  Single image super-resolution (SR) is an ill-posed problem which aims to
recover high-resolution (HR) images from their low-resolution (LR)
observations. The crux of this problem lies in learning the complex mapping
between low-resolution patches and the corresponding high-resolution patches.
Prior arts have used either a mixture of simple regression models or a single
non-linear neural network for this propose. This paper proposes the method of
learning a mixture of SR inference modules in a unified framework to tackle
this problem. Specifically, a number of SR inference modules specialized in
different image local patterns are first independently applied on the LR image
to obtain various HR estimates, and the resultant HR estimates are adaptively
aggregated to form the final HR image. By selecting neural networks as the SR
inference module, the whole procedure can be incorporated into a unified
network and be optimized jointly. Extensive experiments are conducted to
investigate the relation between restoration performance and different network
architectures. Compared with other current image SR approaches, our proposed
method achieves state-of-the-arts restoration results on a wide range of images
consistently while allowing more flexible design choices. The source codes are
available in http://www.ifp.illinois.edu/~dingliu2/accv2016.
