RefVSR++: Exploiting Reference Inputs for Reference-based Video Super-resolution

Smartphones with multi-camera systems, featuring cameras with varying field-of-views (FoVs), are increasingly common. This variation in FoVs results in content differences across videos, paving the way for an innovative approach to video super-resolution (VSR). This method enhances the VSR performance of lower resolution (LR) videos by leveraging higher resolution reference (Ref) videos. Previous works [14, 15], which operate on this principle, generally expand on traditional VSR models by combining LR and Ref inputs over time into a unified stream. However, we can expect that better results are obtained by independently aggregating these Ref image sequences temporally. Therefore, we introduce an improved method, RefVSR++, which performs the parallel aggregation of LR and Ref images in the temporal direction, aiming to optimize the use of the available data. RefVSR++ also incorporates improved mechanisms for aligning image features over time, crucial for effective VSR. Our experiments demonstrate that RefVSR++ outperforms previous works by over 1dB in PSNR, setting a new benchmark in the field.