Small Clips, Big Gains: Learning Long-Range Refocused Temporal Information for Video Super-Resolution
This work addresses a key bottleneck in VSR for applications requiring high-quality video restoration, though it is incremental as it builds on existing recurrent-based models.
The paper tackles the challenge of effectively learning long-range temporal dependencies in video super-resolution (VSR) by proposing LRTI-VSR, a training framework that uses long video clips for training on shorter clips and includes a refocused transformer block, achieving state-of-the-art performance on long-video test sets.
Video super-resolution (VSR) can achieve better performance compared to single image super-resolution by additionally leveraging temporal information. In particular, the recurrent-based VSR model exploits long-range temporal information during inference and achieves superior detail restoration. However, effectively learning these long-term dependencies within long videos remains a key challenge. To address this, we propose LRTI-VSR, a novel training framework for recurrent VSR that efficiently leverages Long-Range Refocused Temporal Information. Our framework includes a generic training strategy that utilizes temporal propagation features from long video clips while training on shorter video clips. Additionally, we introduce a refocused intra&inter-frame transformer block which allows the VSR model to selectively prioritize useful temporal information through its attention module while further improving inter-frame information utilization in the FFN module. We evaluate LRTI-VSR on both CNN and transformer-based VSR architectures, conducting extensive ablation studies to validate the contribution of each component. Experiments on long-video test sets demonstrate that LRTI-VSR achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining training and computational efficiency.