# Unsupervised Methods for Video Quality Improvement: A Survey of Restoration and Enhancement Techniques

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08375 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08375/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 102 of its 214 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 102)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [Noise2Noise: Learning Image Restoration without Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04189/) (2018)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Deep Denoiser Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.13751/) (2020)
- [EnlightenGAN: Deep Light Enhancement without Paired Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06972/) (2019)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01770/) (2018)
- [DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02510/) (2017)
- [Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05609/) (2020)
- [Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06303/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03883/) (2022)
- [Learning Blind Video Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00449/) (2018)
- [An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05495/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Boosted Dehazing Network with Dense Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13388/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Deep Generative Prior for Versatile Image Restoration and Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13659/) (2020)
- [VRT: A Video Restoration Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12288/) (2022)
- [CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07761/) (2020)
- [Plug-and-Play Methods Provably Converge with Properly Trained Denoisers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05406/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Geometry-Aware Representation Denoising for Robust Multi-view 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26230/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video restoration and enhancement are critical not only for improving visual quality, but also as essential pre-processing steps to boost the performance of a wide range of downstream computer vision tasks. This survey presents a comprehensive review of video restoration and enhancement techniques with a particular focus on unsupervised approaches. We begin by outlining the most common video degradations and their underlying causes, followed by a review of early conventional and deep learning methods-based, highlighting their strengths and limitations. We then present an in-depth overview of unsupervised methods, categorise by their fundamental approaches, including domain translation, self-supervision signal design and blind spot or noise-based methods. We also provide a categorization of loss functions employed in unsupervised video restoration and enhancement, and discuss the role of paired synthetic datasets in enabling objective evaluation. Finally, we identify key challenges and outline promising directions for future research in this field.