  In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) achieved unprecedented
performance in many low-level vision tasks. However, state-of-the-art results
are typically achieved by very deep networks, which can reach tens of layers
with tens of millions of parameters. To make DNNs implementable on platforms
with limited resources, it is necessary to weaken the tradeoff between
performance and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a new activation unit,
which is particularly suitable for image restoration problems. In contrast to
the widespread per-pixel activation units, like ReLUs and sigmoids, our unit
implements a learnable nonlinear function with spatial connections. This
enables the net to capture much more complex features, thus requiring a
significantly smaller number of layers in order to reach the same performance.
We illustrate the effectiveness of our units through experiments with
state-of-the-art nets for denoising, de-raining, and super resolution, which
are already considered to be very small. With our approach, we are able to
further reduce these models by nearly 50% without incurring any degradation in
performance.
