Xin Liu

Cong Cao, Huanjing Yue, Xin Liu et al.

Capturing high dynamic range (HDR) images (videos) is attractive because it can reveal the details in both dark and bright regions. Since the mainstream screens only support low dynamic range (LDR) content, tone mapping algorithm is required to compress the dynamic range of HDR images (videos). Although image tone mapping has been widely explored, video tone mapping is lagging behind, especially for the deep-learning-based methods, due to the lack of HDR-LDR video pairs. In this work, we propose a unified framework (IVTMNet) for unsupervised image and video tone mapping. To improve unsupervised training, we propose domain and instance based contrastive learning loss. Instead of using a universal feature extractor, such as VGG to extract the features for similarity measurement, we propose a novel latent code, which is an aggregation of the brightness and contrast of extracted features, to measure the similarity of different pairs. We totally construct two negative pairs and three positive pairs to constrain the latent codes of tone mapped results. For the network structure, we propose a spatial-feature-enhanced (SFE) module to enable information exchange and transformation of nonlocal regions. For video tone mapping, we propose a temporal-feature-replaced (TFR) module to efficiently utilize the temporal correlation and improve the temporal consistency of video tone-mapped results. We construct a large-scale unpaired HDR-LDR video dataset to facilitate the unsupervised training process for video tone mapping. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art image and video tone mapping methods. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/cao-cong/UnCLTMO.

Qiong Chang, Aolong Zha, Weimin Wang et al.

Mobile stereo-matching systems have become an important part of many applications, such as automated-driving vehicles and autonomous robots. Accurate stereo-matching methods usually lead to high computational complexity; however, mobile platforms have only limited hardware resources to keep their power consumption low; this makes it difficult to maintain both an acceptable processing speed and accuracy on mobile platforms. To resolve this trade-off, we herein propose a novel acceleration approach for the well-known zero-means normalized cross correlation (ZNCC) matching cost calculation algorithm on a Jetson Tx2 embedded GPU. In our method for accelerating ZNCC, target images are scanned in a zigzag fashion to efficiently reuse one pixel's computation for its neighboring pixels; this reduces the amount of data transmission and increases the utilization of on-chip registers, thus increasing the processing speed. As a result, our method is 2X faster than the traditional image scanning method, and 26% faster than the latest NCC method. By combining this technique with the domain transformation (DT) algorithm, our system show real-time processing speed of 32 fps, on a Jetson Tx2 GPU for 1,280x384 pixel images with a maximum disparity of 128. Additionally, the evaluation results on the KITTI 2015 benchmark show that our combined system is more accurate than the same algorithm combined with census by 7.26%, while maintaining almost the same processing speed. Source Code: https://github.com/changqiong/Z2ZNCC.git

Marcos V. Conde, Zhijun Lei, Wen Li et al.

This paper introduces a novel benchmark as part of the AIS 2024 Real-Time Image Super-Resolution (RTSR) Challenge, which aims to upscale compressed images from 540p to 4K resolution (4x factor) in real-time on commercial GPUs. For this, we use a diverse test set containing a variety of 4K images ranging from digital art to gaming and photography. The images are compressed using the modern AVIF codec, instead of JPEG. All the proposed methods improve PSNR fidelity over Lanczos interpolation, and process images under 10ms. Out of the 160 participants, 25 teams submitted their code and models. The solutions present novel designs tailored for memory-efficiency and runtime on edge devices. This survey describes the best solutions for real-time SR of compressed high-resolution images.

Li-Wen Chang, Wenlei Bao, Qi Hou et al.

Large deep learning models have demonstrated strong ability to solve many tasks across a wide range of applications. Those large models typically require training and inference to be distributed. Tensor parallelism is a common technique partitioning computation of an operation or layer across devices to overcome the memory capacity limitation of a single processor, and/or to accelerate computation to meet a certain latency requirement. However, this kind of parallelism introduces additional communication that might contribute a significant portion of overall runtime. Thus limits scalability of this technique within a group of devices with high speed interconnects, such as GPUs with NVLinks in a node. This paper proposes a novel method, Flux, to significantly hide communication latencies with dependent computations for GPUs. Flux over-decomposes communication and computation operations into much finer-grained operations and further fuses them into a larger kernel to effectively hide communication without compromising kernel efficiency. Flux can potentially overlap up to 96% of communication given a fused kernel. Overall, it can achieve up to 1.24x speedups for training over Megatron-LM on a cluster of 128 GPUs with various GPU generations and interconnects, and up to 1.66x and 1.30x speedups for prefill and decoding inference over vLLM on a cluster with 8 GPUs with various GPU generations and interconnects.

Xin Liu, Yuang Li, Josh Fromm et al.

Super-resolution (SR) is a coveted image processing technique for mobile apps ranging from the basic camera apps to mobile health. Existing SR algorithms rely on deep learning models with significant memory requirements, so they have yet to be deployed on mobile devices and instead operate in the cloud to achieve feasible inference time. This shortcoming prevents existing SR methods from being used in applications that require near real-time latency. In this work, we demonstrate state-of-the-art latency and accuracy for on-device super-resolution using a novel hybrid architecture called SplitSR and a novel lightweight residual block called SplitSRBlock. The SplitSRBlock supports channel-splitting, allowing the residual blocks to retain spatial information while reducing the computation in the channel dimension. SplitSR has a hybrid design consisting of standard convolutional blocks and lightweight residual blocks, allowing people to tune SplitSR for their computational budget. We evaluate our system on a low-end ARM CPU, demonstrating both higher accuracy and up to 5 times faster inference than previous approaches. We then deploy our model onto a smartphone in an app called ZoomSR to demonstrate the first-ever instance of on-device, deep learning-based SR. We conducted a user study with 15 participants to have them assess the perceived quality of images that were post-processed by SplitSR. Relative to bilinear interpolation -- the existing standard for on-device SR -- participants showed a statistically significant preference when looking at both images (Z=-9.270, p<0.01) and text (Z=-6.486, p<0.01).

Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Zhilu Zhang et al.

This paper reviews the second AIM learned ISP challenge and provides the description of the proposed solutions and results. The participating teams were solving a real-world RAW-to-RGB mapping problem, where to goal was to map the original low-quality RAW images captured by the Huawei P20 device to the same photos obtained with the Canon 5D DSLR camera. The considered task embraced a number of complex computer vision subtasks, such as image demosaicing, denoising, white balancing, color and contrast correction, demoireing, etc. The target metric used in this challenge combined fidelity scores (PSNR and SSIM) with solutions' perceptual results measured in a user study. The proposed solutions significantly improved the baseline results, defining the state-of-the-art for practical image signal processing pipeline modeling.

Xuan Zhu, Yue Cheng, Jinye Peng et al.

Generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR) has attracted enormous interests in recent years. However, the GAN-based SR methods only use image discriminator to distinguish SR images and high-resolution (HR) images. Image discriminator fails to discriminate images accurately since image features cannot be fully expressed. In this paper, we design a new GAN-based SR framework GAN-IMC which includes generator, image discriminator, morphological component discriminator and color discriminator. The combination of multiple feature discriminators improves the accuracy of image discrimination. Adversarial training between the generator and multi-feature discriminators forces SR images to converge with HR images in terms of data and features distribution. Moreover, in some cases, feature enhancement of salient regions is also worth considering. GAN-IMC is further optimized by weighted content loss (GAN-IMCW), which effectively restores and enhances salient regions in SR images. The effectiveness and robustness of our method are confirmed by extensive experiments on public datasets. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method not only achieves competitive Perceptual Index (PI) and Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) values but also obtains pleasant visual perception in image edge, texture, color and salient regions.