No Arabic abstract
Dynamic scene deblurring is a challenging problem in computer vision. It is difficult to accurately estimate the spatially varying blur kernel by traditional methods. Data-driven-based methods usually employ kernel-free end-to-end mapping schemes, which are apt to overlook the kernel estimation. To address this issue, we propose a blur-attention module to dynamically capture the spatially varying features of non-uniform blurred images. The module consists of a DenseBlock unit and a spatial attention unit with multi-pooling feature fusion, which can effectively extract complex spatially varying blur features. We design a multi-level residual connection structure to connect multiple blur-attention modules to form a blur-attention network. By introducing the blur-attention network into a conditional generation adversarial framework, we propose an end-to-end blind motion deblurring method, namely Blur-Attention-GAN (BAG), for a single image. Our method can adaptively select the weights of the extracted features according to the spatially varying blur features, and dynamically restore the images. Experimental results show that the deblurring capability of our method achieved outstanding objective performance in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and subjective visual quality. Furthermore, by visualizing the features extracted by the blur-attention module, comprehensive discussions are provided on its effectiveness.
Recently, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) have been widely used in image restoration and obtained great success. However, most of existing methods are limited to local receptive field and equal treatment of different types of information. Besides, existing methods always use a multi-supervised method to aggregate different feature maps, which can not effectively aggregate hierarchical feature information. To address these issues, we propose an attention cube network (A-CubeNet) for image restoration for more powerful feature expression and feature correlation learning. Specifically, we design a novel attention mechanism from three dimensions, namely spatial dimension, channel-wise dimension and hierarchical dimension. The adaptive spatial attention branch (ASAB) and the adaptive channel attention branch (ACAB) constitute the adaptive dual attention module (ADAM), which can capture the long-range spatial and channel-wise contextual information to expand the receptive field and distinguish different types of information for more effective feature representations. Furthermore, the adaptive hierarchical attention module (AHAM) can capture the long-range hierarchical contextual information to flexibly aggregate different feature maps by weights depending on the global context. The ADAM and AHAM cooperate to form an attention in attention structure, which means AHAMs inputs are enhanced by ASAB and ACAB. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art image restoration methods in both quantitative comparison and visual analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/YCHang686/A-CubeNet.
Spatial attention has been introduced to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for improving both their performance and interpretability in visual tasks including image classification. The essence of the spatial attention is to learn a weight map which represents the relative importance of activations within the same layer or channel. All existing attention mechanisms are local attentions in the sense that weight maps are image-specific. However, in the medical field, there are cases that all the images should share the same weight map because the set of images record the same kind of symptom related to the same object and thereby share the same structural content. In this paper, we thus propose a novel global spatial attention mechanism in CNNs mainly for medical image classification. The global weight map is instantiated by a decision boundary between important pixels and unimportant pixels. And we propose to realize the decision boundary by a binary classifier in which the intensities of all images at a pixel are the features of the pixel. The binary classification is integrated into an image classification CNN and is to be optimized together with the CNN. Experiments on two medical image datasets and one facial expression dataset showed that with the proposed attention, not only the performance of four powerful CNNs which are GoogleNet, VGG, ResNet, and DenseNet can be improved, but also meaningful attended regions can be obtained, which is beneficial for understanding the content of images of a domain.
Non-local low-rank tensor approximation has been developed as a state-of-the-art method for hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration, which includes the tasks of denoising, compressed HSI reconstruction and inpainting. Unfortunately, while its restoration performance benefits from more spectral bands, its runtime also substantially increases. In this paper, we claim that the HSI lies in a global spectral low-rank subspace, and the spectral subspaces of each full band patch group should lie in this global low-rank subspace. This motivates us to propose a unified paradigm combining the spatial and spectral properties for HSI restoration. The proposed paradigm enjoys performance superiority from the non-local spatial denoising and light computation complexity from the low-rank orthogonal basis exploration. An efficient alternating minimization algorithm with rank adaptation is developed. It is done by first solving a fidelity term-related problem for the update of a latent input image, and then learning a low-dimensional orthogonal basis and the related reduced image from the latent input image. Subsequently, non-local low-rank denoising is developed to refine the reduced image and orthogonal basis iteratively. Finally, the experiments on HSI denoising, compressed reconstruction, and inpainting tasks, with both simulated and real datasets, demonstrate its superiority with respect to state-of-the-art HSI restoration methods.
Medical imaging plays a critical role in various clinical applications. However, due to multiple considerations such as cost and risk, the acquisition of certain image modalities could be limited. To address this issue, many cross-modality medical image synthesis methods have been proposed. However, the current methods cannot well model the hard-to-synthesis regions (e.g., tumor or lesion regions). To address this issue, we propose a simple but effective strategy, that is, we propose a dual-discriminator (dual-D) adversarial learning system, in which, a global-D is used to make an overall evaluation for the synthetic image, and a local-D is proposed to densely evaluate the local regions of the synthetic image. More importantly, we build an adversarial attention mechanism which targets at better modeling hard-to-synthesize regions (e.g., tumor or lesion regions) based on the local-D. Experimental results show the robustness and accuracy of our method in synthesizing fine-grained target images from the corresponding source images. In particular, we evaluate our method on two datasets, i.e., to address the tasks of generating T2 MRI from T1 MRI for the brain tumor images and generating MRI from CT. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under comparison in all datasets and tasks. And the proposed difficult-region-aware attention mechanism is also proved to be able to help generate more realistic images, especially for the hard-to-synthesize regions.
Image quality assessment (IQA) is the key factor for the fast development of image restoration (IR) algorithms. The most recent IR methods based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved significant improvement in visual performance, but also presented great challenges for quantitative evaluation. Notably, we observe an increasing inconsistency between perceptual quality and the evaluation results. Then we raise two questions: (1) Can existing IQA methods objectively evaluate recent IR algorithms? (2) When focus on beating current benchmarks, are we getting better IR algorithms? To answer these questions and promote the development of IQA methods, we contribute a large-scale IQA dataset, called Perceptual Image Processing Algorithms (PIPAL) dataset. Especially, this dataset includes the results of GAN-based methods, which are missing in previous datasets. We collect more than 1.13 million human judgments to assign subjective scores for PIPAL images using the more reliable Elo system. Based on PIPAL, we present new benchmarks for both IQA and super-resolution methods. Our results indicate that existing IQA methods cannot fairly evaluate GAN-based IR algorithms. While using appropriate evaluation methods is important, IQA methods should also be updated along with the development of IR algorithms. At last, we improve the performance of IQA networks on GAN-based distortions by introducing anti-aliasing pooling. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method.