicit Normalizing Flow for Arbitrary-Scale Image Super-Resolutioncited by 34
  16. 2025Toward Generalized Image Quality Assessment: Relaxing the Perfect Reference Quality Assumptioncited by 34
  17. 2021Dual-Camera Super-Resolution with Aligned Attention Modulescited by 33
  18. 2021Locally Adaptive Structure and Texture Similarity for Image Quality Assessmentcited by 32
  19. 2021Best-Buddy GANs for Highly Detailed Image Super-Resolutioncited by 30
  20. 2021A Practical Contrastive Learning Framework for Single-Image Super-Resolutioncited by 30
  21. 2023OSRT: Omnidirectional Image Super-Resolution with Distortion-aware Transformercited by 26
  22. 2024SeD: Semantic-Aware Discriminator for Image Super-Resolutioncited by 26
  23. 2022Variational Deep Image Restorationcited by 24
  24. 2024AIGV-Assessor: Benchmarking and Evaluating the Perceptual Quality of Text-to-Video Generation with LMMcited by 24
  25. 2024DVMSR: Distillated Vision Mamba for Efficient Super-Resolutioncited by 23
  26. 2022A Closer Look at Blind Super-Resolution: Degradation Models, Baselines, and Performance Upper Boundscited by 22
  27. 2022Perception-Oriented Single Image Super-Resolution using Optimal Objective Estimationcited by 21
  28. 2021Discovering Distinctive "Semantics" in Super-Resolution Networkscited by 20
  29. 2021A Systematic Survey of Deep Learning-based Single-Image Super-Resolutioncited by 19
  30. 2022Perception-Distortion Balanced ADMM Optimization for Single-Image Super-Resolutioncited by 19
  31. 2023Waving Goodbye to Low-Res: A Diffusion-Wavelet Approach for Image Super-Resolutioncited by 19
  32. 2021NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Perceptual Image Quality Assessmentcited by 18
  33. 2022Coarse-to-Fine Embedded PatchMatch and Multi-Scale Dynamic Aggregation for Reference-based Super-Resolutioncited by 18
  34. 2023SRFormerV2: Taking a Closer Look at Permuted Self-Attention for Image Super-Resolutioncited by 18
  35. 2023SuperBench: A Super-Resolution Benchmark Dataset for Scientific Machine Learningcited by 18
  36. 2022FakeCLR: Exploring Contrastive Learning for Solving Latent Discontinuity in Data-Efficient GANscited by 17
  37. 2021Toward Interactive Modulation for Photo-Realistic Image Restorationcited by 15
  38. 2021Very Lightweight Photo Retouching Network with Conditional Sequential Modulationcited by 14

50 most cited of 145 All 145 (JSON)