Adaptive Progressive Image Enhancement for Edge-Assisted Mobile Vision

Recent advances in deep learning models have pushed Super-Resolution (SR) techniques to an unprecedented altitude, enabling high-quality image rendering with variable scaling size and natural fidelity. To deploy them on resource-constrained mobile devices, however, confronts significant challenges of excessively long latency and poor user experience. To this end, we propose Apie, an edge-assisted adaptive image rendering system that allows low-latency, progressive image enhancement for a smooth user experience. Apie adopts a data parallel strategy across the end device and the edge server, along with a residual learning mechanism to judiciously retrieve information for SR models. Besides, a novel progressive image reconstruction is developed by exploiting content-aware image blocking and incremental image rendering, towards improved quality of user experience. Furthermore, Apie can dynamically adjust the choice of employed SR models with respect to the networking conditions, striking a good balance upon the latency-quality trade-off. Extensive evaluations show that Apie performs 7.33x faster than on-device GPU execution and 1.42x faster compared to the partial offloading method, while achieves 2.84dB higher PSNR compared to the interpolation method using conventional JPEG image compression and 0.74dB higher PSNR compared to the partial offloading method.