Zooming SlowMo: An Efficient One-Stage Framework for Space-Time Video Super-Resolution

In this paper, we address the space-time video super-resolution, which aims at generating a high-resolution (HR) slow-motion video from a low-resolution (LR) and low frame rate (LFR) video sequence. A na"ive method is to decompose it into two sub-tasks: video frame interpolation (VFI) and video super-resolution (VSR). Nevertheless, temporal interpolation and spatial upscaling are intra-related in this problem. Two-stage approaches cannot fully make use of this natural property. Besides, state-of-the-art VFI or VSR deep networks usually have a large frame reconstruction module in order to obtain high-quality photo-realistic video frames, which makes the two-stage approaches have large models and thus be relatively time-consuming. To overcome the issues, we present a one-stage space-time video super-resolution framework, which can directly reconstruct an HR slow-motion video sequence from an input LR and LFR video. Instead of reconstructing missing LR intermediate frames as VFI models do, we temporally interpolate LR frame features of the missing LR frames capturing local temporal contexts by a feature temporal interpolation module. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework not only achieves better qualitative and quantitative performance on both clean and noisy LR frames but also is several times faster than recent state-of-the-art two-stage networks. The source code is released in https://github.com/Mukosame/Zooming-Slow-Mo-CVPR-2020 .