EatGAN: An Edge-Attention Guided Generative Adversarial Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Single-image super-resolution (SISR) is an important task in image processing, aiming to enhance the resolution of imaging systems. Recently, SISR has made a significant leap and achieved promising results with deep learning. GAN-based models stand out among all the deep learning models because of their excellent performance in perceiving quality. However, it is rather difficult for them to reconstruct realistic high-frequency details and achieve stable training. To solve these issues, we introduce an Edge-Attention guided Generative Adversarial Network (EatGAN), the first GAN-based SISR model that simultaneously leverages edge priors both explicitly and implicitly inside the generator, which (i) proposes a Normalized Edge Attention (NEA) mechanism based on channel-affine and spatial gating that transforms edge prior into lightweight, learnable modulation parameters and injects and fuses them multiple times in a (ii) edge-guided hybrid residual block, which progressively enforces structural consistency across scales; and (iii) a composite generator objective combining pixel, perceptual, edge-gradient, and adversarial terms. Experiments show consistent state-of-the-art across distortion-oriented benchmarks and perception oriented benchmarks. Notably, our model achieves 40.87 dB and 0.073 (LPIPS) on Manga 109, which indicates that reframing image priors from passive guidance into a controllable modulation primitive for generators can chart a practical path toward trustworthy, high-fidelity Super-Resolution.