NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Shortform UGC Video Quality Assessment (S-UGC VQA), where various excellent solutions are submitted and evaluated on the collected dataset KVQ from popular short-form video platform, i.e., Kuaishou/Kwai Platform. The KVQ database is divided into three parts, including 2926 videos for training, 420 videos for validation, and 854 videos for testing. The purpose is to build new benchmarks and advance the development of S-UGC VQA. The competition had 200 participants and 13 teams submitted valid solutions for the final testing phase. The proposed solutions achieved state-of-the-art performances for S-UGC VQA. The project can be found at https://github.com/lixinustc/KVQChallenge-CVPR-NTIRE2024.

MC$^2$: Multi-concept Guidance for Customized Multi-concept Generation

Customized text-to-image generation aims to synthesize instantiations of user-specified concepts and has achieved unprecedented progress in handling individual concept. However, when extending to multiple customized concepts, existing methods exhibit limitations in terms of flexibility and fidelity, only accommodating the combination of limited types of models and potentially resulting in a mix of characteristics from different concepts. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-concept guidance for Multi-concept customization, termed MC$^2$, for improved flexibility and fidelity. MC$^2$ decouples the requirements for model architecture via inference time optimization, allowing the integration of various heterogeneous single-concept customized models. It adaptively refines the attention weights between visual and textual tokens, directing image regions to focus on their associated words while diminishing the impact of irrelevant ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MC$^2$ even surpasses previous methods that require additional training in terms of consistency with input prompt and reference images. Moreover, MC$^2$ can be extended to elevate the compositional capabilities of text-to-image generation, yielding appealing results. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/JIANGJiaXiu/MC-2.

NIR-Assisted Image Denoising: A Selective Fusion Approach and A Real-World Benchmark Datase

Despite the significant progress in image denoising, it is still challenging to restore fine-scale details while removing noise, especially in extremely low-light environments. Leveraging near-infrared (NIR) images to assist visible RGB image denoising shows the potential to address this issue, becoming a promising technology. Nonetheless, existing works still struggle with taking advantage of NIR information effectively for real-world image denoising, due to the content inconsistency between NIR-RGB images and the scarcity of real-world paired datasets. To alleviate the problem, we propose an efficient Selective Fusion Module (SFM), which can be plug-and-played into the advanced denoising networks to merge the deep NIR-RGB features. Specifically, we sequentially perform the global and local modulation for NIR and RGB features, and then integrate the two modulated features. Furthermore, we present a Real-world NIR-Assisted Image Denoising (Real-NAID) dataset, which covers diverse scenarios as well as various noise levels. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and our real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better results than state-of-the-art ones. The dataset, codes, and pre-trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/ronjonxu/NAID.

TBSN: Transformer-Based Blind-Spot Network for Self-Supervised Image Denoising

Blind-spot networks (BSN) have been prevalent network architectures in self-supervised image denoising (SSID). Existing BSNs are mostly conducted with convolution layers. Although transformers offer potential solutions to the limitations of convolutions and have demonstrated success in various image restoration tasks, their attention mechanisms may violate the blind-spot requirement, thus restricting their applicability in SSID. In this paper, we present a transformer-based blind-spot network (TBSN) by analyzing and redesigning the transformer operators that meet the blind-spot requirement. Specifically, TBSN follows the architectural principles of dilated BSNs, and incorporates spatial as well as channel self-attention layers to enhance the network capability. For spatial self-attention, an elaborate mask is applied to the attention matrix to restrict its receptive field, thus mimicking the dilated convolution. For channel self-attention, we observe that it may leak the blind-spot information when the channel number is greater than spatial size in the deep layers of multi-scale architectures. To eliminate this effect, we divide the channel into several groups and perform channel attention separately. Furthermore, we introduce a knowledge distillation strategy that distills TBSN into smaller denoisers to improve computational efficiency while maintaining performance. Extensive experiments on real-world image denoising datasets show that TBSN largely extends the receptive field and exhibits favorable performance against state-of-the-art SSID methods. The code and pre-trained models will be publicly available at https://github.com/nagejacob/TBSN.

SmartControl: Enhancing ControlNet for Handling Rough Visual Conditions

Human visual imagination usually begins with analogies or rough sketches. For example, given an image with a girl playing guitar before a building, one may analogously imagine how it seems like if Iron Man playing guitar before Pyramid in Egypt. Nonetheless, visual condition may not be precisely aligned with the imaginary result indicated by text prompt, and existing layout-controllable text-to-image (T2I) generation models is prone to producing degraded generated results with obvious artifacts. To address this issue, we present a novel T2I generation method dubbed SmartControl, which is designed to modify the rough visual conditions for adapting to text prompt. The key idea of our SmartControl is to relax the visual condition on the areas that are conflicted with text prompts. In specific, a Control Scale Predictor (CSP) is designed to identify the conflict regions and predict the local control scales, while a dataset with text prompts and rough visual conditions is constructed for training CSP. It is worth noting that, even with a limited number (e.g., 1,000~2,000) of training samples, our SmartControl can generalize well to unseen objects. Extensive experiments on four typical visual condition types clearly show the efficacy of our SmartControl against state-of-the-arts. Source code, pre-trained models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/SmartControl.

Responsible Visual Editing

With recent advancements in visual synthesis, there is a growing risk of encountering images with detrimental effects, such as hate, discrimination, or privacy violations. The research on transforming harmful images into responsible ones remains unexplored. In this paper, we formulate a new task, responsible visual editing, which entails modifying specific concepts within an image to render it more responsible while minimizing changes. However, the concept that needs to be edited is often abstract, making it challenging to locate what needs to be modified and plan how to modify it. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Cognitive Editor (CoEditor) that harnesses the large multimodal model through a two-stage cognitive process: (1) a perceptual cognitive process to focus on what needs to be modified and (2) a behavioral cognitive process to strategize how to modify. To mitigate the negative implications of harmful images on research, we create a transparent and public dataset, AltBear, which expresses harmful information using teddy bears instead of humans. Experiments demonstrate that CoEditor can effectively comprehend abstract concepts within complex scenes and significantly surpass the performance of baseline models for responsible visual editing. We find that the AltBear dataset corresponds well to the harmful content found in real images, offering a consistent experimental evaluation, thereby providing a safer benchmark for future research. Moreover, CoEditor also shows great results in general editing. We release our code and dataset at https://github.com/kodenii/Responsible-Visual-Editing.

Dual-Camera Smooth Zoom on Mobile Phones

When zooming between dual cameras on a mobile, noticeable jumps in geometric content and image color occur in the preview, inevitably affecting the user's zoom experience. In this work, we introduce a new task, ie, dual-camera smooth zoom (DCSZ) to achieve a smooth zoom preview. The frame interpolation (FI) technique is a potential solution but struggles with ground-truth collection. To address the issue, we suggest a data factory solution where continuous virtual cameras are assembled to generate DCSZ data by rendering reconstructed 3D models of the scene. In particular, we propose a novel dual-camera smooth zoom Gaussian Splatting (ZoomGS), where a camera-specific encoding is introduced to construct a specific 3D model for each virtual camera. With the proposed data factory, we construct a synthetic dataset for DCSZ, and we utilize it to fine-tune FI models. In addition, we collect real-world dual-zoom images without ground-truth for evaluation. Extensive experiments are conducted with multiple FI methods. The results show that the fine-tuned FI models achieve a significant performance improvement over the original ones on DCSZ task. The datasets, codes, and pre-trained models will be publicly available.

ShoeModel: Learning to Wear on the User-specified Shoes via Diffusion Model

With the development of the large-scale diffusion model, Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) techniques are popular recently. However, how to truly make it serve our daily lives remains an open question. To this end, in this paper, we focus on employing AIGC techniques in one filed of E-commerce marketing, i.e., generating hyper-realistic advertising images for displaying user-specified shoes by human. Specifically, we propose a shoe-wearing system, called Shoe-Model, to generate plausible images of human legs interacting with the given shoes. It consists of three modules: (1) shoe wearable-area detection module (WD), (2) leg-pose synthesis module (LpS) and the final (3) shoe-wearing image generation module (SW). Them three are performed in ordered stages. Compared to baselines, our ShoeModel is shown to generalize better to different type of shoes and has ability of keeping the ID-consistency of the given shoes, as well as automatically producing reasonable interactions with human. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed shoe-wearing system. Figure 1 shows the input and output examples of our ShoeModel.

Self-Supervised Video Desmoking for Laparoscopic Surgery

Due to the difficulty of collecting real paired data, most existing desmoking methods train the models by synthesizing smoke, generalizing poorly to real surgical scenarios. Although a few works have explored single-image real-world desmoking in unpaired learning manners, they still encounter challenges in handling dense smoke. In this work, we address these issues together by introducing the self-supervised surgery video desmoking (SelfSVD). On the one hand, we observe that the frame captured before the activation of high-energy devices is generally clear (named pre-smoke frame, PS frame), thus it can serve as supervision for other smoky frames, making real-world self-supervised video desmoking practically feasible. On the other hand, in order to enhance the desmoking performance, we further feed the valuable information from PS frame into models, where a masking strategy and a regularization term are presented to avoid trivial solutions. In addition, we construct a real surgery video dataset for desmoking, which covers a variety of smoky scenes. Extensive experiments on the dataset show that our SelfSVD can remove smoke more effectively and efficiently while recovering more photo-realistic details than the state-of-the-art methods. The dataset, codes, and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/ZcsrenlongZ/SelfSVD}.

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.