Wenzhuo Ma

Jiatong Li, Zheng Chen, Kai Liu et al.

This paper provides a review of the NTIRE 2026 challenge on mobile real-world image super-resolution, highlighting the proposed solutions and the resulting outcomes. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through unknown degradations with a x4 scaling factor while ensuring the models remain executable on mobile devices. The objective is to develop effective and efficient network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art real-world image super-resolution performance. The track of the challenge evaluates performance using a weighted combination of image quality assessment (IQA) score and speedup ratios. The competition attracted 108 registrants, with 16 teams achieving a valid score in the final ranking. This collaborative effort advances the performance of mobile real-world image super-resolution while offering an in-depth overview of the latest trends in the field.

Wenzhuo Ma, Zhenzhong Chen

The practical deployment of diffusion-based Neural Video Compression (NVC) faces critical challenges, including severe information loss, prohibitive inference latency, and poor temporal consistency. To bridge this gap, we propose DiffVC-RT, the first framework designed to achieve real-time diffusion-based perceptual NVC. First, we introduce an Efficient and Informative Model Architecture. Through strategic module replacements and pruning, this architecture significantly reduces computational complexity while mitigating structural information loss. Second, to address generative flickering artifacts, we propose Explicit and Implicit Consistency Modeling. We enhance temporal consistency by explicitly incorporating a zero-cost Online Temporal Shift Module within the U-Net, complemented by hybrid implicit consistency constraints. Finally, we present an Asynchronous and Parallel Decoding Pipeline incorporating Mixed Half Precision, which enables asynchronous latent decoding and parallel frame reconstruction via a Batch-dimension Temporal Shift design. Experiments show that DiffVC-RT achieves 80.1% bitrate savings in terms of LPIPS over VTM-17.0 on HEVC dataset with real-time encoding and decoding speeds of 206 / 30 fps for 720p videos on an NVIDIA H800 GPU, marking a significant milestone in diffusion-based video compression.

Wenzhuo Ma, Zhenzhong Chen

Recently, foundational diffusion models have attracted considerable attention in image compression tasks, whereas their application to video compression remains largely unexplored. In this article, we introduce DiffVC, a diffusion-based perceptual neural video compression framework that effectively integrates foundational diffusion model with the video conditional coding paradigm. This framework uses temporal context from previously decoded frame and the reconstructed latent representation of the current frame to guide the diffusion model in generating high-quality results. To accelerate the iterative inference process of diffusion model, we propose the Temporal Diffusion Information Reuse (TDIR) strategy, which significantly enhances inference efficiency with minimal performance loss by reusing the diffusion information from previous frames. Additionally, to address the challenges posed by distortion differences across various bitrates, we propose the Quantization Parameter-based Prompting (QPP) mechanism, which utilizes quantization parameters as prompts fed into the foundational diffusion model to explicitly modulate intermediate features, thereby enabling a robust variable bitrate diffusion-based neural compression framework. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed solution delivers excellent performance in both perception metrics and visual quality.

Wenzhuo Ma, Zhenzhong Chen

In this work, we first propose DiffVC-OSD, a One-Step Diffusion-based Perceptual Neural Video Compression framework. Unlike conventional multi-step diffusion-based methods, DiffVC-OSD feeds the reconstructed latent representation directly into a One-Step Diffusion Model, enhancing perceptual quality through a single diffusion step guided by both temporal context and the latent itself. To better leverage temporal dependencies, we design a Temporal Context Adapter that encodes conditional inputs into multi-level features, offering more fine-grained guidance for the Denoising Unet. Additionally, we employ an End-to-End Finetuning strategy to improve overall compression performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffVC-OSD achieves state-of-the-art perceptual compression performance, offers about 20$\times$ faster decoding and a 86.92\% bitrate reduction compared to the corresponding multi-step diffusion-based variant.