Real-Time 4K Super-Resolution of Compressed AVIF Images. AIS 2024 Challenge Survey

Marcos V. Conde, Zhijun Lei, Wen Li, Cosmin Stejerean, Ioannis Katsavounidis, Radu Timofte, Kihwan Yoon, Ganzorig Gankhuyag, Jiangtao Lv, Long Sun, Jinshan Pan, Jiangxin Dong, Jinhui Tang, Zhiyuan Li, Hao Wei, Chenyang Ge, Dongyang Zhang, Tianle Liu, Huaian Chen, Yi Jin et al. (55 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel benchmark as part of the AIS 2024 Real-Time Image Super-Resolution (RTSR) Challenge, which aims to upscale compressed images from 540p to 4K resolution (4x factor) in real-time on commercial GPUs. For this, we use a diverse test set containing a variety of 4K images ranging from digital art to gaming and photography. The images are compressed using the modern AVIF codec, instead of JPEG. All the proposed methods improve PSNR fidelity over Lanczos interpolation, and process images under 10ms. Out of the 160 participants, 25 teams submitted their code and models. The solutions present novel designs tailored for memory-efficiency and runtime on edge devices. This survey describes the best solutions for real-time SR of compressed high-resolution images.