OMGSR: You Only Need One Mid-timestep Guidance for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

TL;DR

OMGSR introduces a novel mid-timestep guidance method for real-world image super-resolution using DDPMs, leveraging signal-to-noise analysis and latent refinement to achieve state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new approach that pre-computes an optimal mid-timestep for guidance and refines latent representations, significantly improving one-step super-resolution performance.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics.

Pre-computation and LRR loss improve baseline results.

Effective mid-timestep guidance enhances real-world image super-resolution.

Abstract

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) show promising potential in one-step Real-World Image Super-Resolution (Real-ISR). Current one-step Real-ISR methods typically inject the low-quality (LQ) image latent representation at the start or end timestep of the DDPM scheduler. Recent studies have begun to note that the LQ image latent and the pre-trained noisy latent representations are intuitively closer at a mid-timestep. However, a quantitative analysis of these latent representations remains lacking. Considering these latent representations can be decomposed into signal and noise, we propose a method based on the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to pre-compute an average optimal mid-timestep for injection. To better approximate the pre-trained noisy latent representation, we further introduce the Latent Representation Refinement (LRR) loss via a LoRA-enhanced VAE encoder. We also fine-tune the backbone of the DDPM-based generative model using LoRA to perform one-step denoising at the average optimal mid-timestep. Based on these components, we present OMGSR, a GAN-based Real-ISR framework that employs a DDPM-based generative model as the generator and a DINOv3-ConvNeXt model with multi-level discriminator heads as the discriminator. We also propose the DINOv3-ConvNeXt DISTS (Dv3CD) loss, which is enhanced for structural perception at varying resolutions. Within the OMGSR framework, we develop OMGSR-S based on SD2.1-base. An ablation study confirms that our pre-computation strategy and LRR loss significantly improve the baseline. Comparative studies demonstrate that OMGSR-S achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics. Code is available at \hyperlink{Github}{https://github.com/wuer5/OMGSR}.