47,739 research outputs found
Learning to Predict Image-based Rendering Artifacts with Respect to a Hidden Reference Image
Image metrics predict the perceived per-pixel difference between a reference
image and its degraded (e. g., re-rendered) version. In several important
applications, the reference image is not available and image metrics cannot be
applied. We devise a neural network architecture and training procedure that
allows predicting the MSE, SSIM or VGG16 image difference from the distorted
image alone while the reference is not observed. This is enabled by two
insights: The first is to inject sufficiently many un-distorted natural image
patches, which can be found in arbitrary amounts and are known to have no
perceivable difference to themselves. This avoids false positives. The second
is to balance the learning, where it is carefully made sure that all image
errors are equally likely, avoiding false negatives. Surprisingly, we observe,
that the resulting no-reference metric, subjectively, can even perform better
than the reference-based one, as it had to become robust against
mis-alignments. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in an image-based
rendering context, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we
demonstrate two applications which reduce light field capture time and provide
guidance for interactive depth adjustment.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure
Fully-automatic inverse tone mapping algorithm based on dynamic mid-level tone mapping
High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays can show images with higher color contrast levels and peak luminosities than the common Low Dynamic Range (LDR) displays. However, most existing video content is recorded and/or graded in LDR format. To show LDR content on HDR displays, it needs to be up-scaled using a so-called inverse tone mapping algorithm. Several techniques for inverse tone mapping have been proposed in the last years, going from simple approaches based on global and local operators to more advanced algorithms such as neural networks. Some of the drawbacks of existing techniques for inverse tone mapping are the need for human intervention, the high computation time for more advanced algorithms, limited low peak brightness, and the lack of the preservation of the artistic intentions. In this paper, we propose a fully-automatic inverse tone mapping operator based on mid-level mapping capable of real-time video processing. Our proposed algorithm allows expanding LDR images into HDR images with peak brightness over 1000 nits, preserving the artistic intentions inherent to the HDR domain. We assessed our results using the full-reference objective quality metrics HDR-VDP-2.2 and DRIM, and carrying out a subjective pair-wise comparison experiment. We compared our results with those obtained with the most recent methods found in the literature. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art of simple inverse tone mapping methods and its performance is similar to other more complex and time-consuming advanced techniques
What Is Around The Camera?
How much does a single image reveal about the environment it was taken in? In
this paper, we investigate how much of that information can be retrieved from a
foreground object, combined with the background (i.e. the visible part of the
environment). Assuming it is not perfectly diffuse, the foreground object acts
as a complexly shaped and far-from-perfect mirror. An additional challenge is
that its appearance confounds the light coming from the environment with the
unknown materials it is made of. We propose a learning-based approach to
predict the environment from multiple reflectance maps that are computed from
approximate surface normals. The proposed method allows us to jointly model the
statistics of environments and material properties. We train our system from
synthesized training data, but demonstrate its applicability to real-world
data. Interestingly, our analysis shows that the information obtained from
objects made out of multiple materials often is complementary and leads to
better performance.Comment: Accepted to ICCV. Project:
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~sgeorgou/multinatillum
No-reference Stereoscopic Image Quality Assessment Using Natural Scene Statistics
We present two contributions in this work: (i) a bivariate generalized Gaussian distribution (BGGD) model for the joint distribution of luminance and disparity subband coefficients of natural stereoscopic scenes and (ii) a no-reference (NR) stereo image quality assessment algorithm based on the BGGD model. We first empirically show that a BGGD accurately models the joint distribution of luminance and disparity subband coefficients. We then show that the model parameters form good discriminatory features for NR quality assessment. Additionally, we rely on the previously established result that luminance and disparity subband coefficients of natural stereo scenes are correlated, and show that correlation also forms a good feature for NR quality assessment. These features are computed for both the left and right luminance-disparity pairs in the stereo image and consolidated into one feature vector per stereo pair. This feature set and the stereo pair׳s difference mean opinion score (DMOS) (labels) are used for supervised learning with a support vector machine (SVM). Support vector regression is used to estimate the perceptual quality of a test stereo image pair. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated over popular databases and shown to be competitive with the state-of-the-art no-reference quality assessment algorithms. Further, the strength of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by its consistently good performance over both symmetric and asymmetric distortion types. Our algorithm is called Stereo QUality Evaluator (StereoQUE)
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