Image super-resolution is a machine-learning task where the goal is to increase the resolution of an image, often by a factor of 4x or more, while maintaining its content and details as much as possible. The end result is a high-resolution version of the original image. This task can be used for various applications such as improving image quality, enhancing visual detail, and increasing the accuracy of computer vision algorithms.
Diffusion models excel in noise-to-data generation tasks, providing a mapping from a Gaussian distribution to a more complex data distribution. However they struggle to model translations between complex distributions, limiting their effectiveness in data-to-data tasks. While Bridge Matching (BM) models address this by finding the translation between data distributions, their application to time-correlated data sequences remains unexplored. This is a critical limitation for video generation and manipulation tasks, where maintaining temporal coherence is particularly important. To address this gap, we propose Time-Correlated Video Bridge Matching (TCVBM), a framework that extends BM to time-correlated data sequences in the video domain. TCVBM explicitly models inter-sequence dependencies within the diffusion bridge, directly incorporating temporal correlations into the sampling process. We compare our approach to classical methods based on bridge matching and diffusion models for three video-related tasks: frame interpolation, image-to-video generation, and video super-resolution. TCVBM achieves superior performance across multiple quantitative metrics, demonstrating enhanced generation quality and reconstruction fidelity.




Single-image super-resolution (SISR) remains highly ill-posed because recovering structurally faithful high-frequency content from a single low-resolution observation is ambiguous. Existing edge-aware methods often attach edge priors or attention branches onto increasingly complex backbones, yet ad hoc fusion frequently introduces redundancy, unstable optimization, or limited structural gains. We address this gap with an edge-guided attention mechanism that derives an adaptive modulation map from jointly encoded edge features and intermediate feature activations, then applies it to normalize and reweight responses, selectively amplifying structurally salient regions while suppressing spurious textures. In parallel, we integrate this mechanism into a lightweight residual design trained under a composite objective combining pixel-wise, perceptual, and adversarial terms to balance fidelity, perceptual realism, and training stability. Extensive experiments on standard SISR benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in structural sharpness and perceptual quality over SRGAN, ESRGAN, and prior edge-attention baselines at comparable model complexity. The proposed formulation provides (i) a parameter-efficient path to inject edge priors, (ii) stabilized adversarial refinement through a tailored multiterm loss, and (iii) enhanced edge fidelity without resorting to deeper or heavily overparameterized architectures. These results highlight the effectiveness of principled edge-conditioned modulation for advancing perceptual super-resolution.
Advances in portability and low cost of plenoptic cameras have revived interest in light field imaging. Light-field imaging has evolved into a technology that enables us to capture richer visual information. This high-dimensional representation of visual data provides a powerful way to understand the scene, with remarkable improvement in traditional computer vision problems such as depth sensing , post-capture refocusing , material classification, segmentation, and video stabilization. Capturing light fields with high spatial-angular resolution and capturing light field video at high frame rates remains a major challenge due to the limited resolution of the sensors, with limited processing speed. In this paper, we presented an extensive literature review of light field acquisition techniques, challenges associated with different capturing methodology and algorithms proposed for light-field super-resolution, in order to deal with spatial-angular resolution trade-off issue.
Imaging inverse problems aims to recover high-dimensional signals from undersampled, noisy measurements, a fundamentally ill-posed task with infinite solutions in the null-space of the sensing operator. To resolve this ambiguity, prior information is typically incorporated through handcrafted regularizers or learned models that constrain the solution space. However, these priors typically ignore the task-specific structure of that null-space. In this work, we propose \textit{Non-Linear Projections of the Null-Space} (NPN), a novel class of regularization that, instead of enforcing structural constraints in the image domain, promotes solutions that lie in a low-dimensional projection of the sensing matrix's null-space with a neural network. Our approach has two key advantages: (1) Interpretability: by focusing on the structure of the null-space, we design sensing-matrix-specific priors that capture information orthogonal to the signal components that are fundamentally blind to the sensing process. (2) Flexibility: NPN is adaptable to various inverse problems, compatible with existing reconstruction frameworks, and complementary to conventional image-domain priors. We provide theoretical guarantees on convergence and reconstruction accuracy when used within plug-and-play methods. Empirical results across diverse sensing matrices demonstrate that NPN priors consistently enhance reconstruction fidelity in various imaging inverse problems, such as compressive sensing, deblurring, super-resolution, computed tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging, with plug-and-play methods, unrolling networks, deep image prior, and diffusion models.
As an influential information fusion and low-level vision technique, image fusion integrates complementary information from source images to yield an informative fused image. A few attempts have been made in recent years to jointly realize image fusion and super-resolution. However, in real-world applications such as military reconnaissance and long-range detection missions, the target and background structures in multimodal images are easily corrupted, with low resolution and weak semantic information, which leads to suboptimal results in current fusion techniques. In response, we propose FS-Diff, a semantic guidance and clarity-aware joint image fusion and super-resolution method. FS-Diff unifies image fusion and super-resolution as a conditional generation problem. It leverages semantic guidance from the proposed clarity sensing mechanism for adaptive low-resolution perception and cross-modal feature extraction. Specifically, we initialize the desired fused result as pure Gaussian noise and introduce the bidirectional feature Mamba to extract the global features of the multimodal images. Moreover, utilizing the source images and semantics as conditions, we implement a random iterative denoising process via a modified U-Net network. This network istrained for denoising at multiple noise levels to produce high-resolution fusion results with cross-modal features and abundant semantic information. We also construct a powerful aerial view multiscene (AVMS) benchmark covering 600 pairs of images. Extensive joint image fusion and super-resolution experiments on six public and our AVMS datasets demonstrated that FS-Diff outperforms the state-of-the-art methods at multiple magnifications and can recover richer details and semantics in the fused images. The code is available at https://github.com/XylonXu01/FS-Diff.




State space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, have shown promise in NLP tasks and are increasingly applied to vision tasks. However, most Mamba-based vision models focus on network architecture and scan paths, with little attention to the SSM module. In order to explore the potential of SSMs, we modified the calculation process of SSM without increasing the number of parameters to improve the performance on lightweight super-resolution tasks. In this paper, we introduce the First-order State Space Model (FSSM) to improve the original Mamba module, enhancing performance by incorporating token correlations. We apply a first-order hold condition in SSMs, derive the new discretized form, and analyzed cumulative error. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FSSM improves the performance of MambaIR on five benchmark datasets without additionally increasing the number of parameters, and surpasses current lightweight SR methods, achieving state-of-the-art results.
Microscopy image enhancement plays a pivotal role in understanding the details of biological cells and materials at microscopic scales. In recent years, there has been a significant rise in the advancement of microscopy image enhancement, specifically with the help of deep learning methods. This survey paper aims to provide a snapshot of this rapidly growing state-of-the-art method, focusing on its evolution, applications, challenges, and future directions. The core discussions take place around the key domains of microscopy image enhancement of super-resolution, reconstruction, and denoising, with each domain explored in terms of its current trends and their practical utility of deep learning.
Training deep neural networks has become increasingly demanding, requiring large datasets and significant computational resources, especially as model complexity advances. Data distillation methods, which aim to improve data efficiency, have emerged as promising solutions to this challenge. In the field of single image super-resolution (SISR), the reliance on large training datasets highlights the importance of these techniques. Recently, a generative adversarial network (GAN) inversion-based data distillation framework for SR was proposed, showing potential for better data utilization. However, the current method depends heavily on pre-trained SR networks and class-specific information, limiting its generalizability and applicability. To address these issues, we introduce a new data distillation approach for image SR that does not need class labels or pre-trained SR models. In particular, we first extract high-gradient patches and categorize images based on CLIP features, then fine-tune a diffusion model on the selected patches to learn their distribution and synthesize distilled training images. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while using significantly less training data and requiring less computational time. Specifically, when we train a baseline Transformer model for SR with only 0.68\% of the original dataset, the performance drop is just 0.3 dB. In this case, diffusion model fine-tuning takes 4 hours, and SR model training completes within 1 hour, much shorter than the 11-hour training time with the full dataset.
Plug-and-Play Priors (PnP) is a popular framework for solving imaging inverse problems by integrating learned priors in the form of denoisers trained to remove Gaussian noise from images. In standard PnP methods, the denoiser is applied directly in the image domain, serving as an implicit prior on natural images. This paper considers an alternative analysis formulation of PnP, in which the prior is imposed on a transformed representation of the image, such as its gradient. Specifically, we train a Gaussian denoiser to operate in the gradient domain, rather than on the image itself. Conceptually, this is an extension of total variation (TV) regularization to learned TV regularization. To incorporate this gradient-domain prior in image reconstruction algorithms, we develop two analysis PnP algorithms based on half-quadratic splitting (APnP-HQS) and the alternating direction method of multipliers (APnP-ADMM). We evaluate our approach on image deblurring and super-resolution, demonstrating that the analysis formulation achieves performance comparable to image-domain PnP algorithms.




Diffusion models have recently advanced video restoration, but applying them to real-world video super-resolution (VSR) remains challenging due to high latency, prohibitive computation, and poor generalization to ultra-high resolutions. Our goal in this work is to make diffusion-based VSR practical by achieving efficiency, scalability, and real-time performance. To this end, we propose FlashVSR, the first diffusion-based one-step streaming framework towards real-time VSR. FlashVSR runs at approximately 17 FPS for 768x1408 videos on a single A100 GPU by combining three complementary innovations: (i) a train-friendly three-stage distillation pipeline that enables streaming super-resolution, (ii) locality-constrained sparse attention that cuts redundant computation while bridging the train-test resolution gap, and (iii) a tiny conditional decoder that accelerates reconstruction without sacrificing quality. To support large-scale training, we also construct VSR-120K, a new dataset with 120k videos and 180k images. Extensive experiments show that FlashVSR scales reliably to ultra-high resolutions and achieves state-of-the-art performance with up to 12x speedup over prior one-step diffusion VSR models. We will release the code, pretrained models, and dataset to foster future research in efficient diffusion-based VSR.