FL-MISR: fast large-scale multi-image super-resolution for computed tomography based on multi-GPU acceleration

Multi-image super-resolution (MISR) usually outperforms single-image super-resolution (SISR) under a proper inter-image alignment by explicitly exploiting the inter-image correlation. However, the large computational demand encumbers the deployment of MISR in practice. In this work, we propose a distributed optimization framework based on data parallelism for fast large-scale MISR using multi-GPU acceleration named FL-MISR. The scaled conjugate gradient (SCG) algorithm is applied to the distributed subfunctions and the local SCG variables are communicated to synchronize the convergence rate over multi-GPU systems towards a consistent convergence. Furthermore, an inner-outer border exchange scheme is performed to obviate the border effect between neighboring GPUs. The proposed FL-MISR is applied to the computed tomography (CT) system by super-resolving the projections acquired by subpixel detector shift. The SR reconstruction is performed on the fly during the CT acquisition such that no additional computation time is introduced. FL-MISR is extensively evaluated from different aspects and experimental results demonstrate that FL-MISR effectively improves the spatial resolution of CT systems in modulation transfer function (MTF) and visual perception. Comparing to a multi-core CPU implementation, FL-MISR achieves a more than 50 $$\times$$ speedup on an off-the-shelf 4-GPU system.