Blind Image Super-resolution with Rich Texture-Aware Codebooks

Blind super-resolution (BSR) methods based on high-resolution (HR) reconstruction codebooks have achieved promising results in recent years. However, we find that a codebook based on HR reconstruction may not effectively capture the complex correlations between low-resolution (LR) and HR images. In detail, multiple HR images may produce similar LR versions due to complex blind degradations, causing the HR-dependent only codebooks having limited texture diversity when faced with confusing LR inputs. To alleviate this problem, we propose the Rich Texture-aware Codebook-based Network (RTCNet), which consists of the Degradation-robust Texture Prior Module (DTPM) and the Patch-aware Texture Prior Module (PTPM). DTPM effectively mines the cross-resolution correlation of textures between LR and HR images by exploiting the cross-resolution correspondence of textures. PTPM uses patch-wise semantic pre-training to correct the misperception of texture similarity in the high-level semantic regularization. By taking advantage of this, RTCNet effectively gets rid of the misalignment of confusing textures between HR and LR in the BSR scenarios. Experiments show that RTCNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks by up to 0.16 ~ 0.46dB.