SDCN: Synchronized Depthwise Separable Convolutional Neural Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Recently, image super-resolution techniques used in convolutional neural networks (CNN) have led to remarkable performance in the research area of digital image processing applications and computer vision tasks. Convolutional layers stacked on top of each other can design a more complex network architecture, but they also use more memory in terms of the number of parameters and introduce the vanishing gradient problem during training. Furthermore, earlier approaches of single image super-resolution used interpolation technique as a pre-processing stage to upscale the low-resolution image into HR image. The design of these approaches is simple, but not effective and insert the newer unwanted pixels (noises) in the reconstructed HR image. In this paper, authors are proposing a novel single image super-resolution architecture based on synchronized depthwise separable convolution with Dense Skip Connection Block (DSCB). In addition, unlike existing SR methods that only rely on single path, but our proposed method used the synchronizes path for generating the SISR image. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method (SDCN) achieves promising improvements than other state-of-the-art methods.