Ik Hyun Lee

Ren Yang, Radu Timofte, Meisong Zheng et al. · tencent-ai

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution and Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video. In this challenge, we proposed the LDV 2.0 dataset, which includes the LDV dataset (240 videos) and 95 additional videos. This challenge includes three tracks. Track 1 aims at enhancing the videos compressed by HEVC at a fixed QP. Track 2 and Track 3 target both the super-resolution and quality enhancement of HEVC compressed video. They require x2 and x4 super-resolution, respectively. The three tracks totally attract more than 600 registrations. In the test phase, 8 teams, 8 teams and 12 teams submitted the final results to Tracks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of super-resolution and quality enhancement of compressed video. The proposed LDV 2.0 dataset is available at https://github.com/RenYang-home/LDV_dataset. The homepage of this challenge (including open-sourced codes) is at https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE22_VEnh_SR.

Zheng Chen, Kai Liu, Jingkai Wang et al.

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the NTIRE 2026 Workshop at CVPR 2026. The challenge aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective super-resolution solutions and analyze recent advances in the field. To reflect the evolving objectives of image super-resolution, the challenge includes two tracks: (1) a restoration track, which emphasizes pixel-wise fidelity and ranks submissions based on PSNR; and (2) a perceptual track, which focuses on visual realism and evaluates results using a perceptual score. A total of 194 participants registered for the challenge, with 31 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, main results, and methods of participating teams. The challenge provides a unified benchmark and offers insights into current progress and future directions in image super-resolution.

Sunder Ali Khowaja, Lewis Nkenyereye, Ghulam Mujtaba et al.

With the surge in emerging technologies such as Metaverse, spatial computing, and generative AI, the application of facial style transfer has gained a lot of interest from researchers as well as startups enthusiasts alike. StyleGAN methods have paved the way for transfer-learning strategies that could reduce the dependency on the huge volume of data that is available for the training process. However, StyleGAN methods have the tendency of overfitting that results in the introduction of artifacts in the facial images. Studies, such as DualStyleGAN, proposed the use of multipath networks but they require the networks to be trained for a specific style rather than generating a fusion of facial styles at once. In this paper, we propose a FusIon of STyles (FIST) network for facial images that leverages pre-trained multipath style transfer networks to eliminate the problem associated with lack of huge data volume in the training phase along with the fusion of multiple styles at the output. We leverage pre-trained styleGAN networks with an external style pass that use residual modulation block instead of a transform coding block. The method also preserves facial structure, identity, and details via the gated mapping unit introduced in this study. The aforementioned components enable us to train the network with very limited amount of data while generating high-quality stylized images. Our training process adapts curriculum learning strategy to perform efficient, flexible style and model fusion in the generative space. We perform extensive experiments to show the superiority of FISTNet in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Sunder Ali Khowaja, Ik Hyun Lee, Jiseok Yoon

This technical report briefly introduces to the D$^{3}$Net proposed by our team "TUK-IKLAB" for Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation in $UG2^{+}$ Challenge at CVPR 2022. In the light of test and validation results on textual images to improve text recognition performance and hot-air balloon images for image enhancement, we can say that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we also provide a visual comparison with publicly available denoising, deblurring, and frame averaging methods with respect to the proposed work. The proposed method ranked 2nd on the final leader-board of the aforementioned challenge in the testing phase, respectively.

Sunder Ali Khowaja, Ik Hyun Lee, Kapal Dev et al.

The past decade has seen a rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically the deep learning networks, in Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) ecosystem. However, it has been shown recently that the deep learning networks can be exploited by adversarial attacks that not only make IoMT vulnerable to the data theft but also to the manipulation of medical diagnosis. The existing studies consider adding noise to the raw IoMT data or model parameters which not only reduces the overall performance concerning medical inferences but also is ineffective to the likes of deep leakage from gradients method. In this work, we propose proximal gradient split learning (PSGL) method for defense against the model inversion attacks. The proposed method intentionally attacks the IoMT data when undergoing the deep neural network training process at client side. We propose the use of proximal gradient method to recover gradient maps and a decision-level fusion strategy to improve the recognition performance. Extensive analysis show that the PGSL not only provides effective defense mechanism against the model inversion attacks but also helps in improving the recognition performance on publicly available datasets. We report 14.0$\%$, 17.9$\%$, and 36.9$\%$ gains in accuracy over reconstructed and adversarial attacked images, respectively.