Deformable Kernel Networks for Joint Image Filtering

Joint image filters are used to transfer structural details from a guidance picture used as a prior to a target image, in tasks such as enhancing spatial resolution and suppressing noise. Previous methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) combine nonlinear activations of spatially-invariant kernels to estimate structural details and regress the filtering result. In this paper, we instead learn explicitly sparse and spatially-variant kernels. We propose a CNN architecture and its efficient implementation, called the deformable kernel network (DKN), that outputs sets of neighbors and the corresponding weights adaptively for each pixel. The filtering result is then computed as a weighted average. We also propose a fast version of DKN that runs about seventeen times faster for an image of size 640 x 480. We demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our models on the tasks of depth map upsampling, saliency map upsampling, cross-modality image restoration, texture removal, and semantic segmentation. In particular, we show that the weighted averaging process with sparsely sampled 3 x 3 kernels outperforms the state of the art by a significant margin in all cases.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1903.11286 (IJCV accepted

Learning to Upsample by Learning to Sample

We present DySample, an ultra-lightweight and effective dynamic upsampler. While impressive performance gains have been witnessed from recent kernel-based dynamic upsamplers such as CARAFE, FADE, and SAPA, they introduce much workload, mostly due to the time-consuming dynamic convolution and the additional sub-network used to generate dynamic kernels. Further, the need for high-res feature guidance of FADE and SAPA somehow limits their application scenarios. To address these concerns, we bypass dynamic convolution and formulate upsampling from the perspective of point sampling, which is more resource-efficient and can be easily implemented with the standard built-in function in PyTorch. We first showcase a naive design, and then demonstrate how to strengthen its upsampling behavior step by step towards our new upsampler, DySample. Compared with former kernel-based dynamic upsamplers, DySample requires no customized CUDA package and has much fewer parameters, FLOPs, GPU memory, and latency. Besides the light-weight characteristics, DySample outperforms other upsamplers across five dense prediction tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/dysample.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202