The First Challenge on Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-Resolution at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-Resolution (x4) Challenge, one of the associated challenges of NTIRE 2026. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) infrared images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a x4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective models or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art performance for infrared image SR in remote sensing scenarios. To reflect the characteristics of infrared data and practical application needs, the challenge adopts a single-track setting. A total of 115 participants registered for the competition, with 13 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, dataset, evaluation protocol, main results, and the representative methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance research in infrared image super-resolution and promote the development of effective solutions for real-world remote sensing applications.

Fose: Fusion of One-Step Diffusion and End-to-End Network for Pansharpening

Pansharpening is a significant image fusion task that fuses low-resolution multispectral images (LRMSI) and high-resolution panchromatic images (PAN) to obtain high-resolution multispectral images (HRMSI). The development of the diffusion models (DM) and the end-to-end models (E2E model) has greatly improved the frontier of pansharping. DM takes the multi-step diffusion to obtain an accurate estimation of the residual between LRMSI and HRMSI. However, the multi-step process takes large computational power and is time-consuming. As for E2E models, their performance is still limited by the lack of prior and simple structure. In this paper, we propose a novel four-stage training strategy to obtain a lightweight network Fose, which fuses one-step DM and an E2E model. We perform one-step distillation on an enhanced SOTA DM for pansharping to compress the inference process from 50 steps to only 1 step. Then we fuse the E2E model with one-step DM with lightweight ensemble blocks. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the significant improvement of the proposed Fose on three commonly used benchmarks. Moreover, we achieve a 7.42 speedup ratio compared to the baseline DM while achieving much better performance. The code and model are released at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/Fose.