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

Marcos V. Conde, Zhijun Lei, Wen Li, Ioannis Katsavounidis, Radu Timofte, Min Yan, Xin Liu, Qian Wang, Xiaoqian Ye, Zhan Du, Tiansen Zhang, Zhiyuan Li, Hao Wei, Chenyang Ge, Jiangtao Lv, Long Sun, Jinshan Pan, Jiangxin Dong, Jinhui Tang, Menghan Zhou et al. (48 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel benchmark for efficient image upscaling as part of the AIS 2024 Real-Time Image Super-Resolution (RTSR) Challenge, which aims to up scale compressed images from 540p to native 4K resolution (4x factor) in real-time on commercial GPUs. For this, we use a diverse test set containing diverse 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 30ms. Out of the 160 participants, 25 teams submitted their code. This survey considers only the most novel solutions models, making it the most comprehensive benchmark on real-time SR of compressed images using modern codecs.