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Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement (arxiv.org)
1 point by pilingual on Jul 13, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Starting from random static, it repeatedly cleans the image until a small or blurry photo becomes sharp and high-resolution. In a human test that enlarged faces eight times, its results fooled people about 50% of the time, versus at most 34% for one-pass upscalers.

Abstract

We present SR3, an approach to image Super-Resolution via Repeated Refinement. SR3 adapts denoising diffusion probabilistic models to conditional image generation and performs super-resolution through a stochastic denoising process. Inference starts with pure Gaussian noise and iteratively refines the noisy output using a U-Net model trained on denoising at various noise levels. SR3 exhibits strong performance on super-resolution tasks at different magnification factors, on faces and natural images. We conduct human evaluation on a standard 8X face super-resolution task on CelebA-HQ, comparing with SOTA GAN methods. SR3 achieves a fool rate close to 50%, suggesting photo-realistic outputs, while GANs do not exceed a fool rate of 34%. We further show the effectiveness of SR3 in cascaded image generation, where generative models are chained with super-resolution models, yielding a competitive FID score of 11.3 on ImageNet.

Chitwan Saharia, Jonathan Ho, William Chan, Tim Salimans, David J. Fleet, Mohammad Norouzi
arXiv:2104.07636 · eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Apr 15, 2021 · updated Jun 30, 2021
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