# Component Divide-and-Conquer for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.01928 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01928/

## Key facts

- Cited by 246 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 246)

- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16518/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up to Excellence: Practicing Model Scaling for Photo-Realistic Image Restoration In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13627/) (2024)
- [DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15070/) (2023)
- [Pixel-Aware Stable Diffusion for Realistic Image Super-resolution and Personalized Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14469/) (2023)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)
- [ControlNeXt: Powerful and Efficient Control for Image and Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06070/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09388/) (2023)
- [Real-World Blind Super-Resolution via Feature Matching with Implicit High-Resolution Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13142/) (2022)
- [Pixel-level and Semantic-level Adjustable Super-resolution: A Dual-LoRA Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03017/) (2024)
- [Efficient and Degradation-Adaptive Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14216/) (2022)
- [Blind Image Super-Resolution: A Survey and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03055/) (2021)
- [TSD-SR: One-Step Diffusion with Target Score Distillation for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18263/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models in Low-Level Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11138/) (2024)
- [CoSeR: Bridging Image and Language for Cognitive Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16512/) (2023)
- [AddSR: Accelerating Diffusion-based Blind Super-Resolution with Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01717/) (2024)
- [Real-World Single Image Super-Resolution: A Brief Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02368/) (2021)
- [DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18666/) (2024)
- [Towards Realistic Data Generation for Real-World Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07255/) (2024)
- [DiT4SR: Taming Diffusion Transformer for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23580/) (2025)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Compression for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13383/) (2024)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Robust Image Super-Resolution in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07864/) (2023)
- [Learning RAW-to-sRGB Mappings with Inaccurately Aligned Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08119/) (2021)
- [XPSR: Cross-modal Priors for Diffusion-based Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05049/) (2024)
- [NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09790/) (2024)
- [Efficient Real-world Image Super-Resolution Via Adaptive Directional Gradient Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07023/) (2024)
- [Harnessing Diffusion-Yielded Score Priors for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20590/) (2025)
- [MM-RealSR: Metric Learning based Interactive Modulation for Real-World Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05065/) (2022)
- [Knowledge Distillation based Degradation Estimation for Blind Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16928/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present a large-scale Diverse Real-world image Super-Resolution dataset, i.e., DRealSR, as well as a divide-and-conquer Super-Resolution (SR) network, exploring the utility of guiding SR model with low-level image components. DRealSR establishes a new SR benchmark with diverse real-world degradation processes, mitigating the limitations of conventional simulated image degradation. In general, the targets of SR vary with image regions with different low-level image components, e.g., smoothness preserving for flat regions, sharpening for edges, and detail enhancing for textures. Learning an SR model with conventional pixel-wise loss usually is easily dominated by flat regions and edges, and fails to infer realistic details of complex textures. We propose a Component Divide-and-Conquer (CDC) model and a Gradient-Weighted (GW) loss for SR. Our CDC parses an image with three components, employs three Component-Attentive Blocks (CABs) to learn attentive masks and intermediate SR predictions with an intermediate supervision learning strategy, and trains an SR model following a divide-and-conquer learning principle. Our GW loss also provides a feasible way to balance the difficulties of image components for SR. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance of our CDC and the challenging aspects of our DRealSR dataset related to diverse real-world scenarios. Our dataset and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/xiezw5/Component-Divide-and-Conquer-for-Real-World-Image-Super-Resolution