Diffusion Transformer meets Multi-level Wavelet Spectrum for Single Image Super-Resolution

Peng Du, Hui Li, Han Xu, Paul Barom Jeon, Dongwook Lee, Daehyun Ji, Ran Yang, Feng Zhu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 19700-19710

Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) has been widely explored to enhance the performance of image super-resolution (SR). Despite some DWT-based methods improving SR by capturing fine-grained frequency signals, most existing approaches neglect the interrelations among multi-scale frequency sub-bands, resulting in inconsistencies and unnatural artifacts in the reconstructed images. To address this challenge, we propose a Diffusion Transformer model based on image Wavelet spectra for SR (DTWSR). DTWSR incorporates the superiority of diffusion models and transformers to capture the interrelations among multi-scale frequency sub-bands, leading to a more consistence and realistic SR image. Specifically, we use a Multi-level Discrete Wavelet Transform (MDWT) to decompose images into wavelet spectra. A pyramid tokenization method is proposed which embeds the spectra into a sequence of tokens for transformer model, facilitating to capture features from both spatial and frequency domain. A dual-decoder is designed elaborately to handle the distinct variances in low-frequency (LF) and high-frequency (HF) sub-bands, without omitting their alignment in image generation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, with high performance on both perception quality and fidelity.