H. Zeng

Huimin Zeng, Jie Huang, Jiacheng Li et al.

Portrait retouching aims to improve the aesthetic quality of input portrait photos and especially requires human-region priority. The deep learning-based methods largely elevate the retouching efficiency and provide promising retouched results. However, existing portrait retouching methods focus on automatic retouching, which treats all human-regions equally and ignores users' preferences for specific individuals, thus suffering from limited flexibility in interactive scenarios. In this work, we emphasize the importance of users' intents and explore the interactive portrait retouching task. Specifically, we propose a region-aware retouching framework with two branches: an automatic branch and an interactive branch. The automatic branch involves an encoding-decoding process, which searches region candidates and performs automatic region-aware retouching without user guidance. The interactive branch encodes sparse user guidance into a priority condition vector and modulates latent features with a region selection module to further emphasize the user-specified regions. Experimental results show that our interactive branch effectively captures users' intents and generalizes well to unseen scenes with sparse user guidance, while our automatic branch also outperforms the state-of-the-art retouching methods due to improved region-awareness.

Huimin Zeng, Yue Bai, Hailing Wang et al.

High dynamic range novel view synthesis (HDR-NVS) reconstructs scenes with dynamic details by fusing multi-exposure low dynamic range (LDR) views, yet it struggles to capture ambient illumination-dependent appearance. Implicitly supervising HDR content by constraining tone-mapped results fails in correcting abnormal HDR values, and results in limited gradients for Gaussians in under/over-exposed regions. To this end, we introduce PhysHDR-GS, a physically inspired HDR-NVS framework that models scene appearance via intrinsic reflectance and adjustable ambient illumination. PhysHDR-GS employs a complementary image-exposure (IE) branch and Gaussian-illumination (GI) branch to faithfully reproduce standard camera observations and capture illumination-dependent appearance changes, respectively. During training, the proposed cross-branch HDR consistency loss provides explicit supervision for HDR content, while an illumination-guided gradient scaling strategy mitigates exposure-biased gradient starvation and reduces under-densified representations. Experimental results across realistic and synthetic datasets demonstrate our superiority in reconstructing HDR details (e.g., a PSNR gain of 2.04 dB over HDR-GS), while maintaining real-time rendering speed (up to 76 FPS). Code and models are available at https://huimin-zeng.github.io/PhysHDR-GS/.

Huimin Zeng, Jiacheng Li, Ziqiang Zheng et al.

Visual images corrupted by various types and levels of degradations are commonly encountered in practical image compression. However, most existing image compression methods are tailored for clean images, therefore struggling to achieve satisfying results on these images. Joint compression and restoration methods typically focus on a single type of degradation and fail to address a variety of degradations in practice. To this end, we propose a unified framework for all-in-one image compression and restoration, which incorporates the image restoration capability against various degradations into the process of image compression. The key challenges involve distinguishing authentic image content from degradations, and flexibly eliminating various degradations without prior knowledge. Specifically, the proposed framework approaches these challenges from two perspectives: i.e., content information aggregation, and degradation representation aggregation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the following merits of our model: 1) superior rate-distortion (RD) performance on various degraded inputs while preserving the performance on clean data; 2) strong generalization ability to real-world and unseen scenarios; 3) higher computing efficiency over compared methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZeldaM1/All-in-one.

Huimin Zeng, Jiacheng Li, Zhiwei Xiong

As a widely adopted technique in data transmission, video compression effectively reduces the size of files, making it possible for real-time cloud computing. However, it comes at the cost of visual quality, posing challenges to the robustness of downstream vision models. In this work, we present a versatile codec-aware enhancement framework that reuses codec information to adaptively enhance videos under different compression settings, assisting various downstream vision tasks without introducing computation bottleneck. Specifically, the proposed codec-aware framework consists of a compression-aware adaptation (CAA) network that employs a hierarchical adaptation mechanism to estimate parameters of the frame-wise enhancement network, namely the bitstream-aware enhancement (BAE) network. The BAE network further leverages temporal and spatial priors embedded in the bitstream to effectively improve the quality of compressed input frames. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior quality enhancement performance of our framework over existing enhancement methods, as well as its versatility in assisting multiple downstream tasks on compressed videos as a plug-and-play module. Code and models are available at https://huimin-zeng.github.io/PnP-VCVE/.