eess.IVAug 28, 2026

Efficient JPEG Restoration in the Wavelet Domain via Mean Flows

Authors: Stefan-Alexandru Asandei, Mihai-Alexandru Radu

Organizations: Independent Researcher · Faculty of Physics, "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Ia¸si

Abstract

Latest JPEG restoration systems achieve strong quality with large models, yet often remain too slow and expensive for efficient on-device deployment. We present a 65M-parameter generative restorer that attains the lowest LPIPS at QF 10 and 20 on LIVE-1, Urban100, and DIV2K-val while sustaining 8.05 images/s at 1024×10241024\times1024 on a single RTX 3090, roughly 4.9×4.9\times the reported throughput of one-step SODiff at one-twentieth of its parameters. Trained from scratch, the model replaces the learned VAE encoder-decoder with an exactly invertible two-level Haar transform, predicts a clean wavelet-domain residual through a rank-enhanced linear-attention DiT that estimates compression severity internally, and is optimized with an improved MeanFlow objective that enables inference in one or two network evaluations without distillation. Large pretrained priors remain stronger under severe compression (QF 5), whereas our model prioritizes throughput for deployment-constrained restoration.

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