IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Image restoration tasks demand a complex balance between spatial details and high-level contextualized information while recovering images. In this paper, we propose a novel synergistic design that can optimally balance these competing goals. Our main proposal is a multi-stage architecture, that progressively learns restoration functions for the degraded inputs, thereby breaking down the overall recovery process into more manageable steps. Specifically, our model first learns the contextualized features using encoder-decoder architectures and later combines them with a high-resolution branch that retains local information. At each stage, we introduce a novel per-pixel adaptive design that leverages in-situ supervised attention to reweight the local features. A key ingredient in such a multi-stage architecture is the information exchange between different stages. To this end, we propose a two-faceted approach where the information is not only exchanged sequentially from early to late stages, but lateral connections between feature processing blocks also exist to avoid any loss of information. The resulting tightly interlinked multi-stage architecture, named as MPRNet, delivers strong performance gains on ten datasets across a range of tasks including image deraining, deblurring, and denoising. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MPRNet.

/pdf/multi-stage-progressive-image-restoration-3wfddniu8m.pdf

Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration

Digital twin can be defined as a virtual representation of a physical asset enabled through data and simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, controlling, and improved decision making. Recent advances in computational pipelines, multiphysics solvers, artificial intelligence, big data cybernetics, data processing and management tools bring the promise of digital twins and their impact on society closer to reality. Digital twinning is now an important and emerging trend in many applications. Also referred to as a computational megamodel, device shadow, mirrored system, avatar or a synchronized virtual prototype, there can be no doubt that a digital twin plays a transformative role not only in how we design and operate cyber-physical intelligent systems, but also in how we advance the modularity of multi-disciplinary systems to tackle fundamental barriers not addressed by the current, evolutionary modeling practices. In this work, we review the recent status of methodologies and techniques related to the construction of digital twins mostly from a modeling perspective. Our aim is to provide a detailed coverage of the current challenges and enabling technologies along with recommendations and reflections for various stakeholders.

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Digital Twin: Values, Challenges and Enablers From a Modeling Perspective

As the computing power of modern hardware is increasing strongly, pre-trained deep learning models (e.g., BERT, GPT-3) learned on large-scale datasets have shown their effectiveness over conventional methods. The big progress is mainly contributed to the representation ability of transformer and its variant architectures. In this paper, we study the low-level computer vision task (e.g., denoising, super-resolution and deraining) and develop a new pre-trained model, namely, image processing transformer (IPT). To maximally excavate the capability of transformer, we present to utilize the well-known ImageNet benchmark for generating a large amount of corrupted image pairs. The IPT model is trained on these images with multi-heads and multi-tails. In addition, the contrastive learning is introduced for well adapting to different image processing tasks. The pre-trained model can therefore efficiently employed on desired task after fine-tuning. With only one pre-trained model, IPT outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on various low-level benchmarks. Code is available at this https URL and this https URL

Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer

Deep learning on image denoising: An overview.

Attention-guided CNN for image denoising.

Image denoising using deep CNN with batch renormalization.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been popularly adopted in image super-resolution (SR). However, deep CNNs for SR often suffer from the instability of training, resulting in poor image SR performance. Gathering complementary contextual information can effectively overcome the problem. Along this line, we propose a coarse-to-fine SR CNN (CFSRCNN) to recover a high-resolution (HR) image from its low-resolution version. The proposed CFSRCNN consists of a stack of feature extraction blocks (FEBs), an enhancement block (EB), a construction block (CB) and, a feature refinement block (FRB) to learn a robust SR model. Specifically, the stack of FEBs learns the long- and short-path features, and then fuses the learned features by expending the effect of the shallower layers to the deeper layers to improve the representing power of learned features. A compression unit is then used in each FEB to distill important information of features so as to reduce the number of parameters. Subsequently, the EB utilizes residual learning to integrate the extracted features to prevent from losing edge information due to repeated distillation operations. After that, the CB applies the global and local LR features to obtain coarse features, followed by the FRB to refine the features to reconstruct a high-resolution image. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high efficiency and good performance of our CFSRCNN model on benchmark datasets compared with state-of-the-art SR models. The code of CFSRCNN is accessible on https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/CFSRCNN .

Chunwei Tian

Papers

Deep learning on image denoising: An overview.

Attention-guided CNN for image denoising.

Image denoising using deep CNN with batch renormalization.

Coarse-to-Fine CNN for Image Super-Resolution

Low-rank representation with adaptive graph regularization