NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. This challenge received a wide range of impressive solutions, which are developed and evaluated using our collected real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset. Unlike existing deraining datasets, our Raindrop Clarity dataset is more diverse and challenging in degradation types and contents, which includes day raindrop-focused, day background-focused, night raindrop-focused, and night background-focused degradations. This dataset is divided into three subsets for competition: 14,139 images for training, 240 images for validation, and 731 images for testing. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for the task of removing raindrops under varying lighting and focus conditions. There are a total of 361 participants in the competition, and 32 teams submitting valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset. The project can be found at https://lixinustc.github.io/CVPR-NTIRE2025-RainDrop-Competition.github.io/.

DeFakePro: Decentralized DeepFake Attacks Detection using ENF Authentication

Advancements in generative models, like Deepfake allows users to imitate a targeted person and manipulate online interactions. It has been recognized that disinformation may cause disturbance in society and ruin the foundation of trust. This article presents DeFakePro, a decentralized consensus mechanism-based Deepfake detection technique in online video conferencing tools. Leveraging Electrical Network Frequency (ENF), an environmental fingerprint embedded in digital media recording, affords a consensus mechanism design called Proof-of-ENF (PoENF) algorithm. The similarity in ENF signal fluctuations is utilized in the PoENF algorithm to authenticate the media broadcasted in conferencing tools. By utilizing the video conferencing setup with malicious participants to broadcast deep fake video recordings to other participants, the DeFakePro system verifies the authenticity of the incoming media in both audio and video channels.

Smart Surveillance as an Edge Network Service: from Harr-Cascade, SVM to a Lightweight CNN

Edge computing efficiently extends the realm of information technology beyond the boundary defined by cloud computing paradigm. Performing computation near the source and destination, edge computing is promising to address the challenges in many delay-sensitive applications, like real-time human surveillance. Leveraging the ubiquitously connected cameras and smart mobile devices, it enables video analytics at the edge. In recent years, many smart video surveillance approaches are proposed for object detection and tracking by using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. This work explores the feasibility of two popular human-objects detection schemes, Harr-Cascade and HOG feature extraction and SVM classifier, at the edge and introduces a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (L-CNN) leveraging the depthwise separable convolution for less computation, for human detection. Single Board computers (SBC) are used as edge devices for tests and algorithms are validated using real-world campus surveillance video streams and open data sets. The experimental results are promising that the final algorithm is able to track humans with a decent accuracy at a resource consumption affordable by edge devices in real-time manner.

Real-Time Human Detection as an Edge Service Enabled by a Lightweight CNN

Edge computing allows more computing tasks to take place on the decentralized nodes at the edge of networks. Today many delay sensitive, mission-critical applications can leverage these edge devices to reduce the time delay or even to enable real time, online decision making thanks to their onsite presence. Human objects detection, behavior recognition and prediction in smart surveillance fall into that category, where a transition of a huge volume of video streaming data can take valuable time and place heavy pressure on communication networks. It is widely recognized that video processing and object detection are computing intensive and too expensive to be handled by resource limited edge devices. Inspired by the depthwise separable convolution and Single Shot Multi-Box Detector (SSD), a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (LCNN) is introduced in this paper. By narrowing down the classifier's searching space to focus on human objects in surveillance video frames, the proposed LCNN algorithm is able to detect pedestrians with an affordable computation workload to an edge device. A prototype has been implemented on an edge node (Raspberry PI 3) using openCV libraries, and satisfactory performance is achieved using real world surveillance video streams. The experimental study has validated the design of LCNN and shown it is a promising approach to computing intensive applications at the edge.