BlindDiff: Empowering Degradation Modelling in Diffusion Models for Blind Image Super-Resolution

Diffusion models (DM) have achieved remarkable promise in image super-resolution (SR). However, most of them are tailored to solving non-blind inverse problems with fixed known degradation settings, limiting their adaptability to real-world applications that involve complex unknown degradations. In this work, we propose BlindDiff, a DM-based blind SR method to tackle the blind degradation settings in SISR. BlindDiff seamlessly integrates the MAP-based optimization into DMs, which constructs a joint distribution of the low-resolution (LR) observation, high-resolution (HR) data, and degradation kernels for the data and kernel priors, and solves the blind SR problem by unfolding MAP approach along with the reverse process. Unlike most DMs, BlindDiff firstly presents a modulated conditional transformer (MCFormer) that is pre-trained with noise and kernel constraints, further serving as a posterior sampler to provide both priors simultaneously. Then, we plug a simple yet effective kernel-aware gradient term between adjacent sampling iterations that guides the diffusion model to learn degradation consistency knowledge. This also enables to joint refine the degradation model as well as HR images by observing the previous denoised sample. With the MAP-based reverse diffusion process, we show that BlindDiff advocates alternate optimization for blur kernel estimation and HR image restoration in a mutual reinforcing manner. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that BlindDiff achieves the state-of-the-art performance with significant model complexity reduction compared to recent DM-based methods. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/lifengcs/BlindDiff}

Learning Hierarchical Color Guidance for Depth Map Super-Resolution

Color information is the most commonly used prior knowledge for depth map super-resolution (DSR), which can provide high-frequency boundary guidance for detail restoration. However, its role and functionality in DSR have not been fully developed. In this paper, we rethink the utilization of color information and propose a hierarchical color guidance network to achieve DSR. On the one hand, the low-level detail embedding module is designed to supplement high-frequency color information of depth features in a residual mask manner at the low-level stages. On the other hand, the high-level abstract guidance module is proposed to maintain semantic consistency in the reconstruction process by using a semantic mask that encodes the global guidance information. The color information of these two dimensions plays a role in the front and back ends of the attention-based feature projection (AFP) module in a more comprehensive form. Simultaneously, the AFP module integrates the multi-scale content enhancement block and adaptive attention projection block to make full use of multi-scale information and adaptively project critical restoration information in an attention manner for DSR. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods on four benchmark datasets, our method achieves more competitive performance both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Query-guided Prototype Evolution Network for Few-Shot Segmentation

Previous Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) approaches exclusively utilize support features for prototype generation, neglecting the specific requirements of the query. To address this, we present the Query-guided Prototype Evolution Network (QPENet), a new method that integrates query features into the generation process of foreground and background prototypes, thereby yielding customized prototypes attuned to specific queries. The evolution of the foreground prototype is accomplished through a \textit{support-query-support} iterative process involving two new modules: Pseudo-prototype Generation (PPG) and Dual Prototype Evolution (DPE). The PPG module employs support features to create an initial prototype for the preliminary segmentation of the query image, resulting in a pseudo-prototype reflecting the unique needs of the current query. Subsequently, the DPE module performs reverse segmentation on support images using this pseudo-prototype, leading to the generation of evolved prototypes, which can be considered as custom solutions. As for the background prototype, the evolution begins with a global background prototype that represents the generalized features of all training images. We also design a Global Background Cleansing (GBC) module to eliminate potential adverse components mirroring the characteristics of the current foreground class. Experimental results on the PASCAL-$5^i$ and COCO-$20^i$ datasets attest to the substantial enhancements achieved by QPENet over prevailing state-of-the-art techniques, underscoring the validity of our ideas.

SDDNet: Style-guided Dual-layer Disentanglement Network for Shadow Detection

Despite significant progress in shadow detection, current methods still struggle with the adverse impact of background color, which may lead to errors when shadows are present on complex backgrounds. Drawing inspiration from the human visual system, we treat the input shadow image as a composition of a background layer and a shadow layer, and design a Style-guided Dual-layer Disentanglement Network (SDDNet) to model these layers independently. To achieve this, we devise a Feature Separation and Recombination (FSR) module that decomposes multi-level features into shadow-related and background-related components by offering specialized supervision for each component, while preserving information integrity and avoiding redundancy through the reconstruction constraint. Moreover, we propose a Shadow Style Filter (SSF) module to guide the feature disentanglement by focusing on style differentiation and uniformization. With these two modules and our overall pipeline, our model effectively minimizes the detrimental effects of background color, yielding superior performance on three public datasets with a real-time inference speed of 32 FPS.

Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection

By integrating complementary information from RGB image and depth map, the ability of salient object detection (SOD) for complex and challenging scenes can be improved. In recent years, the important role of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in feature extraction and cross-modality interaction has been fully explored, but it is still insufficient in modeling global long-range dependencies of self-modality and cross-modality. To this end, we introduce CNNs-assisted Transformer architecture and propose a novel RGB-D SOD network with Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement (PICR-Net). On the one hand, considering the prior correlation between RGB modality and depth modality, an attention-triggered cross-modality point-aware interaction (CmPI) module is designed to explore the feature interaction of different modalities with positional constraints. On the other hand, in order to alleviate the block effect and detail destruction problems brought by the Transformer naturally, we design a CNN-induced refinement (CNNR) unit for content refinement and supplementation. Extensive experiments on five RGB-D SOD datasets show that the proposed network achieves competitive results in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons.

Frequency Perception Network for Camouflaged Object Detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to accurately detect objects hidden in the surrounding environment. However, the existing COD methods mainly locate camouflaged objects in the RGB domain, their performance has not been fully exploited in many challenging scenarios. Considering that the features of the camouflaged object and the background are more discriminative in the frequency domain, we propose a novel learnable and separable frequency perception mechanism driven by the semantic hierarchy in the frequency domain. Our entire network adopts a two-stage model, including a frequency-guided coarse localization stage and a detail-preserving fine localization stage. With the multi-level features extracted by the backbone, we design a flexible frequency perception module based on octave convolution for coarse positioning. Then, we design the correction fusion module to step-by-step integrate the high-level features through the prior-guided correction and cross-layer feature channel association, and finally combine them with the shallow features to achieve the detailed correction of the camouflaged objects. Compared with the currently existing models, our proposed method achieves competitive performance in three popular benchmark datasets both qualitatively and quantitatively.

You Can Mask More For Extremely Low-Bitrate Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) methods have experienced significant progress during recent years. However, these methods are primarily dedicated to optimizing the rate-distortion (R-D) performance at medium and high bitrates (> 0.1 bits per pixel (bpp)), while research on extremely low bitrates is limited. Besides, existing methods fail to explicitly explore the image structure and texture components crucial for image compression, treating them equally alongside uninformative components in networks. This can cause severe perceptual quality degradation, especially under low-bitrate scenarios. In this work, inspired by the success of pre-trained masked autoencoders (MAE) in many downstream tasks, we propose to rethink its mask sampling strategy from structure and texture perspectives for high redundancy reduction and discriminative feature representation, further unleashing the potential of LIC methods. Therefore, we present a dual-adaptive masking approach (DA-Mask) that samples visible patches based on the structure and texture distributions of original images. We combine DA-Mask and pre-trained MAE in masked image modeling (MIM) as an initial compressor that abstracts informative semantic context and texture representations. Such a pipeline can well cooperate with LIC networks to achieve further secondary compression while preserving promising reconstruction quality. Consequently, we propose a simple yet effective masked compression model (MCM), the first framework that unifies MIM and LIC end-to-end for extremely low-bitrate image compression. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our approach outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods in R-D performance, visual quality, and downstream applications, at very low bitrates. Our code is available at https://github.com/lianqi1008/MCM.git.

Exploring Resolution Fields for Scalable Image Compression with Uncertainty Guidance

Recently, there are significant advancements in learning-based image compression methods surpassing traditional coding standards. Most of them prioritize achieving the best rate-distortion performance for a particular compression rate, which limits their flexibility and adaptability in various applications with complex and varying constraints. In this work, we explore the potential of resolution fields in scalable image compression and propose the reciprocal pyramid network (RPN) that fulfills the need for more adaptable and versatile compression. Specifically, RPN first builds a compression pyramid and generates the resolution fields at different levels in a top-down manner. The key design lies in the cross-resolution context mining module between adjacent levels, which performs feature enriching and distillation to mine meaningful contextualized information and remove unnecessary redundancy, producing informative resolution fields as residual priors. The scalability is achieved by progressive bitstream reusing and resolution field incorporation varying at different levels. Furthermore, between adjacent compression levels, we explicitly quantify the aleatoric uncertainty from the bottom decoded representations and develop an uncertainty-guided loss to update the upper-level compression parameters, forming a reverse pyramid process that enforces the network to focus on the textured pixels with high variance for more reliable and accurate reconstruction. Combining resolution field exploration and uncertainty guidance in a pyramid manner, RPN can effectively achieve spatial and quality scalable image compression. Experiments show the superiority of RPN against existing classical and deep learning-based scalable codecs. Code will be available at https://github.com/JGIroro/RPNSIC.

PUGAN: Physical Model-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Using GAN with Dual-Discriminators

Due to the light absorption and scattering induced by the water medium, underwater images usually suffer from some degradation problems, such as low contrast, color distortion, and blurring details, which aggravate the difficulty of downstream underwater understanding tasks. Therefore, how to obtain clear and visually pleasant images has become a common concern of people, and the task of underwater image enhancement (UIE) has also emerged as the times require. Among existing UIE methods, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) based methods perform well in visual aesthetics, while the physical model-based methods have better scene adaptability. Inheriting the advantages of the above two types of models, we propose a physical model-guided GAN model for UIE in this paper, referred to as PUGAN. The entire network is under the GAN architecture. On the one hand, we design a Parameters Estimation subnetwork (Par-subnet) to learn the parameters for physical model inversion, and use the generated color enhancement image as auxiliary information for the Two-Stream Interaction Enhancement sub-network (TSIE-subnet). Meanwhile, we design a Degradation Quantization (DQ) module in TSIE-subnet to quantize scene degradation, thereby achieving reinforcing enhancement of key regions. On the other hand, we design the Dual-Discriminators for the style-content adversarial constraint, promoting the authenticity and visual aesthetics of the results. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our PUGAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Dense-Localizing Audio-Visual Events in Untrimmed Videos: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Baseline

Existing audio-visual event localization (AVE) handles manually trimmed videos with only a single instance in each of them. However, this setting is unrealistic as natural videos often contain numerous audio-visual events with different categories. To better adapt to real-life applications, in this paper we focus on the task of dense-localizing audio-visual events, which aims to jointly localize and recognize all audio-visual events occurring in an untrimmed video. The problem is challenging as it requires fine-grained audio-visual scene and context understanding. To tackle this problem, we introduce the first Untrimmed Audio-Visual (UnAV-100) dataset, which contains 10K untrimmed videos with over 30K audio-visual events. Each video has 2.8 audio-visual events on average, and the events are usually related to each other and might co-occur as in real-life scenes. Next, we formulate the task using a new learning-based framework, which is capable of fully integrating audio and visual modalities to localize audio-visual events with various lengths and capture dependencies between them in a single pass. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method as well as the significance of multi-scale cross-modal perception and dependency modeling for this task.