OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Learning of Efficient Geometry-Aware Neural Articulated Representations
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose an unsupervised method for 3D geometry-aware representation learning of articulated objects, in which no image-pose pairs or foreground masks are used for training. Though photorealistic images of articulated objects can be rendered with explicit pose control through existing 3D neural representations, these methods require ground truth 3D pose and foreground masks for training, which are expensive to obtain. We obviate this need by learning the representations with GAN training. The generator is trained to produce realistic images of articulated objects from random poses and latent vectors by adversarial training. To avoid a high computational cost for GAN training, we propose an efficient neural representation for articulated objects based on tri-planes and then present a GAN-based framework for its unsupervised training. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our method and show that GAN-based training enables the learning of controllable 3D representations without paired supervision.
Efficient Long-Range Attention Network for Image Super-Resolution
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, transformer-based methods have demonstrated impressive results in various vision tasks, including image super-resolution (SR), by exploiting the self-attention (SA) for feature extraction. However, the computation of SA in most existing transformer based models is very expensive, while some employed operations may be redundant for the SR task. This limits the range of SA computation and consequently the SR performance. In this work, we propose an efficient long-range attention network (ELAN) for image SR. Specifically, we first employ shift convolution (shift-conv) to effectively extract the image local structural information while maintaining the same level of complexity as 1x1 convolution, then propose a group-wise multi-scale self-attention (GMSA) module, which calculates SA on non-overlapped groups of features using different window sizes to exploit the long-range image dependency. A highly efficient long-range attention block (ELAB) is then built by simply cascading two shift-conv with a GMSA module, which is further accelerated by using a shared attention mechanism. Without bells and whistles, our ELAN follows a fairly simple design by sequentially cascading the ELABs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ELAN obtains even better results against the transformer-based SR models but with significantly less complexity. The source code can be found at https://github.com/xindongzhang/ELAN.
FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce optical Flow transFormer, dubbed as FlowFormer, a transformer-based neural network architecture for learning optical flow. FlowFormer tokenizes the 4D cost volume built from an image pair, encodes the cost tokens into a cost memory with alternate-group transformer (AGT) layers in a novel latent space, and decodes the cost memory via a recurrent transformer decoder with dynamic positional cost queries. On the Sintel benchmark, FlowFormer achieves 1.159 and 2.088 average end-point-error (AEPE) on the clean and final pass, a 16.5% and 15.5% error reduction from the best published result (1.388 and 2.47). Besides, FlowFormer also achieves strong generalization performance. Without being trained on Sintel, FlowFormer achieves 1.01 AEPE on the clean pass of Sintel training set, outperforming the best published result (1.29) by 21.7%.
Coarse-to-Fine Sparse Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Many algorithms have been developed to solve the inverse problem of coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging (CASSI), i.e., recovering the 3D hyperspectral images (HSIs) from a 2D compressive measurement. In recent years, learning-based methods have demonstrated promising performance and dominated the mainstream research direction. However, existing CNN-based methods show limitations in capturing long-range dependencies and non-local self-similarity. Previous Transformer-based methods densely sample tokens, some of which are uninformative, and calculate the multi-head self-attention (MSA) between some tokens that are unrelated in content. This does not fit the spatially sparse nature of HSI signals and limits the model scalability. In this paper, we propose a novel Transformer-based method, coarse-to-fine sparse Transformer (CST), firstly embedding HSI sparsity into deep learning for HSI reconstruction. In particular, CST uses our proposed spectra-aware screening mechanism (SASM) for coarse patch selecting. Then the selected patches are fed into our customized spectra-aggregation hashing multi-head self-attention (SAH-MSA) for fine pixel clustering and self-similarity capturing. Comprehensive experiments show that our CST significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods while requiring cheaper computational costs. The code and models will be released at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/MST
Learning Shadow Correspondence for Video Shadow Detection
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Video shadow detection aims to generate consistent shadow predictions among video frames. However, the current approaches suffer from inconsistent shadow predictions across frames, especially when the illumination and background textures change in a video. We make an observation that the inconsistent predictions are caused by the shadow feature inconsistency, i.e., the features of the same shadow regions show dissimilar proprieties among the nearby frames.In this paper, we present a novel Shadow-Consistent Correspondence method (SC-Cor) to enhance pixel-wise similarity of the specific shadow regions across frames for video shadow detection. Our proposed SC-Cor has three main advantages. Firstly, without requiring the dense pixel-to-pixel correspondence labels, SC-Cor can learn the pixel-wise correspondence across frames in a weakly-supervised manner. Secondly, SC-Cor considers intra-shadow separability, which is robust to the variant textures and illuminations in videos. Finally, SC-Cor is a plug-and-play module that can be easily integrated into existing shadow detectors with no extra computational cost. We further design a new evaluation metric to evaluate the temporal stability of the video shadow detection results. Experimental results show that SC-Cor outperforms the prior state-of-the-art method, by 6.51% on IoU and 3.35% on the newly introduced temporal stability metric.
OSFormer: One-Stage Camouflaged Instance Segmentation with Transformers
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

We present OSFormer, the first one-stage transformer framework for camouflaged instance segmentation (CIS). OSFormer is based on two key designs. First, we design a location-sensing transformer (LST) to obtain the location label and instance-aware parameters by introducing the location-guided queries and the blend-convolution feedforward network. Second, we develop a coarse-to-fine fusion (CFF) to merge diverse context information from the LST encoder and CNN backbone. Coupling these two components enables OSFormer to efficiently blend local features and long-range context dependencies for predicting camouflaged instances. Compared with two-stage frameworks, our OSFormer reaches 41% AP and achieves good convergence efficiency without requiring enormous training data, i.e., only 3,040 samples under 60 epochs. Code link: https://github.com/PJLallen/OSFormer.
Highly Accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

We present a systematic study on a new task called dichotomous image segmentation (DIS) , which aims to segment highly accurate objects from natural images. To this end, we collected the first large-scale DIS dataset, called DIS5K, which contains 5,470 high-resolution (e.g., 2K, 4K or larger) images covering camouflaged, salient, or meticulous objects in various backgrounds. DIS is annotated with extremely fine-grained labels. Besides, we introduce a simple intermediate supervision baseline (IS-Net) using both feature-level and mask-level guidance for DIS model training. IS-Net outperforms various cutting-edge baselines on the proposed DIS5K, making it a general self-learned supervision network that can facilitate future research in DIS. Further, we design a new metric called human correction efforts (HCE) which approximates the number of mouse clicking operations required to correct the false positives and false negatives. HCE is utilized to measure the gap between models and real-world applications and thus can complement existing metrics. Finally, we conduct the largest-scale benchmark, evaluating 16 representative segmentation models, providing a more insightful discussion regarding object complexities, and showing several potential applications (e.g., background removal, art design, 3D reconstruction). Hoping these efforts can open up promising directions for both academic and industries. Project page: https://xuebinqin.github.io/dis/index.html.
Flow-Guided Transformer for Video Inpainting
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a flow-guided transformer, which innovatively leverage the motion discrepancy exposed by optical flows to instruct the attention retrieval in transformer for high fidelity video inpainting. More specially, we design a novel flow completion network to complete the corrupted flows by exploiting the relevant flow features in a local temporal window. With the completed flows, we propagate the content across video frames, and adopt the flow-guided transformer to synthesize the rest corrupted regions. We decouple transformers along temporal and spatial dimension, so that we can easily integrate the locally relevant completed flows to instruct spatial attention only. Furthermore, we design a flow-reweight module to precisely control the impact of completed flows on each spatial transformer. For the sake of efficiency, we introduce window partition strategy to both spatial and temporal transformers. Especially in spatial transformer, we design a dual perspective spatial MHSA, which integrates the global tokens to the window-based attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method qualitatively and quantitatively. Codes are available at https://github.com/hitachinsk/FGT.
Shift-tolerant Perceptual Similarity Metric
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing perceptual similarity metrics assume an image and its reference are well aligned. As a result, these metrics are often sensitive to a small alignment error that is imperceptible to the human eyes. This paper studies the effect of small misalignment, specifically a small shift between the input and reference image, on existing metrics, and accordingly develops a shift-tolerant similarity metric. This paper builds upon LPIPS, a widely used learned perceptual similarity metric, and explores architectural design considerations to make it robust against imperceptible misalignment. Specifically, we study a wide spectrum of neural network elements, such as anti-aliasing filtering, pooling, striding, padding, and skip connection, and discuss their roles in making a robust metric. Based on our studies, we develop a new deep neural network-based perceptual similarity metric. Our experiments show that our metric is tolerant to imperceptible shifts while being consistent with the human similarity judgment.
VQFR: Blind Face Restoration with Vector-Quantized Dictionary and Parallel Decoder
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Although generative facial prior and geometric prior have recently demonstrated high-quality results for blind face restoration, producing fine-grained facial details faithful to inputs remains a challenging problem. Motivated by the classical dictionary-based methods and the recent vector quantization (VQ) technique, we propose a VQ-based face restoration method - VQFR. VQFR takes advantage of high-quality low-level feature banks extracted from high-quality faces and can thus help recover realistic facial details. However, the simple application of the VQ codebook cannot achieve good results with faithful details and identity preservation. Therefore, we further introduce two special network designs. 1). We first investigate the compression patch size in the VQ codebook and find that the VQ codebook designed with a proper compression patch size is crucial to balance the quality and fidelity. 2). To further fuse low-level features from inputs while not "contaminating" the realistic details generated from the VQ codebook, we proposed a parallel decoder consisting of a texture decoder and a main decoder. Those two decoders then interact with a texture warping module with deformable convolution. Equipped with the VQ codebook as a facial detail dictionary and the parallel decoder design, the proposed VQFR can largely enhance the restored quality of facial details while keeping the fidelity to previous methods.
Learning Spatio-Temporal Downsampling for Effective Video Upscaling
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Downsampling is one of the most basic image processing operations. Improper spatio-temporal downsampling applied on videos can cause aliasing issues such as moiré patterns in space and the wagon-wheel effect in time. Consequently, the inverse task of upscaling a low-resolution, low frame-rate video in space and time becomes a challenging ill-posed problem due to information loss and aliasing artifacts. In this paper, we aim to solve the space-time aliasing problem by learning a spatio-temporal downsampler. Towards this goal, we propose a neural network framework that jointly learns spatio-temporal downsampling and upsampling. It enables the downsampler to retain the key patterns of the original video and maximizes the reconstruction performance of the upsampler. To make the downsamping results compatible with popular image and video storage formats, the downsampling results are encoded to uint8 with a differentiable quantization layer. To fully utilize the space-time correspondences, we propose two novel modules for explicit temporal propagation and space-time feature rearrangement. Experimental results show that our proposed method significantly boosts the space-time reconstruction quality by preserving spatial textures and motion patterns in both downsampling and upscaling. Moreover, our framework enables a variety of applications, including arbitrary video resampling, blurry frame reconstruction, and efficient video storage.
Learning Local Implicit Fourier Representation for Image Warping
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Image warping aims to reshape images defined on rectangular grids into arbitrary shapes. Recently, implicit neural functions have shown remarkable performances in representing images in a continuous manner. However, a standalone multi-layer perceptron suffers from learning high-frequency Fourier coefficients. In this paper, we propose a local texture estimator for image warping (LTEW) followed by an implicit neural representation to deform images into continuous shapes. Local textures estimated from a deep super-resolution (SR) backbone are multiplied by locally-varying Jacobian matrices of a coordinate transformation to predict Fourier responses of a warped image. Our LTEW-based neural function outperforms existing warping methods for asymmetric-scale SR and homography transform. Furthermore, our algorithm well generalizes arbitrary coordinate transformations, such as homography transform with a large magnification factor and equirectangular projection (ERP) perspective transform, which are not provided in training.
SepLUT: Separable Image-Adaptive Lookup Tables for Real-Time Image Enhancement
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Image-adaptive lookup tables (LUTs) have achieved great success in real-time image enhancement tasks due to their high efficiency for modeling color transforms. However, they embed the complete transform, including the color component-independent and the component-correlated parts, into only a single type of LUTs, either 1D or 3D, in a coupled manner. This scheme raises a dilemma of improving model expressiveness or efficiency due to two factors. On the one hand, the 1D LUTs provide high computational efficiency but lack the critical capability of color components interaction. On the other, the 3D LUTs present enhanced component-correlated transform capability but suffer from heavy memory footprint, high training difficulty, and limited cell utilization. Inspired by the conventional divide-and-conquer practice in the image signal processor, we present SepLUT (separable image-adaptive lookup table) to tackle the above limitations. Specifically, we separate a single color transform into a cascade of component-independent and component-correlated sub-transforms instantiated as 1D and 3D LUTs, respectively. In this way, the capabilities of two sub-transforms can facilitate each other, where the 3D LUT complements the ability to mix up color components, and the 1D LUT redistributes the input colors to increase the cell utilization of the 3D LUT and thus enable the use of a more lightweight 3D LUT. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method presents enhanced performance on photo retouching benchmark datasets than the current state-of-the-art and achieves real-time processing on both GPUs and CPUs.
Learning Spatiotemporal Frequency-Transformer for Compressed Video Super-Resolution
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Compressed video super-resolution (VSR) aims to restore high-resolution frames from compressed low-resolution counterparts. Most recent VSR approaches often enhance an input frame by borrowing relevant textures from neighboring video frames. Although some progress has been made, there are grand challenges to effectively extract and transfer high-quality textures from compressed videos where most frames are usually highly degraded. In this paper, we propose a novel Frequency-Transformer for compressed video super-resolution (FTVSR) that conducts self-attention over a joint space-time-frequency domain. First, we divide a video frame into patches, and transform each patch into DCT spectral maps in which each channel represents a frequency band. Such a design enables a fine-grained level self-attention on each frequency band, so that real visual texture can be distinguished from artifacts, and further utilized for video frame restoration. Second, we study different self-attention schemes, and discover that a divided attention which conducts a joint space-frequency attention before applying temporal attention on each frequency band, leads to the best video enhancement quality. Experimental results on two widely-used video super-resolution benchmarks show that FTVSR outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both uncompressed and compressed videos with clear visual margins. Code is available at https://github.com/researchmm/FTVSR.
Adaptive Patch Exiting for Scalable Single Image Super-Resolution
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

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
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

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 \url{https://github.com/Neural-video-delivery/EMT-Pytorch-ECCV2022}.
Reference-Based Image Super-Resolution with Deformable Attention Transformer
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

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.