Take a Prior from Other Tasks for Severe Blur Removal

Recovering clear structures from severely blurry inputs is a challenging problem due to the large movements between the camera and the scene. Although some works apply segmentation maps on human face images for deblurring, they cannot handle natural scenes because objects and degradation are more complex, and inaccurate segmentation maps lead to a loss of details. For general scene deblurring, the feature space of the blurry image and corresponding sharp image under the high-level vision task is closer, which inspires us to rely on other tasks (e.g. classification) to learn a comprehensive prior in severe blur removal cases. We propose a cross-level feature learning strategy based on knowledge distillation to learn the priors, which include global contexts and sharp local structures for recovering potential details. In addition, we propose a semantic prior embedding layer with multi-level aggregation and semantic attention transformation to integrate the priors effectively. We introduce the proposed priors to various models, including the UNet and other mainstream deblurring baselines, leading to better performance on severe blur removal. Extensive experiments on natural image deblurring benchmarks and real-world images, such as GoPro and RealBlur datasets, demonstrate our method's effectiveness and generalization ability.

SlimSeg: Slimmable Semantic Segmentation with Boundary Supervision

Accurate semantic segmentation models typically require significant computational resources, inhibiting their use in practical applications. Recent works rely on well-crafted lightweight models to achieve fast inference. However, these models cannot flexibly adapt to varying accuracy and efficiency requirements. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective slimmable semantic segmentation (SlimSeg) method, which can be executed at different capacities during inference depending on the desired accuracy-efficiency tradeoff. More specifically, we employ parametrized channel slimming by stepwise downward knowledge distillation during training. Motivated by the observation that the differences between segmentation results of each submodel are mainly near the semantic borders, we introduce an additional boundary guided semantic segmentation loss to further improve the performance of each submodel. We show that our proposed SlimSeg with various mainstream networks can produce flexible models that provide dynamic adjustment of computational cost and better performance than independent models. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation benchmarks, Cityscapes and CamVid, demonstrate the generalization ability of our framework.

Learning Depth via Leveraging Semantics: Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Both Implicit and Explicit Semantic Guidance

Self-supervised depth estimation has made a great success in learning depth from unlabeled image sequences. While the mappings between image and pixel-wise depth are well-studied in current methods, the correlation between image, depth and scene semantics, however, is less considered. This hinders the network to better understand the real geometry of the scene, since the contextual clues, contribute not only the latent representations of scene depth, but also the straight constraints for depth map. In this paper, we leverage the two benefits by proposing the implicit and explicit semantic guidance for accurate self-supervised depth estimation. We propose a Semantic-aware Spatial Feature Alignment (SSFA) scheme to effectively align implicit semantic features with depth features for scene-aware depth estimation. We also propose a semantic-guided ranking loss to explicitly constrain the estimated depth maps to be consistent with real scene contextual properties. Both semantic label noise and prediction uncertainty is considered to yield reliable depth supervisions. Extensive experimental results show that our method produces high quality depth maps which are consistently superior either on complex scenes or diverse semantic categories, and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin.