It is a challenging task to restore images from their variants with combined distortions. In the existing works, a promising strategy is to apply parallel "operations" to handle different types of distortion. However, in the feature fusion phase, a small number of operations would dominate the restoration result due to the features' heterogeneity by different operations. To this end, we introduce the tensor 1x1 convolutional layer by imposing high-order tensor (outer) product, by which we not only harmonize the heterogeneous features but also take additional non-linearity into account. To avoid the unacceptable kernel size resulted from the tensor product, we construct the kernels with tensor network decomposition, which is able to convert the exponential growth of the dimension to linear growth. Armed with the new layer, we propose High-order OWAN for multi-distorted image restoration. In the numerical experiments, the proposed net outperforms the previous state-of-the-art and shows promising performance even in more difficult tasks.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Liquify is a common technique for image editing, which can be used for image distortion. Due to the uncertainty in the distortion variation, restoring distorted images caused by liquify filter is a challenging task. To edit images in an efficient way, distorted images are expected to be restored automatically. This paper aims at the distorted image restoration, which is characterized by seeking the appropriate warping and completion of a distorted image. Existing methods focus on the hardware assistance or the geometric principle to solve the specific regular deformation caused by natural phen…
CAS Key Laboratory of Technology in Geo-spatial Information Processing and Application System, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学 中国科学院空间信息处理与应用系统技术重点实验室）
Hybrid-distorted image restoration (HD-IR) is dedicated to restore real distorted image that is degraded by multiple distortions. Existing HD-IR approaches usually ignore the inherent interference among hybrid distortions which compromises the restoration performance. To decompose such interference, we introduce the concept of Disentangled Feature Learning to achieve the feature-level divide-and-conquer of hybrid distortions. Specifically, we propose the feature disentanglement module (FDM) to distribute feature representations of different distortions into different channels by revising gain-…
Images of static scenes submerged beneath a wavy water surface exhibit severe non-rigid distortions. The physics of water flow suggests that water surfaces possess spatio-temporal smoothness and temporal periodicity. Hence they possess a sparse representation in the 3D discrete Fourier (DFT) basis. Motivated by this, we pose the task of restoration of such video sequences as a compressed sensing (CS) problem. We begin by tracking a few salient feature points across the frames of a video sequence of the submerged scene. Using these point trajectories, we show that the motion fields at all other…
Deformation-Invariant Neural Network and Its Applications in Distorted Image Restoration and Analysis
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Hong Kong Center for Cerebro-Cardiovascular Health Engineering（香港脑心血管健康工程中心）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人研究院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
With the spread of tampered images, locating the tampered regions in digital images has drawn increasing attention. The existing image tampering localization methods, however, suffer from severe performance degradation when the tampered images are subjected to some post-processing, as the tampering traces would be distorted by the post-processing operations. The poor robustness against post-processing has become a bottleneck for the practical applications of image tampering localization techniques. In order to address this issue, this paper proposes a novel restoration-assisted framework for i…
Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center（协同媒体创新中心）；Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (MoE), School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学电子工程与计算机科学学院机器感知重点实验室（教育部））；Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)（中国科学院智能信息处理重点实验室）；Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Inspired by the free-energy brain theory, which implies that human visual system (HVS) tends to reduce uncertainty and restore perceptual details upon seeing a distorted image, we propose restorative adversarial net (RAN), a GAN-based model for no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). RAN, which mimics the process of HVS, consists of three components: a restorator, a discriminator and an evaluator. The restorator restores and reconstructs input distorted image patches, while the discriminator distinguishes the reconstructed patches from the pristine distortion-free patches. After restor…
Tohoku University（东北大学）；RIKEN Center for AIP（理化学研究所AIP中心）
Many studies have been conducted so far on image restoration, the problem of restoring a clean image from its distorted version. There are many different types of distortion which affect image quality. Previous studies have focused on single types of distortion, proposing methods for removing them. However, image quality degrades due to multiple factors in the real world. Thus, depending on applications, e.g., vision for autonomous cars or surveillance cameras, we need to be able to deal with multiple combined distortions with unknown mixture ratios. For this purpose, we propose a simple yet e…
Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Comprehensive Survey
University of Science and Technology of China（科学技术大学）；National University of Singapore（国立新加坡大学）；Eastern Institute for Advanced Study（东部高级研究机构）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；University of Patras（帕特雷大学）
When images are statistically described by a generative model we can use this information to develop optimum techniques for various image restoration problems as inpainting, super-resolution, image coloring, generative model inversion, etc. With the help of the generative model it is possible to formulate, in a natural way, these restoration problems as Statistical estimation problems. Our approach, by combining maximum a-posteriori probability with maximum likelihood estimation, is capable of restoring images that are distorted by transformations even when the latter contain unknown parameter…
Beware of Aliases -- Signal Preservation is Crucial for Robust Image Restoration
University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）；Institute for Machine Learning and Analytics（机器学习与分析研究所）；Offenburg University（奥芬堡大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息研究所）；Saarland Informatics Campus（萨尔州信息校区）
Sea-Undistort: A Dataset for Through-Water Image Restoration in High Resolution Airborne Bathymetric Mapping
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin（电气工程与计算机科学系，柏林技术大学）；Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD)（学习与数据基础研究院（BIFOLD））
Universität Bremen（不来梅大学）；Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute（弗劳恩霍夫海因里希·赫兹研究所）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Berlin Institute of Technology（柏林工业大学）
In most practical situations, the compression or transmission of images and videos creates distortions that will eventually be perceived by a human observer. Vice versa, image and video restoration techniques, such as inpainting or denoising, aim to enhance the quality of experience of human viewers. Correctly assessing the similarity between an image and an undistorted reference image as subjectively experienced by a human viewer can thus lead to significant improvements in any transmission, compression, or restoration system. This paper introduces the Haar wavelet-based perceptual similarity…
We address the problem of restoring a high-quality image from an observed image sequence strongly distorted by atmospheric turbulence. A novel algorithm is proposed in this paper to reduce geometric distortion as well as space-and-time-varying blur due to strong turbulence. By considering a suitable energy functional, our algorithm first obtains a sharp reference image and a subsampled image sequence containing sharp and mildly distorted image frames with respect to the reference image. The subsampled image sequence is then stabilized by applying the Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) …
University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Institute of Computer Science（计算机科学研究所）
Generative models for image restoration, enhancement, and generation have significantly improved the quality of the generated images. Surprisingly, these models produce more pleasant images to the human eye than other methods, yet, they may get a lower perceptual quality score using traditional perceptual quality metrics such as PSNR or SSIM. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a quantitative metric to reflect the performance of new algorithms, which should be well-aligned with the person's mean opinion score (MOS). Learning-based approaches for perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) usua…
In many professional fields, such as medicine, remote sensing and sciences, users often demand image compression methods to be mathematically lossless. But lossless image coding has a rather low compression ratio (around 2:1 for natural images). The only known technique to achieve significant compression while meeting the stringent fidelity requirements is the methodology of $\ell_\infty$-constrained coding that was developed and standardized in nineties. We make a major progress in $\ell_\infty$-constrained image coding after two decades, by developing a novel CNN-based soft $\ell_\infty$-con…
Circular Quasiconformal Deturbulence: Geometry-Based Restoration from Multiple Turbulent Frames
Department of Mathematics, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学数学系）；Hong Kong Centre for Cerebro-Cardiovascular Health Engineering（香港脑心血管健康工程中心）；Department of Mathematics, Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学数学系）
DA2Diff: Exploring Degradation-aware Adaptive Diffusion Priors for All-in-One Weather Restoration
School of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Collaborative Innovation Center of Novel Software Technology and Industrialization（新型软件技术与产业化协同创新中心）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University of Technology（安徽工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Full-reference (FR) image quality assessment (IQA) evaluates the visual quality of a distorted image by measuring its perceptual difference with pristine-quality reference, and has been widely used in low-level vision tasks. Pairwise labeled data with mean opinion score (MOS) are required in training FR-IQA model, but is time-consuming and cumbersome to collect. In contrast, unlabeled data can be easily collected from an image degradation or restoration process, making it encouraging to exploit unlabeled training data to boost FR-IQA performance. Moreover, due to the distribution inconsistency…
Deakin University（迪肯大学）；Defence Science and Technology Group（国防科学技术集团）
Underwater images are usually covered with a blue-greenish colour cast, making them distorted, blurry or low in contrast. This phenomenon occurs due to the light attenuation given by the scattering and absorption in the water column. In this paper, we present an image enhancement approach for dewatering which employs a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) with two generators. Our Dual Generator Dewatering cGAN (DGD-cGAN) removes the haze and colour cast induced by the water column and restores the true colours of underwater scenes whereby the effects of various attenuation and sca…
In-loop filtering is used in video coding to process the reconstructed frame in order to remove blocking artifacts. With the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), CNNs have been explored for in-loop filtering considering it can be treated as an image de-noising task. However, in addition to being a distorted image, the reconstructed frame is also obtained by a fixed line of block based encoding operations in video coding. It carries coding-unit based coding distortion of some similar characteristics. Therefore, in this paper, we address the filtering problem from two aspects, gl…
