Patch loss: A generic multi-scale perceptual loss for single image super-resolution
Tai An, Binjie Mao, Bin Xue, Chunlei Huo, Shiming Xiang, Chunhong Pan
Abstract
In single image super-resolution (SISR), although PSNR is a key metric for signal fidelity, images with high PSNR do not necessarily render high visual quality. As a result, current perception-driven SISR methods employ perceptual metrics close to the human eye to measure the quality of the generated images. Unfortunately, the perceptual loss and adversarial loss, widely used by the perception-driven SISR methods, still underperform on these non-differentiable perceptual metrics. To this end, we propose a generic multi-scale perceptual loss, i.e., the patch loss, which can be easily plugged into off-the-shelf SISR methods to improve a broad range of perceptual metrics. Specifically, the proposed patch loss minimizes the multi-scale similarity of image patches and enhances the restoration of regions with complex textures and sharp edges via parameter-free adaptive patch-wise attention. Our proposed patch loss introduces more realistic details compared to the perceptual loss and fewer artifacts compared to the adversarial loss.