DPFNet: A Dual-branch Dilated Network with Phase-aware Fourier Convolution for Low-light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement is a classical computer vision problem aiming to recover normal-exposure images from low-light images. However, convolutional neural networks commonly used in this field are good at sampling low-frequency local structural features in the spatial domain, which leads to unclear texture details of the reconstructed images. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel module using the Fourier coefficients, which can recover high-quality texture details under the constraint of semantics in the frequency phase and supplement the spatial domain. In addition, we design a simple and efficient module for the image spatial domain using dilated convolutions with different receptive fields to alleviate the loss of detail caused by frequent downsampling. We integrate the above parts into an end-to-end dual branch network and design a novel loss committee and an adaptive fusion module to guide the network to flexibly combine spatial and frequency domain features to generate more pleasing visual effects. Finally, we evaluate the proposed network on public benchmarks. Extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms many existing state-of-the-art ones, showing outstanding performance and potential.

Single UHD Image Dehazing via Interpretable Pyramid Network

Currently, most single image dehazing models cannot run an ultra-high-resolution (UHD) image with a single GPU shader in real-time. To address the problem, we introduce the principle of infinite approximation of Taylor's theorem with the Laplace pyramid pattern to build a model which is capable of handling 4K hazy images in real-time. The N branch networks of the pyramid network correspond to the N constraint terms in Taylor's theorem. Low-order polynomials reconstruct the low-frequency information of the image (e.g. color, illumination). High-order polynomials regress the high-frequency information of the image (e.g. texture). In addition, we propose a Tucker reconstruction-based regularization term that acts on each branch network of the pyramid model. It further constrains the generation of anomalous signals in the feature space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach can not only run 4K images with haze in real-time on a single GPU (80FPS) but also has unparalleled interpretability. The developed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on two benchmarks (O/I-HAZE) and our updated 4KID dataset while providing the reliable groundwork for subsequent optimization schemes.

Zero-Reference Image Restoration for Under-Display Camera of UAV

The exposed cameras of UAV can shake, shift, or even malfunction under the influence of harsh weather, while the add-on devices (Dupont lines) are very vulnerable to damage. We can place a low-cost T-OLED overlay around the camera to protect it, but this would also introduce image degradation issues. In particular, the temperature variations in the atmosphere can create mist that adsorbs to the T-OLED, which can cause secondary disasters (i.e., more severe image degradation) during the UAV's filming process. To solve the image degradation problem caused by overlaying T-OLEDs, in this paper we propose a new method to enhance the visual experience by enhancing the texture and color of images. Specifically, our method trains a lightweight network to estimate a low-rank affine grid on the input image, and then utilizes the grid to enhance the input image at block granularity. The advantages of our method are that no reference image is required and the loss function is developed from visual experience. In addition, our model can perform high-quality recovery of images of arbitrary resolution in real time. In the end, the limitations of our model and the collected datasets (including the daytime and nighttime scenes) are discussed.