Papers › BAM: A Balanced Attention Mechanism for Single Image Super Resolution

BAM: A Balanced Attention Mechanism for Single Image Super Resolution

15 Apr 2021arXiv:2104.07566archive 2025-07-28

Fanyi Wang, Haotian Hu, Cheng Shen

Recovering texture information from the aliasing regions has always been a major challenge for Single Image Super Resolution (SISR) task. These regions are often submerged in noise so that we have to restore texture details while suppressing noise. To address this issue, we propose a Balanced Attention Mechanism (BAM), which consists of Avgpool Channel Attention Module (ACAM) and Maxpool Spatial Attention Module (MSAM) in parallel. ACAM is designed to suppress extreme noise in the large scale feature maps while MSAM preserves high-frequency texture details. Thanks to the parallel structure, these two modules not only conduct self-optimization, but also mutual optimization to obtain the balance of noise reduction and high-frequency texture restoration during the back propagation process, and the parallel structure makes the inference faster. To verify the effectiveness and robustness of BAM, we applied it to 10 SOTA SISR networks. The results demonstrate that BAM can efficiently improve the networks performance, and for those originally with attention mechanism, the substitution with BAM further reduces the amount of parameters and increases the inference speed. Moreover, we present a dataset with rich texture aliasing regions in real scenes, named realSR7. Experiments prove that BAM achieves better super-resolution results on the aliasing area.

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Code

dandingbudanding/BAM officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Image Super-ResolutionSuper-Resolution

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Super-Resolution Set14 - 4x upscaling DRLN-BAM PSNR 29.08 #24 of 104 Archive leaderboard report
Image Super-Resolution Set14 - 4x upscaling DRLN-BAM SSIM 0.7925 #24 of 104 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Average PoolingBAMConvolutionDense ConnectionsMax PoolingSigmoid Activation

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