NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution and Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video: Dataset, Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution and Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video. In this challenge, we proposed the LDV 2.0 dataset, which includes the LDV dataset (240 videos) and 95 additional videos. This challenge includes three tracks. Track 1 aims at enhancing the videos compressed by HEVC at a fixed QP. Track 2 and Track 3 target both the super-resolution and quality enhancement of HEVC compressed video. They require x2 and x4 super-resolution, respectively. The three tracks totally attract more than 600 registrations. In the test phase, 8 teams, 8 teams and 12 teams submitted the final results to Tracks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of super-resolution and quality enhancement of compressed video. The proposed LDV 2.0 dataset is available at https://github.com/RenYang-home/LDV_dataset. The homepage of this challenge (including open-sourced codes) is at https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE22_VEnh_SR.

Theoretical analysis on Noise2Noise using Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator for Gaussian denoising: Towards unsupervised training with clipped noisy images

Recently, Noise2Noise has been proposed for unsupervised training of deep neural networks in image restoration problems including denoising Gaussian noise. However, it does not work well for truncated noise with non-zero mean. Here, we perform theoretical analysis on Noise2Noise for the limited case of Gaussian noise removal using Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE). We extend SURE to deal with a pair of noise realizations to directly compare with Noise2Noise. Then, we show that Noise2Noise with Gaussian noise is a special case of our newly extended SURE with a pair of uncorrelated noise realizations. Lastly, we propose a compensation method for clipped Gaussian noise to approximately follow Normal distribution and show how this compensation method can be used for SURE based unsupervised denoiser training. We also show that our theoretical analysis provides insights on how to use Noise2Noise for clipped Gaussian noise.

Training deep learning based denoisers without ground truth data

Recent deep learning based denoisers often outperform state-of-the-art conventional denoisers such as BM3D. They are typically trained to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) between the output of a deep neural network and the ground truth image. In deep learning based denoisers, it is important to use high quality noiseless ground truth for high performance, but it is often challenging or even infeasible to obtain such a clean image in application areas such as hyperspectral remote sensing and medical imaging. We propose a Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE) based method for training deep neural network denoisers only with noisy images. We demonstrated that our SURE based method without ground truth was able to train deep neural network denoisers to yield performance close to deep learning denoisers trained with ground truth and to outperform state-of-the-art BM3D. Further improvements were achieved by including noisy test images for training denoiser networks using our proposed SURE based method.