Sliding Window Recurrent Network for Efficient Video Super-Resolution

Abstract: Video super-resolution (VSR) is the task of restoring high-resolution frames from a sequence of low-resolution inputs. Different from single image super-resolution, VSR can utilize frames' temporal information to reconstruct results with more details. Recently, with the rapid development of convolution neural networks (CNN), the VSR task has drawn increasing attention and many CNN-based methods have achieved remarkable results. However, only a few VSR approaches can be applied to real-world mobile devices due to the computational resources and runtime limitations. In this paper, we propose a \textit{Sliding Window based Recurrent Network} (SWRN) which can be real-time inference while still achieving superior performance. Specifically, we notice that video frames should have both spatial and temporal relations that can help to recover details, and the key point is how to extract and aggregate information. Address it, we input three neighboring frames and utilize a hidden state to recurrently store and update the important temporal information. Our experiment on REDS dataset shows that the proposed method can be well adapted to mobile devices and produce visually pleasant results.