DLGSANet: Lightweight Dynamic Local and Global Self-Attention Network for Image Super-Resolution

Abstract

We propose an effective lightweight dynamic local and global self-attention network (DLGSANet) to solve image super-resolution. Our method explores the properties of Transformers while having low computational costs. Motivated by the network designs of Transformers, we develop a simple yet effective multi-head dynamic local self-attention (MHDLSA) module to extract local features efficiently. In addition, we note that existing Transformers usually explore all similarities of the tokens between the queries and keys for the feature aggregation. However, using all the similarities does not effectively facilitate the high-resolution image reconstruction as not all the tokens from the queries are relevant to those in keys. To overcome this problem, we develop a sparse global self-attention (SparseGSA) module to select the most useful similarity values so that the most useful global features can be better utilized for image reconstruction. We develop a hybrid dynamic-Transformer block (HDTB) that integrates the MHDLSA and SparseGSA for both local and global feature exploration. To ease the network training, we formulate the HDTBs into a residual hybrid dynamic-Transformer group (RHDTG). By embedding the RHDTGs into an end-to-end trainable network, we show that the proposed method has fewer network parameters and lower computational costs while achieving competitive performance against state-of-the-art ones in terms of accuracy. More information is available at https://neonleexiang.github.io/DLGSANet/.