TDAN: Temporally-Deformable Alignment Network for Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to restore a photo-realistic high-resolution (HR) video frame from both its corresponding low-resolution (LR) frame (reference frame) and multiple neighboring frames (supporting frames). Due to varying motion of cameras or objects, the reference frame and each support frame are not aligned. Therefore, temporal alignment is a challenging yet important problem for VSR. Previous VSR methods usually utilize optical flow between the reference frame and each supporting frame to warp the supporting frame for temporal alignment. However, both inaccurate flow and the image-level warping strategy will lead to artifacts in the warped supporting frames. To overcome the limitation, we propose a temporally-deformable alignment network (TDAN) to adaptively align the reference frame and each supporting frame at the feature level without computing optical flow. The TDAN uses features from both the reference frame and each supporting frame to dynamically predict offsets of sampling convolution kernels. By using the corresponding kernels, TDAN transforms supporting frames to align with the reference frame. To predict the HR video frame, a reconstruction network taking aligned frames and the reference frame is utilized. Experimental results demonstrate that the TDAN is capable of alleviating occlusions and artifacts for temporal alignment and the TDAN-based VSR model outperforms several recent state-of-the-art VSR networks with a comparable or even much smaller model size. The source code and pre-trained models are released in https://github.com/YapengTian/TDAN-VSR.