DMAligner: Enhancing Image Alignment via Diffusion Model Based View Synthesis

Image alignment is a fundamental task in computer vision with broad applications. Existing methods predominantly employ optical flow-based image warping. However, this technique is susceptible to common challenges such as occlusions and illumination variations, leading to degraded alignment visual quality and compromised accuracy in downstream tasks. In this paper, we present DMAligner, a diffusion-based framework for image alignment through alignment-oriented view synthesis. DMAligner is crafted to tackle the challenges in image alignment from a new perspective, employing a generation-based solution that showcases strong capabilities and avoids the problems associated with flow-based image warping. Specifically, we propose a Dynamics-aware Diffusion Training approach for learning conditional image generation, synthesizing a novel view for image alignment. This incorporates a Dynamics-aware Mask Producing (DMP) module to adaptively distinguish dynamic foreground regions from static backgrounds, enabling the diffusion model to more effectively handle challenges that classical methods struggle to solve. Furthermore, we develop the Dynamic Scene Image Alignment (DSIA) dataset using Blender, which includes 1,033 indoor and outdoor scenes with over 30K image pairs tailored for image alignment. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach on DSIA benchmarks, as well as on a series of widely-used video datasets for qualitative comparisons. Our code is available at https://github.com/boomluo02/DMAligner.

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 Optical Flow from Event Camera with Rendered Dataset

We study the problem of estimating optical flow from event cameras. One important issue is how to build a high-quality event-flow dataset with accurate event values and flow labels. Previous datasets are created by either capturing real scenes by event cameras or synthesizing from images with pasted foreground objects. The former case can produce real event values but with calculated flow labels, which are sparse and inaccurate. The later case can generate dense flow labels but the interpolated events are prone to errors. In this work, we propose to render a physically correct event-flow dataset using computer graphics models. In particular, we first create indoor and outdoor 3D scenes by Blender with rich scene content variations. Second, diverse camera motions are included for the virtual capturing, producing images and accurate flow labels. Third, we render high-framerate videos between images for accurate events. The rendered dataset can adjust the density of events, based on which we further introduce an adaptive density module (ADM). Experiments show that our proposed dataset can facilitate event-flow learning, whereas previous approaches when trained on our dataset can improve their performances constantly by a relatively large margin. In addition, event-flow pipelines when equipped with our ADM can further improve performances.