RSFNet: A White-Box Image Retouching Approach using Region-Specific Color Filters

Retouching images is an essential aspect of enhancing the visual appeal of photos. Although users often share common aesthetic preferences, their retouching methods may vary based on their individual preferences. Therefore, there is a need for white-box approaches that produce satisfying results and enable users to conveniently edit their images simultaneously. Recent white-box retouching methods rely on cascaded global filters that provide image-level filter arguments but cannot perform fine-grained retouching. In contrast, colorists typically use a divide-and-conquer approach, performing a series of region-specific fine-grained enhancements when using traditional tools like Davinci Resolve. We draw on this insight to develop a white-box framework for photo retouching using parallel region-specific filters, called RSFNet. Our model generates filter arguments (e.g., saturation, contrast, hue) and attention maps of regions for each filter simultaneously. Instead of cascading filters, RSFNet employs linear summations of filters, allowing for a more diverse range of filter classes that can be trained more easily. Our experiments demonstrate that RSFNet achieves state-of-the-art results, offering satisfying aesthetic appeal and greater user convenience for editable white-box retouching.

DDColor: Towards Photo-Realistic and Semantic-Aware Image Colorization via Dual Decoders

Automatic image colorization is a particularly challenging problem. Due to the high illness of the problem and multi-modal uncertainty, directly training a deep neural network usually leads to incorrect semantic colors and low color richness. Existing transformer-based methods can deliver better results but highly depend on hand-crafted dataset-level empirical distribution priors. In this work, we propose DDColor, a new end-to-end method with dual decoders, for image colorization. More specifically, we design a multi-scale image decoder and a transformer-based color decoder. The former manages to restore the spatial resolution of the image, while the latter establishes the correlation between semantic representations and color queries via cross-attention. The two decoders incorporate to learn semantic-aware color embedding by leveraging the multi-scale visual features. With the help of these two decoders, our method succeeds in producing semantically consistent and visually plausible colorization results without any additional priors. In addition, a simple but effective colorfulness loss is introduced to further improve the color richness of generated results. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed DDColor achieves significantly superior performance to existing state-of-the-art works both quantitatively and qualitatively. Codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/piddnad/DDColor.