NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution ($\times$4): Methods and Results (original) (raw)

NTIRE 2017 Challenge on Single Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW)

This paper reviews the first challenge on single image super-resolution (restoration of rich details in an low resolution image) with focus on proposed solutions and results. A new DIVerse 2K resolution image dataset (DIV2K) was employed. The challenge had 6 competitions divided into 2 tracks with 3 magnification factors each. Track 1 employed the standard bicubic downscaling setup, while Track 2 had unknown downscaling operators (blur kernel and decimation) but learnable through low and high res train images. Each competition had ∼ 100 registered participants and 20 teams competed in the final testing phase. They gauge the state-of-the-art in single image super-resolution.

AIM 2020 Challenge on Real Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

ArXiv, 2020

This paper introduces the real image Super-Resolution (SR) challenge that was part of the Advances in Image Manipulation (AIM) workshop, held in conjunction with ECCV 2020. This challenge involves three tracks to super-resolve an input image for times\timestimes2, times\timestimes3 and times\timestimes4 scaling factors, respectively. The goal is to attract more attention to realistic image degradation for the SR task, which is much more complicated and challenging, and contributes to real-world image super-resolution applications. 452 participants were registered for three tracks in total, and 24 teams submitted their results. They gauge the state-of-the-art approaches for real image SR in terms of PSNR and SSIM.

NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Real-World Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

2020 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW)

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on real world super-resolution. It focuses on the participating methods and final results. The challenge addresses the real world setting, where paired true high and low-resolution images are unavailable. For training, only one set of source input images is therefore provided along with a set of unpaired high-quality target images. In Track 1: Image Processing artifacts, the aim is to super-resolve images with synthetically generated image processing artifacts. This allows for quantitative benchmarking of the approaches w.r.t. a ground-truth image. In Track 2: Smartphone Images, real low-quality smart phone images have to be super-resolved. In both tracks, the ultimate goal is to achieve the best perceptual quality, evaluated using a human study. This is the second challenge on the subject, following AIM 2019, targeting to advance the state-of-the-art in super-resolution. To measure the performance we use the benchmark protocol from AIM 2019. In total 22 teams competed in the final testing phase, demonstrating new and innovative solutions to the problem.

AIM 2020 Challenge on Efficient Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

Computer Vision – ECCV 2020 Workshops, 2020

This paper reviews the AIM 2020 challenge on efficient single image super-resolution with focus on the proposed solutions and results. The challenge task was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor ×4 based on a set of prior examples of low and corresponding high resolution images. The goal is to devise a network that reduces one or several aspects such as runtime, parameter count, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption while at least maintaining PSNR of MSRRes-Net. The track had 150 registered participants, and 25 teams submitted the final results. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single image super-resolution.

NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Stereo Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW)

In this paper, we summarize the 1st NTIRE challenge on stereo image super-resolution (restoration of rich details in a pair of low-resolution stereo images) with a focus on new solutions and results. This challenge has 1 track aiming at the stereo image super-resolution problem under a standard bicubic degradation. In total, 238 participants were successfully registered, and 21 teams competed in the final testing phase. Among those participants, 20 teams successfully submitted results with PSNR (RGB) scores better than the baseline. This challenge establishes a new benchmark for stereo image SR.

Benefiting from Bicubically Down-Sampled Images for Learning Real-World Image Super-Resolution

2021 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)

Super-resolution (SR) has traditionally been based on pairs of high-resolution images (HR) and their lowresolution (LR) counterparts obtained artificially with bicubic downsampling. However, in real-world SR, there is a large variety of realistic image degradations and analytically modeling these realistic degradations can prove quite difficult. In this work, we propose to handle real-world SR by splitting this ill-posed problem into two comparatively more well-posed steps. First, we train a network to transform real LR images to the space of bicubically downsampled images in a supervised manner, by using both real LR/HR pairs and synthetic pairs. Second, we take a generic SR network trained on bicubically downsampled images to super-resolve the transformed LR image. The first step of the pipeline addresses the problem by registering the large variety of degraded images to a common, well understood space of images. The second step then leverages the already impressive performance of SR on bicubically downsampled images, sidestepping the issues of end-to-end training on datasets with many different image degradations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method by comparing it to recent methods in real-world SR and show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art works in terms of both qualitative and quantitative results, as well as results of an extensive user study conducted on several real image datasets. * Equal contributions.

NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Perceptual Extreme Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

2020

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on perceptual extreme super-resolution with focus on proposed solutions and results. The challenge task was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor ×16 based on a set of prior examples of low and corresponding high resolution images. The goal is to obtain a network design capable to produce high resolution results with the best perceptual quality and similar to the ground truth. The track had 280 registered participants, and 19 teams submitted the final results. They gauge the state-of-the-art in single image superresolution.

AIM 2019 Challenge on Image Extreme Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshop (ICCVW), 2019

This paper reviews the AIM 2019 challenge on extreme image super-resolution, the problem of restoring of rich details in a low resolution image. Compared to previous, this challenge focuses on an extreme upscaling factor, ×16, and employs the novel DIVerse 8K resolution (DIV8K) dataset. This report focuses on the proposed solutions and final results. The challenge had 2 tracks. The goal in Track 1 was to generate a super-resolution result with high fidelity, using the conventional PSNR as the primary metric to evaluate different methods. Track 2 instead focused on generating visually more pleasant super-resolution results, evaluated using subjective opinions. The two tracks had 71 and 52 registered participants, respectively, and 9 teams competed in the final testing phase. This report gauges the experimental protocol and baselines for the extreme image super-resolution task.

NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Video Super-Resolution

2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), 2021

Super-Resolution (SR) is a fundamental computer vision task that aims to obtain a high-resolution clean image from the given low-resolution counterpart. This paper reviews the NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Video Super-Resolution. We present evaluation results from two competition tracks as well as the proposed solutions. Track 1 aims to develop conventional video SR methods focusing on the restoration quality. Track 2 assumes a more challenging environment with lower frame rates, casting spatio-temporal SR problem. In each competition, 247 and 223 participants have registered, respectively. During the final testing phase, 14 teams competed in each track to achieve state-of-the-art performance on video SR tasks.

NTIRE 2017 Challenge on Single Image Super-Resolution: Dataset and Study

2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW), 2017

This paper introduces a novel large dataset for examplebased single image super-resolution and studies the stateof-the-art as emerged from the NTIRE 2017 challenge. The challenge is the first challenge of its kind, with 6 competitions, hundreds of participants and tens of proposed solutions. Our newly collected DIVerse 2K resolution image dataset (DIV2K) was employed by the challenge. In our study we compare the solutions from the challenge to a set of representative methods from the literature and evaluate them using diverse measures on our proposed DIV2K dataset. Moreover, we conduct a number of experiments and draw conclusions on several topics of interest. We conclude that the NTIRE 2017 challenge pushes the state-ofthe-art in single-image super-resolution, reaching the best results to date on the popular Set5, Set14, B100, Urban100 datasets and on our newly proposed DIV2K.