Shuffle block SRGAN for face image super-resolution reconstruction

When low-resolution face images are used for face recognition, the model accuracy is substantially decreased. How to recover high-resolution face features from low-resolution images precisely and efficiently is an essential subtask in face recognition. In this study, we introduce shuffle block SRGAN, a new image super-resolution network inspired by the SRGAN structure. By replacing the residual blocks with shuffle blocks, we can achieve efficient super-resolution reconstruction. Furthermore, by considering the generated image quality in the loss function, we can obtain more realistic super-resolution images. We train and test SB-SRGAN in three public face image datasets and use transfer learning strategy during the training process. The experimental results show that shuffle block SRGAN can achieve desirable image super-resolution performance with respect to visual effect as well as the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structure similarity index method metrics, compared with the performance attained by the other chosen deep-leaning models.