A modular neural network for super-resolution of human faces

Abstract

This paper presents the original and versatile architecture of a modular neural network and its application to super-resolution. Each module is a small multilayer perceptron, trained with the Levenberg-Marquardt method, and is used as a generic building block. By connecting the modules together to establish a composition of their individual mappings, we elaborate a lattice of modules that implements full connectivity between the pixels of the low-resolution input image and those of the higher-resolution output image. After the network is trained with patterns made up of low and high-resolution images of objects or scenes of the same kind, it will be able to enhance dramatically the resolution of a similar object's representation. The modular nature of the architecture allows the training phase to be readily parallelized on a network of PCs. Finally, it is shown that the network performs global-scale reconstruction of human faces from very low resolution input images.