Unsupervised Learning Based Multi-Scale Exposure Fusion
school of Information Science and Engineering, Wuhan University of Science and Technology（武汉科技大学信息科学与工程学院）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡资讯通信研究院（新加坡科技研究局下属机构））
Unsupervised learning based multi-scale exposure fusion (ULMEF) is efficient for fusing differently exposed low dynamic range (LDR) images into a higher quality LDR image for a high dynamic range (HDR) scene. Unlike supervised learning, loss functions play a crucial role in the ULMEF. In this paper, novel loss functions are proposed for the ULMEF and they are defined by using all the images to be fused and other differently exposed images from the same HDR scene. The proposed loss functions can guide the proposed ULMEF to learn more reliable information from the HDR scene than existing loss functions which are defined by only using the set of images to be fused. As such, the quality of the fused image is significantly improved. The proposed ULMEF also adopts a multi-scale strategy that includes a multi-scale attention module to effectively preserve the scene depth and local contrast in the fused image. Meanwhile, the proposed ULMEF can be adopted to achieve exposure interpolation and exposure extrapolation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed ULMEF algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art exposure fusion algorithms.
This paper proposes a novel luminance adjustment method based on automatic exposure compensation for multi-exposure image fusion. Multi-exposure image fusion is a method to produce images without saturation regions, by using photos with different exposures. In conventional works, it has been pointed out that the quality of those multi-exposure images can be improved by adjusting the luminance of them. However, how to determine the degree of adjustment has never been discussed. This paper therefore proposes a way to automatically determines the degree on the basis of the luminance distribution …
This paper proposes a novel pseudo multi-exposure image fusion method based on a single image. Multi-exposure image fusion is used to produce images without saturation regions, by using photos with different exposures. However, it is difficult to take photos suited for the multi-exposure image fusion when we take a photo of dynamic scenes or record a video. In addition, the multi-exposure image fusion cannot be applied to existing images with a single exposure or videos. The proposed method enables us to produce pseudo multi-exposure images from a single image. To produce multi-exposure images…
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；Nagaoka University of Technology（长冈技术科学大学）
This paper proposes a novel multi-exposure image fusion method based on exposure compensation. Multi-exposure image fusion is a method to produce images without color saturation regions, by using photos with different exposures. However, in conventional works, it is unclear how to determine appropriate exposure values, and moreover, it is difficult to set appropriate exposure values at the time of photographing due to time constraints. In the proposed method, the luminance of the input multi-exposure images is adjusted on the basis of the relationship between exposure values and pixel values, …
We present a novel deep learning architecture for fusing static multi-exposure images. Current multi-exposure fusion (MEF) approaches use hand-crafted features to fuse input sequence. However, the weak hand-crafted representations are not robust to varying input conditions. Moreover, they perform poorly for extreme exposure image pairs. Thus, it is highly desirable to have a method that is robust to varying input conditions and capable of handling extreme exposure without artifacts. Deep representations have known to be robust to input conditions and have shown phenomenal performance in a supe…
Low-light images are not conducive to human observation and computer vision algorithms due to their low visibility. Although many image enhancement techniques have been proposed to solve this problem, existing methods inevitably introduce contrast under- and over-enhancement. Inspired by human visual system, we design a multi-exposure fusion framework for low-light image enhancement. Based on the framework, we propose a dual-exposure fusion algorithm to provide an accurate contrast and lightness enhancement. Specifically, we first design the weight matrix for image fusion using illumination es…
LoopExpose: An Unsupervised Framework for Arbitrary-Length Exposure Correction
School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；Hangzhou Institue of Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学杭州学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学信息科学与工程学院）
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.（高通技术公司）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（计算机科学与工程系，人工智能联合实验室，上海交通大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
Huawei German Research Center（华为德国研究中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
In this paper, we focus on Exposure Fusion (EF) [ExposFusi2] for dynamic scenes. The task is to fuse multiple images obtained by exposure bracketing to create an image which comprises a high level of details. Typically, such images are not possible to obtain directly from a camera due to hardware limitations, e.g., a limited dynamic range of the sensor. A major problem of such tasks is that the images may not be spatially aligned due to scene motion or camera motion. It is known that the required alignment by image registration problems is ill-posed. In this case, the images to be aligned vary…
University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Shadow removal is still a challenging task due to its inherent background-dependent and spatial-variant properties, leading to unknown and diverse shadow patterns. Even powerful state-of-the-art deep neural networks could hardly recover traceless shadow-removed background. This paper proposes a new solution for this task by formulating it as an exposure fusion problem to address the challenges. Intuitively, we can first estimate multiple over-exposure images w.r.t. the input image to let the shadow regions in these images have the same color with shadow-free areas in the input image. Then, we …
Chandigarh Engineering College（昌迪加尔工程学院）；Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology, University（塔帕尔工程技术大学）
Recent innovations shows that blending of details captured by single Low Dynamic Range (LDR) sensor overcomes the limitations of standard digital cameras to capture details from high dynamic range scene. We present a method to produce well-exposed fused image that can be displayed directly on conventional display devices. The ambition is to preserve details in poorly illuminated and brightly illuminated regions. Proposed approach does not require true radiance reconstruction and tone manipulation steps. The aforesaid objective is achieved by taking into account local information measure that s…
Digital Medical Research Center, School of Basic Medical Science, Fudan University（复旦大学基础医学院数字医学研究中心）；Shanghai Key Lab of Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention（上海市医学图像计算与计算机辅助干预重点实验室）
In this paper, we propose TransMEF, a transformer-based multi-exposure image fusion framework that uses self-supervised multi-task learning. The framework is based on an encoder-decoder network, which can be trained on large natural image datasets and does not require ground truth fusion images. We design three self-supervised reconstruction tasks according to the characteristics of multi-exposure images and conduct these tasks simultaneously using multi-task learning; through this process, the network can learn the characteristics of multi-exposure images and extract more generalized features…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Automatically selecting exposure bracketing (images exposed differently) is important to obtain a high dynamic range image by using multi-exposure fusion. Unlike previous methods that have many restrictions such as requiring camera response function, sensor noise model, and a stream of preview images with different exposures (not accessible in some scenarios e.g. some mobile applications), we propose a novel deep neural network to automatically select exposure bracketing, named EBSNet, which is sufficiently flexible without having the above restrictions. EBSNet is formulated as a reinforced ag…
High dynamic range (HDR) imaging enables to immortalize natural scenes similar to the way that they are perceived by human observers. With regular low dynamic range (LDR) capture/display devices, significant details may not be preserved in images due to the huge dynamic range of natural scenes. To minimize the information loss and produce high quality HDR-like images for LDR screens, this study proposes an efficient multi-exposure fusion (MEF) approach with a simple yet effective weight extraction method relying on principal component analysis, adaptive well-exposedness and saliency maps. Thes…
Holistic Dynamic Frequency Transformer for Image Fusion and Exposure Correction
School of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学生物医学工程与仪器科学学院）；School of Software Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学软件学院）；School of Mechanical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学机械工程学院）
Institute of Applied Computing and Community Code (IAC3)（应用计算与社区代码研究所（IAC3））；Universitat de les Illes Balears（巴利阿里群岛大学）
Multi-exposure fusion (MEF) is a technique for combining different images of the same scene acquired with different exposure settings into a single image. All the proposed MEF algorithms combine the set of images, somehow choosing from each one the part with better exposure. We propose a novel multi-exposure image fusion chain taking into account noise removal. The novel method takes advantage of DCT processing and the multi-image nature of the MEF problem. We propose a joint fusion and denoising strategy taking advantage of spatio-temporal patch selection and collaborative 3D thresholding. Th…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；ACRV；Data61 CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）；NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）
In this paper, we present LidarStereoNet, the first unsupervised Lidar-stereo fusion network, which can be trained in an end-to-end manner without the need of ground truth depth maps. By introducing a novel "Feedback Loop'' to connect the network input with output, LidarStereoNet could tackle both noisy Lidar points and misalignment between sensors that have been ignored in existing Lidar-stereo fusion studies. Besides, we propose to incorporate a piecewise planar model into network learning to further constrain depths to conform to the underlying 3D geometry. Extensive quantitative and qualit…
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…
Multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) is an important area in computer vision and has attracted increasing interests in recent years. Apart from conventional algorithms, deep learning techniques have also been applied to multi-exposure image fusion. However, although much efforts have been made on developing MEF algorithms, the lack of benchmark makes it difficult to perform fair and comprehensive performance comparison among MEF algorithms, thus significantly hindering the development of this field. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing a benchmark for multi-exposure image fusion (MEFB) wh…
Combining images with different exposure settings are of prime importance in the field of computational photography. Both transform domain approach and filtering based approaches are possible for fusing multiple exposure images, to obtain the well-exposed image. We propose a Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT-based) approach for fusing multiple exposure images. The input image stack is processed in the transform domain by an averaging operation and the inverse transform is performed on the averaged image obtained to generate the fusion of multiple exposure image. The experimental observation leads…
Modern cameras have limited dynamic ranges and often produce images with saturated or dark regions using a single exposure. Although the problem could be addressed by taking multiple images with different exposures, exposure fusion methods need to deal with ghosting artifacts and detail loss caused by camera motion or moving objects. This paper proposes a deep network for exposure fusion. For reducing the potential ghosting problem, our network only takes two images, an underexposed image and an overexposed one. Our network integrates together homography estimation for compensating camera moti…
This paper challenges the cross-domain semantic segmentation task, aiming to improve the segmentation accuracy on the unlabeled target domain without incurring additional annotation. Using the pseudo-label-based unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) pipeline, we propose a novel and effective Multiple Fusion Adaptation (MFA) method. MFA basically considers three parallel information fusion strategies, i.e., the cross-model fusion, temporal fusion and a novel online-offline pseudo label fusion. Specifically, the online-offline pseudo label fusion encourages the adaptive training to pay additional…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）
Unsupervised object discovery (UOD) has recently shown encouraging progress with the adoption of pre-trained Transformer features. However, current methods based on Transformers mainly focus on designing the localization head (e.g., seed selection-expansion and normalized cut) and overlook the importance of improving Transformer features. In this work, we handle UOD task from the perspective of feature enhancement and propose FOReground guidance and MUlti-LAyer feature fusion for unsupervised object discovery, dubbed FORMULA. Firstly, we present a foreground guidance strategy with an off-the-s…
The vast increase in amount and complexity of digital content led to a wide interest in ad-hoc retrieval systems in recent years. Complementary, the existence of heterogeneous data sources and retrieval models stimulated the proliferation of increasingly ingenious and effective rank aggregation functions. Although recently proposed rank aggregation functions are promising with respect to effectiveness, existing proposals in the area usually overlook efficiency aspects. We propose an innovative rank aggregation function that is unsupervised, intrinsically multimodal, and targeted for fast retri…
Little Strokes Fell Great Oaks: Boosting the Hierarchical Features for Multi-exposure Image Fusion
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Mechanical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学机械工程学院）
University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Materials Genome Engineering（北京材料基因工程高精尖创新中心）；School of Computer and Communication Engineering（计算机与通信工程学院）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Knowledge Engineering for Materials Science（北京市材料科学知识工程重点实验室）；Institute for Advanced Materials and Technology（先进材料与技术研究所）
In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised deep learning model to address multi-focus image fusion problem. First, we train an encoder-decoder network in unsupervised manner to acquire deep feature of input images. And then we utilize these features and spatial frequency to measure activity level and decision map. Finally, we apply some consistency verification methods to adjust the decision map and draw out fused result. The key point behind of proposed method is that only the objects within the depth-of-field (DOF) have sharp appearance in the photograph while other objects are likely to …
EPOFusion: Exposure aware Progressive Optimization Method for Infrared and Visible Image Fusion
College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学信息工程学院）；College of Information Science and Technology, Zhejiang Shuren University（浙江树人大学信息科技学院）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学电机电子工程系）
Jiangnan University（江南大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Deep learning-based image fusion approaches have obtained wide attention in recent years, achieving promising performance in terms of visual perception. However, the fusion module in the current deep learning-based methods suffers from two limitations, \textit{i.e.}, manually designed fusion function, and input-independent network learning. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised adaptive image fusion method to address the above issues. We propose a feature mutual mapping fusion module and dual-branch multi-scale autoencoder. More specifically, we construct a global map to measure the connec…
Perceptual Region-Driven Infrared-Visible Co-Fusion for Extreme Scene Enhancement
College of Aerospace Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology（航天科学与工程学院，国防科技大学）；Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory of Image Measurement and Vision Navigation（湖南省图像测量与视觉导航重点实验室）；Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunication Technology（北京跟踪与电信技术研究所）；National Key Laboratory of Space Integrated Information System（空间一体化信息系统国家重点实验室）
This paper proposes a novel multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) scheme for single-shot high dynamic range imaging with spatially varying exposures (SVE). Single-shot imaging with SVE enables us not only to produce images without color saturation regions from a single-shot image, but also to avoid ghost artifacts in the producing ones. However, the number of exposures is generally limited to two, and moreover it is difficult to decide the optimum exposure values before the photographing. In the proposed scheme, a scene segmentation method is applied to input multi-exposure images, and then the lu…
MAUGIF: Mechanism-Aware Unsupervised General Image Fusion via Dual Cross-Image Autoencoders
School of Mathematics, Hunan University（湖南大学数学学院）；College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学信息工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong（香港大学电子与电气工程系）
Fusing low level and high level features is a widely used strategy to provide details that might be missing during convolution and pooling. Different from previous works, we propose a new fusion mechanism called FillIn which takes advantage of prior knowledge described with superpixel segmentation. According to the prior knowledge, the FillIn chooses small region on low level feature map to fill into high level feature map. By using the proposed fusion mechanism, the low level features have equal channels for some tiny region as high level features, which makes the low level features have rela…
Recent learning-based image fusion methods have marked numerous progress in pre-registered multi-modality data, but suffered serious ghosts dealing with misaligned multi-modality data, due to the spatial deformation and the difficulty narrowing cross-modality discrepancy. To overcome the obstacles, in this paper, we present a robust cross-modality generation-registration paradigm for unsupervised misaligned infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF). Specifically, we propose a Cross-modality Perceptual Style Transfer Network (CPSTN) to generate a pseudo infrared image taking a visible image as i…
This paper introduces temporal image fusion. The proposed technique builds upon previous research in exposure fusion and expands it to deal with the limited Temporal Dynamic Range of existing sensors and camera technologies. In particular, temporal image fusion enables the rendering of long-exposure effects on full frame-rate video, as well as the generation of arbitrarily long exposures from a sequence of images of the same scene taken over time. We explore the problem of temporal under-exposure, and show how it can be addressed by selectively enhancing dynamic structure. Finally, we show tha…
University of Sao Paulo（圣保罗大学）；Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）
On visual analytics applications, the concept of putting the user on the loop refers to the ability to replace heuristics by user knowledge on machine learning and data mining tasks. On supervised tasks, the user engagement occurs via the manipulation of the training data. However, on unsupervised tasks, the user involvement is limited to changes in the algorithm parametrization or the input data representation, also known as features. Depending on the application domain, different types of features can be extracted from the raw data. Therefore, the result of unsupervised algorithms heavily de…
Visual Information Laboratory, University of Bristol（布里斯托大学视觉信息实验室）
A significant number of researchers have applied deep learning methods to image fusion. However, most works require a large amount of training data or depend on pre-trained models or frameworks to capture features from source images. This is inevitably hampered by a shortage of training data or a mismatch between the framework and the actual problem. Deep Image Prior (DIP) has been introduced to exploit convolutional neural networks' ability to synthesize the 'prior' in the input image. However, the original design of DIP is hard to be generalized to multi-image processing problems, particular…
Hybrid-Supervised Dual-Search: Leveraging Automatic Learning for Loss-free Multi-Exposure Image Fusion
School of Software Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学软件学院）；School of Mechanical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学机械工程学院）；DUT-RU International School of Information Science & Engineering, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学盘锦国际信息科学与工程学院）
High-dynamic-range (HDR) photography involves fusing a bracket of images taken at different exposure settings in order to compensate for the low dynamic range of digital cameras such as the ones used in smartphones. In this paper, a method for automatically selecting the exposure settings of such images is introduced based on the camera characteristic function. In addition, a new fusion method is introduced based on an optimization formulation and weighted averaging. Both of these methods are implemented on a smartphone platform as an HDR app to demonstrate the practicality of the introduced m…
There and Back Again: A Flexible-Frame Transformer for Multi-Exposure Fusion
Nankai International Advanced Research Institute (SHENZHEN·FUTIAN)（南开国际先进研究院（深圳·福田））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；OPPO Research Institute（OPPO研究院）
ExpoMotion: A Large-Scale Benchmark and A Householder Projection Network for Multi-Exposure Fusion
Nankai International Advanced Research Institute (SHENZHEN·FUTIAN)（南开大学国际研究院（深圳·福田））；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机科学学院）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；OPPO Research Institute（OPPO研究院）
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；The University of Western Australia（西澳大学）
Convolutional neural networks have recently been used for multi-focus image fusion. However, due to the lack of labeled data for supervised training of such networks, existing methods have resorted to adding Gaussian blur in focused images to simulate defocus and generate synthetic training data with ground-truth for supervised learning. Moreover, they classify pixels as focused or defocused and leverage the results to construct the fusion weight maps which then necessitates a series of post-processing steps. In this paper, we present unsupervised end-to-end learning for directly predicting th…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯塞勒基金会）；Huawei Technologies Ireland（华为技术爱尔兰）
Recent deep monocular depth estimation approaches based on supervised regression have achieved remarkable performance. However, they require costly ground truth annotations during training. To cope with this issue, in this paper we present a novel unsupervised deep learning approach for predicting depth maps. We introduce a new network architecture, named Progressive Fusion Network (PFN), that is specifically designed for binocular stereo depth estimation. This network is based on a multi-scale refinement strategy that combines the information provided by both stereo views. In addition, we pro…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Xinjiang University（新疆大学）
Foreground segmentation is an essential task in the field of image understanding. Under unsupervised conditions, different images and instances always have variable expressions, which make it difficult to achieve stable segmentation performance based on fixed rules or single type of feature. In order to solve this problem, the research proposes an unsupervised foreground segmentation method based on semantic-apparent feature fusion (SAFF). Here, we found that key regions of foreground object can be accurately responded via semantic features, while apparent features (represented by saliency and…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study, UESTC（电子科技大学深圳高等研究院）
Unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) person re-identification (ReID) has gained increasing attention for its effectiveness on the target domain without manual annotations. Most fine-tuning based UDA person ReID methods focus on encoding global features for pseudo labels generation, neglecting the local feature that can provide for the fine-grained information. To handle this issue, we propose a Learning Feature Fusion (LF2) framework for adaptively learning to fuse global and local features to obtain a more comprehensive fusion feature representation. Specifically, we first pre-train our model w…
