ADD: Attribution-Driven Data Augmentation Framework for Boosting Image Super-Resolution

Data augmentation (DA) stands out as a powerful technique to enhance the generalization capabilities of deep neural networks across diverse tasks. However, in low-level vision tasks, DA remains rudimentary (i.e., vanilla DA), facing a critical bottleneck due to information loss. In this paper, we introduce a novel Calibrated Attribution Maps (CAM) to generate saliency masks, followed by two saliency-based DA methods—Attribution-Driven Data augmentation (ADD) and ADD+—designed to address this issue. CAM leverages integrated gradients and incorporates two key innovations: a global feature detector and calibrated integrated gradients. Based on CAM and the proposed methods, we have two new insights for low-level vision tasks: (1) increasing pixel diversity, as seen in vanilla DA, can improve performance, and (2) focusing on salient features while minimizing the impact of irrelevant pixels, as seen in saliency-based DA, more effectively enhances model performance. Additionally, we find and highlight the key guiding principle for designing saliency-based DA: a wider spectrum of degradation patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate the compatibility and consistency of our method, as well as the significant performance improvement across various SR tasks and networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/mizeyu/ADD.