The success of deep learning in supervised fine-grained recognition for domain-specific tasks relies heavily on expert annotations. The Open-Set for fine-grained Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) problem aims to enhance performance on downstream tasks by strategically sampling a subset of images (the Core-Set) from a large pool of unlabeled data (the Open-Set). In this paper, we propose a novel method, BloomCoreset, that significantly reduces sampling time from Open-Set while preserving the quality of samples in the coreset. To achieve this, we utilize Bloom filters as an innovative hashing mechanism to store both low- and high-level features of the fine-grained dataset, as captured by Open-CLIP, in a space-efficient manner that enables rapid retrieval of the coreset from the Open-Set. To show the effectiveness of the sampled coreset, we integrate the proposed method into the state-of-the-art fine-grained SSL framework, SimCore [1]. The proposed algorithm drastically outperforms the sampling strategy of the baseline in [1] with a 98.5% reduction in sampling time with a mere 0.83% average trade-off in accuracy calculated across 11 downstream datasets. We have made the code publicly available.

Recently, generative priors have shown significant improvement for unsupervised image restoration. This study explores the incorporation of multiple loss functions that capture various perceptual and structural aspects of image quality. Our proposed method improves robustness across multiple tasks, including denoising, upsampling, inpainting, and deartifacting, by utilizing a comprehensive loss function based on Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity(LPIPS), MultiScale Structural Similarity Index Measure Loss(MS-SSIM), Consistency, Feature, and Gradient losses. The experimental results demonstrate marked improvements in accuracy, fidelity, and visual realism in unsupervised image restoration, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach in delivering high-quality results. The experimental results validate the superiority of our approach and offer a promising direction for future advancements in generative-based image restoration methods. Code & Data can be found here https://aamaanakbar.github.io/investigating_rusir/

This paper presents COT-AD, a comprehensive Dataset designed to enhance cotton crop analysis through computer vision. Comprising over 25,000 images captured throughout the cotton growth cycle, with 5,000 annotated images, COT-AD includes aerial imagery for field-scale detection and segmentation and high-resolution DSLR images documenting key diseases. The annotations cover pest and disease recognition, vegetation, and weed analysis, addressing a critical gap in cotton-specific agricultural datasets. COT-AD supports tasks such as classification, segmentation, image restoration, enhancement, deep generative model-based cotton crop synthesis, and early disease management, advancing data-driven crop management .The COT-AD dataset can be found here: https://aamaanakbar.github.io/COT-AD/.

Recent developments in self-supervised learning (SSL) have made it possible to learn data representations without the need for annotations. Inspired by the non-contrastive SSL approach (SimSiam), we introduce a novel framework SimSAM to compute the Semantic Affinity Matrix, which is significant for unsupervised image segmentation. Given an image, SimSAM first extracts features using pre-trained DINO-ViT, then projects the features to predict the correlations of dense features in a non-contrastive way. We show applications of the Semantic Affinity Matrix in object segmentation and semantic segmentation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/chandagrover/SimSAM.

CLIPStyler demonstrated image style transfer with realistic textures using only a style text description (instead of requiring a reference style image). However, the ground semantics of objects in the style transfer output is lost due to style spill-over on salient and background objects (content mismatch) or over-stylization. To solve this, we propose Semantic CLIP-Styler (Sem-CS), that performs semantic style transfer.Sem-CS first segments the content image into salient and non-salient objects and then transfers artistic style based on a given style text description. The semantic style transfer is achieved using global foreground loss (for salient objects) and global background loss (for non-salient objects). Our empirical results, including DISTS, NIMA and user study scores, show that our proposed framework yields superior qualitative and quantitative performance. Our code is available at github.com/chandagrover/sem-cs.

Recently, there is a vast interest in developing image feature learning methods that are independent of the training data, such as deep image prior [35], InGAN [28], [29], SinGAN [27], and DCIL [8]. These methods perform various tasks, such as image restoration, image editing, and image synthesis. In this work, we proposed a new training data-independent framework, called Deep Contextual Features Learning (DeepCFL), to perform image synthesis and image restoration based on the semantics of the input image. The contextual features are simply the high dimensional vectors representing the semantics of the given image. DeepCFL is a single image GAN framework that learns the distribution of the context vectors from the input image. We show the performance of contextual learning in various challenging scenarios: outpainting, inpainting, and restoration of randomly removed pixels. DeepCFL is applicable when the input source image and the generated target image are not aligned. We illustrate image synthesis using DeepCFL for the task of image resizing.

Recently, there is a vast interest in developing unsupervised methods that are independent of the feature learning from the training data, e.g., deep image prior [26], zero-shot learning [23], and internal learning [21], [22]. These methods are based on the common goal of maxi-mizing the quality of image features learned from a single image despite inherent technical diversity. In this work, we bridge the gap between the various unsupervised approaches above and propose a general framework for image restoration and image retargeting. We use contextual feature learning and internal learning to improvise the structure similarity between the source and the target images. We perform image resizing application in the following setups: classical image resizing using super-resolution, a challenging image resizing where the low-resolution image contains noise, and content-aware image resizing using image retar-geting. We also compare our framework with relevant state-of-the-art methods.