OPE-SR: Orthogonal Position Encoding for Designing a Parameter-Free Upsampling Module in Arbitrary-Scale Image Super-Resolution

Arbitrary-scale image super-resolution (SR) is often tackled using the implicit neural representation (INR) approach, which relies on a position encoding scheme to improve its representation ability. In this paper, we introduce orthogonal position encoding (OPE), an extension of position encoding, and an OPE-Upscale module to replace the INR-based upsampling module for arbitrary-scale image super-resolution. Our OPE-Upscale module takes 2D coordinates and latent code as inputs, just like INR, but does not require any training parameters. This parameter-free feature allows the OPE-Upscale module to directly perform linear combination operations, resulting in continuous image reconstruction and achieving arbitrary-scale image reconstruction. As a concise SR framework, our method is computationally efficient and consumes less memory than state-of-the-art methods, as confirmed by extensive experiments and evaluations. In addition, our method achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods in arbitrary-scale image super-resolution. Lastly, we show that OPE corresponds to a set of orthogonal basis, validating our design principle.