Revisiting the Current Frame: Physical-Trace-Guided Network Output Correction for Video Restoration

Abstract

Video restoration methods exploit temporal information to recover information missing from degraded observations. However, reference frames within the sequence may introduce inconsistent degradation, content discrepancy, or reconstruction errors due to physical image-formation variations, occlusion, and imperfect temporal aggregation. Existing approaches mainly focus on improving restoration networks, while the reliability of the generated outputs at different spatial locations remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose ANCHOR, a model-agnostic framework that revisits the low-quality current frame as a temporally aligned anchor for video restoration correction. Specifically, ANCHOR estimates a spatial trust field from heterogeneous physical-trace evidence and adaptively balances the restoration proposal with the original observation. Experiments on High Dynamic Range video reconstruction and video deraining demonstrate consistent improvements across various state-of-the-art restoration models, validating the effectiveness of reliability-aware output correction for video restoration.