NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Low Light Image Enhancement: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 low light image enhancement challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to discover an effective network design or solution capable of generating brighter, clearer, and visually appealing results when dealing with a variety of conditions, including ultra-high resolution (4K and beyond), non-uniform illumination, backlighting, extreme darkness, and night scenes. A notable total of 428 participants registered for the challenge, with 22 teams ultimately making valid submissions. This paper meticulously evaluates the state-of-the-art advancements in enhancing low-light images, reflecting the significant progress and creativity in this field.

GT-Rain Single Image Deraining Challenge Report

This report reviews the results of the GT-Rain challenge on single image deraining at the UG2+ workshop at CVPR 2023. The aim of this competition is to study the rainy weather phenomenon in real world scenarios, provide a novel real world rainy image dataset, and to spark innovative ideas that will further the development of single image deraining methods on real images. Submissions were trained on the GT-Rain dataset and evaluated on an extension of the dataset consisting of 15 additional scenes. Scenes in GT-Rain are comprised of real rainy image and ground truth image captured moments after the rain had stopped. 275 participants were registered in the challenge and 55 competed in the final testing phase.

Diving Deep into Regions: Exploiting Regional Information Transformer for Single Image Deraining

Transformer-based Single Image Deraining (SID) methods have achieved remarkable success, primarily attributed to their robust capability in capturing long-range interactions. However, we've noticed that current methods handle rain-affected and unaffected regions concurrently, overlooking the disparities between these areas, resulting in confusion between rain streaks and background parts, and inabilities to obtain effective interactions, ultimately resulting in suboptimal deraining outcomes. To address the above issue, we introduce the Region Transformer (Regformer), a novel SID method that underlines the importance of independently processing rain-affected and unaffected regions while considering their combined impact for high-quality image reconstruction. The crux of our method is the innovative Region Transformer Block (RTB), which integrates a Region Masked Attention (RMA) mechanism and a Mixed Gate Forward Block (MGFB). Our RTB is used for attention selection of rain-affected and unaffected regions and local modeling of mixed scales. The RMA generates attention maps tailored to these two regions and their interactions, enabling our model to capture comprehensive features essential for rain removal. To better recover high-frequency textures and capture more local details, we develop the MGFB as a compensation module to complete local mixed scale modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model reaches state-of-the-art performance, significantly improving the image deraining quality. Our code and trained models are publicly available.

Leveraging Herpangina Data to Enhance Hospital-level Prediction of Hand-Foot-and-Mouth Disease Admissions Using UPTST

Outbreaks of hand-foot-and-mouth disease(HFMD) have been associated with significant morbidity and, in severe cases, mortality. Accurate forecasting of daily admissions of pediatric HFMD patients is therefore crucial for aiding the hospital in preparing for potential outbreaks and mitigating nosocomial transmissions. To address this pressing need, we propose a novel transformer-based model with a U-net shape, utilizing the patching strategy and the joint prediction strategy that capitalizes on insights from herpangina, a disease closely correlated with HFMD. This model also integrates representation learning by introducing reconstruction loss as an auxiliary loss. The results show that our U-net Patching Time Series Transformer (UPTST) model outperforms existing approaches in both long- and short-arm prediction accuracy of HFMD at hospital-level. Furthermore, the exploratory extension experiments show that the model's capabilities extend beyond prediction of infectious disease, suggesting broader applicability in various domains.

Decoupled Cross-Scale Cross-View Interaction for Stereo Image Enhancement in The Dark

Low-light stereo image enhancement (LLSIE) is a relatively new task to enhance the quality of visually unpleasant stereo images captured in dark condition. However, current methods achieve inferior performance on detail recovery and illumination adjustment. We find it is because: 1) the insufficient single-scale inter-view interaction makes the cross-view cues unable to be fully exploited; 2) lacking long-range dependency leads to the inability to deal with the spatial long-range effects caused by illumination degradation. To alleviate such limitations, we propose a LLSIE model termed Decoupled Cross-scale Cross-view Interaction Network (DCI-Net). Specifically, we present a decoupled interaction module (DIM) that aims for sufficient dual-view information interaction. DIM decouples the dual-view information exchange into discovering multi-scale cross-view correlations and further exploring cross-scale information flow. Besides, we present a spatial-channel information mining block (SIMB) for intra-view feature extraction, and the benefits are twofold. One is the long-range dependency capture to build spatial long-range relationship, and the other is expanded channel information refinement that enhances information flow in channel dimension. Extensive experiments on Flickr1024, KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015 and Middlebury datasets show that our method obtains better illumination adjustment and detail recovery, and achieves SOTA performance compared to other related methods. Our codes, datasets and models will be publicly available.