EAAI Journal 2026 Journal Article
Progressive information integration in lightweight image super-resolution
- Longfeng Shen
- Jiacong Chen
- Liangjin Diao
- Lei Liu
- Fenglan Qin
- Fangzhen Ge
Transformer-based models have considerably improved image super-resolution (SR). However, these networks fail to design multi-operations aggregation architecture with guidance of SR knowledge. To tackle these drawbacks, we propose a novel progressive information integration (PII) module. It extracts the input features from progressive perspectives: a dense region, sparse region, and three-dimensional space. We employ a local convolution block to access pixels in the dense region and window-based self-attention for those in the sparse region. To leverage the advantages of both channel-attention and spatial-attention schemes, we introduce a Hybrid Attention block (HAB). This block enables the effective use of pixels in three-dimensional space by combining the complementary benefits of the two attention schemes. As an artificial intelligence (AI) -driven approach, our method is applied to lightweight image super-resolution tasks, aiming to balance performance and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PII-based super-resolution (PII-SR) achieves the superior results on lightweight SR benchmarks with fewer parameters (e. g. , 26. 81 dB (dB)@Urban100 × 4 with only 652 thousand (K) parameters).