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In this paper, we propose a learning-based approach for denoising raw videos captured under low lighting conditions. We propose to do this by first explicitly aligning the neighboring frames to the current frame using a convolutional neural network (CNN). We then fuse the registered frames using another CNN to obtain the final denoised frame. To avoid directly aligning the temporally distant frames, we perform the two processes of alignment and fusion in multiple stages. Specifically, at each stage, we perform the denoising process on three consecutive input frames to generate the intermediate denoised frames which are then passed as the input to the next stage. By performing the process in multiple stages, we can effectively utilize the information of neighboring frames without directly aligning the temporally distant frames. We train our multi-stage system using an adversarial loss with a conditional discriminator. Specifically, we condition the discriminator on a soft gradient mask to prevent introducing high-frequency artifacts in smooth regions. We show that our system is able to produce temporally coherent videos with realistic details. Furthermore, we demonstrate through extensive experiments that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art image and video denoising methods both numerically and visually.
In this paper, we present new data pre-processing and augmentation techniques for DNN-based raw image denoising. Compared with traditional RGB image denoising, performing this task on direct camera sensor readings presents new challenges such as how to effectively handle various Bayer patterns from different data sources, and subsequently how to perform valid data augmentation with raw images. To address the first problem, we propose a Bayer pattern unification (BayerUnify) method to unify different Bayer patterns. This allows us to fully utilize a heterogeneous dataset to train a single denoising model instead of training one model for each pattern. Furthermore, while it is essential to augment the dataset to improve model generalization and performance, we discovered that it is error-prone to modify raw images by adapting augmentation methods designed for RGB images. Towards this end, we present a Bayer preserving augmentation (BayerAug) method as an effective approach for raw image augmentation. Combining these data processing technqiues with a modified U-Net, our method achieves a PSNR of 52.11 and a SSIM of 0.9969 in NTIRE 2019 Real Image Denoising Challenge, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jiaming-Liu/BayerUnifyAug.
In recent years, the supervised learning strategy for real noisy image denoising has been emerging and has achieved promising results. In contrast, realistic noise removal for raw noisy videos is rarely studied due to the lack of noisy-clean pairs for dynamic scenes. Clean video frames for dynamic scenes cannot be captured with a long-exposure shutter or averaging multi-shots as was done for static images. In this paper, we solve this problem by creating motions for controllable objects, such as toys, and capturing each static moment for multiple times to generate clean video frames. In this way, we construct a dataset with 55 groups of noisy-clean videos with ISO values ranging from 1600 to 25600. To our knowledge, this is the first dynamic video dataset with noisy-clean pairs. Correspondingly, we propose a raw video denoising network (RViDeNet) by exploring the temporal, spatial, and channel correlations of video frames. Since the raw video has Bayer patterns, we pack it into four sub-sequences, i.e RGBG sequences, which are denoised by the proposed RViDeNet separately and finally fused into a clean video. In addition, our network not only outputs a raw denoising result, but also the sRGB result by going through an image signal processing (ISP) module, which enables users to generate the sRGB result with their favourite ISPs. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art video and raw image denoising algorithms on both indoor and outdoor videos.
Machine learning techniques work best when the data used for training resembles the data used for evaluation. This holds true for learned single-image denoising algorithms, which are applied to real raw camera sensor readings but, due to practical constraints, are often trained on synthetic image data. Though it is understood that generalizing from synthetic to real data requires careful consideration of the noise properties of image sensors, the other aspects of a cameras image processing pipeline (gain, color correction, tone mapping, etc) are often overlooked, despite their significant effect on how raw measurements are transformed into finished images. To address this, we present a technique to unprocess images by inverting each step of an image processing pipeline, thereby allowing us to synthesize realistic raw sensor measurements from commonly available internet photos. We additionally model the relevant components of an image processing pipeline when evaluating our loss function, which allows training to be aware of all relevant photometric processing that will occur after denoising. By processing and unprocessing model outputs and training data in this way, we are able to train a simple convolutional neural network that has 14%-38% lower error rates and is 9x-18x faster than the previous state of the art on the Darmstadt Noise Dataset, and generalizes to sensors outside of that dataset as well.
Modern one-stage video instance segmentation networks suffer from two limitations. First, convolutional features are neither aligned with anchor boxes nor with ground-truth bounding boxes, reducing the mask sensitivity to spatial location. Second, a video is directly divided into individual frames for frame-level instance segmentation, ignoring the temporal correlation between adjacent frames. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective one-stage video instance segmentation framework by spatial calibration and temporal fusion, namely STMask. To ensure spatial feature calibration with ground-truth bounding boxes, we first predict regressed bounding boxes around ground-truth bounding boxes, and extract features from them for frame-level instance segmentation. To further explore temporal correlation among video frames, we aggregate a temporal fusion module to infer instance masks from each frame to its adjacent frames, which helps our framework to handle challenging videos such as motion blur, partial occlusion and unusual object-to-camera poses. Experiments on the YouTube-VIS valid set show that the proposed STMask with ResNet-50/-101 backbone obtains 33.5 % / 36.8 % mask AP, while achieving 28.6 / 23.4 FPS on video instance segmentation. The code is released online https://github.com/MinghanLi/STMask.
Abnormal event detection in video is a complex computer vision problem that has attracted significant attention in recent years. The complexity of the task arises from the commonly-adopted definition of an abnormal event, that is, a rarely occurring event that typically depends on the surrounding context. Following the standard formulation of abnormal event detection as outlier detection, we propose a background-agnostic framework that learns from training videos containing only normal events. Our framework is composed of an object detector, a set of appearance and motion auto-encoders, and a set of classifiers. Since our framework only looks at object detections, it can be applied to different scenes, provided that normal events are defined identically across scenes and that the single main factor of variation is the background. To overcome the lack of abnormal data during training, we propose an adversarial learning strategy for the auto-encoders. We create a scene-agnostic set of out-of-domain pseudo-abnormal examples, which are correctly reconstructed by the auto-encoders before applying gradient ascent on the pseudo-abnormal examples. We further utilize the pseudo-abnormal examples to serve as abnormal examples when training appearance-based and motion-based binary classifiers to discriminate between normal and abnormal latent features and reconstructions. We compare our framework with the state-of-the-art methods on four benchmark data sets, using various evaluation metrics. Compared to existing methods, the empirical results indicate that our approach achieves favorable performance on all data sets. In addition, we provide region-based and track-based annotations for two large-scale abnormal event detection data sets from the literature, namely ShanghaiTech and Subway.