Generic 3D Convolutional Fusion for image restoration

Also recently, exciting strides forward have been made in the area of image restoration, particularly for image denoising and single image super-resolution. Deep learning techniques contributed to this significantly. The top methods differ in their formulations and assumptions, so even if their average performance may be similar, some work better on certain image types and image regions than others. This complementarity motivated us to propose a novel 3D convolutional fusion (3DCF) method. Unlike other methods adapted to different tasks, our method uses the exact same convolutional network architecture to address both image denois- ing and single image super-resolution. As a result, our 3DCF method achieves substantial improvements (0.1dB-0.4dB PSNR) over the state-of-the-art methods that it fuses, and this on standard benchmarks for both tasks. At the same time, the method still is computationally efficient

End-to-End United Video Dehazing and Detection

The recent development of CNN-based image dehazing has revealed the effectiveness of end-to-end modeling. However, extending the idea to end-to-end video dehazing has not been explored yet. In this paper, we propose an End-to-End Video Dehazing Network (EVD-Net), to exploit the temporal consistency between consecutive video frames. A thorough study has been conducted over a number of structure options, to identify the best temporal fusion strategy. Furthermore, we build an End-to-End United Video Dehazing and Detection Network(EVDD-Net), which concatenates and jointly trains EVD-Net with a video object detection model. The resulting augmented end-to-end pipeline has demonstrated much more stable and accurate detection results in hazy video

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

cvpaper.challenge in 2015 - A review of CVPR2015 and DeepSurvey

The "cvpaper.challenge" is a group composed of members from AIST, Tokyo Denki Univ. (TDU), and Univ. of Tsukuba that aims to systematically summarize papers on computer vision, pattern recognition, and related fields. For this particular review, we focused on reading the ALL 602 conference papers presented at the CVPR2015, the premier annual computer vision event held in June 2015, in order to grasp the trends in the field. Further, we are proposing "DeepSurvey" as a mechanism embodying the entire process from the reading through all the papers, the generation of ideas, and to the writing of paper.Comment: Survey Pape

Dense Haze: A benchmark for image dehazing with dense-haze and haze-free images

Single image dehazing is an ill-posed problem that has recently drawn important attention. Despite the significant increase in interest shown for dehazing over the past few years, the validation of the dehazing methods remains largely unsatisfactory, due to the lack of pairs of real hazy and corresponding haze-free reference images. To address this limitation, we introduce Dense-Haze - a novel dehazing dataset. Characterized by dense and homogeneous hazy scenes, Dense-Haze contains 33 pairs of real hazy and corresponding haze-free images of various outdoor scenes. The hazy scenes have been recorded by introducing real haze, generated by professional haze machines. The hazy and haze-free corresponding scenes contain the same visual content captured under the same illumination parameters. Dense-Haze dataset aims to push significantly the state-of-the-art in single-image dehazing by promoting robust methods for real and various hazy scenes. We also provide a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation of state-of-the-art single image dehazing techniques based on the Dense-Haze dataset. Not surprisingly, our study reveals that the existing dehazing techniques perform poorly for dense homogeneous hazy scenes and that there is still much room for improvement.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Fractional Multiscale Fusion-based De-hazing

This report presents the results of a proposed multi-scale fusion-based single image de-hazing algorithm, which can also be used for underwater image enhancement. Furthermore, the algorithm was designed for very fast operation and minimal run-time. The proposed scheme is the faster than existing algorithms for both de-hazing and underwater image enhancement and amenable to digital hardware implementation. Results indicate mostly consistent and good results for both categories of images when compared with other algorithms from the literature.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures, 2 table

Face Recognition in Low Quality Images: A Survey

Low-resolution face recognition (LRFR) has received increasing attention over the past few years. Its applications lie widely in the real-world environment when high-resolution or high-quality images are hard to capture. One of the biggest demands for LRFR technologies is video surveillance. As the the number of surveillance cameras in the city increases, the videos that captured will need to be processed automatically. However, those videos or images are usually captured with large standoffs, arbitrary illumination condition, and diverse angles of view. Faces in these images are generally small in size. Several studies addressed this problem employed techniques like super resolution, deblurring, or learning a relationship between different resolution domains. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of approaches to low-resolution face recognition in the past five years. First, a general problem definition is given. Later, systematically analysis of the works on this topic is presented by catogory. In addition to describing the methods, we also focus on datasets and experiment settings. We further address the related works on unconstrained low-resolution face recognition and compare them with the result that use synthetic low-resolution data. Finally, we summarized the general limitations and speculate a priorities for the future effort.Comment: There are some mistakes addressing in this paper which will be misleading to the reader and we wont have a new version in short time. We will resubmit once it is being corecte

A Multi-Scale and Multi-Depth Convolutional Neural Network for Remote Sensing Imagery Pan-Sharpening

Pan-sharpening is a fundamental and significant task in the field of remote sensing imagery processing, in which high-resolution spatial details from panchromatic images are employed to enhance the spatial resolution of multi-spectral (MS) images. As the transformation from low spatial resolution MS image to high-resolution MS image is complex and highly non-linear, inspired by the powerful representation for non-linear relationships of deep neural networks, we introduce multi-scale feature extraction and residual learning into the basic convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture and propose the multi-scale and multi-depth convolutional neural network (MSDCNN) for the pan-sharpening of remote sensing imagery. Both the quantitative assessment results and the visual assessment confirm that the proposed network yields high-resolution MS images that are superior to the images produced by the compared state-of-the-art methods

UG2+^{2+} Track 2: A Collective Benchmark Effort for Evaluating and Advancing Image Understanding in Poor Visibility Environments

The UG$^{2+}$ challenge in IEEE CVPR 2019 aims to evoke a comprehensive discussion and exploration about how low-level vision techniques can benefit the high-level automatic visual recognition in various scenarios. In its second track, we focus on object or face detection in poor visibility enhancements caused by bad weathers (haze, rain) and low light conditions. While existing enhancement methods are empirically expected to help the high-level end task, that is observed to not always be the case in practice. To provide a more thorough examination and fair comparison, we introduce three benchmark sets collected in real-world hazy, rainy, and low-light conditions, respectively, with annotate objects/faces annotated. To our best knowledge, this is the first and currently largest effort of its kind. Baseline results by cascading existing enhancement and detection models are reported, indicating the highly challenging nature of our new data as well as the large room for further technical innovations. We expect a large participation from the broad research community to address these challenges together.Comment: A summary paper on datasets, fact sheets, baseline results, challenge results, and winning methods in UG$^{2+}$ Challenge (Track 2). More materials are provided in http://www.ug2challenge.org/index.htm

Structure-Preserving Image Super-resolution via Contextualized Multi-task Learning

Single image super resolution (SR), which refers to reconstruct a higher-resolution (HR) image from the observed low-resolution (LR) image, has received substantial attention due to its tremendous application potentials. Despite the breakthroughs of recently proposed SR methods using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), their generated results usually lack of preserving structural (high-frequency) details. In this paper, regarding global boundary context and residual context as complimentary information for enhancing structural details in image restoration, we develop a contextualized multi-task learning framework to address the SR problem. Specifically, our method first extracts convolutional features from the input LR image and applies one deconvolutional module to interpolate the LR feature maps in a content-adaptive way. Then, the resulting feature maps are fed into two branched sub-networks. During the neural network training, one sub-network outputs salient image boundaries and the HR image, and the other sub-network outputs the local residual map, i.e., the residual difference between the generated HR image and ground-truth image. On several standard benchmarks (i.e., Set5, Set14 and BSD200), our extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our SR method on achieving both higher restoration quality and computational efficiency compared with several state-of-the-art SR approaches. The source code and some SR results can be found at: http://hcp.sysu.edu.cn/structure-preserving-image-super-resolution/Comment: To appear in Transactions on Multimedia 201