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Rain-by-snow weather removal is a specialized task in weather-degraded image restoration aiming to eliminate coexisting rain streaks and snow particles. In this paper, we propose RSFormer, an efficient and effective Transformer that addresses this challenge. Initially, we explore the proximity of convolution networks (ConvNets) and vision Transformers (ViTs) in hierarchical architectures and experimentally find they perform approximately at intra-stage feature learning. On this basis, we utilize a Transformer-like convolution block (TCB) that replaces the computationally expensive self-attention while preserving attention characteristics for adapting to input content. We also demonstrate that cross-stage progression is critical for performance improvement, and propose a global-local self-attention sampling mechanism (GLASM) that down-/up-samples features while capturing both global and local dependencies. Finally, we synthesize two novel rain-by-snow datasets, RSCityScape and RS100K, to evaluate our proposed RSFormer. Extensive experiments verify that RSFormer achieves the best trade-off between performance and time-consumption compared to other restoration methods. For instance, it outperforms Restormer with a 1.53% reduction in the number of parameters and a 15.6% reduction in inference time. Datasets, source code and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/chdwyb/RSFormer}., code is available at \url{https://github.com/chdwyb/RSFormer}

Facial portrait is an artistic form which draws faces by emphasizing discriminative or prominent parts of faces via various kinds of drawing tools. However, the complex interplay between the different facial factors, such as facial parts, background, and drawing styles, and the significant domain gap between natural facial images and their portrait counterparts makes the task challenging. In this paper, a flexible four-stream Disentangled Feature Networks (DFN) is proposed to learn disentangled feature representation of different facial factors and generate plausible portraits with reasonable exaggerations and richness in style. Four factors are encoded as embedding features, and combined to reconstruct facial portraits. Meanwhile, to make the process fully automatic (without manually specifying either portrait style or exaggerating form), we propose a new Adversarial Portrait Mapping Module (APMM) to map noise to the embedding feature space, as proxies for portrait style and exaggerating. Thanks to the proposed DFN and APMM, we are able to manipulate the portrait style and facial geometric structures to generate a large number of portraits. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that our proposed methods can generate a diverse set of artistic portraits.

Blind Face Restoration (BFR) aims to construct a high-quality (HQ) face image from its corresponding low-quality (LQ) input. Recently, many BFR methods have been proposed and they have achieved remarkable success. However, these methods are trained or evaluated on privately synthesized datasets, which makes it infeasible for the subsequent approaches to fairly compare with them. To address this problem, we first synthesize two blind face restoration benchmark datasets called EDFace-Celeb-1M (BFR128) and EDFace-Celeb-150K (BFR512). State-of-the-art methods are benchmarked on them under five settings including blur, noise, low resolution, JPEG compression artifacts, and the combination of them (full degradation). To make the comparison more comprehensive, five widely-used quantitative metrics and two task-driven metrics including Average Face Landmark Distance (AFLD) and Average Face ID Cosine Similarity (AFICS) are applied. Furthermore, we develop an effective baseline model called Swin Transformer U-Net (STUNet). The STUNet with U-net architecture applies an attention mechanism and a shifted windowing scheme to capture long-range pixel interactions and focus more on significant features while still being trained efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed baseline method performs favourably against the SOTA methods on various BFR tasks.

Face Restoration (FR) aims to restore High-Quality (HQ) faces from Low-Quality (LQ) input images, which is a domain-specific image restoration problem in the low-level computer vision area. The early face restoration methods mainly use statistic priors and degradation models, which are difficult to meet the requirements of real-world applications in practice. In recent years, face restoration has witnessed great progress after stepping into the deep learning era. However, there are few works to study deep learning-based face restoration methods systematically. Thus, this paper comprehensively surveys recent advances in deep learning techniques for face restoration. Specifically, we first summarize different problem formulations and analyze the characteristic of the face image. Second, we discuss the challenges of face restoration. Concerning these challenges, we present a comprehensive review of existing FR methods, including prior based methods and deep learning-based methods. Then, we explore developed techniques in the task of FR covering network architectures, loss functions, and benchmark datasets. We also conduct a systematic benchmark evaluation on representative methods. Finally, we discuss future directions, including network designs, metrics, benchmark datasets, applications,etc. We also provide an open-source repository for all the discussed methods, which is available at https://github.com/TaoWangzj/Awesome-Face-Restoration., Comment: 21 pages, 19 figures

The dense rain accumulation in heavy rain can significantly wash out images and thus destroy the background details of images. Although existing deep rain removal models lead to improved performance for heavy rain removal, we find that most of them ignore the detail reconstruction accuracy of rain-free images. In this paper, we propose a dual-stage progressive enhancement network (DPENet) to achieve effective deraining with structure-accurate rain-free images. Two main modules are included in our framework, namely a rain streaks removal network (R$^2$Net) and a detail reconstruction network (DRNet). The former aims to achieve accurate rain removal, and the latter is designed to recover the details of rain-free images. We introduce two main strategies within our networks to achieve trade-off between the effectiveness of deraining and the detail restoration of rain-free images. Firstly, a dilated dense residual block (DDRB) within the rain streaks removal network is presented to aggregate high/low level features of heavy rain. Secondly, an enhanced residual pixel-wise attention block (ERPAB) within the detail reconstruction network is designed for context information aggregation. We also propose a comprehensive loss function to highlight the marginal and regional accuracy of rain-free images. Extensive experiments on benchmark public datasets show both efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving structure-preserving rain-free images for heavy rain removal. The source code and pre-trained models can be found at \url{https://github.com/wybchd/DPENet}.

We propose a new setting that relaxes the assumption in the conventional CoSOD setting by allowing the presence of \enquote{noisy images} which do not share the common salient object. We call this new setting Generalised Co-Salient Object Detection (GCoSOD). We propose a novel random sampling based Generalised CoSOD Training (GCT) strategy to distill the awareness of inter-image absence of co-salient object into CoSOD models. It employs a Diverse Sampling Self-Supervised Learning (D$\text{S}^{3}$L) that, in addition to the provided supervised co-salient label, introduces additional self-supervised labels for images (being null that no co-salient object is present). Further, the random sampling process inherent in GCT enables the generation of a high-quality uncertainty map highlighting potential false-positive predictions at instance level. To evaluate the performance of CoSOD models under the GCoSOD setting, we propose two new testing datasets, namely CoCA-Common and CoCA-Zero, where a common salient object is partially present in the former and completely absent in the latter. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the performance of CoSOD models in terms of the performance under the GCoSOD setting as well as the model calibration degrees.

As the quality of optical sensors improves, there is a need for processing large-scale images. In particular, the ability of devices to capture ultra-high definition (UHD) images and video places new demands on the image processing pipeline. In this paper, we consider the task of low-light image enhancement (LLIE) and introduce a large-scale database consisting of images at 4K and 8K resolution. We conduct systematic benchmarking studies and provide a comparison of current LLIE algorithms. As a second contribution, we introduce LLFormer, a transformer-based low-light enhancement method. The core components of LLFormer are the axis-based multi-head self-attention and cross-layer attention fusion block, which significantly reduces the linear complexity. Extensive experiments on the new dataset and existing public datasets show that LLFormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also show that employing existing LLIE methods trained on our benchmark as a pre-processing step significantly improves the performance of downstream tasks, e.g., face detection in low-light conditions. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/TaoWangzj/LLFormer., Comment: Accepted at AAAI 2023. #AAAI2023

Vision transformers have shown great success on numerous computer vision tasks. However, its central component, softmax attention, prohibits vision transformers from scaling up to high-resolution images, due to both the computational complexity and memory footprint being quadratic. Although linear attention was introduced in natural language processing (NLP) tasks to mitigate a similar issue, directly applying existing linear attention to vision transformers may not lead to satisfactory results. We investigate this problem and find that computer vision tasks focus more on local information compared with NLP tasks. Based on this observation, we present a Vicinity Attention that introduces a locality bias to vision transformers with linear complexity. Specifically, for each image patch, we adjust its attention weight based on its 2D Manhattan distance measured by its neighbouring patches. In this case, the neighbouring patches will receive stronger attention than far-away patches. Moreover, since our Vicinity Attention requires the token length to be much larger than the feature dimension to show its efficiency advantages, we further propose a new Vicinity Vision Transformer (VVT) structure to reduce the feature dimension without degenerating the accuracy. We perform extensive experiments on the CIFAR100, ImageNet1K, and ADE20K datasets to validate the effectiveness of our method. Our method has a slower growth rate of GFlops than previous transformer-based and convolution-based networks when the input resolution increases. In particular, our approach achieves state-of-the-art image classification accuracy with 50% fewer parameters than previous methods., Comment: code: https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/Vicinity-Vision-Transformer

Blind Face Restoration (BFR) aims to recover high-quality face images from low-quality ones and usually resorts to facial priors for improving restoration performance. However, current methods still suffer from two major difficulties: 1) how to derive a powerful network architecture without extensive hand tuning; 2) how to capture complementary information from multiple facial priors in one network to improve restoration performance. To this end, we propose a Face Restoration Searching Network (FRSNet) to adaptively search the suitable feature extraction architecture within our specified search space, which can directly contribute to the restoration quality. On the basis of FRSNet, we further design our Multiple Facial Prior Searching Network (MFPSNet) with a multi-prior learning scheme. MFPSNet optimally extracts information from diverse facial priors and fuses the information into image features, ensuring that both external guidance and internal features are reserved. In this way, MFPSNet takes full advantage of semantic-level (parsing maps), geometric-level (facial heatmaps), reference-level (facial dictionaries) and pixel-level (degraded images) information and thus generates faithful and realistic images. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that MFPSNet performs favorably on both synthetic and real-world datasets against the state-of-the-art BFR methods. The codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/YYJ1anG/MFPSNet., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures

Multi-scale and multi-patch deep models have been shown effective in removing blurs of dynamic scenes. However, these methods still suffer from one major obstacle: manually designing a lightweight and high-efficiency network is challenging and time-consuming. To tackle this obstacle, we propose a novel deblurring method, dubbed PyNAS (pyramid neural architecture search network), towards automatically designing hyper-parameters including the scales, patches, and standard cell operators. The proposed PyNAS adopts gradient-based search strategies and innovatively searches the hierarchy patch and scale scheme not limited to cell searching. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical search strategy tailored to the multi-scale and multi-patch deblurring task. The strategy follows the principle that the first distinguishes between the top-level (pyramid-scales and pyramid-patches) and bottom-level variables (cell operators) and then searches multi-scale variables using the top-to-bottom principle. During the search stage, PyNAS employs an early stopping strategy to avoid the collapse and computational issues. Furthermore, we use a path-level binarization mechanism for multi-scale cell searching to save the memory consumption. Our primary contribution is a real-time deblurring algorithm (around 58 fps) for 720p images while achieves state-of-the-art deblurring performance on the GoPro and Video Deblurring datasets.

Industrial production of graphene by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) requires more than the ability to synthesize large domain, high quality graphene in a lab reactor. The integration of graphene in the fabrication process of electronic devices requires the cost-effective and environmentally-friendly production of graphene on dielectric substrates, but current approaches can only produce graphene on metal catalysts. Sustainable manufacturing of graphene should also conserve the catalyst and reaction gases, but today the metal catalysts are typically dissolved after synthesis. Progress toward these objectives is hindered by the hundreds of coupled synthesis parameters that can strongly affect CVD of low-dimensional materials, and poor communication in the published literature of the rich experimental data that exists in individual laboratories. We report here on a platform, “Graphene – Recipes for synthesis of high quality material” (Gr-ResQ: pronounced graphene rescue), that includes powerful new tools for data-driven graphene synthesis. At the core of Gr-ResQ is a crowd-sourced database of CVD synthesis recipes and associated experimental results. The database captures ∼300 parameters ranging from synthesis conditions like catalyst material and preparation steps, to ambient lab temperature and reactor details, as well as resulting Raman spectra and microscopy images. These parameters are carefully selected to unlock the potential of machine-learning models to advance synthesis. A suite of associated tools enable fast, automated and standardized processing of Raman spectra and scanning electron microscopy images. To facilitate community-based efforts, Gr-ResQ provides tools for cyber-physical collaborations among research groups, allowing experiments to be designed, executed, and analyzed by different teams. Gr-ResQ also allows publication and discovery of recipes via the Materials Data Facility (MDF), which assigns each recipe a unique identifier when published and collects parameters in a search index. We envision that this holistic approach to data-driven synthesis can accelerate CVD recipe discovery and production control, and open opportunities for advancing not only graphene, but also many other 1D and 2D materials.

Images captured in snowy days suffer from noticeable degradation of scene visibility, which degenerates the performance of current vision-based intelligent systems. Removing snow from images thus is an important topic in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a Deep Dense Multi-Scale Network (DDMSNet) for snow removal by exploiting semantic and depth priors. As images captured in outdoor often share similar scenes and their visibility varies with depth from camera, such semantic and depth information provides a strong prior for snowy image restoration. We incorporate the semantic and depth maps as input and learn the semantic-aware and geometry-aware representation to remove snow. In particular, we first create a coarse network to remove snow from the input images. Then, the coarsely desnowed images are fed into another network to obtain the semantic and depth labels. Finally, we design a DDMSNet to learn semantic-aware and geometry-aware representation via a self-attention mechanism to produce the final clean images. Experiments evaluated on public synthetic and real-world snowy images verify the superiority of the proposed method, offering better results both quantitatively and qualitatively. https://github.com/HDCVLab/Deep-Dense-Multi-scale-Network https://github.com/HDCVLab/Deep-Dense-Multi-scale-Network .

Blur artifacts can seriously degrade the visual quality of images, and numerous deblurring methods have been proposed for specific scenarios. However, in most real-world images, blur is caused by different factors, e.g., motion and defocus. In this paper, we address how different deblurring methods perform in the case of multiple types of blur. For in-depth performance evaluation, we construct a new large-scale multi-cause image deblurring dataset (called MC-Blur), including real-world and synthesized blurry images with mixed factors of blurs. The images in the proposed MC-Blur dataset are collected using different techniques: averaging sharp images captured by a 1000-fps high-speed camera, convolving Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) sharp images with large-size kernels, adding defocus to images, and real-world blurry images captured by various camera models. Based on the MC-Blur dataset, we conduct extensive benchmarking studies to compare SOTA methods in different scenarios, analyze their efficiency, and investigate the built dataset's capacity. These benchmarking results provide a comprehensive overview of the advantages and limitations of current deblurring methods, and reveal the advances of our dataset.

Video deraining is an important task in computer vision as the unwanted rain hampers the visibility of videos and deteriorates the robustness of most outdoor vision systems. Despite the significant success which has been achieved for video deraining recently, two major challenges remain: 1) how to exploit the vast information among continuous frames to extract powerful spatio-temporal features across both the spatial and temporal domains, and 2) how to restore high-quality derained videos with a high-speed approach. In this paper, we present a new end-to-end video deraining framework, named Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Interaction Network (ESTINet), which considerably boosts current state-of-the-art video deraining quality and speed. The ESTINet takes the advantage of deep residual networks and convolutional long short-term memory, which can capture the spatial features and temporal correlations among continuing frames at the cost of very little computational source. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that the proposed ESTINet can achieve faster speed than the competitors, while maintaining better performance than the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)

Effective and Efficient spatio-temporal modeling is essential for action recognition. Existing methods suffer from the trade-off between model performance and model complexity. In this paper, we present a novel Spatio-Temporal Hybrid Convolution Network (denoted as "STH") which simultaneously encodes spatial and temporal video information with a small parameter cost. Different from existing works that sequentially or parallelly extract spatial and temporal information with different convolutional layers, we divide the input channels into multiple groups and interleave the spatial and temporal operations in one convolutional layer, which deeply incorporates spatial and temporal clues. Such a design enables efficient spatio-temporal modeling and maintains a small model scale. STH-Conv is a general building block, which can be plugged into existing 2D CNN architectures such as ResNet and MobileNet by replacing the conventional 2D-Conv blocks (2D convolutions). STH network achieves competitive or even better performance than its competitors on benchmark datasets such as Something-Something (V1 & V2), Jester, and HMDB-51. Moreover, STH enjoys performance superiority over 3D CNNs while maintaining an even smaller parameter cost than 2D CNNs.

Sign language translation (SLT) aims to interpret sign video sequences into text-based natural language sentences. Sign videos consist of continuous sequences of sign gestures with no clear boundaries in between. Existing SLT models usually represent sign visual features in a frame-wise manner so as to avoid needing to explicitly segmenting the videos into isolated signs. However, these methods neglect the temporal information of signs and lead to substantial ambiguity in translation. In this paper, we explore the temporal semantic structures of signvideos to learn more discriminative features. To this end, we first present a novel sign video segment representation which takes into account multiple temporal granularities, thus alleviating the need for accurate video segmentation. Taking advantage of the proposed segment representation, we develop a novel hierarchical sign video feature learning method via a temporal semantic pyramid network, called TSPNet. Specifically, TSPNet introduces an inter-scale attention to evaluate and enhance local semantic consistency of sign segments and an intra-scale attention to resolve semantic ambiguity by using non-local video context. Experiments show that our TSPNet outperforms the state-of-the-art with significant improvements on the BLEU score (from 9.58 to 13.41) and ROUGE score (from 31.80 to 34.96)on the largest commonly-used SLT dataset. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/verashira/TSPNet., Comment: NeurIPS 2020 preprint

Informative features play a crucial role in the single image super-resolution task. Channel attention has been demonstrated to be effective for preserving information-rich features in each layer. However, channel attention treats each convolution layer as a separate process that misses the correlation among different layers. To address this problem, we propose a new holistic attention network (HAN), which consists of a layer attention module (LAM) and a channel-spatial attention module (CSAM), to model the holistic interdependencies among layers, channels, and positions. Specifically, the proposed LAM adaptively emphasizes hierarchical features by considering correlations among layers. Meanwhile, CSAM learns the confidence at all the positions of each channel to selectively capture more informative features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed HAN performs favorably against the state-of-the-art single image super-resolution approaches., Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision