Chao Ren

Xin Lin, Chao Ren, Xiao Liu et al.

Deep learning methods have shown remarkable performance in image denoising, particularly when trained on large-scale paired datasets. However, acquiring such paired datasets for real-world scenarios poses a significant challenge. Although unsupervised approaches based on generative adversarial networks offer a promising solution for denoising without paired datasets, they are difficult in surpassing the performance limitations of conventional GAN-based unsupervised frameworks without significantly modifying existing structures or increasing the computational complexity of denoisers. To address this problem, we propose a SC strategy for multiple denoisers. This strategy can achieve significant performance improvement without increasing the inference complexity of the GAN-based denoising framework. Its basic idea is to iteratively replace the previous less powerful denoiser in the filter-guided noise extraction module with the current powerful denoiser. This process generates better synthetic clean-noisy image pairs, leading to a more powerful denoiser for the next iteration. This baseline ensures the stability and effectiveness of the training network. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.

Bin Ren, Yawei Li, Nancy Mehta et al.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

Xiangpeng Tian, Xiangyu Liao, Xiao Liu et al.

All-in-one image restoration aims to recover clear images from various degradation types and levels with a unified model. Nonetheless, the significant variations among degradation types present challenges for training a universal model, often resulting in task interference, where the gradient update directions of different tasks may diverge due to shared parameters. To address this issue, motivated by the routing strategy, we propose DFPIR, a novel all-in-one image restorer that introduces Degradation-aware Feature Perturbations(DFP) to adjust the feature space to align with the unified parameter space. In this paper, the feature perturbations primarily include channel-wise perturbations and attention-wise perturbations. Specifically, channel-wise perturbations are implemented by shuffling the channels in high-dimensional space guided by degradation types, while attention-wise perturbations are achieved through selective masking in the attention space. To achieve these goals, we propose a Degradation-Guided Perturbation Block (DGPB) to implement these two functions, positioned between the encoding and decoding stages of the encoder-decoder architecture. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DFPIR achieves state-of-the-art performance on several all-in-one image restoration tasks including image denoising, image dehazing, image deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our codes are available at https://github.com/TxpHome/DFPIR.

Xiangyu Liao, Tianheng Zheng, Jiayu Zhong et al.

In recent years, self-supervised denoising methods have gained significant success and become critically important in the field of image restoration. Among them, the blind spot network based methods are the most typical type and have attracted the attentions of a large number of researchers. Although the introduction of blind spot operations can prevent identity mapping from noise to noise, it imposes stringent requirements on the receptive fields in the network design, thereby limiting overall performance. To address this challenge, we propose a single mask scheme for self-supervised denoising training, which eliminates the need for blind spot operation and thereby removes constraints on the network structure design. Furthermore, to achieve denoising across entire image during inference, we propose a multi-mask scheme. Our method, featuring the asymmetric mask scheme in training and inference, achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing real noisy image datasets. All the source code will be made available to the public.

Zhengxin Chen, Xiaohai He, Tingrong Zhang et al.

Recently, learned image compression methods have made remarkable achievements, some of which have outperformed the traditional image codec VVC. The advantages of learned image compression methods over traditional image codecs can be largely attributed to their powerful nonlinear transform coding. Convolutional layers and shifted window transformer (Swin-T) blocks are the basic units of neural networks, and their representation capabilities play an important role in nonlinear transform coding. In this paper, to improve the ability of the vanilla convolution to extract local features, we propose a novel prior-guided convolution (PGConv), where asymmetric convolutions (AConvs) and difference convolutions (DConvs) are introduced to strengthen skeleton elements and extract high-frequency information, respectively. A re-parameterization strategy is also used to reduce the computational complexity of PGConv. Moreover, to improve the ability of the Swin-T block to extract non-local features, we propose a novel multi-scale gated transformer (MGT), where dilated window-based multi-head self-attention blocks with different dilation rates and depth-wise convolution layers with different kernel sizes are used to extract multi-scale features, and a gate mechanism is introduced to enhance non-linearity. Finally, we propose a novel joint Multi-scale Gated Transformer and Prior-guided Convolutional Network (MGTPCN) for learned image compression. Experimental results show that our MGTPCN surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms with a better trade-off between performance and complexity.

Xin Lin, Jingtong Yue, Sixian Ding et al.

Rain in the dark poses a significant challenge to deploying real-world applications such as autonomous driving, surveillance systems, and night photography. Existing low-light enhancement or deraining methods struggle to brighten low-light conditions and remove rain simultaneously. Additionally, cascade approaches like ``deraining followed by low-light enhancement'' or the reverse often result in problematic rain patterns or overly blurred and overexposed images. To address these challenges, we introduce an end-to-end model called L$^{2}$RIRNet, designed to manage both low-light enhancement and deraining in real-world settings. Our model features two main components: a Dual Degradation Representation Network (DDR-Net) and a Restoration Network. The DDR-Net independently learns degradation representations for luminance effects in dark areas and rain patterns in light areas, employing dual degradation loss to guide the training process. The Restoration Network restores the degraded image using a Fourier Detail Guidance (FDG) module, which leverages near-rainless detailed images, focusing on texture details in frequency and spatial domains to inform the restoration process. Furthermore, we contribute a dataset containing both synthetic and real-world low-light-rainy images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our L$^{2}$RIRNet performs favorably against existing methods in both synthetic and complex real-world scenarios. All the code and dataset can be found in \url{https://github.com/linxin0/Low_light_rainy}.

Xin Lin, Jingtong Yue, Kelvin C. K. Chan et al.

Multi-task image restoration has gained significant interest due to its inherent versatility and efficiency compared to its single-task counterpart. However, performance decline is observed with an increase in the number of tasks, primarily attributed to the restoration model's challenge in handling different tasks with distinct natures at the same time. Thus, a perspective emerged aiming to explore the degradation-insensitive semantic commonalities among different degradation tasks. In this paper, we observe that the features of DINOv2 can effectively model semantic information and are independent of degradation factors. Motivated by this observation, we propose \mbox{\textbf{DINO-IR}}, a multi-task image restoration approach leveraging robust features extracted from DINOv2 to solve multi-task image restoration simultaneously. We first propose a pixel-semantic fusion (PSF) module to dynamically fuse DINOV2's shallow features containing pixel-level information and deep features containing degradation-independent semantic information. To guide the restoration model with the features of DINOv2, we develop a DINO-Restore adaption and fusion module to adjust the channel of fused features from PSF and then integrate them with the features from the restoration model. By formulating these modules into a unified deep model, we propose a DINO perception contrastive loss to constrain the model training. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our DINO-IR performs favorably against existing multi-task image restoration approaches in various tasks by a large margin. The source codes and trained models will be made available.

Liping Yi, Han Yu, Chao Ren et al.

Model heterogeneous federated learning (MHeteroFL) enables FL clients to collaboratively train models with heterogeneous structures in a distributed fashion. However, existing MHeteroFL methods rely on training loss to transfer knowledge between the client model and the server model, resulting in limited knowledge exchange. To address this limitation, we propose the Federated model heterogeneous Matryoshka Representation Learning (FedMRL) approach for supervised learning tasks. It adds an auxiliary small homogeneous model shared by clients with heterogeneous local models. (1) The generalized and personalized representations extracted by the two models' feature extractors are fused by a personalized lightweight representation projector. This step enables representation fusion to adapt to local data distribution. (2) The fused representation is then used to construct Matryoshka representations with multi-dimensional and multi-granular embedded representations learned by the global homogeneous model header and the local heterogeneous model header. This step facilitates multi-perspective representation learning and improves model learning capability. Theoretical analysis shows that FedMRL achieves a $O(1/T)$ non-convex convergence rate. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate its superior model accuracy with low communication and computational costs compared to seven state-of-the-art baselines. It achieves up to 8.48% and 24.94% accuracy improvement compared with the state-of-the-art and the best same-category baseline, respectively.

Chao Ren, Justin Dulay, Gregory Rolwes et al.

Automated high throughput plant phenotyping involves leveraging sensors, such as RGB, thermal and hyperspectral cameras (among others), to make large scale and rapid measurements of the physical properties of plants for the purpose of better understanding the difference between crops and facilitating rapid plant breeding programs. One of the most basic phenotyping tasks is to determine the cultivar, or species, in a particular sensor product. This simple phenotype can be used to detect errors in planting and to learn the most differentiating features between cultivars. It is also a challenging visual recognition task, as a large number of highly related crops are grown simultaneously, leading to a classification problem with low inter-class variance. In this paper, we introduce the Sorghum-100 dataset, a large dataset of RGB imagery of sorghum captured by a state-of-the-art gantry system, a multi-resolution network architecture that learns both global and fine-grained features on the crops, and a new global pooling strategy called Dynamic Outlier Pooling which outperforms standard global pooling strategies on this task.

Honggang Chen, Xiaohai He, Linbo Qing et al.

Single image super-resolution (SISR), which aims to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) image from a low-resolution (LR) observation, has been an active research topic in the area of image processing in recent decades. Particularly, deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) approaches have drawn much attention and have greatly improved the reconstruction performance on synthetic data. Recent studies show that simulation results on synthetic data usually overestimate the capacity to super-resolve real-world images. In this context, more and more researchers devote themselves to develop SR approaches for realistic images. This article aims to make a comprehensive review on real-world single image super-resolution (RSISR). More specifically, this review covers the critical publically available datasets and assessment metrics for RSISR, and four major categories of RSISR methods, namely the degradation modeling-based RSISR, image pairs-based RSISR, domain translation-based RSISR, and self-learning-based RSISR. Comparisons are also made among representative RSISR methods on benchmark datasets, in terms of both reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. Besides, we discuss challenges and promising research topics on RSISR.

Junxi Feng, Xiaohai He, Qizhi Teng et al.

Porous media are ubiquitous in both nature and engineering applications, thus their modelling and understanding is of vital importance. In contrast to direct acquisition of three-dimensional (3D) images of such medium, obtaining its sub-region (s) like two-dimensional (2D) images or several small areas could be much feasible. Therefore, reconstructing whole images from the limited information is a primary technique in such cases. Specially, in practice the given data cannot generally be determined by users and may be incomplete or partially informed, thus making existing reconstruction methods inaccurate or even ineffective. To overcome this shortcoming, in this study we proposed a deep learning-based framework for reconstructing full image from its much smaller sub-area(s). Particularly, conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) is utilized to learn the mapping between input (partial image) and output (full image). To preserve the reconstruction accuracy, two simple but effective objective functions are proposed and then coupled with the other two functions to jointly constrain the training procedure. Due to the inherent essence of this ill-posed problem, a Gaussian noise is introduced for producing reconstruction diversity, thus allowing for providing multiple candidate outputs. Extensively tested on a variety of porous materials and demonstrated by both visual inspection and quantitative comparison, the method is shown to be accurate, stable yet fast ($\sim0.08s$ for a $128 \times 128$ image reconstruction). We highlight that the proposed approach can be readily extended, such as incorporating any user-define conditional data and an arbitrary number of object functions into reconstruction, and being coupled with other reconstruction methods.

Honggang Chen, Xiaohai He, Chao Ren et al.

In recent years, much research has been conducted on image super-resolution (SR). To the best of our knowledge, however, few SR methods were concerned with compressed images. The SR of compressed images is a challenging task due to the complicated compression artifacts, while many images suffer from them in practice. The intuitive solution for this difficult task is to decouple it into two sequential but independent subproblems, i.e., compression artifacts reduction (CAR) and SR. Nevertheless, some useful details may be removed in CAR stage, which is contrary to the goal of SR and makes the SR stage more challenging. In this paper, an end-to-end trainable deep convolutional neural network is designed to perform SR on compressed images (CISRDCNN), which reduces compression artifacts and improves image resolution jointly. Experiments on compressed images produced by JPEG (we take the JPEG as an example in this paper) demonstrate that the proposed CISRDCNN yields state-of-the-art SR performance on commonly used test images and imagesets. The results of CISRDCNN on real low quality web images are also very impressive, with obvious quality enhancement. Further, we explore the application of the proposed SR method in low bit-rate image coding, leading to better rate-distortion performance than JPEG.