Deep learning algorithms for video Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI) have achieved great success, yet they predominantly focus on reconstructing from clean measurements. This overlooks a critical real-world challenge: the captured signal itself is often severely degraded by motion blur and low light. Consequently, existing models falter in practical applications. To break this limitation, we pioneer the first study on robust video SCI restoration, shifting the goal from "reconstruction" to "restoration"--recovering the underlying pristine scene from a degraded measurement. To facilitate this new task, we first construct a large-scale benchmark by simulating realistic, continuous degradations on the DAVIS 2017 dataset. Second, we propose RobustSCI, a network that enhances a strong encoder-decoder backbone with a novel RobustCFormer block. This block introduces two parallel branches--a multi-scale deblur branch and a frequency enhancement branch--to explicitly disentangle and remove degradations during the recovery process. Furthermore, we introduce RobustSCI-C (RobustSCI-Cascade), which integrates a pre-trained Lightweight Post-processing Deblurring Network to significantly boost restoration performance with minimal overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods outperform all SOTA models on the new degraded testbeds, with additional validation on real-world degraded SCI data confirming their practical effectiveness, elevating SCI from merely reconstructing what is captured to restoring what truly happened.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: PSNR performance of our methods against SOTA models across 10 scenarios (clean, 3 motion blur (MB), 3 low-light (LL), 3 mixed degradation levels) on grayscale benchmarks. Our models demonstrate superior robustness as degradation severity increases.
Figure 2: Overview of our training and inference pipeline. Paired data is generated by applying simulated degradations to clean video frames, followed by CACTI simulation to produce degraded measurements ( Y ). RobustSCI is trained end-to-end to recover clean ground truth frames ( X ), while the Lightweight Post-processing Deblurring Network (trained separately) can be used as a frozen post-processing step during inference.
Figure 3: Architecture of the proposed RobustCFormer block. Input features are processed via four parallel branches (ST-Baseline: SCB+TSAB, MSDB, FEB) before fusion. Aggregated features are refined by an FFN with a residual connection.
Scenario
Blur ( N )
Darkening
Noise ( σ )
MotionBlur-L1
7
-
-
MotionBlur-L2
11
-
-
MotionBlur-L3
15
-
-
LowLight-L1
-
0.6
10
LowLight-L2
-
0.8
25
LowLight-L3
-
0.9
40
Table 1: Degradation parameters for the nine test scenarios.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparison on the grayscale runner benchmark under different degradation scenarios. From top to bottom, the rows show results for Clean, MotionBlur-L2 (MB-L2), LowLight-L2 (LL-L2), and Mixed-L2 scenarios. The first column displays the ground truth or the degraded input. Each subsequent column shows the reconstruction from a different model.
Figure 5: Qualitative comparison on the color Jockey benchmark. From top to bottom, the rows show the input and the results from different models. From left to right, the columns show different degradation scenarios at the L2 level.
Figure 6: Qualitative comparison on real-world degraded SCI data. From top to bottom: EfficientSCI-B (Base, trained under the conventional degradation-agnostic paradigm), EfficientSCI-B, RobustSCI, and RobustSCI-C. The rightmost column shows a low-light enhanced version of the boxed region for better visualization.
Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI) offers an efficient solution for high-speed video acquisition and, under exposure-time camera--scene relative motion, multi-view scene capture by compressing temporal or spatial information into a single 2D measurement. While recent studies have explored SCI for 3D scene reconstruction, existing methods struggle with significant challenges due to information loss, limited viewpoint diversity, and the computational burden of jointly optimizing 3D representations and camera poses. In this work, we propose a novel framework that reconstructs high-quality 3D scenes from a single SCI measurement by leveraging 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and the powerful priors of large-scale vision foundation models (VFMs). Our primary reconstruction combines measurement-derived 3D VFM initialization with SCI-aware Gaussian optimization. After coarse-stage convergence, an auxiliary 2D VFM provides pseudo-view supervision at synthesized viewpoints for local appearance refinement. To further address the instability caused by ambiguous SCI supervision during 3DGS optimization, we introduce Opacity-Guided Splitting and Growth Regulation (OSGR), an SCI-specific densification strategy that augments split candidates using local opacity statistics, discourages loss-compensating opacity inflation through mean-opacity regulation, and bounds representation growth with explicit candidate-ratio and Gaussian-count constraints. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves the strongest overall performance, combining leading reconstruction quality and robustness to viewpoint variation with competitive computational efficiency.
Yanming Yang, Chenxi Song, Ping Wang +2
AGI Lab, Westlake University, Hangzhou 310030, China · Westlake University, Hangzhou 310030, China
While Deep Unfolding Networks (DUNs) dominate video Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI), they remain constrained by a uniform design philosophy. Existing methods repeatedly stack high-complexity priors with identical structures, ignoring the fact that optimization trajectories converge toward static states. This results in representation stagnation, where high-cost computations are wasted on minimal feature updates. To address this inefficiency, we present Differential Unfolding (DU), a heterogeneous framework that replaces uniform repetition with dynamic evolution. Central to DU is the Differential Evolutionary Framework (DEF), which partitions the unfolding process into two complementary roles: structural anchoring and differential evolution. In this scheme, high-parameter general stages are sparsely deployed to generate high-fidelity feature foundations. Complementing these, lightweight differential stages employ a Differential Representation Prior (DRP) to propagate and refine these foundational features through a differential mechanism. By integrating Differential Representation Attention (DRA) for evolving attention maps and a Differential Modulated FFN (DM-FFN) for feature rectification, DRP effectively models cross-stage variations with minimal overhead. By focusing computational resources on dynamic evolution rather than static redundancy, DU achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments verify that our method establishes new state-of-the-art results while significantly slashing computational overhead. https://github.com/Muyuan-Zhang/DU
Muyuan Zhang, Jiancheng Zhang, Haijin Zeng +1
Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China · Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, China
Video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) enables the reconstruction of dynamic scenes from a single snapshot measurement. Recently, NeRF-based methods have shown promising reconstruction performance. However, such methods typically adopt random ray sampling strategies and fail to capture content structural similarities, resulting in limited reconstruction quality. To address these issues, we first propose a patch-level ray sampling strategy to enable the modeling of content structure. Then, we propose an Inter- and Intra-Ray Transformer (RayFormer) to capture the structural similarities, modeling both inter-ray similarities among spatially neighboring points at the same depth and intra-ray correlations between adjacent points along the viewing ray. Finally, benefiting from the patch-level sampling strategy, the total variation prior is incorporated into the objective function to enhance spatial smoothness and suppress artifacts. Experiments in both simulated and real-world scenes demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) reconstruction performance.
Yubo Dong, Danhua Liu, Anqi Li +1
Changzhi Medical College, Changzhi 046000, China · Engineering Research Centre for Intelligent Data Assisted Diagnosis and Treatment in Shanxi Province, Changzhi 046000, China · Uniwave Artificial Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd., Changzhi 046000, China +1