14 research outputs found
Probabilistic Image Colorization
We develop a probabilistic technique for colorizing grayscale natural images.
In light of the intrinsic uncertainty of this task, the proposed probabilistic
framework has numerous desirable properties. In particular, our model is able
to produce multiple plausible and vivid colorizations for a given grayscale
image and is one of the first colorization models to provide a proper
stochastic sampling scheme. Moreover, our training procedure is supported by a
rigorous theoretical framework that does not require any ad hoc heuristics and
allows for efficient modeling and learning of the joint pixel color
distribution. We demonstrate strong quantitative and qualitative experimental
results on the CIFAR-10 dataset and the challenging ILSVRC 2012 dataset
IST Austria Thesis
Modern computer vision systems heavily rely on statistical machine learning models, which typically require large amounts of labeled data to be learned reliably. Moreover, very recently computer vision research widely adopted techniques for representation learning, which further increase the demand for labeled data. However, for many important practical problems there is relatively small amount of labeled data available, so it is problematic to leverage full potential of the representation learning methods. One way to overcome this obstacle is to invest substantial resources into producing large labelled datasets. Unfortunately, this can be prohibitively expensive in practice. In this thesis we focus on the alternative way of tackling the aforementioned issue. We concentrate on methods, which make use of weakly-labeled or even unlabeled data. Specifically, the first half of the thesis is dedicated to the semantic image segmentation task. We develop a technique, which achieves competitive segmentation performance and only requires annotations in a form of global image-level labels instead of dense segmentation masks. Subsequently, we present a new methodology, which further improves segmentation performance by leveraging tiny additional feedback from a human annotator. By using our methods practitioners can greatly reduce the amount of data annotation effort, which is required to learn modern image segmentation models. In the second half of the thesis we focus on methods for learning from unlabeled visual data. We study a family of autoregressive models for modeling structure of natural images and discuss potential applications of these models. Moreover, we conduct in-depth study of one of these applications, where we develop the state-of-the-art model for the probabilistic image colorization task
Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models
This paper develops a unified framework for image-to-image translation based
on conditional diffusion models and evaluates this framework on four
challenging image-to-image translation tasks, namely colorization, inpainting,
uncropping, and JPEG restoration. Our simple implementation of image-to-image
diffusion models outperforms strong GAN and regression baselines on all tasks,
without task-specific hyper-parameter tuning, architecture customization, or
any auxiliary loss or sophisticated new techniques needed. We uncover the
impact of an L2 vs. L1 loss in the denoising diffusion objective on sample
diversity, and demonstrate the importance of self-attention in the neural
architecture through empirical studies. Importantly, we advocate a unified
evaluation protocol based on ImageNet, with human evaluation and sample quality
scores (FID, Inception Score, Classification Accuracy of a pre-trained
ResNet-50, and Perceptual Distance against original images). We expect this
standardized evaluation protocol to play a role in advancing image-to-image
translation research. Finally, we show that a generalist, multi-task diffusion
model performs as well or better than task-specific specialist counterparts.
Check out https://diffusion-palette.github.io for an overview of the results