With the goal of recovering high-quality image content from its degraded version, image restoration enjoys numerous applications, such as in surveillance, computational photography and medical imaging. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved dramatic improvements over conventional approaches for image restoration task. Existing CNN-based methods typically operate either on full-resolution or on progressively low-resolution representations. In the former case, spatially precise but contextually less robust results are achieved, while in the latter case, semantically reliable but spatially less accurate outputs are generated. In this paper, we present an architecture with the collective goals of maintaining spatially-precise high-resolution representations through the entire network and receiving strong contextual information from the low-resolution representations. The core of our approach is a multi-scale residual block containing several key elements: (a) parallel multi-resolution convolution streams for extracting multi-scale features, (b) information exchange across the multi-resolution streams, (c) spatial and channel attention mechanisms for capturing contextual information, and (d) attention based multi-scale feature aggregation. In a nutshell, our approach learns an enriched set of features that combines contextual information from multiple scales, while simultaneously preserving the high-resolution spatial details. Extensive experiments on five real image benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method, named as MIRNet, achieves state-of-the-art results for image denoising, super-resolution, and image enhancement. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MIRNet.

Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement

This paper introduces a novel large dataset for video deblurring, video super-resolution and studies the state-of-the-art as emerged from the NTIRE 2019 video restoration challenges. The video deblurring and video super-resolution challenges are each the first challenge of its kind, with 4 competitions, hundreds of participants and tens of proposed solutions. Our newly collected REalistic and Diverse Scenes dataset (REDS) was employed by the challenges. In our study, we compare the solutions from the challenges to a set of representative methods from the literature and evaluate them on our proposed REDS dataset. We find that the NTIRE 2019 challenges push the state-of-the-art in video deblurring and super-resolution, reaching compelling performance on our newly proposed REDS dataset.

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NTIRE 2019 Challenge on Video Deblurring and Super-Resolution: Dataset and Study

Most of the existing learning-based single image super-resolution (SISR) methods are trained and evaluated on simulated datasets, where the low-resolution (LR) images are generated by applying a simple and uniform degradation (i.e., bicubic downsampling) to their high-resolution (HR) counterparts. However, the degradations in real-world LR images are far more complicated. As a consequence, the SISR models trained on simulated data become less effective when applied to practical scenarios. In this paper, we build a real-world super-resolution (RealSR) dataset where paired LR-HR images on the same scene are captured by adjusting the focal length of a digital camera. An image registration algorithm is developed to progressively align the image pairs at different resolutions. Considering that the degradation kernels are naturally non-uniform in our dataset, we present a Laplacian pyramid based kernel prediction network (LP-KPN), which efficiently learns per-pixel kernels to recover the HR image. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that SISR models trained on our RealSR dataset deliver better visual quality with sharper edges and finer textures on real-world scenes than those trained on simulated datasets. Though our RealSR dataset is built by using only two cameras (Canon 5D3 and Nikon D810), the trained model generalizes well to other camera devices such as Sony a7II and mobile phones.

/pdf/toward-real-world-single-image-super-resolution-a-new-39vy7sc9j4.pdf

Toward Real-World Single Image Super-Resolution: A New Benchmark and a New Model

Deep convolutional networks–based super-resolution is a fast-growing field with numerous practical applications. In this exposition, we extensively compare more than 30 state-of-the-art super-resolution Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) over three classical and three recently introduced challenging datasets to benchmark single image super-resolution. We introduce a taxonomy for deep learning–based super-resolution networks that groups existing methods into nine categories including linear, residual, multi-branch, recursive, progressive, attention-based, and adversarial designs. We also provide comparisons between the models in terms of network complexity, memory footprint, model input and output, learning details, the type of network losses, and important architectural differences (e.g., depth, skip-connections, filters). The extensive evaluation performed shows the consistent and rapid growth in the accuracy in the past few years along with a corresponding boost in model complexity and the availability of large-scale datasets. It is also observed that the pioneering methods identified as the benchmarks have been significantly outperformed by the current contenders. Despite the progress in recent years, we identify several shortcomings of existing techniques and provide future research directions towards the solution of these open problems. Datasets and codes for evaluation are publicly available at https://github.com/saeed-anwar/SRsurvey.

A Deep Journey into Super-resolution: A Survey

Deep neural networks have enabled astonishing transformations from low-resolution (LR) to super-resolved images However, whether, and under what imaging conditions, such deep-learning models outperform super-resolution (SR) microscopy is poorly explored Here, using multimodality structured illumination microscopy (SIM), we first provide an extensive dataset of LR-SR image pairs and evaluate the deep-learning SR models in terms of structural complexity, signal-to-noise ratio and upscaling factor Second, we devise the deep Fourier channel attention network (DFCAN), which leverages the frequency content difference across distinct features to learn precise hierarchical representations of high-frequency information about diverse biological structures Third, we show that DFCAN's Fourier domain focalization enables robust reconstruction of SIM images under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions We demonstrate that DFCAN achieves comparable image quality to SIM over a tenfold longer duration in multicolor live-cell imaging experiments, which reveal the detailed structures of mitochondrial cristae and nucleoids and the interaction dynamics of organelles and cytoskeleton

Evaluation and development of deep neural networks for image super-resolution in optical microscopy

This paper reviewed the 3rd NTIRE challenge on single-image super-resolution (restoration of rich details in a low-resolution image) with a focus on proposed solutions and results. The challenge had 1 track, which was aimed at the real-world single image super-resolution problem with an unknown scaling factor. Participants were mapping low-resolution images captured by a DSLR camera with a shorter focal length to their high-resolution images captured at a longer focal length. With this challenge, we introduced a novel real-world super-resolution dataset (RealSR). The track had 403 registered participants, and 36 teams competed in the final testing phase. They gauge the state-of-the-art in real-world single image super-resolution.

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NTIRE 2019 Challenge on Real Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

Image style transfer aims at synthesizing an image with the content from one image and the style from another. User studies have revealed that the semantic correspondence between style and content greatly affects subjective perception of style transfer results. While current studies have made great progress in improving the visual quality of stylized images, most methods directly transfer global style statistics without considering semantic alignment. Current semantic style transfer approaches still work in an iterative optimization fashion, which is impractically computationally expensive. Addressing these issues, we introduce a novel dual-affinity style embedding network (DaseNet) to synthesize images with style aligned at semantic region granularity. In the dual-affinity module, feature correlation and semantic correspondence between content and style images are modeled jointly for embedding local style patterns according to semantic distribution. Furthermore, the semantic-weighted style loss and the region-consistency loss are introduced to ensure semantic alignment and content preservation. With the end-to-end network architecture, DaseNet can well balance visual quality and inference efficiency for semantic style transfer. Experimental results on different scene categories have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Xin Li

Papers

NTIRE 2019 Challenge on Real Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

Dual-Affinity Style Embedding Network for Semantic-Aligned Image Style Transfer.