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

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.

Wenbin Zou, Tianyi Liu, Kejun Wu, Huiping Zhuang, Zongwei Wu, Zhuyun Zhou, Radu Timofte, Kim-Hui Yap, Lap-Pui Chau, Yi Wang, Shiqi Zhou, Xiaodi Shi, Yuxiang Chen, Yilian Zhong, Shibo Yin, Yushun Fang, Xilei Zhu, Yahui Wang, Chen Lu, Zhitao Wang, Lifa Ha, Hengyu Man, Xiaopeng Fan, Priyansh Singh, Sidharth, Krrish Dev, Soham Kakkar, Vinit Jakhetiya, Ovais Iqbal Shah, Wei Zhou, Linfeng Li, Qi Xu, Zhenyang Liu, Kepeng Xu, Tong Qiao, Jiachen Tu, Guoyi Xu, Yaoxin Jiang, Jiajia Liu, Yaokun Shi · 2026