Diffusion or score-based models recently showed high performance in image generation. They rely on a forward and a backward stochastic differential equations (SDE). The sampling of a data distribution is achieved by numerically solving the backward SDE or its associated flow ODE. Studying the convergence of these models necessitates to control four different types of error: the initialization error, the truncation error, the discretization error and the score approximation. In this paper, we theoretically study the behavior of diffusion models and their numerical implementation when the data distribution is Gaussian. Our first contribution is to derive the analytical solutions of the backward SDE and the probability flow ODE and to prove that these solutions and their discretizations are all Gaussian processes. Our second contribution is to compute the exact Wasserstein errors between the target and the numerically sampled distributions for any numerical scheme. This allows us to monitor convergence directly in the data space, while experimental works limit their empirical analysis to Inception features. An implementation of our code is available online.

Abstract. Super-resolution (SR) is the problem that consists in reconstructing images that have been degraded by a zoom-out operator. This is an ill-posed problem that does not have a unique solution, and numerical approaches rely on a prior on high-resolution images. While optimization-based methods are generally deterministic, with the rise of image generative models more and more interest has been given to stochastic SR, that is, sampling among all possible SR images associated with a given low-resolution input. In this paper, we construct an efficient, stable, and provably exact sampler for the stochastic SR of Gaussian microtextures. Even though our approach is limited regarding the scope of images it encompasses, our algorithm is competitive with deep learning state-of-the-art methods both in terms of perceptual metric and execution time when applied to microtextures. The framework of Gaussian microtextures also allows us to rigorously discuss the limitations of various reconstruction metrics to evaluate the efficiency of SR routines. An implementation of our algorithm is available at https://github.com/emilePi/Stochastic_SR_for_Gaussian_textures .

Super-resolution (SR) is an ill-posed inverse problem which consists in proposing high-resolution images consistent with a given low-resolution one. While most SR algorithms are deterministic, stochastic SR deals with designing a stochastic sampler generating any realistic SR solution. The goal of this paper is to show that stochastic SR is a well-posed and solvable problem when restricting to Gaussian stationary textures. Using Gaussian conditional sampling and exploiting the stationarity assumption, we propose an efficient algorithm based on fast Fourier transform. We also demonstrate the practical relevance of the approach for SR with a reference image. Although limited to stationary microtextures, our approach compares favorably in terms of speed and visual quality to some state of the art methods designed for a larger class of images.