Towards Efficient SDRTV-to-HDRTV by Learning from Image Formation

Modern displays are capable of rendering video content with high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG). However, the majority of available resources are still in standard dynamic range (SDR). As a result, there is significant value in transforming existing SDR content into the HDRTV standard. In this paper, we define and analyze the SDRTV-to-HDRTV task by modeling the formation of SDRTV/HDRTV content. Our analysis and observations indicate that a naive end-to-end supervised training pipeline suffers from severe gamut transition errors. To address this issue, we propose a novel three-step solution pipeline called HDRTVNet++, which includes adaptive global color mapping, local enhancement, and highlight refinement. The adaptive global color mapping step uses global statistics as guidance to perform image-adaptive color mapping. A local enhancement network is then deployed to enhance local details. Finally, we combine the two sub-networks above as a generator and achieve highlight consistency through GAN-based joint training. Our method is primarily designed for ultra-high-definition TV content and is therefore effective and lightweight for processing 4K resolution images. We also construct a dataset using HDR videos in the HDR10 standard, named HDRTV1K that contains 1235 and 117 training images and 117 testing images, all in 4K resolution. Besides, we select five metrics to evaluate the results of SDRTV-to-HDRTV algorithms. Our final results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and visually. The code, model and dataset are available at https://github.com/xiaom233/HDRTVNet-plus.Comment: Extended version of HDRTVNe

Fully Point-wise Convolutional Neural Network for Modeling Statistical Regularities in Natural Images

Modeling statistical regularity plays an essential role in ill-posed image processing problems. Recently, deep learning based methods have been presented to implicitly learn statistical representation of pixel distributions in natural images and leverage it as a constraint to facilitate subsequent tasks, such as color constancy and image dehazing. However, the existing CNN architecture is prone to variability and diversity of pixel intensity within and between local regions, which may result in inaccurate statistical representation. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel fully point-wise CNN architecture for modeling statistical regularities in natural images. Specifically, we propose to randomly shuffle the pixels in the origin images and leverage the shuffled image as input to make CNN more concerned with the statistical properties. Moreover, since the pixels in the shuffled image are independent identically distributed, we can replace all the large convolution kernels in CNN with point-wise ($1*1$) convolution kernels while maintaining the representation ability. Experimental results on two applications: color constancy and image dehazing, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed network over the existing architectures, i.e., using 1/10$\sim$1/100 network parameters and computational cost while achieving comparable performance.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. To appear in ACM MM 201