No Arabic abstract
Many camera sensors use a dual-pixel (DP) design that operates as a rudimentary light field providing two sub-aperture views of a scene in a single capture. The DP sensor was developed to improve how cameras perform autofocus. Since the DP sensors introduction, researchers have found additional uses for the DP data, such as depth estimation, reflection removal, and defocus deblurring. We are interested in the latter task of defocus deblurring. In particular, we propose a single-image deblurring network that incorporates the two sub-aperture views into a multi-task framework. Specifically, we show that jointly learning to predict the two DP views from a single blurry input image improves the networks ability to learn to deblur the image. Our experiments show this multi-task strategy achieves +1dB PSNR improvement over state-of-the-art defocus deblurring methods. In addition, our multi-task framework allows accurate DP-view synthesis (e.g., ~ 39dB PSNR) from the single input image. These high-quality DP views can be used for other DP-based applications, such as reflection removal. As part of this effort, we have captured a new dataset of 7,059 high-quality images to support our training for the DP-view synthesis task. Our dataset, code, and trained models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Abdullah-Abuolaim/multi-task-defocus-deblurring-dual-pixel-nimat
Recent work has shown impressive results on data-driven defocus deblurring using the two-image views available on modern dual-pixel (DP) sensors. One significant challenge in this line of research is access to DP data. Despite many cameras having DP sensors, only a limited number provide access to the low-level DP sensor images. In addition, capturing training data for defocus deblurring involves a time-consuming and tedious setup requiring the cameras aperture to be adjusted. Some cameras with DP sensors (e.g., smartphones) do not have adjustable apertures, further limiting the ability to produce the necessary training data. We address the data capture bottleneck by proposing a procedure to generate realistic DP data synthetically. Our synthesis approach mimics the optical image formation found on DP sensors and can be applied to virtual scenes rendered with standard computer software. Leveraging these realistic synthetic DP images, we introduce a recurrent convolutional network (RCN) architecture that improves deblurring results and is suitable for use with single-frame and multi-frame data (e.g., video) captured by DP sensors. Finally, we show that our synthetic DP data is useful for training DNN models targeting video deblurring applications where access to DP data remains challenging.
The defocus deblurring raised from the finite aperture size and exposure time is an essential problem in the computational photography. It is very challenging because the blur kernel is spatially varying and difficult to estimate by traditional methods. Due to its great breakthrough in low-level tasks, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been introduced to the defocus deblurring problem and achieved significant progress. However, they apply the same kernel for different regions of the defocus blurred images, thus it is difficult to handle these nonuniform blurred images. To this end, this study designs a novel blur-aware multi-branch network (BaMBNet), in which different regions (with different blur amounts) should be treated differentially. In particular, we estimate the blur amounts of different regions by the internal geometric constraint of the DP data, which measures the defocus disparity between the left and right views. Based on the assumption that different image regions with different blur amounts have different deblurring difficulties, we leverage different networks with different capacities (emph{i.e.} parameters) to process different image regions. Moreover, we introduce a meta-learning defocus mask generation algorithm to assign each pixel to a proper branch. In this way, we can expect to well maintain the information of the clear regions while recovering the missing details of the blurred regions. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our BaMBNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Source code will be available at https://github.com/junjun-jiang/BaMBNet.
Analyzing and understanding hand information from multimedia materials like images or videos is important for many real world applications and remains active in research community. There are various works focusing on recovering hand information from single image, however, they usually solve a single task, for example, hand mask segmentation, 2D/3D hand pose estimation, or hand mesh reconstruction and perform not well in challenging scenarios. To further improve the performance of these tasks, we propose a novel Hand Image Understanding (HIU) framework to extract comprehensive information of the hand object from a single RGB image, by jointly considering the relationships between these tasks. To achieve this goal, a cascaded multi-task learning (MTL) backbone is designed to estimate the 2D heat maps, to learn the segmentation mask, and to generate the intermediate 3D information encoding, followed by a coarse-to-fine learning paradigm and a self-supervised learning strategy. Qualitative experiments demonstrate that our approach is capable of recovering reasonable mesh representations even in challenging situations. Quantitatively, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on various widely-used datasets, in terms of diverse evaluation metrics.
As a proposal-free approach, instance segmentation through pixel embedding learning and clustering is gaining more emphasis. Compared with bounding box refinement approaches, such as Mask R-CNN, it has potential advantages in handling complex shapes and dense objects. In this work, we propose a simple, yet highly effective, architecture for object-aware embedding learning. A distance regression module is incorporated into our architecture to generate seeds for fast clustering. At the same time, we show that the features learned by the distance regression module are able to promote the accuracy of learned object-aware embeddings significantly. By simply concatenating features of the distance regression module to the images as inputs of the embedding module, the mSBD scores on the CVPPP Leaf Segmentation Challenge can be further improved by more than 8% compared to the identical set-up without concatenation, yielding the best overall result amongst the leaderboard at CodaLab.
Recently, deep learning based image deblurring has been well developed. However, exploiting the detailed image features in a deep learning framework always requires a mass of parameters, which inevitably makes the network suffer from high computational burden. To solve this problem, we propose a lightweight multiinformation fusion network (LMFN) for image deblurring. The proposed LMFN is designed as an encoder-decoder architecture. In the encoding stage, the image feature is reduced to various smallscale spaces for multi-scale information extraction and fusion without a large amount of information loss. Then, a distillation network is used in the decoding stage, which allows the network benefit the most from residual learning while remaining sufficiently lightweight. Meanwhile, an information fusion strategy between distillation modules and feature channels is also carried out by attention mechanism. Through fusing different information in the proposed approach, our network can achieve state-of-the-art image deblurring result with smaller number of parameters and outperforms existing methods in model complexity.