Most of the existing learning-based deraining methods are supervisedly trained on synthetic rainy-clean pairs. The domain gap between the synthetic and real rain makes them less generalized to complex real rainy scenes. Moreover, the existing methods mainly utilize the property of the image or rain layers independently, while few of them have considered their mutually exclusive relationship. To solve above dilemma, we explore the intrinsic intra-similarity within each layer and inter-exclusiveness between two layers and propose an unsupervised non-local contrastive learning (NLCL) deraining method. The non-local self-similarity image patches as the positives are tightly pulled together, rain patches as the negatives are remarkably pushed away, and vice versa. On one hand, the intrinsic self-similarity knowledge within positive/negative samples of each layer benefits us to discover more compact representation; on the other hand, the mutually exclusive property between the two layers enriches the discriminative decomposition. Thus, the internal self-similarity within each layer (similarity) and the external exclusive relationship of the two layers (dissimilarity) serving as a generic image prior jointly facilitate us to unsupervisedly differentiate the rain from clean image. We further discover that the intrinsic dimension of the non-local image patches is generally higher than that of the rain patches. This motivates us to design an asymmetric contrastive loss to precisely model the compactness discrepancy of the two layers for better discriminative decomposition. In addition, considering that the existing real rain datasets are of low quality, either small scale or downloaded from the internet, we collect a real large-scale dataset under various rainy kinds of weather that contains high-resolution rainy images.
Deep learning algorithms have recently achieved promising deraining performances on both the natural and synthetic rainy datasets. As an essential low-level pre-processing stage, a deraining network should clear the rain streaks and preserve the fine semantic details. However, most existing methods only consider low-level image restoration. That limits their performances at high-level tasks requiring precise semantic information. To address this issue, in this paper, we present a segmentation-aware progressive network (SAPNet) based upon contrastive learning for single image deraining. We star…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
The intricacy of rainy image contents often leads cutting-edge deraining models to image degradation including remnant rain, wrongly-removed details, and distorted appearance. Such degradation is further exacerbated when applying the models trained on synthetic data to real-world rainy images. We observe two types of domain gaps between synthetic and real-world rainy images: one exists in rain streak patterns; the other is the pixel-level appearance of rain-free images. To bridge the two domain gaps, we propose a semi-supervised detail-recovery image deraining network (Semi-DRDNet) with dual s…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Image deraining is a typical low-level image restoration task, which aims at decomposing the rainy image into two distinguishable layers: the clean image layer and the rain layer. Most of the existing learning-based deraining methods are supervisedly trained on synthetic rainy-clean pairs. The domain gap between the synthetic and real rains makes them less generalized to different real rainy scenes. Moreover, the existing methods mainly utilize the property of the two layers independently, while few of them have considered the mutually exclusive relationship between the two layers. In this wor…
Shenyang Aerospace University（沈阳航空航天大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Learning single image deraining (SID) networks from an unpaired set of clean and rainy images is practical and valuable as acquiring paired real-world data is almost infeasible. However, without the paired data as the supervision, learning a SID network is challenging. Moreover, simply using existing unpaired learning methods (e.g., unpaired adversarial learning and cycle-consistency constraints) in the SID task is insufficient to learn the underlying relationship from rainy inputs to clean outputs as there exists significant domain gap between the rainy and clean images. In this paper, we dev…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；National Tsing Hua University（台湾清华大学）
Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer have achieved great success in multimedia applications. However, little effort has been made to effectively and efficiently harmonize these two architectures to satisfy image deraining. This paper aims to unify these two architectures to take advantage of their learning merits for image deraining. In particular, the local connectivity and translation equivariance of CNN and the global aggregation ability of self-attention (SA) in Transformer are fully exploited for specific local context and global structure representations. Based on the obser…
Single image rain streaks removal is extremely important since rainy images adversely affect many computer vision systems. Deep learning based methods have found great success in image deraining tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel residual-guide feature fusion network, called ResGuideNet, for single image deraining that progressively predicts highquality reconstruction. Specifically, we propose a cascaded network and adopt residuals generated from shallower blocks to guide deeper blocks. By using this strategy, we can obtain a coarse to fine estimation of negative residual as the blocks g…
Unpaired Photo-realistic Image Deraining with Energy-informed Diffusion Model
School of Information Engineering, Chang’an University（长安大学信息工程学院）；School of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Chang’an University（长安大学数据科学与人工智能学院）
RainMamba: Enhanced Locality Learning with State Space Models for Video Deraining
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Hong Kong Metropolitan University（香港都会大学）
Rethinking Real-world Image Deraining via An Unpaired Degradation-Conditioned Diffusion Model
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
This paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised video object segmentation on resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones. We formulate this problem as a distillation task, whereby we demonstrate that small space-time-memory networks with finite memory can achieve competitive results with state of the art, but at a fraction of the computational cost (32 milliseconds per frame on a Samsung Galaxy S22). Specifically, we provide a theoretically grounded framework that unifies knowledge distillation with supervised contrastive representation learning. These models are able to jointly bene…
Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) serves as a de-facto standard to align images and texts. Nonetheless, the loose correlation between images and texts of web-crawled data renders the contrastive objective data inefficient and craving for a large training batch size. In this work, we explore the validity of non-contrastive language-image pre-training (nCLIP), and study whether nice properties exhibited in visual self-supervised models can emerge. We empirically observe that the non-contrastive objective nourishes representation learning while sufficiently underperforming under zero…
Annotated medical images are typically rarer than labeled natural images since they are limited by domain knowledge and privacy constraints. Recent advances in transfer and contrastive learning have provided effective solutions to tackle such issues from different perspectives. The state-of-the-art transfer learning (e.g., Big Transfer (BiT)) and contrastive learning (e.g., Simple Siamese Contrastive Learning (SimSiam)) approaches have been investigated independently, without considering the complementary nature of such techniques. It would be appealing to accelerate contrastive learning with …
Hong Kong Metropolitan University（香港都会大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Lingnan University（岭南大学）；Education University of Hong Kong（香港教育大学）
Image filters are fast, lightweight and effective, which make these conventional wisdoms preferable as basic tools in vision tasks. In practical scenarios, users have to tweak parameters multiple times to obtain satisfied results. This inconvenience heavily discounts the efficiency and user experience. We propose basis composition learning on single image filters to automatically determine their optimal formulas. The feasibility is based on a two-step strategy: first, we build a set of filtered basis (FB) consisting of approximations under selected parameter configurations; second, a dual-bran…
Modern applications such as self-driving cars and drones rely heavily upon robust object detection techniques. However, weather corruptions can hinder the object detectability and pose a serious threat to their navigation and reliability. Thus, there is a need for efficient denoising, deraining, and restoration techniques. Generative adversarial networks and transformers have been widely adopted for image restoration. However, the training of these methods is often unstable and time-consuming. Furthermore, when used for object detection (OD), the output images generated by these methods may pr…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；SUNY at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
Many unsupervised hashing methods are implicitly established on the idea of reconstructing the input data, which basically encourages the hashing codes to retain as much information of original data as possible. However, this requirement may force the models spending lots of their effort on reconstructing the unuseful background information, while ignoring to preserve the discriminative semantic information that is more important for the hashing task. To tackle this problem, inspired by the recent success of contrastive learning in learning continuous representations, we propose to adapt this …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Most modern face completion approaches adopt an autoencoder or its variants to restore missing regions in face images. Encoders are often utilized to learn powerful representations that play an important role in meeting the challenges of sophisticated learning tasks. Specifically, various kinds of masks are often presented in face images in the wild, forming complex patterns, especially in this hard period of COVID-19. It's difficult for encoders to capture such powerful representations under this complex situation. To address this challenge, we propose a self-supervised Siamese inference netw…
Rare diseases are characterized by low prevalence and are often chronically debilitating or life-threatening. Imaging-based classification of rare diseases is challenging due to the severe shortage in training examples. Few-shot learning (FSL) methods tackle this challenge by extracting generalizable prior knowledge from a large base dataset of common diseases and normal controls, and transferring the knowledge to rare diseases. Yet, most existing methods require the base dataset to be labeled and do not make full use of the precious examples of the rare diseases. To this end, we propose in th…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Knowledge distillation, which involves extracting the "dark knowledge" from a teacher network to guide the learning of a student network, has emerged as an important technique for model compression and transfer learning. Unlike previous works that exploit architecture-specific cues such as activation and attention for distillation, here we wish to explore a more general and model-agnostic approach for extracting "richer dark knowledge" from the pre-trained teacher model. We show that the seemingly different self-supervision task can serve as a simple yet powerful solution. For example, when pe…
WDMamba: When Wavelet Degradation Prior Meets Vision Mamba for Image Dehazing
School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University of Technology（安徽理工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）；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）；College of Artificial Intelligence, Taiyuan University of Technology（太原科技大学人工智能学院）
Retinex Meets Language: A Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network
State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography and the Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China（物理海洋学国家重点实验室和中国海洋大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen university（中山大学深圳校区计算机科学与技术学院）
Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zurich（计算机视觉实验室，苏黎世联邦理工学院）
A key requirement for the success of supervised deep learning is a large labeled dataset - a condition that is difficult to meet in medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can help in this regard by providing a strategy to pre-train a neural network with unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning for a downstream task with limited annotations. Contrastive learning, a particular variant of SSL, is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations. In this work, we propose strategies for extending the contrastive learning framework for segmentation of volumetric medical i…
HiCMAE: Hierarchical Contrastive Masked Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Mashang Consumer Finance Co., Ltd.（马上消费金融股份有限公司）
Self-supervised representation learning for visual pre-training has achieved remarkable success with sample (instance or pixel) discrimination and semantics discovery of instance, whereas there still exists a non-negligible gap between pre-trained model and downstream dense prediction tasks. Concretely, these downstream tasks require more accurate representation, in other words, the pixels from the same object must belong to a shared semantic category, which is lacking in the previous methods. In this work, we present Dense Semantic Contrast (DSC) for modeling semantic category decision bounda…
