Optimizing SR-GAN for Resource-Efficient Single-Image Super-Resolution via Knowledge Distillation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have facilitated substantial improvement in single-image super-resolution (SR) by enabling the generation of photo-realistic images. However, the high memory requirements of GAN-based SRs (mainly generators) lead to reduced performance and increased energy consumption, making it difficult to implement them onto resource-constricted devices. In this study, we propose an efficient and compressed architecture for the SR-GAN (generator) model using the model compression technique Knowledge Distillation. Our approach involves the transmission of knowledge from a heavy network to a lightweight one, which reduces the storage requirement of the model by 58% with also an increase in their performance. Experimental results on various benchmarks indicate that our proposed compressed model enhances performance with an increase in PSNR, SSIM, and image quality respectively for x4 super-resolution tasks.