In plain words: It rebuilds a sharp image pixel by pixel, letting each pixel depend on earlier ones and the blurry input, so it commits to one believable set of details instead of averaging them. Human raters found its images more photo-realistic than the usual blurry average.
Abstract
We present a pixel recursive super resolution model that synthesizes realistic details into images while enhancing their resolution. A low resolution image may correspond to multiple plausible high resolution images, thus modeling the super resolution process with a pixel independent conditional model often results in averaging different details--hence blurry edges. By contrast, our model is able to represent a multimodal conditional distribution by properly modeling the statistical dependencies among the high resolution image pixels, conditioned on a low resolution input. We employ a PixelCNN architecture to define a strong prior over natural images and jointly optimize this prior with a deep conditioning convolutional network. Human evaluations indicate that samples from our proposed model look more photo realistic than a strong L2 regression baseline.
Ryan Dahl, Mohammad Norouzi, Jonathon Shlens
arXiv:1702.00783 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Feb 2, 2017 · updated Mar 22, 2017
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[0]: https://dheera.net/projects/blur