Images captured in weak illumination conditions will seriously degrade the image quality. Solving a series of degradation of low-light images can effectively improve the visual quality of the image and the performance of high-level visual tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Real-low to Real-normal Network for low-light image enhancement, dubbed R2RNet, based on the Retinex theory, which includes three subnets: a Decom-Net, a Denoise-Net, and a Relight-Net. These three subnets are used for decomposing, denoising, and contrast enhancement, respectively. Unlike most previous methods trained on synthetic images, we collect the first Large-Scale Real-World paired low/normal-light images dataset (LSRW dataset) for training. Our method can properly improve the contrast and suppress noise simultaneously. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin both quantitatively and visually. And we also show that the performance of the high-level visual task (\emph{i.e.} face detection) can be effectively improved by using the enhanced results obtained by our method in low-light conditions. Our codes and the LSRW dataset are available at: https://github.com/abcdef2000/R2RNet.
This paper reviews the first NTIRE challenge on quality enhancement of compressed video, with a focus on the proposed methods and results. In this challenge, the new Large-scale Diverse Video (LDV) dataset is employed. The challenge has three tracks. Tracks 1 and 2 aim at enhancing the videos compressed by HEVC at a fixed QP, while Track 3 is designed for enhancing the videos compressed by x265 at a fixed bit-rate. Besides, the quality enhancement of Tracks 1 and 3 targets at improving the fidelity (PSNR), and Track 2 targets at enhancing the perceptual quality. The three tracks totally attract 482 registrations. In the test phase, 12 teams, 8 teams and 11 teams submitted the final results of Tracks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of video quality enhancement. The homepage of the challenge: https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE21_VEnh
This paper introduces a novel dataset for video enhancement and studies the state-of-the-art methods of the NTIRE 2021 challenge on quality enhancement of compressed video. The challenge is the first NTIRE challenge in this direction, with three competitions, hundreds of participants and tens of proposed solutions. Our newly collected Large-scale Diverse Video (LDV) dataset is employed in the challenge. In our study, we analyze the proposed methods of the challenge and several methods in previous works on the proposed LDV dataset. We find that the NTIRE 2021 challenge advances the state-of-the-art of quality enhancement on compressed video. The proposed LDV dataset is publicly available at the homepage of the challenge: https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE21_VEnh
In recent years we have witnessed an increasing interest in applying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to improve the rate-distortion performance in image compression. However, the existing approaches either train a post-processing DNN on the decoder side, or propose learning for image compression in an end-to-end manner. This way, the trained DNNs are required in the decoder, leading to the incompatibility to the standard image decoders (e.g., JPEG) in personal computers and mobiles. Therefore, we propose learning to improve the encoding performance with the standard decoder. In this paper, We work on JPEG as an example. Specifically, a frequency-domain pre-editing method is proposed to optimize the distribution of DCT coefficients, aiming at facilitating the JPEG compression. Moreover, we propose learning the JPEG quantization table jointly with the pre-editing network. Most importantly, we do not modify the JPEG decoder and therefore our approach is applicable when viewing images with the widely used standard JPEG decoder. The experiments validate that our approach successfully improves the rate-distortion performance of JPEG in terms of various quality metrics, such as PSNR, MS-SSIM and LPIPS. Visually, this translates to better overall color retention especially when strong compression is applied. The codes are available at https://github.com/YannickStruempler/LearnedJPEG.
The past few years have witnessed increasing interests in applying deep learning to video compression. However, the existing approaches compress a video frame with only a few number of reference frames, which limits their ability to fully exploit the temporal correlation among video frames. To overcome this shortcoming, this paper proposes a Recurrent Learned Video Compression (RLVC) approach with the Recurrent Auto-Encoder (RAE) and Recurrent Probability Model (RPM). Specifically, the RAE employs recurrent cells in both the encoder and decoder. As such, the temporal information in a large range of frames can be used for generating latent representations and reconstructing compressed outputs. Furthermore, the proposed RPM network recurrently estimates the Probability Mass Function (PMF) of the latent representation, conditioned on the distribution of previous latent representations. Due to the correlation among consecutive frames, the conditional cross entropy can be lower than the independent cross entropy, thus reducing the bit-rate. The experiments show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art learned video compression performance in terms of both PSNR and MS-SSIM. Moreover, our approach outperforms the default Low-Delay P (LDP) setting of x265 on PSNR, and also has better performance on MS-SSIM than the SSIM-tuned x265 and the slowest setting of x265.