FastLLVE: Real-Time Low-Light Video Enhancement with Intensity-Aware Lookup Table

Low-Light Video Enhancement (LLVE) has received considerable attention in recent years. One of the critical requirements of LLVE is inter-frame brightness consistency, which is essential for maintaining the temporal coherence of the enhanced video. However, most existing single-image-based methods fail to address this issue, resulting in flickering effect that degrades the overall quality after enhancement. Moreover, 3D Convolution Neural Network (CNN)-based methods, which are designed for video to maintain inter-frame consistency, are computationally expensive, making them impractical for real-time applications. To address these issues, we propose an efficient pipeline named FastLLVE that leverages the Look-Up-Table (LUT) technique to maintain inter-frame brightness consistency effectively. Specifically, we design a learnable Intensity-Aware LUT (IA-LUT) module for adaptive enhancement, which addresses the low-dynamic problem in low-light scenarios. This enables FastLLVE to perform low-latency and low-complexity enhancement operations while maintaining high-quality results. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance in terms of both image quality and inter-frame brightness consistency. More importantly, our FastLLVE can process 1,080p videos at $\mathit{50+}$ Frames Per Second (FPS), which is $\mathit{2 \times}$ faster than SOTA CNN-based methods in inference time, making it a promising solution for real-time applications. The code is available at https://github.com/Wenhao-Li-777/FastLLVE.Comment: 11pages, 9 Figures, and 6 Tables. Accepted by ACMMM 202

Image Aesthetics Assessment via Learnable Queries

Image aesthetics assessment (IAA) aims to estimate the aesthetics of images. Depending on the content of an image, diverse criteria need to be selected to assess its aesthetics. Existing works utilize pre-trained vision backbones based on content knowledge to learn image aesthetics. However, training those backbones is time-consuming and suffers from attention dispersion. Inspired by learnable queries in vision-language alignment, we propose the Image Aesthetics Assessment via Learnable Queries (IAA-LQ) approach. It adapts learnable queries to extract aesthetic features from pre-trained image features obtained from a frozen image encoder. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate the advantages of IAA-LQ, beating the best state-of-the-art method by 2.2% and 2.1% in terms of SRCC and PLCC, respectively.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

DDColor: Towards Photo-Realistic Image Colorization via Dual Decoders

Image colorization is a challenging problem due to multi-modal uncertainty and high ill-posedness. Directly training a deep neural network usually leads to incorrect semantic colors and low color richness. While transformer-based methods can deliver better results, they often rely on manually designed priors, suffer from poor generalization ability, and introduce color bleeding effects. To address these issues, we propose DDColor, an end-to-end method with dual decoders for image colorization. Our approach includes a pixel decoder and a query-based color decoder. The former restores the spatial resolution of the image, while the latter utilizes rich visual features to refine color queries, thus avoiding hand-crafted priors. Our two decoders work together to establish correlations between color and multi-scale semantic representations via cross-attention, significantly alleviating the color bleeding effect. Additionally, a simple yet effective colorfulness loss is introduced to enhance the color richness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDColor achieves superior performance to existing state-of-the-art works both quantitatively and qualitatively. The codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/piddnad/DDColor.Comment: ICCV 2023; Code: https://github.com/piddnad/DDColo

RSFNet: A White-Box Image Retouching Approach using Region-Specific Color Filters

Retouching images is an essential aspect of enhancing the visual appeal of photos. Although users often share common aesthetic preferences, their retouching methods may vary based on their individual preferences. Therefore, there is a need for white-box approaches that produce satisfying results and enable users to conveniently edit their images simultaneously. Recent white-box retouching methods rely on cascaded global filters that provide image-level filter arguments but cannot perform fine-grained retouching. In contrast, colorists typically employ a divide-and-conquer approach, performing a series of region-specific fine-grained enhancements when using traditional tools like Davinci Resolve. We draw on this insight to develop a white-box framework for photo retouching using parallel region-specific filters, called RSFNet. Our model generates filter arguments (e.g., saturation, contrast, hue) and attention maps of regions for each filter simultaneously. Instead of cascading filters, RSFNet employs linear summations of filters, allowing for a more diverse range of filter classes that can be trained more easily. Our experiments demonstrate that RSFNet achieves state-of-the-art results, offering satisfying aesthetic appeal and increased user convenience for editable white-box retouching.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202