No Arabic abstract
Recovering a high dynamic range (HDR) image from a single low dynamic range (LDR) input image is challenging due to missing details in under-/over-exposed regions caused by quantization and saturation of camera sensors. In contrast to existing learning-based methods, our core idea is to incorporate the domain knowledge of the LDR image formation pipeline into our model. We model the HDRto-LDR image formation pipeline as the (1) dynamic range clipping, (2) non-linear mapping from a camera response function, and (3) quantization. We then propose to learn three specialized CNNs to reverse these steps. By decomposing the problem into specific sub-tasks, we impose effective physical constraints to facilitate the training of individual sub-networks. Finally, we jointly fine-tune the entire model end-to-end to reduce error accumulation. With extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on diverse image datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art single-image HDR reconstruction algorithms.
Most consumer-grade digital cameras can only capture a limited range of luminance in real-world scenes due to sensor constraints. Besides, noise and quantization errors are often introduced in the imaging process. In order to obtain high dynamic range (HDR) images with excellent visual quality, the most common solution is to combine multiple images with different exposures. However, it is not always feasible to obtain multiple images of the same scene and most HDR reconstruction methods ignore the noise and quantization loss. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based approach using a spatially dynamic encoder-decoder network, HDRUNet, to learn an end-to-end mapping for single image HDR reconstruction with denoising and dequantization. The network consists of a UNet-style base network to make full use of the hierarchical multi-scale information, a condition network to perform pattern-specific modulation and a weighting network for selectively retaining information. Moreover, we propose a Tanh_L1 loss function to balance the impact of over-exposed values and well-exposed values on the network learning. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in quantitative comparisons and visual quality. The proposed HDRUNet model won the second place in the single frame track of NITRE2021 High Dynamic Range Challenge.
Synthesizing high dynamic range (HDR) images from multiple low-dynamic range (LDR) exposures in dynamic scenes is challenging. There are two major problems caused by the large motions of foreground objects. One is the severe misalignment among the LDR images. The other is the missing content due to the over-/under-saturated regions caused by the moving objects, which may not be easily compensated for by the multiple LDR exposures. Thus, it requires the HDR generation model to be able to properly fuse the LDR images and restore the missing details without introducing artifacts. To address these two problems, we propose in this paper a novel GAN-based model, HDR-GAN, for synthesizing HDR images from multi-exposed LDR images. To our best knowledge, this work is the first GAN-based approach for fusing multi-exposed LDR images for HDR reconstruction. By incorporating adversarial learning, our method is able to produce faithful information in the regions with missing content. In addition, we also propose a novel generator network, with a reference-based residual merging block for aligning large object motions in the feature domain, and a deep HDR supervision scheme for eliminating artifacts of the reconstructed HDR images. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance over the prior HDR methods on diverse scenes.
Image Signal Processor (ISP) is a crucial component in digital cameras that transforms sensor signals into images for us to perceive and understand. Existing ISP designs always adopt a fixed architecture, e.g., several sequential modules connected in a rigid order. Such a fixed ISP architecture may be suboptimal for real-world applications, where camera sensors, scenes and tasks are diverse. In this study, we propose a novel Reconfigurable ISP (ReconfigISP) whose architecture and parameters can be automatically tailored to specific data and tasks. In particular, we implement several ISP modules, and enable backpropagation for each module by training a differentiable proxy, hence allowing us to leverage the popular differentiable neural architecture search and effectively search for the optimal ISP architecture. A proxy tuning mechanism is adopted to maintain the accuracy of proxy networks in all cases. Extensive experiments conducted on image restoration and object detection, with different sensors, light conditions and efficiency constraints, validate the effectiveness of ReconfigISP. Only hundreds of parameters need tuning for every task.
We seek to reconstruct sharp and noise-free high-dynamic range (HDR) video from a dual-exposure sensor that records different low-dynamic range (LDR) information in different pixel columns: Odd columns provide low-exposure, sharp, but noisy information; even columns complement this with less noisy, high-exposure, but motion-blurred data. Previous LDR work learns to deblur and denoise (DISTORTED->CLEAN) supervised by pairs of CLEAN and DISTORTED images. Regrettably, capturing DISTORTED sensor readings is time-consuming; as well, there is a lack of CLEAN HDR videos. We suggest a method to overcome those two limitations. First, we learn a different function instead: CLEAN->DISTORTED, which generates samples containing correlated pixel noise, and row and column noise, as well as motion blur from a low number of CLEAN sensor readings. Second, as there is not enough CLEAN HDR video available, we devise a method to learn from LDR video in-stead. Our approach compares favorably to several strong baselines, and can boost existing methods when they are re-trained on our data. Combined with spatial and temporal super-resolution, it enables applications such as re-lighting with low noise or blur.
Shape reconstruction of deformable organs from two-dimensional X-ray images is a key technology for image-guided intervention. In this paper, we propose an image-to-graph convolutional network (IGCN) for deformable shape reconstruction from a single-viewpoint projection image. The IGCN learns relationship between shape/deformation variability and the deep image features based on a deformation mapping scheme. In experiments targeted to the respiratory motion of abdominal organs, we confirmed the proposed framework with a regularized loss function can reconstruct liver shapes from a single digitally reconstructed radiograph with a mean distance error of 3.6mm.