Perceiving Better Moments: Cover Frame Reselection and Enhancement for Live Photos with the Live2K Dataset

Junyu Lou, Kai Chen, Weiyi You, Hui Zeng, Lei Zhang, Shuhang Gu

Modern smartphones capture Live Photos, short video bursts surrounding a still image, offering a dynamic and engaging photographic experience. However, the cover photo and video components are generated by two distinct imaging pipelines: the photo stream undergoes full computational photography processing, while the video stream is constrained by real-time efficiency and heavy compression. This intrinsic separation produces a substantial quality gap in resolution, color fidelity, and dynamic range between the cover photo and video frames. When users reselect an alternative frame from the video to replace an imperfect cover, the chosen frame often suffers from severe degradation, making direct replacement visually unsatisfactory. Restoring such frames requires simultaneous enhancement of spatial detail and color appearance, a task considerably more challenging than ordinary super-resolution or color enhancement. To address this, we define the Live Photo Cover Frame Reselection and Enhancement (LPRE) task, which leverages the intrinsic cues available within each Live Photo: the high-quality cover image as a structural and color reference, the user-reselected low-quality frame as the reconstruction target and several adjacent video frames providing temporal cues. Building upon this formulation, we construct Live2K, a real-world dataset of 2,042 Live Photos, and develop a unified one-stage baseline that integrates multi-frame fusion, guided color enhancement and super-resolution, establishing the first benchmark for Live Photo enhancement research.