Xiaolin Wu

Xi Zhang, Xiaolin Wu

Recently, numerous end-to-end optimized image compression neural networks have been developed and proved themselves as leaders in rate-distortion performance. The main strength of these learnt compression methods is in powerful nonlinear analysis and synthesis transforms that can be facilitated by deep neural networks. However, out of operational expediency, most of these end-to-end methods adopt uniform scalar quantizers rather than vector quantizers, which are information-theoretically optimal. In this paper, we present a novel Lattice Vector Quantization scheme coupled with a spatially Adaptive Companding (LVQAC) mapping. LVQ can better exploit the inter-feature dependencies than scalar uniform quantization while being computationally almost as simple as the latter. Moreover, to improve the adaptability of LVQ to source statistics, we couple a spatially adaptive companding (AC) mapping with LVQ. The resulting LVQAC design can be easily embedded into any end-to-end optimized image compression system. Extensive experiments demonstrate that for any end-to-end CNN image compression models, replacing uniform quantizer by LVQAC achieves better rate-distortion performance without significantly increasing the model complexity.

Chang Liu, Xiaolin Wu

Nighttime photographers are often troubled by light pollution of unwanted artificial lights. Artificial lights, after scattered by aerosols in the atmosphere, can inundate the starlight and degrade the quality of nighttime images, by reducing contrast and dynamic range and causing hazes. In this paper we develop a physically-based light pollution reduction (LPR) algorithm that can substantially alleviate the aforementioned degradations of perceptual quality and restore the pristine state of night sky. The key to the success of the proposed LPR algorithm is an inverse method to estimate the spatial radiance distribution and spectral signature of ground artificial lights. Extensive experiments are carried out to evaluate the efficacy and limitations of the LPR algorithm.

Bolin Liu, Xiao Shu, Xiaolin Wu

Taking photos of optoelectronic displays is a direct and spontaneous way of transferring data and keeping records, which is widely practiced. However, due to the analog signal interference between the pixel grids of the display screen and camera sensor array, objectionable moiré (alias) patterns appear in captured screen images. As the moiré patterns are structured and highly variant, they are difficult to be completely removed without affecting the underneath latent image. In this paper, we propose an approach of deep convolutional neural network for demoiréing screen photos. The proposed DCNN consists of a coarse-scale network and a fine-scale network. In the coarse-scale network, the input image is first downsampled and then processed by stacked residual blocks to remove the moiré artifacts. After that, the fine-scale network upsamples the demoiréd low-resolution image back to the original resolution. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed technique can efficiently remove the moiré patterns for camera acquired screen images; the new technique outperforms the existing ones.

Xiao Shu, Xiaolin Wu

Small compression noises, despite being transparent to human eyes, can adversely affect the results of many image restoration processes, if left unaccounted for. Especially, compression noises are highly detrimental to inverse operators of high-boosting (sharpening) nature, such as deblurring and superresolution against a convolution kernel. By incorporating the non-linear DCT quantization mechanism into the formulation for image restoration, we propose a new sparsity-based convex programming approach for joint compression noise removal and image restoration. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains of the new approach over existing image restoration methods.