ResVR: Joint Rescaling and Viewport Rendering of Omnidirectional Images

With the advent of virtual reality technology, omnidirectional image (ODI) rescaling techniques are increasingly embraced for reducing transmitted and stored file sizes while preserving high image quality. Despite this progress, current ODI rescaling methods predominantly focus on enhancing the quality of images in equirectangular projection (ERP) format, which overlooks the fact that the content viewed on head mounted displays (HMDs) is actually a rendered viewport instead of an ERP image. In this work, we emphasize that focusing solely on ERP quality results in inferior viewport visual experiences for users. Thus, we propose ResVR, which is the first comprehensive framework for the joint Rescaling and Viewport Rendering of ODIs. ResVR allows obtaining LR ERP images for transmission while rendering high-quality viewports for users to watch on HMDs. In our ResVR, a novel discrete pixel sampling strategy is developed to tackle the complex mapping between the viewport and ERP, enabling end-to-end training of ResVR pipeline. Furthermore, a spherical pixel shape representation technique is innovatively derived from spherical differentiation to significantly improve the visual quality of rendered viewports. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ResVR outperforms existing methods in viewport rendering tasks across different fields of view, resolutions, and view directions while keeping a low transmission overhead.

CoFInAl: Enhancing Action Quality Assessment with Coarse-to-Fine Instruction Alignment

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) is pivotal for quantifying actions across domains like sports and medical care. Existing methods often rely on pre-trained backbones from large-scale action recognition datasets to boost performance on smaller AQA datasets. However, this common strategy yields suboptimal results due to the inherent struggle of these backbones to capture the subtle cues essential for AQA. Moreover, fine-tuning on smaller datasets risks overfitting. To address these issues, we propose Coarse-to-Fine Instruction Alignment (CoFInAl). Inspired by recent advances in large language model tuning, CoFInAl aligns AQA with broader pre-trained tasks by reformulating it as a coarse-to-fine classification task. Initially, it learns grade prototypes for coarse assessment and then utilizes fixed sub-grade prototypes for fine-grained assessment. This hierarchical approach mirrors the judging process, enhancing interpretability within the AQA framework. Experimental results on two long-term AQA datasets demonstrate CoFInAl achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant correlation gains of 5.49% and 3.55% on Rhythmic Gymnastics and Fis-V, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhouKanglei/CoFInAl_AQA.

CAMixerSR: Only Details Need More "Attention"

To satisfy the rapidly increasing demands on the large image (2K-8K) super-resolution (SR), prevailing methods follow two independent tracks: 1) accelerate existing networks by content-aware routing, and 2) design better super-resolution networks via token mixer refining. Despite directness, they encounter unavoidable defects (e.g., inflexible route or non-discriminative processing) limiting further improvements of quality-complexity trade-off. To erase the drawbacks, we integrate these schemes by proposing a content-aware mixer (CAMixer), which assigns convolution for simple contexts and additional deformable window-attention for sparse textures. Specifically, the CAMixer uses a learnable predictor to generate multiple bootstraps, including offsets for windows warping, a mask for classifying windows, and convolutional attentions for endowing convolution with the dynamic property, which modulates attention to include more useful textures self-adaptively and improves the representation capability of convolution. We further introduce a global classification loss to improve the accuracy of predictors. By simply stacking CAMixers, we obtain CAMixerSR which achieves superior performance on large-image SR, lightweight SR, and omnidirectional-image SR.

Modular Blind Video Quality Assessment

Blind video quality assessment (BVQA) plays a pivotal role in evaluating and improving the viewing experience of end-users across a wide range of video-based platforms and services. Contemporary deep learning-based models primarily analyze the video content in its aggressively downsampled format, while being blind to the impact of actual spatial resolution and frame rate on video quality. In this paper, we propose a modular BVQA model, and a method of training it to improve its modularity. Specifically, our model comprises a base quality predictor, a spatial rectifier, and a temporal rectifier, responding to the visual content and distortion, spatial resolution, and frame rate changes on video quality, respectively. During training, spatial and temporal rectifiers are dropped out with some probabilities so as to make the base quality predictor a standalone BVQA model, which should work better with the rectifiers. Extensive experiments on both professionally-generated content and user generated content video databases show that our quality model achieves superior or comparable performance to current methods. Furthermore, the modularity of our model offers a great opportunity to analyze existing video quality databases in terms of their spatial and temporal complexities. Last, our BVQA model is cost-effective to add other quality-relevant video attributes such as dynamic range and color gamut as additional rectifiers.

Optimal Transcoding Resolution Prediction for Efficient Per-Title Bitrate Ladder Estimation

Adaptive video streaming requires efficient bitrate ladder construction to meet heterogeneous network conditions and end-user demands. Per-title optimized encoding typically traverses numerous encoding parameters to search the Pareto-optimal operating points for each video. Recently, researchers have attempted to predict the content-optimized bitrate ladder for pre-encoding overhead reduction. However, existing methods commonly estimate the encoding parameters on the Pareto front and still require subsequent pre-encodings. In this paper, we propose to directly predict the optimal transcoding resolution at each preset bitrate for efficient bitrate ladder construction. We adopt a Temporal Attentive Gated Recurrent Network to capture spatial-temporal features and predict transcoding resolutions as a multi-task classification problem. We demonstrate that content-optimized bitrate ladders can thus be efficiently determined without any pre-encoding. Our method well approximates the ground-truth bitrate-resolution pairs with a slight Bj{\o}ntegaard Delta rate loss of 1.21% and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art fixed ladder.

Video Compression with Arbitrary Rescaling Network

Most video platforms provide video streaming services with different qualities, and the quality of the services is usually adjusted by the resolution of the videos. So high-resolution videos need to be downsampled for compression. In order to solve the problem of video coding at different resolutions, we propose a rate-guided arbitrary rescaling network (RARN) for video resizing before encoding. To help the RARN be compatible with standard codecs and generate compression-friendly results, an iteratively optimized transformer-based virtual codec (TVC) is introduced to simulate the key components of video encoding and perform bitrate estimation. By iteratively training the TVC and the RARN, we achieved 5%-29% BD-Rate reduction anchored by linear interpolation under different encoding configurations and resolutions, exceeding the previous methods on most test videos. Furthermore, the lightweight RARN structure can process FHD (1080p) content at real-time speed (91 FPS) and obtain a considerable rate reduction.

Hybrid Transformer and CNN Attention Network for Stereo Image Super-resolution

Multi-stage strategies are frequently employed in image restoration tasks. While transformer-based methods have exhibited high efficiency in single-image super-resolution tasks, they have not yet shown significant advantages over CNN-based methods in stereo super-resolution tasks. This can be attributed to two key factors: first, current single-image super-resolution transformers are unable to leverage the complementary stereo information during the process; second, the performance of transformers is typically reliant on sufficient data, which is absent in common stereo-image super-resolution algorithms. To address these issues, we propose a Hybrid Transformer and CNN Attention Network (HTCAN), which utilizes a transformer-based network for single-image enhancement and a CNN-based network for stereo information fusion. Furthermore, we employ a multi-patch training strategy and larger window sizes to activate more input pixels for super-resolution. We also revisit other advanced techniques, such as data augmentation, data ensemble, and model ensemble to reduce overfitting and data bias. Finally, our approach achieved a score of 23.90dB and emerged as the winner in Track 1 of the NTIRE 2023 Stereo Image Super-Resolution Challenge.

OPDN: Omnidirectional Position-aware Deformable Network for Omnidirectional Image Super-Resolution

360{\deg} omnidirectional images have gained research attention due to their immersive and interactive experience, particularly in AR/VR applications. However, they suffer from lower angular resolution due to being captured by fisheye lenses with the same sensor size for capturing planar images. To solve the above issues, we propose a two-stage framework for 360{\deg} omnidirectional image superresolution. The first stage employs two branches: model A, which incorporates omnidirectional position-aware deformable blocks (OPDB) and Fourier upsampling, and model B, which adds a spatial frequency fusion module (SFF) to model A. Model A aims to enhance the feature extraction ability of 360{\deg} image positional information, while Model B further focuses on the high-frequency information of 360{\deg} images. The second stage performs same-resolution enhancement based on the structure of model A with a pixel unshuffle operation. In addition, we collected data from YouTube to improve the fitting ability of the transformer, and created pseudo low-resolution images using a degradation network. Our proposed method achieves superior performance and wins the NTIRE 2023 challenge of 360{\deg} omnidirectional image super-resolution.

Self-Asymmetric Invertible Network for Compression-Aware Image Rescaling

High-resolution (HR) images are usually downscaled to low-resolution (LR) ones for better display and afterward upscaled back to the original size to recover details. Recent work in image rescaling formulates downscaling and upscaling as a unified task and learns a bijective mapping between HR and LR via invertible networks. However, in real-world applications (e.g., social media), most images are compressed for transmission. Lossy compression will lead to irreversible information loss on LR images, hence damaging the inverse upscaling procedure and degrading the reconstruction accuracy. In this paper, we propose the Self-Asymmetric Invertible Network (SAIN) for compression-aware image rescaling. To tackle the distribution shift, we first develop an end-to-end asymmetric framework with two separate bijective mappings for high-quality and compressed LR images, respectively. Then, based on empirical analysis of this framework, we model the distribution of the lost information (including downscaling and compression) using isotropic Gaussian mixtures and propose the Enhanced Invertible Block to derive high-quality/compressed LR images in one forward pass. Besides, we design a set of losses to regularize the learned LR images and enhance the invertibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate the consistent improvements of SAIN across various image rescaling datasets in terms of both quantitative and qualitative evaluation under standard image compression formats (i.e., JPEG and WebP).

Panoramic Video Salient Object Detection with Ambisonic Audio Guidance

Video salient object detection (VSOD), as a fundamental computer vision problem, has been extensively discussed in the last decade. However, all existing works focus on addressing the VSOD problem in 2D scenarios. With the rapid development of VR devices, panoramic videos have been a promising alternative to 2D videos to provide immersive feelings of the real world. In this paper, we aim to tackle the video salient object detection problem for panoramic videos, with their corresponding ambisonic audios. A multimodal fusion module equipped with two pseudo-siamese audio-visual context fusion (ACF) blocks is proposed to effectively conduct audio-visual interaction. The ACF block equipped with spherical positional encoding enables the fusion in the 3D context to capture the spatial correspondence between pixels and sound sources from the equirectangular frames and ambisonic audios. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed components and demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ASOD60K dataset.