NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration: Methods and Results

TL;DR

The NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration evaluates methods for recovering coherent videos from corrupted bitstreams, highlighting current challenges and technical trends in robust video restoration.

Contribution

This paper introduces a benchmark, dataset, and evaluation protocol for the emerging task of bitstream-corrupted video restoration, and summarizes participating methods and results.

Findings

The challenge reveals the difficulty of restoring videos from corrupted bitstreams.

Participating methods show varied effectiveness in handling spatial-temporal artifacts.

Insights from the challenge guide future research directions in robust video restoration.

Abstract

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration (BSCVR). The challenge aims to advance research on recovering visually coherent videos from corrupted bitstreams, whose decoding often produces severe spatial-temporal artifacts and content distortion. Built upon recent progress in bitstream-corrupted video recovery, the challenge provides a common benchmark for evaluating restoration methods under realistic corruption settings. We describe the dataset, evaluation protocol, and participating methods, and summarize the final results and main technical trends. The challenge highlights the difficulty of this emerging task and provides useful insights for future research on robust video restoration under practical bitstream corruption.