Jianrui Cai

Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely explored in single image super-resolution (SISR) and obtained remarkable performance. However, most of the existing CNN-based SISR methods mainly focus on wider or deeper architecture design, neglecting to explore the feature correlations of intermediate layers, hence hindering the representational power of CNNs. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a second-order attention network (SAN) for more powerful feature expression and feature correlation learning. Specifically, a novel train- able second-order channel attention (SOCA) module is developed to adaptively rescale the channel-wise features by using second-order feature statistics for more discriminative representations. Furthermore, we present a non-locally enhanced residual group (NLRG) structure, which not only incorporates non-local operations to capture long-distance spatial contextual information, but also contains repeated local-source residual attention groups (LSRAG) to learn increasingly abstract feature representations. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our SAN network over state-of-the-art SISR methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality.

Due to the poor lighting condition and limited dynamic range of digital imaging devices, the recorded images are often under-/over-exposed and with low contrast. Most of previous single image contrast enhancement (SICE) methods adjust the tone curve to correct the contrast of an input image. Those methods, however, often fail in revealing image details because of the limited information in a single image. On the other hand, the SICE task can be better accomplished if we can learn extra information from appropriately collected training data. In this work, we propose to use the convolutional neural network (CNN) to train a SICE enhancer. One key issue is how to construct a training dataset of low-contrast and high-contrast image pairs for end-to-end CNN learning. To this end, we build a large-scale multi-exposure image dataset, which contains 589 elaborately selected high-resolution multi-exposure sequences with 4,413 images. Thirteen representative multi-exposure image fusion and stack-based high dynamic range imaging algorithms are employed to generate the contrast enhanced images for each sequence, and subjective experiments are conducted to screen the best quality one as the reference image of each scene. With the constructed dataset, a CNN can be easily trained as the SICE enhancer to improve the contrast of an under-/over-exposure image. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our method over existing SICE methods with a significant margin.

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.

Recent years have witnessed the increasing popularity of learning based methods to enhance the color and tone of photos. However, many existing photo enhancement methods either deliver unsatisfactory results or consume too much computational and memory resources, hindering their application to high-resolution images (usually with more than 12 megapixels) in practice. In this paper, we learn image-adaptive 3-dimensional lookup tables (3D LUTs) to achieve fast and robust photo enhancement. 3D LUTs are widely used for manipulating color and tone of photos, but they are usually manually tuned and fixed in camera imaging pipeline or photo editing tools. We, for the first time to our best knowledge, propose to learn 3D LUTs from annotated data using pairwise or unpaired learning. More importantly, our learned 3D LUT is image-adaptive for flexible photo enhancement. We learn multiple basis 3D LUTs and a small convolutional neural network (CNN) simultaneously in an end-to-end manner. The small CNN works on the down-sampled version of the input image to predict content-dependent weights to fuse the multiple basis 3D LUTs into an image-adaptive one, which is employed to transform the color and tone of source images efficiently. Our model contains less than 600K parameters and takes less than 2 ms to process an image of 4K resolution using one Titan RTX GPU. While being highly efficient, our model also outperforms the state-of-the-art photo enhancement methods by a large margin in terms of PSNR, SSIM and a color difference metric on two publically available benchmark datasets. Code will be released at https://github.com/HuiZeng/Image-Adaptive-3DLUT.

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.