Joint Super-Resolution and Inverse Tone-Mapping: A Feature Decomposition Aggregation Network and A New Benchmark
This work addresses image enhancement for applications like photography and video processing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing decomposition techniques.
The paper tackles joint super-resolution and inverse tone-mapping for enhancing low-resolution, standard dynamic range images by proposing a lightweight Feature Decomposition Aggregation Network (FDAN) that generalizes decomposition from image to feature domains, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.
Joint Super-Resolution and Inverse Tone-Mapping (joint SR-ITM) aims to increase the resolution and dynamic range of low-resolution and standard dynamic range images. Recent networks mainly resort to image decomposition techniques with complex multi-branch architectures. However, the fixed decomposition techniques would largely restricts their power on versatile images. To exploit the potential power of decomposition mechanism, in this paper, we generalize it from the image domain to the broader feature domain. To this end, we propose a lightweight Feature Decomposition Aggregation Network (FDAN). In particular, we design a Feature Decomposition Block (FDB) to achieve learnable separation of detail and base feature maps, and develop a Hierarchical Feature Decomposition Group by cascading FDBs for powerful multi-level feature decomposition. Moreover, to better evaluate the comparison methods, we collect a large-scale dataset for joint SR-ITM, i.e., SRITM-4K, which provides versatile scenarios for robust model training and evaluation. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our FDAN is efficient and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on joint SR-ITM. The code of our FDAN and the SRITM-4K dataset are available at https://github.com/CS-GangXu/FDAN.