Towards Multi-View Consistent Style Transfer with One-Step Diffusion via Vision Conditioning

The stylization of 3D scenes is an increasingly attractive topic in 3D vision. Although image style transfer has been extensively researched with promising results, directly applying 2D style transfer methods to 3D scenes often fails to preserve the structural and multi-view properties of 3D environments, resulting in unpleasant distortions in images from different viewpoints. To address these issues, we leverage the remarkable generative prior of diffusion-based models and propose a novel style transfer method, OSDiffST, based on a pre-trained one-step diffusion model (i.e., SD-Turbo) for rendering diverse styles in multi-view images of 3D scenes. To efficiently adapt the pre-trained model for multi-view style transfer on small datasets, we introduce a vision condition module to extract style information from the reference style image to serve as conditional input for the diffusion model and employ LoRA in diffusion model for adaptation. Additionally, we consider color distribution alignment and structural similarity between the stylized and content images using two specific loss functions. As a result, our method effectively preserves the structural information and multi-view consistency in stylized images without any 3D information. Experiments show that our method surpasses other promising style transfer methods in synthesizing various styles for multi-view images of 3D scenes. Stylized images from different viewpoints generated by our method achieve superior visual quality, with better structural integrity and less distortion. The source code is available at https://github.com/YushenZuo/OSDiffST.

Geometric Distortion Guided Transformer for Omnidirectional Image Super-Resolution

As virtual and augmented reality applications gain popularity, omnidirectional image (ODI) super-resolution has become increasingly important. Unlike 2D plain images that are formed on a plane, ODIs are projected onto spherical surfaces. Applying established image super-resolution methods to ODIs, therefore, requires performing equirectangular projection (ERP) to map the ODIs onto a plane. ODI super-resolution needs to take into account geometric distortion resulting from ERP. However, without considering such geometric distortion of ERP images, previous deep-learning-based methods only utilize a limited range of pixels and may easily miss self-similar textures for reconstruction. In this paper, we introduce a novel Geometric Distortion Guided Transformer for Omnidirectional image Super-Resolution (GDGT-OSR). Specifically, a distortion modulated rectangle-window self-attention mechanism, integrated with deformable self-attention, is proposed to better perceive the distortion and thus involve more self-similar textures. Distortion modulation is achieved through a newly devised distortion guidance generator that produces guidance by exploiting the variability of distortion across latitudes. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic feature aggregation scheme to adaptively fuse the features from different self-attention modules. We present extensive experimental results on public datasets and show that the new GDGT-OSR outperforms methods in existing literature.

Resource-Constrained Edge AI with Early Exit Prediction

By leveraging the data sample diversity, the early-exit network recently emerges as a prominent neural network architecture to accelerate the deep learning inference process. However, intermediate classifiers of the early exits introduce additional computation overhead, which is unfavorable for resource-constrained edge artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, we propose an early exit prediction mechanism to reduce the on-device computation overhead in a device-edge co-inference system supported by early-exit networks. Specifically, we design a low-complexity module, namely the Exit Predictor, to guide some distinctly "hard" samples to bypass the computation of the early exits. Besides, considering the varying communication bandwidth, we extend the early exit prediction mechanism for latency-aware edge inference, which adapts the prediction thresholds of the Exit Predictor and the confidence thresholds of the early-exit network via a few simple regression models. Extensive experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the Exit Predictor in achieving a better tradeoff between accuracy and on-device computation overhead for early-exit networks. Besides, compared with the baseline methods, the proposed method for latency-aware edge inference attains higher inference accuracy under different bandwidth conditions.