Involution and BSConv Multi-Depth Distillation Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution

Abstract

Single-image super-resolution (SISR) is a fundamental problem in computer vision that aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved substantial advancements, deeper architectures often introduce excessive parameters, higher memory usage, and computational cost, limiting their applicability on resource-constrained devices. Recent research has thus focused on lightweight architectures that preserve accuracy while reducing complexity. This paper presents the Involution and BSConv Multi-Depth Distillation Network (IBMDN), a lightweight and effective architecture for SISR. The proposed IBMDN comprises Involution and BSConv Multi-Depth Distillation Blocks (IBMDB) and a Contrast and High-Frequency Attention Block (CHFAB). IBMDB employs varying combinations of Involution and BSConv at multiple depths to perform efficient feature extraction while minimizing computational complexity. CHFAB, a lightweight self-attention mechanism, focuses on extracting high-frequency and contrast information to enhance perceptual quality in the reconstructed images. The flexible design of IBMDB enables it to be seamlessly integrated into diverse SISR frameworks, including information distillation, transformer-based, and GAN-based models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that incorporating IBMDB significantly reduces memory usage, parameters, and floating-point operations (FLOPs), while achieving improvements in both pixel-wise accuracy and visual quality. The source code is available at: https://github.com/akramkhatami/IBMDN.