Kernel-Aware Burst Blind Super-Resolution

Wenyi Lian, Shanglian Peng; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 4892-4902

Burst super-resolution technique provides a possibility of restoring rich details from low-quality images. However, since real world low-resolution (LR) images in practical applications have multiple complicated and unknown degradations, existing non-blind (e.g., bicubic) designed networks usually suffer severe performance drop in recovering high-resolution (HR) images. In this paper, we address the problem of reconstructing HR images from raw burst sequences acquired from modern handheld devices. The central idea is a kernel-guided strategy which can solve the burst SR problem with two steps: kernel estimation and HR image restoration. The former estimates burst kernels from raw inputs, while the latter predicts the super-resolved image based on the estimated kernels. Furthermore, we introduce a pyramid kernel-aware deformable alignment module which can effectively align the raw images with consideration of the blurry priors. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can perform favorable state-of-the-art performance in the burst SR problem.