Low Resource Video Super-resolution using Memory and Residual Deformable Convolutions

Transformer-based video super-resolution (VSR) models have set new benchmarks in recent years, but their substantial computational demands make most of them unsuitable for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Achieving a balance between model complexity and output quality remains a formidable challenge in VSR. Although lightweight models have been introduced to address this issue, they often struggle to deliver state-of-the-art performance. We propose a novel lightweight, parameter-efficient deep residual deformable convolution network for VSR. Unlike prior methods, our model enhances feature utilization through residual connections and employs deformable convolution for precise frame alignment, addressing motion dynamics effectively. Furthermore, we introduce a single memory tensor to capture information accrued from the past frames and improve motion estimation across frames. This design enables an efficient balance between computational cost and reconstruction quality. With just 2.3 million parameters, our model achieves state-of-the-art SSIM of 0.9175 on the REDS4 dataset, surpassing existing lightweight and many heavy models in both accuracy and resource efficiency. Architectural insights from our model pave the way for real-time VSR on streaming data.