No Arabic abstract
Existing deep convolutional neural networks have found major success in image deraining, but at the expense of an enormous number of parameters. This limits their potential application, for example in mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight pyramid of networks (LPNet) for single image deraining. Instead of designing a complex network structures, we use domain-specific knowledge to simplify the learning process. Specifically, we find that by introducing the mature Gaussian-Laplacian image pyramid decomposition technology to the neural network, the learning problem at each pyramid level is greatly simplified and can be handled by a relatively shallow network with few parameters. We adopt recursive and residual network structures to build the proposed LPNet, which has less than 8K parameters while still achieving state-of-the-art performance on rain removal. We also discuss the potential value of LPNet for other low- and high-level vision tasks.
We propose a novel lightweight generative adversarial network for efficient image manipulation using natural language descriptions. To achieve this, a new word-level discriminator is proposed, which provides the generator with fine-grained training feedback at word-level, to facilitate training a lightweight generator that has a small number of parameters, but can still correctly focus on specific visual attributes of an image, and then edit them without affecting other contents that are not described in the text. Furthermore, thanks to the explicit training signal related to each word, the discriminator can also be simplified to have a lightweight structure. Compared with the state of the art, our method has a much smaller number of parameters, but still achieves a competitive manipulation performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method can better disentangle different visual attributes, then correctly map them to corresponding semantic words, and thus achieve a more accurate image modification using natural language descriptions.
We present a novel GAN-based model that utilizes the space of deep features learned by a pre-trained classification model. Inspired by classical image pyramid representations, we construct our model as a Semantic Generation Pyramid -- a hierarchical framework which leverages the continuum of semantic information encapsulated in such deep features; this ranges from low level information contained in fine features to high level, semantic information contained in deeper features. More specifically, given a set of features extracted from a reference image, our model generates diverse image samples, each with matching features at each semantic level of the classification model. We demonstrate that our model results in a versatile and flexible framework that can be used in various classic and novel image generation tasks. These include: generating images with a controllable extent of semantic similarity to a reference image, and different manipulation tasks such as semantically-controlled inpainting and compositing; all achieved with the same model, with no further training.
We propose a principled convolutional neural pyramid (CNP) framework for general low-level vision and image processing tasks. It is based on the essential finding that many applications require large receptive fields for structure understanding. But corresponding neural networks for regression either stack many layers or apply large kernels to achieve it, which is computationally very costly. Our pyramid structure can greatly enlarge the field while not sacrificing computation efficiency. Extra benefit includes adaptive network depth and progressive upsampling for quasi-realtime testing on VGA-size input. Our method profits a broad set of applications, such as depth/RGB image restoration, completion, noise/artifact removal, edge refinement, image filtering, image enhancement and colorization.
Image dehazing aims to recover the uncorrupted content from a hazy image. Instead of leveraging traditional low-level or handcrafted image priors as the restoration constraints, e.g., dark channels and increased contrast, we propose an end-to-end gated context aggregation network to directly restore the final haze-free image. In this network, we adopt the latest smoothed dilation technique to help remove the gridding artifacts caused by the widely-used dilated convolution with negligible extra parameters, and leverage a gated sub-network to fuse the features from different levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can surpass previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively. In addition, to demonstrate the generality of the proposed method, we further apply it to the image deraining task, which also achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Code has been made available at https://github.com/cddlyf/GCANet.
Recent CNN-based methods for image deraining have achieved excellent performance in terms of reconstruction error as well as visual quality. However, these methods are limited in the sense that they can be trained only on fully labeled data. Due to various challenges in obtaining real world fully-labeled image deraining datasets, existing methods are trained only on synthetically generated data and hence, generalize poorly to real-world images. The use of real-world data in training image deraining networks is relatively less explored in the literature. We propose a Gaussian Process-based semi-supervised learning framework which enables the network in learning to derain using synthetic dataset while generalizing better using unlabeled real-world images. Through extensive experiments and ablations on several challenging datasets (such as Rain800, Rain200H and DDN-SIRR), we show that the proposed method, when trained on limited labeled data, achieves on-par performance with fully-labeled training. Additionally, we demonstrate that using unlabeled real-world images in the proposed GP-based framework results in superior performance as compared to existing methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/rajeevyasarla/Syn2Real