Performance is a critical challenge in mobile image processing. Given a
reference imaging pipeline, or even human-adjusted pairs of images, we seek to
reproduce the enhancements and enable real-time evaluation. For this, we
introduce a new neural network architecture inspired by bilateral grid
processing and local affine color transforms. Using pairs of input/output
images, we train a convolutional neural network to predict the coefficients of
a locally-affine model in bilateral space. Our architecture learns to make
local, global, and content-dependent decisions to approximate the desired image
transformation. At runtime, the neural network consumes a low-resolution
version of the input image, produces a set of affine transformations in
bilateral space, upsamples those transformations in an edge-preserving fashion
using a new slicing node, and then applies those upsampled transformations to
the full-resolution image. Our algorithm processes high-resolution images on a
smartphone in milliseconds, provides a real-time viewfinder at 1080p
resolution, and matches the quality of state-of-the-art approximation
techniques on a large class of image operators. Unlike previous work, our model
is trained off-line from data and therefore does not require access to the
original operator at runtime. This allows our model to learn complex,
scene-dependent transformations for which no reference implementation is
available, such as the photographic edits of a human retoucher.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures, Siggraph 201