63,377 research outputs found
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual
similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite
complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as
PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many
nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found
that features of the VGG network trained on ImageNet classification has been
remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual
are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their
success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new dataset of human
perceptual similarity judgments. We systematically evaluate deep features
across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics.
We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by large margins on
our dataset. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to
ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures
and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised).
Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared
across deep visual representations.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2018; Code and data available at
https://www.github.com/richzhang/PerceptualSimilarit
Learning to Predict Image-based Rendering Artifacts with Respect to a Hidden Reference Image
Image metrics predict the perceived per-pixel difference between a reference
image and its degraded (e. g., re-rendered) version. In several important
applications, the reference image is not available and image metrics cannot be
applied. We devise a neural network architecture and training procedure that
allows predicting the MSE, SSIM or VGG16 image difference from the distorted
image alone while the reference is not observed. This is enabled by two
insights: The first is to inject sufficiently many un-distorted natural image
patches, which can be found in arbitrary amounts and are known to have no
perceivable difference to themselves. This avoids false positives. The second
is to balance the learning, where it is carefully made sure that all image
errors are equally likely, avoiding false negatives. Surprisingly, we observe,
that the resulting no-reference metric, subjectively, can even perform better
than the reference-based one, as it had to become robust against
mis-alignments. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in an image-based
rendering context, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we
demonstrate two applications which reduce light field capture time and provide
guidance for interactive depth adjustment.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure
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