BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment

Abstract

A recurrent structure is a popular framework choice for the task of video super-resolution. The state-of-the-art method BasicVSR adopts bidirectional propagation with feature alignment to effectively exploit information from the entire input video. In this study, we redesign BasicVSR by proposing second-order grid propagation and flow-guided deformable alignment. We show that by empowering the recurrent framework with enhanced propagation and alignment, one can exploit spatiotemporal information across misaligned video frames more effectively. The new components lead to an improved performance under a similar computational constraint. In particular, our model BasicVSR++ surpasses BasicVSR by a significant 0.82 dB in PSNR with similar number of parameters. BasicVSR++ is generalizable to other video restoration tasks, and obtains three champions and one first runner-up in NTIRE 2021 video restoration challenge.