Stereo image super-resolution aims at enhancing the quality of super-resolution results by utilizing the complementary information provided by binocular systems. To obtain reasonable performance, most methods focus on finely designing modules, loss functions, and etc. to exploit information from another viewpoint. This has the side effect of increasing system complexity, making it difficult for researchers to evaluate new ideas and compare methods. This paper inherits a strong and simple image restoration model, NAFNet, for single-view feature extraction and extends it by adding cross attention modules to fuse features between views to adapt to binocular scenarios. The proposed baseline for stereo image super-resolution is noted as NAFSSR. Furthermore, training/testing strategies are proposed to fully exploit the performance of NAFSSR. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In particular, NAFSSR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, Middlebury, and Flickr1024 datasets. With NAFSSR, we won 1st place in the NTIRE 2022 Stereo Image Super-resolution Challenge. Codes and models will be released at //github.com/megvii-research/NAFNet.
We present a novel high-resolution and challenging stereo dataset framing indoor scenes annotated with dense and accurate ground-truth disparities. Peculiar to our dataset is the presence of several specular and transparent surfaces, i.e. the main causes of failures for state-of-the-art stereo networks. Our acquisition pipeline leverages a novel deep space-time stereo framework which allows for easy and accurate labeling with sub-pixel precision. We release a total of 419 samples collected in 64 different scenes and annotated with dense ground-truth disparities. Each sample include a high-resolution pair (12 Mpx) as well as an unbalanced pair (Left: 12 Mpx, Right: 1.1 Mpx). Additionally, we provide manually annotated material segmentation masks and 15K unlabeled samples. We evaluate state-of-the-art deep networks based on our dataset, highlighting their limitations in addressing the open challenges in stereo and drawing hints for future research.
Score-based generative models (SGMs) have recently emerged as a promising class of generative models. The key idea is to produce high-quality images by recurrently adding Gaussian noises and gradients to a Gaussian sample until converging to the target distribution, a.k.a. the diffusion sampling. To ensure stability of convergence in sampling and generation quality, however, this sequential sampling process has to take a small step size and many sampling iterations (e.g., 2000). Several acceleration methods have been proposed with focus on low-resolution generation. In this work, we consider the acceleration of high-resolution generation with SGMs, a more challenging yet more important problem. We prove theoretically that this slow convergence drawback is primarily due to the ignorance of the target distribution. Further, we introduce a novel Target Distribution Aware Sampling (TDAS) method by leveraging the structural priors in space and frequency domains. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CelebA, LSUN, and FFHQ datasets validate that TDAS can consistently accelerate state-of-the-art SGMs, particularly on more challenging high resolution (1024x1024) image generation tasks by up to 18.4x, whilst largely maintaining the synthesis quality. With fewer sampling iterations, TDAS can still generate good quality images. In contrast, the existing methods degrade drastically or even fails completely
The free-form deformation model can represent a wide range of non-rigid deformations by manipulating a control point lattice over the image. However, due to a large number of parameters, it is challenging to fit the free-form deformation model directly to the deformed image for deformation estimation because of the complexity of the fitness landscape. In this paper, we cast the registration task as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) according to the fact that regions affected by each control point overlap with each other. Specifically, by partitioning the template image into several regions and measuring the similarity of each region independently, multiple objectives are built and deformation estimation can thus be realized by solving the MOP with off-the-shelf multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). In addition, a coarse-to-fine strategy is realized by image pyramid combined with control point mesh subdivision. Specifically, the optimized candidate solutions of the current image level are inherited by the next level, which increases the ability to deal with large deformation. Also, a post-processing procedure is proposed to generate a single output utilizing the Pareto optimal solutions. Comparative experiments on both synthetic and real-world images show the effectiveness and usefulness of our deformation estimation method.
Pre-training is essential to deep learning model performance, especially in medical image analysis tasks where limited training data are available. However, existing pre-training methods are inflexible as the pre-trained weights of one model cannot be reused by other network architectures. In this paper, we propose an architecture-irrelevant hyper-initializer, which can initialize any given network architecture well after being pre-trained for only once. The proposed initializer is a hypernetwork which takes a downstream architecture as input graphs and outputs the initialization parameters of the respective architecture. We show the effectiveness and efficiency of the hyper-initializer through extensive experimental results on multiple medical imaging modalities, especially in data-limited fields. Moreover, we prove that the proposed algorithm can be reused as a favorable plug-and-play initializer for any downstream architecture and task (both classification and segmentation) of the same modality.
We present a video generation model that accurately reproduces object motion, changes in camera viewpoint, and new content that arises over time. Existing video generation methods often fail to produce new content as a function of time while maintaining consistencies expected in real environments, such as plausible dynamics and object persistence. A common failure case is for content to never change due to over-reliance on inductive biases to provide temporal consistency, such as a single latent code that dictates content for the entire video. On the other extreme, without long-term consistency, generated videos may morph unrealistically between different scenes. To address these limitations, we prioritize the time axis by redesigning the temporal latent representation and learning long-term consistency from data by training on longer videos. To this end, we leverage a two-phase training strategy, where we separately train using longer videos at a low resolution and shorter videos at a high resolution. To evaluate the capabilities of our model, we introduce two new benchmark datasets with explicit focus on long-term temporal dynamics.
As a highly ill-posed issue, single image super-resolution (SISR) has been widely investigated in recent years. The main task of SISR is to recover the information loss caused by the degradation procedure. According to the Nyquist sampling theory, the degradation leads to aliasing effect and makes it hard to restore the correct textures from low-resolution (LR) images. In practice, there are correlations and self-similarities among the adjacent patches in the natural images. This paper considers the self-similarity and proposes a hierarchical image super-resolution network (HSRNet) to suppress the influence of aliasing. We consider the SISR issue in the optimization perspective, and propose an iterative solution pattern based on the half-quadratic splitting (HQS) method. To explore the texture with local image prior, we design a hierarchical exploration block (HEB) and progressive increase the receptive field. Furthermore, multi-level spatial attention (MSA) is devised to obtain the relations of adjacent feature and enhance the high-frequency information, which acts as a crucial role for visual experience. Experimental result shows HSRNet achieves better quantitative and visual performance than other works, and remits the aliasing more effectively.
Existing weak supervision approaches use all the data covered by weak signals to train a classifier. We show both theoretically and empirically that this is not always optimal. Intuitively, there is a tradeoff between the amount of weakly-labeled data and the precision of the weak labels. We explore this tradeoff by combining pretrained data representations with the cut statistic (Muhlenbach et al., 2004) to select (hopefully) high-quality subsets of the weakly-labeled training data. Subset selection applies to any label model and classifier and is very simple to plug in to existing weak supervision pipelines, requiring just a few lines of code. We show our subset selection method improves the performance of weak supervision for a wide range of label models, classifiers, and datasets. Using less weakly-labeled data improves the accuracy of weak supervision pipelines by up to 19% (absolute) on benchmark tasks.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.
Image segmentation is considered to be one of the critical tasks in hyperspectral remote sensing image processing. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has established itself as a powerful model in segmentation and classification by demonstrating excellent performances. The use of a graphical model such as a conditional random field (CRF) contributes further in capturing contextual information and thus improving the segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a method to segment hyperspectral images by considering both spectral and spatial information via a combined framework consisting of CNN and CRF. We use multiple spectral cubes to learn deep features using CNN, and then formulate deep CRF with CNN-based unary and pairwise potential functions to effectively extract the semantic correlations between patches consisting of three-dimensional data cubes. Effective piecewise training is applied in order to avoid the computationally expensive iterative CRF inference. Furthermore, we introduce a deep deconvolution network that improves the segmentation masks. We also introduce a new dataset and experimented our proposed method on it along with several widely adopted benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. By comparing our results with those from several state-of-the-art models, we show the promising potential of our method.