Lanpeng Jia

Youwei Li, Haibin Huang, Lanpeng Jia et al.

In this paper, we present D2C-SR, a novel framework for the task of real-world image super-resolution. As an ill-posed problem, the key challenge in super-resolution related tasks is there can be multiple predictions for a given low-resolution input. Most classical deep learning based approaches ignored the fundamental fact and lack explicit modeling of the underlying high-frequency distribution which leads to blurred results. Recently, some methods of GAN-based or learning super-resolution space can generate simulated textures but do not promise the accuracy of the textures which have low quantitative performance. Rethinking both, we learn the distribution of underlying high-frequency details in a discrete form and propose a two-stage pipeline: divergence stage to convergence stage. At divergence stage, we propose a tree-based structure deep network as our divergence backbone. Divergence loss is proposed to encourage the generated results from the tree-based network to diverge into possible high-frequency representations, which is our way of discretely modeling the underlying high-frequency distribution. At convergence stage, we assign spatial weights to fuse these divergent predictions to obtain the final output with more accurate details. Our approach provides a convenient end-to-end manner to inference. We conduct evaluations on several real-world benchmarks, including a new proposed D2CRealSR dataset with x8 scaling factor. Our experiments demonstrate that D2C-SR achieves better accuracy and visual improvements against state-of-the-art methods, with a significantly less parameters number and our D2C structure can also be applied as a generalized structure to some other methods to obtain improvement. Our codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/megvii-research/D2C-SR

Goutam Bhat, Martin Danelljan, Radu Timofte et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE2021 challenge on burst super-resolution. Given a RAW noisy burst as input, the task in the challenge was to generate a clean RGB image with 4 times higher resolution. The challenge contained two tracks; Track 1 evaluating on synthetically generated data, and Track 2 using real-world bursts from mobile camera. In the final testing phase, 6 teams submitted results using a diverse set of solutions. The top-performing methods set a new state-of-the-art for the burst super-resolution task.

Nianjin Ye, Chuan Wang, Shuaicheng Liu et al.

Image alignment by mesh warps, such as meshflow, is a fundamental task which has been widely applied in various vision applications(e.g., multi-frame HDR/denoising, video stabilization). Traditional mesh warp methods detect and match image features, where the quality of alignment highly depends on the quality of image features. However, the image features are not robust in occurrence of low-texture and low-light scenes. Deep homography methods, on the other hand, are free from such problem by learning deep features for robust performance. However, a homography is limited to plane motions. In this work, we present a deep meshflow motion model, which takes two images as input and output a sparse motion field with motions located at mesh vertexes. The deep meshflow enjoys the merics of meshflow that can describe nonlinear motions while also shares advantage of deep homography that is robust against challenging textureless scenarios. In particular, a new unsupervised network structure is presented with content-adaptive capability. On one hand, the image content that cannot be aligned under mesh representation are rejected by our learned mask, similar to the RANSAC procedure. On the other hand, we learn multiple mesh resolutions, combining to a non-uniform mesh division. Moreover, a comprehensive dataset is presented, covering various scenes for training and testing. The comparison between both traditional mesh warp methods and deep based methods show the effectiveness of our deep meshflow motion model.

Jirong Zhang, Chuan Wang, Shuaicheng Liu et al.

Homography estimation is a basic image alignment method in many applications. It is usually conducted by extracting and matching sparse feature points, which are error-prone in low-light and low-texture images. On the other hand, previous deep homography approaches use either synthetic images for supervised learning or aerial images for unsupervised learning, both ignoring the importance of handling depth disparities and moving objects in real world applications. To overcome these problems, in this work we propose an unsupervised deep homography method with a new architecture design. In the spirit of the RANSAC procedure in traditional methods, we specifically learn an outlier mask to only select reliable regions for homography estimation. We calculate loss with respect to our learned deep features instead of directly comparing image content as did previously. To achieve the unsupervised training, we also formulate a novel triplet loss customized for our network. We verify our method by conducting comprehensive comparisons on a new dataset that covers a wide range of scenes with varying degrees of difficulties for the task. Experimental results reveal that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art including deep solutions and feature-based solutions.