STFF: Spatio-Temporal and Frequency Fusion for Video Compression Artifact Removal

Video compression artifact removal focuses on enhancing the visual quality of compressed videos by mitigating visual distortions. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively capture spatio-temporal features and recover high-frequency details, due to their suboptimal adaptation to the characteristics of compression artifacts. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel Spatio-Temporal and Frequency Fusion (STFF) framework. STFF incorporates three key components: Feature Extraction and Alignment (FEA), which employs SRU for effective spatiotemporal feature extraction; Bidirectional High-Frequency Enhanced Propagation (BHFEP), which integrates HCAB to restore high-frequency details through bidirectional propagation; and Residual High-Frequency Refinement (RHFR), which further enhances high-frequency information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STFF achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in both objective metrics and subjective visual quality, effectively addressing the challenges posed by video compression artifacts. Trained model available: https://github.com/Stars-WMX/STFF.