Efficient Invariant Kalman Filter for Inertial-based Odometry with Large-sample Environmental Measurements

A filter for inertial-based odometry is a recursive method used to estimate the pose from measurements of ego-motion and relative pose. Currently, there is no known filter that guarantees the computation of a globally optimal solution for the non-linear measurement model. In this paper, we demonstrate that an innovative filter, with the state being $SE_2(3)$ and the $\sqrt{n}$-\textit{consistent} pose as the initialization, efficiently achieves \textit{asymptotic optimality} in terms of minimum mean square error. This approach is tailored for real-time SLAM and inertial-based odometry applications. Our first contribution is that we propose an iterative filtering method based on the Gauss-Newton method on Lie groups which is numerically to solve the estimation of states from a priori and non-linear measurements. The filtering stands out due to its iterative mechanism and adaptive initialization. Second, when dealing with environmental measurements of the surroundings, we utilize a $\sqrt{n}$-consistent pose as the initial value for the update step in a single iteration. The solution is closed in form and has computational complexity $O(n)$. Third, we theoretically show that the approach can achieve asymptotic optimality in the sense of minimum mean square error from the a priori and virtual relative pose measurements (see Problem~\ref{prob:new update problem}). Finally, to validate our method, we carry out extensive numerical and experimental evaluations. Our results consistently demonstrate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art filter-based methods, including the iterated extended Kalman filter and the invariant extended Kalman filter, in terms of accuracy and running time.

Deep Linear Array Pushbroom Image Restoration: A Degradation Pipeline and Jitter-Aware Restoration Network

Linear Array Pushbroom (LAP) imaging technology is widely used in the realm of remote sensing. However, images acquired through LAP always suffer from distortion and blur because of camera jitter. Traditional methods for restoring LAP images, such as algorithms estimating the point spread function (PSF), exhibit limited performance. To tackle this issue, we propose a Jitter-Aware Restoration Network (JARNet), to remove the distortion and blur in two stages. In the first stage, we formulate an Optical Flow Correction (OFC) block to refine the optical flow of the degraded LAP images, resulting in pre-corrected images where most of the distortions are alleviated. In the second stage, for further enhancement of the pre-corrected images, we integrate two jitter-aware techniques within the Spatial and Frequency Residual (SFRes) block: 1) introducing Coordinate Attention (CoA) to the SFRes block in order to capture the jitter state in orthogonal direction; 2) manipulating image features in both spatial and frequency domains to leverage local and global priors. Additionally, we develop a data synthesis pipeline, which applies Continue Dynamic Shooting Model (CDSM) to simulate realistic degradation in LAP images. Both the proposed JARNet and LAP image synthesis pipeline establish a foundation for addressing this intricate challenge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed two-stage method outperforms state-of-the-art image restoration models. Code is available at https://github.com/JHW2000/JARNet.

Adaptive Window Pruning for Efficient Local Motion Deblurring

Local motion blur commonly occurs in real-world photography due to the mixing between moving objects and stationary backgrounds during exposure. Existing image deblurring methods predominantly focus on global deblurring, inadvertently affecting the sharpness of backgrounds in locally blurred images and wasting unnecessary computation on sharp pixels, especially for high-resolution images. This paper aims to adaptively and efficiently restore high-resolution locally blurred images. We propose a local motion deblurring vision Transformer (LMD-ViT) built on adaptive window pruning Transformer blocks (AdaWPT). To focus deblurring on local regions and reduce computation, AdaWPT prunes unnecessary windows, only allowing the active windows to be involved in the deblurring processes. The pruning operation relies on the blurriness confidence predicted by a confidence predictor that is trained end-to-end using a reconstruction loss with Gumbel-Softmax re-parameterization and a pruning loss guided by annotated blur masks. Our method removes local motion blur effectively without distorting sharp regions, demonstrated by its exceptional perceptual and quantitative improvements (+0.24dB) compared to state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our approach substantially reduces FLOPs by 66% and achieves more than a twofold increase in inference speed compared to Transformer-based deblurring methods. We will make our code and annotated blur masks publicly available.

Real-world Deep Local Motion Deblurring

Most existing deblurring methods focus on removing global blur caused by camera shake, while they cannot well handle local blur caused by object movements. To fill the vacancy of local deblurring in real scenes, we establish the first real local motion blur dataset (ReLoBlur), which is captured by a synchronized beam-splitting photographing system and corrected by a post-progressing pipeline. Based on ReLoBlur, we propose a Local Blur-Aware Gated network (LBAG) and several local blur-aware techniques to bridge the gap between global and local deblurring: 1) a blur detection approach based on background subtraction to localize blurred regions; 2) a gate mechanism to guide our network to focus on blurred regions; and 3) a blur-aware patch cropping strategy to address data imbalance problem. Extensive experiments prove the reliability of ReLoBlur dataset, and demonstrate that LBAG achieves better performance than state-of-the-art global deblurring methods without our proposed local blur-aware techniques.

SRDiff: Single Image Super-Resolution with Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Single image super-resolution (SISR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from the given low-resolution (LR) ones, which is an ill-posed problem because one LR image corresponds to multiple HR images. Recently, learning-based SISR methods have greatly outperformed traditional ones, while suffering from over-smoothing, mode collapse or large model footprint issues for PSNR-oriented, GAN-driven and flow-based methods respectively. To solve these problems, we propose a novel single image super-resolution diffusion probabilistic model (SRDiff), which is the first diffusion-based model for SISR. SRDiff is optimized with a variant of the variational bound on the data likelihood and can provide diverse and realistic SR predictions by gradually transforming the Gaussian noise into a super-resolution (SR) image conditioned on an LR input through a Markov chain. In addition, we introduce residual prediction to the whole framework to speed up convergence. Our extensive experiments on facial and general benchmarks (CelebA and DIV2K datasets) show that 1) SRDiff can generate diverse SR results in rich details with state-of-the-art performance, given only one LR input; 2) SRDiff is easy to train with a small footprint; and 3) SRDiff can perform flexible image manipulation including latent space interpolation and content fusion.