Papers › High-Frequency Prior-Driven Adaptive Masking for Accelerating Image Super-Resolution

High-Frequency Prior-Driven Adaptive Masking for Accelerating Image Super-Resolution

11 May 2025arXiv:2505.06975archive 2025-07-28

Wei Shang, Dongwei Ren, Wanying Zhang, Pengfei Zhu, QinGhua Hu, WangMeng Zuo

The primary challenge in accelerating image super-resolution lies in reducing computation while maintaining performance and adaptability. Motivated by the observation that high-frequency regions (e.g., edges and textures) are most critical for reconstruction, we propose a training-free adaptive masking module for acceleration that dynamically focuses computation on these challenging areas. Specifically, our method first extracts high-frequency components via Gaussian blur subtraction and adaptively generates binary masks using K-means clustering to identify regions requiring intensive processing. Our method can be easily integrated with both CNNs and Transformers. For CNN-based architectures, we replace standard 3 ×3 convolutions with an unfold operation followed by 1 ×1 convolutions, enabling pixel-wise sparse computation guided by the mask. For Transformer-based models, we partition the mask into non-overlapping windows and selectively process tokens based on their average values. During inference, unnecessary pixels or windows are pruned, significantly reducing computation. Moreover, our method supports dilation-based mask adjustment to control the processing scope without retraining, and is robust to unseen degradations (e.g., noise, compression). Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our method reduces FLOPs by 24--43% for state-of-the-art models (e.g., CARN, SwinIR) while achieving comparable or better quantitative metrics. The source code is available at https://github.com/shangwei5/AMSR

PaperPDFCode

Code

shangwei5/amsr officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Image Super-ResolutionSuper-Resolution

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Adaptive MaskingL1 Regularizationk-Means Clustering

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections