BFRVSR: A Bidirectional Frame Recurrent Method for Video Super-Resolution

Abstract

Video super-resolution is a challenging task. One possible solution, called the sliding window method, tries to divide the generation of high-resolution video sequences into independent subtasks. Another popular method, named the recurrent algorithm, utilizes the generated high-resolution images of previous frames to generate the high-resolution image. However, both methods have some unavoidable disadvantages. The former method usually leads to bad temporal consistency and has higher computational cost, while the latter method cannot always make full use of information contained by optical flow or any other calculated features. Thus, more investigations need to be done to explore the balance between these two methods. In this work, a bidirectional frame recurrent video super-resolution method is proposed. To be specific, reverse training is proposed that also utilizes a generated high-resolution frame to help estimate the high-resolution version of the former frame. The bidirectional recurrent method guarantees temporal consistency and also makes full use of the adjacent information due to the bidirectional training operation, while the computational cost is acceptable. Experimental results demonstrate that the bidirectional super-resolution framework gives remarkable performance and it solves time-related problems.