# DART: A Degradation-Aware Recurrent Transformer for Archival Film Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21219 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21219/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [EDVR: Video Restoration with Enhanced Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02716/) (2019)
- [BasicVSR++: Improving Video Super-Resolution with Enhanced Propagation and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13371/) (2021)
- [BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02181/) (2020)
- [TDAN: Temporally Deformable Alignment Network for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02898/) (2018)
- [Recurrent Video Restoration Transformer with Guided Deformable Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02146/) (2022)
- [FastDVDnet: Towards Real-Time Deep Video Denoising Without Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01361/) (2019)
- [Bringing Old Photos Back to Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09484/) (2020)
- [Global Structure-Aware Diffusion Process for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17577/) (2023)
- [Free-form Video Inpainting with 3D Gated Convolution and Temporal PatchGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10247/) (2019)
- [A Simple Baseline for Video Restoration with Grouped Spatial-temporal Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10810/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Deep Video Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15045/) (2020)
- [Fully Automatic Video Colorization with Self-Regularization and Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01311/) (2019)
- [Bringing Old Films Back to Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17276/) (2022)
- [CLIP-driven rain perception: Adaptive deraining with pattern-aware network routing and mask-guided cross-attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01366/) (2025)
- [AbsoluteDegradation: A Physics-Inspired Synthetic Film-Degradation Pipeline and Archival Film Restoration Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02131/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Archival film restoration is a challenging problem because historical footage contains compound degradations such as scratches, dust, blur, noise, flicker, and photometric aging, while clean reference videos are unavailable. Existing video restoration methods largely treat these degradations implicitly, reconstructing frames without explicit knowledge of where damage occurs or how severe it is. We propose DART, a degradation-aware recurrent transformer for archival film restoration. DART predicts and propagates a soft defect mask through time, using it to guide temporal fusion and condition the restoration network on both damage location and severity. This makes the restoration process explicitly aware of film artifacts rather than relying only on reconstruction losses. Experiments on real archival benchmarks show that DART improves no-reference perceptual quality over prior restoration architectures while remaining compact and efficient, producing cleaner and more temporally consistent restorations of structured film damage.