Lossy image and video compression algorithms introduce several different types of visual artifacts that reduce the visual quality of the compressed media, and the higher the compression rate the higher is the strength of these artifacts. In this work, we describe an approach for visual quality improvement of compressed images and videos to be performed at presentation time, so to obtain the benefits of fast data transfer and reduced data storage, while enjoying a visual quality that could be obtained only reducing the compression rate. To obtain this result we propose to use a deep neural network trained using the NoGAN approach, adapting the popular DeOldify architecture used for colorization. We show how the proposed method can be applied both to image and video compression artifact removal and restoration.

In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for localizing the inner eye canthus in thermal face images. We first coarsely detect 5 facial keypoints corresponding to the center of the eyes, the nosetip and the ears. Then we compute a sparse 2D-3D points correspondence using a 3D Morphable Face Model (3DMM). This correspondence is used to project the entire 3D face onto the image, and subsequently locate the inner eye canthus. Detecting this location allows to obtain the most precise body temperature measurement for a person using a thermal camera. We evaluated the approach on a thermal face dataset provided with manually annotated landmarks. However, such manual annotations are normally conceived to identify facial parts such as eyes, nose and mouth, and are not specifically tailored for localizing the eye canthus region. As additional contribution, we enrich the original dataset by using the annotated landmarks to deform and project the 3DMM onto the images. Then, by manually selecting a small region corresponding to the eye canthus, we enrich the dataset with additional annotations. By using the manual landmarks, we ensure the correctness of the 3DMM projection, which can be used as ground-truth for future evaluations. Moreover, we supply the dataset with the 3D head poses and per-point visibility masks for detecting self-occlusions. The data will be publicly released.

In this paper we propose a method for improving pedestrian detection in the thermal domain using two stages: first, a generative data augmentation approach is used, then a domain adaptation method using generated data adapts an RGB pedestrian detector. Our model, based on the Least-Squares Generative Adversarial Network, is trained to synthesize realistic thermal versions of input RGB images which are then used to augment the limited amount of labeled thermal pedestrian images available for training. We apply our generative data augmentation strategy in order to adapt a pretrained YOLOv3 pedestrian detector to detection in the thermal-only domain. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: using less than 50% of available real thermal training data, and relying on synthesized data generated by our model in the domain adaptation phase, our detector achieves state-of-the-art results on the KAIST Multispectral Pedestrian Detection Benchmark; even if more real thermal data is available adding GAN generated images to the training data results in improved performance, thus showing that these images act as an effective form of data augmentation. To the best of our knowledge, our detector achieves the best single-modality detection results on KAIST with respect to the state-of-the-art.