Low-light image enhancement, such as recovering color and texture details from low-light images, is a complex and vital task. For automated driving, low-light scenarios will have serious implications for vision-based applications. To address this problem, we propose a real-time unsupervised generative adversarial network (GAN) containing multiple discriminators, i.e. a multi-scale discriminator, a texture discriminator, and a color discriminator. These distinct discriminators allow the evaluation of images from different perspectives. Further, considering that different channel features contain different information and the illumination is uneven in the image, we propose a feature fusion attention module. This module combines channel attention with pixel attention mechanisms to extract image features. Additionally, to reduce training time, we adopt a shared encoder for the generator and the discriminator. This makes the structure of the model more compact and the training more stable. Experiments indicate that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in qualitative and quantitative evaluations, and significant improvements are achieved for both autopilot positioning and detection results.
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
We propose an effective Structural Prior guided Generative Adversarial Transformer (SPGAT) to solve low-light image enhancement. Our SPGAT mainly contains a generator with two discriminators and a structural prior estimator (SPE). The generator is based on a U-shaped Transformer which is used to explore non-local information for better clear image restoration. The SPE is used to explore useful structures from images to guide the generator for better structural detail estimation. To generate more realistic images, we develop a new structural prior guided adversarial learning method by building …
PUGAN: Physical Model-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Using GAN with Dual-Discriminators
Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学信息科学研究所）；School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）；College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；ByteDance Inc.（字节跳动公司）；Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司）
In this paper, we tackle the problem of enhancing real-world low-light images with significant noise in an unsupervised fashion. Conventional unsupervised learning-based approaches usually tackle the low-light image enhancement problem using an image-to-image translation model. They focus primarily on illumination or contrast enhancement but fail to suppress the noise that ubiquitously exists in images taken under real-world low-light conditions. To address this issue, we explicitly decouple this task into two sub-tasks: illumination enhancement and noise suppression. We propose to learn a two…
Tongji University（同济大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Meituan（美团）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Getting rid of the fundamental limitations in fitting to the paired training data, recent unsupervised low-light enhancement methods excel in adjusting illumination and contrast of images. However, for unsupervised low light enhancement, the remaining noise suppression issue due to the lacking of supervision of detailed signal largely impedes the wide deployment of these methods in real-world applications. Herein, we propose a novel Cycle-Interactive Generative Adversarial Network (CIGAN) for unsupervised low-light image enhancement, which is capable of not only better transferring illuminatio…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Restoring images from low-light data is a challenging problem. Most existing deep-network based algorithms are designed to be trained with pairwise images. Due to the lack of real-world datasets, they usually perform poorly when generalized in practice in terms of loss of image edge and color information. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised generation network with attention-guidance to handle the low-light image enhancement task. Specifically, our network contains two parts: an edge auxiliary module that restores sharper edges and an attention guidance module that recovers more realistic…
Deep learning-based methods for low-light image enhancement typically require enormous paired training data, which are impractical to capture in real-world scenarios. Recently, unsupervised approaches have been explored to eliminate the reliance on paired training data. However, they perform erratically in diverse real-world scenarios due to the absence of priors. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised low-light image enhancement method based on an effective prior termed histogram equalization prior (HEP). Our work is inspired by the interesting observation that the feature maps of …
School of Electrical Engineering, Korea University（高丽大学电气工程学院）；LG Display（LG显示公司）
Various power-constrained contrast enhancement (PCCE) techniques have been applied to an organic light emitting diode (OLED) display for reducing the power demands of the display while preserving the image quality. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based PCCE scheme that constrains the power consumption of the OLED displays while enhancing the contrast of the displayed image. In the proposed method, the power consumption is constrained by simply reducing the brightness a certain ratio, whereas the perceived visual quality is preserved as much as possible by enhancing the contrast o…
The extremes of lighting (e.g. too much or too little light) usually cause many troubles for machine and human vision. Many recent works have mainly focused on under-exposure cases where images are often captured in low-light conditions (e.g. nighttime) and achieved promising results for enhancing the quality of images. However, they are inferior to handling images under over-exposure. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a novel unsupervised enhancement framework which is robust against various lighting conditions while does not require any well-exposed images to serve as the ground-truths…
Supervised learning-based methods yield robust denoising results, yet they are inherently limited by the need for large-scale clean/noisy paired datasets. The use of unsupervised denoisers, on the other hand, necessitates a more detailed understanding of the underlying image statistics. In particular, it is well known that apparent differences between clean and noisy images are most prominent on high-frequency bands, justifying the use of low-pass filters as part of conventional image preprocessing steps. However, most learning-based denoising methods utilize only one-sided information from th…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Low-light image enhancement is an inherently subjective process whose targets vary with the user's aesthetic. Motivated by this, several personalized enhancement methods have been investigated. However, the enhancement process based on user preferences in these techniques is invisible, i.e., a "black box". In this work, we propose an intelligible unsupervised personalized enhancer (iUPEnhancer) for low-light images, which establishes the correlations between the low-light and the unpaired reference images with regard to three user-friendly attributions (brightness, chromaticity, and noise). Th…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；École polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）
Benefited from the deep learning, image Super-Resolution has been one of the most developing research fields in computer vision. Depending upon whether using a discriminator or not, a deep convolutional neural network can provide an image with high fidelity or better perceptual quality. Due to the lack of ground truth images in real life, people prefer a photo-realistic image with low fidelity to a blurry image with high fidelity. In this paper, we revisit the classic example based image super-resolution approaches and come up with a novel generative model for perceptual image super-resolution…
UDBE: Unsupervised Diffusion-based Brightness Enhancement in Underwater Images
Centro de Ciências Computacionais（计算机科学中心）；Universidade Federal do Rio Grande（南里奥格兰德联邦大学）；Instituto de Ciências Exatas e Tecnologia（精确科学与技术研究所）；Universidade Federal do Amazonas（亚马逊联邦大学）
LLGS: Unsupervised Gaussian Splatting for Image Enhancement and Reconstruction in Pure Dark Environment
School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex（萨塞克斯大学工程与信息学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Yale-NUS College（耶鲁-新加坡国立大学学院）
Night images suffer not only from low light, but also from uneven distributions of light. Most existing night visibility enhancement methods focus mainly on enhancing low-light regions. This inevitably leads to over enhancement and saturation in bright regions, such as those regions affected by light effects (glare, floodlight, etc). To address this problem, we need to suppress the light effects in bright regions while, at the same time, boosting the intensity of dark regions. With this idea in mind, we introduce an unsupervised method that integrates a layer decomposition network and a light-…
Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳社会人工智能与机器人研究院）；Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
As vision based perception methods are usually built on the normal light assumption, there will be a serious safety issue when deploying them into low light environments. Recently, deep learning based methods have been proposed to enhance low light images by penalizing the pixel-wise loss of low light and normal light images. However, most of them suffer from the following problems: 1) the need of pairs of low light and normal light images for training, 2) the poor performance for dark images, 3) the amplification of noise. To alleviate these problems, in this paper, we propose a two-stage uns…
Gaussian Light Field Splatting: A Physical Prior-Driven Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement
College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Chongqing University（重庆大学机械与车辆工程学院）；Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学赫伯特·韦特海姆工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学电气与计算机工程系）；National Innovation Center of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles（国家智能网联汽车创新中心）；School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与运载学院）
For unsupervised image-to-image translation, we propose a discriminator architecture which focuses on the statistical features instead of individual patches. The network is stabilized by distribution matching of key statistical features at multiple scales. Unlike the existing methods which impose more and more constraints on the generator, our method facilitates the shape deformation and enhances the fine details with a greatly simplified framework. We show that the proposed method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models in various challenging applications including selfie-to-anime, m…
Disentangled representation is a powerful technique to tackle domain shift problem in medical image analysis in unsupervised domain adaptation setting.However, previous methods only focus on exacting domain-invariant feature and ignore whether exacted feature is meaningful for downstream tasks.We propose a novel framework, called semantic-guided disentangled representation (SGDR), an effective method to exact semantically meaningful feature for segmentation task to improve performance of cross modality medical image segmentation in unsupervised domain adaptation setting. To exact the meaningfu…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）
Recently, CycleGAN was shown to provide high-performance, ultra-fast denoising for low-dose X-ray computed tomography (CT) without the need for a paired training dataset. Although this was possible thanks to cycle consistency, CycleGAN requires two generators and two discriminators to enforce cycle consistency, demanding significant GPU resources and technical skills for training. A recent proposal of tunable CycleGAN with Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) alleviates the problem in part by using a single generator. However, two discriminators and an additional AdaIN code generator are st…
Deep learning for change detection is one of the current hot topics in the field of remote sensing. However, most end-to-end networks are proposed for supervised change detection, and unsupervised change detection models depend on traditional pre-detection methods. Therefore, we proposed a fully convolutional change detection framework with generative adversarial network, to conclude unsupervised, weakly supervised, regional supervised, and fully supervised change detection tasks into one framework. A basic Unet segmentor is used to obtain change detection map, an image-to-image generator is i…
Washington University（华盛顿大学）；Washington University School of Medicine（华盛顿大学医学院）
Purpose: The research is to develop a novel CNN-based adversarial deep learning method to improve and expedite the multi-organ semantic segmentation of CT images, and to generate accurate contours on pelvic CT images. Methods: Planning CT and structure datasets for 120 patients with intact prostate cancer were retrospectively selected and divided for 10-fold cross-validation. The proposed adversarial multi-residual multi-scale pooling Markov Random Field (MRF) enhanced network (ARPM-net) implements an adversarial training scheme. A segmentation network and a discriminator network were trained …
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are well known for their unsupervised learning capabilities. A recent success in the field of astronomy is deblending two overlapping galaxy images via a branched GAN model. However, it remains a significant challenge to comprehend how the network works, which is particularly difficult for non-expert users. This research focuses on behaviors of one of the network's major components, the Discriminator, which plays a vital role but is often overlooked, Specifically, we enhance the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) scheme to generate a heatmap-based vis…
Unsupervised image translation using adversarial learning has been attracting attention to improve the image quality of medical images. However, adversarial training based on the global evaluation values of discriminators does not provide sufficient translation performance for locally different image features. We propose adversarial learning with a feedback mechanism from a discriminator to improve the quality of CBCT images. This framework employs U-net as the discriminator and outputs a probability map representing the local discrimination results. The probability map is fed back to the gene…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）
Video enhancement is a challenging problem, more than that of stills, mainly due to high computational cost, larger data volumes and the difficulty of achieving consistency in the spatio-temporal domain. In practice, these challenges are often coupled with the lack of example pairs, which inhibits the application of supervised learning strategies. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient adversarial video enhancement framework that learns directly from unpaired video examples. In particular, our framework introduces new recurrent cells that consist of interleaved local and global m…
Unsupervised dMRI Artifact Detection via Angular Resolution Enhancement and Cycle Consistency Learning
School of Computer Science, University of Sydney（悉尼大学计算机科学学院）；Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney（悉尼大学脑与心智中心）；Central Clinical School, University of Sydney（悉尼大学临床中心）；School of Biomedical Engineering, University of Sydney（悉尼大学生物医学工程学院）
Vanderbilt University（范德堡大学）；Sigma Technology（12西格玛技术公司）；Vanderbilt University Medical Center（范德堡大学医学中心）
Dynamic contrast enhanced computed tomography (CT) is an imaging technique that provides critical information on the relationship of vascular structure and dynamics in the context of underlying anatomy. A key challenge for image processing with contrast enhanced CT is that phase discrepancies are latent in different tissues due to contrast protocols, vascular dynamics, and metabolism variance. Previous studies with deep learning frameworks have been proposed for classifying contrast enhancement with networks inspired by computer vision. Here, we revisit the challenge in the context of whole ab…
Inspired by the success of adversarial learning, we propose a new end-to-end unsupervised deep learning framework for monocular depth estimation consisting of two Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), deeply coupled with a structured Conditional Random Field (CRF) model. The two GANs aim at generating distinct and complementary disparity maps and at improving the generation quality via exploiting the adversarial learning strategy. The deep CRF coupling model is proposed to fuse the generative and discriminative outputs from the dual GAN nets. As such, the model implicitly constructs mutual co…
Enhancing and Adapting in the Clinic: Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Enhancement
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局）；Beijing Information Science and Technology University（北京信息科技大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
This paper presents a generative model method for multispectral image fusion in remote sensing which is trained without supervision. This method eases the supervision of learning and it also considers a multi-objective loss function to achieve image fusion. The loss function incorporates both spectral and spatial distortions. Two discriminators are designed to minimize the spectral and spatial distortions of the generative output. Extensive experimentations are conducted using three public domain datasets. The comparison results across four reduced-resolution and three full-resolution objectiv…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Yale School of Medicine（耶鲁大学医学院）
Deep neural networks have shown exceptional learning capability and generalizability in the source domain when massive labeled data is provided. However, the well-trained models often fail in the target domain due to the domain shift. Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to improve network performance when applying robust models trained on medical images from source domains to a new target domain. In this work, we present an approach based on the Wasserstein distance guided disentangled representation to achieve 3D multi-domain liver segmentation. Concretely, we embed images onto a shared conte…
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Low quality depth poses a considerable challenge to computer vision algorithms. In this work we aim to enhance highly degraded, real-world depth images acquired by a low-cost sensor, for which an analytical noise model is unavailable. In the absence of clean ground-truth, we approach the task as an unsupervised domain-translation between the low-quality sensor domain and a high-quality sensor domain, represented using two unpaired training sets. We employ the highly-successful Cycle-GAN to this task, but find it to perform poorly in this case. Identifying the sources of the failure, we introdu…
One task that is often discussed in a computer vision is the mapping of an image from one domain to a corresponding image in another domain known as image-to-image translation. Currently there are several approaches solving this task. In this paper, we present an enhancement of the UNIT framework that aids in removing its main drawbacks. More specifically, we introduce an additional adversarial discriminator on the latent representation used instead of VAE, which enforces the latent space distributions of both domains to be similar. On MNIST and USPS domain adaptation tasks, this approach grea…
Recently, deep learning approaches have become the main research frontier for biological image reconstruction and enhancement problems thanks to their high performance, along with their ultra-fast inference times. However, due to the difficulty of obtaining matched reference data for supervised learning, there has been increasing interest in unsupervised learning approaches that do not need paired reference data. In particular, self-supervised learning and generative models have been successfully used for various biological imaging applications. In this paper, we overview these approaches from…
Light field (LF) technology is considered as a promising way for providing a high-quality virtual reality (VR) content. However, such an imaging technology produces a large amount of data requiring efficient LF image compression solutions. In this paper, we propose a LF image coding method based on a view synthesis and view quality enhancement techniques. Instead of transmitting all the LF views, only a sparse set of reference views are encoded and transmitted, while the remaining views are synthesized at the decoder side. The transmitted views are encoded using the versatile video coding (VVC…
To improve the performance of classical generative adversarial network (GAN), Wasserstein generative adversarial networks (W-GAN) was developed as a Kantorovich dual formulation of the optimal transport (OT) problem using Wasserstein-1 distance. However, it was not clear how cycleGAN-type generative models can be derived from the optimal transport theory. Here we show that a novel cycleGAN architecture can be derived as a Kantorovich dual OT formulation if a penalized least square (PLS) cost with deep learning-based inverse path penalty is used as a transportation cost. One of the most importa…
vivo AI Lab（vivo人工智能实验室）；Trinity College Dublin（都柏林大学三一学院）
Speech enhancement is an essential task of improving speech quality in noise scenario. Several state-of-the-art approaches have introduced visual information for speech enhancement,since the visual aspect of speech is essentially unaffected by acoustic environment. This paper proposes a novel frameworkthat involves visual information for speech enhancement, by in-corporating a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). In par-ticular, the proposed visual speech enhancement GAN consistof two networks trained in adversarial manner, i) a generator that adopts multi-layer feature fusion convolution net…
