LIF-VSR: A Lightweight Framework for Video Super-Resolution with Implicit Alignment and Attentional Fusion

Area of Science:

• Computer Vision
• Artificial Intelligence
• Video Processing

Background:

• Video super-resolution (VSR) techniques enhance video quality but are often computationally expensive.
• Existing methods face challenges with real-world applicability due to high resource demands.

Purpose of the Study:

• Introduce LIF-VSR, a lightweight and efficient framework for near-real-time video super-resolution.
• Address the computational cost limitations of current state-of-the-art VSR methods.

Main Methods:

• Employ a uni-directional recurrent architecture for economical temporal propagation via a compact inter-frame memory unit.
• Utilize a deformable convolution module for implicit feature alignment and a sparse attention fusion module for efficient adjacent-frame information aggregation, avoiding 3D convolutions and optical flow.
• Implement a cross-attention mechanism for cost-effective temporal feature calibration.

Main Results:

• LIF-VSR achieves competitive results on public benchmarks with only 3.06 million parameters.
• Demonstrates a significantly low computational footprint compared to existing VSR methods.
• Achieved 27.65 dB on Vid4 and 31.61 dB on SPMCs benchmarks.

Conclusions:

• LIF-VSR offers an efficient and effective solution for real-time video super-resolution.
• The framework's lightweight design and novel modules make high-quality video enhancement accessible for practical applications.
• Demonstrates the potential of efficiency-first design in advancing VSR technology.