EchoSR: Efficient Context Harnessing for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution

Abstract

Image super-resolution (SR) aims to reconstruct high-quality, high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs and plays a critical role in various downstream applications. Despite recent advancements, balancing reconstruction fidelity and computational efficiency remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in resource-constrained scenarios. While existing lightweight methods attempt to expand receptive fields, many of them either incur substantial computational overhead, naively scale up kernel sizes, or lack mechanisms for coherent multi-scale integration, limiting their overall effectiveness and scalability. To address these limitations, we propose EchoSR, an efficient context-harnessing framework for lightweight image super-resolution, which unifies multi-scale receptive field modeling and hierarchical context fusion. EchoSR decouples feature learning into disentangled local, multi-scale, and global modeling stages through an efficient context-harnessing strategy, and further promotes seamless cross-scale integration via a cross-scale overlapping fusion mechanism. Extensive experiments have shown that EchoSR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight super-resolution methods across multiple benchmarks, while also achieving a faster speed $(\sim 2\times )$. The source code is available at https://github.com/funnyWang-Echoes/EchoSR.

Accepted by Information Fusion; 20 pages, 17 figures

References in corpus (4)

• PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer
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• Visual Style Prompt Learning Using Diffusion Models for Blind Face Restoration
• DDistill-SR: Reparameterized Dynamic Distillation Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution