ReBotNet: Fast Real-time Video Enhancement

Most video restoration networks are slow, have high computational load, and can't be used for real-time video enhancement. In this work, we design an efficient and fast framework to perform real-time video enhancement for practical use-cases like live video calls and video streams. Our proposed method, called Recurrent Bottleneck Mixer Network (ReBotNet), employs a dual-branch framework. The first branch learns spatio-temporal features by tokenizing the input frames along the spatial and temporal dimensions using a ConvNext-based encoder and processing these abstract tokens using a bottleneck mixer. To further improve temporal consistency, the second branch employs a mixer directly on tokens extracted from individual frames. A common decoder then merges the features form the two branches to predict the enhanced frame. In addition, we propose a recurrent training approach where the last frame's prediction is leveraged to efficiently enhance the current frame while improving temporal consistency. To evaluate our method, we curate two new datasets that emulate real-world video call and streaming scenarios, and show extensive results on multiple datasets where ReBotNet outperforms existing approaches with lower computations, reduced memory requirements, and faster inference time.

RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Free-form inpainting is the task of adding new content to an image in the regions specified by an arbitrary binary mask. Most existing approaches train for a certain distribution of masks, which limits their generalization capabilities to unseen mask types. Furthermore, training with pixel-wise and perceptual losses often leads to simple textural extensions towards the missing areas instead of semantically meaningful generation. In this work, we propose RePaint: A Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) based inpainting approach that is applicable to even extreme masks. We employ a pretrained unconditional DDPM as the generative prior. To condition the generation process, we only alter the reverse diffusion iterations by sampling the unmasked regions using the given image information. Since this technique does not modify or condition the original DDPM network itself, the model produces high-quality and diverse output images for any inpainting form. We validate our method for both faces and general-purpose image inpainting using standard and extreme masks. RePaint outperforms state-of-the-art Autoregressive, and GAN approaches for at least five out of six mask distributions. Github Repository: git.io/RePaint

Normalizing Flow as a Flexible Fidelity Objective for Photo-Realistic Super-resolution

Super-resolution is an ill-posed problem, where a ground-truth high-resolution image represents only one possibility in the space of plausible solutions. Yet, the dominant paradigm is to employ pixel-wise losses, such as L_1, which drive the prediction towards a blurry average. This leads to fundamentally conflicting objectives when combined with adversarial losses, which degrades the final quality. We address this issue by revisiting the L_1 loss and show that it corresponds to a one-layer conditional flow. Inspired by this relation, we explore general flows as a fidelity-based alternative to the L_1 objective. We demonstrate that the flexibility of deeper flows leads to better visual quality and consistency when combined with adversarial losses. We conduct extensive user studies for three datasets and scale factors, where our approach is shown to outperform state-of-the-art methods for photo-realistic super-resolution. Code and trained models will be available at: git.io/AdFlow

Hierarchical Conditional Flow: A Unified Framework for Image Super-Resolution and Image Rescaling

Normalizing flows have recently demonstrated promising results for low-level vision tasks. For image super-resolution (SR), it learns to predict diverse photo-realistic high-resolution (HR) images from the low-resolution (LR) image rather than learning a deterministic mapping. For image rescaling, it achieves high accuracy by jointly modelling the downscaling and upscaling processes. While existing approaches employ specialized techniques for these two tasks, we set out to unify them in a single formulation. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical conditional flow (HCFlow) as a unified framework for image SR and image rescaling. More specifically, HCFlow learns a bijective mapping between HR and LR image pairs by modelling the distribution of the LR image and the rest high-frequency component simultaneously. In particular, the high-frequency component is conditional on the LR image in a hierarchical manner. To further enhance the performance, other losses such as perceptual loss and GAN loss are combined with the commonly used negative log-likelihood loss in training. Extensive experiments on general image SR, face image SR and image rescaling have demonstrated that the proposed HCFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality.

DeFlow: Learning Complex Image Degradations from Unpaired Data with Conditional Flows

The difficulty of obtaining paired data remains a major bottleneck for learning image restoration and enhancement models for real-world applications. Current strategies aim to synthesize realistic training data by modeling noise and degradations that appear in real-world settings. We propose DeFlow, a method for learning stochastic image degradations from unpaired data. Our approach is based on a novel unpaired learning formulation for conditional normalizing flows. We model the degradation process in the latent space of a shared flow encoder-decoder network. This allows us to learn the conditional distribution of a noisy image given the clean input by solely minimizing the negative log-likelihood of the marginal distributions. We validate our DeFlow formulation on the task of joint image restoration and super-resolution. The models trained with the synthetic data generated by DeFlow outperform previous learnable approaches on all three datasets.

SRFlow: Learning the Super-Resolution Space with Normalizing Flow

Super-resolution is an ill-posed problem, since it allows for multiple predictions for a given low-resolution image. This fundamental fact is largely ignored by state-of-the-art deep learning based approaches. These methods instead train a deterministic mapping using combinations of reconstruction and adversarial losses. In this work, we therefore propose SRFlow: a normalizing flow based super-resolution method capable of learning the conditional distribution of the output given the low-resolution input. Our model is trained in a principled manner using a single loss, namely the negative log-likelihood. SRFlow therefore directly accounts for the ill-posed nature of the problem, and learns to predict diverse photo-realistic high-resolution images. Moreover, we utilize the strong image posterior learned by SRFlow to design flexible image manipulation techniques, capable of enhancing super-resolved images by, e.g., transferring content from other images. We perform extensive experiments on faces, as well as on super-resolution in general. SRFlow outperforms state-of-the-art GAN-based approaches in terms of both PSNR and perceptual quality metrics, while allowing for diversity through the exploration of the space of super-resolved solutions.

NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Real-World Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on real world super-resolution. It focuses on the participating methods and final results. The challenge addresses the real world setting, where paired true high and low-resolution images are unavailable. For training, only one set of source input images is therefore provided along with a set of unpaired high-quality target images. In Track 1: Image Processing artifacts, the aim is to super-resolve images with synthetically generated image processing artifacts. This allows for quantitative benchmarking of the approaches \wrt a ground-truth image. In Track 2: Smartphone Images, real low-quality smart phone images have to be super-resolved. In both tracks, the ultimate goal is to achieve the best perceptual quality, evaluated using a human study. This is the second challenge on the subject, following AIM 2019, targeting to advance the state-of-the-art in super-resolution. To measure the performance we use the benchmark protocol from AIM 2019. In total 22 teams competed in the final testing phase, demonstrating new and innovative solutions to the problem.

AIM 2019 Challenge on Real-World Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the AIM 2019 challenge on real world super-resolution. It focuses on the participating methods and final results. The challenge addresses the real world setting, where paired true high and low-resolution images are unavailable. For training, only one set of source input images is therefore provided in the challenge. In Track 1: Source Domain the aim is to super-resolve such images while preserving the low level image characteristics of the source input domain. In Track 2: Target Domain a set of high-quality images is also provided for training, that defines the output domain and desired quality of the super-resolved images. To allow for quantitative evaluation, the source input images in both tracks are constructed using artificial, but realistic, image degradations. The challenge is the first of its kind, aiming to advance the state-of-the-art and provide a standard benchmark for this newly emerging task. In total 7 teams competed in the final testing phase, demonstrating new and innovative solutions to the problem.

Unsupervised Learning for Real-World Super-Resolution

Most current super-resolution methods rely on low and high resolution image pairs to train a network in a fully supervised manner. However, such image pairs are not available in real-world applications. Instead of directly addressing this problem, most works employ the popular bicubic downsampling strategy to artificially generate a corresponding low resolution image. Unfortunately, this strategy introduces significant artifacts, removing natural sensor noise and other real-world characteristics. Super-resolution networks trained on such bicubic images therefore struggle to generalize to natural images. In this work, we propose an unsupervised approach for image super-resolution. Given only unpaired data, we learn to invert the effects of bicubic downsampling in order to restore the natural image characteristics present in the data. This allows us to generate realistic image pairs, faithfully reflecting the distribution of real-world images. Our super-resolution network can therefore be trained with direct pixel-wise supervision in the high resolution domain, while robustly generalizing to real input. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in quantitative and qualitative experiments.