NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Perceptual Extreme Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on perceptual extreme super-resolution with focus on proposed solutions and results. The challenge task was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor 16 based on a set of prior examples of low and corresponding high resolution images. The goal is to obtain a network design capable to produce high resolution results with the best perceptual quality and similar to the ground truth. The track had 280 registered participants, and 19 teams submitted the final results. They gauge the state-of-the-art in single image super-resolution.

Deep Space-Time Video Upsampling Networks

Video super-resolution (VSR) and frame interpolation (FI) are traditional computer vision problems, and the performance have been improving by incorporating deep learning recently. In this paper, we investigate the problem of jointly upsampling videos both in space and time, which is becoming more important with advances in display systems. One solution for this is to run VSR and FI, one by one, independently. This is highly inefficient as heavy deep neural networks (DNN) are involved in each solution. To this end, we propose an end-to-end DNN framework for the space-time video upsampling by efficiently merging VSR and FI into a joint framework. In our framework, a novel weighting scheme is proposed to fuse input frames effectively without explicit motion compensation for efficient processing of videos. The results show better results both quantitatively and qualitatively, while reducing the computation time (x7 faster) and the number of parameters (30%) compared to baselines.

DMV: Visual Object Tracking via Part-level Dense Memory and Voting-based Retrieval

We propose a novel memory-based tracker via part-level dense memory and voting-based retrieval, called DMV. Since deep learning techniques have been introduced to the tracking field, Siamese trackers have attracted many researchers due to the balance between speed and accuracy. However, most of them are based on a single template matching, which limits the performance as it restricts the accessible in-formation to the initial target features. In this paper, we relieve this limitation by maintaining an external memory that saves the tracking record. Part-level retrieval from the memory also liberates the information from the template and allows our tracker to better handle the challenges such as appearance changes and occlusions. By updating the memory during tracking, the representative power for the target object can be enhanced without online learning. We also propose a novel voting mechanism for the memory reading to filter out unreliable information in the memory. We comprehensively evaluate our tracker on OTB-100,TrackingNet, GOT-10k, LaSOT, and UAV123, which show that our method yields comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods.

Learning the Loss Functions in a Discriminative Space for Video Restoration

With more advanced deep network architectures and learning schemes such as GANs, the performance of video restoration algorithms has greatly improved recently. Meanwhile, the loss functions for optimizing deep neural networks remain relatively unchanged. To this end, we propose a new framework for building effective loss functions by learning a discriminative space specific to a video restoration task. Our framework is similar to GANs in that we iteratively train two networks - a generator and a loss network. The generator learns to restore videos in a supervised fashion, by following ground truth features through the feature matching in the discriminative space learned by the loss network. In addition, we also introduce a new relation loss in order to maintain the temporal consistency in output videos. Experiments on video superresolution and deblurring show that our method generates visually more pleasing videos with better quantitative perceptual metric values than the other state-of-the-art methods.

Unsupervised Keypoint Learning for Guiding Class-Conditional Video Prediction

We propose a deep video prediction model conditioned on a single image and an action class. To generate future frames, we first detect keypoints of a moving object and predict future motion as a sequence of keypoints. The input image is then translated following the predicted keypoints sequence to compose future frames. Detecting the keypoints is central to our algorithm, and our method is trained to detect the keypoints of arbitrary objects in an unsupervised manner. Moreover, the detected keypoints of the original videos are used as pseudo-labels to learn the motion of objects. Experimental results show that our method is successfully applied to various datasets without the cost of labeling keypoints in videos. The detected keypoints are similar to human-annotated labels, and prediction results are more realistic compared to the previous methods.

Copy-and-Paste Networks for Deep Video Inpainting

We present a novel deep learning based algorithm for video inpainting. Video inpainting is a process of completing corrupted or missing regions in videos. Video inpainting has additional challenges compared to image inpainting due to the extra temporal information as well as the need for maintaining the temporal coherency. We propose a novel DNN-based framework called the Copy-and-Paste Networks for video inpainting that takes advantage of additional information in other frames of the video. The network is trained to copy corresponding contents in reference frames and paste them to fill the holes in the target frame. Our network also includes an alignment network that computes affine matrices between frames for the alignment, enabling the network to take information from more distant frames for robustness. Our method produces visually pleasing and temporally coherent results while running faster than the state-of-the-art optimization-based method. In addition, we extend our framework for enhancing over/under exposed frames in videos. Using this enhancement technique, we were able to significantly improve the lane detection accuracy on road videos.

Onion-Peel Networks for Deep Video Completion

We propose the onion-peel networks for video completion. Given a set of reference images and a target image with holes, our network fills the hole by referring the contents in the reference images. Our onion-peel network progressively fills the hole from the hole boundary enabling it to exploit richer contextual information for the missing regions every step. Given a sufficient number of recurrences, even a large hole can be inpainted successfully. To attend to the missing information visible in the reference images, we propose an asymmetric attention block that computes similarities between the hole boundary pixels in the target and the non-hole pixels in the references in a non-local manner. With our attention block, our network can have an unlimited spatial-temporal window size and fill the holes with globally coherent contents. In addition, our framework is applicable to the image completion guided by the reference images without any modification, which is difficult to do with the previous methods. We validate that our method produces visually pleasing image and video inpainting results in realistic test cases.

Fast User-Guided Video Object Segmentation by Interaction-and-Propagation Networks

We present a deep learning method for the interactive video object segmentation. Our method is built upon two core operations, interaction and propagation, and each operation is conducted by Convolutional Neural Networks. The two networks are connected both internally and externally so that the networks are trained jointly and interact with each other to solve the complex video object segmentation problem. We propose a new multi-round training scheme for the interactive video object segmentation so that the networks can learn how to understand the user's intention and update incorrect estimations during the training. At the testing time, our method produces high-quality results and also runs fast enough to work with users interactively. We evaluated the proposed method quantitatively on the interactive track benchmark at the DAVIS Challenge 2018. We outperformed other competing methods by a significant margin in both the speed and the accuracy. We also demonstrated that our method works well with real user interactions.

End-to-End Time-Lapse Video Synthesis from a Single Outdoor Image

Time-lapse videos usually contain visually appealing content but are often difficult and costly to create. In this paper, we present an end-to-end solution to synthesize a time-lapse video from a single outdoor image using deep neural networks. Our key idea is to train a conditional generative adversarial network based on existing datasets of time-lapse videos and image sequences. We propose a multi-frame joint conditional generation framework to effectively learn the correlation between the illumination change of an outdoor scene and the time of the day. We further present a multi-domain training scheme for robust training of our generative models from two datasets with different distributions and missing timestamp labels. Compared to alternative time-lapse video synthesis algorithms, our method uses the timestamp as the control variable and does not require a reference video to guide the synthesis of the final output. We conduct ablation studies to validate our algorithm and compare with state-of-the-art techniques both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks

We propose a novel solution for semi-supervised video object segmentation. By the nature of the problem, available cues (e.g. video frame(s) with object masks) become richer with the intermediate predictions. However, the existing methods are unable to fully exploit this rich source of information. We resolve the issue by leveraging memory networks and learn to read relevant information from all available sources. In our framework, the past frames with object masks form an external memory, and the current frame as the query is segmented using the mask information in the memory. Specifically, the query and the memory are densely matched in the feature space, covering all the space-time pixel locations in a feed-forward fashion. Contrast to the previous approaches, the abundant use of the guidance information allows us to better handle the challenges such as appearance changes and occlussions. We validate our method on the latest benchmark sets and achieved the state-of-the-art performance (overall score of 79.4 on Youtube-VOS val set, J of 88.7 and 79.2 on DAVIS 2016/2017 val set respectively) while having a fast runtime (0.16 second/frame on DAVIS 2016 val set).