Beyond Visual Quality: Fidelity-Oriented Diffusion Model for Real-world Image Super-Resolution

Although existing diffusion-based image super-resolution methods have achieved remarkable visual quality, they often struggle with fidelity issues, particularly in preserving consistency with the original input image. This issue arises because using low-quality images as conditional inputs introduces substantial errors in the diffusion backward denoising process, making the restored features deviate from target features and thus degrade image fidelity. To improve the accuracy of noise estimation, we propose a dual-memory module to reinforce the input low-quality conditional features, which consists of a pre-trained high-quality memory bank to enrich the structural information and a degradation memory to remove the degradation components. Furthermore, we develop an uncertainty-aware noise estimation framework, utilizing an extra branch in the denoising network to predict pixel-wise uncertainty values, thus dynamically adjust the optimization weights for high-uncertainty regions. This adaptive strategy effectively improves the accuracy of noise estimation in challenging reconstruction areas. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the fidelity while preserving high visual quality of diffusion-based super-resolution, improving the reliability of diffusion applications.