Motion blur is a common photography artifact in dynamic environments that typically comes jointly with the other types of degradation. This paper reviews the NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Image Deblurring. In this challenge report, we describe the challenge specifics and the evaluation results from the 2 competition tracks with the proposed solutions. While both the tracks aim to recover a high-quality clean image from a blurry image, different artifacts are jointly involved. In track 1, the blurry images are in a low resolution while track 2 images are compressed in JPEG format. In each competition, there were 338 and 238 registered participants and in the final testing phase, 18 and 17 teams competed. The winning methods demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance on the image deblurring task with the jointly combined artifacts.

/pdf/ntire-2021-challenge-on-image-deblurring-4xwplefo3i.pdf

NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Image Deblurring

This paper reviews the first challenge on high-dynamic range (HDR) imaging that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2021. This manuscript focuses on the newly introduced dataset, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge aims at estimating a HDR image from one or multiple respective low-dynamic range (LDR) observations, which might suffer from under-or over-exposed regions and different sources of noise. The challenge is composed by two tracks: In Track 1 only a single LDR image is provided as input, whereas in Track 2 three differently-exposed LDR images with inter-frame motion are available. In both tracks, the ultimate goal is to achieve the best objective HDR reconstruction in terms of PSNR with respect to a ground-truth image, evaluated both directly and with a canonical tonemapping operation.

/pdf/ntire-2021-challenge-on-high-dynamic-range-imaging-dataset-dmp4lwf5u6.pdf

NTIRE 2021 Challenge on High Dynamic Range Imaging: Dataset, Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2021 challenge on learning the super-Resolution space. It focuses on the participating methods and final results. The challenge addresses the problem of learning a model capable of predicting the space of plausible super-resolution (SR) images, from a single low-resolution image. The model must thus be capable of sampling diverse outputs, rather than just generating a single SR image. The goal of the challenge is to spur research into developing learning formulations and models better suited for the highly ill-posed SR problem. And thereby advance the state-of-the-art in the broader SR field. In order to evaluate the quality of the predicted SR space, we propose a new evaluation metric and perform a comprehensive analysis of the participating methods. The challenge contains two tracks: 4× and 8 scale factor. In total, 11 teams competed in the final testing× phase.

/pdf/ntire-2021-learning-the-super-resolution-space-challenge-2rbcxvbz27.pdf

NTIRE 2021 Learning the Super-Resolution Space Challenge

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2021 challenge on perceptual image quality assessment (IQA), held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement workshop (NTIRE) workshop at CVPR 2021. As a new type of image processing technology, perceptual image processing algorithms based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have produced images with more realistic textures. These output images have completely different characteristics from traditional distortions, thus pose a new challenge for IQA methods to evaluate their visual quality. In comparison with previous IQA challenges, the training and testing datasets in this challenge include the outputs of perceptual image processing algorithms and the corresponding subjective scores. Thus they can be used to develop and evaluate IQA methods on GAN-based distortions. The challenge has 270 registered participants in total. In the final testing stage, 13 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Almost all of them have achieved much better results than existing IQA methods, while the winning method can demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.

/pdf/ntire-2021-challenge-on-perceptual-image-quality-assessment-18h691tz8u.pdf

NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Perceptual Image Quality Assessment

In this paper, we introduce the first Challenge on Multi-modal Aerial View Object Classification (MAVOC) in con-junction with the NTIRE 2021 workshop at CVPR. This challenge is composed of two different tracks using EO and SAR imagery. Both EO and SAR sensors possess different advantages and drawbacks. The purpose of this competition is to analyze how to use both sets of sensory information in complementary ways. We discuss the top methods submitted for this competition and evaluate their results on our blind test set. Our challenge results show significant improvement of more than 15% accuracy from our current baselines for each track of the competition.

/pdf/ntire-2021-multi-modal-aerial-view-object-classification-2q4v58tfmu.pdf

NTIRE 2021 Multi-modal Aerial View Object Classification Challenge

Image relighting is attracting increasing interest due to its various applications. From a research perspective, im-age relighting can be exploited to conduct both image normalization for domain adaptation, and also for data augmentation. It also has multiple direct uses for photo montage and aesthetic enhancement. In this paper, we review the NTIRE 2021 depth guided image relighting challenge.We rely on the VIDIT dataset for each of our two challenge tracks, including depth information. The first track is on one-to-one relighting where the goal is to transform the illumination setup of an input image (color temperature and light source position) to the target illumination setup. In the second track, the any-to-any relighting challenge, the objective is to transform the illumination settings of the in-put image to match those of another guide image, similar to style transfer. In both tracks, participants were given depth information about the captured scenes. We had nearly 250 registered participants, leading to 18 confirmed team sub-missions in the final competition stage. The competitions, methods, and final results are presented in this paper.

/pdf/ntire-2021-depth-guided-image-relighting-challenge-26esz7jp2m.pdf

Cheng-Ze Lu

Papers

NTIRE 2021 Depth Guided Image Relighting Challenge