# Wavelet Domain Style Transfer for an Effective Perception-distortion Tradeoff in Single Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.04074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04074/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Wavelet Diffusion Models are fast and scalable Image Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16152/) (2022)
- [Fourier Space Losses for Efficient Perceptual Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00783/) (2021)
- [ResDiff: Combining CNN and Diffusion Model for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08714/) (2023)
- [WaveFill: A Wavelet-based Generation Network for Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11027/) (2021)
- [Single Image Depth Prediction with Wavelet Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02022/) (2021)
- [Wave-SAN: Wavelet based Style Augmentation Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07656/) (2022)
- [WaveGAN: Frequency-aware GAN for High-Fidelity Few-shot Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07288/) (2022)
- [AIM 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video: Dataset, Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11184/) (2022)
- [Perception-Distortion Balanced ADMM Optimization for Single-Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03324/) (2022)
- [Training Generative Image Super-Resolution Models by Wavelet-Domain Losses Enables Better Control of Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19215/) (2024)
- [PyNET-CA: Enhanced PyNET with Channel Attention for End-to-End Mobile Image Signal Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02895/) (2021)
- [Spatial Attention-based Non-reference Perceptual Quality Prediction Network for Omnidirectional Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06116/) (2021)
- [Training Transformer Models by Wavelet Losses Improves Quantitative and Visual Performance in Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11273/) (2024)
- [Auto-Encoded Supervision for Perceptual Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00124/) (2024)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) Powered Fast Magnetic Resonance Imaging -- Mini Review, Comparison and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01800/) (2021)
- [Priors in Deep Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02070/) (2022)
- [Neural Contourlet Network for Monocular 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01817/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Frame Interpolation in Wavelet Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03508/) (2023)
- [Perceptual-Distortion Balanced Image Super-Resolution is a Multi-Objective Optimization Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03179/) (2024)
- [UGPNet: Universal Generative Prior for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00370/) (2023)
- [Pairwise Distance Distillation for Unsupervised Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07302/) (2024)
- [MGHF: Multi-Granular High-Frequency Perceptual Loss for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13548/) (2024)
- [FreSca: Scaling in Frequency Space Enhances Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02154/) (2025)
- [Computationally Efficient Diffusion Models in Medical Imaging: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07866/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Transformer meets Multi-level Wavelet Spectrum for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01175/) (2025)
- [Both Spatial and Frequency Cues Contribute to High-Fidelity Image Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07678/) (2023)
- [FDWST: Fingerphoto Deblurring using Wavelet Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15964/) (2024)
- [GDSR: Global-Detail Integration through Dual-Branch Network with Wavelet Losses for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01460/) (2024)
- [SUPER Module for Detail-Sensitive and Cost-Efficient U-Net Variant Decoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11015/) (2025)
- [Decoupling Wavelet Sub-bands for Single Source Domain Generalization in Fundus Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28463/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In single image super-resolution (SISR), given a low-resolution (LR) image, one wishes to find a high-resolution (HR) version of it which is both accurate and photo-realistic. Recently, it has been shown that there exists a fundamental tradeoff between low distortion and high perceptual quality, and the generative adversarial network (GAN) is demonstrated to approach the perception-distortion (PD) bound effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on wavelet domain style transfer (WDST), which achieves a better PD tradeoff than the GAN based methods. Specifically, we propose to use 2D stationary wavelet transform (SWT) to decompose one image into low-frequency and high-frequency sub-bands. For the low-frequency sub-band, we improve its objective quality through an enhancement network. For the high-frequency sub-band, we propose to use WDST to effectively improve its perceptual quality. By feat of the perfect reconstruction property of wavelets, these sub-bands can be re-combined to obtain an image which has simultaneously high objective and perceptual quality. The numerical results on various datasets show that our method achieves the best trade-off between the distortion and perceptual quality among the existing state-of-the-art SISR methods.