Nowadays, an increasingly high demand on image information with high quality and high definition occurs in social life. For example, in a home digital media application, 1080p and 4K×2K televisions are increasingly popular. However, most of current television program sources and DVD format videos are standard-definition format videos, and therefore, a super-resolution technology is needed to convert a standard-definition format video into a high-definition or ultra-high definition format video. In addition, in a network video application, due to impact of bandwidth, the quality of many videos on the Internet is poor, and when the videos are displayed on a mobile terminal, a PC, or a Digital TV with a large screen, the super-resolution technology may be used. In addition, image super-resolution is widely applied in fields such as medical imaging and remote sensing satellite.
In the prior art, in the super-resolution technology, a low-resolution image generally needs to be converted into an initial high-resolution image first; and then image processing is performed based on the initial high-resolution image, and the initial high-resolution image is converted into a real high-resolution image. However, because the initial high-resolution image already has higher resolution and more pixels, in a process of performing image processing on the initial high-resolution image, calculation complexity of a system is higher, and more memory sources are occupied during hardware implementation.