Chang Chen

Chang Chen, Zhiwei Xiong, Xiaoming Liu et al.

Camera trace is a unique noise produced in digital imaging process. Most existing forensic methods analyze camera trace to identify image origins. In this paper, we address a new low-level vision problem, camera trace erasing, to reveal the weakness of trace-based forensic methods. A comprehensive investigation on existing anti-forensic methods reveals that it is non-trivial to effectively erase camera trace while avoiding the destruction of content signal. To reconcile these two demands, we propose Siamese Trace Erasing (SiamTE), in which a novel hybrid loss is designed on the basis of Siamese architecture for network training. Specifically, we propose embedded similarity, truncated fidelity, and cross identity to form the hybrid loss. Compared with existing anti-forensic methods, SiamTE has a clear advantage for camera trace erasing, which is demonstrated in three representative tasks. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ngchc/CameraTE.

Chang Chen, Zhiwei Xiong, Xinmei Tian et al.

Existing methods for single image super-resolution (SR) are typically evaluated with synthetic degradation models such as bicubic or Gaussian downsampling. In this paper, we investigate SR from the perspective of camera lenses, named as CameraSR, which aims to alleviate the intrinsic tradeoff between resolution (R) and field-of-view (V) in realistic imaging systems. Specifically, we view the R-V degradation as a latent model in the SR process and learn to reverse it with realistic low- and high-resolution image pairs. To obtain the paired images, we propose two novel data acquisition strategies for two representative imaging systems (i.e., DSLR and smartphone cameras), respectively. Based on the obtained City100 dataset, we quantitatively analyze the performance of commonly-used synthetic degradation models, and demonstrate the superiority of CameraSR as a practical solution to boost the performance of existing SR methods. Moreover, CameraSR can be readily generalized to different content and devices, which serves as an advanced digital zoom tool in realistic imaging systems. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/ngchc/CameraSR.

Ruikang Xu, Mingde Yao, Chang Chen et al.

Existing methods for spectral reconstruction usually learn a discrete mapping from RGB images to a number of spectral bands. However, this modeling strategy ignores the continuous nature of spectral signature. In this paper, we propose Neural Spectral Reconstruction (NeSR) to lift this limitation, by introducing a novel continuous spectral representation. To this end, we embrace the concept of implicit function and implement a parameterized embodiment with a neural network. Specifically, we first adopt a backbone network to extract spatial features of RGB inputs. Based on it, we devise Spectral Profile Interpolation (SPI) module and Neural Attention Mapping (NAM) module to enrich deep features, where the spatial-spectral correlation is involved for a better representation. Then, we view the number of sampled spectral bands as the coordinate of continuous implicit function, so as to learn the projection from deep features to spectral intensities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the distinct advantage of NeSR in reconstruction accuracy over baseline methods. Moreover, NeSR extends the flexibility of spectral reconstruction by enabling an arbitrary number of spectral bands as the target output.

Chang Chen, Yin Li, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro et al.

Understanding the physics of large cosmological surveys down to small (nonlinear) scales will significantly improve our knowledge of the Universe. Large N-body simulations have been built to obtain predictions in the non-linear regime. However, N-body simulations are computationally expensive and generate large amount of data, putting burdens on storage. These data are snapshots of the simulated Universe at different times, and fine sampling is necessary to accurately save its whole history. We employ a deep neural network model to predict the nonlinear N-body simulation at an intermediate time step given two widely separated snapshots. Our results outperform the cubic Hermite interpolation benchmark method in interpolating N-body simulations. This work can greatly reduce the storage requirement and allow us to reconstruct the cosmic history from far fewer snapshots of the universe.