BAM: A Lightweight and Efficient Balanced Attention Mechanism for Single Image Super Resolution

Single image super-resolution (SISR) is one of the most challenging problems in the field of computer vision. Among the deep convolutional neural network based methods, attention mechanism has shown the enormous potential. However, due to the diverse network architectures, there is a lack of a universal attention mechanism for the SISR task. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient Balanced Attention Mechanism (BAM), which can be generally applicable for different SISR networks. It consists of Avgpool Channel Attention Module (ACAM) and Maxpool Spatial Attention Module (MSAM). These two modules are connected in parallel to minimize the error accumulation and the crosstalk. To reduce the undesirable effect of redundant information on the attention generation, we only apply Avgpool for channel attention because Maxpool could pick up the illusive extreme points in the feature map across the spatial dimensions, and we only apply Maxpool for spatial attention because the useful features along the channel dimension usually exist in the form of maximum values for SISR task. To verify the efficiency and robustness of BAM, we apply it to 12 state-of-the-art SISR networks, among which eight were without attention thus we plug BAM in and four were with attention thus we replace its original attention module with BAM. We experiment on Set5, Set14 and BSD100 benchmark datasets with the scale factor of x2 , x3 and x4 . The results demonstrate that BAM can generally improve the network performance. Moreover, we conduct the ablation experiments to prove the minimalism of BAM. Our results show that the parallel structure of BAM can better balance channel and spatial attentions, thus outperforming the series structure of prior Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM).