Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution

Recent research on super-resolution has progressed with the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). In particular, residual learning techniques exhibit improved performance. In this paper, we develop an enhanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR) with performance exceeding those of current state-of-the-art SR methods. The significant performance improvement of our model is due to optimization by removing unnecessary modules in conventional residual networks. The performance is further improved by expanding the model size while we stabilize the training procedure. We also propose a new multi-scale deep super-resolution system (MDSR) and training method, which can reconstruct high-resolution images of different upscaling factors in a single model. The proposed methods show superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and prove its excellence by winning the NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2017 workshop. Best paper award of the NTIRE2017 workshop, and the winners of the NTIRE2017 Challenge on Single Image Super-Resolutio

Projection-based reduced order modeling of an iterative coupling scheme for thermo-poroelasticity

This paper explores an iterative coupling approach to solve thermo-poroelasticity problems, with its application as a high-fidelity discretization utilizing finite elements during the training of projection-based reduced order models. One of the main challenges in addressing coupled multi-physics problems is the complexity and computational expenses involved. In this study, we introduce a decoupled iterative solution approach, integrated with reduced order modeling, aimed at augmenting the efficiency of the computational algorithm. The iterative coupling technique we employ builds upon the established fixed-stress splitting scheme that has been extensively investigated for Biot's poroelasticity. By leveraging solutions derived from this coupled iterative scheme, the reduced order model employs an additional Galerkin projection onto a reduced basis space formed by a small number of modes obtained through proper orthogonal decomposition. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through numerical experiments, showcasing its computational prowess

Traffic-Aware Autonomous Driving with Differentiable Traffic Simulation

While there have been advancements in autonomous driving control and traffic simulation, there have been little to no works exploring the unification of both with deep learning. Works in both areas seem to focus on entirely different exclusive problems, yet traffic and driving have inherent semantic relations in the real world. In this paper, we present a generalizable distillation-style method for traffic-informed imitation learning that directly optimizes a autonomous driving policy for the overall benefit of faster traffic flow and lower energy consumption. We capitalize on improving the arbitrarily defined supervision of speed control in imitation learning systems, as most driving research focus on perception and steering. Moreover, our method addresses the lack of co-simulation between traffic and driving simulators and lays groundwork for directly involving traffic simulation with autonomous driving in future work. Our results show that, with information from traffic simulation involved in supervision of imitation learning methods, an autonomous vehicle can learn how to accelerate in a fashion that is beneficial for traffic flow and overall energy consumption for all nearby vehicles

WGICP: Differentiable Weighted GICP-Based Lidar Odometry

We present a novel differentiable weighted generalized iterative closest point (WGICP) method applicable to general 3D point cloud data, including that from Lidar. Our method builds on differentiable generalized ICP (GICP), and we propose using the differentiable K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm to enhance differentiability. The differentiable GICP algorithm provides the gradient of output pose estimation with respect to each input point, which allows us to train a neural network to predict its importance, or weight, in estimating the correct pose. In contrast to the other ICP-based methods that use voxel-based downsampling or matching methods to reduce the computational cost, our method directly reduces the number of points used for GICP by only selecting those with the highest weights and ignoring redundant ones with lower weights. We show that our method improves both accuracy and speed of the GICP algorithm for the KITTI dataset and can be used to develop a more robust and efficient SLAM system.Comment: 6 page

ICF-SRSR: Invertible scale-Conditional Function for Self-Supervised Real-world Single Image Super-Resolution

Single image super-resolution (SISR) is a challenging ill-posed problem that aims to up-sample a given low-resolution (LR) image to a high-resolution (HR) counterpart. Due to the difficulty in obtaining real LR-HR training pairs, recent approaches are trained on simulated LR images degraded by simplified down-sampling operators, e.g., bicubic. Such an approach can be problematic in practice because of the large gap between the synthesized and real-world LR images. To alleviate the issue, we propose a novel Invertible scale-Conditional Function (ICF), which can scale an input image and then restore the original input with different scale conditions. By leveraging the proposed ICF, we construct a novel self-supervised SISR framework (ICF-SRSR) to handle the real-world SR task without using any paired/unpaired training data. Furthermore, our ICF-SRSR can generate realistic and feasible LR-HR pairs, which can make existing supervised SISR networks more robust. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in handling SISR in a fully self-supervised manner. Our ICF-SRSR demonstrates superior performance compared to the existing methods trained on synthetic paired images in real-world scenarios and exhibits comparable performance compared to state-of-the-art supervised/unsupervised methods on public benchmark datasets

Exploring the relationship between the spatial distribution of roads and universal pattern of travel-route efficiency in urban road networks

Urban road networks are well known to have universal characteristics and scale-invariant patterns, despite the different geographical and historical environments of cities. Previous studies on universal characteristics of the urban road networks mostly have paid attention to their network properties but often ignored the spatial networked structures. To fill the research gap, we explore the underlying spatial patterns of road networks. In doing so, we inspect the travel-route efficiency in a given road network across 70 global cities which provides information on the usage pattern and functionality of the road structure. The efficiency is quantified by the detour patterns of the travel routes, estimated by the detour index (DI). The DI is a long-standing popular measure, but its spatiality has been barely considered so far. In this study, we probe the behavior of DI with respect to spatial variables by scanning the network radially from a city center. Through empirical analysis, we first discover universal properties in DI throughout most cities, which are summarized as a constant behavior of DI regardless of the radial position from a city center and clear collapse into a single curve for DIs for various radii with respect to the angular distance. Especially, the latter enables us to know the scaling factor in the length scale. We also reveal that the core-periphery spatial structure of the roads induces the universal pattern, which is supported by an artificial road network model. Furthermore, we visualize the spatial DI pattern on the city map to figure out the city-specific characteristics. The most and least efficient connections of several representative cities show the potential for practical implications in analyzing individual cities.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure