GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Spatial-Frequency Domain Information Integration for Pan-Sharpening
Authors: Man Zhou; Jie Huang; Keyu Yan; Hu Yu; Xueyang Fu; Aiping Liu; Xian Wei; Feng Zhao
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Pan-sharpening aims to generate the high-resolution multi-spectral (MS) images by fusing PAN images and low-resolution MS images. Despite the great advances, most existing pan-sharpening methods only work in the spatial domain and rarely explore the potential solution in frequency domain. In this paper, we first attempt to address pan-sharpening in both spatial-frequency domain and propose a Spatial-Frequency Information Integration Network, dubbed as SFIIN. To implement SFIIN, we devise a core building module tailored with pan-sharpening, consisting of three key components: spatial-domain information branch, frequency-domain information one and dual domain interaction. To be specific, the first employs the standard convolution to integrate the local information of two modalities of PAN and MS images in the spatial domain while the second adopts deep Fourier transformation to achieve the image-wide receptive field for exploring global contextual information. Followed by, the third is responsible for facilitating the information flow and learning the complementary representation. We conduct extensive experiments to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed network and demonstrate the favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods."
Adaptive Patch Exiting for Scalable Single Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Shizun Wang; Jiaming Liu; Kaixin Chen; Xiaoqi Li; Ming Lu; Yandong Guo
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Since the future of computing is heterogeneous, scalability is a crucial problem for single image super-resolution. Recent works try to train one network, which can be deployed on platforms with different capacities. However, they rely on the pixel-wise sparse convolution, which is not hardware-friendly and achieves limited practical speedup. As image can be divided into patches, which have various restoration difficulties, we present a scalable method based on Adaptive Patch Exiting (APE) to achieve more practical speedup. Specifically, we propose to train a regressor to predict the incremental capacity of each layer for the patch. Once the incremental capacity is below the threshold, the patch can exit at the specific layer. Our method can easily adjust the trade-off between performance and efficiency by changing the threshold of incremental capacity. Furthermore, we propose a novel strategy to enable the network training of our method. We conduct extensive experiments across various backbones, datasets and scaling factors to demonstrate the advantages of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/littlepure2333/APE"
Efficient Meta-Tuning for Content-Aware Neural Video Delivery
Authors: Xiaoqi Li; Jiaming Liu; Shizun Wang; Cheng Lyu; Ming Lu; Yurong Chen; Anbang Yao; Yandong Guo; Shanghang Zhang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are utilized to reduce the bandwidth and improve the quality of Internet video delivery. Existing methods train corresponding content-aware super-resolution (SR) model for each video chunk on the server, and stream low-resolution (LR) video chunks along with SR models to the client. Although they achieve promising results, the huge computational cost of network training limits their practical applications. In this paper, we present a method named Efficient Meta-Tuning (EMT) to reduce the computational cost. Instead of training from scratch, EMT adapts a meta-learned model to the first chunk of the input video. As for the following chunks, it fine-tunes the partial parameters selected by gradient masking of previous adapted model. In order to achieve further speedup for EMT, we propose a novel sampling strategy to extract the most challenging patches from video frames. The proposed strategy is highly efficient and brings negligible additional cost. Our method significantly reduces the computational cost and achieves even better performance, paving the way for applying neural video delivery techniques to practical applications. We conduct extensive experiments based on various efficient SR architectures, including ESPCN, SRCNN, FSRCNN and EDSR-1, demonstrating the generalization ability of our work. The code is released at https://github.com/Neural-video-delivery/EMT-Pytorch-ECCV2022."
Reference-Based Image Super-Resolution with Deformable Attention Transformer
Authors: Jiezhang Cao; Jingyun Liang; Kai Zhang; Yawei Li; Yulun Zhang; Wenguan Wang; Luc Van Gool
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Reference-based image super-resolution (RefSR) aims to exploit auxiliary reference (Ref) images to super-resolve low-resolution (LR) images. Recently, RefSR has been attracting great attention as it provides an alternative way to surpass single image SR. However, addressing the RefSR problem has two critical challenges: (i) It is difficult to match the correspondence between LR and Ref images when they are significantly different; (ii) How to transfer the relevant texture from Ref images to compensate the details for LR images is very challenging. To address these issues of RefSR, this paper proposes a deformable attention Transformer, namely DATSR, with multiple scales, each of which consists of a texture feature encoder (TFE) module, a reference-based deformable attention (RDA) module and a residual feature aggregation (RFA) module. Specifically, TFE first extracts image transformation (e.g., brightness) insensitive features for LR and Ref images, RDA then can exploit multiple relevant textures to compensate more information for LR features, and RFA lastly aggregates LR features and relevant textures to get a more visually pleasant result. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DATSR achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets quantitatively and qualitatively."
Local Color Distributions Prior for Image Enhancement
Authors: Haoyuan Wang; Ke Xu; Rynson W.H. Lau
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Existing image enhancement methods are typically designed to address either the over- or under-exposure problem in the input image. When the illumination of the input image contains both over- and under-exposure problems, these existing methods may not work well. We observe from the image statistics that the local color distributions (LCDs) of an image suffering from both problems tend to vary across different regions of the image, depending on the local illuminations. Based on this observation, we propose in this paper to exploit these LCDs as a prior for locating and enhancing the two types of regions (i.e., over-/under-exposed regions). First, we leverage the LCDs to represent these regions, and propose a novel local color distribution embedded (LCDE) module to formulate LCDs in multi-scales to model the correlations across different regions. Second, we propose a dual-illumination learning mechanism to enhance the two types of regions. Third, we construct a new dataset to facilitate the learning process, by following the camera image signal processing (ISP) pipeline to render standard RGB images with both under-/over-exposures from raw data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively. Codes and dataset are in https://hywang99.github.io/lcdpnet/."
L-CoDer: Language-Based Colorization with Color-Object Decoupling Transformer
Authors: Zheng Chang; Shuchen Weng; Yu Li; Si Li; Boxin Shi
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Language-based colorization requires the colorized image to be consistent with the the user-provided language caption. A most recent work proposes to decouple the language into color and object conditions in solving the problem. Though decent progress has been made, its performance is limited by three key issues. (i) The large gap between vision and language modalities using independent feature extractors makes it difficult to fully understand the language. (ii) The inaccurate language features are never refined by the image features such that the language may fail to colorize the image precisely. (iii) The local region does not perceive the whole image, producing global inconsistent colors. In this work, we introduce transformer into language-based colorization to tackle the aforementioned issues while keeping the language decoupling property. Our method unifies the modalities of image and language, and further performs color conditions evolving with image features in a coarse-to-fine manner. In addition, thanks to the global receptive field, our method is robust to the strong local variation. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method is able to produce realistic colorization and outperforms prior arts in terms of consistency with the caption."
From Face to Natural Image: Learning Real Degradation for Blind Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Xiaoming Li; Chaofeng Chen; Xianhui Lin; Wangmeng Zuo; Lei Zhang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "How to design proper training pairs is critical for super-resolving real-world low-quality (LQ) images, which suffers from the difficulties in either acquiring paired ground-truth high-quality (HQ) images or synthesizing photo-realistic degraded LQ observations. Recent works mainly focus on modeling the degradation with handcrafted or estimated degradation parameters, which are however incapable to model complicated real-world degradation types, resulting in limited quality improvement. Notably, LQ face images, which may have the same degradation process as natural images, can be robustly restored with photo-realistic textures by exploiting their strong structural priors. This motivates us to use the real-world LQ face images and their restored HQ counterparts to model the complex real-world degradation (namely ReDegNet), and then transfer it to HQ natural images to synthesize their realistic LQ counterparts. By taking these paired HQ-LQ face images as inputs to explicitly predict the degradation-aware and content-independent representations, we could control the degraded image generation, and subsequently transfer these degradation representations from face to natural images to synthesize the degraded LQ natural images. Experiments show that our ReDegNet can well learn the real degradation process from face images. The restoration network trained with our synthetic pairs performs favorably against SOTAs. More importantly, our method provides a new way to handle the real-world complex scenarios by learning their degradation representations from the facial portions, which can be used to significantly improve the quality of non-facial areas. The source code is available at https://github.com/csxmli2016/ReDegNet."
Towards Interpretable Video Super-Resolution via Alternating Optimization
Authors: Jiezhang Cao; Jingyun Liang; Kai Zhang; Wenguan Wang; Qin Wang; Yulun Zhang; Hao Tang; Luc Van Gool
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "In this paper, we study a practical space-time video super-resolution (STVSR) problem which aims at generating a high-framerate high-resolution sharp video from a low-framerate low-resolution blurry video. Such problem often occurs when recording a fast dynamic event with a low-framerate and low-resolution camera, and the captured video would suffer from three typical issues: i) motion blur occurs due to object/camera motions during exposure time; ii) motion aliasing is unavoidable when the event temporal frequency exceeds the Nyquist limit of temporal sampling; iii) high-frequency details are lost because of the low spatial sampling rate. These issues can be alleviated by a cascade of three separate sub-tasks, including video deblurring, frame interpolation, and super-resolution, which, however, would fail to capture the spatial and temporal correlations among video sequences. To address this, we propose an interpretable STVSR framework by leveraging both model-based and learning-based methods. Specifically, we formulate STVSR as a joint video deblurring, frame interpolation, and super-resolution problem, and solve it as two sub-problems in an alternate way. For the first sub-problem, we derive an interpretable analytical solution and use it as a Fourier data transform layer. Then, we propose a recurrent video enhancement layer for the second sub-problem to further recover high-frequency details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality."
Event-Based Fusion for Motion Deblurring with Cross-Modal Attention
Authors: Lei Sun; Christos Sakaridis; Jingyun Liang; Qi Jiang; Kailun Yang; Peng Sun; Yaozu Ye; Kaiwei Wang; Luc Van Gool
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Traditional frame-based cameras inevitably suffer from motion blur due to long exposure times. As a kind of bio-inspired camera, the event camera records the intensity changes in an asynchronous way with high temporal resolution, providing valid image degradation information within the exposure time. In this paper, we rethink the event-based image deblurring problem and unfold it into an end-to-end two-stage image restoration network. To effectively fuse event and image features, we design an event-image cross-modal attention module applied at multiple levels of our network, which allows to focus on relevant features from the event branch and filter out noise. We also introduce a novel symmetric cumulative event representation specifically for image deblurring as well as an event mask gated connection between the two stages of our network which helps avoid information loss. At the dataset level, to foster event-based motion deblurring and to facilitate evaluation on challenging real-world images, we introduce the Real Event Blur (REBlur) dataset, captured with an event camera in an illumination-controlled optical laboratory. Our Event Fusion Network (EFNet) sets the new state of the art in motion deblurring, surpassing both the prior best-performing image-based method and all event-based methods with public implementations on the GoPro dataset (by up to 2.47dB) and on our REBlur dataset, even in extreme blurry conditions. The code and our REBlur dataset are available at https://ahupujr.github.io/EFNet/"
Fast and High Quality Image Denoising via Malleable Convolution
Authors: Yifan Jiang; Bartlomiej Wronski; Ben Mildenhall; Jonathan T. Barron; Zhangyang Wang; Tianfan Xue
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Most image denoising networks apply a single set of static convolutional kernels across the entire input image. This is sub-optimal for natural images, as they often consist of heterogeneous visual patterns. Dynamic convolution tries to address this issue by using per-pixel convolution kernels, but this greatly increases computational cost. In this work, we present \textbf{Malle}able \textbf{Conv}olution (\textbf{MalleConv}), which performs spatial-varying processing with minimal computational overhead. MalleConv uses a smaller set of spatially-varying convolution kernels, a compromise between static and per-pixel convolution kernels. These spatially-varying kernels are produced by an efficient predictor network running on a downsampled input, making them much more efficient to compute than per-pixel kernels produced by a full-resolution image, and also enlarging the network’s receptive field compared with static kernels. These kernels are then jointly upsampled and applied to a full-resolution feature map through an efficient on-the-fly slicing operator with minimum memory overhead. To demonstrate the effectiveness of MalleConv, we use it to build an efficient denoising network we call \textbf{MalleNet}. MalleNet achieves high quality results without a very deep architecture, e.g., running 8.9$\times$ faster than the best performing denoising algorithms (SwinIR) while maintaining similar quality. We also show that a single MalleConv layer added to a standard convolution-based backbone can contribute significantly to reducing the computational cost or can boost image quality at a similar cost."
TAPE: Task-Agnostic Prior Embedding for Image Restoration
Authors: Lin Liu; Lingxi Xie; Xiaopeng Zhang; Shanxin Yuan; Xiangyu Chen; Wengang Zhou; Houqiang Li; Qi Tian
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Learning a generalized prior for natural image restoration is an important yet challenging task. Early methods mostly involved handcrafted priors including normalized sparsity, â„“0 gradients, dark channel priors, etc.. Recently, deep neural networks have been used to learn various image priors but do not guarantee to generalize. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that embeds a task-agnostic prior into a transformer. Our approach, named Task-Agnostic Prior Embedding (TAPE), consists of two stages, namely, task-agnostic pre-training and task-specific fine-tuning, where the first stage embeds prior knowledge about natural images into the transformer and the second stage extracts the knowledge to assist downstream image restoration. Experiments on various types of degradation validate the effectiveness of TAPE. The image restoration performance in terms of PSNR is improved by as much as 1.45 dB and even outperforms task-specific algorithms. More importantly, TAPE shows the ability of disentangling generalized image priors from degraded images, which enjoys favorable transfer ability to unknown downstream tasks."
Uncertainty Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement
Authors: Zhenqi Fu; Wu Wang; Yue Huang; Xinghao Ding; Kai-Kuang Ma
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "A main challenge faced in the deep learning-based Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is that the ground truth high-quality image is unavailable. Most of the existing methods first generate approximate reference maps and then train an enhancement network with certainty. This kind of method fails to handle the ambiguity of the reference map. In this paper, we resolve UIE into distribution estimation and consensus process. We present a novel probabilistic network to learn the enhancement distribution of degraded underwater images. Specifically, we combine conditional variational autoencoder with adaptive instance normalization to construct the enhancement distribution. After that, we adopt a consensus process to predict a deterministic result based on a set of samples from the distribution. By learning the enhancement distribution, our method can cope with the bias introduced in the reference map labeling to some extent. Additionally, the consensus process is useful to capture a robust and stable result. We examined the proposed method on two widely used real-world underwater image enhancement datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enables sampling possible enhancement predictions. Meanwhile, the consensus estimate yields competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art UIE methods."
Hourglass Attention Network for Image Inpainting
Authors: Ye Deng; Siqi Hui; Rongye Meng; Sanping Zhou; Jinjun Wang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Benefiting from the powerful ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to learn semantic information and texture patterns of images, learning-based image inpainting methods have made noticeable breakthroughs over the years. However, certain inherent defects (e.g. local prior, spatially sharing parameters) of CNNs limit their performance when encountering broken images mixed with invalid information. Compared to convolution, attention has a lower inductive bias, and the output is highly correlated with the input, making it more suitable for processing images with various breakage. Inspired by this, in this paper we propose a novel attention-based network (transformer), called hourglass attention network (HAN) for image inpainting, which builds an hourglass-shaped attention structure to generate appropriate features for complemented images. In addition, we design a novel attention called Laplace attention, which introduces a Laplace distance prior for the vanilla multi-head attention, allowing the feature matching process to consider not only the similarity of features themselves, but also distance between features. With the synergy of hourglass attention structure and Laplace attention, our HAN is able to make full use of hierarchical features to mine effective information for broken images. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance by our proposed approach."
Unfolded Deep Kernel Estimation for Blind Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Hongyi Zheng; Hongwei Yong; Lei Zhang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Blind image super-resolution (BISR) aims to reconstruct a high-resolution image from its low-resolution counterpart degraded by unknown blur kernel and noise. Many deep neural network based methods have been proposed to tackle this challenging problem without considering the image degradation model. However, they largely rely on the training sets and often fail to handle images with unseen blur kernels during inference. Deep unfolding methods have also been proposed to perform BISR by utilizing the degradation model. Nonetheless, the existing deep unfolding methods cannot explicitly solve the data term of the unfolding objective function, limiting their capability in blur kernel estimation. In this work, we propose a novel unfolded deep kernel estimation (UDKE) method, which, for the first time to our best knowledge, explicitly solves the data term with high efficiency. The UDKE based BISR method can jointly learn image and kernel priors in an end-to-end manner, and it can effectively exploit the information in both training data and image degradation model. Experiments on benchmark datasets and real-world data demonstrate that the proposed UDKE method could well predict complex unseen non-Gaussian blur kernels in inference, achieving significantly better BISR performance than state-of-the-art. The source code of UDKE is available at https://github.com/natezhenghy/UDKE."
Event-Guided Deblurring of Unknown Exposure Time Videos
Authors: Taewoo Kim; Jeongmin Lee; Lin Wang; Kuk-Jin Yoon
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Motion deblurring is a highly ill-posed problem due to the loss of motion information in the blur degradation process. Since event cameras can capture apparent motion with a high temporal resolution, several attempts have explored the potential of events for guiding deblurring. These methods generally assume that the exposure time is the same as the reciprocal of the video frame rate. However, this is not true in real situations, and the exposure time might be unknown and dynamically varies depending on the video shooting environment(e.g., illumination condition). In this paper, we address the event-guided motion deblurring assuming dynamically variable unknown exposure time of the frame-based camera. To this end, we first derive a new formulation for event-guided motion deblurring by considering the exposure and readout time in the video frame acquisition process. We then propose a novel end-to-end learning framework for event-guided motion deblurring. In particular, we design a novel Exposure Time-based Event Selection(ETES) module to selectively use event features by estimating the cross-modal correlation between the features from blurred frames and the events. Moreover, we propose a feature fusion module to fuse the selected features from events and blur frames effectively. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets and demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance."