NTIRE 2021 Learning the Super-Resolution Space Challenge

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2021 challenge on learning the super-Resolution space. It focuses on the participating methods and final results. The challenge addresses the problem of learning a model capable of predicting the space of plausible super-resolution (SR) images, from a single low-resolution image. The model must thus be capable of sampling diverse outputs, rather than just generating a single SR image. The goal of the challenge is to spur research into developing learning formulations and models better suited for the highly ill-posed SR problem. And thereby advance the state-of-the-art in the broader SR field. In order to evaluate the quality of the predicted SR space, we propose a new evaluation metric and perform a comprehensive analysis of the participating methods. The challenge contains two tracks: 4× and 8 scale factor. In total, 11 teams competed in the final testing× phase.