Shepard convolutional neural networks

Deep learning has recently been introduced to the field of low-level computer vision and image processing. Promising results have been obtained in a number of tasks including super-resolution, inpainting, deconvolution, filtering, etc. However, previously adopted neural network approaches such as convolutional neural networks and sparse auto-encoders are inherently with translation invariant operators. We found this property prevents the deep learning approaches from outperforming the state-of-the-art if the task itself requires translation variant interpolation (TVI). In this paper, we draw on Shepard interpolation and design Shepard Convolutional Neural Networks (ShCNN) which efficiently realizes end-to-end trainable TVI operators in the network. We show that by adding only a few feature maps in the new Shepard layers, the network is able to achieve stronger results than a much deeper architecture. Superior performance on both image in-painting and super-resolution is obtained where our system outperforms previous ones while keeping the running time competitive.