SDRTV-to-HDRTV Conversion via Spatial-Temporal Feature Fusion

HDR(High Dynamic Range) video can reproduce realistic scenes more realistically, with a wider gamut and broader brightness range. HDR video resources are still scarce, and most videos are still stored in SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) format. Therefore, SDRTV-to-HDRTV Conversion (SDR video to HDR video) can significantly enhance the user's video viewing experience. Since the correlation between adjacent video frames is very high, the method utilizing the information of multiple frames can improve the quality of the converted HDRTV. Therefore, we propose a multi-frame fusion neural network \textbf{DSLNet} for SDRTV to HDRTV conversion. We first propose a dynamic spatial-temporal feature alignment module \textbf{DMFA}, which can align and fuse multi-frame. Then a novel spatial-temporal feature modulation module \textbf{STFM}, STFM extracts spatial-temporal information of adjacent frames for more accurate feature modulation. Finally, we design a quality enhancement module \textbf{LKQE} with large kernels, which can enhance the quality of generated HDR videos. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we construct a corresponding multi-frame dataset using HDR video of the HDR10 standard to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of different methods. The experimental results show that our method obtains state-of-the-art performance. The dataset and code will be released.

Individualized Conditioning and Negative Distances for Speaker Separation

Speaker separation aims to extract multiple voices from a mixed signal. In this paper, we propose two speaker-aware designs to improve the existing speaker separation solutions. The first model is a speaker conditioning network that integrates speech samples to generate individualized speaker conditions, which then provide informed guidance for a separation module to produce well-separated outputs. The second design aims to reduce non-target voices in the separated speech. To this end, we propose negative distances to penalize the appearance of any non-target voice in the channel outputs, and positive distances to drive the separated voices closer to the clean targets. We explore two different setups, weighted-sum and triplet-like, to integrate these two distances to form a combined auxiliary loss for the separation networks. Experiments conducted on LibriMix demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed models.

Heatmap Distribution Matching for Human Pose Estimation

For tackling the task of 2D human pose estimation, the great majority of the recent methods regard this task as a heatmap estimation problem, and optimize the heatmap prediction using the Gaussian-smoothed heatmap as the optimization objective and using the pixel-wise loss (e.g. MSE) as the loss function. In this paper, we show that optimizing the heatmap prediction in such a way, the model performance of body joint localization, which is the intrinsic objective of this task, may not be consistently improved during the optimization process of the heatmap prediction. To address this problem, from a novel perspective, we propose to formulate the optimization of the heatmap prediction as a distribution matching problem between the predicted heatmap and the dot annotation of the body joint directly. By doing so, our proposed method does not need to construct the Gaussian-smoothed heatmap and can achieve a more consistent model performance improvement during the optimization of the heatmap prediction. We show the effectiveness of our proposed method through extensive experiments on the COCO dataset and the MPII dataset.

Global Priors Guided Modulation Network for Joint Super-Resolution and Inverse Tone-Mapping

Joint super-resolution and inverse tone-mapping (SR-ITM) aims to enhance the visual quality of videos that have quality deficiencies in resolution and dynamic range. This problem arises when using 4K high dynamic range (HDR) TVs to watch a low-resolution standard dynamic range (LR SDR) video. Previous methods that rely on learning local information typically cannot do well in preserving color conformity and long-range structural similarity, resulting in unnatural color transition and texture artifacts. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose a global priors guided modulation network (GPGMNet) for joint SR-ITM. In particular, we design a global priors extraction module (GPEM) to extract color conformity prior and structural similarity prior that are beneficial for ITM and SR tasks, respectively. To further exploit the global priors and preserve spatial information, we devise multiple global priors guided spatial-wise modulation blocks (GSMBs) with a few parameters for intermediate feature modulation, in which the modulation parameters are generated by the shared global priors and the spatial features map from the spatial pyramid convolution block (SPCB). With these elaborate designs, the GPGMNet can achieve higher visual quality with lower computational complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed GPGMNet is superior to the state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, our proposed model exceeds the state-of-the-art by 0.64 dB in PSNR, with 69$\%$ fewer parameters and 3.1$\times$ speedup. The code will be released soon.

Meta Spatio-Temporal Debiasing for Video Scene Graph Generation

Video scene graph generation (VidSGG) aims to parse the video content into scene graphs, which involves modeling the spatio-temporal contextual information in the video. However, due to the long-tailed training data in datasets, the generalization performance of existing VidSGG models can be affected by the spatio-temporal conditional bias problem. In this work, from the perspective of meta-learning, we propose a novel Meta Video Scene Graph Generation (MVSGG) framework to address such a bias problem. Specifically, to handle various types of spatio-temporal conditional biases, our framework first constructs a support set and a group of query sets from the training data, where the data distribution of each query set is different from that of the support set w.r.t. a type of conditional bias. Then, by performing a novel meta training and testing process to optimize the model to obtain good testing performance on these query sets after training on the support set, our framework can effectively guide the model to learn to well generalize against biases. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework.

Linearization of a dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator using optical carrier band processing

The linearization of a microwave photonic link based on a dual-parallel Mach-Zehnder modulator is theoretically described and experimentally demonstrated. Up to four different radio frequency tones are considered in the study, which allow us to provide a complete mathematical description of all third-order distortion terms that arise at the photodetector. Simulations show that a complete linearization is obtained by properly tuning the DC bias voltages and processing the optical carrier and. As a result, a suppression of 17 dBm is experimentally obtained for the third-order distortion terms, as well as a SDFR improvement of 3 dB. The proposed linearization method enables the simultaneous modulation of four different signals without the need of additional radio frequency components, which is desirable to its implementation in integrated optics and makes it suitable for several applications in microwave photonics.

NTIRE 2022 Challenge on High Dynamic Range Imaging: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the challenge on constrained high dynamic range (HDR) imaging that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2022. This manuscript focuses on the competition set-up, datasets, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge aims at estimating an HDR image from multiple respective low dynamic range (LDR) observations, which might suffer from under- or over-exposed regions and different sources of noise. The challenge is composed of two tracks with an emphasis on fidelity and complexity constraints: In Track 1, participants are asked to optimize objective fidelity scores while imposing a low-complexity constraint (i.e. solutions can not exceed a given number of operations). In Track 2, participants are asked to minimize the complexity of their solutions while imposing a constraint on fidelity scores (i.e. solutions are required to obtain a higher fidelity score than the prescribed baseline). Both tracks use the same data and metrics: Fidelity is measured by means of PSNR with respect to a ground-truth HDR image (computed both directly and with a canonical tonemapping operation), while complexity metrics include the number of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations and runtime (in seconds).

Transcoded Video Restoration by Temporal Spatial Auxiliary Network

In most video platforms, such as Youtube, and TikTok, the played videos usually have undergone multiple video encodings such as hardware encoding by recording devices, software encoding by video editing apps, and single/multiple video transcoding by video application servers. Previous works in compressed video restoration typically assume the compression artifacts are caused by one-time encoding. Thus, the derived solution usually does not work very well in practice. In this paper, we propose a new method, temporal spatial auxiliary network (TSAN), for transcoded video restoration. Our method considers the unique traits between video encoding and transcoding, and we consider the initial shallow encoded videos as the intermediate labels to assist the network to conduct self-supervised attention training. In addition, we employ adjacent multi-frame information and propose the temporal deformable alignment and pyramidal spatial fusion for transcoded video restoration. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method is superior to that of the previous techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/icecherylXuli/TSAN.

Statistical Perspectives on Reliability of Artificial Intelligence Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have become increasingly popular in many areas. Nevertheless, AI technologies are still in their developing stages, and many issues need to be addressed. Among those, the reliability of AI systems needs to be demonstrated so that the AI systems can be used with confidence by the general public. In this paper, we provide statistical perspectives on the reliability of AI systems. Different from other considerations, the reliability of AI systems focuses on the time dimension. That is, the system can perform its designed functionality for the intended period. We introduce a so-called SMART statistical framework for AI reliability research, which includes five components: Structure of the system, Metrics of reliability, Analysis of failure causes, Reliability assessment, and Test planning. We review traditional methods in reliability data analysis and software reliability, and discuss how those existing methods can be transformed for reliability modeling and assessment of AI systems. We also describe recent developments in modeling and analysis of AI reliability and outline statistical research challenges in this area, including out-of-distribution detection, the effect of the training set, adversarial attacks, model accuracy, and uncertainty quantification, and discuss how those topics can be related to AI reliability, with illustrative examples. Finally, we discuss data collection and test planning for AI reliability assessment and how to improve system designs for higher AI reliability. The paper closes with some concluding remarks.

Recent Advances of Continual Learning in Computer Vision: An Overview

In contrast to batch learning where all training data is available at once, continual learning represents a family of methods that accumulate knowledge and learn continuously with data available in sequential order. Similar to the human learning process with the ability of learning, fusing, and accumulating new knowledge coming at different time steps, continual learning is considered to have high practical significance. Hence, continual learning has been studied in various artificial intelligence tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the recent progress of continual learning in computer vision. In particular, the works are grouped by their representative techniques, including regularization, knowledge distillation, memory, generative replay, parameter isolation, and a combination of the above techniques. For each category of these techniques, both its characteristics and applications in computer vision are presented. At the end of this overview, several subareas, where continuous knowledge accumulation is potentially helpful while continual learning has not been well studied, are discussed.