Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method.

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Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network

Single image super-resolution is the task of inferring a high-resolution image from a single low-resolution input. Traditionally, the performance of algorithms for this task is measured using pixel-wise reconstruction measures such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) which have been shown to correlate poorly with the human perception of image quality. As a result, algorithms minimizing these metrics tend to produce over-smoothed images that lack highfrequency textures and do not look natural despite yielding high PSNR values.,,We propose a novel application of automated texture synthesis in combination with a perceptual loss focusing on creating realistic textures rather than optimizing for a pixelaccurate reproduction of ground truth images during training. By using feed-forward fully convolutional neural networks in an adversarial training setting, we achieve a significant boost in image quality at high magnification ratios. Extensive experiments on a number of datasets show the effectiveness of our approach, yielding state-of-the-art results in both quantitative and qualitative benchmarks.

EnhanceNet: Single Image Super-Resolution Through Automated Texture Synthesis

Severe weather conditions, such as rain and snow, adversely affect the visual quality of images captured under such conditions, thus rendering them useless for further usage and sharing. In addition, such degraded images drastically affect the performance of vision systems. Hence, it is important to address the problem of single image de-raining. However, the inherent ill-posed nature of the problem presents several challenges. We attempt to leverage powerful generative modeling capabilities of the recently introduced conditional generative adversarial networks (CGAN) by enforcing an additional constraint that the de-rained image must be indistinguishable from its corresponding ground truth clean image. The adversarial loss from GAN provides additional regularization and helps to achieve superior results. In addition to presenting a new approach to de-rain images, we introduce a new refined loss function and architectural novelties in the generator–discriminator pair for achieving improved results. The loss function is aimed at reducing artifacts introduced by GANs and ensure better visual quality. The generator sub-network is constructed using the recently introduced densely connected networks, whereas the discriminator is designed to leverage global and local information to decide if an image is real/fake. Based on this, we propose a novel single image de-raining method called image de-raining conditional generative adversarial network (ID-CGAN) that considers quantitative, visual, and also discriminative performance into the objective function. The experiments evaluated on synthetic and real images show that the proposed method outperforms many recent state-of-the-art single image de-raining methods in terms of quantitative and visual performances. Furthermore, the experimental results evaluated on object detection datasets using the Faster-RCNN also demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method in improving the detection performance on images degraded by rain.

Image De-Raining Using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

Single image super-resolution is the task of inferring a high-resolution image from a single low-resolution input. Traditionally, the performance of algorithms for this task is measured using pixel-wise reconstruction measures such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) which have been shown to correlate poorly with the human perception of image quality. As a result, algorithms minimizing these metrics tend to produce over-smoothed images that lack high-frequency textures and do not look natural despite yielding high PSNR values. 
We propose a novel application of automated texture synthesis in combination with a perceptual loss focusing on creating realistic textures rather than optimizing for a pixel-accurate reproduction of ground truth images during training. By using feed-forward fully convolutional neural networks in an adversarial training setting, we achieve a significant boost in image quality at high magnification ratios. Extensive experiments on a number of datasets show the effectiveness of our approach, yielding state-of-the-art results in both quantitative and qualitative benchmarks.

This paper proposes a new super-resolution (SR) scheme for landmark images by retrieving correlated web images. Using correlated web images significantly improves the exemplar-based SR. Given a low-resolution (LR) image, we extract local descriptors from its up-sampled version and bundle the descriptors according to their spatial relationship to retrieve correlated high-resolution (HR) images from the web. Though similar in content, the retrieved images are usually taken with different illumination, focal lengths, and shot perspectives, resulting in uncertainty for the HR detail approximation. To solve this problem, we first propose aligning these images to the up-sampled LR image through a global registration, which identifies the corresponding regions in these images and reduces the mismatching. Second, we propose a structure-aware matching criterion and adaptive block sizes to improve the mapping accuracy between LR and HR patches. Finally, these matched HR patches are blended together by solving an energy minimization problem to recover the desired HR image. Experimental results demonstrate that our SR scheme achieves significant improvement compared with four state-of-the-art schemes in terms of both subjective and objective qualities.

Landmark Image Super-Resolution by Retrieving Web Images

Current image coding schemes make it hard to utilize external images for compression even if highly correlated images can be found in the cloud. To solve this problem, we propose a method of cloud-based image coding that is different from current image coding even on the ground. It no longer compresses images pixel by pixel and instead tries to describe images and reconstruct them from a large-scale image database via the descriptions. First, we describe an input image based on its down-sampled version and local feature descriptors. The descriptors are used to retrieve highly correlated images in the cloud and identify corresponding patches. The down-sampled image serves as a target to stitch retrieved image patches together. Second, the down-sampled image is compressed using current image coding. The feature vectors of local descriptors are predicted by the corresponding vectors extracted in the decoded down-sampled image. The predicted residual vectors are compressed by transform, quantization, and entropy coding. The experimental results show that the visual quality of reconstructed images is significantly better than that of intra-frame coding in HEVC and JPEG at thousands to one compression .

Cloud-Based Image Coding for Mobile Devices—Toward Thousands to One Compression

Cloud detection is one of the important tasks for remote sensing image (RSI) preprocessing. In this paper, we utilize the thumbnail (i.e., preview image) of RSI, which contains the information of original multispectral or panchromatic imagery, to extract cloud mask efficiently. Compared with detection cloud mask from original RSI, it is more challenging to detect cloud mask using thumbnails due to the loss of resolution and spectrum information. To tackle this problem, we propose a cloud detection neural network (CDnet) with an encoder–decoder structure, a feature pyramid module (FPM), and a boundary refinement (BR) block. The FPM extracts the multiscale contextual information without the loss of resolution and coverage; the BR block refines object boundaries; and the encoder–decoder structure gradually recovers segmentation results with the same size as input image. Experimental results on the ZY-3 satellite thumbnails cloud cover validation data set and two other validation data sets (GF-1 WFV Cloud and Cloud Shadow Cover Validation Data and Landsat-8 Cloud Cover Assessment Validation Data) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves accurate detection accuracy and outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.

CDnet: CNN-Based Cloud Detection for Remote Sensing Imagery

In this paper, we propose to introduce intrinsic image decomposition priors into decomposition models for contrast enhancement. Since image decomposition is a highly ill-posed problem, we introduce constraints on both reflectance and illumination layers to yield a highly reliable solution. We regularize the reflectance layer to be piecewise constant by introducing a weighted $\ell _{1}$ norm constraint on neighboring pixels according to the color similarity, so that the decomposed reflectance would not be affected much by the illumination information. The illumination layer is regularized by a piecewise smoothness constraint. The proposed model is effectively solved by the Split Bregman algorithm. Then, by adjusting the illumination layer, we obtain the enhancement result. To avoid potential color artifacts introduced by illumination adjusting and reduce computing complexity, the proposed decomposition model is performed on the value channel in HSV space. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method performs well for a wide variety of images, and achieves better or comparable subjective and objective quality compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Contrast Enhancement Based on Intrinsic Image Decomposition

In recent years, the supervised learning strategy for real noisy image denoising has been emerging and has achieved promising results. In contrast, realistic noise removal for raw noisy videos is rarely studied due to the lack of noisy-clean pairs for dynamic scenes. Clean video frames for dynamic scenes cannot be captured with a long-exposure shutter or averaging multi-shots as was done for static images. In this paper, we solve this problem by creating motions for controllable objects, such as toys, and capturing each static moment for multiple times to generate clean video frames. In this way, we construct a dataset with 55 groups of noisy-clean videos with ISO values ranging from 1600 to 25600. To our knowledge, this is the first dynamic video dataset with noisy-clean pairs. Correspondingly, we propose a raw video denoising network (RViDeNet) by exploring the temporal, spatial, and channel correlations of video frames. Since the raw video has Bayer patterns, we pack it into four sub-sequences, i.e RGBG sequences, which are denoised by the proposed RViDeNet separately and finally fused into a clean video. In addition, our network not only outputs a raw denoising result, but also the sRGB result by going through an image signal processing (ISP) module, which enables users to generate the sRGB result with their favourite ISPs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art video and raw image denoising algorithms on both indoor and outdoor videos.

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Huanjing Yue

Papers

Landmark Image Super-Resolution by Retrieving Web Images

Cloud-Based Image Coding for Mobile Devices—Toward Thousands to One Compression

CDnet: CNN-Based Cloud Detection for Remote Sensing Imagery

Contrast Enhancement Based on Intrinsic Image Decomposition

Supervised Raw Video Denoising With a Benchmark Dataset on Dynamic Scenes