Chen Change Loy

Jianyi Wang, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Chen Change Loy

Measuring the perception of visual content is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Many mathematical models have been developed to evaluate the look or quality of an image. Despite the effectiveness of such tools in quantifying degradations such as noise and blurriness levels, such quantification is loosely coupled with human language. When it comes to more abstract perception about the feel of visual content, existing methods can only rely on supervised models that are explicitly trained with labeled data collected via laborious user study. In this paper, we go beyond the conventional paradigms by exploring the rich visual language prior encapsulated in Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models for assessing both the quality perception (look) and abstract perception (feel) of images in a zero-shot manner. In particular, we discuss effective prompt designs and show an effective prompt pairing strategy to harness the prior. We also provide extensive experiments on controlled datasets and Image Quality Assessment (IQA) benchmarks. Our results show that CLIP captures meaningful priors that generalize well to different perceptual assessments. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/IceClear/CLIP-IQA.

Kaiyang Zhou, Jingkang Yang, Chen Change Loy et al.

With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at https://github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.

Zongsheng Yue, Jianyi Wang, Chen Change Loy

Diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR) methods are mainly limited by the low inference speed due to the requirements of hundreds or even thousands of sampling steps. Existing acceleration sampling techniques inevitably sacrifice performance to some extent, leading to over-blurry SR results. To address this issue, we propose a novel and efficient diffusion model for SR that significantly reduces the number of diffusion steps, thereby eliminating the need for post-acceleration during inference and its associated performance deterioration. Our method constructs a Markov chain that transfers between the high-resolution image and the low-resolution image by shifting the residual between them, substantially improving the transition efficiency. Additionally, an elaborate noise schedule is developed to flexibly control the shifting speed and the noise strength during the diffusion process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method obtains superior or at least comparable performance to current state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets, even only with 15 sampling steps. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/zsyOAOA/ResShift.

Xiangtai Li, Henghui Ding, Haobo Yuan et al.

Visual segmentation seeks to partition images, video frames, or point clouds into multiple segments or groups. This technique has numerous real-world applications, such as autonomous driving, image editing, robot sensing, and medical analysis. Over the past decade, deep learning-based methods have made remarkable strides in this area. Recently, transformers, a type of neural network based on self-attention originally designed for natural language processing, have considerably surpassed previous convolutional or recurrent approaches in various vision processing tasks. Specifically, vision transformers offer robust, unified, and even simpler solutions for various segmentation tasks. This survey provides a thorough overview of transformer-based visual segmentation, summarizing recent advancements. We first review the background, encompassing problem definitions, datasets, and prior convolutional methods. Next, we summarize a meta-architecture that unifies all recent transformer-based approaches. Based on this meta-architecture, we examine various method designs, including modifications to the meta-architecture and associated applications. We also present several closely related settings, including 3D point cloud segmentation, foundation model tuning, domain-aware segmentation, efficient segmentation, and medical segmentation. Additionally, we compile and re-evaluate the reviewed methods on several well-established datasets. Finally, we identify open challenges in this field and propose directions for future research. The project page can be found at https://github.com/lxtGH/Awesome-Segmentation-With-Transformer. We will also continually monitor developments in this rapidly evolving field.

Yuenan Hou, Xinge Zhu, Yuexin Ma et al.

This article addresses the problem of distilling knowledge from a large teacher model to a slim student network for LiDAR semantic segmentation. Directly employing previous distillation approaches yields inferior results due to the intrinsic challenges of point cloud, i.e., sparsity, randomness and varying density. To tackle the aforementioned problems, we propose the Point-to-Voxel Knowledge Distillation (PVD), which transfers the hidden knowledge from both point level and voxel level. Specifically, we first leverage both the pointwise and voxelwise output distillation to complement the sparse supervision signals. Then, to better exploit the structural information, we divide the whole point cloud into several supervoxels and design a difficulty-aware sampling strategy to more frequently sample supervoxels containing less-frequent classes and faraway objects. On these supervoxels, we propose inter-point and inter-voxel affinity distillation, where the similarity information between points and voxels can help the student model better capture the structural information of the surrounding environment. We conduct extensive experiments on two popular LiDAR segmentation benchmarks, i.e., nuScenes and SemanticKITTI. On both benchmarks, our PVD consistently outperforms previous distillation approaches by a large margin on three representative backbones, i.e., Cylinder3D, SPVNAS and MinkowskiNet. Notably, on the challenging nuScenes and SemanticKITTI datasets, our method can achieve roughly 75% MACs reduction and 2x speedup on the competitive Cylinder3D model and rank 1st on the SemanticKITTI leaderboard among all published algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/cardwing/Codes-for-PVKD.

Size Wu, Wenwei Zhang, Sheng Jin et al.

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) learn to align vision and language representations on large-scale datasets, where each image-text pair usually contains a bag of semantic concepts. However, existing open-vocabulary object detectors only align region embeddings individually with the corresponding features extracted from the VLMs. Such a design leaves the compositional structure of semantic concepts in a scene under-exploited, although the structure may be implicitly learned by the VLMs. In this work, we propose to align the embedding of bag of regions beyond individual regions. The proposed method groups contextually interrelated regions as a bag. The embeddings of regions in a bag are treated as embeddings of words in a sentence, and they are sent to the text encoder of a VLM to obtain the bag-of-regions embedding, which is learned to be aligned to the corresponding features extracted by a frozen VLM. Applied to the commonly used Faster R-CNN, our approach surpasses the previous best results by 4.6 box AP50 and 2.8 mask AP on novel categories of open-vocabulary COCO and LVIS benchmarks, respectively. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wusize/ovdet.

Zongsheng Yue, Chen Change Loy

While deep learning-based methods for blind face restoration have achieved unprecedented success, they still suffer from two major limitations. First, most of them deteriorate when facing complex degradations out of their training data. Second, these methods require multiple constraints, e.g., fidelity, perceptual, and adversarial losses, which require laborious hyper-parameter tuning to stabilize and balance their influences. In this work, we propose a novel method named DifFace that is capable of coping with unseen and complex degradations more gracefully without complicated loss designs. The key of our method is to establish a posterior distribution from the observed low-quality (LQ) image to its high-quality (HQ) counterpart. In particular, we design a transition distribution from the LQ image to the intermediate state of a pre-trained diffusion model and then gradually transmit from this intermediate state to the HQ target by recursively applying a pre-trained diffusion model. The transition distribution only relies on a restoration backbone that is trained with $L_2$ loss on some synthetic data, which favorably avoids the cumbersome training process in existing methods. Moreover, the transition distribution can contract the error of the restoration backbone and thus makes our method more robust to unknown degradations. Comprehensive experiments show that DifFace is superior to current state-of-the-art methods, especially in cases with severe degradations. Code and model are available at https://github.com/zsyOAOA/DifFace.

Xiangtai Li, Wenwei Zhang, Jiangmiao Pang et al.

This paper presents Video K-Net, a simple, strong, and unified framework for fully end-to-end video panoptic segmentation. The method is built upon K-Net, a method that unifies image segmentation via a group of learnable kernels. We observe that these learnable kernels from K-Net, which encode object appearances and contexts, can naturally associate identical instances across video frames. Motivated by this observation, Video K-Net learns to simultaneously segment and track "things" and "stuff" in a video with simple kernel-based appearance modeling and cross-temporal kernel interaction. Despite the simplicity, it achieves state-of-the-art video panoptic segmentation results on Citscapes-VPS, KITTI-STEP, and VIPSeg without bells and whistles. In particular, on KITTI-STEP, the simple method can boost almost 12\% relative improvements over previous methods. On VIPSeg, Video K-Net boosts almost 15\% relative improvements and results in 39.8 % VPQ. We also validate its generalization on video semantic segmentation, where we boost various baselines by 2\% on the VSPW dataset. Moreover, we extend K-Net into clip-level video framework for video instance segmentation, where we obtain 40.5% mAP for ResNet50 backbone and 54.1% mAP for Swin-base on YouTube-2019 validation set. We hope this simple, yet effective method can serve as a new, flexible baseline in unified video segmentation design. Both code and models are released at https://github.com/lxtGH/Video-K-Net.

Guangcong Wang, Yinuo Yang, Chen Change Loy et al.

We present a new lighting estimation and editing framework to generate high-dynamic-range (HDR) indoor panorama lighting from a single limited field-of-view (LFOV) image captured by low-dynamic-range (LDR) cameras. Existing lighting estimation methods either directly regress lighting representation parameters or decompose this problem into LFOV-to-panorama and LDR-to-HDR lighting generation sub-tasks. However, due to the partial observation, the high-dynamic-range lighting, and the intrinsic ambiguity of a scene, lighting estimation remains a challenging task. To tackle this problem, we propose a coupled dual-StyleGAN panorama synthesis network (StyleLight) that integrates LDR and HDR panorama synthesis into a unified framework. The LDR and HDR panorama synthesis share a similar generator but have separate discriminators. During inference, given an LDR LFOV image, we propose a focal-masked GAN inversion method to find its latent code by the LDR panorama synthesis branch and then synthesize the HDR panorama by the HDR panorama synthesis branch. StyleLight takes LFOV-to-panorama and LDR-to-HDR lighting generation into a unified framework and thus greatly improves lighting estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on indoor lighting estimation. Notably, StyleLight also enables intuitive lighting editing on indoor HDR panoramas, which is suitable for real-world applications. Code is available at https://style-light.github.io.

Jingkang Yang, Wenxuan Peng, Xiangtai Li et al. · stanford

Towards building comprehensive real-world visual perception systems, we propose and study a new problem called panoptic scene graph generation (PVSG). PVSG relates to the existing video scene graph generation (VidSGG) problem, which focuses on temporal interactions between humans and objects grounded with bounding boxes in videos. However, the limitation of bounding boxes in detecting non-rigid objects and backgrounds often causes VidSGG to miss key details crucial for comprehensive video understanding. In contrast, PVSG requires nodes in scene graphs to be grounded by more precise, pixel-level segmentation masks, which facilitate holistic scene understanding. To advance research in this new area, we contribute the PVSG dataset, which consists of 400 videos (289 third-person + 111 egocentric videos) with a total of 150K frames labeled with panoptic segmentation masks as well as fine, temporal scene graphs. We also provide a variety of baseline methods and share useful design practices for future work.

Jiahao Xie, Wei Li, Xiangtai Li et al.

We present MosaicFusion, a simple yet effective diffusion-based data augmentation approach for large vocabulary instance segmentation. Our method is training-free and does not rely on any label supervision. Two key designs enable us to employ an off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion model as a useful dataset generator for object instances and mask annotations. First, we divide an image canvas into several regions and perform a single round of diffusion process to generate multiple instances simultaneously, conditioning on different text prompts. Second, we obtain corresponding instance masks by aggregating cross-attention maps associated with object prompts across layers and diffusion time steps, followed by simple thresholding and edge-aware refinement processing. Without bells and whistles, our MosaicFusion can produce a significant amount of synthetic labeled data for both rare and novel categories. Experimental results on the challenging LVIS long-tailed and open-vocabulary benchmarks demonstrate that MosaicFusion can significantly improve the performance of existing instance segmentation models, especially for rare and novel categories. Code: https://github.com/Jiahao000/MosaicFusion.

Xiao-Ming Wu, Bin Fan, Kang Liao et al.

Following the rise of large foundation models, Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) emerged, leveraging strong visual and language understanding from Vision-Language Models for general-purpose policy learning. Yet, the current VLA landscape remains fragmented and exploratory. Although many groups have proposed their own VLA models, inconsistencies in training protocols and evaluation settings make it difficult to identify which design choices truly matter. To bring structure to this evolving space, we reexamine the VLA design space under a unified framework and evaluation setup. Starting from a simple VLA baseline similar to RT-2, which is the origin of VLA, we systematically dissect design choices along three dimensions: foundational components, perception essentials, and action modelling perspectives. From this study, we distill 12 key findings that together form a practical recipe for building strong VLA models. The outcome of this exploration is a simple yet effective model, VLANeXt. It outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the LIBERO and LIBERO-plus benchmarks and demonstrates strong performance in real-world experiments. We release a unified and easy-to-use codebase to reproduce our findings, explore the design space, and develop new VLA variants on top of a shared foundation. The codebase is available at https://github.com/DravenALG/VLANeXt.

Zeqi Xiao, Wenwei Zhang, Tai Wang et al.

DEtection TRansformer (DETR) started a trend that uses a group of learnable queries for unified visual perception. This work begins by applying this appealing paradigm to LiDAR-based point cloud segmentation and obtains a simple yet effective baseline. Although the naive adaptation obtains fair results, the instance segmentation performance is noticeably inferior to previous works. By diving into the details, we observe that instances in the sparse point clouds are relatively small to the whole scene and often have similar geometry but lack distinctive appearance for segmentation, which are rare in the image domain. Considering instances in 3D are more featured by their positional information, we emphasize their roles during the modeling and design a robust Mixed-parameterized Positional Embedding (MPE) to guide the segmentation process. It is embedded into backbone features and later guides the mask prediction and query update processes iteratively, leading to Position-Aware Segmentation (PA-Seg) and Masked Focal Attention (MFA). All these designs impel the queries to attend to specific regions and identify various instances. The method, named Position-guided Point cloud Panoptic segmentation transFormer (P3Former), outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 3.4% and 1.2% PQ on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes benchmark, respectively. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/SmartBot-PJLab/P3Former .

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Shangchen Zhou, Xiangyu Xu et al.

The exploitation of long-term information has been a long-standing problem in video restoration. The recent BasicVSR and BasicVSR++ have shown remarkable performance in video super-resolution through long-term propagation and effective alignment. Their success has led to a question of whether they can be transferred to different video restoration tasks. In this work, we extend BasicVSR++ to a generic framework for video restoration tasks. In tasks where inputs and outputs possess identical spatial size, the input resolution is reduced by strided convolutions to maintain efficiency. With only minimal changes from BasicVSR++, the proposed framework achieves compelling performance with great efficiency in various video restoration tasks including video deblurring and denoising. Notably, BasicVSR++ achieves comparable performance to Transformer-based approaches with up to 79% of parameter reduction and 44x speedup. The promising results demonstrate the importance of propagation and alignment in video restoration tasks beyond just video super-resolution. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ckkelvinchan/BasicVSR_PlusPlus.

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Xiangyu Xu, Xintao Wang et al.

We show that pre-trained Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) such as StyleGAN and BigGAN can be used as a latent bank to improve the performance of image super-resolution. While most existing perceptual-oriented approaches attempt to generate realistic outputs through learning with adversarial loss, our method, Generative LatEnt bANk (GLEAN), goes beyond existing practices by directly leveraging rich and diverse priors encapsulated in a pre-trained GAN. But unlike prevalent GAN inversion methods that require expensive image-specific optimization at runtime, our approach only needs a single forward pass for restoration. GLEAN can be easily incorporated in a simple encoder-bank-decoder architecture with multi-resolution skip connections. Employing priors from different generative models allows GLEAN to be applied to diverse categories (\eg~human faces, cats, buildings, and cars). We further present a lightweight version of GLEAN, named LightGLEAN, which retains only the critical components in GLEAN. Notably, LightGLEAN consists of only 21% of parameters and 35% of FLOPs while achieving comparable image quality. We extend our method to different tasks including image colorization and blind image restoration, and extensive experiments show that our proposed models perform favorably in comparison to existing methods. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmediting.

Ruicheng Feng, Chongyi Li, Huaijin Chen et al.

Due to the difficulty in collecting large-scale and perfectly aligned paired training data for Under-Display Camera (UDC) image restoration, previous methods resort to monitor-based image systems or simulation-based methods, sacrificing the realness of the data and introducing domain gaps. In this work, we revisit the classic stereo setup for training data collection -- capturing two images of the same scene with one UDC and one standard camera. The key idea is to "copy" details from a high-quality reference image and "paste" them on the UDC image. While being able to generate real training pairs, this setting is susceptible to spatial misalignment due to perspective and depth of field changes. The problem is further compounded by the large domain discrepancy between the UDC and normal images, which is unique to UDC restoration. In this paper, we mitigate the non-trivial domain discrepancy and spatial misalignment through a novel Transformer-based framework that generates well-aligned yet high-quality target data for the corresponding UDC input. This is made possible through two carefully designed components, namely, the Domain Alignment Module (DAM) and Geometric Alignment Module (GAM), which encourage robust and accurate discovery of correspondence between the UDC and normal views. Extensive experiments show that high-quality and well-aligned pseudo UDC training pairs are beneficial for training a robust restoration network. Code and the dataset are available at https://github.com/jnjaby/AlignFormer.

Yidi Shao, Chen Change Loy, Bo Dai

Particle-based systems provide a flexible and unified way to simulate physics systems with complex dynamics. Most existing data-driven simulators for particle-based systems adopt graph neural networks (GNNs) as their network backbones, as particles and their interactions can be naturally represented by graph nodes and graph edges. However, while particle-based systems usually contain hundreds even thousands of particles, the explicit modeling of particle interactions as graph edges inevitably leads to a significant computational overhead, due to the increased number of particle interactions. Consequently, in this paper we propose a novel Transformer-based method, dubbed as Transformer with Implicit Edges (TIE), to capture the rich semantics of particle interactions in an edge-free manner. The core idea of TIE is to decentralize the computation involving pair-wise particle interactions into per-particle updates. This is achieved by adjusting the self-attention module to resemble the update formula of graph edges in GNN. To improve the generalization ability of TIE, we further amend TIE with learnable material-specific abstract particles to disentangle global material-wise semantics from local particle-wise semantics. We evaluate our model on diverse domains of varying complexity and materials. Compared with existing GNN-based methods, without bells and whistles, TIE achieves superior performance and generalization across all these domains. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/ftbabi/TIE_ECCV2022.git.

Ruicheng Feng, Chongyi Li, Shangchen Zhou et al.

Developing and integrating advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems are prevalent with the increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms. However, the lack of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). To bridge the gap, we introduce the first MIPI challenge including five tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Under-Display Camera (UDC) Image Restoration track on MIPI 2022. In total, 167 participants were successfully registered, and 19 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Under-Display Camera Image Restoration. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://github.com/mipi-challenge/MIPI2022.

Li Siyao, Yuhang Li, Bo Li et al.

Existing correspondence datasets for two-dimensional (2D) cartoon suffer from simple frame composition and monotonic movements, making them insufficient to simulate real animations. In this work, we present a new 2D animation visual correspondence dataset, AnimeRun, by converting open source three-dimensional (3D) movies to full scenes in 2D style, including simultaneous moving background and interactions of multiple subjects. Our analyses show that the proposed dataset not only resembles real anime more in image composition, but also possesses richer and more complex motion patterns compared to existing datasets. With this dataset, we establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating several existing optical flow and segment matching methods, and analyze shortcomings of these methods on animation data. Data, code and other supplementary materials are available at https://lisiyao21.github.io/projects/AnimeRun.

Wenwei Zhang, Jiangmiao Pang, Kai Chen et al.

This paper presents Dense Siamese Network (DenseSiam), a simple unsupervised learning framework for dense prediction tasks. It learns visual representations by maximizing the similarity between two views of one image with two types of consistency, i.e., pixel consistency and region consistency. Concretely, DenseSiam first maximizes the pixel level spatial consistency according to the exact location correspondence in the overlapped area. It also extracts a batch of region embeddings that correspond to some sub-regions in the overlapped area to be contrasted for region consistency. In contrast to previous methods that require negative pixel pairs, momentum encoders or heuristic masks, DenseSiam benefits from the simple Siamese network and optimizes the consistency of different granularities. It also proves that the simple location correspondence and interacted region embeddings are effective enough to learn the similarity. We apply DenseSiam on ImageNet and obtain competitive improvements on various downstream tasks. We also show that only with some extra task-specific losses, the simple framework can directly conduct dense prediction tasks. On an existing unsupervised semantic segmentation benchmark, it surpasses state-of-the-art segmentation methods by 2.1 mIoU with 28% training costs. Code and models are released at https://github.com/ZwwWayne/DenseSiam.

Junzhe Zhang, Daxuan Ren, Zhongang Cai et al.

Recovering a textured 3D mesh from a monocular image is highly challenging, particularly for in-the-wild objects that lack 3D ground truths. In this work, we present MeshInversion, a novel framework to improve the reconstruction by exploiting the generative prior of a 3D GAN pre-trained for 3D textured mesh synthesis. Reconstruction is achieved by searching for a latent space in the 3D GAN that best resembles the target mesh in accordance with the single view observation. Since the pre-trained GAN encapsulates rich 3D semantics in terms of mesh geometry and texture, searching within the GAN manifold thus naturally regularizes the realness and fidelity of the reconstruction. Importantly, such regularization is directly applied in the 3D space, providing crucial guidance of mesh parts that are unobserved in the 2D space. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that our framework obtains faithful 3D reconstructions with consistent geometry and texture across both observed and unobserved parts. Moreover, it generalizes well to meshes that are less commonly seen, such as the extended articulation of deformable objects. Code is released at https://github.com/junzhezhang/mesh-inversion

Qingyu Yang, Guang Yang, Jun Jiang et al.

Developing and integrating advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems are prevalent with the increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms. However, the lack of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). To bridge the gap, we introduce the first MIPI challenge, including five tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, Quad Joint Remosaic and Denoise, one of the five tracks, working on the interpolation of Quad CFA to Bayer at full resolution, is introduced. The participants were provided a new dataset, including 70 (training) and 15 (validation) scenes of high-quality Quad and Bayer pairs. In addition, for each scene, Quad of different noise levels was provided at 0dB, 24dB, and 42dB. All the data were captured using a Quad sensor in both outdoor and indoor conditions. The final results are evaluated using objective metrics, including PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, and KLD. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://github.com/mipi-challenge/MIPI2022.

Li Siyao, Tianpei Gu, Weiye Xiao et al.

We aim to address a significant but understudied problem in the anime industry, namely the inbetweening of cartoon line drawings. Inbetweening involves generating intermediate frames between two black-and-white line drawings and is a time-consuming and expensive process that can benefit from automation. However, existing frame interpolation methods that rely on matching and warping whole raster images are unsuitable for line inbetweening and often produce blurring artifacts that damage the intricate line structures. To preserve the precision and detail of the line drawings, we propose a new approach, AnimeInbet, which geometrizes raster line drawings into graphs of endpoints and reframes the inbetweening task as a graph fusion problem with vertex repositioning. Our method can effectively capture the sparsity and unique structure of line drawings while preserving the details during inbetweening. This is made possible via our novel modules, i.e., vertex geometric embedding, a vertex correspondence Transformer, an effective mechanism for vertex repositioning and a visibility predictor. To train our method, we introduce MixamoLine240, a new dataset of line drawings with ground truth vectorization and matching labels. Our experiments demonstrate that AnimeInbet synthesizes high-quality, clean, and complete intermediate line drawings, outperforming existing methods quantitatively and qualitatively, especially in cases with large motions. Data and code are available at https://github.com/lisiyao21/AnimeInbet.

Zeren Chen, Gengshi Huang, Wei Li et al.

Recent self-supervised methods are mainly designed for representation learning with the base model, e.g., ResNets or ViTs. They cannot be easily transferred to DETR, with task-specific Transformer modules. In this work, we present Siamese DETR, a Siamese self-supervised pretraining approach for the Transformer architecture in DETR. We consider learning view-invariant and detection-oriented representations simultaneously through two complementary tasks, i.e., localization and discrimination, in a novel multi-view learning framework. Two self-supervised pretext tasks are designed: (i) Multi-View Region Detection aims at learning to localize regions-of-interest between augmented views of the input, and (ii) Multi-View Semantic Discrimination attempts to improve object-level discrimination for each region. The proposed Siamese DETR achieves state-of-the-art transfer performance on COCO and PASCAL VOC detection using different DETR variants in all setups. Code is available at https://github.com/Zx55/SiameseDETR.

Wenxiu Sun, Qingpeng Zhu, Chongyi Li et al.

Developing and integrating advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems is prevalent with the increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms. However, the lack of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). To bridge the gap, we introduce the first MIPI challenge including five tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, RGB+ToF Depth Completion, one of the five tracks, working on the fusion of RGB sensor and ToF sensor (with spot illumination) is introduced. The participants were provided with a new dataset called TetrasRGBD, which contains 18k pairs of high-quality synthetic RGB+Depth training data and 2.3k pairs of testing data from mixed sources. All the data are collected in an indoor scenario. We require that the running time of all methods should be real-time on desktop GPUs. The final results are evaluated using objective metrics and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) subjectively. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://github.com/mipi-challenge/MIPI2022.

Qingyu Yang, Guang Yang, Jun Jiang et al.

Developing and integrating advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems are prevalent with the increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms. However, the lack of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). To bridge the gap, we introduce the first MIPI challenge including five tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, RGBW Joint Remosaic and Denoise, one of the five tracks, working on the interpolation of RGBW CFA to Bayer at full resolution, is introduced. The participants were provided with a new dataset including 70 (training) and 15 (validation) scenes of high-quality RGBW and Bayer pairs. In addition, for each scene, RGBW of different noise levels was provided at 0dB, 24dB, and 42dB. All the data were captured using an RGBW sensor in both outdoor and indoor conditions. The final results are evaluated using objective metrics including PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, and KLD. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://github.com/mipi-challenge/MIPI2022.

Qingyu Yang, Guang Yang, Jun Jiang et al.

Developing and integrating advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems are prevalent with the increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms. However, the lack of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). To bridge the gap, we introduce the first MIPI challenge, including five tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, RGBW Joint Fusion and Denoise, one of the five tracks, working on the fusion of binning-mode RGBW to Bayer, is introduced. The participants were provided with a new dataset including 70 (training) and 15 (validation) scenes of high-quality RGBW and Bayer pairs. In addition, for each scene, RGBW of different noise levels was provided at 24dB and 42dB. All the data were captured using an RGBW sensor in both outdoor and indoor conditions. The final results are evaluated using objective metrics, including PSNR, SSIM}, LPIPS, and KLD. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://github.com/mipi-challenge/MIPI2022.

Size Wu, Wenwei Zhang, Lumin Xu et al.

Open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks including object detection and image segmentation have been advanced by the success of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP). CLIP models, particularly those incorporating vision transformers (ViTs), have exhibited remarkable generalization ability in zero-shot image classification. However, when transferring the vision-language alignment of CLIP from global image representation to local region representation for the open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks, CLIP ViTs suffer from the domain shift from full images to local image regions. In this paper, we embark on an in-depth analysis of the region-language alignment in CLIP models, which is essential for downstream open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks. Subsequently, we propose an approach named CLIPSelf, which adapts the image-level recognition ability of CLIP ViT to local image regions without needing any region-text pairs. CLIPSelf empowers ViTs to distill itself by aligning a region representation extracted from its dense feature map with the image-level representation of the corresponding image crop. With the enhanced CLIP ViTs, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance on open-vocabulary object detection, semantic segmentation, and panoptic segmentation across various benchmarks. Models and code are released at https://github.com/wusize/CLIPSelf.

Shangchen Zhou, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Chongyi Li et al.

Blind face restoration is a highly ill-posed problem that often requires auxiliary guidance to 1) improve the mapping from degraded inputs to desired outputs, or 2) complement high-quality details lost in the inputs. In this paper, we demonstrate that a learned discrete codebook prior in a small proxy space largely reduces the uncertainty and ambiguity of restoration mapping by casting blind face restoration as a code prediction task, while providing rich visual atoms for generating high-quality faces. Under this paradigm, we propose a Transformer-based prediction network, named CodeFormer, to model the global composition and context of the low-quality faces for code prediction, enabling the discovery of natural faces that closely approximate the target faces even when the inputs are severely degraded. To enhance the adaptiveness for different degradation, we also propose a controllable feature transformation module that allows a flexible trade-off between fidelity and quality. Thanks to the expressive codebook prior and global modeling, CodeFormer outperforms the state of the arts in both quality and fidelity, showing superior robustness to degradation. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our method.

Yaohui Wang, Xinyuan Chen, Xin Ma et al.

This work aims to learn a high-quality text-to-video (T2V) generative model by leveraging a pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) model as a basis. It is a highly desirable yet challenging task to simultaneously a) accomplish the synthesis of visually realistic and temporally coherent videos while b) preserving the strong creative generation nature of the pre-trained T2I model. To this end, we propose LaVie, an integrated video generation framework that operates on cascaded video latent diffusion models, comprising a base T2V model, a temporal interpolation model, and a video super-resolution model. Our key insights are two-fold: 1) We reveal that the incorporation of simple temporal self-attentions, coupled with rotary positional encoding, adequately captures the temporal correlations inherent in video data. 2) Additionally, we validate that the process of joint image-video fine-tuning plays a pivotal role in producing high-quality and creative outcomes. To enhance the performance of LaVie, we contribute a comprehensive and diverse video dataset named Vimeo25M, consisting of 25 million text-video pairs that prioritize quality, diversity, and aesthetic appeal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaVie achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, we showcase the versatility of pre-trained LaVie models in various long video generation and personalized video synthesis applications.

Shuai Yang, Yifan Zhou, Ziwei Liu et al.

Large text-to-image diffusion models have exhibited impressive proficiency in generating high-quality images. However, when applying these models to video domain, ensuring temporal consistency across video frames remains a formidable challenge. This paper proposes a novel zero-shot text-guided video-to-video translation framework to adapt image models to videos. The framework includes two parts: key frame translation and full video translation. The first part uses an adapted diffusion model to generate key frames, with hierarchical cross-frame constraints applied to enforce coherence in shapes, textures and colors. The second part propagates the key frames to other frames with temporal-aware patch matching and frame blending. Our framework achieves global style and local texture temporal consistency at a low cost (without re-training or optimization). The adaptation is compatible with existing image diffusion techniques, allowing our framework to take advantage of them, such as customizing a specific subject with LoRA, and introducing extra spatial guidance with ControlNet. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework over existing methods in rendering high-quality and temporally-coherent videos.

Guangcong Wang, Zhaoxi Chen, Chen Change Loy et al.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) significantly degrades when only a limited number of views are available. To complement the lack of 3D information, depth-based models, such as DSNeRF and MonoSDF, explicitly assume the availability of accurate depth maps of multiple views. They linearly scale the accurate depth maps as supervision to guide the predicted depth of few-shot NeRFs. However, accurate depth maps are difficult and expensive to capture due to wide-range depth distances in the wild. In this work, we present a new Sparse-view NeRF (SparseNeRF) framework that exploits depth priors from real-world inaccurate observations. The inaccurate depth observations are either from pre-trained depth models or coarse depth maps of consumer-level depth sensors. Since coarse depth maps are not strictly scaled to the ground-truth depth maps, we propose a simple yet effective constraint, a local depth ranking method, on NeRFs such that the expected depth ranking of the NeRF is consistent with that of the coarse depth maps in local patches. To preserve the spatial continuity of the estimated depth of NeRF, we further propose a spatial continuity constraint to encourage the consistency of the expected depth continuity of NeRF with coarse depth maps. Surprisingly, with simple depth ranking constraints, SparseNeRF outperforms all state-of-the-art few-shot NeRF methods (including depth-based models) on standard LLFF and DTU datasets. Moreover, we collect a new dataset NVS-RGBD that contains real-world depth maps from Azure Kinect, ZED 2, and iPhone 13 Pro. Extensive experiments on NVS-RGBD dataset also validate the superiority and generalizability of SparseNeRF. Code and dataset are available at https://sparsenerf.github.io/.

Yuhang Zang, Wei Li, Kaiyang Zhou et al.

Open-vocabulary object detection, which is concerned with the problem of detecting novel objects guided by natural language, has gained increasing attention from the community. Ideally, we would like to extend an open-vocabulary detector such that it can produce bounding box predictions based on user inputs in form of either natural language or exemplar image. This offers great flexibility and user experience for human-computer interaction. To this end, we propose a novel open-vocabulary detector based on DETR -- hence the name OV-DETR -- which, once trained, can detect any object given its class name or an exemplar image. The biggest challenge of turning DETR into an open-vocabulary detector is that it is impossible to calculate the classification cost matrix of novel classes without access to their labeled images. To overcome this challenge, we formulate the learning objective as a binary matching one between input queries (class name or exemplar image) and the corresponding objects, which learns useful correspondence to generalize to unseen queries during testing. For training, we choose to condition the Transformer decoder on the input embeddings obtained from a pre-trained vision-language model like CLIP, in order to enable matching for both text and image queries. With extensive experiments on LVIS and COCO datasets, we demonstrate that our OV-DETR -- the first end-to-end Transformer-based open-vocabulary detector -- achieves non-trivial improvements over current state of the arts.

Hao Zhu, Wayne Wu, Wentao Zhu et al.

Large-scale datasets have played indispensable roles in the recent success of face generation/editing and significantly facilitated the advances of emerging research fields. However, the academic community still lacks a video dataset with diverse facial attribute annotations, which is crucial for the research on face-related videos. In this work, we propose a large-scale, high-quality, and diverse video dataset with rich facial attribute annotations, named the High-Quality Celebrity Video Dataset (CelebV-HQ). CelebV-HQ contains 35,666 video clips with the resolution of 512x512 at least, involving 15,653 identities. All clips are labeled manually with 83 facial attributes, covering appearance, action, and emotion. We conduct a comprehensive analysis in terms of age, ethnicity, brightness stability, motion smoothness, head pose diversity, and data quality to demonstrate the diversity and temporal coherence of CelebV-HQ. Besides, its versatility and potential are validated on two representative tasks, i.e., unconditional video generation and video facial attribute editing. Furthermore, we envision the future potential of CelebV-HQ, as well as the new opportunities and challenges it would bring to related research directions. Data, code, and models are publicly available. Project page: https://celebv-hq.github.io.

Li Siyao, Weijiang Yu, Tianpei Gu et al.

Driving 3D characters to dance following a piece of music is highly challenging due to the spatial constraints applied to poses by choreography norms. In addition, the generated dance sequence also needs to maintain temporal coherency with different music genres. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel music-to-dance framework, Bailando, with two powerful components: 1) a choreographic memory that learns to summarize meaningful dancing units from 3D pose sequence to a quantized codebook, 2) an actor-critic Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) that composes these units to a fluent dance coherent to the music. With the learned choreographic memory, dance generation is realized on the quantized units that meet high choreography standards, such that the generated dancing sequences are confined within the spatial constraints. To achieve synchronized alignment between diverse motion tempos and music beats, we introduce an actor-critic-based reinforcement learning scheme to the GPT with a newly-designed beat-align reward function. Extensive experiments on the standard benchmark demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. Notably, the learned choreographic memory is shown to discover human-interpretable dancing-style poses in an unsupervised manner.

Henghui Ding, Chang Liu, Shuting He et al.

This paper strives for motion expressions guided video segmentation, which focuses on segmenting objects in video content based on a sentence describing the motion of the objects. Existing referring video object datasets typically focus on salient objects and use language expressions that contain excessive static attributes that could potentially enable the target object to be identified in a single frame. These datasets downplay the importance of motion in video content for language-guided video object segmentation. To investigate the feasibility of using motion expressions to ground and segment objects in videos, we propose a large-scale dataset called MeViS, which contains numerous motion expressions to indicate target objects in complex environments. We benchmarked 5 existing referring video object segmentation (RVOS) methods and conducted a comprehensive comparison on the MeViS dataset. The results show that current RVOS methods cannot effectively address motion expression-guided video segmentation. We further analyze the challenges and propose a baseline approach for the proposed MeViS dataset. The goal of our benchmark is to provide a platform that enables the development of effective language-guided video segmentation algorithms that leverage motion expressions as a primary cue for object segmentation in complex video scenes. The proposed MeViS dataset has been released at https://henghuiding.github.io/MeViS.

Yuhang Zang, Wei Li, Kaiyang Zhou et al.

Prompt tuning, a parameter- and data-efficient transfer learning paradigm that tunes only a small number of parameters in a model's input space, has become a trend in the vision community since the emergence of large vision-language models like CLIP. We present a systematic study on two representative prompt tuning methods, namely text prompt tuning and visual prompt tuning. A major finding is that none of the unimodal prompt tuning methods performs consistently well: text prompt tuning fails on data with high intra-class visual variances while visual prompt tuning cannot handle low inter-class variances. To combine the best from both worlds, we propose a simple approach called Unified Prompt Tuning (UPT), which essentially learns a tiny neural network to jointly optimize prompts across different modalities. Extensive experiments on over 11 vision datasets show that UPT achieves a better trade-off than the unimodal counterparts on few-shot learning benchmarks, as well as on domain generalization benchmarks. Code and models will be released to facilitate future research.

Jianglin Fu, Shikai Li, Yuming Jiang et al.

Unconditional human image generation is an important task in vision and graphics, which enables various applications in the creative industry. Existing studies in this field mainly focus on "network engineering" such as designing new components and objective functions. This work takes a data-centric perspective and investigates multiple critical aspects in "data engineering", which we believe would complement the current practice. To facilitate a comprehensive study, we collect and annotate a large-scale human image dataset with over 230K samples capturing diverse poses and textures. Equipped with this large dataset, we rigorously investigate three essential factors in data engineering for StyleGAN-based human generation, namely data size, data distribution, and data alignment. Extensive experiments reveal several valuable observations w.r.t. these aspects: 1) Large-scale data, more than 40K images, are needed to train a high-fidelity unconditional human generation model with vanilla StyleGAN. 2) A balanced training set helps improve the generation quality with rare face poses compared to the long-tailed counterpart, whereas simply balancing the clothing texture distribution does not effectively bring an improvement. 3) Human GAN models with body centers for alignment outperform models trained using face centers or pelvis points as alignment anchors. In addition, a model zoo and human editing applications are demonstrated to facilitate future research in the community.

Shangchen Zhou, Chongyi Li, Kelvin C. K. Chan et al.

Flow-based propagation and spatiotemporal Transformer are two mainstream mechanisms in video inpainting (VI). Despite the effectiveness of these components, they still suffer from some limitations that affect their performance. Previous propagation-based approaches are performed separately either in the image or feature domain. Global image propagation isolated from learning may cause spatial misalignment due to inaccurate optical flow. Moreover, memory or computational constraints limit the temporal range of feature propagation and video Transformer, preventing exploration of correspondence information from distant frames. To address these issues, we propose an improved framework, called ProPainter, which involves enhanced ProPagation and an efficient Transformer. Specifically, we introduce dual-domain propagation that combines the advantages of image and feature warping, exploiting global correspondences reliably. We also propose a mask-guided sparse video Transformer, which achieves high efficiency by discarding unnecessary and redundant tokens. With these components, ProPainter outperforms prior arts by a large margin of 1.46 dB in PSNR while maintaining appealing efficiency.

Zhexin Liang, Chongyi Li, Shangchen Zhou et al.

We propose a novel unsupervised backlit image enhancement method, abbreviated as CLIP-LIT, by exploring the potential of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) for pixel-level image enhancement. We show that the open-world CLIP prior not only aids in distinguishing between backlit and well-lit images, but also in perceiving heterogeneous regions with different luminance, facilitating the optimization of the enhancement network. Unlike high-level and image manipulation tasks, directly applying CLIP to enhancement tasks is non-trivial, owing to the difficulty in finding accurate prompts. To solve this issue, we devise a prompt learning framework that first learns an initial prompt pair by constraining the text-image similarity between the prompt (negative/positive sample) and the corresponding image (backlit image/well-lit image) in the CLIP latent space. Then, we train the enhancement network based on the text-image similarity between the enhanced result and the initial prompt pair. To further improve the accuracy of the initial prompt pair, we iteratively fine-tune the prompt learning framework to reduce the distribution gaps between the backlit images, enhanced results, and well-lit images via rank learning, boosting the enhancement performance. Our method alternates between updating the prompt learning framework and enhancement network until visually pleasing results are achieved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and generalization ability, without requiring any paired data.

Chongyi Li, Chun-Le Guo, Man Zhou et al.

Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) photo has gradually become the standard configuration in advanced imaging devices. The new standard unveils many issues in existing approaches for low-light image enhancement (LLIE), especially in dealing with the intricate issue of joint luminance enhancement and noise removal while remaining efficient. Unlike existing methods that address the problem in the spatial domain, we propose a new solution, UHDFour, that embeds Fourier transform into a cascaded network. Our approach is motivated by a few unique characteristics in the Fourier domain: 1) most luminance information concentrates on amplitudes while noise is closely related to phases, and 2) a high-resolution image and its low-resolution version share similar amplitude patterns.Through embedding Fourier into our network, the amplitude and phase of a low-light image are separately processed to avoid amplifying noise when enhancing luminance. Besides, UHDFour is scalable to UHD images by implementing amplitude and phase enhancement under the low-resolution regime and then adjusting the high-resolution scale with few computations. We also contribute the first real UHD LLIE dataset, \textbf{UHD-LL}, that contains 2,150 low-noise/normal-clear 4K image pairs with diverse darkness and noise levels captured in different scenarios. With this dataset, we systematically analyze the performance of existing LLIE methods for processing UHD images and demonstrate the advantage of our solution. We believe our new framework, coupled with the dataset, would push the frontier of LLIE towards UHD. The code and dataset are available at https://li-chongyi.github.io/UHDFour.

Zhongang Cai, Wanqi Yin, Ailing Zeng et al.

Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods still depend largely on a confined set of training datasets. In this work, we investigate scaling up EHPS towards the first generalist foundation model (dubbed SMPLer-X), with up to ViT-Huge as the backbone and training with up to 4.5M instances from diverse data sources. With big data and the large model, SMPLer-X exhibits strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. 1) For the data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 32 EHPS datasets, including a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. 2) For the model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turn SMPLer-X into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation model SMPLer-X consistently delivers state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA (107.2 mm NMVE), UBody (57.4 mm PVE), EgoBody (63.6 mm PVE), and EHF (62.3 mm PVE without finetuning). Homepage: https://caizhongang.github.io/projects/SMPLer-X/

Guangcong Wang, Peng Wang, Zhaoxi Chen et al.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has achieved substantial progress in novel view synthesis given multi-view images. Recently, some works have attempted to train a NeRF from a single image with 3D priors. They mainly focus on a limited field of view with a few occlusions, which greatly limits their scalability to real-world 360-degree panoramic scenarios with large-size occlusions. In this paper, we present PERF, a 360-degree novel view synthesis framework that trains a panoramic neural radiance field from a single panorama. Notably, PERF allows 3D roaming in a complex scene without expensive and tedious image collection. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel collaborative RGBD inpainting method and a progressive inpainting-and-erasing method to lift up a 360-degree 2D scene to a 3D scene. Specifically, we first predict a panoramic depth map as initialization given a single panorama and reconstruct visible 3D regions with volume rendering. Then we introduce a collaborative RGBD inpainting approach into a NeRF for completing RGB images and depth maps from random views, which is derived from an RGB Stable Diffusion model and a monocular depth estimator. Finally, we introduce an inpainting-and-erasing strategy to avoid inconsistent geometry between a newly-sampled view and reference views. The two components are integrated into the learning of NeRFs in a unified optimization framework and achieve promising results. Extensive experiments on Replica and a new dataset PERF-in-the-wild demonstrate the superiority of our PERF over state-of-the-art methods. Our PERF can be widely used for real-world applications, such as panorama-to-3D, text-to-3D, and 3D scene stylization applications. Project page and code are available at https://perf-project.github.io/ and https://github.com/perf-project/PeRF.

Zhongang Cai, Daxuan Ren, Ailing Zeng et al.

4D human sensing and modeling are fundamental tasks in vision and graphics with numerous applications. With the advances of new sensors and algorithms, there is an increasing demand for more versatile datasets. In this work, we contribute HuMMan, a large-scale multi-modal 4D human dataset with 1000 human subjects, 400k sequences and 60M frames. HuMMan has several appealing properties: 1) multi-modal data and annotations including color images, point clouds, keypoints, SMPL parameters, and textured meshes; 2) popular mobile device is included in the sensor suite; 3) a set of 500 actions, designed to cover fundamental movements; 4) multiple tasks such as action recognition, pose estimation, parametric human recovery, and textured mesh reconstruction are supported and evaluated. Extensive experiments on HuMMan voice the need for further study on challenges such as fine-grained action recognition, dynamic human mesh reconstruction, point cloud-based parametric human recovery, and cross-device domain gaps.

Shuai Yang, Liming Jiang, Ziwei Liu et al.

Recent studies on StyleGAN show high performance on artistic portrait generation by transfer learning with limited data. In this paper, we explore more challenging exemplar-based high-resolution portrait style transfer by introducing a novel DualStyleGAN with flexible control of dual styles of the original face domain and the extended artistic portrait domain. Different from StyleGAN, DualStyleGAN provides a natural way of style transfer by characterizing the content and style of a portrait with an intrinsic style path and a new extrinsic style path, respectively. The delicately designed extrinsic style path enables our model to modulate both the color and complex structural styles hierarchically to precisely pastiche the style example. Furthermore, a novel progressive fine-tuning scheme is introduced to smoothly transform the generative space of the model to the target domain, even with the above modifications on the network architecture. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of DualStyleGAN over state-of-the-art methods in high-quality portrait style transfer and flexible style control.

Jiahao Xie, Wei Li, Xiaohang Zhan et al.

We present Masked Frequency Modeling (MFM), a unified frequency-domain-based approach for self-supervised pre-training of visual models. Instead of randomly inserting mask tokens to the input embeddings in the spatial domain, in this paper, we shift the perspective to the frequency domain. Specifically, MFM first masks out a portion of frequency components of the input image and then predicts the missing frequencies on the frequency spectrum. Our key insight is that predicting masked components in the frequency domain is more ideal to reveal underlying image patterns rather than predicting masked patches in the spatial domain, due to the heavy spatial redundancy. Our findings suggest that with the right configuration of mask-and-predict strategy, both the structural information within high-frequency components and the low-level statistics among low-frequency counterparts are useful in learning good representations. For the first time, MFM demonstrates that, for both ViT and CNN, a simple non-Siamese framework can learn meaningful representations even using none of the following: (i) extra data, (ii) extra model, (iii) mask token. Experimental results on image classification and semantic segmentation, as well as several robustness benchmarks show the competitive performance and advanced robustness of MFM compared with recent masked image modeling approaches. Furthermore, we also comprehensively investigate the effectiveness of classical image restoration tasks for representation learning from a unified frequency perspective and reveal their intriguing relations with our MFM approach.

Jianhui Yu, Hao Zhu, Liming Jiang et al.

Text-driven generation models are flourishing in video generation and editing. However, face-centric text-to-video generation remains a challenge due to the lack of a suitable dataset containing high-quality videos and highly relevant texts. This paper presents CelebV-Text, a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality dataset of facial text-video pairs, to facilitate research on facial text-to-video generation tasks. CelebV-Text comprises 70,000 in-the-wild face video clips with diverse visual content, each paired with 20 texts generated using the proposed semi-automatic text generation strategy. The provided texts are of high quality, describing both static and dynamic attributes precisely. The superiority of CelebV-Text over other datasets is demonstrated via comprehensive statistical analysis of the videos, texts, and text-video relevance. The effectiveness and potential of CelebV-Text are further shown through extensive self-evaluation. A benchmark is constructed with representative methods to standardize the evaluation of the facial text-to-video generation task. All data and models are publicly available.

Wei Cheng, Ruixiang Chen, Wanqi Yin et al.

Realistic human-centric rendering plays a key role in both computer vision and computer graphics. Rapid progress has been made in the algorithm aspect over the years, yet existing human-centric rendering datasets and benchmarks are rather impoverished in terms of diversity, which are crucial for rendering effect. Researchers are usually constrained to explore and evaluate a small set of rendering problems on current datasets, while real-world applications require methods to be robust across different scenarios. In this work, we present DNA-Rendering, a large-scale, high-fidelity repository of human performance data for neural actor rendering. DNA-Rendering presents several alluring attributes. First, our dataset contains over 1500 human subjects, 5000 motion sequences, and 67.5M frames' data volume. Second, we provide rich assets for each subject -- 2D/3D human body keypoints, foreground masks, SMPLX models, cloth/accessory materials, multi-view images, and videos. These assets boost the current method's accuracy on downstream rendering tasks. Third, we construct a professional multi-view system to capture data, which contains 60 synchronous cameras with max 4096 x 3000 resolution, 15 fps speed, and stern camera calibration steps, ensuring high-quality resources for task training and evaluation. Along with the dataset, we provide a large-scale and quantitative benchmark in full-scale, with multiple tasks to evaluate the existing progress of novel view synthesis, novel pose animation synthesis, and novel identity rendering methods. In this manuscript, we describe our DNA-Rendering effort as a revealing of new observations, challenges, and future directions to human-centric rendering. The dataset, code, and benchmarks will be publicly available at https://dna-rendering.github.io/

Yuekun Dai, Chongyi Li, Shangchen Zhou et al.

Artificial lights commonly leave strong lens flare artifacts on images captured at night. Nighttime flare not only affects the visual quality but also degrades the performance of vision algorithms. Existing flare removal methods mainly focus on removing daytime flares and fail in nighttime. Nighttime flare removal is challenging because of the unique luminance and spectrum of artificial lights and the diverse patterns and image degradation of the flares captured at night. The scarcity of nighttime flare removal datasets limits the research on this crucial task. In this paper, we introduce, Flare7K, the first nighttime flare removal dataset, which is generated based on the observation and statistics of real-world nighttime lens flares. It offers 5,000 scattering and 2,000 reflective flare images, consisting of 25 types of scattering flares and 10 types of reflective flares. The 7,000 flare patterns can be randomly added to flare-free images, forming the flare-corrupted and flare-free image pairs. With the paired data, we can train deep models to restore flare-corrupted images taken in the real world effectively. Apart from abundant flare patterns, we also provide rich annotations, including the labeling of light source, glare with shimmer, reflective flare, and streak, which are commonly absent from existing datasets. Hence, our dataset can facilitate new work in nighttime flare removal and more fine-grained analysis of flare patterns. Extensive experiments show that our dataset adds diversity to existing flare datasets and pushes the frontier of nighttime flare removal.

Qianxiong Xu, Guosheng Lin, Chen Change Loy et al.

Recent advancements in few-shot segmentation (FSS) have exploited pixel-by-pixel matching between query and support features, typically based on cross attention, which selectively activate query foreground (FG) features that correspond to the same-class support FG features. However, due to the large receptive fields in deep layers of the backbone, the extracted query and support FG features are inevitably mingled with background (BG) features, impeding the FG-FG matching in cross attention. Hence, the query FG features are fused with less support FG features, i.e., the support information is not well utilized. This paper presents a novel plug-in termed ambiguity elimination network (AENet), which can be plugged into any existing cross attention-based FSS methods. The main idea is to mine discriminative query FG regions to rectify the ambiguous FG features, increasing the proportion of FG information, so as to suppress the negative impacts of the doped BG features. In this way, the FG-FG matching is naturally enhanced. We plug AENet into three baselines CyCTR, SCCAN and HDMNet for evaluation, and their scores are improved by large margins, e.g., the 1-shot performance of SCCAN can be improved by 3.0%+ on both PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$. The code is available at https://github.com/Sam1224/AENet.