PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models

We have noticed a lot of concern that PULSE will be used to identify individuals whose faces have been blurred out. We want to emphasize that this is impossible - PULSE makes imaginary faces of people who do not exist, which should not be confused for real people. It will not help identify or reconstruct the original image.

We also want to address concerns of bias in PULSE. We have now included a new section in the paper and an accompanying model card directly addressing this bias.


A preview of PULSE in action, making an imaginary high-resolution face.


Abstract

The primary aim of single-image super-resolution is to construct a high-resolution (HR) image from a corresponding low-resolution (LR) input. In previous approaches, which have generally been supervised, the training objective typically measures a pixel-wise average distance between the super-resolved (SR) and HR images. Optimizing such metrics often leads to blurring, especially in high variance (detailed) regions. We propose an alternative formulation of the super-resolution problem based on creating realistic SR images that downscale correctly. We present a novel super-resolution algorithm addressing this problem, PULSE (Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration), which generates high-resolution, realistic images at resolutions previously unseen in the literature. It accomplishes this in an entirely self-supervised fashion and is not confined to a specific degradatio n operator used during training, unlike previous methods (which require training on databases of LR-HR image pairs for supervised learning). Instead of starting with the LR image and slowly adding detail, PULSE traverses the high-resolution natural image manifold, searching for images that downscale to the original LR image. This is formalized through the “downscaling loss,” which guides exploration through the latent space of a generative model. By leveraging properties of high-dimensional Gaussians, we restrict the search space to guarantee that our outputs are realistic. PULSE thereby generates super-resolved images that both are realistic and downscale correctly.

We show extensive experimental results demonstrating the efficacy of our approach in the domain of face super-resolution (also known as face hallucination). Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in perceptual quality at higher resolutions and scale factors than previously possible.

Links
Main idea in one minute

See paper for details.

Comparison with other methods

Reference
@InProceedings{PULSE_CVPR_2020,
author = {Menon, Sachit and Damian, Alex and Hu, McCourt and Ravi, Nikhil and Rudin, Cynthia},
title = {PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models},
booktitle = {The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2020}
}

Comparison Reference
Acknowledgments
The project website is based on Dmitry Ulyanov's wonderful Deep Image Prior project page. Funding was provided by the Lord Foundation of North Carolina and the Duke Department of Computer Science. Thank you to the Google Cloud Platform research credits program and Google Colab team.