7,412 research outputs found
Steered mixture-of-experts for light field images and video : representation and coding
Research in light field (LF) processing has heavily increased over the last decade. This is largely driven by the desire to achieve the same level of immersion and navigational freedom for camera-captured scenes as it is currently available for CGI content. Standardization organizations such as MPEG and JPEG continue to follow conventional coding paradigms in which viewpoints are discretely represented on 2-D regular grids. These grids are then further decorrelated through hybrid DPCM/transform techniques. However, these 2-D regular grids are less suited for high-dimensional data, such as LFs. We propose a novel coding framework for higher-dimensional image modalities, called Steered Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE). Coherent areas in the higher-dimensional space are represented by single higher-dimensional entities, called kernels. These kernels hold spatially localized information about light rays at any angle arriving at a certain region. The global model consists thus of a set of kernels which define a continuous approximation of the underlying plenoptic function. We introduce the theory of SMoE and illustrate its application for 2-D images, 4-D LF images, and 5-D LF video. We also propose an efficient coding strategy to convert the model parameters into a bitstream. Even without provisions for high-frequency information, the proposed method performs comparable to the state of the art for low-to-mid range bitrates with respect to subjective visual quality of 4-D LF images. In case of 5-D LF video, we observe superior decorrelation and coding performance with coding gains of a factor of 4x in bitrate for the same quality. At least equally important is the fact that our method inherently has desired functionality for LF rendering which is lacking in other state-of-the-art techniques: (1) full zero-delay random access, (2) light-weight pixel-parallel view reconstruction, and (3) intrinsic view interpolation and super-resolution
Image Denoising via CNNs: An Adversarial Approach
Is it possible to recover an image from its noisy version using convolutional
neural networks? This is an interesting problem as convolutional layers are
generally used as feature detectors for tasks like classification, segmentation
and object detection. We present a new CNN architecture for blind image
denoising which synergically combines three architecture components, a
multi-scale feature extraction layer which helps in reducing the effect of
noise on feature maps, an l_p regularizer which helps in selecting only the
appropriate feature maps for the task of reconstruction, and finally a three
step training approach which leverages adversarial training to give the final
performance boost to the model. The proposed model shows competitive denoising
performance when compared to the state-of-the-art approaches
Deep Burst Denoising
Noise is an inherent issue of low-light image capture, one which is
exacerbated on mobile devices due to their narrow apertures and small sensors.
One strategy for mitigating noise in a low-light situation is to increase the
shutter time of the camera, thus allowing each photosite to integrate more
light and decrease noise variance. However, there are two downsides of long
exposures: (a) bright regions can exceed the sensor range, and (b) camera and
scene motion will result in blurred images. Another way of gathering more light
is to capture multiple short (thus noisy) frames in a "burst" and intelligently
integrate the content, thus avoiding the above downsides. In this paper, we use
the burst-capture strategy and implement the intelligent integration via a
recurrent fully convolutional deep neural net (CNN). We build our novel,
multiframe architecture to be a simple addition to any single frame denoising
model, and design to handle an arbitrary number of noisy input frames. We show
that it achieves state of the art denoising results on our burst dataset,
improving on the best published multi-frame techniques, such as VBM4D and
FlexISP. Finally, we explore other applications of image enhancement by
integrating content from multiple frames and demonstrate that our DNN
architecture generalizes well to image super-resolution
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