Image Super-Resolution

Ask about this topic

Overview

Image super-resolution estimates sharper, higher-resolution images from one or more low-resolution observations, supporting photography, microscopy, remote sensing, and medical imaging when direct high-resolution capture is limited. Methods range from CNNs and attention or state-space Transformers to continuous implicit representations and multi-frame fusion; diffusion, flow-matching, and autoregressive models generate plausible fine detail, with distillation and quantization helping reduce inference costs. Evaluation spans synthetic benchmarks using PSNR and SSIM, real-world perceptual measures and human judgments, and task-specific tests such as recognition or segmentation. A central tension is that realistic textures can be hallucinated or depart from observed content, while synthetic training and pixel metrics may not predict performance on real sensors.

Latest papers

CardsList

250 papers23 papers in the last four weeks, up 5% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. RASLF: Representation-Aware State Space Model for Light Field Super-Resolution

    Mar 17, 2026Zeqiang Wei, Kai Jin, Kuan Song +3Image Super-ResolutionState Space Models

    Capital Normal University Information Engineering College, Beijing 100048, China · Bigo Technology Pte. Ltd., Beijing 100020, China · Explorer Global (Suzhou) Artificial Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd., Suzhou, Jiangsu 215123, China +1

  2. GDPO-SR: Group Direct Preference Optimization for One-Step Generative Image Super-Resolution

    Mar 16, 2026Qiaosi Yi, Shuai Li, Rongyuan Wu +3Image Super-ResolutionDirect Preference Optimization

    The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · OPPO Research Institute

  3. DualTSR: Unified Dual-Diffusion Transformer for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

    Mar 15, 2026Axi Niu, Kang Zhang, Qingsen Yan +3Image Super-ResolutionDiffusion Transformer

    Northwestern Polytechnical University · Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

  4. Revisiting the Perception-Distortion Trade-off with Spatial-Semantic Guided Super-Resolution

    Mar 14, 2026Dan Wang, Haiyan Sun, Shan Du +4Image Super-ResolutionDistortion-Perception Tradeoff

    University of California, San Diego · University of North Texas · University of British Columbia +1

  5. Self-Supervised Uncertainty Estimation For Super-Resolution of Satellite Images

    Mar 14, 2026Zhe Zheng, Valéry Dewil, Pablo AriasImage Super-ResolutionRemote Sensing Image Super-Resolution

    Centre Borelli, ENS Paris-Saclay, Universite Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, France · Dept. of Engineering, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, SPAIN

  6. OARS: Process-Aware Online Alignment for Generative Real-World Image Super-Resolution

    Mar 13, 2026Shijie Zhao, Xuanyu Zhang, Bin Chen +8Image Super-ResolutionDiffusion Model Alignment

    ByteDance Inc. · Peking University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  7. RAW-Domain Degradation Models for Realistic Smartphone Super-Resolution

    Mar 12, 2026Ali Mosleh, Faraz Ali, Fengjia Zhang +4Image Super-ResolutionImage Restoration

    AI Center-Toronto, Samsung Electronics

  8. UCAN: Unified Convolutional Attention Network for Expansive Receptive Fields in Lightweight Super-Resolution

    Mar 12, 2026Cao Thien Tan, Phan Thi Thu Trang, Do Nghiem Duc +3Image Super-ResolutionLightweight CNNs

    Ho Chi Minh City Open University · AI Tech Lab, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology · Code Mely AI Research Team +3

  9. Progressive Split Mamba: Effective State Space Modelling for Image Restoration

    Mar 10, 2026Mohammed Hassanin, Nour Moustafa, Weijian Deng +1Image RestorationVisual SSMs

  10. POLISH'ing the Sky: Wide-Field and High-Dynamic Range Interferometric Image Reconstruction with Application to Strong Lens Discovery

    Mar 10, 2026Zihui Wu, Liam Connor, Samuel McCarty +1Radio AstronomyImage Reconstruction

    Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, CA, USA · Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Cambridge, MA, USA

  11. QUSR: Quality-Aware and Uncertainty-Guided Image Super-Resolution Diffusion Model

    Mar 10, 2026Junjie Yin, Jiaju Li, Hanfa XingImage Super-ResolutionDiffusion Models for Image Restoration

    School of BeiDou Research Institute, South China Normal University, China

  12. Disentangled Textual Priors for Diffusion-based Image Super-Resolution

    Mar 8, 2026Lei Jiang, Xin Liu, Xinze Tong +4Image Super-ResolutionDiffusion Models for Image Restoration

    State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China

  13. Single Image Super-Resolution via Bivariate `A Trous Wavelet Diffusion

    Mar 7, 2026Maryam Heidari, Nantheera Anantrasirichai, Alin AchimImage Super-ResolutionDiffusion Models for Image Restoration

    Visual Information Laboratory, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

  14. Spectral and Trajectory Regularization for Diffusion Transformer Super-Resolution

    Mar 6, 2026Jingkai Wang, Yixin Tang, Jue Gong +6Diffusion TransformerDiffusion Model Distillation

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China · Shenzhen Transsion Holdings Co., Ltd., China

  15. Rank-Factorized Implicit Neural Bias: Scaling Super-Resolution Transformer with FlashAttention

    Mar 6, 2026Dongheon Lee, Seokju Yun, Jaegyun Im +1Image Super-ResolutionAttention Mechanisms

    University of Seoul · KAIST AI

  16. LucidNFT: LR-Anchored Multi-Reward Preference Optimization for Flow-Based Real-World Super-Resolution

    Mar 6, 2026Song Fei, Tian Ye, Sixiang Chen +3Image Super-ResolutionPreference Optimization

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

  17. Toward Real-world Infrared Image Super-Resolution: A Unified Autoregressive Framework and Benchmark Dataset

    Mar 5, 2026Yang Zou, Jun Ma, Zhidong Jiao +3Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-ResolutionAutoregressive Image Super-Resolution

    School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University · School of Software Technology & DUT-RU International School of ISE, Dalian University of Technology · School of Computer Science, Zhejiang University +1

  18. FiDeSR: High-Fidelity and Detail-Preserving One-Step Diffusion Super-Resolution

    Mar 3, 2026Aro Kim, Myeongjin Jang, Chaewon Moon +3Image Super-ResolutionDiffusion Models for Image Restoration

    Kyungpook National University · Korea Electronics Technology Institute

  19. ATD: Improved Transformer with Adaptive Token Dictionary for Image Restoration

    Mar 3, 2026Leheng Zhang, Wei Long, Yawei Li +3Image RestorationEfficient ViTs

    School of Computer Science and Engineering (School of Cyber Security), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), China · Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland and with the Integrated Systems Laboratory, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

  20. AlignVAR: Towards Globally Consistent Visual Autoregression for Image Super-Resolution

    Feb 28, 2026Cencen Liu, Dongyang Zhang, Wen Yin +6Autoregressive Image Super-ResolutionImage Super-Resolution

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Ubiquitous Intelligence and Trusted Services Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province

  21. Joint Geometric and Trajectory Consistency Learning for One-Step Real-World Super-Resolution

    Feb 27, 2026Chengyan Deng, Zhangquan Chen, Li Yu +3Image Super-ResolutionConsistency Models

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Tsinghua University · Nanjing University

  22. DACESR: Degradation-Aware Conditional Embedding for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

    Feb 27, 2026Xiaoyan Lei, Wenlong Zhang, Biao Luo +3Image Super-Resolution

    School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, Zhengzhou 450002, Henan, China. · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai 200233, China. · School of Automation, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China. +1

  23. CASR: A Robust Cyclic Framework for Arbitrary Large-Scale Super-Resolution with Distribution Alignment and Self-Similarity Awareness

    Feb 25, 2026Wenhao Guo, Zhaoran Zhao, Peng Lu +3Image Super-ResolutionDistribution Matching

    Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Peking University

  24. Scan Clusters, Not Pixels: A Cluster-Centric Paradigm for Efficient Ultra-high-definition Image Restoration

    Feb 25, 2026Chen Wu, Ling Wang, Zhuoran Zheng +6Image RestorationVisual SSMs

    National University of Defense Technology · HKUST(GZ) · Qilu University of Technology +3

  25. Physics-Consistent Diffusion for Efficient Fluid Super-Resolution via Multiscale Residual Correction

    Feb 25, 2026Zhihao Li, Shengwei Dong, Chuang Yi +5Physics-Informed Diffusion ModelsImage Super-Resolution

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China · SandGold AI Research, Guangzhou, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China +1

  26. Perceptual Quality Optimization of Image Super-Resolution

    Feb 25, 2026Wei Zhou, Yixiao Li, Hadi Amirpour +4Image Super-ResolutionPerceptual Loss

    School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, UK · Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA, Alpen-Adria-Universität, Klagenfurt, Austria · XiaomiEV, China +1

  27. InfScene-SR: Seamless Super-Resolution of Arbitrarily Large Remote-Sensing Scenes via Variance-Preserving Joint Denoising

    Feb 23, 2026Shoukun Sun, Zhe Wang, Xiang Que +2Image Super-ResolutionRemote Sensing Image Super-Resolution

    University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho, USA · NCEAS, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA · Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, China

  28. Efficient Image Super-Resolution with Multi-Scale Spatial Adaptive Attention Networks

    Feb 22, 2026Sushi Rao, Jingwei LiImage Super-ResolutionMulti-Scale Attention

    Zhejiang Gongshang University

  29. Robust Self-Supervised Cross-Modal Super-Resolution against Real-World Misaligned Observations

    Feb 21, 2026Xiaoyu Dong, Jiahuan Li, Ziteng Cui +1Image Super-ResolutionCross-Modal Alignment

    The University of Tokyo, Japan · RIKEN AIP, Japan

  30. CASCADE: Cross-scale Advective Super-resolution with Climate Assimilation and Downscaling Evolution

    Feb 18, 2026Alexander KovalenkoImage Super-ResolutionPrecipitation Downscaling