FANVIDv2: Evaluating Video Super-Resolution by Face and Licence-Plate Recognition Under Compound Degradation

Video super-resolution (VSR) is normally judged by PSNR and SSIM on clips that were downsampled bicubically, although in surveillance its purpose is to make faces and licence plates recognisable. We present FANVIDv2, a benchmark that scores VSR by what a recognition pipeline can do with its output. FANVIDv2 provides 320×180 low-resolution (LR) clips with high-resolution (HR) references for 48 public figures (with one HR gallery image each) and 375 licence-plate clips covering 360 distinct plate strings. LR clips are generated with a randomised compound degradation (blur, resize jitter, sensor noise, JPEG compression, final downsampling) rather than bicubic downsampling alone. Two metrics score recognition inside detections: FaceRecBox rewards a face only if it is localised and correctly identified, and TextRecBox scores plate transcriptions by normalised edit distance weighted by localisation quality. With a 2.3,M-parameter VSR baseline (RCDM), FaceRecBox rises from 0.6864 to 0.7222, identity accuracy on matched faces from 84.35% to 86.93%, and TextRecBox from 0.3088 to 0.3667; a residual-map gated variant (RCDM-RMGF) reaches 0.3801 on plates. We describe the degradation model, the baseline architectures and the scorers in detail, and release annotations, metadata, download and degradation scripts and evaluation code.