Seonghyeon Nam

Seonghyeon Nam, Abhijith Punnappurath, Marcus A. Brubaker et al.

Most camera images are rendered and saved in the standard RGB (sRGB) format by the camera's hardware. Due to the in-camera photo-finishing routines, nonlinear sRGB images are undesirable for computer vision tasks that assume a direct relationship between pixel values and scene radiance. For such applications, linear raw-RGB sensor images are preferred. Saving images in their raw-RGB format is still uncommon due to the large storage requirement and lack of support by many imaging applications. Several "raw reconstruction" methods have been proposed that utilize specialized metadata sampled from the raw-RGB image at capture time and embedded in the sRGB image. This metadata is used to parameterize a mapping function to de-render the sRGB image back to its original raw-RGB format when needed. Existing raw reconstruction methods rely on simple sampling strategies and global mapping to perform the de-rendering. This paper shows how to improve the de-rendering results by jointly learning sampling and reconstruction. Our experiments show that our learned sampling can adapt to the image content to produce better raw reconstructions than existing methods. We also describe an online fine-tuning strategy for the reconstruction network to improve results further.

Ziyu Wan, Christian Richardt, Aljaž Božič et al.

Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) enable novel view synthesis with unprecedented visual quality. However, to render photorealistic images, NeRFs require hundreds of deep multilayer perceptron (MLP) evaluations - for each pixel. This is prohibitively expensive and makes real-time rendering infeasible, even on powerful modern GPUs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to distill and bake NeRFs into highly efficient mesh-based neural representations that are fully compatible with the massively parallel graphics rendering pipeline. We represent scenes as neural radiance features encoded on a two-layer duplex mesh, which effectively overcomes the inherent inaccuracies in 3D surface reconstruction by learning the aggregated radiance information from a reliable interval of ray-surface intersections. To exploit local geometric relationships of nearby pixels, we leverage screen-space convolutions instead of the MLPs used in NeRFs to achieve high-quality appearance. Finally, the performance of the whole framework is further boosted by a novel multi-view distillation optimization strategy. We demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach via extensive experiments on a range of standard datasets.

Mingyang Xie, Numair Khan, Tianfu Wang et al.

Given a monocular video, the goal of video re-rendering is to generate views of the scene from a novel camera trajectory. Existing methods face two distinct challenges. Geometrically unconditioned models lack spatial awareness, leading to drift and deformation under viewpoint changes. On the other hand, geometrically-conditioned models depend on estimated depth and explicit reconstruction, making them susceptible to depth inaccuracies and calibration errors. We propose to address these challenges by using the implicit geometric knowledge embedded in the latent space of a large 4D reconstruction model to condition the video generation process. These latents capture scene structure in a continuous space without explicit reconstruction. Therefore, they provide a flexible representation that allows the pretrained diffusion prior to regularize errors more effectively. By jointly conditioning on these latents and source camera poses, we demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the video re-rendering task. Project webpage is https://lavr-4d-scene-rerender.github.io/

Gyeongmin Choe, Beibei Du, Seonghyeon Nam et al.

For low-level computer vision and image processing ML tasks, training on large datasets is critical for generalization. However, the standard practice of relying on real-world images primarily from the Internet comes with image quality, scalability, and privacy issues, especially in commercial contexts. To address this, we have developed a procedural synthetic data generation pipeline and dataset tailored to low-level vision tasks. Our Unreal engine-based synthetic data pipeline populates large scenes algorithmically with a combination of random 3D objects, materials, and geometric transformations. Then, we calibrate the camera noise profiles to synthesize the noisy images. From this pipeline, we generated a fully synthetic image denoising dataset (FSID) which consists of 175,000 noisy/clean image pairs. We then trained and validated a CNN-based denoising model, and demonstrated that the model trained on this synthetic data alone can achieve competitive denoising results when evaluated on real-world noisy images captured with smartphone cameras.

Hyunyoung Jung, Seonghyeon Nam, Nikolaos Sarafianos et al.

Shape and geometric patterns are essential in defining stylistic identity. However, current 3D style transfer methods predominantly focus on transferring colors and textures, often overlooking geometric aspects. In this paper, we introduce Geometry Transfer, a novel method that leverages geometric deformation for 3D style transfer. This technique employs depth maps to extract a style guide, subsequently applied to stylize the geometry of radiance fields. Moreover, we propose new techniques that utilize geometric cues from the 3D scene, thereby enhancing aesthetic expressiveness and more accurately reflecting intended styles. Our extensive experiments show that Geometry Transfer enables a broader and more expressive range of stylizations, thereby significantly expanding the scope of 3D style transfer.

Seonghyeon Nam, Marcus A. Brubaker, Michael S. Brown

We propose a framework for aligning and fusing multiple images into a single view using neural image representations (NIRs), also known as implicit or coordinate-based neural representations. Our framework targets burst images that exhibit camera ego motion and potential changes in the scene. We describe different strategies for alignment depending on the nature of the scene motion -- namely, perspective planar (i.e., homography), optical flow with minimal scene change, and optical flow with notable occlusion and disocclusion. With the neural image representation, our framework effectively combines multiple inputs into a single canonical view without the need for selecting one of the images as a reference frame. We demonstrate how to use this multi-frame fusion framework for various layer separation tasks. The code and results are available at https://shnnam.github.io/research/nir.

Young Hwi Kim, Seonghyeon Nam, Seon Joo Kim

Many video understanding tasks work in the offline setting by assuming that the input video is given from the start to the end. However, many real-world problems require the online setting, making a decision immediately using only the current and the past frames of videos such as in autonomous driving and surveillance systems. In this paper, we present a novel solution for online action detection by using a simple yet effective RNN-based networks called the Future Anticipation and Temporally Smoothing network (FATSnet). The proposed network consists of a module for anticipating the future that can be trained in an unsupervised manner with the cycle-consistency loss, and another component for aggregating the past and the future for temporally smooth frame-by-frame predictions. We also propose a solution to relieve the performance loss when running RNN-based models on very long sequences. Evaluations on TVSeries, THUMOS14, and BBDB show that our method achieve the state-of-the-art performances compared to the previous works on online action detection.

Subin Jeon, Seonghyeon Nam, Seoung Wug Oh et al.

We propose an attention-based networks for transferring motions between arbitrary objects. Given a source image(s) and a driving video, our networks animate the subject in the source images according to the motion in the driving video. In our attention mechanism, dense similarities between the learned keypoints in the source and the driving images are computed in order to retrieve the appearance information from the source images. Taking a different approach from the well-studied warping based models, our attention-based model has several advantages. By reassembling non-locally searched pieces from the source contents, our approach can produce more realistic outputs. Furthermore, our system can make use of multiple observations of the source appearance (e.g. front and sides of faces) to make the results more accurate. To reduce the training-testing discrepancy of the self-supervised learning, a novel cross-identity training scheme is additionally introduced. With the training scheme, our networks is trained to transfer motions between different subjects, as in the real testing scenario. Experimental results validate that our method produces visually pleasing results in various object domains, showing better performances compared to previous works.

Younghyun Jo, Jaeyeon Kang, Seoung Wug Oh et al.

With more advanced deep network architectures and learning schemes such as GANs, the performance of video restoration algorithms has greatly improved recently. Meanwhile, the loss functions for optimizing deep neural networks remain relatively unchanged. To this end, we propose a new framework for building effective loss functions by learning a discriminative space specific to a video restoration task. Our framework is similar to GANs in that we iteratively train two networks - a generator and a loss network. The generator learns to restore videos in a supervised fashion, by following ground truth features through the feature matching in the discriminative space learned by the loss network. In addition, we also introduce a new relation loss in order to maintain the temporal consistency in output videos. Experiments on video superresolution and deblurring show that our method generates visually more pleasing videos with better quantitative perceptual metric values than the other state-of-the-art methods.

Yunji Kim, Seonghyeon Nam, In Cho et al.

We propose a deep video prediction model conditioned on a single image and an action class. To generate future frames, we first detect keypoints of a moving object and predict future motion as a sequence of keypoints. The input image is then translated following the predicted keypoints sequence to compose future frames. Detecting the keypoints is central to our algorithm, and our method is trained to detect the keypoints of arbitrary objects in an unsupervised manner. Moreover, the detected keypoints of the original videos are used as pseudo-labels to learn the motion of objects. Experimental results show that our method is successfully applied to various datasets without the cost of labeling keypoints in videos. The detected keypoints are similar to human-annotated labels, and prediction results are more realistic compared to the previous methods.

Seonghyeon Nam, Chongyang Ma, Menglei Chai et al.

Time-lapse videos usually contain visually appealing content but are often difficult and costly to create. In this paper, we present an end-to-end solution to synthesize a time-lapse video from a single outdoor image using deep neural networks. Our key idea is to train a conditional generative adversarial network based on existing datasets of time-lapse videos and image sequences. We propose a multi-frame joint conditional generation framework to effectively learn the correlation between the illumination change of an outdoor scene and the time of the day. We further present a multi-domain training scheme for robust training of our generative models from two datasets with different distributions and missing timestamp labels. Compared to alternative time-lapse video synthesis algorithms, our method uses the timestamp as the control variable and does not require a reference video to guide the synthesis of the final output. We conduct ablation studies to validate our algorithm and compare with state-of-the-art techniques both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Seonghyeon Nam, Yunji Kim, Seon Joo Kim

This paper addresses the problem of manipulating images using natural language description. Our task aims to semantically modify visual attributes of an object in an image according to the text describing the new visual appearance. Although existing methods synthesize images having new attributes, they do not fully preserve text-irrelevant contents of the original image. In this paper, we propose the text-adaptive generative adversarial network (TAGAN) to generate semantically manipulated images while preserving text-irrelevant contents. The key to our method is the text-adaptive discriminator that creates word-level local discriminators according to input text to classify fine-grained attributes independently. With this discriminator, the generator learns to generate images where only regions that correspond to the given text are modified. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing methods on CUB and Oxford-102 datasets, and our results were mostly preferred on a user study. Extensive analysis shows that our method is able to effectively disentangle visual attributes and produce pleasing outputs.

Seonghyeon Nam, Seon Joo Kim

We present a novel deep learning framework that models the scene dependent image processing inside cameras. Often called as the radiometric calibration, the process of recovering RAW images from processed images (JPEG format in the sRGB color space) is essential for many computer vision tasks that rely on physically accurate radiance values. All previous works rely on the deterministic imaging model where the color transformation stays the same regardless of the scene and thus they can only be applied for images taken under the manual mode. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach to learn the scene dependent and locally varying image processing inside cameras under the automode. Our method incorporates both the global and the local scene context into pixel-wise features via multi-scale pyramid of learnable histogram layers. The results show that we can model the imaging pipeline of different cameras that operate under the automode accurately in both directions (from RAW to sRGB, from sRGB to RAW) and we show how we can apply our method to improve the performance of image deblurring.

Seonghyeon Nam, Seon Joo Kim

Automatic photo adjustment is to mimic the photo retouching style of professional photographers and automatically adjust photos to the learned style. There have been many attempts to model the tone and the color adjustment globally with low-level color statistics. Also, spatially varying photo adjustment methods have been studied by exploiting high-level features and semantic label maps. Those methods are semantics-aware since the color mapping is dependent on the high-level semantic context. However, their performance is limited to the pre-computed hand-crafted features and it is hard to reflect user's preference to the adjustment. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network that models the semantics-aware photo adjustment. The proposed network exploits bilinear models that are the multiplicative interaction of the color and the contexual features. As the contextual features we propose the semantic adjustment map, which discovers the inherent photo retouching presets that are applied according to the scene context. The proposed method is trained using a robust loss with a scene parsing task. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing method both quantitatively and qualitatively. The proposed method also provides users a way to retouch the photo by their own likings by giving customized adjustment maps.