NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Image and Video Deblurring

Motion blur is one of the most common degradation artifacts in dynamic scene photography. This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Image and Video Deblurring. In this challenge, we present the evaluation results from 3 competition tracks as well as the proposed solutions. Track 1 aims to develop single-image deblurring methods focusing on restoration quality. On Track 2, the image deblurring methods are executed on a mobile platform to find the balance of the running speed and the restoration accuracy. Track 3 targets developing video deblurring methods that exploit the temporal relation between input frames. In each competition, there were 163, 135, and 102 registered participants and in the final testing phase, 9, 4, and 7 teams competed. The winning methods demonstrate the state-ofthe-art performance on image and video deblurring tasks.Comment: To be published in CVPR 2020 Workshop (New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement

NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Image Demoireing: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the Challenge on Image Demoireing that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2020. Demoireing is a difficult task of removing moire patterns from an image to reveal an underlying clean image. The challenge was divided into two tracks. Track 1 targeted the single image demoireing problem, which seeks to remove moire patterns from a single image. Track 2 focused on the burst demoireing problem, where a set of degraded moire images of the same scene were provided as input, with the goal of producing a single demoired image as output. The methods were ranked in terms of their fidelity, measured using the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) between the ground truth clean images and the restored images produced by the participants' methods. The tracks had 142 and 99 registered participants, respectively, with a total of 14 and 6 submissions in the final testing stage. The entries span the current state-of-the-art in image and burst image demoireing problems

Super-Resolution with Deep Adaptive Image Resampling

Deep learning based methods have recently pushed the state-of-the-art on the problem of Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). In this work, we revisit the more traditional interpolation-based methods, that were popular before, now with the help of deep learning. In particular, we propose to use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to estimate spatially variant interpolation kernels and apply the estimated kernels adaptively to each position in the image. The whole model is trained in an end-to-end manner. We explore two ways to improve the results for the case of large upscaling factors, and propose a recursive extension of our basic model. This achieves results that are on par with state-of-the-art methods. We visualize the estimated adaptive interpolation kernels to gain more insight on the effectiveness of the proposed method. We also extend the method to the task of joint image filtering and again achieve state-of-the-art performance

Structural Residual Learning for Single Image Rain Removal

To alleviate the adverse effect of rain streaks in image processing tasks, CNN-based single image rain removal methods have been recently proposed. However, the performance of these deep learning methods largely relies on the covering range of rain shapes contained in the pre-collected training rainy-clean image pairs. This makes them easily trapped into the overfitting-to-the-training-samples issue and cannot finely generalize to practical rainy images with complex and diverse rain streaks. Against this generalization issue, this study proposes a new network architecture by enforcing the output residual of the network possess intrinsic rain structures. Such a structural residual setting guarantees the rain layer extracted by the network finely comply with the prior knowledge of general rain streaks, and thus regulates sound rain shapes capable of being well extracted from rainy images in both training and predicting stages. Such a general regularization function naturally leads to both its better training accuracy and testing generalization capability even for those non-seen rain configurations. Such superiority is comprehensively substantiated by experiments implemented on synthetic and real datasets both visually and quantitatively as compared with current state-of-the-art methods

Recurrent Back-Projection Network for Video Super-Resolution

We proposed a novel architecture for the problem of video super-resolution. We integrate spatial and temporal contexts from continuous video frames using a recurrent encoder-decoder module, that fuses multi-frame information with the more traditional, single frame super-resolution path for the target frame. In contrast to most prior work where frames are pooled together by stacking or warping, our model, the Recurrent Back-Projection Network (RBPN) treats each context frame as a separate source of information. These sources are combined in an iterative refinement framework inspired by the idea of back-projection in multiple-image super-resolution. This is aided by explicitly representing estimated inter-frame motion with respect to the target, rather than explicitly aligning frames. We propose a new video super-resolution benchmark, allowing evaluation at a larger scale and considering videos in different motion regimes. Experimental results demonstrate that our RBPN is superior to existing methods on several datasets.Comment: To appear in CVPR201

Learning Spatial Pyramid Attentive Pooling in Image Synthesis and Image-to-Image Translation

Image synthesis and image-to-image translation are two important generative learning tasks. Remarkable progress has been made by learning Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)~\cite{goodfellow2014generative} and cycle-consistent GANs (CycleGANs)~\cite{zhu2017unpaired} respectively. This paper presents a method of learning Spatial Pyramid Attentive Pooling (SPAP) which is a novel architectural unit and can be easily integrated into both generators and discriminators in GANs and CycleGANs. The proposed SPAP integrates Atrous spatial pyramid~\cite{chen2018deeplab}, a proposed cascade attention mechanism and residual connections~\cite{he2016deep}. It leverages the advantages of the three components to facilitate effective end-to-end generative learning: (i) the capability of fusing multi-scale information by ASPP; (ii) the capability of capturing relative importance between both spatial locations (especially multi-scale context) or feature channels by attention; (iii) the capability of preserving information and enhancing optimization feasibility by residual connections. Coarse-to-fine and fine-to-coarse SPAP are studied and intriguing attention maps are observed in both tasks. In experiments, the proposed SPAP is tested in GANs on the Celeba-HQ-128 dataset~\cite{karras2017progressive}, and tested in CycleGANs on the Image-to-Image translation datasets including the Cityscape dataset~\cite{cordts2016cityscapes}, Facade and Aerial Maps dataset~\cite{zhu2017unpaired}, both obtaining better performance.Comment: 12 page

Reverse Attention for Salient Object Detection

Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).Comment: ECCV 201

Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution via Deep Progressive Zero-centric Residual Learning

This paper explores the problem of hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution that merges a low resolution HSI (LR-HSI) and a high resolution multispectral image (HR-MSI). The cross-modality distribution of the spatial and spectral information makes the problem challenging. Inspired by the classic wavelet decomposition-based image fusion, we propose a novel \textit{lightweight} deep neural network-based framework, namely progressive zero-centric residual network (PZRes-Net), to address this problem efficiently and effectively. Specifically, PZRes-Net learns a high resolution and \textit{zero-centric} residual image, which contains high-frequency spatial details of the scene across all spectral bands, from both inputs in a progressive fashion along the spectral dimension. And the resulting residual image is then superimposed onto the up-sampled LR-HSI in a \textit{mean-value invariant} manner, leading to a coarse HR-HSI, which is further refined by exploring the coherence across all spectral bands simultaneously. To learn the residual image efficiently and effectively, we employ spectral-spatial separable convolution with dense connections. In addition, we propose zero-mean normalization implemented on the feature maps of each layer to realize the zero-mean characteristic of the residual image. Extensive experiments over both real and synthetic benchmark datasets demonstrate that our PZRes-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods to a \textit{significant} extent in terms of both 4 quantitative metrics and visual quality, e.g., our PZRes-Net improves the PSNR more than 3dB, while saving 2.3$\times$ parameters and consuming 15$\times$ less FLOPs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zbzhzhy/PZRes-Net

AIM 2020 Challenge on Efficient Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the AIM 2020 challenge on efficient single image super-resolution with focus on the proposed solutions and results. The challenge task was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor x4 based on a set of prior examples of low and corresponding high resolution images. The goal is to devise a network that reduces one or several aspects such as runtime, parameter count, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption while at least maintaining PSNR of MSRResNet. The track had 150 registered participants, and 25 teams submitted the final results. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single image super-resolution

Deep Generative Filter for Motion Deblurring

Removing blur caused by camera shake in images has always been a challenging problem in computer vision literature due to its ill-posed nature. Motion blur caused due to the relative motion between the camera and the object in 3D space induces a spatially varying blurring effect over the entire image. In this paper, we propose a novel deep filter based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture integrated with global skip connection and dense architecture in order to tackle this problem. Our model, while bypassing the process of blur kernel estimation, significantly reduces the test time which is necessary for practical applications. The experiments on the benchmark datasets prove the effectiveness of the proposed method which outperforms the state-of-the-art blind deblurring algorithms both quantitatively and qualitatively