The Ninth NTIRE 2024 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

Semantic Segmentation on VSPW Dataset through Contrastive Loss and Multi-dataset Training Approach

Video scene parsing incorporates temporal information, which can enhance the consistency and accuracy of predictions compared to image scene parsing. The added temporal dimension enables a more comprehensive understanding of the scene, leading to more reliable results. This paper presents the winning solution of the CVPR2023 workshop for video semantic segmentation, focusing on enhancing Spatial-Temporal correlations with contrastive loss. We also explore the influence of multi-dataset training by utilizing a label-mapping technique. And the final result is aggregating the output of the above two models. Our approach achieves 65.95% mIoU performance on the VSPW dataset, ranked 1st place on the VSPW challenge at CVPR 2023.

Nondiscriminatory Treatment: a straightforward framework for multi-human parsing

Multi-human parsing aims to segment every body part of every human instance. Nearly all state-of-the-art methods follow the "detection first" or "segmentation first" pipelines. Different from them, we present an end-to-end and box-free pipeline from a new and more human-intuitive perspective. In training time, we directly do instance segmentation on humans and parts. More specifically, we introduce a notion of "indiscriminate objects with categorie" which treats humans and parts without distinction and regards them both as instances with categories. In the mask prediction, each binary mask is obtained by a combination of prototypes shared among all human and part categories. In inference time, we design a brand-new grouping post-processing method that relates each part instance with one single human instance and groups them together to obtain the final human-level parsing result. We name our method as Nondiscriminatory Treatment between Humans and Parts for Human Parsing (NTHP). Experiments show that our network performs superiorly against state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the MHP v2.0 and PASCAL-Person-Part datasets.