# BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.02181 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/

## Key facts

- Cited by 304 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 304)

- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [Exploring Video Quality Assessment on User Generated Contents from Aesthetic and Technical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04894/) (2022)
- [FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16194/) (2022)
- [VRT: A Video Restoration Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12288/) (2022)
- [ProPainter: Improving Propagation and Transformer for Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03897/) (2023)
- [VFHQ: A High-Quality Dataset and Benchmark for Video Face Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03409/) (2022)
- [Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02146/) (2022)
- [Low-Light Image and Video Enhancement Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10729/) (2021)
- [Investigating Tradeoffs in Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12704/) (2021)
- [Upscale-A-Video: Temporal-Consistent Diffusion Model for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06640/) (2023)
- [Hybrid Spatial-Temporal Entropy Modelling for Neural Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05894/) (2022)
- [Neural Video Compression with Feature Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17414/) (2024)
- [Video Super-Resolution Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06847/) (2021)
- [FlowFormer++: Masked Cost Volume Autoencoding for Pretraining Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01237/) (2023)
- [Towards An End-to-End Framework for Flow-Guided Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02663/) (2022)
- [IFRNet: Intermediate Feature Refine Network for Efficient Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14620/) (2022)
- [VideoINR: Learning Video Implicit Neural Representation for Continuous Space-Time Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04647/) (2022)
- [VideoFlow: Exploiting Temporal Cues for Multi-frame Optical Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08340/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Alignment in Video Super-Resolution Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08494/) (2022)
- [A Simple Baseline for Video Restoration with Grouped Spatial-temporal Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10810/) (2022)
- [VEnhancer: Generative Space-Time Enhancement for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07667/) (2024)
- [SeedVR: Seeding Infinity in Diffusion Transformer Towards Generic Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01320/) (2025)
- [Learning Trajectory-Aware Transformer for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04216/) (2022)
- [Motion-Guided Latent Diffusion for Temporally Consistent Real-world Video Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00853/) (2023)
- [STAR: Spatial-Temporal Augmentation with Text-to-Video Models for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02976/) (2025)
- [SeedVR2: One-Step Video Restoration via Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05301/) (2025)
- [Towards Explainable In-the-Wild Video Quality Assessment: A Database and a Language-Prompted Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12726/) (2023)
- [FlashVSR: Towards Real-Time Diffusion-Based Streaming Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12747/) (2025)
- [DeSRA: Detect and Delete the Artifacts of GAN-based Real-World Super-Resolution Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02457/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Video Super-Resolution via Implicit Resampling-based Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00163/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video super-resolution (VSR) approaches tend to have more components than the image counterparts as they need to exploit the additional temporal dimension. Complex designs are not uncommon. In this study, we wish to untangle the knots and reconsider some most essential components for VSR guided by four basic functionalities, i.e., Propagation, Alignment, Aggregation, and Upsampling. By reusing some existing components added with minimal redesigns, we show a succinct pipeline, BasicVSR, that achieves appealing improvements in terms of speed and restoration quality in comparison to many state-of-the-art algorithms. We conduct systematic analysis to explain how such gain can be obtained and discuss the pitfalls. We further show the extensibility of BasicVSR by presenting an information-refill mechanism and a coupled propagation scheme to facilitate information aggregation. The BasicVSR and its extension, IconVSR, can serve as strong baselines for future VSR approaches.