14 research outputs found
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 () 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
1/101/100 network parameters and computational cost while achieving
comparable performance.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. To appear in ACM MM 201
Does Haze Removal Help CNN-based Image Classification?
Hazy images are common in real scenarios and many dehazing methods have been
developed to automatically remove the haze from images. Typically, the goal of
image dehazing is to produce clearer images from which human vision can better
identify the object and structural details present in the images. When the
ground-truth haze-free image is available for a hazy image, quantitative
evaluation of image dehazing is usually based on objective metrics, such as
Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM). However, in
many applications, large-scale images are collected not for visual examination
by human. Instead, they are used for many high-level vision tasks, such as
automatic classification, recognition and categorization. One fundamental
problem here is whether various dehazing methods can produce clearer images
that can help improve the performance of the high-level tasks. In this paper,
we empirically study this problem in the important task of image classification
by using both synthetic and real hazy image datasets. From the experimental
results, we find that the existing image-dehazing methods cannot improve much
the image-classification performance and sometimes even reduce the
image-classification performance