Photorealistic Video Restoration

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2 papers in the last 28 days · 0.0% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-21

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Photorealistic Video Restoration.

32 papers

Latest in Photorealistic Video Restoration

Sep 23, 2026cs.CV

High Dynamic Range Video Reconstruction from Single-Exposure Raw Sequences

Due to the limited dynamic range of conventional image sensors, captured low dynamic range (LDR) video often suffers from highlight clipping and shadow detail loss, making high-quality high dynamic range (HDR) reconstruction from single-exposure sequences highly challenging without alternating exposures or extra hardware. Alternating-exposure HDR methods sacrifice frame rate and struggle with motion alignment, making them impractical for real-world capture. To address this, we propose RawHDRV, an end-to-end framework for single-exposure Raw video HDR reconstruction, that fundamentally exploits the linear response and channel-specific characteristics of Bayer data. Specifically, it features a channel-decomposition temporal alignment and fusion strategy that processes Bayer channels separately to exploit their distinct exposure characteristics, together with exposure-aware weighted fusion. It further incorporates an exposure complementarity mask-guided restoration module that leverages inter-frame exposure redundancy to adaptively fuse reliable information and suppress saturation artifacts, and introduces a mask-guided color loss that combines normalized error constraints with gradient smoothing to enhance highlight recovery. Furthermore, we construct a large-scale mobile Raw-HDR video dataset with per-frame HDR annotations. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art results in all metrics, demonstrating superior spatial quality and temporal stability under extreme exposure conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/supeixian/RawHDRV.
Tao Zhang, Peixian Su, Xingyu Gao +6
Sep 16, 2026eess.IV

Perceptual Refinement of an End-to-End Video Streaming Pipeline via Generative AI Layers

Traditional codecs treat every region of a frame alike; a generative layer can instead degrade the regions a viewer attends to least and reconstruct them at the client. We present PRESLEY, which extends the prior conference work ELVIS by replacing destructive block removal with adaptive in-place degradation under a removability mask, signaling per-block strength in a bit-packed side channel, and restoring via generative backbones conditioned on transmitted visual priors rather than unconditioned in-painting. We separate the problem into three goals: choosing which blocks to degrade, degrading them so the encoder spends fewer bits, and restoring them. Against its predecessor at matched rate, PRESLEY achieves a decisive mean -56.4% BD-rate reduction on delivered background quality across 13 rate ladders spanning multiple codecs and dataset families. Against pristine baselines, PRESLEY defines the operating regime of generative transport: delivering substantial bitrate savings (up to -29.4% BD-rate) and superior background quality (17/23 sequences) in the target bit-starved regime, while maintaining foreground fidelity bit-exact. We further map where the theoretical headroom in this class of architecture lies. Using an exact leave-one-superblock-out combinatorial oracle as an additive empirical bound, we show that existing complexity heuristics already capture 83.3% of bit-cost savings, bounding remaining cost-axis headroom at about 5% of total bitrate. We then identify and model the primary unaddressed axis -- post-restoration damage -- which disperses widely (4.9-8.4 dB). We prove that this damage is predictable before transmission (held-out rho = +0.400), establishing the feasibility of transmit-time restorability modeling and defining the roadmap for joint rate-distortion-restoration selection rules.
Emanuele Artioli, Farzad Tashtarian, Christian Timmerer
Sep 15, 2026cs.CV

Bi-FlowGS: Bridging Generative View Completion and Gaussian Geometry through Bidirectional Flow Co-Refinement

Sparse-view 3D scene reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is inherently underconstrained. Plausible renderings can also coexist with erroneous Gaussian geometry, as errors in positions or depths may be concealed by opacity, scale, and appearance; we term this failure mode Geometry Cheating. Existing regularization methods constrain geometry but remain limited to observed views, while video-diffusion-based methods complete unseen views yet mainly use them as RGB pseudo-supervision, underusing motion and temporal priors and lacking explicit geometry supervision. We present Bi-FlowGS, which uses optical flow to bridge generative view completion and Gaussian geometry regularization. Our plug-and-play Video-to-Geometry Flow Distillation (V2G) distills temporal correspondence priors from restored videos into Gaussian geometry to alleviate Geometry Cheating. Conversely, Geometry-to-Video Flow-Guided Restoration (G2V) uses the current 3DGS geometry to guide temporally consistent video restoration, providing more reliable generative supervision. Together, V2G and G2V form an implicit bidirectional co-refinement process, enabling restored videos and the optimized 3DGS scene to iteratively improve each other. Experiments demonstrate improved rendering quality and geometric consistency across wide-baseline and unbounded 360° benchmarks.
Yuetong Wang, Jinsheng Quan, Yi Yang +1
Aug 10, 2026cs.CV

Revisiting the Current Frame: Physical-Trace-Guided Network Output Correction for Video Restoration

Video restoration methods exploit temporal information to recover information missing from degraded observations. However, reference frames within the sequence may introduce inconsistent degradation, content discrepancy, or reconstruction errors due to physical image-formation variations, occlusion, and imperfect temporal aggregation. Existing approaches mainly focus on improving restoration networks, while the reliability of the generated outputs at different spatial locations remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose ANCHOR, a model-agnostic framework that revisits the low-quality current frame as a temporally aligned anchor for video restoration correction. Specifically, ANCHOR estimates a spatial trust field from heterogeneous physical-trace evidence and adaptively balances the restoration proposal with the original observation. Experiments on High Dynamic Range video reconstruction and video deraining demonstrate consistent improvements across various state-of-the-art restoration models, validating the effectiveness of reliability-aware output correction for video restoration.
Yifeng Lin, Liuxiang Qiu, Guangming Ren +1
Aug 7, 2026cs.CV

Multiple Hypothesis Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation under Matching Ambiguity

Many flow-based video frame interpolation (VFI) methods synthesize an intermediate frame by estimating optical flow fields, warping the two input frames, and blending the warped observations. These latent flow fields are typically learned through image-level reconstruction supervision without direct flow annotations. In ambiguous regions containing repetitive or stochastic textures, rotating symmetric structures, or fast motion with blur, the matching evidence for a single query may contain multiple comparable and spatially separated peaks. Although the ground-truth intermediate frame provides indirect supervision, it may not uniquely identify the latent correspondence in ambiguous regions.When several locations provide multiple plausible matches, a single-flow estimator can retain only one displacement and discard the remaining candidates. If the selected match is incorrect or inconsistent with those of neighboring pixels, warping samples content from mismatched locations, producing ghosting, structural distortion, or blur.To address this limitation, we propose a multiple hypothesis flow estimation framework that preserves top-K candidate correspondences and selects one per location through a reliability-guided router. Each hypothesis is initialized from a coarse matching anchor and refined separately through anchor-centered local attention. Frame synthesis is thus conditioned on one selected flow-appearance hypothesis rather than a soft combination of candidate motions.Experiments on the proposed MA-HD benchmark and public VFI benchmarks show that our method achieves the best LPIPS and DISTS among the compared methods.
Zibo Su, Jing Kong, Ruixing Wang +2
Aug 4, 2026cs.CV

OmniVR: Joint Video-Audio Conditional Generation for Restoring Degraded Historical Films

Historical films suffer from co-occurring visual and audio degradations---blur, noise, flicker, hiss, clipping, and dropout---yet existing methods restore each modality independently, leaving quality gaps and cross-modal inconsistency. We present OmniVR, the first joint audio-video generative restoration model. Built upon a 22B-parameter audio-video generation backbone, OmniVR formulates restoration as conditional generation within a unified multimodal DiT: the low-quality video and audio are encoded as latent conditions, combined with a fixed restoration prompt, and jointly denoised to recover visual structure, temporal motion, and acoustic detail under one coordinated objective. Three key designs enable this adaptation: (1) a joint audio-video degradation pipeline that simulates real old-film characteristics from Internet-collected data; (2) an architecture-preserving text-to-audio-video (T2AV) to audio-video-to-audio-video (AV2AV) transition with prompt annealing that maximally retains the generative prior; and (3) first-frame image-to-video (I2V) anchoring with loss reweighting and waveform supervision for long-video extrapolation and audio fidelity. We also propose OmniVRBench, the first benchmark that evaluates audio-video restoration across visual quality, audio quality, temporal consistency, and audio-visual synchrony on 200 real historical clips. OmniVR surpasses all prior methods on all six visual metrics, achieves the best audio quality, and produces natural colorization---the first method to jointly address all three aspects. Code and weights will be publicly released. Project Page: https://xin1u.github.io/OminiVR_PAGE/
Xin Lu, Zihao Fan, Mingchen Zhong +3
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

MoCRA: Mixture of Compositional Rank-1 Atoms for 4K All-in-One Video Restoration

Real-world video arrives hazy, rainy, dark, or noisy, and a deployable restorer faces three demands at once: no degradation label, native 4K output, and stability in playback. Existing methods answer them separately and break on the joint problem, because per-frame degradation readings flip between frames, downsampled proxies erase the rain and noise they are meant to remove, and dense temporal alignment does not fit 4K memory. No paired benchmark even poses that problem, so we build one. UHV-4K-AIO renders physically modeled haze, rain, sensor noise, and low light over the same 100 clean 4K clips with shared depth and motion, and its construction exposes the split MoCRA is built on: haze and low light survive aggressive downsampling, while rain and noise exist only at native scale. Band-matched compositional conditioning follows, spending conditioning capacity, computation, and supervision in the band where each degradation lives. One dictionary of rank-1 atoms, recomposed sparsely per frame, conditions both a once-per-clip coarse branch and a shallow native-resolution refiner, in 3.6M parameters and with no optical flow. Trained once for all four tasks, MoCRA takes the best task-mean PSNR of eleven retrained image and video baselines, holds warping error at the level of the flow-based video models while never estimating motion, and restores native 4K in under half a second, against 1.7 seconds for the fastest baseline.
Yongcong Wang, Pu Wang, Hingchin Chen +8
Jul 24, 2026cs.CV

ID-V2V: Identity-Preserving Video Restylization

In visual storytelling, human performances are central to creative intent and narrative meaning. However, preserving human identity and performance while enabling flexible visual edits remains challenging for generative video models. We formalize this challenge as identity-preserving video restylization, which propagates scene, lighting, and style changes specified by an edited keyframe across a source video, while preserving facial likeness and performance, including expressions, eye gaze, and lip synchronization. A key obstacle is the absence of paired training data, as identity-preserving restylized video pairs are rare in real-world settings. To address this, we propose a decoupling of source-grounded identity preservation and edit-driven video synthesis. Our key insight is that facial appearance and expression should remain invariant, with illumination being the primary permissible variation. We therefore cast identity preservation as a video relighting problem, while modeling visual edit propagation as controlled video synthesis guided by the edited keyframe. Building on this formulation, we introduce ID-V2V, a video-to-video generative framework integrating complementary control signals: relit facial regions and facial normal maps tightly constrain facial likeness and performance, while edited keyframes and depth sequences enable flexible and temporally coherent generation. This design enables constructing training pairs from a single video, eliminating the need for scarce paired data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ID-V2V significantly outperforms existing methods in preserving facial likeness and fine-grained facial performance, supports both single- and multi-subject scenarios, and delivers high visual quality, highlighting its potential as a human-centric tool for real-world content production. The code is available at: https://github.com/Eyeline-Labs/ID-V2V.
Yuancheng Xu, Mingming He, Pablo Salamanca +5
Jul 23, 2026cs.CV

DART: A Degradation-Aware Recurrent Transformer for Archival Film Restoration

Archival film restoration is a challenging problem because historical footage contains compound degradations such as scratches, dust, blur, noise, flicker, and photometric aging, while clean reference videos are unavailable. Existing video restoration methods largely treat these degradations implicitly, reconstructing frames without explicit knowledge of where damage occurs or how severe it is. We propose DART, a degradation-aware recurrent transformer for archival film restoration. DART predicts and propagates a soft defect mask through time, using it to guide temporal fusion and condition the restoration network on both damage location and severity. This makes the restoration process explicitly aware of film artifacts rather than relying only on reconstruction losses. Experiments on real archival benchmarks show that DART improves no-reference perceptual quality over prior restoration architectures while remaining compact and efficient, producing cleaner and more temporally consistent restorations of structured film damage.
Mikołaj Jastrzębski, Wojciech Kozłowski, Kamil Adamczewski
Jul 15, 2026cs.CV

LPM: Industrial-Scale Generative Video Restoration

We present the Large Processing Model (LPM), a diffusion-based generative framework for photorealistic video restoration under complex, in-the-wild degradations. To our knowledge, LPM is the first generative video restoration model deployed at industrial scale. LPM addresses the diverse degradations in user-generated content (UGC) through a unified system encompassing large-scale data engineering, foundation-model training, and efficient inference. Its enhanced architecture, progressive training strategy, and temporal-pyramid inference mechanism jointly enable high-fidelity, temporally consistent restoration of arbitrarily long videos across the broad content distribution encountered on UGC platforms. LPM has been deployed in production at Kuaishou, where videos processed by the model account for approximately 45% of total viewing time, delivering consistent improvements across key quality-of-experience metrics. Beyond perceptual enhancement, LPM delivers substantial system-level benefits: at comparable perceptual quality, it reduces bitrate by 20% relative to Kuaishou's in-house codec, yielding annual bandwidth cost savings on the order of hundreds of millions. Its low serving cost also enables integration into products such as Kling, demonstrating that generative restoration can be practical, scalable, and cost-effective for large-scale video processing.
Bichuan Zhu, Fulin Li, Jiachao Gong +14
Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

SVI360: Spherical Video Interpolation

This paper addresses the problem of omnidirectional video interpolation, which plays an essential role in applications such as virtual reality and immersive video enhancement. Existing video interpolation methods are not well-suited for spherical videos, as they have difficulty handling severe distortions close to the poles. To address this issue, we propose SVI360, a dual-branch framework that combines the image frame and its rotated orthogonal view to deal with these distortions. The core methodological aspect of the approach is to reinforce equivariance of the flow displacements between the original and orthogonal views to improve intermediate frame prediction. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in interpolation quality while maintaining accurate optical flow in four different public benchmarks. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://icb-vision-ai.github.io/video360_interpolation/
Le-Kim Nguyen, Renato Martins, Pascal Vasseur +1
Jul 7, 2026cs.CV

FADRA: Frequency-Aware Diffusion with Residual Adaptation for Video Face Restoration

Video face restoration (VFR) aims to recover high-quality and temporally consistent facial details from severely degraded video sequences; however, existing methods still struggle to balance spatial fidelity and temporal coherence under complex degradations. To address this, we propose FADRA, a frequency-aware diffusion framework with iterative residual adaptation specifically tailored for robust VFR. We first leverage the strong temporal consistency of a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion model and introduce lightweight LoRA adapters together with a Low-Quality (LQ) Pixel-Alignment Feature Fusion module to efficiently adapt the frozen generative prior to the VFR task. To further adapt the frozen diffusion backbone to the downstream VFR task beyond LoRA-based adaptation, we introduce a Repeated Residual Adaptation Head (RRAH) for step-wise residual refinement after the diffusion backbone. To make this refinement explicitly guided by the degraded observation, RRAH further takes the LQ latent together with the current velocity prediction as input, allowing the model to repeatedly revisit LQ cues and predict residual updates at each flow-matching step. This LQ-guided repeated residual adaptation helps recover fine facial details while preserving the inherent temporal priors of the pre-trained model. Furthermore, to ensure the structural integrity of perceptually important details, we introduce a Frequency-Aware Loss that provides explicit supervision across multiple spectral bands, emphasizing visually sensitive frequency components that are crucial for perceptual quality and prone to temporal jittering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FADRA recovers better facial structures and produces more temporally consistent videos than state-of-the-art methods, leading to clear gains in both quantitative metrics and visual perception.
Jin Jiang, Jia Wang, Panwen Hu +2
Jul 5, 2026cs.CV

Perceiving Better Moments: Cover Frame Reselection and Enhancement for Live Photos with the Live2K Dataset

Modern smartphones capture Live Photos, short video bursts surrounding a still image, offering a dynamic and engaging photographic experience. However, the cover photo and video components are generated by two distinct imaging pipelines: the photo stream undergoes full computational photography processing, while the video stream is constrained by real-time efficiency and heavy compression. This intrinsic separation produces a substantial quality gap in resolution, color fidelity, and dynamic range between the cover photo and video frames. When users reselect an alternative frame from the video to replace an imperfect cover, the chosen frame often suffers from severe degradation, making direct replacement visually unsatisfactory. Restoring such frames requires simultaneous enhancement of spatial detail and color appearance, a task considerably more challenging than ordinary super-resolution or color enhancement. To address this, we define the Live Photo Cover Frame Reselection and Enhancement (LPRE) task, which leverages the intrinsic cues available within each Live Photo: the high-quality cover image as a structural and color reference, the user-reselected low-quality frame as the reconstruction target and several adjacent video frames providing temporal cues. Building upon this formulation, we construct Live2K, a real-world dataset of 2,042 Live Photos, and develop a unified one-stage baseline that integrates multi-frame fusion, guided color enhancement and super-resolution, establishing the first benchmark for Live Photo enhancement research.
Junyu Lou, Kai Chen, Weiyi You +3
Jul 2, 2026cs.CV

AbsoluteDegradation: A Physics-Inspired Synthetic Film-Degradation Pipeline and Archival Film Restoration Benchmark

Restoring archival film remains a fundamentally challenging problem due to the absence of paired training data and the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks. Pristine versions of deteriorated footage are physically unrecoverable, requiring supervised methods to rely on synthetic data that often fail to capture the complex, temporally coherent nature of real film degradation. At the same time, existing real-world datasets are limited in scale, quality, and accessibility, hindering reliable evaluation and fair comparison across methods. We address both limitations with AbsoluteDegradation, a physics-inspired, modular pipeline for synthesizing realistic film degradations, and a new large-scale archival benchmark. The proposed pipeline models the analog-to-digital process as a structured composition of artifact families, incorporating signal-dependent grain, parametric scratches, and temporally coherent camera motion, enabling controlled generation of diverse degradation regimes. In parallel, we introduce a curated dataset of 81,576 high-resolution frames sourced from real archival footage, designed for consistent evaluation under real-world conditions. Together, these contributions provide a unified framework for training and benchmarking restoration models. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures show that models trained with AbsoluteDegradation generalize better to real-world footage, while the proposed benchmark reveals systematic failure modes of current methods. We hope this work establishes a foundation for reproducible and domain-authentic evaluation in archival film restoration.
Mikołaj Jastrzębski, Dawid Glinkowski, Dawid Zieliński +3
Jun 27, 2026cs.CV

SATB-VR: Training Few-Step Video Restoration Diffusion Model using SNR-Aware Trajectory Blending

While diffusion models excel in video restoration, their reliance on extensive iterative steps limits efficiency. Conversely, aggressive single-step distillation often compromises fine texture recovery. To achieve an optimal balance, we present SATB-VR, a few-step paradigm that jump-starts the denoising process via an auxiliary predictor, explicitly bypassing early low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) steps. However, naive joint training of the predictor and the denoiser inherently introduces a severe train-inference discrepancy. To resolve this, we propose the SNR-Aware Trajectory Blending (SATB) strategy. During the forward process, SATB constructs the noisy input by dynamically blending the predictor's output with the ground-truth trajectory based on the SNRs. This forces the denoiser to robustly compensate for initial prediction errors while smoothly converging to the clean data manifold. Furthermore, we introduce a Denoiser-Driven Consistency (DDC) loss, leveraging the concurrently updated denoiser as a dynamic evaluator to explicitly align internal features and boost predictor accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under flexible few-step inference regimes (\eg, ≤5\le 5 steps), SATB-VR performs favorably against existing approaches on synthetic, real-world, and AIGC benchmarks.
Haoran Bai, Xiaoxu Chen, Xiaoyu Liu +4
Jun 25, 2026cs.CV

DeLux: Cross-Modal Local Artifact Restoration in Video Using Neuromorphic Data

Conventional RGB cameras suffer from lighting artifacts such as flare, glare, flicker, and overexposure, leading to irrecoverable information loss that necessitates computational restoration. However, existing approaches treat these problems in isolation, failing to recover structural details completely obscured by complex spatially discrete image degradations. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-modal restoration paradigm and present DeLux, a modular proof-of-concept pipeline that leverages neuromorphic event streams as a structural prior to guide the targeted detection and inpainting of lighting artifacts in RGB video. Validation on synthetic benchmarks and real-world automotive footage demonstrates that DeLux effectively suppresses local artifacts and restores affected regions. The proposed approach outperforms existing RGB-only baselines and event-guided HDR models, achieving an average MS-SSIM of over 0.99 across all artifact types and demonstrating up to an 88% reduction in artifact severity in real-world automotive footage. The synthetic artifact generation tools and curated real-world evaluation datasets are made publicly available to foster future research on cross-modal restoration.
Bartosz Stachowiak, Dariusz Brzezinski
Jun 23, 2026cs.CV

TIGER: Taming Identity, Geometry, and Generative Priors for High-Quality Face Video Restoration

Face Video Restoration (FVR) aims to recover high-fidelity facial videos from degraded input while preserving identity and semantic consistency across frames. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously address three key challenges: identity shift, viewpoint-entangled guidance, and perceptual realism. To tackle these issues, we propose TIGER, a structured tri-prior fusion framework that Tames Identity, Geometry, and gEnerative pRiors for high-quality FVR. Specifically, an Identity Prior is first established by injecting subject-discriminative embeddings into the latent space, effectively anchoring the subject's identity against severe degradations. Then, to provide temporally consistent structural guidance for dynamic videos, TIGER constructs a Geometry Prior by lifting 2D reference cues into a disentangled 3D parameter space, creating a geometric anchor through cross-source parameter fusion. Moreover, to achieve maximum efficiency without compromising realism, we harness the video generation model's Generative Prior through a one-step rectified flow. We further design a progressive three-stage training optimization strategy that refines structural fidelity, textural reconstruction, and distribution-level realism to ensure robust optimization. We also construct a large-scale FVR dataset to facilitate robust training and standardized evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TIGER achieves state-of-the-art performance in both identity fidelity and temporal stability, delivering a high-quality, efficient and identity-consistent FVR. Project page: https://yzhoulv.github.io/Tiger/.
Yang Zhou, Wenxue Li, Peng Zhang +3
Jun 18, 2026cs.CV

Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoder for Endoscopic Videos

Endoscopic video analysis is essential for gastrointestinal diagnosis and computer-assisted interventions, but video sequences are routinely degraded by specular reflections, motion artifacts, and missing frames. These transient corruptions can distract clinicians, reduce image interpretability, and disrupt downstream tasks such as 3D reconstruction and navigation. Effective restoration therefore requires methods that exploit temporal continuity rather than treating frames in isolation. We introduce a Gaussian Process Prior Variational Autoencoder (GPVAE) framework for endoscopic video restoration that replaces the standard factorized latent prior with a temporal Gaussian process prior, enabling interpolation of missing frames with uncertainty-aware reconstruction. The framework combines endoscopy-specific encoders, including a convolutional EndoVAE backbone and pretrained Vision Transformer encoders from GastroNet-5M, with two scalable GP approximations: Hierarchical Prior Approximation (HPA) and Sparse Precision Approximation (SPA). Specular reflections are handled using a DUCKNet-based masking pipeline that excludes corrupted pixels from the reconstruction objective. On the C3VDv2 colonoscopy dataset, the best GPVAE variants reduced image reconstruction RMSE by 21.9% on average, and by up to 26.1%, relative to matched VAE baselines. Downstream trajectory RMSE was reduced by 12.7% on average across classical visual odometry and a pretrained PoseNet, at an average increase of 27.3% in training time per epoch. Finally, the GP posterior provides per-frame uncertainty estimates that reflect temporal support and offer a confidence signal for restored frames.
Ivan De Boi, Xinxing Shi, Xiaoyu Jiang +5
Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

SierpinskiCam: Camera-Controlled Video Retaking with Sierpinski Triangle Pattern Cues

Generating novel renderings of a scene along user-defined camera trajectories from a single monocular video, dubbed video retaking, is a compelling but difficult problem in content creation and visual effects. Existing geometry-guided approaches reconstruct a 4D representation from the source video and render it along the target trajectory to condition video diffusion models. However, this guidance degrades as the target camera departs from the source trajectory, leaving newly revealed regions sparse or entirely missing. We propose SierpinskiCam, which addresses this limitation by augmenting geometry-based guidance with Sierpinski dome texture cues that contains rich trackable features even under large viewpoint changes. We further introduce a reference video conditioning mechanism that appends source-video tokens to the target-token sequence and separates the two streams with negative RoPE indices, enabling appearance grounding without architectural modification or per-video adaptation. Extensive experiments show that SierpinskiCam achieves significant gains in camera controllability, geometric consistency, and video quality across diverse and challenging retaking scenarios. Project page: https://hyelinnam.github.io/SierpinskiCam/.
Suttisak Wizadwongsa, Hyelin Nam, Supasorn Suwajanakorn +1
Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

RGFVR: Reference-Guided Face Video Restoration with Flow Matching

Face video restoration from degraded observations is challenging, as it requires simultaneously recovering visual fidelity, temporal consistency, and subject identity. Existing approaches are often either reference-free, which can lead to identity loss when person-specific facial details are lost, or subject-specific, which limits generalization to unseen identities. We propose a subject-agnostic, reference-guided framework for identity-preserving face video restoration. Our method introduces bimodal perceptual-descriptive identity conditioning into a pretrained flow-based text-to-video generator and employs a two-stage training strategy to strengthen identity guidance during restoration. Experiments show that our approach improves restoration fidelity, temporal consistency, and identity preservation, achieving superior performance under challenging video degradations, including downsampling, blur, noise, and compression artifacts. The code is available under: https://github.com/batuhanntosun/RG-FVR.
Cem Eteke, Batuhan Tosun, Eckehard Steinbach
Jun 8, 2026cs.CV

SwiftVR: Real-Time One-Step Generative Video Restoration

Real-time video restoration (VR) for live streams requires high-resolution outputs under strict per-frame latency constraints. Existing one-step diffusion-based VR models remain difficult to deploy on consumer-grade GPUs due to two main bottlenecks: quadratic spatial attention at high resolutions and the latency-memory overhead of large video autoencoders. We present SwiftVR, a streaming one-step generative VR framework that reduces both bottlenecks under a causal chunk-wise protocol. For attention, mask-free shifted-window self-attention gathers each spatial window into a dense tensor via deterministic indexing, keeping all attention calls on the dense scaled dot-product attention path without masks, cyclic shifts, padding, or hardware-specific sparse kernels. Because SwiftVR uses only standard dense SDPA calls, the trained model transfers to consumer GPUs without retraining or custom kernels. For autoencoding, a lightweight Restoration-aware Autoencoder enables fast chunk-wise decoding while preserving reconstruction quality. On a single H100, SwiftVR sustains 31FPS at 2560x1440 and 14FPS at 3840x2160, whereas all compared diffusion-based VR baselines exceed the memory limit at 4K. On a consumer RTX5090, SwiftVR reaches 26FPS at 1920x1080. To our knowledge, SwiftVR is the first generative VR model to achieve real-time 1080p streaming on a consumer-grade GPU, while attaining strong no-reference perceptual quality with lower inference cost. Project is available at https://h-oliday.github.io/SwiftVR.
Jiaqi Yan, Xiangyu Chen, Xinlin Zhong +5
May 27, 2026cs.CV

HarmoVid: Relightful Video Portrait Harmonization

We present a method for harmonizing the lighting of a foreground video to match a target background scene, adjusting shadows, color tone, and illumination intensity (relightful harmonization). Unlike images, acquiring labeled data for videos, where identical motions are recorded under different lighting conditions, is practically infeasible and non-scalable. While one way to create such paired data is to apply existing image-based harmonization models frame by frame to a video, the resulting outputs often suffer from significant temporal jitters. We overcome this problem by introducing a novel lighting deflickering model that can stabilize the global and local lighting flickering artifacts. Our video diffusion model learns from these upgraded deflickered data with a volume of real and synthetic videos to generate high-quality video harmonization results. We further propose an asymmetric alpha mask conditioning technique to learn the clean boundaries from real videos. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves strong temporal coherence, naturalness, cleaner boundaries, and physically meaningful lighting behavior, while maintaining strong relighting expressiveness compared to prior image-based and video-based harmonization methods.
Jun Myeong Choi, Jae Shin Yoon, Luchao Qi +2
May 20, 2026cs.CV

VDFP: Video Deflickering with Flicker-banding Priors

Capturing digital screens with smartphones frequently induces severe banding due to hardware synchronization mismatches. Existing video restoration methods struggle with these structured, periodic luminance fluctuations, often resulting in residual artifacts or over-smoothed textures. We firstly construct DeViD, a real-world dataset in various scenes to deal with the lack of available datasets. Then we propose VDFP (Video Deflickering with Flicker-banding Priors), a novel perception-guided generation framework. First, we introduce a Degradation Field Modeling Based on Rolling Shutter Mechanism (DFM) capable of synthesizing complex multi-banding scenarios. Second, we present a spatial-temporal continuous prior perception (CPP). Unlike traditional binary segmentation, this module is optimized via a Flicker-Aware Mean Squared Error (FA-MSE) to capture the luminance transitions. By zero-initializing an augmented input layer, our model preserves pre-trained generative priors as well as spatial-temporal prior perception. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VDFP significantly outperforms other methods, eliminating complex banding with high-fidelity spatial details and temporal consistency. Our dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/ZhiyiZZhou/VDFP.
Zhiyi Zhou, Libo Zhu, Zihan Zhou +2
May 20, 2026cs.CV

Accelerating Video Inverse Problem Solvers with Autoregressive Diffusion Models

Diffusion models provide powerful priors for zero-shot video inverse problems, but their real-time deployment is hindered by two inefficiencies: high initial latency caused by holistic video restoration, and low throughput resulting from multiple VAE passes to enforce measurement consistency in pixel space. To overcome these limitations, we propose Autoregressive Video Inverse problem Solver (AVIS). The AVIS framework leverages autoregressive video diffusion models to restore videos in a streaming manner, naturally eliminating latency bottlenecks. Specifically, AVIS initializes reverse diffusion with a measurement-consistent estimate, reducing the required sampling steps. Compared to leading non-autoregressive solvers, AVIS drastically reduces initial latency from 114s to 4s and increases throughput from 0.71 to 1.18 FPS while achieving superior restoration quality. We further introduce a highly accelerated variant, dubbed AVIS Flash, that enforces measurement consistency solely on the first chunk. AVIS Flash substantially boosts throughput to 5.91 FPS on a single RTX 4090 GPU while maintaining competitive performance and achieving a favorable efficiency-performance trade-off, paving the way toward real-time deployment.
Taesung Kwon, Jonghyun Park, Hyungjin Chung +1
May 12, 2026cs.CV

Single-Shot HDR Recovery via a Video Diffusion Prior

Recent generative methods for single-shot high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction show promising results, but often struggle with preserving fidelity to the input image. They require separate models to handle highlights and shadows, or sacrifice interpretability by directly predicting the final HDR image. We address these limitations by re-casting single-shot HDR reconstruction as conditional video generation and fusing the generated frames into an HDR image. We finetune a video diffusion model to generate an exposure bracket, conditioned on a low dynamic range (LDR) input. We fuse this image bracket using per-pixel weights predicted by a light-weight UNet. This formulation is simple, interpretable, and effective. Rather than directly hallucinating an HDR image, it explicitly reconstructs the intermediate exposure stack and fuses it into the final output. Our method eliminates the need for separate models across exposure regimes and produces HDR reconstructions with high input fidelity. On quantitative benchmarks, we outperform state-of-the-art generative baselines with comparable model capacity on several reconstruction metrics. Human evaluators further prefer our results in 72% of pairwise comparisons against existing methods. Finally, we show that this input-conditioned sequence generation and fusion framework extends beyond HDR to other image reconstruction tasks, such as all-in-focus image recovery from a single defocus-blurred input.
Chinmay Talegaonkar, Jinshi He, Christopher McKenna +1
May 11, 2026cs.CV

PolarVSR: A Unified Framework and Benchmark for Continuous Space-Time Polarization Video Reconstruction

Polarimetric imaging captures surface polarization characteristics, such as the Degree of Linear Polarization (DoLP) and the Angle of Polarization (AoP). In mainstream Division of-Focal-Plane (DoFP) color polarization imaging, recovering polarization parameters from captured mosaic arrays remains a challenging inverse problem. Existing DoFP cameras also face hardware bottlenecks and often cannot support high-frame-rate acquisition, limiting polarimetric imaging in dynamic video tasks. These limitations motivate joint spatial and temporal enhancement. To this end, we propose the first space-time polarization video reconstruction architecture. The method jointly models polarization directions in space and time and uses a polarization-aware implicit neural representation for continuous, high-fidelity upsampling. By analyzing temporal variations in polarization parameters, we further introduce a flow-guided polarization variation loss to supervise polarization dynamics. We also establish the first large-scale color DoFP polarization video benchmark to support this research direction. Extensive experiments on this benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.
Chenggong Li, Yidong Luo, Junchao Zhang +2
May 8, 2026cs.CV

SoLAR: Error-Resilient Streamable Long-Horizon Free-Viewpoint Video Reconstruction with Anchor Activation and Latent Recalibration

Free-Viewpoint Video (FVV) has emerged as a cornerstone of next-generation immersive media systems and attracted widespread attention. Previous methods primarily focus on short video sequences and suffer from significant performance degradation when processing long-horizon free-viewpoint video (LFVV). Motivated by bit allocation theory, we analyze dynamic-anchor-based volumetric video representation within a rate-distortion optimization framework and propose \textbf{SoLAR}, which is the first error-resilient streamable FVV framework that maintains stable reconstruction quality on long sequences without requiring group-of-pictures partitioning. We propose the Anchor Activation Dynamics (AAD), which enables dynamic anchors to model non-rigid transformations by dynamically activating informative anchors and suppressing redundant ones. Furthermore, we introduce Latent Discrepancy Aware Recalibration (LaDAR), which is a mechanism to identify discrepancies between latent representations and recalibrate the correspondences encoded in the network, effectively mitigating error propagation in LFVV without compromising real-time performance or storage compactness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textbf{SoLAR} achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance while maintaining minimum storage overhead, which provides a new direction for LFVV reconstruction and advances the practical deployment of immersive systems. Demo free-viewpoint videos are provided in the supplementary material.
Haotian Zhang, Xu Mo, Yixin Yu +7
May 6, 2026cs.CV

A unified Benchmark for Multi-Frame Image Restoration under Severe Refractive Warping

Video sequence capturing through refractive dynamic media, such as a turbulent air or water surface, often suffer from severe geometric distortions and temporal instability. While recent advances address mild atmospheric turbulence, no existing benchmarks systematically evaluate restoration methods under strong and highly nonuniform refractive conditions. We present a comprehensive benchmark for geometric distortion removal in video, covering a range from turbulence-like mild warping to strong discontinuous refractive deformations. The benchmark includes both laboratory-captured real data and synthetic sequences generated for static scenes via physics-based light refraction modeling across four distortion levels and multiple surface wave types. We evaluate a spectrum of methods from simple baselines and classical registration algorithms to advanced learning-based approaches including DATUM and our proposed diffusion based V-cache for high and extreme distortions regimes. Evaluation uses both pixel-level (PSNR, SSIM), and perceptual (LPIPS, DINO, CLIP) metrics providing the first large scale analysis of geometric distortion removal. Our benchmark establishes a new foundation for developing and evaluating algorithms capable of reconstructing video from highly distorted optical environments. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/iafoss/refractive-mfir-benchmark.
Maxim V. Shugaev, Md Reshad Ul Hoque, Bridget Kennedy +8
Apr 30, 2026cs.CV

RayFormer: Modeling Inter- and Intra-Ray Similarity for NeRF-Based Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging

Video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) enables the reconstruction of dynamic scenes from a single snapshot measurement. Recently, NeRF-based methods have shown promising reconstruction performance. However, such methods typically adopt random ray sampling strategies and fail to capture content structural similarities, resulting in limited reconstruction quality. To address these issues, we first propose a patch-level ray sampling strategy to enable the modeling of content structure. Then, we propose an Inter- and Intra-Ray Transformer (RayFormer) to capture the structural similarities, modeling both inter-ray similarities among spatially neighboring points at the same depth and intra-ray correlations between adjacent points along the viewing ray. Finally, benefiting from the patch-level sampling strategy, the total variation prior is incorporated into the objective function to enhance spatial smoothness and suppress artifacts. Experiments in both simulated and real-world scenes demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) reconstruction performance.
Yubo Dong, Danhua Liu, Anqi Li +1
Apr 16, 2026cs.CV

DVFace: Spatio-Temporal Dual-Prior Diffusion for Video Face Restoration

Video face restoration aims to enhance degraded face videos into high-quality results with realistic facial details, stable identity, and temporal coherence. Recent diffusion-based methods have brought strong generative priors to restoration and enabled more realistic detail synthesis. However, existing approaches for face videos still rely heavily on generic diffusion priors and multi-step sampling, which limit both facial adaptation and inference efficiency. These limitations motivate the use of one-step diffusion for video face restoration, yet achieving faithful facial recovery alongside temporally stable outputs remains challenging. In this paper, we propose, DVFace, a one-step diffusion framework for real-world video face restoration. Specifically, we introduce a spatio-temporal dual-codebook design to extract complementary spatial and temporal facial priors from degraded videos. We further propose an asymmetric spatio-temporal fusion module to inject these priors into the diffusion backbone according to their distinct roles. Evaluation on various benchmarks shows that DVFace delivers superior restoration quality, temporal consistency, and identity preservation compared to recent methods. Code: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/DVFace.
Zheng Chen, Bowen Chai, Rongjun Gao +7
Dec 31, 2025cs.CV

HaineiFRDM: Structure-Preserving Diffusion for Film Restoration under Fast Motion and Diverse Defects

Existing film-restoration methods frequently fail under fast motion, producing limb disappearance and structural distortion due to inaccurate motion modeling. Moreover, high-resolution restoration under spatially-persistent and mixed defects remains insufficiently studied. We propose HaineiFRDM, a Film Restoration Diffusion Model that leverages the content modeling capability of diffusion models for content-aware restoration, removing defects while preserving scene structure.To enable scalable high-resolution restoration, we adopt a patch-wise strategy with position-aware global fusion modules to maintain cross-patch coherence. We further introduce a frequency-based module to enhance texture consistency and a patch-consistent inference framework to alleviate blocking artifacts introduced by patch-based processing.We also construct a film restoration dataset comprising categorized defect templates, professionally restored films, and realistic synthetic degradations.Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior restoration quality with strong structural consistency. Our design also reduces memory requirements, enabling high-resolution restoration on a single 24GB-VRAM GPU.Code and the dataset will be released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HaineiFRDM.
Rongji Xun, Junjie Yuan, Zhongjie Wang
Aug 20, 2025cs.CV

Vivid-VR: Distilling Concepts from Text-to-Video Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Video Restoration

We present Vivid-VR, a DiT-based generative video restoration method built upon an advanced T2V foundation model, where ControlNet is leveraged to control the generation process, ensuring content consistency. However, conventional fine-tuning of such controllable pipelines frequently suffers from distribution drift due to limitations in imperfect multimodal alignment, resulting in compromised texture realism and temporal coherence. To tackle this challenge, we propose a concept distillation training strategy that utilizes the pretrained T2V model to synthesize training samples with embedded textual concepts, thereby distilling its conceptual understanding to preserve texture and temporal quality. To enhance generation controllability, we redesign the control architecture with two key components: 1) a control feature projector that filters degradation artifacts from input video latents to minimize their propagation through the generation pipeline, and 2) a new ControlNet connector employing a dual-branch design. This connector synergistically combines MLP-based feature mapping with cross-attention mechanism for dynamic control feature retrieval, enabling both content preservation and adaptive control signal modulation. Extensive experiments show that Vivid-VR performs favorably against existing approaches on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, as well as AIGC videos, achieving impressive texture realism, visual vividness, and temporal consistency. The codes and checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/csbhr/Vivid-VR.
Haoran Bai, Xiaoxu Chen, Canqian Yang +3