Yi Zhang

Dasong Li, Xiaoyu Shi, Yi Zhang et al.

Video restoration, which aims to restore clear frames from degraded videos, has numerous important applications. The key to video restoration depends on utilizing inter-frame information. However, existing deep learning methods often rely on complicated network architectures, such as optical flow estimation, deformable convolution, and cross-frame self-attention layers, resulting in high computational costs. In this study, we propose a simple yet effective framework for video restoration. Our approach is based on grouped spatial-temporal shift, which is a lightweight and straightforward technique that can implicitly capture inter-frame correspondences for multi-frame aggregation. By introducing grouped spatial shift, we attain expansive effective receptive fields. Combined with basic 2D convolution, this simple framework can effectively aggregate inter-frame information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method, while using less than a quarter of its computational cost, on both video deblurring and video denoising tasks. These results indicate the potential for our approach to significantly reduce computational overhead while maintaining high-quality results. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/dasongli1/Shift-Net.

Dasong Li, Yi Zhang, Ka Chun Cheung et al.

In various learning-based image restoration tasks, such as image denoising and image super-resolution, the degradation representations were widely used to model the degradation process and handle complicated degradation patterns. However, they are less explored in learning-based image deblurring as blur kernel estimation cannot perform well in real-world challenging cases. We argue that it is particularly necessary for image deblurring to model degradation representations since blurry patterns typically show much larger variations than noisy patterns or high-frequency textures.In this paper, we propose a framework to learn spatially adaptive degradation representations of blurry images. A novel joint image reblurring and deblurring learning process is presented to improve the expressiveness of degradation representations. To make learned degradation representations effective in reblurring and deblurring, we propose a Multi-Scale Degradation Injection Network (MSDI-Net) to integrate them into the neural networks. With the integration, MSDI-Net can handle various and complicated blurry patterns adaptively. Experiments on the GoPro and RealBlur datasets demonstrate that our proposed deblurring framework with the learned degradation representations outperforms state-of-the-art methods with appealing improvements. The code is released at https://github.com/dasongli1/Learning_degradation.

Yi Zhang, Dasong Li, Xiaoyu Shi et al.

How to aggregate spatial information plays an essential role in learning-based image restoration. Most existing CNN-based networks adopt static convolutional kernels to encode spatial information, which cannot aggregate spatial information adaptively. Recent transformer-based architectures achieve adaptive spatial aggregation. But they lack desirable inductive biases of convolutions and require heavy computational costs. In this paper, we propose a kernel basis attention (KBA) module, which introduces learnable kernel bases to model representative image patterns for spatial information aggregation. Different kernel bases are trained to model different local structures. At each spatial location, they are linearly and adaptively fused by predicted pixel-wise coefficients to obtain aggregation weights. Based on the KBA module, we further design a multi-axis feature fusion (MFF) block to encode and fuse channel-wise, spatial-invariant, and pixel-adaptive features for image restoration. Our model, named kernel basis network (KBNet), achieves state-of-the-art performances on more than ten benchmarks over image denoising, deraining, and deblurring tasks while requiring less computational cost than previous SOTA methods.

Dasong Li, Yi Zhang, Ka Lung Law et al.

With the growing popularity of smartphones, capturing high-quality images is of vital importance to smartphones. The cameras of smartphones have small apertures and small sensor cells, which lead to the noisy images in low light environment. Denoising based on a burst of multiple frames generally outperforms single frame denoising but with the larger compututional cost. In this paper, we propose an efficient yet effective burst denoising system. We adopt a three-stage design: noise prior integration, multi-frame alignment and multi-frame denoising. First, we integrate noise prior by pre-processing raw signals into a variance-stabilization space, which allows using a small-scale network to achieve competitive performance. Second, we observe that it is essential to adopt an explicit alignment for burst denoising, but it is not necessary to integrate a learning-based method to perform multi-frame alignment. Instead, we resort to a conventional and efficient alignment method and combine it with our multi-frame denoising network. At last, we propose a denoising strategy that processes multiple frames sequentially. Sequential denoising avoids filtering a large number of frames by decomposing multiple frames denoising into several efficient sub-network denoising. As for each sub-network, we propose an efficient multi-frequency denoising network to remove noise of different frequencies. Our three-stage design is efficient and shows strong performance on burst denoising. Experiments on synthetic and real raw datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with less computational cost. Furthermore, the low complexity and high-quality performance make deployment on smartphones possible.

Yi Zhang, Dasong Li, Ka Lung Law et al.

The lack of large-scale noisy-clean image pairs restricts supervised denoising methods' deployment in actual applications. While existing unsupervised methods are able to learn image denoising without ground-truth clean images, they either show poor performance or work under impractical settings (e.g., paired noisy images). In this paper, we present a practical unsupervised image denoising method to achieve state-of-the-art denoising performance. Our method only requires single noisy images and a noise model, which is easily accessible in practical raw image denoising. It performs two steps iteratively: (1) Constructing a noisier-noisy dataset with random noise from the noise model; (2) training a model on the noisier-noisy dataset and using the trained model to refine noisy images to obtain the targets used in the next round. We further approximate our full iterative method with a fast algorithm for more efficient training while keeping its original high performance. Experiments on real-world, synthetic, and correlated noise show that our proposed unsupervised denoising approach has superior performances over existing unsupervised methods and competitive performance with supervised methods. In addition, we argue that existing denoising datasets are of low quality and contain only a small number of scenes. To evaluate raw image denoising performance in real-world applications, we build a high-quality raw image dataset SenseNoise-500 that contains 500 real-life scenes. The dataset can serve as a strong benchmark for better evaluating raw image denoising. Code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/zhangyi-3/IDR

Yi Zhang, Hongwei Qin, Xiaogang Wang et al.

The lack of large-scale real raw image denoising dataset gives rise to challenges on synthesizing realistic raw image noise for training denoising models. However, the real raw image noise is contributed by many noise sources and varies greatly among different sensors. Existing methods are unable to model all noise sources accurately, and building a noise model for each sensor is also laborious. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective to synthesize noise by directly sampling from the sensor's real noise. It inherently generates accurate raw image noise for different camera sensors. Two efficient and generic techniques: pattern-aligned patch sampling and high-bit reconstruction help accurate synthesis of spatial-correlated noise and high-bit noise respectively. We conduct systematic experiments on SIDD and ELD datasets. The results show that (1) our method outperforms existing methods and demonstrates wide generalization on different sensors and lighting conditions. (2) Recent conclusions derived from DNN-based noise modeling methods are actually based on inaccurate noise parameters. The DNN-based methods still cannot outperform physics-based statistical methods.

Zhen-Jia Pang, Ruo-Ze Liu, Zhou-Yu Meng et al.

StarCraft II poses a grand challenge for reinforcement learning. The main difficulties of it include huge state and action space and a long-time horizon. In this paper, we investigate a hierarchical reinforcement learning approach for StarCraft II. The hierarchy involves two levels of abstraction. One is the macro-action automatically extracted from expert's trajectories, which reduces the action space in an order of magnitude yet remains effective. The other is a two-layer hierarchical architecture which is modular and easy to scale, enabling a curriculum transferring from simpler tasks to more complex tasks. The reinforcement training algorithm for this architecture is also investigated. On a 64x64 map and using restrictive units, we achieve a winning rate of more than 99\% against the difficulty level-1 built-in AI. Through the curriculum transfer learning algorithm and a mixture of combat model, we can achieve over 93\% winning rate of Protoss against the most difficult non-cheating built-in AI (level-7) of Terran, training within two days using a single machine with only 48 CPU cores and 8 K40 GPUs. It also shows strong generalization performance, when tested against never seen opponents including cheating levels built-in AI and all levels of Zerg and Protoss built-in AI. We hope this study could shed some light on the future research of large-scale reinforcement learning.