본 연구실의 박종은 학생이 연구한 "Kernel estimation Using Total Variation Guided GAN for Image Super-Resolution" 제목의 논문이 Sensors (Impact factor : 3.847, Rank : Q2)에 게재가 확정되었다. 본 연구는 박종은 학생(1저자)과 김한솔 학생(2저자), 강문기 교수(교신저자)가 진행하였다.

Abstract

Various super-resolution (SR) kernels in the degradation model deteriorate the performance of the SR algorithms, showing unpleasant artifacts in the output images. Hence, SR kernel estimation has been studied to improve the SR performance in several ways for more than a decade. In particular, a conventional research named KernelGAN has recently been proposed. To estimate the SR kernel from a single image, KernelGAN introduces generative adversarial networks(GANs) that utilize the recurrence of similar structures across scales. Subsequently, an enhanced version of KernelGAN, named E-KernelGAN, was proposed to consider image sharpness and edge thickness. Although it is stable compared to the earlier method, it still encounters challenges in estimating sizable and anisotropic kernels because the structural information of an input image is not sufficiently considered. In this paper, we propose a kernel estimation algorithm called Total Variation Guided KernelGAN (TVG-KernelGAN), which efficiently enables networks to focus on the structural information of an input image. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm accurately and stably estimates kernels, particularly sizable and anisotropic kernels, both qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, we compared the results of the non-blind SR methods, using SR kernel estimation techniques. The results indicate that the performance of the SR algorithms was improved using our proposed method.