No Arabic abstract
Most learning-based super-resolution (SR) methods aim to recover high-resolution (HR) image from a given low-resolution (LR) image via learning on LR-HR image pairs. The SR methods learned on synthetic data do not perform well in real-world, due to the domain gap between the artificially synthesized and real LR images. Some efforts are thus taken to capture real-world image pairs. The captured LR-HR image pairs usually suffer from unavoidable misalignment, which hampers the performance of end-to-end learning, however. Here, focusing on the real-world SR, we ask a different question: since misalignment is unavoidable, can we propose a method that does not need LR-HR image pairing and alignment at all and utilize real images as they are? Hence we propose a framework to learn SR from an arbitrary set of unpaired LR and HR images and see how far a step can go in such a realistic and unsupervised setting. To do so, we firstly train a degradation generation network to generate realistic LR images and, more importantly, to capture their distribution (i.e., learning to zoom out). Instead of assuming the domain gap has been eliminated, we minimize the discrepancy between the generated data and real data while learning a degradation adaptive SR network (i.e., learning to zoom in). The proposed unpaired method achieves state-of-the-art SR results on real-world images, even in the datasets that favor the paired-learning methods more.
In real-world single image super-resolution (SISR) task, the low-resolution image suffers more complicated degradations, not only downsampled by unknown kernels. However, existing SISR methods are generally studied with the synthetic low-resolution generation such as bicubic interpolation (BI), which greatly limits their performance. Recently, some researchers investigate real-world SISR from the perspective of the camera and smartphone. However, except the acquisition equipment, the display device also involves more complicated degradations. In this paper, we focus on the camera-screen degradation and build a real-world dataset (Cam-ScreenSR), where HR images are original ground truths from the previous DIV2K dataset and corresponding LR images are camera-captur
Most image super-resolution (SR) methods are developed on synthetic low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) image pairs that are constructed by a predetermined operation, e.g., bicubic downsampling. As existing methods typically learn an inverse mapping of the specific function, they produce blurry results when applied to real-world images whose exact formulation is different and unknown. Therefore, several methods attempt to synthesize much more diverse LR samples or learn a realistic downsampling model. However, due to restrictive assumptions on the downsampling process, they are still biased and less generalizable. This study proposes a novel method to simulate an unknown downsampling process without imposing restrictive prior knowledge. We propose a generalizable low-frequency loss (LFL) in the adversarial training framework to imitate the distribution of target LR images without using any paired examples. Furthermore, we design an adaptive data loss (ADL) for the downsampler, which can be adaptively learned and updated from the data during the training loops. Extensive experiments validate that our downsampling model can facilitate existing SR methods to perform more accurate reconstructions on various synthetic and real-world examples than the conventional approaches.
This paper shows that when applying machine learning to digital zoom for photography, it is beneficial to use real, RAW sensor data for training. Existing learning-based super-resolution methods do not use real sensor data, instead operating on RGB images. In practice, these approaches result in loss of detail and accuracy in their digitally zoomed output when zooming in on distant image regions. We also show that synthesizing sensor data by resampling high-resolution RGB images is an oversimplified approximation of real sensor data and noise, resulting in worse image quality. The key barrier to using real sensor data for training is that ground truth high-resolution imagery is missing. We show how to obtain the ground-truth data with optically zoomed images and contribute a dataset, SR-RAW, for real-world computational zoom. We use SR-RAW to train a deep network with a novel contextual bilateral loss (CoBi) that delivers critical robustness to mild misalignment in input-output image pairs. The trained network achieves state-of-the-art performance in 4X and 8X computational zoom.
Super-resolution (SR) has traditionally been based on pairs of high-resolution images (HR) and their low-resolution (LR) counterparts obtained artificially with bicubic downsampling. However, in real-world SR, there is a large variety of realistic image degradations and analytically modeling these realistic degradations can prove quite difficult. In this work, we propose to handle real-world SR by splitting this ill-posed problem into two comparatively more well-posed steps. First, we train a network to transform real LR images to the space of bicubically downsampled images in a supervised manner, by using both real LR/HR pairs and synthetic pairs. Second, we take a generic SR network trained on bicubically downsampled images to super-resolve the transformed LR image. The first step of the pipeline addresses the problem by registering the large variety of degraded images to a common, well understood space of images. The second step then leverages the already impressive performance of SR on bicubically downsampled images, sidestepping the issues of end-to-end training on datasets with many different image degradations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method by comparing it to recent methods in real-world SR and show that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art works in terms of both qualitative and quantitative results, as well as results of an extensive user study conducted on several real image datasets.
Single image super-resolution (SISR), which aims to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) image from a low-resolution (LR) observation, has been an active research topic in the area of image processing in recent decades. Particularly, deep learning-based super-resolution (SR) approaches have drawn much attention and have greatly improved the reconstruction performance on synthetic data. Recent studies show that simulation results on synthetic data usually overestimate the capacity to super-resolve real-world images. In this context, more and more researchers devote themselves to develop SR approaches for realistic images. This article aims to make a comprehensive review on real-world single image super-resolution (RSISR). More specifically, this review covers the critical publically available datasets and assessment metrics for RSISR, and four major categories of RSISR methods, namely the degradation modeling-based RSISR, image pairs-based RSISR, domain translation-based RSISR, and self-learning-based RSISR. Comparisons are also made among representative RSISR methods on benchmark datasets, in terms of both reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. Besides, we discuss challenges and promising research topics on RSISR.