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Multi-Laplacian GAN with Edge Enhancement for Face Super Resolution

Shanlei Ko, Bi-Ru Dai

Auto-TLDR; Face Image Super-Resolution with Enhanced Edge Information

Abstract Slides Poster

Face image super-resolution has become a research hotspot in the field of image processing. Nowadays, more and more researches add additional information, such as landmark, identity, to reconstruct high resolution images from low resolution ones, and have a good performance in quantitative terms and perceptual quality. However, these additional information is hard to obtain in many cases. In this work, we focus on reconstructing face images by extracting useful information from face images directly rather than using additional information. By observing edge information in each scale of face images, we propose a method to reconstruct high resolution face images with enhanced edge information. In additional, with the proposed training procedure, our method reconstructs photo-realistic images in upscaling factor 8x and outperforms state-of-the-art methods both in quantitative terms and perceptual quality.

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Face Super-Resolution Network with Incremental Enhancement of Facial Parsing Information

Shuang Liu, Chengyi Xiong, Zhirong Gao

Auto-TLDR; Learning-based Face Super-Resolution with Incremental Boosting Facial Parsing Information

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Recently, facial priors based face super-resolution (SR) methods have obtained significant performance gains in dealing with extremely degraded facial images, and facial priors have also been proved useful in facilitating the inference of face images. Based on this, how to fully fuse facial priors into deep features to improve face SR performance has attracted a major attention. In this paper, we propose a learning-based face SR approach with incremental boosting facial parsing information (IFPSR) for high-magnification of low-resolution faces. The proposed IFPSR method consists of three main parts: i) a three-stage parsing map embedded features upsampling network, in which image recovery and prior estimation processes are performed simultaneously and progressively to improve the image resolution; ii) a progressive training method and a joint facial attention and heatmap loss to obtain better facial attributes; iii) the channel attention strategy in residual dense blocks to adaptively learn facial features. Extensive experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative and qualitative metrics, our approach can achieve an outstanding balance between SR image quality and low network complexity.

Boosting High-Level Vision with Joint Compression Artifacts Reduction and Super-Resolution

Xiaoyu Xiang, Qian Lin, Jan Allebach

Auto-TLDR; A Context-Aware Joint CAR and SR Neural Network for High-Resolution Text Recognition and Face Detection

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Due to the limits of bandwidth and storage space, digital images are usually down-scaled and compressed when transmitted over networks, resulting in loss of details and jarring artifacts that can lower the performance of high-level visual tasks. In this paper, we aim to generate an artifact-free high-resolution image from a low-resolution one compressed with an arbitrary quality factor by exploring joint compression artifacts reduction (CAR) and super-resolution (SR) tasks. First, we propose a context-aware joint CAR and SR neural network (CAJNN) that integrates both local and non-local features to solve CAR and SR in one-stage. Finally, a deep reconstruction network is adopted to predict high quality and high-resolution images. Evaluation on CAR and SR benchmark datasets shows that our CAJNN model outperforms previous methods and also takes 26.2% less runtime. Based on this model, we explore addressing two critical challenges in high-level computer vision: optical character recognition of low-resolution texts, and extremely tiny face detection. We demonstrate that CAJNN can serve as an effective image preprocessing method and improve the accuracy for real-scene text recognition (from 85.30% to 85.75%) and the average precision for tiny face detection (from 0.317 to 0.611).

On-Device Text Image Super Resolution

Dhruval Jain, Arun Prabhu, Gopi Ramena, Manoj Goyal, Debi Mohanty, Naresh Purre, Sukumar Moharana

Auto-TLDR; A Novel Deep Neural Network for Super-Resolution on Low Resolution Text Images

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Recent research on super-resolution (SR) has wit- nessed major developments with the advancements of deep convolutional neural networks. There is a need for information extraction from scenic text images or even document images on device, most of which are low-resolution (LR) images. Therefore, SR becomes an essential pre-processing step as Bicubic Upsampling, which is conventionally present in smartphones, performs poorly on LR images. To give the user more control over his privacy, and to reduce the carbon footprint by reducing the overhead of cloud computing and hours of GPU usage, executing SR models on the edge is a necessity in the recent times. There are various challenges in running and optimizing a model on resource-constrained platforms like smartphones. In this paper, we present a novel deep neural network that reconstructs sharper character edges and thus boosts OCR confidence. The proposed architecture not only achieves significant improvement in PSNR over bicubic upsampling on various benchmark datasets but also runs with an average inference time of 11.7 ms per image. We have outperformed state-of-the-art on the Text330 dataset. We also achieve an OCR accuracy of 75.89% on the ICDAR 2015 TextSR dataset, where ground truth has an accuracy of 78.10%.

Super-Resolution Guided Pore Detection for Fingerprint Recognition

Syeda Nyma Ferdous, Ali Dabouei, Jeremy Dawson, Nasser M. Nasarabadi

Auto-TLDR; Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network for Fingerprint Recognition Using Pore Features

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Performance of fingerprint recognition algorithms substantially rely on fine features extracted from fingerprints. Apart from minutiae and ridge patterns, pore features have proven to be usable for fingerprint recognition. Although features from minutiae and ridge patterns are quite attainable from low-resolution images, using pore features is practical only if the fingerprint image is of high resolution which necessitates a model that enhances the image quality of the conventional 500 ppi legacy fingerprints preserving the fine details. To find a solution for recovering pore information from low-resolution fingerprints, we adopt a joint learning-based approach that combines both super-resolution and pore detection networks. Our modified single image Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) framework helps to reliably reconstruct high-resolution fingerprint samples from low-resolution ones assisting the pore detection network to identify pores with a high accuracy. The network jointly learns a distinctive feature representation from a real low-resolution fingerprint sample and successfully synthesizes a high-resolution sample from it. To add discriminative information and uniqueness for all the subjects, we have integrated features extracted from a deep fingerprint verifier with the SRGAN quality discriminator. We also add ridge reconstruction loss, utilizing ridge patterns to make the best use of extracted features. Our proposed method solves the recognition problem by improving the quality of fingerprint images. High recognition accuracy of the synthesized samples that is close to the accuracy achieved using the original high-resolution images validate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Hierarchically Aggregated Residual Transformation for Single Image Super Resolution

Zejiang Hou, Sy Kung

Auto-TLDR; HARTnet: Hierarchically Aggregated Residual Transformation for Multi-Scale Super-resolution

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Visual patterns usually appear at different scales/sizes in natural images. Multi-scale feature representation is of great importance for the single-image super-resolution(SISR) task to reconstruct image objects at different scales.However, such characteristic has been rarely considered by CNN-based SISR methods. In this work, we propose a novel build-ing block, i.e. hierarchically aggregated residual transformation(HART), to achieve multi-scale feature representation in each layer of the network. Within each HART block, we connect multiple convolutions in a hierarchical residual-like manner, which greatly expands the range of effective receptive fields and helps to detect image features at different scales. To theoretically understand the proposed HART block, we recast SISR as an optimal control problem and show that HART effectively approximates the classical4th-order Runge-Kutta method, which has the merit of small local truncation error for solving numerical ordinary differential equation. By cascading the proposed HART blocks, we establish our high-performing HARTnet. Comparedwith existing SR state-of-the-arts (including those in NTIRE2019 SR Challenge leaderboard), the proposed HARTnet demonstrates consistent PSNR/SSIM performance improvements on various benchmark datasets under different degradation models.Moreover, HARTnet can efficiently restore more faithful high-resolution images than comparative SR methods (cf. Figure 1).

Progressive Splitting and Upscaling Structure for Super-Resolution

Qiang Li, Tao Dai, Shutao Xia

Auto-TLDR; PSUS: Progressive and Upscaling Layer for Single Image Super-Resolution

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great success in single image super-resolution (SISR). Most of these methods focus on the design of network architecture and adopt a sub-pixel convolution layer at the end of network, but few have paid attention to exploring potential representation ability of upscaling layer. Sub-pixel convolution layer aggregates several low resolution (LR) feature maps and builds super-resolution (SR) images in a single step. However, those LR feature maps share similar patterns as they are extracted from a single trunk network. We believe that the mapping relationships between input image and each LR feature map are not consistent. Inspired by this, we propose a novel progressive splitting and upscaling structure, termed PSUS, which generates decoupled feature maps for upscaling layer to get better SR image. Experiments show that our method can not only speed up the convergence, but also achieve considerable improvement on image quality with fewer parameters and lower computational complexity.

Detail-Revealing Deep Low-Dose CT Reconstruction

Xinchen Ye, Yuyao Xu, Rui Xu, Shoji Kido, Noriyuki Tomiyama

Auto-TLDR; A Dual-branch Aggregation Network for Low-Dose CT Reconstruction

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Low-dose CT imaging emerges with low radiation risk due to the reduction of radiation dose, but brings negative impact on the imaging quality. This paper addresses the problem of low-dose CT reconstruction. Previous methods are unsatisfactory due to the inaccurate recovery of image details under the strong noise generated by the reduction of radiation dose, which directly affects the final diagnosis. To suppress the noise effectively while retain the structures well, we propose a detail-revealing dual-branch aggregation network to effectively reconstruct the degraded CT image. Specifically, the main reconstruction branch iteratively exploits and compensates the reconstruction errors to gradually refine the CT image, while the prior branch is to learn the structure details as prior knowledge to help recover the CT image. A sophisticated detail-revealing loss is designed to fuse the information from both branches and guide the learning to obtain better performance from pixel-wise and holistic perspectives respectively. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-art methods in both PSNR and SSIM metrics.

Thermal Image Enhancement Using Generative Adversarial Network for Pedestrian Detection

Mohamed Amine Marnissi, Hajer Fradi, Anis Sahbani, Najoua Essoukri Ben Amara

Auto-TLDR; Improving Visual Quality of Infrared Images for Pedestrian Detection Using Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Infrared imaging has recently played an important role in a wide range of applications including surveillance, robotics and night vision. However, infrared cameras often suffer from some limitations, essentially about low-contrast and blurred details. These problems contribute to the loss of observation of target objects in infrared images, which could limit the feasibility of different infrared imaging applications. In this paper, we mainly focus on the problem of pedestrian detection on thermal images. Particularly, we emphasis the need for enhancing the visual quality of images beforehand performing the detection step. % to ensure effective results. To address that, we propose a novel thermal enhancement architecture based on Generative Adversarial Network, and composed of two modules contrast enhancement and denoising modules with a post-processing step for edge restoration in order to improve the overall quality. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is assessed by means of visual quality metrics and better results are obtained compared to the original thermal images and to the obtained results by other existing enhancement methods. These results have been conduced on a subset of KAIST dataset. Using the same dataset, the impact of the proposed enhancement architecture has been demonstrated on the detection results by obtaining better performance with a significant margin using YOLOv3 detector.

Small Object Detection Leveraging on Simultaneous Super-Resolution

Hong Ji, Zhi Gao, Xiaodong Liu, Tiancan Mei

Auto-TLDR; Super-Resolution via Generative Adversarial Network for Small Object Detection

Abstract Poster Similar

Despite the impressive advancement achieved in object detection, the detection performance of small object is still far from satisfactory due to the lack of sufficient detailed appearance to distinguish it from similar objects. Inspired by the positive effects of super-resolution for object detection, we propose a general framework that can be incorporated with most available detector networks to significantly improve the performance of small object detection, in which the low-resolution image is super-resolved via generative adversarial network (GAN) in an unsupervised manner. In our method, the super-resolution network and the detection network are trained jointly and alternately with each other fixed. In particular, the detection loss is back-propagated into the super-resolution network during training to facilitate detection. Compared with available simultaneous super-resolution and detection methods which heavily rely on low-/high-resolution image pairs, our work breaks through such restriction via applying the CycleGAN strategy, achieving increased generality and applicability, while remaining an elegant structure. Extensive experiments on datasets from both computer vision and remote sensing communities demonstrate that our method works effectively on a wide range of complex scenarios, resulting in best performance that significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches.

Local Facial Attribute Transfer through Inpainting

Ricard Durall, Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Janis Keuper

Auto-TLDR; Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The term attribute transfer refers to the tasks of altering images in such a way, that the semantic interpretation of a given input image is shifted towards an intended direction, which is quantified by semantic attributes. Prominent example applications are photo realistic changes of facial features and expressions, like changing the hair color, adding a smile, enlarging the nose or altering the entire context of a scene, like transforming a summer landscape into a winter panorama. Recent advances in attribute transfer are mostly based on generative deep neural networks, using various techniques to manipulate images in the latent space of the generator. In this paper, we present a novel method for the common sub-task of local attribute transfers, where only parts of a face have to be altered in order to achieve semantic changes (e.g. removing a mustache). In contrast to previous methods, where such local changes have been implemented by generating new (global) images, we propose to formulate local attribute transfers as an inpainting problem. Removing and regenerating only parts of images, our Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network (ATI-GAN) is able to utilize local context information to focus on the attributes while keeping the background unmodified resulting in visually sound results.

High Resolution Face Age Editing

Xu Yao, Gilles Puy, Alasdair Newson, Yann Gousseau, Pierre Hellier

Auto-TLDR; An Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Face Age editing on High Resolution Images

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Face age editing has become a crucial task in film post-production, and is also becoming popular for general purpose photography. Recently, adversarial training has produced some of the most visually impressive results for image manipulation, including the face aging/de-aging task. In spite of considerable progress, current methods often present visual artifacts and can only deal with low-resolution images. In order to achieve aging/de-aging with the high quality and robustness necessary for wider use, these problems need to be addressed. This is the goal of the present work. We present an encoder-decoder architecture for face age editing. The core idea of our network is to encode a face image to age-invariant features, and learn a modulation vector corresponding to a target age. We then combine these two elements to produce a realistic image of the person with the desired target age. Our architecture is greatly simplified with respect to other approaches, and allows for fine-grained age editing on high resolution images in a single unified model. Source codes are available at https://github.com/InterDigitalInc/HRFAE.

RSAN: Residual Subtraction and Attention Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Shuo Wei, Xin Sun, Haoran Zhao, Junyu Dong

Auto-TLDR; RSAN: Residual subtraction and attention network for super-resolution

Abstract Slides Similar

The single-image super-resolution (SISR) aims to recover a potential high-resolution image from its low-resolution version. Recently, deep learning-based methods have played a significant role in super-resolution field due to its effectiveness and efficiency. However, most of the SISR methods neglect the importance among the feature map channels. Moreover, they can not eliminate the redundant noises, making the output image be blurred. In this paper, we propose the residual subtraction and attention network (RSAN) for powerful feature expression and channels importance learning. More specifically, RSAN firstly implements one redundance removal module to learn noise information in the feature map and subtract noise through residual learning. Then it introduces the channel attention module to amplify high-frequency information and suppress the weight of effectless channels. Experimental results on extensive public benchmarks demonstrate our RSAN achieves significant improvement over the previous SISR methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality.

Learning Disentangled Representations for Identity Preserving Surveillance Face Camouflage

Jingzhi Li, Lutong Han, Hua Zhang, Xiaoguang Han, Jingguo Ge, Xiaochu Cao

Auto-TLDR; Individual Face Privacy under Surveillance Scenario with Multi-task Loss Function

Abstract Poster Similar

In this paper, we focus on protecting the person face privacy under the surveillance scenarios, whose goal is to change the visual appearances of faces while keep them to be recognizable by current face recognition systems. This is a challenging problem as that we should retain the most important structures of captured facial images, while alter the salient facial regions to protect personal privacy. To address this problem, we introduce a novel individual face protection model, which can camouflage the face appearance from the perspective of human visual perception and preserve the identity features of faces used for face authentication. To that end, we develop an encoder-decoder network architecture that can separately disentangle the person feature representation into an appearance code and an identity code. Specifically, we first randomly divide the face image into two groups, the source set and the target set, where the source set is used to extract the identity code and the target set provides the appearance code. Then, we recombine the identity and appearance codes to synthesize a new face, which has the same identity with the source subject. Finally, the synthesized faces are used to replace the original face to protect the privacy of individual. Furthermore, our model is trained end-to-end with a multi-task loss function, which can better preserve the identity and stabilize the training loss. Experiments conducted on Cross-Age Celebrity dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and validate our superiority in terms of visual quality and scalability.

Tarsier: Evolving Noise Injection inSuper-Resolution GANs

Baptiste Roziere, Nathanaël Carraz Rakotonirina, Vlad Hosu, Rasoanaivo Andry, Hanhe Lin, Camille Couprie, Olivier Teytaud

Auto-TLDR; Evolutionary Super-Resolution using Diagonal CMA

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Super-resolution aims at increasing the resolution and level of detail within an image. The current state of the art in general single-image super-resolution is held by nESRGAN+,which injects a Gaussian noise after each residual layer at training time. In this paper, we harness evolutionary methods to improve nESRGAN+ by optimizing the noise injection at inference time. More precisely, we use Diagonal CMA to optimize the injected noise according to a novel criterion combining quality assessment and realism. Our results are validated by the PIRM perceptual score and a human study. Our method outperforms nESRGAN+ on several standard super-resolution datasets. More generally, our approach can be used to optimize any method based on noise injection.

Residual Fractal Network for Single Image Super Resolution by Widening and Deepening

Jiahang Gu, Zhaowei Qu, Xiaoru Wang, Jiawang Dan, Junwei Sun

Auto-TLDR; Residual fractal convolutional network for single image super-resolution

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The architecture of the convolutional neural network (CNN) plays an important role in single image super-resolution (SISR). However, most models proposed in recent years usually transplant methods or architectures that perform well in other vision fields. Thence they do not combine the characteristics of super-resolution (SR) and ignore the key information brought by the recurring texture feature in the image. To utilize patch-recurrence in SR and the high correlation of texture, we propose a residual fractal convolutional block (RFCB) and expand its depth and width to obtain residual fractal network (RFN), which contains deep residual fractal network (DRFN) and wide residual fractal network (WRFN). RFCB is recursive with multiple branches of magnified receptive field. Through the phased feature fusion module, the network focuses on extracting high-frequency texture feature that repeatedly appear in the image. We also introduce residual in residual (RIR) structure to RFCB that enables abundant low-frequency feature feed into deeper layers and reduce the difficulties of network training. RFN is the first supervised learning method to combine the patch-recurrence characteristic in SISR into network design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RFN outperforms state-of-the-art SISR methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality, while the amount of parameters has been greatly optimized.

Improving Low-Resolution Image Classification by Super-Resolution with Enhancing High-Frequency Content

Liguo Zhou, Guang Chen, Mingyue Feng, Alois Knoll

Auto-TLDR; Super-resolution for Low-Resolution Image Classification

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With the prosperous development of Convolutional Neural Networks, currently they can perform excellently on visual understanding tasks when the input images are high quality and common quality images. However, large degradation in performance always occur when the input images are low quality images. In this paper, we propose a new super-resolution method in order to improve the classification performance for low-resolution images. In an image, the regions in which pixel values vary dramatically contain more abundant high frequency contents compared to other parts. Based on this fact, we design a weight map and integrate it with a super-resolution CNN training framework. During the process of training, this weight map can find out positions of the high frequency pixels in ground truth high-resolution images. After that, the pixel-level loss function takes effect only at these found positions to minimize the difference between reconstructed high-resolution images and ground truth high-resolution images. Compared with other state-of-the-art super-resolution methods, the experiment results show that our method can recover more high-frequency contents in high-resolution image reconstructing, and better improve the classification accuracy after low-resolution image preprocessing.

Boundary Guided Image Translation for Pose Estimation from Ultra-Low Resolution Thermal Sensor

Kohei Kurihara, Tianren Wang, Teng Zhang, Brian Carrington Lovell

Auto-TLDR; Pose Estimation on Low-Resolution Thermal Images Using Image-to-Image Translation Architecture

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This work addresses the pose estimation task on low-resolution images captured using thermal sensors which can operate in a no-light environment. Low-resolution thermal sensors have been widely adopted in various applications for cost control and privacy protection purposes. In this paper, targeting the challenging scenario of ultra-low resolution thermal imaging (3232 pixels), we aim to estimate human poses for the purpose of monitoring health conditions and indoor events. To overcome the challenges in ultra-low resolution thermal imaging such as blurred boundaries and data scarcity, we propose a new Image-to-Image (I2I) translation architecture which can translate the original blurred thermal image into a visible light image with sharper boundaries. Then the generated visible light image can be fed into the off-the-shelf pose estimator which was well-trained in the visible domain. Experimental results suggest that the proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the I2I based pose estimation task for our thermal image dataset. Furthermore, we also demonstrated the merits of the proposed method on the publicly available FLIR dataset by measuring the quality of translated images.

Unsupervised Face Manipulation Via Hallucination

Keerthy Kusumam, Enrique Sanchez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos

Auto-TLDR; Unpaired Face Image Manipulation using Autoencoders

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This paper addresses the problem of manipulatinga face image in terms of changing its pose. To achieve this, wepropose a new method that can be trained under the very general“unpaired” setting. To this end, we firstly propose to modelthe general appearance, layout and background of the inputimage using a low-resolution version of it which is progressivelypassed through a hallucination network to generate featuresat higher resolutions. We show that such a formulation issignificantly simpler than previous approaches for appearancemodelling based on autoencoders. Secondly, we propose a fullylearnable and spatially-aware appearance transfer module whichcan cope with misalignment between the input source image andthe target pose and can effectively combine the features fromthe hallucination network with the features produced by ourgenerator. Thirdly, we introduce an identity preserving methodthat is trained in an unsupervised way, by using an auxiliaryfeature extractor and a contrastive loss between the real andgenerated images. We compare our method against the state-of-the-art reporting significant improvements both quantitatively, interms of FID and IS, and qualitatively.

Wavelet Attention Embedding Networks for Video Super-Resolution

Young-Ju Choi, Young-Woon Lee, Byung-Gyu Kim

Auto-TLDR; Wavelet Attention Embedding Network for Video Super-Resolution

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Recently, Video super-resolution (VSR) has become more crucial as the resolution of display has been grown. The majority of deep learning-based VSR methods combine the convolutional neural networks (CNN) with motion compensation or alignment module to estimate high-resolution (HR) frame from low-resolution (LR) frames. However, most of previous methods deal with the spatial features equally and may result in the misaligned temporal features by pixel-based motion compensation and alignment module. It can lead to the damaging effect on the accuracy of the estimated HR feature. In this paper, we propose a wavelet attention embedding network (WAEN), including wavelet embedding network (WENet) and attention embedding network (AENet), to fully exploit the spatio-temporal informative features. The WENet is operated as a spatial feature extractor of individual low and high-frequency information based on 2-D Haar discrete wavelet transform. The meaningful temporal feature is extracted in the AENet through utilizing the weighted attention map between frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

LiNet: A Lightweight Network for Image Super Resolution

Armin Mehri, Parichehr Behjati Ardakani, Angel D. Sappa

Auto-TLDR; LiNet: A Compact Dense Network for Lightweight Super Resolution

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This paper proposes a new lightweight network, LiNet, that enhancing technical efficiency in lightweight super resolution and operating approximately like very large and costly networks in terms of number of network parameters and operations. The proposed architecture allows the network to learn more abstract properties by avoiding low-level information via multiple links. LiNet introduces a Compact Dense Module, which contains set of inner and outer blocks, to efficiently extract meaningful information, to better leverage multi-level representations before upsampling stage, and to allow an efficient information and gradient flow within the network. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed LiNet achieves favorable performance against lightweight state-of-the-art methods.

SIDGAN: Single Image Dehazing without Paired Supervision

Pan Wei, Xin Wang, Lei Wang, Ji Xiang, Zihan Wang

Auto-TLDR; DehazeGAN: An End-to-End Generative Adversarial Network for Image Dehazing

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Single image dehazing is challenging without scene airlight and transmission map. Most of existing dehazing algorithms tend to estimate key parameters based on manual designed priors or statistics, which may be invalid in some scenarios. Although deep learning-based dehazing methods provide an effective solution, most of them rely on paired training datasets, which are prohibitively difficult to be collected in real world. In this paper, we propose an effective end-to-end generative adversarial network for image dehazing, named DehazeGAN. The proposed DehazeGAN adopts a U-net architecture with a novel color-consistency loss derived from dark channel prior and perceptual loss, which can be trained in an unsupervised fashion without paired synthetic datasets. We create a RealHaze dataset for network training, including 4,000 outdoor hazy images and 4,000 haze-free images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DehazeGAN achieves better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic datasets and real-world datasets in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and subjective visual experience.

Towards Artifacts-Free Image Defogging

Gabriele Graffieti, Davide Maltoni

Auto-TLDR; CurL-Defog: Learning Based Defogging with CycleGAN and HArD

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In this paper we present a novel defogging technique, named CurL-Defog, aimed at minimizing the creation of artifacts. The majority of learning based defogging approaches relies on paired data (i.e., the same images with and without fog), where fog is artificially added to clear images: this often provides good results on mildly fogged images but does not generalize well to real difficult cases. On the other hand, the models trained with real unpaired data (e.g. CycleGAN) can provide visually impressive results but often produce unwanted artifacts. In this paper we propose a curriculum learning strategy coupled with an enhanced CycleGAN model in order to reduce the number of produced artifacts, while maintaining state-of-the- art performance in terms of contrast enhancement and image reconstruction. We also introduce a new metric, called HArD (Hazy Artifact Detector) to numerically quantify the amount of artifacts in the defogged images, thus avoiding the tedious and subjective manual inspection of the results. The proposed approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art techniques on both real and synthetic datasets.

Deep Iterative Residual Convolutional Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Rao Muhammad Umer, Gian Luca Foresti, Christian Micheloni

Auto-TLDR; ISRResCNet: Deep Iterative Super-Resolution Residual Convolutional Network for Single Image Super-resolution

Abstract Slides Similar

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success for single image super-resolution (SISR) task due to their powerful feature representation capabilities. Most recent deep learning based SISR methods focus on designing deeper / wider models to learn the non-linear mapping between low-resolution (LR) inputs and the high-resolution (HR) outputs. These existing SR methods do not take into account the image observation (physical) model and thus require a large number of network's trainable parameters with a huge volume of training data. To address these issues, we propose a deep Iterative Super-Resolution Residual Convolutional Network (ISRResCNet) that exploits the powerful image regularization and large-scale optimization techniques by training the deep network in an iterative manner with a residual learning approach. Extensive experimental results on various super-resolution benchmarks demonstrate that our method with a few trainable parameters improves results for different scaling factors in comparison with the state-of-art methods.

Cross-Layer Information Refining Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Hongyi Zhang, Wen Lu, Xiaopeng Sun

Auto-TLDR; Interlaced Spatial Attention Block for Single Image Super-Resolution

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Recently, deep learning-based image super-resolution (SR) has made a remarkable progress. However, previous SR methods rarely focus on the correlation between adjacent layers, which leads to underutilization of the information extracted by each convolutional layer. To address these problem, we design a simple and efficient cross-layer information refining network (CIRN) for single image super-resolution. Concretely, we propose the interlaced spatial attention block (ISAB) to measure the correlation between the adjacent layers feature maps and adaptively rescale spatial-wise features for refining the information. Owing to the two stage information propagation strategy, the CIRN can distill the primary information of adjacent layers without introducing too many parameters. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets illustrate that our method achieves better accuracy than state-of-the-art methods even in 16× scale, spcifically it has a better banlance between performance and parameters.

Attributes Aware Face Generation with Generative Adversarial Networks

Zheng Yuan, Jie Zhang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen

Auto-TLDR; AFGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Attributes Aware Face Image Generation

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Recent studies have shown remarkable success in face image generations. However, most of the existing methods only generate face images from random noise, and cannot generate face images according to the specific attributes. In this paper, we focus on the problem of face synthesis from attributes, which aims at generating faces with specific characteristics corresponding to the given attributes. To this end, we propose a novel attributes aware face image generator method with generative adversarial networks called AFGAN. Specifically, we firstly propose a two-path embedding layer and self-attention mechanism to convert binary attribute vector to rich attribute features. Then three stacked generators generate 64 * 64, 128 * 128 and 256 * 256 resolution face images respectively by taking the attribute features as input. In addition, an image-attribute matching loss is proposed to enhance the correlation between the generated images and input attributes. Extensive experiments on CelebA demonstrate the superiority of our AFGAN in terms of both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

GAN-Based Image Deblurring Using DCT Discriminator

Hiroki Tomosada, Takahiro Kudo, Takanori Fujisawa, Masaaki Ikehara

Auto-TLDR; DeblurDCTGAN: A Discrete Cosine Transform for Image Deblurring

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In this paper, we propose high quality image debluring by using discrete cosine transform (DCT) with less computational complexity. Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based algorithms have been proposed for image deblurring. Moreover, multi-scale architecture of CNN restores blurred image cleary and suppresses more ringing artifacts or block noise, but it takes much time to process. To solve these problems, we propose a method that preserves texture and suppresses ringing artifacts in the restored image without multi-scale architecture using DCT based loss named ``DeblurDCTGAN.''. It compares frequency domain of the images made from deblurred image and grand truth image by using DCT. Hereby, DeblurDCTGAN can reduce block noise or ringing artifacts while maintaining deblurring performance. Our experimental results show that DeblurDCTGAN gets the highest performances on both PSNR and SSIM comparing with other conventional methods in both GoPro test Dataset and DVD test Dataset. Also, the running time per pair of DeblurDCTGAN is faster than others.

MBD-GAN: Model-Based Image Deblurring with a Generative Adversarial Network

Li Song, Edmund Y. Lam

Auto-TLDR; Model-Based Deblurring GAN for Inverse Imaging

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This paper presents a methodology to tackle inverse imaging problems by leveraging the synergistic power of imaging model and deep learning. The premise is that while learning-based techniques have quickly become the methods of choice in various applications, they often ignore the prior knowledge embedded in imaging models. Incorporating the latter has the potential to improve the image estimation. Specifically, we first provide a mathematical basis of using generative adversarial network (GAN) in inverse imaging through considering an optimization framework. Then, we develop the specific architecture that connects the generator and discriminator networks with the imaging model. While this technique can be applied to a variety of problems, from image reconstruction to super-resolution, we take image deblurring as the example here, where we show in detail the implementation and experimental results of what we call the model-based deblurring GAN (MBD-GAN).

Local-Global Interactive Network for Face Age Transformation

Jie Song, Ping Wei, Huan Li, Yongchi Zhang, Nanning Zheng

Auto-TLDR; A Novel Local-Global Interaction Framework for Long-span Face Age Transformation

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Face age transformation, which aims to generate a face image in the past or future, has receiving increasing attention due to its significant application value in some special fields, such as looking for a lost child, tracking criminals and entertainment, etc. Currently, most existing methods mainly focus on unidirectional short-span face aging. In this paper, we propose a novel local-global interaction framework for long-span face age transformation. Firstly, we divide a face image into five independent parts and design a local generative network for each of them to learn the local structure changes of a face image, while we utilize a global generative network to learn the global structure changes. Then we introduce an interactive network and an age classification network, which are respectively used to integrate the local and global features and maintain the corresponding age features in different age groups. Given any face image at a certain age, our network can produce a clear and realistic image of face aging or rejuvenation. We test and evaluate the model on complex datasets, and extensive qualitative comparison experiments has proved the effectiveness and immense potential of our proposed method.

SATGAN: Augmenting Age Biased Dataset for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Wenshuang Liu, Wenting Chen, Yuanlue Zhu, Linlin Shen

Auto-TLDR; SATGAN: Stable Age Translation GAN for Cross-Age Face Recognition

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In this paper, we propose a Stable Age Translation GAN (SATGAN) to generate fake face images at different ages to augment age biased face datasets for Cross-Age Face Recognition (CAFR) . The proposed SATGAN consists of both generator and discriminator. As a part of the generator, a novel Mask Attention Module (MAM) is introduced to make the generator focus on the face area. In addition, the generator employs a Uniform Distribution Discriminator (UDD) to supervise the learning of latent feature map and enforce the uniform distribution. Besides, the discriminator employs a Feature Separation Module (FSM) to disentangle identity information from the age information. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations on Morph dataset prove that SATGAN achieves much better performance than existing methods. The face recognition model trained using dataset (VGGFace2 and MS-Celeb-1M) augmented using our SATGAN achieves better accuracy on cross age dataset like Cross-Age LFW and AgeDB-30.

TinyVIRAT: Low-Resolution Video Action Recognition

Ugur Demir, Yogesh Rawat, Mubarak Shah

Auto-TLDR; TinyVIRAT: A Progressive Generative Approach for Action Recognition in Videos

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The existing research in action recognition is mostly focused on high-quality videos where the action is distinctly visible. In real-world surveillance environments, the actions in videos are captured at a wide range of resolutions. Most activities occur at a distance with a small resolution and recognizing such activities is a challenging problem. In this work, we focus on recognizing tiny actions in videos. We introduce a benchmark dataset, TinyVIRAT, which contains natural low-resolution activities. The actions in TinyVIRAT videos have multiple labels and they are extracted from surveillance videos which makes them realistic and more challenging. We propose a novel method for recognizing tiny actions in videos which utilizes a progressive generative approach to improve the quality of low-resolution actions. The proposed method also consists of a weakly trained attention mechanism which helps in focusing on the activity regions in the video. We perform extensive experiments to benchmark the proposed TinyVIRAT dataset and observe that the proposed method significantly improves the action recognition performance over baselines. We also evaluate the proposed approach on synthetically resized action recognition datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results when compared with existing methods. The dataset and code will be publicly available.

Adaptive Image Compression Using GAN Based Semantic-Perceptual Residual Compensation

Ruojing Wang, Zitang Sun, Sei-Ichiro Kamata, Weili Chen

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Image Compression using GAN based Semantic-Perceptual Residual Compensation

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Image compression is a basic task in image processing. In this paper, We present an adaptive image compression algorithm that relies on GAN based semantic-perceptual residual compensation, which is available to offer visually pleasing reconstruction at a low bitrate. Our method adopt an U-shaped encoding and decoding structure accompanied by a well-designed dense residual connection with strip pooling module to improve the original auto-encoder. Besides, we introduce the idea of adversarial learning by introducing a discriminator thus constructed a complete GAN. To improve the coding efficiency, we creatively designed an adaptive semantic-perception residual compensation block based on Grad-CAM algorithm. In the improvement of the quantizer, we embed the method of soft-quantization so as to solve the problem to some extent that back propagation process is irreversible. Simultaneously, we use the latest FLIF lossless compression algorithm and BPG vector compression algorithm to perform deeper compression on the image. More importantly experimental results including PSNR, MS-SSIM demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art image compression methods.

Detail Fusion GAN: High-Quality Translation for Unpaired Images with GAN-Based Data Augmentation

Ling Li, Yaochen Li, Chuan Wu, Hang Dong, Peilin Jiang, Fei Wang

Auto-TLDR; Data Augmentation with GAN-based Generative Adversarial Network

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Image-to-image translation, a task to learn the mapping relation between two different domains, is a rapid-growing research field in deep learning. Although existing Generative Adversarial Network(GAN)-based methods have achieved decent results in this field, there are still some limitations in generating high-quality images for practical applications (e.g., data augmentation and image inpainting). In this work, we aim to propose a GAN-based network for data augmentation which can generate translated images with more details and less artifacts. The proposed Detail Fusion Generative Adversarial Network(DFGAN) consists of a detail branch, a transfer branch, a filter module, and a reconstruction module. The detail branch is trained by a super-resolution loss and its intermediate features can be used to introduce more details to the transfer branch by the filter module. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our model generates more satisfactory images against the state-of-the-art approaches for data augmentation.

Free-Form Image Inpainting Via Contrastive Attention Network

Xin Ma, Xiaoqiang Zhou, Huaibo Huang, Zhenhua Chai, Xiaolin Wei, Ran He

Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Siamese inference for image inpainting

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Most deep learning based image inpainting approaches adopt autoencoder or its variants to fill missing regions in images. Encoders are usually utilized to learn powerful representational spaces, which are important for dealing with sophisticated learning tasks. Specifically, in the image inpainting task, masks with any shapes can appear anywhere in images (i.e., free-form masks) forming complex patterns. It is difficult for encoders to capture such powerful representations under this complex situation. To tackle this problem, we propose a self-supervised Siamese inference network to improve the robustness and generalization. Moreover, the restored image usually can not be harmoniously integrated into the exiting content, especially in the boundary area. To address this problem, we propose a novel Dual Attention Fusion module (DAF), which can combine both the restored and known regions in a smoother way and be inserted into decoder layers in a plug-and-play way. DAF is developed to not only adaptively rescale channel-wise features by taking interdependencies between channels into account but also force deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) focusing more on unknown regions. In this way, the unknown region will be naturally filled from the outside to the inside. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on multiple datasets, including facial and natural datasets (i.e., Celeb-HQ, Pairs Street View, Places2 and ImageNet), demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms against state-of-the-arts in generating high-quality inpainting results.

Coherence and Identity Learning for Arbitrary-Length Face Video Generation

Shuquan Ye, Chu Han, Jiaying Lin, Guoqiang Han, Shengfeng He

Auto-TLDR; Face Video Synthesis Using Identity-Aware GAN and Face Coherence Network

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Face synthesis is an interesting yet challenging task in computer vision. It is even much harder to generate a portrait video than a single image. In this paper, we propose a novel video generation framework for synthesizing arbitrary-length face videos without any face exemplar or landmark. To overcome the synthesis ambiguity of face video, we propose a divide-and-conquer strategy to separately address the video face synthesis problem from two aspects, face identity synthesis and rearrangement. To this end, we design a cascaded network which contains three components, Identity-aware GAN (IA-GAN), Face Coherence Network, and Interpolation Network. IA-GAN is proposed to synthesize photorealistic faces with the same identity from a set of noises. Face Coherence Network is designed to re-arrange the faces generated by IA-GAN while keeping the inter-frame coherence. Interpolation Network is introduced to eliminate the discontinuity between two adjacent frames and improve the smoothness of the face video. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed network is able to generate face video with high visual quality while preserving the identity. Statistics show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art unconditional face video generative models in multiple challenging datasets.

Single Image Super-Resolution with Dynamic Residual Connection

Karam Park, Jae Woong Soh, Nam Ik Cho

Auto-TLDR; Dynamic Residual Attention Network for Lightweight Single Image Super-Residual Networks

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Deep convolutional neural networks have shown significant improvement in the single image super-resolution (SISR) field. Recently, there have been attempts to solve the SISR problem using lightweight networks, considering limited computational resources for real-world applications. Especially for lightweight networks, balancing between parameter demand and performance is very difficult to adjust, and most lightweight SISR networks are manually designed based on a huge number of brute-force experiments. Besides, a critical key to the network performance relies on the skip connection of building blocks that are repeatedly in the architecture. Notably, in previous works, these connections are pre-defined and manually determined by human researchers. Hence, they are less flexible to the input image statistics, and there can be a better solution for the given number of parameters. Therefore, we focus on the automated design of networks regarding the connection of basic building blocks (residual networks), and as a result, propose a dynamic residual attention network (DRAN). The proposed method allows the network to dynamically select residual paths depending on the input image, based on the idea of attention mechanism. For this, we design a dynamic residual module that determines the residual paths between the basic building blocks for the given input image. By finding optimal residual paths between the blocks, the network can selectively bypass informative features needed to reconstruct the target high-resolution (HR) image. Experimental results show that our proposed DRAN outperforms most of the existing state-of-the-arts lightweight models in SISR.

Galaxy Image Translation with Semi-Supervised Noise-Reconstructed Generative Adversarial Networks

Qiufan Lin, Dominique Fouchez, Jérôme Pasquet

Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Image Translation with Generative Adversarial Networks Using Paired and Unpaired Images

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Image-to-image translation with Deep Learning neural networks, particularly with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), is one of the most powerful methods for simulating astronomical images. However, current work is limited to utilizing paired images with supervised translation, and there has been rare discussion on reconstructing noise background that encodes instrumental and observational effects. These limitations might be harmful for subsequent scientific applications in astrophysics. Therefore, we aim to develop methods for using unpaired images and preserving noise characteristics in image translation. In this work, we propose a two-way image translation model using GANs that exploits both paired and unpaired images in a semi-supervised manner, and introduce a noise emulating module that is able to learn and reconstruct noise characterized by high-frequency features. By experimenting on multi-band galaxy images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHT), we show that our method recovers global and local properties effectively and outperforms benchmark image translation models. To our best knowledge, this work is the first attempt to apply semi-supervised methods and noise reconstruction techniques in astrophysical studies.

A NoGAN Approach for Image and Video Restoration and Compression Artifact Removal

Mameli Filippo, Marco Bertini, Leonardo Galteri, Alberto Del Bimbo

Auto-TLDR; Deep Neural Network for Image and Video Compression Artifact Removal and Restoration

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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.

Continuous Learning of Face Attribute Synthesis

Ning Xin, Shaohui Xu, Fangzhe Nan, Xiaoli Dong, Weijun Li, Yuanzhou Yao

Auto-TLDR; Continuous Learning for Face Attribute Synthesis

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The generative adversarial network (GAN) exhibits great superiority in the face attribute synthesis task. However, existing methods have very limited effects on the expansion of new attributes. To overcome the limitations of a single network in new attribute synthesis, a continuous learning method for face attribute synthesis is proposed in this work. First, the feature vector of the input image is extracted and attribute direction regression is performed in the feature space to obtain the axes of different attributes. The feature vector is then linearly guided along the axis so that images with target attributes can be synthesized by the decoder. Finally, to make the network capable of continuous learning, the orthogonal direction modification module is used to extend the newly-added attributes. Experimental results show that the proposed method can endow a single network with the ability to learn attributes continuously, and, as compared to those produced by the current state-of-the-art methods, the synthetic attributes have higher accuracy.

Fidelity-Controllable Extreme Image Compression with Generative Adversarial Networks

Shoma Iwai, Tomo Miyazaki, Yoshihiro Sugaya, Shinichiro Omachi

Auto-TLDR; GAN-based Image Compression at Low Bitrates

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We propose a GAN-based image compression method working at extremely low bitrates below 0.1bpp. Most existing learned image compression methods suffer from blur at extremely low bitrates. Although GAN can help to reconstruct sharp images, there are two drawbacks. First, GAN makes train- ing unstable. Second, the reconstructions often contain unpleasing noise or artifacts. To address both of the drawbacks, our method adopts two-stage training and network interpolation. The two- stage training is effective to stabilize the training. Moreover, the network interpolation utilizes the models in both stages and reduces undesirable noise and artifacts, while maintaining important edges. Hence, we can control the trade-off between perceptual quality and fidelity without re-training models. The experimental results show that our model can reconstruct high quality images. Furthermore, our user study confirms that our reconstructions are preferable to state-of-the-art GAN-based image compression model.

Small Object Detection by Generative and Discriminative Learning

Yi Gu, Jie Li, Chentao Wu, Weijia Jia, Jianping Chen

Auto-TLDR; Generative and Discriminative Learning for Small Object Detection

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With the development of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the object detection accuracy has been greatly improved. But the performance of small object detection is still far from satisfactory, mainly because small objects are so tiny that the information contained in the feature map is limited. Existing methods focus on improving classification accuracy but still suffer from the limitation of bounding box prediction. To solve this issue, we propose a detection framework by generative and discriminative learning. First, a reconstruction generator network is designed to reconstruct the mapping from low frequency to high frequency for anchor box prediction. Then, a detector module extracts the regions of interest (ROIs) from generated results and implements a RoI-Head to predict object category and refine bounding box. In order to guide the reconstructed image related to the corresponding one, a discriminator module is adopted to tell from the generated result and the original image. Extensive evaluations on the challenging MS-COCO dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms most state-of-the-art models in detecting small objects, especially the reconstruction module improves the average precision for small object (APs) by 7.7%.

Single Image Deblurring Using Bi-Attention Network

Yaowei Li, Ye Luo, Jianwei Lu

Auto-TLDR; Bi-Attention Neural Network for Single Image Deblurring

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Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have been extensively applied into image deblurring and have achieved remarkable performance. However, most CNN-based image deblurring methods focus on simply increasing network depth, neglecting the contextual information of the blurred image and the reconstructed image. Meanwhile, most encoder-decoder based methods rarely exploit encoder's multi-layer features. To address these issues, we propose a bi-attention neural network for single image deblurring, which mainly consists of a bi-attention network and a feature fusion network. Specifically, two criss-cross attention modules are plugged before and after the encoder-decoder to capture long-range spatial contextual information in the blurred image and the reconstructed image simultaneously, and the feature fusion network combines multi-layer features from encoder to enable the decoder reconstruct the image with multi-scale features. The whole network is end-to-end trainable. Quantitative and qualitative experiment results validate that the proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR and SSIM on benchmark datasets.

Efficient Super Resolution by Recursive Aggregation

Zhengxiong Luo Zhengxiong Luo, Yan Huang, Shang Li, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan

Auto-TLDR; Recursive Aggregation Network for Efficient Deep Super Resolution

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Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable results on image super resolution (SR), but the efficiency problem of deep SR networks is rarely studied. We experimentally find that many sequentially stacked convolutional blocks in nowadays SR networks are far from being fully optimized, which largely damages their overall efficiency. It indicates that comparable or even better results could be achieved with less but sufficiently optimized blocks. In this paper, we try to construct more efficient SR model via the proposed recursive aggregation network (RAN). It recursively aggregates convolutional blocks in different orders, and avoids too many sequentially stacked blocks. In this way, multiple shortcuts are introduced in RAN, and help gradients easier flow to all inner layers, even for very deep SR networks. As a result, all blocks in RAN can be better optimized, thus RAN can achieve better performance with smaller model size than existing methods.

Lightweight Low-Resolution Face Recognition for Surveillance Applications

Yoanna Martínez-Díaz, Heydi Mendez-Vazquez, Luis S. Luevano, Leonardo Chang, Miguel Gonzalez-Mendoza

Auto-TLDR; Efﬁciency of Lightweight Deep Face Networks on Low-Resolution Surveillance Imagery

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Typically, real-world requirements to deploy face recognition models in unconstrained surveillance scenarios demand to identify low-resolution faces with extremely low computational cost. In the last years, several methods based on complex deep learning models have been proposed with promising recognition results but at a high computational cost. Inspired by the compactness and computation efﬁciency of lightweight deep face networks and their high accuracy on general face recognition tasks, in this work we propose to benchmark two recently introduced lightweight face models on low-resolution surveillance imagery to enable efﬁcient system deployment. In this way, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the two typical settings: LR-to-HR and LR-to-LR matching. In addition, we investigate the effect of using trained models with down-sampled synthetic data from high-resolution images, as well as the combination of different models, for face recognition on real low-resolution images. Experimental results show that the used lightweight face models achieve state-of-the-art results on low-resolution benchmarks with low memory footprint and computational complexity. Moreover, we observed that combining models trained with different degradations improves the recognition accuracy on low-resolution surveillance imagery, which is feasible due to their low computational cost.

Makeup Style Transfer on Low-Quality Images with Weighted Multi-Scale Attention

Daniel Organisciak, Edmond S. L. Ho, Shum Hubert P. H.

Auto-TLDR; Facial Makeup Style Transfer for Low-Resolution Images Using Multi-Scale Spatial Attention

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Facial makeup style transfer is an extremely challenging sub-field of image-to-image-translation. Due to this difficulty, state-of-the-art results are mostly reliant on the Face Parsing Algorithm, which segments a face into parts in order to easily extract makeup features. However, we find that this algorithm can only work well on high-definition images where facial features can be accurately extracted. Faces in many real-world photos, such as those including a large background or multiple people, are typically of low-resolution, which considerably hinders state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end holistic approach to effectively transfer makeup styles between two low-resolution images. The idea is built upon a novel weighted multi-scale spatial attention module, which identifies salient pixel regions on low-resolution images in multiple scales, and uses channel attention to determine the most effective attention map. This design provides two benefits: low-resolution images are usually blurry to different extents, so a multi-scale architecture can select the most effective convolution kernel size to implement spatial attention; makeup is applied on both a macro-level (foundation, fake tan) and a micro-level (eyeliner, lipstick) so different scales can excel in extracting different makeup features. We develop an Augmented CycleGAN network that embeds our attention modules at selected layers to most effectively transfer makeup. We test our system with the FBD data set, which consists of many low-resolution facial images, and demonstrates that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in transferring makeup for blurry images and partially occluded images.

OCT Image Segmentation Using NeuralArchitecture Search and SRGAN

Saba Heidari, Omid Dehzangi, Nasser M. Nasarabadi, Ali Rezai

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Segmentation of Retinal Layers in Optical Coherence Tomography using Neural Architecture Search

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Alzheimer’s disease (AD) diagnosis is one of the major research areas in computational medicine. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive, inexpensive, and timely efficient method that scans the human’s retina with depth. It has been hypothesized that the thickness of the retinal layers extracted from OCTs could be an efficient and effective biomarker for early diagnosis of AD. In this work, we aim to design a self-training model architecture for the task of segmenting the retinal layers in OCT scans. Neural architecture search (NAS) is a subfield of AutoML domain, which has a significant impact on improving the accuracy of machine vision tasks. We integrate the NAS algorithm with a Unet auto-encoder architecture as its backbone. Then, we employ our proposed model to segment the retinal nerve fiber layer in our preprocessed OCT images with the aim of AD diagnosis. In this work, we trained a super-resolution generative adversarial network on the raw OCT scans to improve the quality of the images before the modeling stage. In our architecture search strategy, different primitive operations suggested to find down- \& up-sampling Unet cell blocks and the binary gate method has been applied to make the search strategy more practical. Our architecture search method is empirically evaluated by training on the Unet and NAS-Unet from scratch. Specifically, the proposed NAS-Unet training significantly outperforms the baseline human-designed architecture by achieving 95.1\% in the mean Intersection over Union metric and 79.1\% in the Dice similarity coefﬁcient.

Age Gap Reducer-GAN for Recognizing Age-Separated Faces

Daksha Yadav, Naman Kohli, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh, Afzel Noore

Auto-TLDR; Generative Adversarial Network for Age-separated Face Recognition

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In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for matching faces with temporal variations caused due to age progression. The proposed generative adversarial network algorithm is a unified framework which combines facial age estimation and age-separated face verification. The key idea of this approach is to learn the age variations across time by conditioning the input image on the subject's gender and the target age group to which the face needs to be progressed. The loss function accounts for reducing the age gap between the original image and generated face image as well as preserving the identity. Both visual fidelity and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture on different facial age databases for age-separated face recognition.

Image Inpainting with Contrastive Relation Network

Xiaoqiang Zhou, Junjie Li, Zilei Wang, Ran He, Tieniu Tan

Auto-TLDR; Two-Stage Inpainting with Graph-based Relation Network

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Image inpainting faces the challenging issue of the requirements on structure reasonableness and texture coherence. In this paper, we propose a two-stage inpainting framework to address this issue. The basic idea is to address the two requirements in two separate stages. Completed segmentation of the corrupted image is firstly predicted through segmentation reconstruction network, while fine-grained image details are restored in the second stage through an image generator. The two stages are connected in series as the image details are generated under the guidance of completed segmentation map that predicted in the first stage. Specifically, in the second stage, we propose a novel graph-based relation network to model the relationship existed in corrupted image. In relation network, both intra-relationship for pixels in the same semantic region and inter-relationship between different semantic parts are considered, improving the consistency and compatibility of image textures. Besides, contrastive loss is designed to facilitate the relation network training. Such a framework not only simplifies the inpainting problem directly, but also exploits the relationship in corrupted image explicitly. Extensive experiments on various public datasets quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art.

Mask-Based Style-Controlled Image Synthesis Using a Mask Style Encoder

Jaehyeong Cho, Wataru Shimoda, Keiji Yanai

Auto-TLDR; Style-controlled Image Synthesis from Semantic Segmentation masks using GANs

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In recent years, the advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive results for image generation and translation tasks. In particular, the image-to-image translation is a method of learning mapping from a source domain to a target domain and synthesizing an image. Image-to-image translation can be applied to a variety of tasks, making it possible to quickly and easily synthesize realistic images from semantic segmentation masks. However, in the existing image-to-image translation method, there is a limitation on controlling the style of the translated image, and it is not easy to synthesize an image by controlling the style of each mask element in detail. Therefore, we propose an image synthesis method that controls the style of each element by improving the existing image-to-image translation method. In the proposed method, we implement a style encoder that extracts style features for each mask element. The extracted style features are concatenated to the semantic mask in the normalization layer, and used the style-controlled image synthesis of each mask element. In experiments, we train style-controlled images synthesis using the datasets consisting of semantic segmentation masks and real images. The results show that the proposed method has excellent performance for style-controlled images synthesis for each element.