Night photography often struggles with challenges like low light and blurring, stemming from dark environments and prolonged exposures. Current methods either disregard priors and directly fitting end-to-end networks, leading to inconsistent illumination, or rely on unreliable handcrafted priors to constrain the network, thereby bringing the greater error to the final result. We believe in the strength of data-driven high-quality priors and strive to offer a reliable and consistent prior, circumventing the restrictions of manual priors. In this paper, we propose Clearer Night Image Restoration with Vector-Quantized Codebook (VQCNIR) to achieve remarkable and consistent restoration outcomes on real-world and synthetic benchmarks. To ensure the faithful restoration of details and illumination, we propose the incorporation of two essential modules: the Adaptive Illumination Enhancement Module (AIEM) and the Deformable Bi-directional Cross-Attention (DBCA) module. The AIEM leverages the inter-channel correlation of features to dynamically maintain illumination consistency between degraded features and high-quality codebook features. Meanwhile, the DBCA module effectively integrates texture and structural information through bi-directional cross-attention and deformable convolution, resulting in enhanced fine-grained detail and structural fidelity across parallel decoders. Extensive experiments validate the remarkable benefits of VQCNIR in enhancing image quality under low-light conditions, showcasing its state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/AlexZou14/VQCNIR.
Prototypical contrastive learning (PCL) has been widely used to learn class-wise domain-invariant features recently. These methods are based on the assumption that the prototypes, which are represented as the central value of the same class in a certain domain, are domain-invariant. Since the prototypes of different domains have discrepancies as well, the class-wise domain-invariant features learned from the source domain by PCL need to be aligned with the prototypes of other domains simultaneously. However, the prototypes of the same class in different domains may be different while the prototypes of different classes may be similar, which may affect the learning of class-wise domain-invariant features. Based on these observations, a calibration-based dual prototypical contrastive learning (CDPCL) approach is proposed to reduce the domain discrepancy between the learned class-wise features and the prototypes of different domains for domain generalization semantic segmentation. It contains an uncertainty-guided PCL (UPCL) and a hard-weighted PCL (HPCL). Since the domain discrepancies of the prototypes of different classes may be different, we propose an uncertainty probability matrix to represent the domain discrepancies of the prototypes of all the classes. The UPCL estimates the uncertainty probability matrix to calibrate the weights of the prototypes during the PCL. Moreover, considering that the prototypes of different classes may be similar in some circumstances, which means these prototypes are hard-aligned, the HPCL is proposed to generate a hard-weighted matrix to calibrate the weights of the hard-aligned prototypes during the PCL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance over current approaches on domain generalization semantic segmentation tasks.
Stereo image super-resolution aims to improve the quality of high-resolution stereo image pairs by exploiting complementary information across views. To attain superior performance, many methods have prioritized designing complex modules to fuse similar information across views, yet overlooking the importance of intra-view information for high-resolution reconstruction. It also leads to problems of wrong texture in recovered images. To address this issue, we explore the interdependencies between various hierarchies from intra-view and propose a novel method, named Cross-View-Hierarchy Network for Stereo Image Super-Resolution (CVHSSR). Specifically, we design a cross-hierarchy information mining block (CHIMB) that leverages channel attention and large kernel convolution attention to extract both global and local features from the intra-view, enabling the efficient restoration of accurate texture details. Additionally, a cross-view interaction module (CVIM) is proposed to fuse similar features from different views by utilizing cross-view attention mechanisms, effectively adapting to the binocular scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. CVHSSR achieves the best stereo image super-resolution performance than other state-of-the-art methods while using fewer parameters. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AlexZou14/CVHSSR.
Video semantic segmentation (VSS) is beneficial for dealing with dynamic scenes due to the continuous property of the real-world environment. On the one hand, some methods alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem between continuous frames. On the other hand, other methods employ the previous frame as the prior information to assist in segmenting the current frame. Although the previous methods achieve superior performances on the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d) data, they can not generalize well on other unseen domains. Thus, we explore a new task, the video generalizable semantic segmentation (VGSS) task that considers both continuous frames and domain generalization. In this paper, we propose a class-wise non-salient region generalized (CNSG) framework for the VGSS task. Concretely, we first define the class-wise non-salient feature, which describes features of the class-wise non-salient region that carry more generalizable information. Then, we propose a class-wise non-salient feature reasoning strategy to select and enhance the most generalized channels adaptively. Finally, we propose an inter-frame non-salient centroid alignment loss to alleviate the predicted inconsistent problem in the VGSS task. We also extend our video-based framework to the image-based generalizable semantic segmentation (IGSS) task. Experiments demonstrate that our CNSG framework yields significant improvement in the VGSS and IGSS tasks.
This paper reviews the Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video at AIM 2022. This challenge includes two tracks. Track 1 aims at the super-resolution of compressed image, and Track~2 targets the super-resolution of compressed video. In Track 1, we use the popular dataset DIV2K as the training, validation and test sets. In Track 2, we propose the LDV 3.0 dataset, which contains 365 videos, including the LDV 2.0 dataset (335 videos) and 30 additional videos. In this challenge, there are 12 teams and 2 teams that submitted the final results to Track 1 and Track 2, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of super-resolution on compressed image and video. The proposed LDV 3.0 dataset is available at https://github.com/RenYang-home/LDV_dataset. The homepage of this challenge is at https://github.com/RenYang-home/AIM22_CompressSR.
Neural architecture search methods seek optimal candidates with efficient weight-sharing supernet training. However, recent studies indicate poor ranking consistency about the performance between stand-alone architectures and shared-weight networks. In this paper, we present Prior-Guided One-shot NAS (PGONAS) to strengthen the ranking correlation of supernets. Specifically, we first explore the effect of activation functions and propose a balanced sampling strategy based on the Sandwich Rule to alleviate weight coupling in the supernet. Then, FLOPs and Zen-Score are adopted to guide the training of supernet with ranking correlation loss. Our PGONAS ranks 3rd place in the supernet Track Track of CVPR2022 Second lightweight NAS challenge. Code is available in https://github.com/pprp/CVPR2022-NAS?competition-Track1-3th-solution.
This paper reviews the NTIRE 2022 challenge on efficient single image super-resolution with focus on the proposed solutions and results. The task of the challenge was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of $\times$4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high resolution images. The aim was to design a network for single image super-resolution that achieved improvement of efficiency measured according to several metrics including runtime, parameters, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption while at least maintaining the PSNR of 29.00dB on DIV2K validation set. IMDN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 3 tracks including the main track (runtime), sub-track one (model complexity), and sub-track two (overall performance). In the main track, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated. The rank of the teams were determined directly by the absolute value of the average runtime on the validation set and test set. In sub-track one, the number of parameters and FLOPs were considered. And the individual rankings of the two metrics were summed up to determine a final ranking in this track. In sub-track two, all of the five metrics mentioned in the description of the challenge including runtime, parameter count, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption were considered. Similar to sub-track one, the rankings of five metrics were summed up to determine a final ranking. The challenge had 303 registered participants, and 43 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single image super-resolution.
Recently, deep learning has been successfully applied to the single-image super-resolution (SISR) with remarkable performance. However, most existing methods focus on building a more complex network with a large number of layers, which can entail heavy computational costs and memory storage. To address this problem, we present a lightweight Self-Calibrated Efficient Transformer (SCET) network to solve this problem. The architecture of SCET mainly consists of the self-calibrated module and efficient transformer block, where the self-calibrated module adopts the pixel attention mechanism to extract image features effectively. To further exploit the contextual information from features, we employ an efficient transformer to help the network obtain similar features over long distances and thus recover sufficient texture details. We provide comprehensive results on different settings of the overall network. Our proposed method achieves more remarkable performance than baseline methods. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AlexZou14/SCET.
Image deblurring is a classical computer vision problem that aims to recover a sharp image from a blurred image. To solve this problem, existing methods apply the Encode-Decode architecture to design the complex networks to make a good performance. However, most of these methods use repeated up-sampling and down-sampling structures to expand the receptive field, which results in texture information loss during the sampling process and some of them design the multiple stages that lead to difficulties with convergence. Therefore, our model uses dilated convolution to enable the obtainment of the large receptive field with high spatial resolution. Through making full use of the different receptive fields, our method can achieve better performance. On this basis, we reduce the number of up-sampling and down-sampling and design a simple network structure. Besides, we propose a novel module using the wavelet transform, which effectively helps the network to recover clear high-frequency texture details. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations of real and synthetic datasets show that our deblurring method is comparable to existing algorithms in terms of performance with much lower training requirements. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/FlyEgle/SDWNet.
Parsing an image into a hierarchy of objects, parts, and relations is important and also challenging in many computer vision tasks. This paper proposes a simple and effective capsule autoencoder to address this issue, called DPR-CAE. In our approach, the encoder parses the input into a set of part capsules, including pose, intensity, and dynamic vector. The decoder introduces a novel dynamic part representation (DPR) by combining the dynamic vector and a shared template bank. These part representations are then regulated by corresponding capsules to composite the final output in an interpretable way. Besides, an extra translation-invariant module is proposed to avoid directly learning the uncertain scene-part relationship in our DPR-CAE, which makes the resulting method achieves a promising performance gain on $rm$-MNIST and $rm$-Fashion-MNIST. % to model the scene-object relationship DPR-CAE can be easily combined with the existing stacked capsule autoencoder and experimental results show it significantly improves performance in terms of unsupervised object classification. Our code is available in the Appendix.