Classic image scaling (e.g. bicubic) can be seen as one convolutional layer and a single upscaling filter. Its implementation is ubiquitous in all display devices and image processing software. In the last decade deep learning systems have been introduced for the task of image super-resolution (SR), using several convolutional layers and numerous filters. These methods have taken over the benchmarks of image quality for upscaling tasks. Would it be possible to replace classic upscalers with deep learning architectures on edge devices such as display panels, tablets, laptop computers, etc.? On one hand, the current trend in Edge-AI chips shows a promising future in this direction, with rapid development of hardware that can run deep-learning tasks efficiently. On the other hand, in image SR only few architectures have pushed the limit to extreme small sizes that can actually run on edge devices at real-time. We explore possible solutions to this problem with the aim to fill the gap between classic upscalers and small deep learning configurations. As a transition from classic to deep-learning upscaling we propose edge-SR (eSR), a set of one-layer architectures that use interpretable mechanisms to upscale images. Certainly, a one-layer architecture cannot reach the quality of deep learning systems. Nevertheless, we find that for high speed requirements, eSR becomes better at trading-off image quality and runtime performance. Filling the gap between classic and deep-learning architectures for image upscaling is critical for massive adoption of this technology. It is equally important to have an interpretable system that can reveal the inner strategies to solve this problem and guide us to future improvements and better understanding of larger networks.
Different from the Single Image Super-Resolution(SISR) task, the key for Video Super-Resolution(VSR) task is to make full use of complementary information across frames to reconstruct the high-resolution sequence. Since images from different frames with diverse motion and scene, accurately aligning multiple frames and effectively fusing different frames has always been the key research work of VSR tasks. To utilize rich complementary information of neighboring frames, in this paper, we propose a multi-stage VSR deep architecture, dubbed as PP-MSVSR, with local fusion module, auxiliary loss and re-align module to refine the enhanced result progressively. Specifically, in order to strengthen the fusion of features across frames in feature propagation, a local fusion module is designed in stage-1 to perform local feature fusion before feature propagation. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary loss in stage-2 to make the features obtained by the propagation module reserve more correlated information connected to the HR space, and introduce a re-align module in stage-3 to make full use of the feature information of the previous stage. Extensive experiments substantiate that PP-MSVSR achieves a promising performance of Vid4 datasets, which achieves a PSNR of 28.13dB with only 1.45M parameters. And the PP-MSVSR-L exceeds all state of the art method on REDS4 datasets with considerable parameters. Code and models will be released in PaddleGAN\footnote{//github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleGAN.}.
We present techniques for scaling Swin Transformer up to 3 billion parameters and making it capable of training with images of up to 1,536$\times$1,536 resolution. By scaling up capacity and resolution, Swin Transformer sets new records on four representative vision benchmarks: 84.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-V2 image classification, 63.1/54.4 box/mask mAP on COCO object detection, 59.9 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation, and 86.8% top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400 video action classification. Our techniques are generally applicable for scaling up vision models, which has not been widely explored as that of NLP language models, partly due to the following difficulties in training and applications: 1) vision models often face instability issues at scale and 2) many downstream vision tasks require high resolution images or windows and it is not clear how to effectively transfer models pre-trained at low resolutions to higher resolution ones. The GPU memory consumption is also a problem when the image resolution is high. To address these issues, we present several techniques, which are illustrated by using Swin Transformer as a case study: 1) a post normalization technique and a scaled cosine attention approach to improve the stability of large vision models; 2) a log-spaced continuous position bias technique to effectively transfer models pre-trained at low-resolution images and windows to their higher-resolution counterparts. In addition, we share our crucial implementation details that lead to significant savings of GPU memory consumption and thus make it feasible to train large vision models with regular GPUs. Using these techniques and self-supervised pre-training, we successfully train a strong 3B Swin Transformer model and effectively transfer it to various vision tasks involving high-resolution images or windows, achieving the state-of-the-art accuracy on a variety of benchmarks.
Normalizing flows have recently demonstrated promising results for low-level vision tasks. For image super-resolution (SR), it learns to predict diverse photo-realistic high-resolution (HR) images from the low-resolution (LR) image rather than learning a deterministic mapping. For image rescaling, it achieves high accuracy by jointly modelling the downscaling and upscaling processes. While existing approaches employ specialized techniques for these two tasks, we set out to unify them in a single formulation. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical conditional flow (HCFlow) as a unified framework for image SR and image rescaling. More specifically, HCFlow learns a bijective mapping between HR and LR image pairs by modelling the distribution of the LR image and the rest high-frequency component simultaneously. In particular, the high-frequency component is conditional on the LR image in a hierarchical manner. To further enhance the performance, other losses such as perceptual loss and GAN loss are combined with the commonly used negative log-likelihood loss in training. Extensive experiments on general image SR, face image SR and image rescaling have demonstrated that the proposed HCFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality.
In recent years, deep learning has made great progress in many fields such as image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition and video super-resolution. In this survey, we comprehensively investigate 33 state-of-the-art video super-resolution (VSR) methods based on deep learning. It is well known that the leverage of information within video frames is important for video super-resolution. Thus we propose a taxonomy and classify the methods into six sub-categories according to the ways of utilizing inter-frame information. Moreover, the architectures and implementation details of all the methods are depicted in detail. Finally, we summarize and compare the performance of the representative VSR method on some benchmark datasets. We also discuss some challenges, which need to be further addressed by researchers in the community of VSR. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first systematic review on VSR tasks, and it is expected to make a contribution to the development of recent studies in this area and potentially deepen our understanding to the VSR techniques based on deep learning.
Recent advances in single image super-resolution (SISR) explored the power of convolutional neural network (CNN) to achieve a better performance. Despite the great success of CNN-based methods, it is not easy to apply these methods to edge devices due to the requirement of heavy computation. To solve this problem, various fast and lightweight CNN models have been proposed. The information distillation network is one of the state-of-the-art methods, which adopts the channel splitting operation to extract distilled features. However, it is not clear enough how this operation helps in the design of efficient SISR models. In this paper, we propose the feature distillation connection (FDC) that is functionally equivalent to the channel splitting operation while being more lightweight and flexible. Thanks to FDC, we can rethink the information multi-distillation network (IMDN) and propose a lightweight and accurate SISR model called residual feature distillation network (RFDN). RFDN uses multiple feature distillation connections to learn more discriminative feature representations. We also propose a shallow residual block (SRB) as the main building block of RFDN so that the network can benefit most from residual learning while still being lightweight enough. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed RFDN achieve a better trade-off against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance and model complexity. Moreover, we propose an enhanced RFDN (E-RFDN) and won the first place in the AIM 2020 efficient super-resolution challenge. Code will be available at //github.com/njulj/RFDN.
This paper studies the single image super-resolution problem using adder neural networks (AdderNet). Compared with convolutional neural networks, AdderNet utilizing additions to calculate the output features thus avoid massive energy consumptions of conventional multiplications. However, it is very hard to directly inherit the existing success of AdderNet on large-scale image classification to the image super-resolution task due to the different calculation paradigm. Specifically, the adder operation cannot easily learn the identity mapping, which is essential for image processing tasks. In addition, the functionality of high-pass filters cannot be ensured by AdderNet. To this end, we thoroughly analyze the relationship between an adder operation and the identity mapping and insert shortcuts to enhance the performance of SR models using adder networks. Then, we develop a learnable power activation for adjusting the feature distribution and refining details. Experiments conducted on several benchmark models and datasets demonstrate that, our image super-resolution models using AdderNet can achieve comparable performance and visual quality to that of their CNN baselines with an about 2$\times$ reduction on the energy consumption.
Recently, adaptive inference is gaining increasing attention due to its high computational efficiency. Different from existing works, which mainly exploit architecture redundancy for adaptive network design, in this paper, we focus on spatial redundancy of input samples, and propose a novel Resolution Adaptive Network (RANet). Our motivation is that low-resolution representations can be sufficient for classifying "easy" samples containing canonical objects, while high-resolution features are curial for recognizing some "hard" ones. In RANet, input images are first routed to a lightweight sub-network that efficiently extracts coarse feature maps, and samples with high confident predictions will exit early from the sub-network. The high-resolution paths are only activated for those "hard" samples whose previous predictions are unreliable. By adaptively processing the features in varying resolutions, the proposed RANet can significantly improve its computational efficiency. Experiments on three classification benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in both anytime prediction setting and budgeted batch classification setting.
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.
Although considerable attention has been given to neural ranking architectures recently, far less attention has been paid to the term representations that are used as input to these models. In this work, we investigate how two pretrained contextualized language models (ELMo and BERT) can be utilized for ad-hoc document ranking. Through experiments on TREC benchmarks, we find that several existing neural ranking architectures can benefit from the additional context provided by contextualized language models. Furthermore, we propose a joint approach that incorporates BERT's classification vector into existing neural models and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art ad-hoc ranking baselines. We call this joint approach CEDR (Contextualized Embeddings for Document Ranking). We also address practical challenges in using these models for ranking, including the maximum input length imposed by BERT and runtime performance impacts of contextualized language models.
Deep learning has recently demonstrated its excellent performance for multi-view stereo (MVS). However, one major limitation of current learned MVS approaches is the scalability: the memory-consuming cost volume regularization makes the learned MVS hard to be applied to high-resolution scenes. In this paper, we introduce a scalable multi-view stereo framework based on the recurrent neural network. Instead of regularizing the entire 3D cost volume in one go, the proposed Recurrent Multi-view Stereo Network (R-MVSNet) sequentially regularizes the 2D cost maps along the depth direction via the gated recurrent unit (GRU). This reduces dramatically the memory consumption and makes high-resolution reconstruction feasible. We first show the state-of-the-art performance achieved by the proposed R-MVSNet on the recent MVS benchmarks. Then, we further demonstrate the scalability of the proposed method on several large-scale scenarios, where previous learned approaches often fail due to the memory constraint. Code is available at //github.com/YoYo000/MVSNet.