Image Super-Resolution

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13 papers in the last four weeks, up 30% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 156

Oct 6, 2026cs.CV

DISRQAD: Diffusion Image Super-Resolution Quality Assessment Dataset and Benchmark

Diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR) can create visually plausible detail that is not supported by the low-resolution input. We introduce DISRQAD, a subjective-quality dataset and diagnostic benchmark for this setting. It contains mean opinion scores (MOS) for 14,000 SR outputs from ten diffusion and four non-diffusion methods, spanning four low-resolution degradation conditions and x2/x4 upscaling. We evaluate 51 standard full-reference and no-reference metric configurations and 11 adapted variants. Agreement with MOS is substantially weaker on diffusion outputs: the strongest standard no-reference baseline reaches 0.431 SRCC on diffusion SR versus 0.813 on non-diffusion SR. As a case study in benchmark use, a pruned and distilled Q-ReAlign-mini student reaches 0.496 SRCC on diffusion SR. DISRQAD measures perceived output quality, not faithfulness to the input; it enables analysis of metric behavior across generator families and input conditions. Our findings reveal a substantial gap in the assessment of diffusion-based SR and provide a basis for developing quality models sensitive to diffusion-specific artifacts.

Nikita Kukuzei, Artem Borisov, Evgeney Bogatyrev +3

Lomonosov Moscow State University Moscow, Russia · MSU Institute for AI, Lomonosov Moscow State University Moscow, Russia

Image Quality Assessment Image Super-Resolution Diffusion Models for Image Restoration

Oct 5, 2026cs.CV

AstraSR: Real-World Thermal Super-Resolution with GPT-6 Astra

Real-world thermal super-resolution (SR) is constrained by limited sensor resolution and the difficulty of obtaining corresponding high-resolution (HR) observations for direct model supervision. Conventional SR methods typically construct training pairs by treating captured thermal images with real-world degradations as HR references and applying predefined degradation to generate synthetic low-resolution (LR) inputs. Such a construction not only introduces a domain gap between synthetic and captured LR observations but also retains acquisition degradations in the supervision. To address this issue, we propose AstraSR, a real-world thermal SR method guided by GPT-6 Astra, a frontier multimodal generative model endowed with emergent and transformative visual capabilities. Specifically, we construct a dataset of image pairs by using captured LR thermal images to condition GPT-based HR reference. We develop a direct generative supervision strategy that learns from captured thermal inputs paired with GPT-generated HR references. Pixel, gradient, and perceptual losses jointly supervise the transfer of intensity patterns, structural boundaries, and visual details from the generated references. Qualitative comparisons with seven existing state-of-the-art real-world SR methods show continuous object contours, distinct structural boundaries, and smooth intensity transitions in the thermal scenes. These results demonstrate that AstraSR outperforms existing real-world SR methods in both thermal clarity and structural coherence.

Mengyuan Li, Changhong Fu, Jun Zhang +3

School of Mechanical Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China

Thermal Imaging Image Super-Resolution

Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

Image resolution enhancement for advanced semiconductor nodes

Advanced semiconductor nodes are pushing the limits of feature sizes and require metrology with sub-nm resolution without compromising on the throughput as needed for in-line process control. Recently, high-throughput scanning probe microscopy (SPM) based metrology and inspection tools capable of meeting these needs have been introduced to the market and qualified for use in HVM. While innovative measurement methods and tool architecture have allowed for a leap of improvement in throughput, the next step in further reducing imaging time can be obtained through the application of machine learning for enhancing the resolution of measured images for extraction of relevant parameters. In this work, we provide the general framework under which a neural network-based resolution enhancer is designed and used for SPM images. We showcase the effectiveness of this framework using measurements performed on Line/Space structures with a pitch of 200 nm. For the reusability of a pre-developed pre-trained model, we additionally leverage transfer learning and show that a new model for slightly differing structures can be re-trained and calibrated with a smaller data set of measurements performed on Line/Space structures with a pitch of 100 nm.

Lucas Rencker, Omid Tajalizadehkhoob, Khalid Elsayed +7

Nearfield Instruments, B.V. (The Netherlands)

Semiconductor Manufacturing Image Super-Resolution

Oct 4, 2026eess.IV

TIRMamba: A Thermal-Prior-Modulated State-Space Network for Sub-Million-Parameter Infrared Image Super-Resolution

Infrared image super-resolution is currently led by Mamba-based networks with 26 to 37 million parameters, which are difficult to deploy on the airborne and handheld platforms where thermal imaging is most needed. This paper presents TIRMamba, a network with 896K to 910K parameters for single-channel thermal imagery. A Thermal Prior Highway computes gradient, local-contrast and spectral cues once at the input and, through one adapter per residual group, modulates a weight-tied bidirectional state-space trunk and gates its dual-scale detail branch; a tri-path reconstruction adds the learned residual to a bicubic radiometric baseline. Because the standard benchmark provides only 265 infrared training images and evaluates fusion products on full images, we train with a replay strategy: grayscale DIV2K pre-training followed by fine-tuning on 64-pixel patches drawn with equal probability from the infrared and natural corpora. At scale factor 4, TIRMamba matches the strongest protocol-trained methods on both official test sets with 29 to 40 times fewer parameters and 2.8 to 9.4 times lower latency; at scale factor 2 it gives the highest SSIM on both. A variant with prior-conditioned selectivity, TIRMamba-Rad, corrects a 3 dB raw-thermal failure of an intermediate size-invariant design and gives the best results at scale factor 4 on raw-thermal, unmanned-aerial-vehicle and independent-sensor test sets. Code and trained models will be released at https://github.com/julian135707/TIRMamba upon acceptance.

Chun-An Lin, Tsung-Jung Liu, Yen-Chieh Ouyang

Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung 402202, Taiwan · College of Computing and Informatics, Providence University, Taichung 433303, Taiwan

Thermal Imaging Efficient Neural Network Inference Visual SSMs Image Super-Resolution

Sep 30, 2026cs.CV

Super-Resolving Unseen Hyperspectral Sensors at Any Scale via Spatial Operators

Achieving cross-sensor generalization and arbitrary-scale reconstruction with a single model remains challenging in hyperspectral super-resolution (HSR). Although recent methods support arbitrary-scale reconstruction, applying them to new sensors or scales beyond the training range often requires additional data and computation to maintain reconstruction quality. To address these challenges, we propose OmniHSR, which predicts band-shared spatial operators rather than spectral values. Cross-Spectral Mapping (CSM) resamples inputs with any number of bands to fixed reference positions and predicts local operators with Gaussian supports. Continuous Operator-Field Reconstruction (COFR) composes these operators into a continuous field and applies them to all original bands for arbitrary-scale reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate that operator prediction outperforms direct spectral-value prediction on all seven datasets. Trained solely on ARAD with only 0.538M parameters, OmniHSR outperforms all directly transferred baselines on six unseen datasets without target-domain training data or adaptation. Across twelve upsampling factors from

\times2

to

\times48

, it improves average PSNR on Pavia U and Chikusei by 0.55 dB over the strongest baseline. It also surpasses baselines trained from scratch or adapted on the target sensor and achieves up to

36\times

faster inference. Our code will be publicly released soon.

Ji-Xuan He, Guohang Zhuang, Bo Junge +6

Xi’an Jiaotong University · Hefei University of Technology · National University of Singapore +1

Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution Operator Learning Image Super-Resolution

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

Detection of Adversarial Attacks on Super-Resolvers Using Spectral Features

The integration of deep learning models into image preprocessing pipelines such as super-resolution introduces a largely unexplored attack vector for adversaries targeting downstream tasks. To ensure trustworthiness of critical imaging pipelines, we must be able to detect adversarial behavior within preprocessing models. In this paper, we propose a spectral-based detection method for identifying adversarial attacks embedded in super-resolution model weights. More specifically, we use the radially-averaged power spectral density as a discriminative feature to train an extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) detector, demonstrating detectability of model-level threats in super-resolution networks. We further benchmark our detector against magnitude- and phase-based Fourier spectrum detectors, evaluating each method across a range of training and cross-architecture scenarios. Our proposed detector out-performs the comparison detectors in most of these scenarios and indicates that high-frequency features are most informative for detecting AdvSR attacks across SR architectures.

Emma J. Reid, Haley Duba-Sullivan, Tony G. Allen

Human Analysis and Biometrics Oak Ridge Laboratory Oak Ridge, TN, USA · Radar and Computational Imaging Oak Ridge Laboratory Oak Ridge, TN, USA

Adversarial Example Detection Image Super-Resolution

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

From Pixel Generation to Topological Inference: Structural Dual Super-Resolution for Trustworthy Cross-Physical-Domain Trabecular Morphology Learning

Clinical CT and UHRCT cannot resolve individual trabeculae, whereas synchrotron radiation microCT (SRuCT) provides high-resolution references but is not applicable for in vivo imaging. The two domains differ by a 32x resolution gap, are only coarsely paired, and exhibit severe physical differences including partial volume effects, noise, and artifacts. Existing super-resolution networks and pretrained-prior methods (GLEAN/StyleGAN2, Stable SR/LDM) underperform because they target pixel generation---diverse details and SSIM/PSNR---and do not model these physical differences. Pixel generation for a 32x resolution gap is intrinsically ill-posed. We propose a paradigm shift from pixel generation to topological inference: deterministically predicting invariant microstructures from macro-scale low-resolution inputs, evaluated by morphological parameters. The core of our 2D morphology learning lies in training on 2D slices while evaluating on 3D morphological parameters, ensuring that the learned representations capture true three-dimensional trabecular topology rather than 2D pixel statistics. We realize this paradigm via structural dual super-resolution, coupling forward physical degradation (micro-to-macro) with inverse structural inference (macro-to-micro) through structural duality constraints. The method is an end-to-end, few-shot, compact structural dual network (SDN), comprising a bidirectional modeling network, a multi-scale structural consistency discriminator, and four structural duality constraints. On the test set, SDN achieves morphological parameters largely consistent with SRuCT across six metrics, with SSIM reaching 0.8. Trained on 3.2 um SSRF data, the model generalizes well to 3.25 um isotropic BSRF data from an independent source, validating cross-source generalization and confirming trustworthy structural inference rather than pixel generation.

Fan Zhang, Yi Zhang, Ling Wang

Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100049, China · Department of Radiology Beijing Jishuitan Hospital Beijing, China

3D Medical Imaging Medical Image Super-Resolution Computed Tomography Image Super-Resolution

Sep 27, 2026cs.CV

Fill2SR: Repurposing Inpainting Diffusion Transformers for Real-World Super-Resolution

Recent real-world image super-resolution (SR) methods often adapt text-to-image (T2I) backbones with ControlNet-style branches or spatial conditioning tokens, which increases memory and computes with resolution and often constrains training to a fixed scale. We propose Fill2SR, which repurposes a masked-inpainting Diffusion Transformer for SR without extra spatial branches. Our Inpainting-Interface Evidence Adapter (IIEA) writes the low-quality (LQ) observation into the native masked-image slot under a full-image mask, turning inpainting into a reverse-degradation conditional rectified flow trained with LoRA-only tuning. We further introduce RCDT, an offline pipeline that distills degradation descriptors from unpaired real images and transfers them onto clean targets using frozen open-source models. Fill2SR supports mixed-resolution training up to QHD and yields stable performance across

512/1024/2048

outputs. On synthetic benchmarks, our base model with IIEA achieves the best LPIPS on DIV2K and LSDIR; adding RCDT trades a small LPIPS drop for consistently stronger no-reference quality on RealLQ250 and RealPhoto60. Fill2SR remains memory-predictable, running

1536^2

inference on a single 32GB GPU and extending to multi-megapixel outputs via tiled restoration.

Xingfu Yi, Xiaoxue Yu

Independent Researcher, Hangzhou, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Diffusion Transformer Image Restoration Image Super-Resolution

Sep 27, 2026cs.CV

In-Token Learning for High-Fidelity Image Restoration via Diffusion Transformers

We present In-Token Learning, an image restoration framework that adapts a pretrained diffusion transformer using conditional rectified flow matching. Clean targets paired with degraded inputs supervise transport from Gaussian noise to restored images. Spatially aligned degraded-image tokens are fused with evolving latent tokens along the channel dimension, preserving the image-token count at a given resolution. Direct Low-Quality Guidance (DLG) combines frozen degraded-image embeddings with a fixed task prompt through the native conditioning pathway, without a trainable ControlNet-style branch or image captioning. We evaluate super-resolution and denoising on DIV2K, LSDIR, FFHQ, RealLQ250, and RealPhoto60, and automatic colorization on DIV2K and LSDIR. The tasks use separately trained checkpoints under the same framework. Results show competitive fidelity and perceptual quality under the evaluated protocols, with weaker generalization on RealLQ250. We report full-image QHD (

2560{\times}1440

) inference and a tiled

12

K restoration demonstration of Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Attention cost still increases with resolution. This technical report preserves the early broader study underlying Fill2SR, which subsequently developed the real-world super-resolution direction.

Xingfu Yi, Xiaoxue Yu

Independent Researcher, Hangzhou, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

Image-to-Image Translation Diffusion Transformer Image Restoration Image Super-Resolution Image Denoising

Sep 24, 2026cs.CV

TOLA: Text-aware One-Step Latent Adaptation for Diffusion-based Text Image Super-Resolution

Text image super-resolution (TSR) aims to recover visually faithful and readable text under unknown degradations. Existing diffusion-based methods typically rely on multi-step prediction of either the high-resolution image or its text prior, resulting in prohibitive computational cost and inference latency. More critically, an erroneous text prior may be repeatedly injected into the denoising process, causing image and text predictions to reinforce each other and progressively amplify an early recognition error into a sharp yet semantically incorrect character. To address these limitations, we propose TOLA, a Text-aware One-step Latent Adaptation framework without iterative image-text diffusion. TOLA consists of two key modules. First, a confidence-weighted text conditioning module constructs the semantic condition only once and suppresses unreliable OCR predictions before they contaminate image reconstruction. Second, a lightweight latent residual correction module explicitly estimates and corrects the structured residual errors to recover missing or distorted stroke details. Extensive experiments demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance across all evaluation metrics on both CTR-TSR-Test (

\times 4

) and RealCE-200 benchmarks. It is worth noting that our TOLA consistently surpasses existing diffusion-based TSR methods by at least 2.72 dB in PSNR on CTR-TSR-Test.

Yike Xu, Yue Shi, Yong Guo +1

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Shanghai AI Laboratory

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Image Super-Resolution

Sep 24, 2026cs.LG

Generative Atmospheric Super-Resolution from Heterogeneous In Situ Observations through Composable Interfaces

Atmospheric observations are sparse, heterogeneous, and unevenly distributed, whereas many generative atmospheric models learn distributions over regularly gridded multivariate states. Once pretrained, diffusion models can supply atmospheric priors that can be combined with observation-derived likelihood factors in a Bayesian formulation. However, these observation sources differ substantially in geometry and sampling density, complicating the consistent use of their observations within a common inference framework. Here, we formulate this reconstruction problem as generative atmospheric super-resolution and introduce composable observation interfaces for conditioning a single pretrained 13-variable atmospheric diffusion model. The interfaces convert sparse radiosonde (R), clustered aircraft (A), and dense irregular surface-station (S) observations into source-specific likelihood factors that specify where observations constrain the gridded state, how residuals are counted under uneven sampling, and how strongly each source guides posterior sampling. We developed the aircraft and surface observation interfaces using 2019 observations and evaluated the selected interfaces throughout 2020 without further tuning. Compared with reconstructions conditioned only on radiosonde observations, the composed R+A+S interface reduces RMSE evaluated against ERA5 by

9.24\%

across all 13 state variables over the CONUS domain. The aircraft and surface factors provide complementary improvements in upper-air and surface variables. The R+A+S combination also lowers the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), while evaluations at held-out aircraft and surface-station observations show reduced prediction errors. Together, these results demonstrate a modular route for conditioning a pretrained atmospheric generative prior on heterogeneous in situ observations without retraining the underlying model.

Yang Xu, Dibyajyoti Chakraborty, Haiwen Guan +2

School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA · College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

Bayesian Inverse Problems Data Assimilation Diffusion Posterior Sampling Image Super-Resolution

Sep 22, 2026cs.CV

Super-Resolution of Solar Magnetograms via Adaptive Stratified Ensemble Learning with Uncertainty Estimation

Single-image super-resolution of Sun's photospheric magnetograms enables consistent analysis across heterogeneous space-based instruments and supports long-term studies of solar magnetic field evolution. We address the super-resolution task from SOHO/MDI (low-resolution) to SDO/HMI (high-resolution) line-of-sight (LOS) magnetograms using a modified RRDBNet architecture initialized by ESRGAN pretrained weights. Through systematic per-image diagnostic analysis, we identify image complexity as the dominant predictor of reconstruction errors. To exploit this finding, we introduce an adaptive stratified specialist ensemble (SSE) of three specialist networks with uncertainty estimation, where each specialist network is trained by images from three different complexity strata using a weighted random sampling strategy. During inference, a lightweight router based on input image statistics assigns each test image to the appropriate specialist network. Our experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the proposed ensemble and its superiority over closely related methods.

Sina Norouzi Kandalan, Haodi Jiang, Jason T. L. Wang +1

Department of Computer Science, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77341, USA · Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA · Department of Physics, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA

Deep Ensembles Image Super-Resolution

Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

DNF-SR: Dual-Input and Negative-Aware Feature Fine-Tuning for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Benefiting from the powerful generative priors of diffusion models, diffusion-based real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) methods have demonstrated impressive performance.To achieve efficient Real-ISR, several recent works have designed one-step diffusion-based models.Howerver, unmediatedly feeding LR into a diffusion model creates a distributional gap with the model's original input.A straightforward approach to reduce the distribution gap is to introduce noise to the LR latents. However, directly adding noise inevitably corrupts the content of the LR images.In this study, we propose DNF-SR, a Dual-input and Negative-aware Feature fine-tuning method for Real-ISR.Specifically, we use a dual-input strategy that concatenates the original LR image with the noisy LR input and feeds them into a diffusion-based image editing model, ensuring both high-fidelity one-step super-resolution and improved perceptual and content consistency.Additionally, the noise present in the noisy LR input introduces randomness and diversity into the outputs. We exploit this property and propose a post-training optimization method, Negative-aware Feature Fine-Tuning (NF2T), which guides the model toward producing higher-quality results.NF^2T classifies multiple outputs into positive and negative subsets and then defines implicit policy improvement directions in both the image and feature spaces, thereby further enhancing the stability of the optimization.Extensive experiments show that DNF-SR outperforms other methods.Code will be released.

Shuhao Han, Wenjie Liao, Hayden Vance +4

VCIP, CS, Nankai University · Independent Researcher

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Diffusion Model Fine-Tuning Image Super-Resolution

Sep 11, 2026cs.CV

CEM-TUDASR: Computationally efficient multi-modality transformer based unsupervised domain adaptive super-resolution approach

Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) enables non-invasive visualization of the gastrointestinal tract, but its miniaturized optics, sensor limitations, and wireless transmission constraints result in low-resolution images with reduced visibility of diagnostically important structures. This paper proposes CEM-TUDASR, a computationally efficient unsupervised Transformer-based super-resolution framework for WCE image enhancement without paired low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) training data. A domain-adaptive degradation network synthesizes realistic WCE-like LR images from HR conventional endoscopy images, reducing the domain gap and enabling effective unpaired learning. The SR generator integrates Deep Attention Blocks (DABs) and a Fusion Attention Block (FAB) to capture long-range contextual dependencies and fine local structures while preserving perceptual and structural fidelity. The model is trained on a curated dataset derived from Kvasir Capsule and evaluated on KID and GIANA for cross-dataset generalization. No-reference quality metrics, including BRISQUE, PIQE, NIQE, and the domain-specific EndoQM, show that CEM-TUDASR consistently outperforms existing unsupervised SR methods. Qualitative results further demonstrate improved restoration of mucosal textures, vascular patterns, and clinically relevant anatomical details. Cross-domain experiments on retinal images additionally demonstrate the adaptability of the framework. With only 2.67 million parameters and 169.94 GFLOPs, CEM-TUDASR achieves high-quality reconstruction while maintaining computational efficiency, making it suitable for resource-constrained clinical and embedded endoscopic applications.

Anjali Sarvaiya, Jay Kadel, Kishor Upla +1

Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology (SVNIT), Surat, India.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Medical Image Super-Resolution Image Super-Resolution

Sep 11, 2026cs.CV

Guided Super-Resolution of Digital Elevation Models with Diffusion-Based Image Generators

High-resolution digital surface models (DSMs) play an important role in urban analysis, 3D building reconstruction, and infrastructure monitoring, yet their availability remains limited due to the high cost and complexity of data acquisition. In contrast, coarse DSMs from commercial satellite missions are widely accessible, and high-resolution optical imagery is increasingly available from aerial and satellite platforms. We address the resulting mismatch in spatial resolution and propose a DSM superresolution approach that enhances 5 m DSMs to 0.5 m resolution, using guidance from high-resolution spectral images. Our method employs denoising diffusion to transfer information that is visible only in the image, like crisp outlines and detailed roof structures, into the elevation maps. In this way, surface details are reconstructed more accurately than with conventional interpolation or filtering techniques. Experiments on several cities in Central Europe demonstrate that the proposed approach produces high-quality DSMs with improved structural detail and accurate surface geometry. Our results highlight the potential of guided super-resolution with foundational image priors as a means of reconstructing high-resolution surface models.

Armand Mihai Nicolicioiu, Dominik Narnhofer, Nando Metzger +3

Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland · Remote Sensing Technology Institute, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Wessling, Germany

Diffusion Model Guidance Image Super-Resolution

Sep 9, 2026cs.CV

Symmetry-aware super-resolution of crystal orientation maps via invariant latent-space learning

Crystal-orientation maps are physical fields defined only up to crystal symmetry; electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) resolves them experimentally, but acquisition-time constraints limit spatial resolution. Unlike conventional images, EBSD data lie on the quotient space

\mathrm{SO}(3)/G

, where

G

is the crystal-symmetry group. Standard Euclidean interpolation can therefore mix symmetry-equivalent representations and blur grain boundaries. We introduce the Symmetry-Group-Aware Super-Resolution Attention Network (SG-SRAN), which incorporates crystal symmetry and boundary preservation by design. A frozen, locally isometric encoder maps equivalent orientations to a common latent representation in which Euclidean distance approximates misorientation. Super-resolution is performed in this space, with each high-resolution token restricted to a feature-consistent local support to prevent cross-boundary mixing. A dictionary-based decoder then recovers valid orientations. Across FCC and HCP benchmarks, SG-SRAN matches 15-16 million parameter backbones using only 27-49k trainable parameters, while achieving the lowest p68 errors, highest inverse-pole-figure fidelity, and zero-shot transfer to unseen alloys.

Umang Garg, Warren Zamudio, McLean P. Echlin +3

Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, California, USA. · Mechanical Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, California, USA. · Materials, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, California, USA.

Materials Science Invariant Representation Learning Image Super-Resolution

Sep 3, 2026cs.CV

SPARK: Input-Conditioned Sparse Activation Modulation for Frozen DiT-based Super-Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution (SR) increasingly relies on Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbones, whose internal activations can be dominated by a small number of massive channels. Yet improving perceptual quality in these models still typically requires fine-tuning the network or attaching additional adapters, leaving this structured activation space largely unexplored for adaptation. We investigate whether dominant channels can instead serve as a compact adaptation interface for frozen DiT-based SR models. We first characterize their behavior in pretrained SR backbones and show through controlled interventions that they strongly affect reconstruction quality. Building on this observation, we introduce SPARK, a lightweight input-conditioned controller that predicts bounded per-channel affine transformations for only the selected channels, while keeping the SR backbone and VAE frozen. Dominant channels are identified through an online activation-ranking procedure, and only a small predictor conditioned on the low-resolution VAE latent is optimized. Experiments on three DiT-based SR backbones across DIV2K, RealSR, and DRealSR show consistent gains in both fidelity and perceptual quality while modulating only eight channels per stream and block. Controlled comparisons further show that these gains cannot be explained by parameter budget or access to the selected channels alone.

Federico Putamorsi, Leonardo Zini, Marcella Cornia +1

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Diffusion Transformer Activation Sparsity Image Super-Resolution Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Sep 2, 2026cs.CV

UnCapsTSR: An Unsupervised Transformer-based Image Super-Resolution Approach for Capsule Endoscopy Images

Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) captures and streams video while passing through a patient's Gastrointestinal (GI) tract and is used to examine its irregularities. Although advantageous over conventional endoscopy, WCE suffers from limitations related to capsule size and wireless transmission, resulting in images with coarser resolution. This work presents UnCapsTSR, an unsupervised transformer-based Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework for improving the spatial resolution of Low-Resolution (LR) WCE images. The proposed method accomplishes SR without explicit degradation estimation of real-world LR data and eliminates the need for true LR-HR pairs. UnCapsTSR employs a Bilateral Total Variation (BTV) loss to ensure spatial continuity in SR images. A newly curated dataset from the Kvasir Capsule dataset is also presented for training WCE SR models. Generalizability is validated on KID and GIANA datasets that are not used during training. A new non-reference metric, Endoscopy Quality Metric (EndoQM), is introduced for quantitative evaluation of domain-specific WCE data. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvement over state-of-the-art unsupervised SR approaches using NIQE, BRISQUE, PIQE, and EndoQM. Statistical evaluation shows 40 to 80 percent improvement in EndoQM from LR to SR across the evaluated datasets.

Anjali Sarvaiya, Shubh Kawa, Lalit Agrawal +3

Department of Electronics Engineering, Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat, India

Image Super-Resolution Endoscopy Generative Adversarial Networks

Sep 2, 2026cs.CV

LaST-SR: Laplace-Inspired Steady-Transient Complex-Frequency Decomposition for Single Image Super-Resolution

Single-image super-resolution (SISR) requires global context modeling for structurally consistent reconstruction. Fourier operators are increasingly adopted for global feature modeling. However, their periodic spectral bases constrain the representation of localized aperiodic variations, limiting the recovery of irregular structures and fine details. In dynamical systems, the Laplace neural operator extends Fourier modes to complex frequencies and decomposes the output signal into complementary steady-state and transient responses to jointly model periodic and aperiodic information. We derive, for the first time, an approximate steady-transient decomposition for two-dimensional feature maps, providing an analytical basis for the proposed complex-frequency decomposition. Accordingly, we propose LaST-SR, centered on a Complex-Frequency Decomposition module that couples a global full-spectrum Fourier branch for image-wide dependencies and long-range structural consistency with a window-conditioned local complex-frequency branch for localized, content-dependent aperiodic variations. To fuse the resulting features, we further design a Steady-Transient Collaborative Aggregation module for cross-branch interaction and joint aggregation. Experiments on five benchmarks show that LaST-SR achieves the best PSNR/SSIM among the compared methods for

\times2

and

\times4

SISR. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and its key modeling mechanisms.

Linhao Li, Zhaojie Pan, Langkun Chen

School of Mathematics Southeast University Nanjing, China

Frequency-Domain Feature Learning Frequency-Domain Image Processing Image Super-Resolution

Sep 2, 2026eess.IV

Perceptually Regularized Diffusion Model for Image Super-Resolution

Image super-resolution, which aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from their low-resolution observations, is fundamental to medical imaging, remote sensing, surveillance, microscopy, and scientific visualization. Traditional model-based methods formulate super-resolution as an inverse problem with hand-crafted regularization priors. While interpretable and theoretically grounded, they rely on fixed assumptions and require computationally intensive iterative solvers. Deep learning methods offer data-driven flexibility by learning nonlinear mappings from low- to high-resolution images, among which diffusion models have achieved particularly impressive perceptual quality. However, the standard diffusion training objective is a pixel-domain noise-prediction loss that does not explicitly enforce perceptual fidelity, which can lead to oversmoothing and loss of fine image structure. To address these limitations, we propose a perceptually regularized diffusion framework that incorporates prior knowledge through perceptual-loss-based regularization, improving training convergence and encouraging the recovery of meaningful image features. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate improved perceptual quality and competitive distortion metrics, highlighting the effectiveness of regularization for diffusion-based super resolution.

Chuxiangbo Wang, Pavithra Venkatachalapathy, Ying Liang +4

Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. · Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA. · Department of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA. +3

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Perceptual Loss Image Super-Resolution

Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

PixelIR: Fidelity-Perception Decoupling via Pixel-Space Image-Residual Flow Matching for Efficient One-Step Real-World Super-Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims to preserve structures supported by the degraded observation while reconstructing perceptually realistic details. However, existing Real-ISR methods largely optimize fidelity and perceptual quality within a shared network, causing the two objectives to interfere throughout training and making their balance difficult to control. Recent one-step methods reduce sampling steps, yet often inherit both this coupled optimization behavior and the expensive high-resolution backbone of their multi-step predecessors. We argue that efficient Real-ISR requires not only a shorter sampling trajectory, but also specialized modeling of faithful reconstruction and perceptual detail synthesis. Based on this insight, we propose PixelIR, a fidelity-perception decoupling framework built upon pixel-space image-residual flow matching. PixelIR first learns an image flow that maps the degraded observation to a faithful reconstruction. Then, a residual flow synthesizes the missing perceptual details from noise without repeatedly relearning or overwriting the complete restoration solution. We further distill the teacher into a deployment-oriented one-step student within a coarse-to-fine pyramid architecture. Extensive experiments show that PixelIR achieves leading PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS on both RealSR and DRealSR. The final model completes pixel-space restoration in a single evaluation with only 32.9M parameters, 89.7G MACs, and 8.5ms latency, demonstrating a strong practical fidelity-perception-efficiency balance.

Bingtian Qiao, Yue Shi, Yong Guo +2

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Fuzhou University · Shanghai AI Laboratory

Image Super-Resolution

Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

MPISuperRes-PnP: A Super-Resolution Zero-Shot Plug-and-Play Reconstruction Algorithm for Magnetic Particle Imaging

Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) is an emerging medical imaging modality. MPI is based on the non-linear response of magnetic nanoparticles to an applied magnetic field and avoids ionizing radiation. The measured signal is the voltage induced in receive coils by the particles' response. Reconstructing the particle concentration from the signal constitutes the imaging task. Even using state-of-the-art measurement-based reconstruction, the associated spatial grid is very coarse, hence super-resolution (SR) techniques are important. In this work, we propose an approach for SR in MPI inspired by energy minimization. Different methods have been proposed for SR in MPI, ranging from upscaling of the associated system matrix to interpolation of the reconstruction. Here we incorporate SR into the reconstruction task via an energy minimization formulation. Following the plug-and-play approach to energy minimization we derive a splitting scheme and a SR method for MPI where the arising Gaussian denoising task is treated with a pre-trained learned Gaussian denoiser in a zero-shot fashion. This way, we incorporate benefits of deep learning without training and avoid the need of training data. Further, we provide a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the proposed method. Hyper-parameter are selected via an extended parameter search. The found parameters are applied for reconstruction on real data. We show the applicability of our method on synthetic and on real data (MPIData: EquilibriumModelWithAnisotropy and 2D-OpenMPI Data). The proposed method employs a deep-learning denoiser without training -- thus it does not require presently scarcely available MPI training data. The denoiser behaves conservatively, i.e., no hallucination artifacts were observed. The SR approach is generic such that it can be applied in future MPI contexts involving different regularizers or different imaging tasks.

Vladyslav Gapyak, Thomas März, Andreas Weinmann

Institute for the Protection of Terrestrial Infrastructures, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Sankt Augustin, Germany · Hochschule Darmstadt, Schöfferstr. 3, 64295, Darmastdt, Germany · Data Science Institute, European University of Technology, European Union +1

Medical Imaging Image Reconstruction Medical Image Super-Resolution Image Super-Resolution

Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

MeanSR: Restoration Trajectory Learning for One-Step Perceptual Super-Resolution

Diffusion-based super-resolution (SR) achieves strong perceptual quality but requires costly iterative denoising. Existing one-step distillation methods reduce inference time but depend on expensive pretrained teachers, whereas CTMSR avoids distillation through PF-ODE consistency training yet does not explicitly model the restoration dynamics from low-resolution (LR) inputs to high-resolution (HR) images. We propose MeanSR, a one-step perceptual SR method that learns an LR-conditioned average velocity field to directly capture the finite-time transition from degraded or noisy inputs to plausible HR outputs. We further reformulate distribution trajectory matching for average-velocity generation and introduce a Stage-Aware Temporal Sampling strategy to improve trajectory learning. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that MeanSR outperforms CTMSR on CLIPIQA, MUSIQ, and MANIQA while substantially reducing FLOPs and inference latency. MeanSR also reconstructs sharper structures and more realistic textures with fewer perceptual artifacts.

Axi Niu, Jiawei Kou, Kang Zhang +3

School of Computer Science Northwestern Polytechnical University Xi’an, Shaanxi, China

Diffusion Model Inference Acceleration Image Super-Resolution

Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

Preserve More Details: Mitigating Content Drift in Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims to reconstruct high-quality (HQ) images from low-quality (LQ) inputs subject to diverse real-world degradations. Recent advances have leveraged the LQ inputs and natural image priors learned by Stable Diffusion models to achieve impressive results. However, existing methods often overlook insufficient clarity of LQ inputs inevitably induce content drift in the generated HQ images. This manifests primarily as visual detail degradation and textual semantic shift, severely compromising both fidelity and perceptual quality. To address this challenge, we propose FSP-Diff, a novel one-step diffusion model featuring a dual-pathway architecture. This architecture comprises a Detail-Conditioned Pathway for injecting structured details to recover fine structures, and a Detail-Modulated Semantic Pathway that refines semantic guidance using structured details to mitigate semantic deviations. Extensive experiments on standard Real-ISR benchmarks demonstrate that FSP-Diff surpasses existing one-step diffusion methods in both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Chunxiao Liu, Wei Liu, Anbin Xiong +1

Xiaomi Corporation Beijing, China

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Image Restoration Image Super-Resolution Diffusion Models

Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

OGG-FR: Orthogonal Gradient Gaming and Frequency Rectification for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Infrared Image Super-Resolution

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) infrared image super-resolution aims to recover weak thermal structures for deployment on resource-constrained platforms; lightweight models are therefore preferred, but multi-loss training can be unstable. A common strategy combines pixel-domain and frequency-domain objectives; however, low contrast, limited high-frequency content, and sensor-specific noise often make their gradients weakly aligned or conflicting. To address this optimization ambiguity, we propose Orthogonal Gradient Gaming and Frequency Rectification (OGG-FR), a plug-and-play optimization framework that decomposes the frequency gradient into a redundant parallel component and an orthogonal innovation component relative to the pixel gradient. In the conflict regime, OGG-FR computes a safe base gradient using the Multiple Gradient Descent Algorithm (MGDA) and adds a variance-rectified orthogonal innovation; in the compatible regime, it discards redundant parallel information and injects the orthogonal innovation according to a confidence score estimated from the high-frequency residual. Experimental results on the UAV thermal benchmark show broad gains under BI and BD degradations at

\times 4

and

\times 8

scales, while gradient analyses support the effectiveness of the proposed conflict-aware update rule.

Yongsong Huang, Qingzhong Wang, Xiaofeng Liu +3

Tohoku University · Amazon Web Services · Yale University

Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution Multi-Objective Optimization UAV Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution

Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

When Latents Forget Pixels: Restoring Fidelity in Diffusion Transformer Super-Resolution

Image super-resolution (SR) with large generative models has recently achieved remarkable perceptual quality, yet maintaining fidelity to the LR observation remains challenging. In particular, we observe that diffusion transformers (DiTs) built on latent representations suffer from a critical limitation: the compression bottleneck of the VAE weakens fine-grained spatial information, leading to hallucinated details that are weakly grounded in the input image. In this work, we revisit generative SR from a representation perspective and propose a pixel-grounded super-resolution (PGSR) framework that preserves LR-observed pixel evidence before VAE compression and reuses it throughout restoration. Instead of relying solely on the compressed latent condition, PGSR extracts pre-VAE pixel evidence from the upsampled LR image and reuses it at two stages. First, Condition-Side Trajectory Guidance fuses LR-derived pixel evidence with the latent LR condition to guide the latent restoration trajectory. Second, Decoder-Side Pixel Grounding injects multi-scale pixel features into the frozen VAE decoder to ground the final rendering with LR-observed cues. To efficiently adapt large pretrained DiT models, we keep the latent autoencoder and main flow-matching backbone frozen, and train only lightweight restoration modules. We further study an efficient local-window attention variant for improved high-resolution efficiency and scalability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PGSR improves the realism--fidelity trade-off and produces more faithful, visually convincing results than existing latent generative SR approaches.

Yu Shi, Yuyao Zhang, Yu-wing Tai

Dartmouth College

Diffusion Model Guidance Diffusion Transformer Latent Diffusion Models Image Super-Resolution

Aug 9, 2026cs.CV

Towards Adaptive Super-Resolution and Quality Assessment via Test-Time Adaptation

This paper presents doctoral research on adaptive video super-resolution and perceptual quality modeling under real-world conditions. Existing video super-resolution (VSR) methods struggle to generalize under unknown degradations arising from heterogeneous devices, codecs, and network environments. We address this challenge through test-time adaptation (TTA), a unified paradigm that improves robustness and perceptual quality without retraining or high-quality supervision. Specifically, we: 1) propose a TTA-based framework for no-reference video quality assessment (VQA), where adapted quality predictions provide perceptual guidance for VSR under unseen distortions; 2) develop a transformer-based architecture for screen-content super-resolution that preserves text clarity and structural fidelity; and 3) introduce a region-aware TTA strategy that selectively refines text and non-text regions without requiring high-resolution ground truth. Experimental results across diverse benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in perceptual quality and readability. We also outline ongoing work toward fully adaptive video enhancement systems capable of generalizing across unseen domains.

Ajeet Kumar Verma

Indian Institute of Technology Jammu · Jammu, J & K, India

Test-Time Adaptation Video Quality Assessment Video Super-Resolution Image Super-Resolution

Aug 6, 2026cs.CV

Improving Low-Resolution Face Recognition under Limited Data: How Synthetic Data Generation Can Close the Domain Gap

Face Recognition (FR) systems in surveillance settings often encounter Low Resolution (LR) faces, those whose face region falls below the standard 112

\times

112 input size. While labelled High Resolution (HR) training data is abundant, labelled native-LR data, and above all paired native LR/HR data, is scarce. One workaround is to synthesize LR data from the available HR faces, but how much synthesis effort is repaid in recognition accuracy remains unclear. We present a study of simple synthetic generation strategies for a compact, edge device-oriented face recognition system, spanning interpolation-based degradation, knowledge distillation, a Prepended Domain Transformer (PDT), Real ESRGAN-style degradation, and a learned Super Resolution (SR) front-end with an identity-aware loss. We evaluate these strategies on synthetic cross-resolution face benchmarks (LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB-30) and on TinyFace, a real-world native LR dataset, and expose a synthetic-real gap: the degradation setting that is optimal on synthetic benchmarks is not the one that is optimal on real LR. We find that more synthesis effort does not help monotonically: the learned SR front-end does not surpass a direct feed of the aligned LR image into a strong backbone, while simple interpolation augmentation of a compact backbone is the only synthesis that improves over its own baseline. We conclude that generative methods for LR face recognition must be validated on real LR and against a direct-feed baseline, and release our pipeline at https://idiap.ch/paper/synth-lrfr

Luis S. Luevano, Ünsal Öztürk, Hatef Otroshi Shahreza +2

Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland

Synthetic Data Augmentation Synthetic Data Generation Face Recognition Image Super-Resolution

Aug 6, 2026cs.AI

Temporal Bridges for Spatial Resolution: Enhancing Climate Data Super-Resolution with Bidirectional Alignment

High-resolution climate data is crucial for meteorological predictions and for informing decision support across diverse domains. However, the acquisition of such high-resolution climate information is often prohibitively costly, necessitating the development of data-driven meteorological prediction models. These models aim to generate fine-grained climate data from low-resolution inputs, a process termed climate data super-resolution (SR). Nevertheless, recent advancements in deep learning for climate data SR have primarily focused on leveraging single-frame spatial information, largely neglecting the temporal correlations between different time frames that could enhance SR outcomes. Furthermore, climate data are inherently stochastic and noisy, rendering widely used temporal alignment methods, such as optical flow models, ineffective in this context. Consequently, the development of a framework tailored for climate data SR that effectively captures implicit temporal correlations remains an unresolved challenge. To this end, we propose a novel Temporal-Enhanced framework with bidirectional temporal alignment. In essence, our framework establishes a temporal bridge to enhance spatial resolution in climate data SR through bidirectional alignment, leading to improved SR performance. Within this framework, Paired Latent Mapping achieves spatial alignment and noise reduction by unifying latent spaces. Then a Bidirectional Temporal Alignment captures temporal correlations by training forward and backward networks on consecutive latent frames. Temporal Enhanced Super-resolution then optimizes the entire framework for climate data SR. Experiments on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrated the superior performance of our framework.

Yichen Zhang, Yixiong Xiao, Congxi Xiao +1

Baidu, Inc., Beijing, China

Climate Modeling Image Super-Resolution

Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

Coupled Continuous-Discrete Generation for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims to recover visually plausible appearance while preserving character semantics from degraded inputs. Existing STISR systems often rely on externally generated priors or separate image and text models, resulting in error propagation and costly multi-stage inference. We present DualTSR, a unified framework that formulates STISR as coupled continuous-discrete generation. Conditional flow matching restores continuous image latents, while absorbing-state discrete diffusion reconstructs text tokens. Both processes share a multimodal transformer backbone, allowing the evolving image and text states to interact throughout generation without an external OCR prior at inference. On CTR-TSR, DualTSR achieves the best FID, LPIPS, ACC, and NED among the compared methods at both X2 and X4. On an aligned RealCE subset, it obtains the best FID, ACC, and NED with competitive LPIPS. Compared with DiffTSR at X4, DualTSR improves ACC by 12.78 percentage points while reducing the parameter count from 1.23B to 203M and end-to-end latency from 13.3s to 132ms. These results establish DualTSR as an accurate and efficient method for STISR.

Axi Niu, Knag Zhang, Qingsen Yan +3

Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China · Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea

Image Super-Resolution Diffusion Models Multimodal Diffusion Models

Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

Morphology-Aware Implicit Super-Resolution Network for Pathological Images

Accurate diagnosis in Digital Pathology (DP) relies on high-resolution whole-slide images, yet clinical deployment is often limited by hardware costs. Super-Resolution (SR) offers a promising alternative by computationally enhancing low-resolution acquisitions. However, existing SR methods frequently struggle to preserve fine-grained cellular morphology, leading to texture oversmoothing and blurred structural boundaries under complex tissue variability. To address this issue, we propose Morph-ISR, a morphology-aware implicit super-resolution framework for DP that restores diagnostically relevant details with sub-pixel precision. Morph-ISR reformulates SR as a continuous coordinate-based reconstruction problem and integrates an Implicit Position-aware Kernel Generator (IPKG) to adaptively model spatially varying tissue morphology. To further enhance structural fidelity, a Morphological Fidelity Prior (MFP) is introduced, leveraging semantic guidance from a pre-trained cell segmentation network to enforce boundary-preserving and region-aware reconstruction, thereby improving the representation of critical cellular boundaries and nuclear textures. Experiments on TCGA and SurGen datasets show that Morph-ISR achieves the best LPIPS and ST-LPIPS among the evaluated methods, reducing them by up to 38.37% and 39.55%, respectively, over the second-best methods while maintaining strong PSNR and SSIM. These results demonstrate superior preservation of diagnostically relevant cellular boundaries and nuclear textures, while compact parameterization and high throughput support efficient edge deployment. Code and trained models will be released upon publication.

Jiaming Liang, QiHui Han, Haolin Chen +5

School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China · School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China · School of Future Technology, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China +1

Computational Pathology Implicit Neural Representations Medical Image Super-Resolution Image Super-Resolution

Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

FaithIR: Rethinking Infrared Image Super-Resolution from Perceptual Sharpness to Task Relevant Fidelity

Infrared image super-resolution (IISR) is important for downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Existing IISR methods often produce artificial textures, over-sharpened edges, and spurious high-frequency details that distort authentic thermal structures and semantic information. To address this issue, we propose FaithIR, a faithful infrared super-resolution framework for reliable machine perception. FaithIR consists of a patch-level conditioning branch that captures global thermal and structural information and a pixel-level restoration branch that performs dense local reconstruction under structural guidance. The entire restoration process is performed directly in the pixel domain to preserve infrared-specific structures and task-relevant information. Extensive experiments on FLIR-IISR, M3FD, and FMB demonstrate strong reconstruction fidelity, cross-dataset generalization, and superior performance in object detection and semantic segmentation. These results show that demonstrate that preserving faithful infrared structure preservations is more important for reliable machine perception than merely pursuing perceptual sharpness alone.

Axi Niu, Zhenguo Wu, Kang Zhang +3

School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China · School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea · School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China

Image Super-Resolution

Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

Loggia dei Lanzi: AI Thermography Enhancement Comparisons through 3D Photogrammetry

The Loggia dei Lanzi in the Piazza della Signoria is one of Florence's most prominent structures visited by millions every year. Its construction history spans multiple centuries of modification. This paper presents the results of a thermal imaging campaign conducted in December 2025, using a FLIR T1020 HD camera, revealing hidden architectural features including walled-up openings and material transitions beneath the plaster surface. The favorable winter ambient conditions provided a feature-rich benchmark upon which to compare the results of enhancement algorithms and artificial intelligence models. We evaluate the application of AI-based image enhancement to thermal heritage documentation through a comparison of three tiers of image resolution in a photogrammetric Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline: native resolution, FLIR's hardware-based pixel-shifted super-resolution (UltraMax), and state of the art AI-upscaled imagery models. We quantify the effect of each resolution tier on feature detection and tie-point generation, assessing whether the additional detail produced by super-resolution, whether hardware or AI-derived, translates into meaningfully denser and more accurate 3D thermal models. Our results contribute to the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence and heritage thermography by providing a direct comparison of hardware microscanning and AI super-resolution within a thermal photogrammetric workflow for cultural heritage. All datasets are made publicly available and accessible within an interactive 3D archival framework, and integrated into a custom citywide extended reality overlay application.

Scott McAvoy, Jonathan Klingspon, George Bent +4

Cultural Heritage Engineering Initiative (CHEI), University of California San Diego · Washington and Lee University · Editech, Florence, Italy

Thermal Imaging Structure from Motion Image Super-Resolution

Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

Detail Continuation over a Trustworthy Coarse Scale for Autoregressive Super-Resolution

Hallucination remains a persistent challenge in generative super-resolution (GSR), where reconstructed results may contain visually plausible yet weakly supported content, structural deviations, or unnatural textures with respect to the low-resolution (LR) input. Existing GSR methods have extensively explored the trade-off between perceptual realism and reconstruction fidelity, but the division between preserving reliable coarse-scale information and restoring more uncertain fine details is often handled implicitly within the overall restoration process. Visual autoregressive (VAR) modeling provides a natural opportunity to revisit this issue, as its coarse-to-fine next-scale prediction offers an explicit scale-wise generation interface. However, existing VAR-based SR methods still inherit the original full 1-to-

N

autoregressive generation path, even though, for super-resolution, coarse-scale information in LR is often relatively more reliable, while long autoregressive chains may accumulate prediction errors. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textbf{K2N}, which reformulates VAR-based SR from full-path generation into a

k

-to-

N

detail continuation process. Specifically, early coarse-scale states are established directly from LR, while only the remaining finer scales are restored autoregressively. Experimental results show that K2N remains competitive with the VARSR baseline on standard SR metrics, while exhibiting clearer advantages on hallucination-focused evaluation. These findings suggest that explicitly rethinking the generation path in a scale-wise manner can be a promising direction for improving the reliability of generative super-resolution. Our code will be released soon at https://github.com/BRL-SYSU/K2NSR.

Hongyi Fang, Jiahui Wu, Yichen Yue +2

Visual Autoregressive Models Image Super-Resolution

Aug 1, 2026cs.CV

PixelSR: Efficient Screen Content Super-Resolution via Pixel Classification

Screen content images are generally composed of texts and graphics. Compared to natural images, these man-made images contain a large quantity of sharp but repetitive structures. However, existing works in screen content super-resolution underutilize the special characteristics of screen content, leaving a large room to improve model performance and speed up. In this paper, we propose PixelSR, a simple yet effective method to improve super-resolution performance but with faster inference speed. To improve model performance, we classify pixels via pixel binning to compute content attention in the training phase. Specifically, after binning pixels into content-dependent groups, content attention is aggregated from pixel features within each group to introduce a content-dependent and non-local receptive field for every pixel. In the testing phase, we utilize the properties of self-repetitiveness and redundancy in screen content to speed up inference without the loss of model performance. We divide targeted high-resolution pixels into three types, which are unique pixels, repeated pixels, and background pixels for each test image. We conduct conventional network processing on unique pixels and cache their predictions in the on-the-fly lookup table. For repeated pixels which have appeared in unique pixels, we directly retrieve prediction results from the lookup table without network processing. For background pixels, we use the nearest neighbor algorithm to generate high-resolution pixels. The on-the-fly lookup table is cleaned and repeats the procedure above for the next test image. Experiments show our PixelSR achieves state-of-the-art performance with shorter inference time in screen content super-resolution.

Zhiheng Li, Lei Chen, Jie Zhou +1

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.

Image Super-Resolution

Jul 31, 2026cs.CV

CoDe-SSM: Context-Detail Decoupled State Space Model for Efficient UHD Image Restoration

Ultra-high-definition (UHD) image restoration must balance the aggregation of spatially recurring degradation cues with the preservation of localized image structures. Compact aggregation can reduce redundant processing but may attenuate edges, textures, and other fine structures. Existing approaches manage UHD restoration cost through downsampling, window partitioning, or cluster-based token reduction; yet many of them do not explicitly retain information that is poorly represented by shared aggregation. In this study, we propose a Context-Detail Decoupled State Space Model (CoDe-SSM) for UHD restoration, which processes aggregated context and clustering residuals in separate pathways. The context modeling pathway, implemented by the Global Cluster Scan Module (GCSM), aggregates features into

K

input-dependent cluster centers and applies selective SSM reasoning over the resulting fixed-order sequence, enabling cross-region context sharing while decoupling computational cost from spatial resolution. The detail recovery pathway, implemented by the Local High-Frequency Module (LHFM), processes the clustering residual with an input-derived high-frequency mask and a sparse mixture of convolutional experts. Extensive experiments on five UHD benchmarks and five degradation types demonstrate that our explicit context-detail decoupling strategy yields substantial gains in restoration quality while maintaining desirable efficiency.

Jiaxu Su, Zhijian Wu, Jun Li +2

School of Computer and Electronic Information, Nanjing Normal University, China · Medical Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Westlake University, China

Visual SSMs Image Restoration Image Super-Resolution

Jul 30, 2026cs.CV

Collaborative Feature Aggregation for Face Super-Resolution and Robust Re-Identification

We propose a novel collaborative approach for face super-resolution (SR) and robust person re-identification from sequential or multi-view facial images. Traditional SR methods often suffer from blurring and distortion in faces recovered from poor-quality images due to low resolution. Image- and video-based facial SR methods using facial landmarks or segmentation also have similar challenges. To overcome these limitations, we leverage multiple correlated facial observations, across time or viewpoints, by introducing a transformer-based collaborative feature aggregation method that unifies identity features from multi-sequence or multi-view data. This allows faces in multiple sequences of an individual to contribute to accurately estimating common facial features. Furthermore, we propose a cascade SR network to progressively restore the high-resolution image of the target's face with gradual facial feature unification. The unified identity representation is further utilized in person re-identification scenarios, enabling accurate matching even under severe image degradation. The exhaustive experimental results and comparisons show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating consistent improvements in both face super-resolution and re-identification performance. Our work highlights the effectiveness of joint identity reconstruction and progressive image restoration from multiple facial inputs in enhancing downstream visual recognition tasks.

Juheon Hwang, Taewan Kim, Jiwoo Kang

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul, 03722, South Korea. · Data Science Major, Dongduk Women’s University, Seoul, 02748, South Korea. · Division of Artificial Intelligence Engineering, Sookmyung Women’s University, Seoul, 04310, South Korea.

Image Super-Resolution Person Re-Identification

Jul 28, 2026cs.CV

ScaleResfusion: Residual Rectified Flow based on Residual Vector Field

Real-world Image Restoration (Real-IR) aims to recover high-quality (HQ) images from complex and unknown degradations. Recent diffusion-based methods have substantially improved perceptual quality, yet two obstacles remain: methods that sample from Gaussian noise require many steps and are often less faithful to the degraded input, whereas residual-based methods that start from the low-quality (LQ) image typically train task-specific models from scratch, with optimization objectives coupled to a particular noise scheduler, and therefore cannot reuse modern pre-trained generative priors. We present \textbf{ScaleResfusion}, which rewrites residual restoration as a scheduler-independent adaptation interface for pre-trained text-to-image rectified-flow models. Its core, \textbf{Residual Rectified Flow} (RRF), inserts the residual term

R

into the linear transport path of Rectified Flow, so that sampling starts from noisy LQ at an exact acceleration point, where the signal-to-noise ratio of the starting state is continuously controlled by the residual ratio

γ

. The resulting optimization target, the \textbf{residual vector field}, contains no scheduler-specific coefficients and differs from the pre-trained rectified-flow target only by the residual offset

γR

; adapting a frozen billion-scale backbone therefore reduces to fitting this compact residual correction with LoRA-only training. A knowledge-distillation pipeline built around RRF further reduces sampling to as few as 4 steps. Experiments on real-world super-resolution across multiple benchmarks show that ScaleResfusion achieves state-of-the-art restoration quality and transfers consistently across pre-trained rectified-flow backbones from 2B to 9B parameters.

Zhenning Shi, Chen Xu, Junhao Zhang +4

College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Tianjin, China · Faculty of Information Science and Computing, University of Macau, Macau, China · CSIRO Data61, Australia +1

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Rectified Flow Diffusion Model Fine-Tuning Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems Image Super-Resolution

Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

MicroZoom: Structure-Preserving Detail Synthesis at Extreme Scale

We introduce MicroZoom, a generative framework for gigapixel image synthesis at the microscopic scale. Given a standard photograph and a sparse set of consumer-grade microscope close-ups, MicroZoom synthesizes a seamless, gigapixel-resolution image grounded in the material character of the real references, enabling exploratory visualization of microscopic texture across the full spatial extent of an object. Our goal is plausible synthesis, not exact reconstruction. We focus on full-image, reference-based, extreme-scale super-resolution at magnification levels of up to 350x, a setting that introduces two major challenges: (1) recovering texture-specific detail from highly lossy inputs near ambiguous material boundaries, and (2) preserving correct large-scale pattern structure, such as the repeating geometry of a fabric weave, across millions of local predictions. We address these with a two-stage cascaded design, where the first stage recovers global pattern coherence and the second refines local texture detail, supplemented by a segmentation mask to guide synthesis at ambiguous boundaries. We verify our approach on a collection of self-captured everyday objects and demonstrate globally coherent, materially grounded gigapixel imagery.

Huy Huynh, Jingwei Ma, Brian Curless +2

University of Washington, USA

Image Generation Texture Synthesis Image Super-Resolution

Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

BeyondFusion: Self-Aligned Latent Diffusion for Calibration-Free Infrared Super-Resolution and Infrared-Visible Fusion

Mobile infrared-visible imaging typically pairs a compact infrared sensor with a high-resolution visible camera for complementary perception. While cross-sensor misalignment caused by different optics, viewpoints, fields of view, and exposure timings hinders practical deployment. In this paper, we propose BeyondFusion, a unified latent diffusion framework for calibration-free visible-guided infrared super-resolution and infrared-visible fusion tasks. The proposed framework supports both task-specific training and joint training where two tasks are optimized and executed as two readouts of the same generative process. Instead of relying on explicit registration or geometric warping, BeyondFusion introduces a cross-modal self-aligning (CMSA) module into the denoising U-Net. CMSA reorganizes infrared and visible latent tokens into a shared attention space to learn content-adaptive cross-modal correspondence during the denoising process. Together with misalignment augmentation module, the model is facilitated to exploit visible structural and semantic cues while preserving thermal consistency, enabling high-frequency infrared reconstruction and informative fused-image generation under uncalibrated conditions. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and a mobile infrared-visible imaging system show strong performance across aligned inputs, low-resolution infrared observations, synthetic misalignments, and real mobile captures with unsynchronized sensors. Ablation studies, unified training analysis, and downstream pedestrian detection further validate the effectiveness of BeyondFusion for calibration-free multimodal imaging.

Minchong Chen, Xiaoyun Yuan, Minyu Cao +4

MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Institute of AI, School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Institute of Modern Optics, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Multi-Source Image Fusion Infrared-Visible Image Fusion Cross-Modal Alignment Image Super-Resolution

Jul 24, 2026cs.CV

IR275K: A Benchmark for Infrared Multi-Frame Super-Resolution Toward Efficient Remote Sensing

Efficient processing is becoming increasingly important in infrared remote sensing, where satellite constellations produce large volumes of observations under constrained detector resolution, power, and downlink bandwidth. Multi-frame super-resolution (MFSR) offers a software-based route to spatial enhancement, but its evaluation in infrared sensing remains fragmented across private datasets and ad-hoc protocols. Existing benchmarks do not explicitly capture the thermal contrast, sensor noise, weak texture, and platform-induced frame-to-frame variation that characterize infrared video. We introduce IR275K, a curated benchmark containing 594 infrared video sequences and 275,196 frames. It provides sequence-level train/validation/test splits and a reproducible X4 evaluation protocol. As an initial architectural probe, we further evaluate CGMamba, a lightweight state-space model with 10.90M parameters and 112.14G FLOPs. CGMamba combines 2D rotary position encoding (2D~~RoPE) with center-guided cross-Mamba (CGCM) fusion for implicit multi-frame reconstruction. It achieves 33.19dB PSNR, outperforming infrared single-image super-resolution references by 0.35--0.52~~dB at substantially lower computational cost. Ablation results show that removing 2D~RoPE from CGCM causes a 1.53dB drop and severe grid-like artifacts. This indicates that explicit spatial anchoring is critical for stabilizing SSM-based cross-frame gating under infrared conditions. IR275K provides a reproducible foundation for accuracy--efficiency evaluation of infrared MFSR methods, while the architectural analysis offers a concrete starting point for spatially aware SSM design under resource-constrained infrared sensing. Dataset and evaluation resources are available at: https://github.com/InfraRecon7/IR275K.

Jie Deng, Heyang Wang, Changxin Wang +6

Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, Hangzhou 310024, China. · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100000, China. · Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200000, China.

Remote Sensing Remote Sensing Benchmarks Video Super-Resolution Image Super-Resolution State Space Models

Jul 24, 2026eess.IV

Frequency-Aware Dual-Stream Learning for Balanced Realism and Fidelity in Electron Microscopy Imaging

Electron microscopy enables nanoscale cellular visualization but faces a trade-off between imaging resolution and acquisition speed. Existing learning-based methods rely on single-stream architectures that struggle to balance perceptual realism and quantitative fidelity, either over-smoothing details or generating unrealistic hallucinations. This work introduces a frequency-adaptive dual-stream architecture to resolve this conflict. Using discrete wavelet transform, we decompose images into low-frequency structures and high-frequency details, then employ a conditional diffusion model for realistic global synthesis and a transformer network for precise detail recovery. Experiments on the EMDiffuse dataset show the method achieves superior LPIPS and resolution ratio, substantially outperforming existing approaches. The method also shows strong generalization across diverse biological samples, supporting fast and reliable electron microscopy imaging for structural biology and nanotechnology applications. The source code and associated dataset are publicly available to facilitate further research.

Longmi Gao, Zhengkai Zhao, Pan Gao +1

College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 211106, China. · School of computing, Mathematics, and Engineering, Charles Sturt University, NSW, Australia.

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Microscopy Image Analysis Image Super-Resolution

Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

Texture++: Elevating 3D Asset Texture Resolution with a Region-Aware Diffusion Model

Numerous 3D assets are discarded due to low texture resolution, while current super-resolution models ignore texture maps and focus on natural images. An efficient and generalizable texture super-resolution model can revitalize a large corpus of aging yet valuable assets across industries such as film and video games. We present Texture++, a novel framework for texture super-resolution, which enhances the low-resolution textures of assets to produce high-resolution, high-quality results. Specifically, we reformulate the task of super-resolution in UV space into performing it across multiple rendered views and merging the outputs. Firstly, to achieve more complete and continuous textures in the view space, we propose an adaptive view selection strategy to integrate textures dispersed across UV texture patches. Furthermore, we introduce a quadtree-based texture region organization method for combining super-resolved textures from different viewpoints, providing masks to distinguish regions that require improvement. Finally, we design a diffusion-based super-resolution model that enhances the texture resolution for specified masked regions, seamlessly integrating with surrounding regions. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our approach yields textures with substantially improved detail and coherence over existing methods.

Shuaiwei Wang, Shi Li, Jieting Xu +4

State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, China · North China Electric Power University, China

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Image Super-Resolution

Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

Physics-Informed Deep Learning Model for Cross-Modality Super-Resolution in Fluorescence Microscopy

Cross-modality image translation offers a route to super-resolution fluorescence microscopy from low-resolution images while reducing phototoxicity and instrumentation demands. However, purely data-driven models can produce visually plausible outputs that are inconsistent with optical image formation. Here, we propose a physics-informed generative adversarial network for confocal-to-STED image translation that incorporates microscope-specific point spread function information into the training objective. Simulated and experimentally measured PSFs were evaluated using a limited paired confocal-STED dataset of TOM20-labeled mitochondria in human primary M2 macrophages acquired across different experimental days. Performance was assessed using reference-based and non-reference-based image-quality metrics, together with complementary frequency- and distribution-sensitive analyses. The no-reference metrics probed physics-relevant image properties, including spatial-frequency content, contrast, and signal-to-noise behavior. PSF-guided models improved structural fidelity, reduced local deviations, and achieved closer agreement with STED references than non-PSF baselines, particularly in frequency-domain analyses. These results demonstrate that optical priors can improve the structural fidelity and physical plausibility of generative microscopy models for cross-modality super-resolution imaging.

Mohammad Soltaninezhad, Elena Corbetta, Francisco Paez Larios +4

Department “Photonic Data Science”, Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology, Member of Leibniz Health Technologies, Member of the Leibniz Center for Photonics in Infection Research (LPI), Jena, Germany · Work group “Photonic Data Science”, Institute of Physical Chemistry (IPC) and Abbe Center of Photonics (ACP), Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Member of the Leibniz Center for Photonics in Infection Research (LPI), Jena, Germany · Institute of Applied Optics and Biophysics, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany +3

Image-to-Image Translation Physics-Informed ML Generative Adversarial Networks Microscopy Image Analysis Image Super-Resolution

Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

Decoupling Cross-Modality Manifold Discrepancy: Leveraging Visible Diffusion Priors for Infrared Super-Resolution

Infrared image super-resolution (IISR) mitigates the limitations imposed by low spatial resolution. Existing methods have recognized that IISR should preserve consistency in global distribution and structural information while enhancing image clarity. However, these methods are either insufficient or overly intrusive, a problem that becomes even more pronounced in diffusion-based models. To address these issues, we propose a dual-path diffusion-based framework for IISR, termed Shift-IISR. The proposed method is designed to improve the consistency of IISR results while preserving the generative capacity of diffusion models. Specifically, we develop a Global Representation Modulation (GRM) module to extract modality-specific information from infrared imagery and guide the global distribution of the diffusion model toward the ground truth. In addition, we introduce a Local Structure Refinement (LSR) module to encourage the model to focus on structural information at each step of the iterative denoising process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method effectively improves distributional and structural consistency while maintaining competitive super-resolution performance. The source code of the proposed Shift-IISR can be available at https://github.com/Assassink8/Shift-IISR.

Yunpeng Hua, Hongwei Yu, Jiawei Li +3

University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Image Super-Resolution Diffusion Models

Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Physics-Informed Super-Resolution of Atmospheric Data

In the context of global warming, extreme events have become more frequent and intense, making their trustworthy detection and forecasting more important than ever. Yet, atmospheric observations lack sufficient spatial resolution, motivating atmospheric data downscaling as a way to reconstruct high-resolution data from coarse observations. This task is now being formulated as a super-resolution (SR) problem with machine learning methods featuring high efficiency. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether the super-resolved atmospheric data still satisfies fundamental physics governing the Earth system, raising concerns about their trustworthiness in climate-related applications. In this work, we address this challenge by constraining SR models to respect hydrostatic primitive equations that represent multivariate atmospheric physics. First, we propose a Physics-Informed Super-Resolution (PISR) method involving multi-scale physics-informed objectives based on primitive equations. PISR favors the SR outputs to respect these equations and therefore naturally encodes inter-variable relationships. In addition, we propose a metric called Normalized Physical Consistency (NPC) derived from said primitive equations to measure the physical consistency of super-resolved data. Experiments on ERA5, CERRA, and COSMO demonstrate that PISR enhances the reconstruction fidelity by improving physical consistency, SR accuracy, and downstream detection of extreme events, as demonstrated by case studies in heatwaves and extreme winds.

Chang Xu, Gencer Sumbul, Hugo Porta +3

EPFL, Switzerland · University of Cambridge, England

Climate Modeling Physics-Informed ML Image Super-Resolution

Jul 21, 2026cs.CV

Think Sparse, Predict Dense: Continuous Thought Machines for Image Super-Resolution

Continuous Thought Machines introduce an internal temporal dimension in which neuron-level histories and synchronization-derived representations evolve over a sequence of thought ticks. Extending this mechanism to dense visual prediction is non-trivial, because tasks such as image super-resolution require spatial evidence to remain available at every output location rather than being compressed into a single global representation. In the proposed window-level use of CTM, the thought dynamics produce a compact summary representation for each local window. DQ-CTM transforms this compact thought representation into window-aligned dense queries through a structured low-rank, parameter-efficient compact-to-dense query mechanism. Each position within a window receives its own query, while shared thought dynamics progressively refine the dense representation across ticks. In its super-resolution instantiation, termed ThinkSR, encoded feature maps are partitioned into local visual windows without token pooling, restored to the original feature field after shared refinement, and decoded into a high-resolution image. Preliminary experiments under a fixed four-tick training horizon reveal a progressive reconstruction trajectory. PSNR-Y increases from 28.1045 dB at

T=0

to 30.2817 dB at

T=4

, while PSNR-RGB increases from 26.6271 dB to 28.7781 dB and the mean

\ell_1

error decreases from 0.034602 to 0.023545. All 100 evaluated images improve from

T=1

to

T=4

. These initial results establish the feasibility of sparse latent thought for dense spatial reconstruction and motivate broader continuous-thought architectures for dense vision.

Zekai Shi

Xi’an Jiaotong University

Dense Prediction Image Super-Resolution

Jul 20, 2026cs.CV

Rarity-Aware Discrete Diffusion with Spatially Consistent Decoding for Photo-Realistic Image Super-Resolution

Continuous diffusion models have become the dominant paradigm for photo-realistic image Super-Resolution (SR), but they typically formulate reconstruction as continuous signal-level denoising and incorporate semantic priors through external conditioning modules. This makes it less direct to exploit the unified token-based scaling paradigm of modern multimodal models. Autoregressive models provide a more native semantic representation by modeling images as discrete visual tokens, yet their causal decoding is inefficient for high-resolution reconstruction. Discrete diffusion offers a promising middle ground by enabling non-causal, parallel prediction over visual tokens. However, directly adapting discrete diffusion to SR remains non-trivial due to two task-specific challenges: (1) the long-tailed distribution of visual tokens, which under-represents rare but perceptually critical textures; and (2) spatially inconsistent parallel decoding, which may introduce isolated artifacts. To address these issues, we propose DiMOO-SR, a rarity-aware multimodal discrete diffusion framework for photo-realistic image SR. During training, Inverse Frequency Sampling (IFS) prioritizes under-represented but information-rich tokens. During inference, Spatial Consistency Ranking (SCR) refines token confidence using local neighborhood agreement to improve structural coherence. Extensive experiments on widely used real-world SR benchmarks demonstrate that DiMOO-SR achieves competitive perceptual quality with only a few parallel decoding steps, highlighting the potential of discrete diffusion for generative image super-resolution. The code will be released upon publication.

Ao Li, Yapeng Du, Yi Xin +5

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · 2Nanjing University · 3The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) +2

Image Super-Resolution Diffusion Models Multimodal Diffusion Models

Jul 19, 2026cs.CV

Does Super-Resolution Preserve Defect Evidence? A Low-False-Call Benchmark for Semiconductor Inspection

Super-resolution can make inspection images appear sharper without preserving the evidence needed to detect a defect. We study this failure mode with a benchmark that separates reconstruction from detection and evaluates both at a predeclared low false-positive rate. Ten end-to-end repetitions combine independently generated line/space and contact-hole images with model training, calibration, clean controls, weak defects, and a held-out defect morphology. Every reconstruction is scored by the same local residual detector, while direct and jointly trained detectors form a separate comparison track. Reconstruction fidelity and inspection utility diverge: the two learned reconstruction models attain the highest structural similarity yet detect fewer defect pixels than bicubic interpolation in every paired repetition. A direct DeepLabV3 detector reaches

0.1984\pm0.0385

recall at

0.000174\pm0.000084

false-positive rate and satisfies the held-out feasibility criterion in all ten repetitions. An illustrative joint model, DPU-WaferSR, passes independent clean calibration but exceeds the held-out limit in all ten repetitions, demonstrating that calibration success does not guarantee transfer. Weak-defect recall remains near zero for every feasible method. Applying the unchanged policies to 4,591 public Carinthia-S masks further reveals large method-dependent shifts on real SEM texture. These results support a simple conclusion: super-resolution for inspection should be judged by preserved task evidence and operating-point transfer, not reconstruction quality alone.

Shaoliang Yang, Jun Wang

Santa Clara University Santa Clara, CA 95053, USA

Industrial Inspection Microscopy Image Analysis Image Super-Resolution

Jul 17, 2026cs.CV

Efficient Difficulty-Aware Dynamic Routing for Diffusion-Based Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Diffusion-based methods have achieved impressive performance in real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) by leveraging large pre-trained stable diffusion (SD) models as powerful generative priors. However, these methods still face two key limitations. First, existing SD-based one-step and multi-step Real-ISR approaches adopt a unified processing paradigm for all input samples, ignoring the varying restoration difficulty across images. Second, the aggressive resolution reduction of the VAE in SD models (e.g., 8x downsampling) leads to irreversible loss of fine-scale details, which cannot be recovered by the subsequent diffusion process. To address these limitations, we propose a Difficulty-aware Dynamic Routing (DDR) strategy that overcomes the rigid, one-size-fits-all processing paradigm. Specifically, we first design a difficulty estimator to predict the restoration cost of each input image, enabling automatic assignment to a network of appropriate capacity. Then, we construct a set of Real-ISR networks with varying model capacities by modulating the spatial downsampling ratio of the VAE in the SD backbone, thereby preserving more high-frequency information for challenging cases while maintaining efficiency for simpler inputs. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model compared to recent state-of-the-art methods.

Xue Wu, Kang Zhao, Kafeng Wang +4

Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, Shaanxi, China. · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Image Super-Resolution

Jul 14, 2026cs.CV

RFMSR: Residual Flow Matching for Image Super-Resolution

Image super-resolution (ISR) has witnessed remarkable progress with diffusion models and flow matching. The dominant text-to-image (T2I) based approaches leverage large-scale foundation models as generative priors, achieving impressive perceptual quality but at the cost of massive model sizes and prohibitive training expenses. Recent flow-matching-based vision-only approaches have made significant strides; however, they adopt standard flow formulations that transport from a pure Gaussian prior to the data distribution, discarding the rich structural information already present in the low-quality (LQ) input. Furthermore, existing single-step acceleration techniques often forfeit the model's multi-step inference capability. In this paper, we propose Residual Flow Matching for Image Super-Resolution (RFMSR), a vision-only framework that centers the source distribution at the LQ latent, reducing transport distance and preserving structural priors throughout the flow trajectory. We further introduce a two-phase training strategy: Phase I pretrains the velocity field via conditional flow matching, while Phase II applies end-to-end supervision to the single-step prediction while retaining the velocity loss across all timesteps, achieving high-quality single-step generation without sacrificing multi-step refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RFMSR achieves comparable or even superior perceptual quality compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Faze-Hsw/RFMSR.

Shuwei Huang, Tianyao Luo, Jicheng Liu +2

Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Wuhan University

Flow Matching Image Super-Resolution

Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

CUST: Clustered Unit-level Similarity Transformer for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution

Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT)-based models have exhibited remarkable performance in image super-resolution. However, the quadratic computational complexity of ViTs with respect to spatial resolution severely constrains their efficiency, leading to high latency and massive memory consumption. To alleviate this, various window-based attention mechanisms have been proposed; yet, they inherently compromise the long-range dependency modeling that is the primary advantage of ViTs. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Clustered Unit-level Similarity Transformer (CUST), a novel architecture that efficiently integrates global and local information. Specifically, CUST enables each patch to aggregate and attend to similar patches within a broadened regional scope outside its local window, thereby capturing extensive contextual understanding. Furthermore, it employs overlapping attention windows to capture local dependencies, while explicitly extracting high-frequency details by computing the residual difference between the original features and their downsampled-upsampled counterparts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves a practical balance between computational efficiency and restoration performance. It achieves a lower memory footprint and faster inference speed compared to recent global context or lightweight models under realistic constraints. Code is available at [https://github.com/jwgdmkj/CUST].

Jeongsoo Kim

Independent Researcher

Vision Transformer Efficient ViTs Attention Mechanisms Image Super-Resolution

Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

Reference-Based Face Super-Resolution Using the Spatial Transformer

Face super-resolution is the task of increasing the resolution of an image containing a face thereby adding finer detail. It is a ubiquitous task in many computer vision applications and quite often the user isn't even aware that it is being performed. However, doing it with high fidelity is challenging as it is an ill-posed problem. In this paper we present a reference-based solution for face super-resolution that uses higher resolution reference images to aid in the task. We show an alignment module based on the spatial transformer that is considerably more stable than the popular deformable convolutions. We also show an aggregation function that can take good quality information from the reference images when available or suppress the function when such information is unavailable. Finally, we show that our relatively smaller model can achieve state of the art results on multiple datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/varun-jois/FSRST.

Varun Ramesh Jois, Antonella DiLillo, James Storer

Brandeis University, Waltham MA 02453, USA

Image Super-Resolution

Jul 10, 2026cs.CV

Simon-SR: Spatially Adaptive Modulation and Visual Prompt Adaptation for Text-Reinforced Super-Resolution

Severe downsampling makes single image super-resolution (SISR) an ill-posed problem, in which the language-guided multi-modal methods are especially vulnerable to erroneous priors and require costly textual annotations. To address these issues, we propose Simon-SR, a multi-modal SISR framework leveraging learnable prompts for efficient semantic mining and robust text-image fusion. Simon-SR treats textual semantics as learnable latent variables. Specifically, the Contrastive Prompt Learning (CPL) mines instance-level semantics from unannotated images with frozen CLIP encoders, and Prompt-Guided Spatially Adaptive Refinement (PSAR) injects them through attention-gated multi-modal fusion. On CUB and COCO2017 at

\times4

and

\times16

, Simon-SR gains up to 0.50 dB PSNR and 0.0133 SSIM over current SOTA. The project is available at https://github.com/CHT05017/ICAIS26-SimonSR

Haotong Cheng, Yuxuan Li, Zijie Cui

College of Electronic Science and Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun China

Multimodal Fusion Visual Prompt Learning Image Super-Resolution

Jul 8, 2026cs.CV

Cardiac MRI Through-Plane Super-Resolution Guided by Reference and Memory

Clinical cardiac MRI is commonly acquired with high in-plane resolution but coarse through-plane resolution to reduce scan time and accommodate breath-hold and cardiac-motion constraints, which limits 3D analysis and diagnostic accuracy. We propose STRMSR, a reference- and memory-guided through-plane super-resolution (SR) framework that reconstructs high-resolution (HR) cardiac volumes by leveraging HR reference views acquired from the same subject and intermediate SR results as the memory. Our method uses coarse-to-fine contextual matching to establish robust correspondence between low-resolution target and reference/memory images under spatial misalignment. A learnable patch-wise dynamic feature aggregation module predicts content-adaptive mixture weights for each local patch, effectively fusing dynamic information while suppressing unreliable feature transfers. The intermediate SR results stored in the memory bank ensure slice-to-slice consistency for the super-resolved 3D volume. Experiments on the WHS cardiac MRI dataset under two reference protocols, orthogonal-plane views and long-axis chamber views, demonstrate consistent improvements over baselines at 4x and 8x upsampling factors.

Shaoming Pan, Chenchuhui Hu, Leon Axel +1

University of Texas at Arlington · University of Texas At Arlington · New York University Grossman School of Medicine

3D Medical Imaging Medical Image Super-Resolution Cardiac MRI Image Super-Resolution

Jul 6, 2026cs.CV

Robust Face Super-Resolution and Recognition Through Multi-Feature Aggregation in Diffusion Models

Images acquired in surveillance environments often suffer from conditions such as low resolution, variations in pose, irregular illumination, and occlusions. Due to the low quality of these images, face recognition algorithms often struggle. This major limitation can be addressed by employing super-resolution techniques that enhance the details of the image. However, due to the high degree of difficulty of the problem, most super-resolution algorithms tend to cause distortions in the image and in the individual's identity. Thus, additional information must be incorporated into the processing to improve recognition robustness. In this regard, surveillance cameras can capture multiple images, even at low quality, and the data extracted from these images, such as consecutive video frames, can significantly enhance both super-resolution and facial recognition. In this work, we introduce FASR++, a diffusion-model-based super-resolution algorithm. It leverages a reference low-resolution image and features extracted from multiple auxiliary low-quality images to generate a super-resolved output, minimizing distortions in the individual's identity. Our approach recovers facial features without explicitly providing soft attributes or computing a function gradient to guide the reconstruction process. FASR++ generates high-quality images that can considerably improve performance in face recognition tasks when used as a pre-processing step. We validate our approach on two standard face recognition datasets and attain state-of-the-art results for verification, face recognition, and image quality metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS.

Marcelo dos Santos, Rayson Laroca, João Carlos Raposo Neves +1

Federal University of Paraná, Department of Informatics, Curitiba-PR, 81531-970, Brazil · Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Federal University of Paraná · University of Beira Interior +1

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Face Recognition Image Super-Resolution

Jul 1, 2026cs.CV

Slope-Guided Mamba and Angular-Refined Transformer for Light Field Super-Resolution

Light Field Super-Resolution (LFSR) necessitates accurate modeling of spatial-angular correlations while preserving intrinsic 4D ray coherence. However, maintaining such high-dimensional consistency remains challenging, primarily due to two inherent limitations in prevailing modeling paradigms. First, spatial and angular dimensions are often modeled in a decoupled manner, restricting early cross-dimensional interaction and leading to geometric inconsistencies. Moreover, although continuous sequence modeling paradigms show promise in representing epipolar structures, their rigid scanning mechanisms fundamentally conflict with epipolar geometry, limiting geometry-aware feature aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose a hybrid light field super-resolution network, termed SMART, which integrates a Slope-Guided Mamba and an Angular-Refined Transformer to effectively overcome these limitations. Specifically, we introduce an angular-modulated spatial module to bridge the decoupling gap, incorporating angular priors to strengthen spatial-angular correlation modeling. To mitigate the scan-geometry mismatch, we propose a manifold-aligned trajectory module that enables geometry-consistent sequence modeling along epipolar structures. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that SMART achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing previous methods by 0.42 dB (PSNR) with significantly reduced artifacts.

Li Jin, Jian Huang, Junde Lu +3

Hangzhou International Innovation Institute, Beihang University, Hangzhou, China

Image Super-Resolution

Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

Language-Assisted Super-Resolution from Real-World Low-Resolution Patches

Single image super-resolution aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs. Training SR models typically requires paired HR-LR data, which is difficult to obtain in reality. As a result, most methods synthesize LR images by artificially degrading HR images with handcrafted kernels or camera ISP adjustments. However, these synthetic degradations fail to capture the complexity of real LR images, leading to poor generalization in practice. To address this, we observe that even within a single high-quality image, regions at different depths exhibit varying resolutions, where distant regions act as LR patches and closer ones as HR patches. This allows the extraction of real, degradation-induced LR patches from real images. Since these LR patches lack paired HR counterparts, we propose LA-SR (Language Assistant for SR), a novel framework for unpaired SR. The key idea of LA-SR is to redefine unpaired SR in the language space, using vision-language models to bridge the LR-HR gap. LA-SR projects images into a semantically rich space representing both content and quality, and applies two language-guided losses: linguistic content loss to preserve semantic fidelity, and linguistic quality loss to enhance perceptual realism. With this alignment, LA-SR effectively super-resolves real LR inputs, producing realistic outputs that overcome the limitations of synthetic-data-trained methods.

Joonkyu Park, Kyoung Mu Lee

Dept. of ECE&ASRI, 2IPAI, Seoul National University

Image Super-Resolution

Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

SkelEM: Training-Signal Decoupling of Skeleton and Diffusion for Self-supervised Axial Super-Resolution in Volume Microscopy

Volume microscopy, including electron and light microscopy, suffers from severe anisotropic resolution due to physical axial sectioning. Existing self-supervised axial super-resolution (ASR) methods face a trilemma bounded by overly smoothed regression textures, structural hallucinations of pure diffusion models, and prohibitive inference latency. In this paper, we propose Skeleton-refinE Microscopy (SkelEM), a self-supervised framework that decouples ASR at the training-signal level: a frozen topological network and a diffusion refiner are optimized by disjoint objectives, separating low-frequency topology formulation from high-frequency detail enhancement. Building on this deterministic skeleton, we exploit a unified cycle-consistent mechanism on input sparse slices to simultaneously extract a real-domain residual prior and bidirectionally align the diffusion refiner, washing away cross-plane artifacts without synthetic bias. By truncating the reverse diffusion process with this physical prior, SkelEM achieves high-fidelity detail restoration in merely

\le 5

steps. To rigorously assess cross-instrument generalization, we further introduce BRAVE-ASR, a new benchmark of co-aligned anisotropic and isotropic volumes acquired on a Plasma-FIB instrument. Across public benchmarks, SkelEM achieves the most favorable balance across the fidelity-perception trade-off among self-supervised methods, with state-of-the-art downstream membrane segmentation performance and robust zero-shot generalization across distinct modalities.

Bohao Chen, Yanchao Zhang, Yanan Lv +3

School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China · State Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China · School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China +1

Diffusion Models for Image Restoration Microscopy Image Analysis Image Super-Resolution

Jun 28, 2026cs.CV

GarmentZoom: Generating Zoomable Images from Garment Listings

Online product listings for garments often include an overview photo and a close-up to show garment details. However, each photo focuses on either field of view or garment detail, forcing users to alternate between views and breaking browsing continuity. We present GarmentZoom, a system that enhances the full-view photo to match the fidelity of its accompanying close-up, enabling seamless zoom-and-pan exploration. Unlike standard reference-based super-resolution, our setting involves close-up references that are spatially unaligned with the full view, and scale factors that vary substantially across garments 3-20

\times

. Prior work typically relies on alignment to transfer details or requires per-instance fine-tuning to memorize them. Instead, we train a single model that supports a continuous range of scales across diverse garments. Our approach synthesizes details without requiring spatial alignment and matches the quality of per-instance methods with a fraction of the training cost.

Renjie Zhao, Jingwei Ma, Huy Huynh Cao +3

University of Washington

Image Editing Image Super-Resolution