Uncertainty-Aware Source-Free Adaptive Image Super-Resolution with Wavelet Augmentation Transformer

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can effectively address domain gap issues in real-world image Super-Resolution (SR) by accessing both the source and target data. Considering privacy policies or transmission restrictions of source data in practical scenarios we propose a SOurce-free Domain Adaptation framework for image SR (SODA-SR) to address this issue i.e. adapt a source-trained model to a target domain with only unlabeled target data. SODA-SR leverages the source-trained model to generate refined pseudo-labels for teacher-student learning. To better utilize pseudo-labels we propose a novel wavelet-based augmentation method named Wavelet Augmentation Transformer (WAT) which can be flexibly incorporated with existing networks to implicitly produce useful augmented data. WAT learns low-frequency information of varying levels across diverse samples which is aggregated efficiently via deformable attention. Furthermore an uncertainty-aware self-training mechanism is proposed to improve the accuracy of pseudo-labels with inaccurate predictions being rectified by uncertainty estimation. To acquire better SR results and avoid overfitting pseudo-labels several regularization losses are proposed to constrain target LR and SR images in the frequency domain. Experiments show that without accessing source data SODA-SR outperforms state-of-the-art UDA methods in both synthetic->real and real->real adaptation settings and is not constrained by specific network architectures.