No Arabic abstract
Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method.
In this paper, we propose a deep generative adversarial network for super-resolution considering the trade-off between perception and distortion. Based on good performance of a recently developed model for super-resolution, i.e., deep residual network using enhanced upscale modules (EUSR), the proposed model is trained to improve perceptual performance with only slight increase of distortion. For this purpose, together with the conventional content loss, i.e., reconstruction loss such as L1 or L2, we consider additional losses in the training phase, which are the discrete cosine transform coefficients loss and differential content loss. These consider perceptual part in the content loss, i.e., consideration of proper high frequency components is helpful for the trade-off problem in super-resolution. The experimental results show that our proposed model has good performance for both perception and distortion, and is effective in perceptual super-resolution applications.
Gaze redirection is the task of changing the gaze to a desired direction for a given monocular eye patch image. Many applications such as videoconferencing, films, games, and generation of training data for gaze estimation require redirecting the gaze, without distorting the appearance of the area surrounding the eye and while producing photo-realistic images. Existing methods lack the ability to generate perceptually plausible images. In this work, we present a novel method to alleviate this problem by leveraging generative adversarial training to synthesize an eye image conditioned on a target gaze direction. Our method ensures perceptual similarity and consistency of synthesized images to the real images. Furthermore, a gaze estimation loss is used to control the gaze direction accurately. To attain high-quality images, we incorporate perceptual and cycle consistency losses into our architecture. In extensive evaluations we show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both image quality and redirection precision. Finally, we show that generated images can bring significant improvement for the gaze estimation task if used to augment real training data.
We consider the single image super-resolution problem in a more general case that the low-/high-resolution pairs and the down-sampling process are unavailable. Different from traditional super-resolution formulation, the low-resolution input is further degraded by noises and blurring. This complicated setting makes supervised learning and accurate kernel estimation impossible. To solve this problem, we resort to unsupervised learning without paired data, inspired by the recent successful image-to-image translation applications. With generative adversarial networks (GAN) as the basic component, we propose a Cycle-in-Cycle network structure to tackle the problem within three steps. First, the noisy and blurry input is mapped to a noise-free low-resolution space. Then the intermediate image is up-sampled with a pre-trained deep model. Finally, we fine-tune the two modules in an end-to-end manner to get the high-resolution output. Experiments on NTIRE2018 datasets demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised method achieves comparable results as the state-of-the-art supervised models.
Among the major remaining challenges for single image super resolution (SISR) is the capacity to recover coherent images with global shapes and local details conforming to human vision system. Recent generative adversarial network (GAN) based SISR methods have yielded overall realistic SR images, however, there are always unpleasant textures accompanied with structural distortions in local regions. To target these issues, we introduce the gradient branch into the generator to preserve structural information by restoring high-resolution gradient maps in SR process. In addition, we utilize a U-net based discriminator to consider both the whole image and the detailed per-pixel authenticity, which could encourage the generator to maintain overall coherence of the reconstructed images. Moreover, we have studied objective functions and LPIPS perceptual loss is added to generate more realistic and natural details. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art perceptual-driven SR methods in perception index (PI), and obtains more geometrically consistent and visually pleasing textures in natural image restoration.
Despite significant advances in image-to-image (I2I) translation with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been made, it remains challenging to effectively translate an image to a set of diverse images in multiple target domains using a pair of generator and discriminator. Existing multimodal I2I translation methods adopt multiple domain-specific content encoders for different domains, where each domain-specific content encoder is trained with images from the same domain only. Nevertheless, we argue that the content (domain-invariant) features should be learned from images among all the domains. Consequently, each domain-specific content encoder of existing schemes fails to extract the domain-invariant features efficiently. To address this issue, we present a flexible and general SoloGAN model for efficient multimodal I2I translation among multiple domains with unpaired data. In contrast to existing methods, the SoloGAN algorithm uses a single projection discriminator with an additional auxiliary classifier, and shares the encoder and generator for all domains. As such, the SoloGAN model can be trained effectively with images from all domains such that the domain-invariant content representation can be efficiently extracted. Qualitative and quantitative results over a wide range of datasets against several counterparts and variants of the SoloGAN model demonstrate the merits of the method, especially for the challenging I2I translation tasks, i.e., tasks that involve extreme shape variations or need to keep the complex backgrounds unchanged after translations. Furthermore, we demonstrate the contribution of each component using ablation studies.