Leveraging Positional Encoding for Robust Multi-Reference-Based Object 6D Pose Estimation

Accurately estimating the pose of an object is a crucial task in computer vision and robotics. There are two main deep learning approaches for this: geometric representation regression and iterative refinement. However, these methods have some limitations that reduce their effectiveness. In this paper, we analyze these limitations and propose new strategies to overcome them. To tackle the issue of blurry geometric representation, we use positional encoding with high-frequency components for the object's 3D coordinates. To address the local minimum problem in refinement methods, we introduce a normalized image plane-based multi-reference refinement strategy that's independent of intrinsic matrix constraints. Lastly, we utilize adaptive instance normalization and a simple occlusion augmentation method to help our model concentrate on the target object. Our experiments on Linemod, Linemod-Occlusion, and YCB-Video datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods. We will soon release the code.

LAN-HDR: Luminance-based Alignment Network for High Dynamic Range Video Reconstruction

As demands for high-quality videos continue to rise, high-resolution and high-dynamic range (HDR) imaging techniques are drawing attention. To generate an HDR video from low dynamic range (LDR) images, one of the critical steps is the motion compensation between LDR frames, for which most existing works employed the optical flow algorithm. However, these methods suffer from flow estimation errors when saturation or complicated motions exist. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end HDR video composition framework, which aligns LDR frames in the feature space and then merges aligned features into an HDR frame, without relying on pixel-domain optical flow. Specifically, we propose a luminance-based alignment network for HDR (LAN-HDR) consisting of an alignment module and a hallucination module. The alignment module aligns a frame to the adjacent reference by evaluating luminance-based attention, excluding color information. The hallucination module generates sharp details, especially for washed-out areas due to saturation. The aligned and hallucinated features are then blended adaptively to complement each other. Finally, we merge the features to generate a final HDR frame. In training, we adopt a temporal loss, in addition to frame reconstruction losses, to enhance temporal consistency and thus reduce flickering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs better or comparable to state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks.

High Dynamic Range Imaging of Dynamic Scenes with Saturation Compensation but without Explicit Motion Compensation

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is a highly challenging task since a large amount of information is lost due to the limitations of camera sensors. For HDR imaging, some methods capture multiple low dynamic range (LDR) images with altering exposures to aggregate more information. However, these approaches introduce ghosting artifacts when significant inter-frame motions are present. Moreover, although multi-exposure images are given, we have little information in severely over-exposed areas. Most existing methods focus on motion compensation, i.e., alignment of multiple LDR shots to reduce the ghosting artifacts, but they still produce unsatisfying results. These methods also rather overlook the need to restore the saturated areas. In this paper, we generate well-aligned multi-exposure features by reformulating a motion alignment problem into a simple brightness adjustment problem. In addition, we propose a coarse-to-fine merging strategy with explicit saturation compensation. The saturated areas are reconstructed with similar well-exposed content using adaptive contextual attention. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods regarding qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Self-supervised Image Denoising with Downsampled Invariance Loss and Conditional Blind-Spot Network

There have been many image denoisers using deep neural networks, which outperform conventional model-based methods by large margins. Recently, self-supervised methods have attracted attention because constructing a large real noise dataset for supervised training is an enormous burden. The most representative self-supervised denoisers are based on blind-spot networks, which exclude the receptive field's center pixel. However, excluding any input pixel is abandoning some information, especially when the input pixel at the corresponding output position is excluded. In addition, a standard blind-spot network fails to reduce real camera noise due to the pixel-wise correlation of noise, though it successfully removes independently distributed synthetic noise. Hence, to realize a more practical denoiser, we propose a novel self-supervised training framework that can remove real noise. For this, we derive the theoretic upper bound of a supervised loss where the network is guided by the downsampled blinded output. Also, we design a conditional blind-spot network (C-BSN), which selectively controls the blindness of the network to use the center pixel information. Furthermore, we exploit a random subsampler to decorrelate noise spatially, making the C-BSN free of visual artifacts that were often seen in downsample-based methods. Extensive experiments show that the proposed C-BSN achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world datasets as a self-supervised denoiser and shows qualitatively pleasing results without any post-processing or refinement.

Lightweight Hybrid Video Compression Framework Using Reference-Guided Restoration Network

Recent deep-learning-based video compression methods brought coding gains over conventional codecs such as AVC and HEVC. However, learning-based codecs generally require considerable computation time and model complexity. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight hybrid video codec consisting of a conventional video codec(HEVC / VVC), a lossless image codec, and our new restoration network. Precisely, our encoder consists of the conventional video encoder and a lossless image encoder, transmitting a lossy-compressed video bitstream along with a losslessly-compressed reference frame. The decoder is constructed with corresponding video/image decoders and a new restoration network, which enhances the compressed video in two-step processes. In the first step, a network trained with a large video dataset restores the details lost by the conventional encoder. Then, we further boost the video quality with the guidance of a reference image, which is a losslessly compressed video frame. The reference image provides video-specific information, which can be utilized to better restore the details of a compressed video. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance to top-tier methods, even when applied to HEVC. Nevertheless, our method has lower complexity, a faster run time, and can be easily integrated into existing conventional codecs.

Perception-Oriented Single Image Super-Resolution using Optimal Objective Estimation

Single-image super-resolution (SISR) networks trained with perceptual and adversarial losses provide high-contrast outputs compared to those of networks trained with distortion-oriented losses, such as L1 or L2. However, it has been shown that using a single perceptual loss is insufficient for accurately restoring locally varying diverse shapes in images, often generating undesirable artifacts or unnatural details. For this reason, combinations of various losses, such as perceptual, adversarial, and distortion losses, have been attempted, yet it remains challenging to find optimal combinations. Hence, in this paper, we propose a new SISR framework that applies optimal objectives for each region to generate plausible results in overall areas of high-resolution outputs. Specifically, the framework comprises two models: a predictive model that infers an optimal objective map for a given low-resolution (LR) input and a generative model that applies a target objective map to produce the corresponding SR output. The generative model is trained over our proposed objective trajectory representing a set of essential objectives, which enables the single network to learn various SR results corresponding to combined losses on the trajectory. The predictive model is trained using pairs of LR images and corresponding optimal objective maps searched from the objective trajectory. Experimental results on five benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art perception-driven SR methods in LPIPS, DISTS, PSNR, and SSIM metrics. The visual results also demonstrate the superiority of our method in perception-oriented reconstruction. The code and models are available at https://github.com/seungho-snu/SROOE.

Training Patch Analysis and Mining Skills for Image Restoration Deep Neural Networks

There have been numerous image restoration methods based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, most of the literature on this topic focused on the network architecture and loss functions, while less detailed on the training methods. Hence, some of the works are not easily reproducible because it is required to know the hidden training skills to obtain the same results. To be specific with the training dataset, few works discussed how to prepare and order the training image patches. Moreover, it requires a high cost to capture new datasets to train a restoration network for the real-world scene. Hence, we believe it is necessary to study the preparation and selection of training data. In this regard, we present an analysis of the training patches and explore the consequences of different patch extraction methods. Eventually, we propose a guideline for the patch extraction from given training images.

Variational Deep Image Restoration

This paper presents a new variational inference framework for image restoration and a convolutional neural network (CNN) structure that can solve the restoration problems described by the proposed framework. Earlier CNN-based image restoration methods primarily focused on network architecture design or training strategy with non-blind scenarios where the degradation models are known or assumed. For a step closer to real-world applications, CNNs are also blindly trained with the whole dataset, including diverse degradations. However, the conditional distribution of a high-quality image given a diversely degraded one is too complicated to be learned by a single CNN. Therefore, there have also been some methods that provide additional prior information to train a CNN. Unlike previous approaches, we focus more on the objective of restoration based on the Bayesian perspective and how to reformulate the objective. Specifically, our method relaxes the original posterior inference problem to better manageable sub-problems and thus behaves like a divide-and-conquer scheme. As a result, the proposed framework boosts the performance of several restoration problems compared to the previous ones. Specifically, our method delivers state-of-the-art performance on Gaussian denoising, real-world noise reduction, blind image super-resolution, and JPEG compression artifacts reduction.

One-Shot Face Reenactment on Megapixels

The goal of face reenactment is to transfer a target expression and head pose to a source face while preserving the source identity. With the popularity of face-related applications, there has been much research on this topic. However, the results of existing methods are still limited to low-resolution and lack photorealism. In this work, we present a one-shot and high-resolution face reenactment method called MegaFR. To be precise, we leverage StyleGAN by using 3DMM-based rendering images and overcome the lack of high-quality video datasets by designing a loss function that works without high-quality videos. Also, we apply iterative refinement to deal with extreme poses and/or expressions. Since the proposed method controls source images through 3DMM parameters, we can explicitly manipulate source images. We apply MegaFR to various applications such as face frontalization, eye in-painting, and talking head generation. Experimental results show that our method successfully disentangles identity from expression and head pose, and outperforms conventional methods.

Flexible Style Image Super-Resolution using Conditional Objective

Recent studies have significantly enhanced the performance of single-image super-resolution (SR) using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). While there can be many high-resolution (HR) solutions for a given input, most existing CNN-based methods do not explore alternative solutions during the inference. A typical approach to obtaining alternative SR results is to train multiple SR models with different loss weightings and exploit the combination of these models. Instead of using multiple models, we present a more efficient method to train a single adjustable SR model on various combinations of losses by taking advantage of multi-task learning. Specifically, we optimize an SR model with a conditional objective during training, where the objective is a weighted sum of multiple perceptual losses at different feature levels. The weights vary according to given conditions, and the set of weights is defined as a style controller. Also, we present an architecture appropriate for this training scheme, which is the Residual-in-Residual Dense Block equipped with spatial feature transformation layers. At the inference phase, our trained model can generate locally different outputs conditioned on the style control map. Extensive experiments show that the proposed SR model produces various desirable reconstructions without artifacts and yields comparable quantitative performance to state-of-the-art SR methods.