# BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13371 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/

## Key facts

- Cited by 342 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Deformable ConvNets v2: More Deformable, Better Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11168/) (2018)
- [Video Enhancement with Task-Oriented Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09078/) (2017)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks for Fast and Accurate Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03915/) (2017)
- [Optical Flow Estimation using a Spatial Pyramid Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00850/) (2016)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (2020)
- [Softmax Splatting for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05534/) (2020)
- [TDAN: Temporally Deformable Alignment Network for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02898/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Representations for Labeling Pixels and Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04514/) (2019)
- [Frame-Recurrent Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04590/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Video Super-Resolution with Spatio-Temporal Networks and Motion Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05250/) (2016)
- [Detail-revealing Deep Video Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02738/) (2017)
- [Recurrent Back-Projection Network for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10128/) (2019)
- [Video Super-Resolution with Recurrent Structure-Detail Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00455/) (2020)
- [Spatio-Temporal Filter Adaptive Network for Video Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12257/) (2019)
- [Zooming Slow-Mo: Fast and Accurate One-Stage Space-Time Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11616/) (2020)
- [MuCAN: Multi-Correspondence Aggregation Network for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11803/) (2020)
- [Video Super-resolution with Temporal Group Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10595/) (2020)
- [Understanding Deformable Alignment in Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07265/) (2020)
- [Efficient Video Super-Resolution through Recurrent Latent Space Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08080/) (2019)
- [Residual Conv-Deconv Grid Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07958/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Temporal Modeling for Video Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05765/) (2020)
- [Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Temporal CreditAssignment Through Reminding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03702/) (2018)
- [NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10781/) (2021)
- [Optimizing Video Object Detection via a Scale-Time Lattice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05472/) (2018)
- [Higher Order Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.00064/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 342)

- [LAVIE: High-Quality Video Generation with Cascaded Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15103/) (2023)
- [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)
- [AMT: All-Pairs Multi-Field Transforms for Efficient Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09790/) (2023)
- [Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02146/) (2022)
- [Neural Video Compression with Diverse Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14402/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Towards An End-to-End Framework for Flow-Guided Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02663/) (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)
- [Motion-Guided Latent Diffusion for Temporally Consistent Real-world Video Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00853/) (2023)
- [RainMamba: Enhanced Locality Learning with State Space Models for Video Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21773/) (2024)
- [STAR: Spatial-Temporal Augmentation with Text-to-Video Models for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02976/) (2025)
- [Reference-based Image Super-Resolution with Deformable Attention Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11938/) (2022)
- [SeedVR2: One-Step Video Restoration via Diffusion Adversarial Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05301/) (2025)
- [Implicit Temporal Modeling with Learnable Alignment for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10465/) (2023)
- [Flow-Guided Sparse Transformer for Video Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01893/) (2022)
- [FlashVSR: Towards Real-Time Diffusion-Based Streaming Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12747/) (2025)
- [High-Fidelity and Freely Controllable Talking Head Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10168/) (2023)
- [DeSRA: Detect and Delete the Artifacts of GAN-based Real-World Super-Resolution Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02457/) (2023)
- [MGMAE: Motion Guided Masking for Video Masked Autoencoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10794/) (2023)
- [KVQ: Kwai Video Quality Assessment for Short-form Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07220/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Video Super-Resolution via Implicit Resampling-based Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00163/) (2023)
- [DiffIR2VR-Zero: Zero-Shot Video Restoration with Diffusion-based Image Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01519/) (2024)
- [Learning Spatial-Temporal Implicit Neural Representations for Event-Guided Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13767/) (2023)
- [RealViformer: Investigating Attention for Real-World Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13987/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A recurrent structure is a popular framework choice for the task of video super-resolution. The state-of-the-art method BasicVSR adopts bidirectional propagation with feature alignment to effectively exploit information from the entire input video. In this study, we redesign BasicVSR by proposing second-order grid propagation and flow-guided deformable alignment. We show that by empowering the recurrent framework with the enhanced propagation and alignment, one can exploit spatiotemporal information across misaligned video frames more effectively. The new components lead to an improved performance under a similar computational constraint. In particular, our model BasicVSR++ surpasses BasicVSR by 0.82 dB in PSNR with similar number of parameters. In addition to video super-resolution, BasicVSR++ generalizes well to other video restoration tasks such as compressed video enhancement. In NTIRE 2021, BasicVSR++ obtains three champions and one runner-up in the Video Super-Resolution and Compressed Video Enhancement Challenges. Codes and models will be released to MMEditing.