Spatial Degradation-Aware and Temporal Consistent Diffusion Model for Compressed Video Super-Resolution

Abstract: Due to storage and bandwidth limitations, videos transmitted over the Internet often exhibit low quality, characterized by low-resolution and compression artifacts. Although video super-resolution (VSR) is an efficient video enhancing technique, existing VSR methods focus less on compressed videos. Consequently, directly applying general VSR approaches fails to improve practical videos with compression artifacts, especially when frames are highly compressed at a low bit rate. The inevitable quantization information loss complicates the reconstruction of texture details. Recently, diffusion models have shown superior performance in low-level visual tasks. Leveraging the high-realism generation capability of diffusion models, we propose a novel method that exploits the priors of pre-trained diffusion models for compressed VSR. To mitigate spatial distortions and refine temporal consistency, we introduce a Spatial Degradation-Aware and Temporal Consistent (SDATC) diffusion model. Specifically, we incorporate a distortion control module (DCM) to modulate diffusion model inputs, thereby minimizing the impact of noise from low-quality frames on the generation stage. Subsequently, the diffusion model performs a denoising process to generate details, guided by a fine-tuned compression-aware prompt module (CAPM) and a spatio-temporal attention module (STAM). CAPM dynamically encodes compression-related information into prompts, enabling the sampling process to adapt to different degradation levels. Meanwhile, STAM extends the spatial attention mechanism into the spatio-temporal dimension, effectively capturing temporal correlations. Additionally, we utilize optical flow-based alignment during each denoising step to enhance the smoothness of output videos. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed modules in restoring compressed videos.