Associate Everything Detected: Facilitating Tracking-by-Detection to the Unknown

Multi-object tracking (MOT) emerges as a pivotal and highly promising branch in the field of computer vision. Classical closed-vocabulary MOT (CV-MOT) methods aim to track objects of predefined categories. Recently, some open-vocabulary MOT (OV-MOT) methods have successfully addressed the problem of tracking unknown categories. However, we found that the CV-MOT and OV-MOT methods each struggle to excel in the tasks of the other. In this paper, we present a unified framework, Associate Everything Detected (AED), that simultaneously tackles CV-MOT and OV-MOT by integrating with any off-the-shelf detector and supports unknown categories. Different from existing tracking-by-detection MOT methods, AED gets rid of prior knowledge (e.g. motion cues) and relies solely on highly robust feature learning to handle complex trajectories in OV-MOT tasks while keeping excellent performance in CV-MOT tasks. Specifically, we model the association task as a similarity decoding problem and propose a sim-decoder with an association-centric learning mechanism. The sim-decoder calculates similarities in three aspects: spatial, temporal, and cross-clip. Subsequently, association-centric learning leverages these threefold similarities to ensure that the extracted features are appropriate for continuous tracking and robust enough to generalize to unknown categories. Compared with existing powerful OV-MOT and CV-MOT methods, AED achieves superior performance on TAO, SportsMOT, and DanceTrack without any prior knowledge. Our code is available at https://github.com/balabooooo/AED.

OAPT: Offset-Aware Partition Transformer for Double JPEG Artifacts Removal

Deep learning-based methods have shown remarkable performance in single JPEG artifacts removal task. However, existing methods tend to degrade on double JPEG images, which are prevalent in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose Offset-Aware Partition Transformer for double JPEG artifacts removal, termed as OAPT. We conduct an analysis of double JPEG compression that results in up to four patterns within each 8x8 block and design our model to cluster the similar patterns to remedy the difficulty of restoration. Our OAPT consists of two components: compression offset predictor and image reconstructor. Specifically, the predictor estimates pixel offsets between the first and second compression, which are then utilized to divide different patterns. The reconstructor is mainly based on several Hybrid Partition Attention Blocks (HPAB), combining vanilla window-based self-attention and sparse attention for clustered pattern features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OAPT outperforms the state-of-the-art method by more than 0.16dB in double JPEG image restoration task. Moreover, without increasing any computation cost, the pattern clustering module in HPAB can serve as a plugin to enhance other transformer-based image restoration methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/QMoQ/OAPT.git .

Compressed Video Quality Enhancement with Temporal Group Alignment and Fusion

In this paper, we propose a temporal group alignment and fusion network to enhance the quality of compressed videos by using the long-short term correlations between frames. The proposed model consists of the intra-group feature alignment (IntraGFA) module, the inter-group feature fusion (InterGFF) module, and the feature enhancement (FE) module. We form the group of pictures (GoP) by selecting frames from the video according to their temporal distances to the target enhanced frame. With this grouping, the composed GoP can contain either long- or short-term correlated information of neighboring frames. We design the IntraGFA module to align the features of frames of each GoP to eliminate the motion existing between frames. We construct the InterGFF module to fuse features belonging to different GoPs and finally enhance the fused features with the FE module to generate high-quality video frames. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves up to 0.05dB gain and lower complexity compared to the state-of-the-art method.

Texture-guided Coding for Deep Features

With the rapid development of machine vision technology in recent years, many researchers have begun to focus on feature compression that is better suited for machine vision tasks. The target of feature compression is deep features, which arise from convolution in the middle layer of a pre-trained convolutional neural network. However, due to the large volume of data and high level of abstraction of deep features, their application is primarily limited to machine-centric scenarios, which poses significant constraints in situations requiring human-computer interaction. This paper investigates features and textures and proposes a texture-guided feature compression strategy based on their characteristics. Specifically, the strategy comprises feature layers and texture layers. The feature layers serve the machine, including a feature selection module and a feature reconstruction network. With the assistance of texture images, they selectively compress and transmit channels relevant to visual tasks, reducing feature data while providing high-quality features for the machine. The texture layers primarily serve humans and consist of an image reconstruction network. This image reconstruction network leverages features and texture images to reconstruct preview images for humans. Our method fully exploits the characteristics of texture and features. It eliminates feature redundancy, reconstructs high-quality preview images for humans, and supports decision-making. The experimental results demonstrate excellent performance when employing our proposed method to compress the deep features.

CPGA: Coding Priors-Guided Aggregation Network for Compressed Video Quality Enhancement

Recently, numerous approaches have achieved notable success in compressed video quality enhancement (VQE). However, these methods usually ignore the utilization of valuable coding priors inherently embedded in compressed videos, such as motion vectors and residual frames, which carry abundant temporal and spatial information. To remedy this problem, we propose the Coding Priors-Guided Aggregation (CPGA) network to utilize temporal and spatial information from coding priors. The CPGA mainly consists of an inter-frame temporal aggregation (ITA) module and a multi-scale non-local aggregation (MNA) module. Specifically, the ITA module aggregates temporal information from consecutive frames and coding priors, while the MNA module globally captures spatial information guided by residual frames. In addition, to facilitate research in VQE task, we newly construct the Video Coding Priors (VCP) dataset, comprising 300 videos with various coding priors extracted from corresponding bitstreams. It remedies the shortage of previous datasets on the lack of coding information. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/CPGA/CPGA.git.

Multiple Latent Space Mapping for Compressed Dark Image Enhancement

Dark image enhancement aims at converting dark images to normal-light images. Existing dark image enhancement methods take uncompressed dark images as inputs and achieve great performance. However, in practice, dark images are often compressed before storage or transmission over the Internet. Current methods get poor performance when processing compressed dark images. Artifacts hidden in the dark regions are amplified by current methods, which results in uncomfortable visual effects for observers. Based on this observation, this study aims at enhancing compressed dark images while avoiding compression artifacts amplification. Since texture details intertwine with compression artifacts in compressed dark images, detail enhancement and blocking artifacts suppression contradict each other in image space. Therefore, we handle the task in latent space. To this end, we propose a novel latent mapping network based on variational auto-encoder (VAE). Firstly, different from previous VAE-based methods with single-resolution features only, we exploit multiple latent spaces with multi-resolution features, to reduce the detail blur and improve image fidelity. Specifically, we train two multi-level VAEs to project compressed dark images and normal-light images into their latent spaces respectively. Secondly, we leverage a latent mapping network to transform features from compressed dark space to normal-light space. Specifically, since the degradation models of darkness and compression are different from each other, the latent mapping process is divided mapping into enlightening branch and deblocking branch. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in compressed dark image enhancement.

Learning to Kindle the Starlight

Capturing highly appreciated star field images is extremely challenging due to light pollution, the requirements of specialized hardware, and the high level of photographic skills needed. Deep learning-based techniques have achieved remarkable results in low-light image enhancement (LLIE) but have not been widely applied to star field image enhancement due to the lack of training data. To address this problem, we construct the first Star Field Image Enhancement Benchmark (SFIEB) that contains 355 real-shot and 854 semi-synthetic star field images, all having the corresponding reference images. Using the presented dataset, we propose the first star field image enhancement approach, namely StarDiffusion, based on conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM). We introduce dynamic stochastic corruptions to the inputs of conditional DDPM to improve the performance and generalization of the network on our small-scale dataset. Experiments show promising results of our method, which outperforms state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement algorithms. The dataset and codes will be open-sourced.

OL-DN: Online learning based dual-domain network for HEVC intra frame quality enhancement

Convolution neural network (CNN) based methods offer effective solutions for enhancing the quality of compressed image and video. However, these methods ignore using the raw data to enhance the quality. In this paper, we adopt the raw data in the quality enhancement for the HEVC intra-coded image by proposing an online learning-based method. When quality enhancement is demanded, we online train our proposed model at encoder side and then use the parameters to update the model of decoder side. This method not only improves model performance, but also makes one model adoptable to multiple coding scenarios. Besides, quantization error in discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients is the root cause of various HEVC compression artifacts. Thus, we combine frequency domain priors to assist image reconstruction. We design a DCT based convolution layer, to produce DCT coefficients that are suitable for CNN learning. Experimental results show that our proposed online learning based dual-domain network (OL-DN) has achieved superior performance, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Luminance-Guided Chrominance Image Enhancement for HEVC Intra Coding

In this paper, we propose a luminance-guided chrominance image enhancement convolutional neural network for HEVC intra coding. Specifically, we firstly develop a gated recursive asymmetric-convolution block to restore each degraded chrominance image, which generates an intermediate output. Then, guided by the luminance image, the quality of this intermediate output is further improved, which finally produces the high-quality chrominance image. When our proposed method is adopted in the compression of color images with HEVC intra coding, it achieves 28.96% and 16.74% BD-rate gains over HEVC for the U and V images, respectively, which accordingly demonstrate its superiority.

Enhancing Quality for VVC Compressed Videos by Jointly Exploiting Spatial Details and Temporal Structure

In this paper, we propose a quality enhancement network for Versatile Video Coding (VVC) compressed videos by jointly exploiting spatial details and temporal structure (SDTS). The network consists of a temporal structure prediction subnet and a spatial detail enhancement subnet. The former subnet is used to estimate and compensate the temporal motion across frames, and the spatial detail subnet is used to reduce the compression artifacts and enhance the reconstruction quality of the VVC compressed video. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our SDTS-based approach. It offers over 7.82$\%$ BD-rate saving on the common test video sequences and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.