Existing deep learning-based video super-resolution (SR) methods usually depend on the supervised learning approach, where the training data is usually generated by the blurring operation with known or predefined kernels (e.g., Bicubic kernel) followed by a decimation operation. However, this does not hold for real applications as the degradation process is complex and cannot be approximated by these idea cases well. Moreover, obtaining high-resolution (HR) videos and the corresponding low-resolution (LR) ones in real-world scenarios is difficult. To overcome these problems, we propose a self-supervised learning method to solve the blind video SR problem, which simultaneously estimates blur kernels and HR videos from the LR videos. As directly using LR videos as supervision usually leads to trivial solutions, we develop a simple and effective method to generate auxiliary paired data from original LR videos according to the image formation of video SR, so that the networks can be better constrained by the generated paired data for both blur kernel estimation and latent HR video restoration. In addition, we introduce an optical flow estimation module to exploit the information from adjacent frames for HR video restoration. Experiments show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art ones on benchmarks and real-world videos.

We present a large-scale facial UV-texture dataset that contains over 50,000 high-quality texture UV-maps with even illuminations, neutral expressions, and cleaned facial regions, which are desired characteristics for rendering realistic 3D face models under different lighting conditions. The dataset is derived from a large-scale face image dataset namely FFHQ, with the help of our fully automatic and robust UV-texture production pipeline. Our pipeline utilizes the recent advances in StyleGAN-based facial image editing approaches to generate multi-view normalized face images from single-image inputs. An elaborated UV-texture extraction, correction, and completion procedure is then applied to produce high-quality UV-maps from the normalized face images. Compared with existing UV-texture datasets, our dataset has more diverse and higher-quality texture maps. We further train a GAN-based texture decoder as the nonlinear texture basis for parametric fitting based 3D face reconstruction. Experiments show that our method improves the reconstruction accuracy over state-of-the-art approaches, and more importantly, produces high-quality texture maps that are ready for realistic renderings. The dataset, code, and pre-trained texture decoder are publicly available at https://github.com/csbhr/FFHQ-UV.

We present compact and effective deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by exploring properties of videos for video deblurring. Motivated by the non-uniform blur property that not all the pixels of the frames are blurry, we develop a CNN to integrate a temporal sharpness prior (TSP) for removing blur in videos. The TSP exploits sharp pixels from adjacent frames to facilitate the CNN for better frame restoration. Observing that the motion field is related to latent frames instead of blurry ones in the image formation model, we develop an effective cascaded training approach to solve the proposed CNN in an end-to-end manner. As videos usually contain similar contents within and across frames, we propose a non-local similarity mining approach based on a self-attention method with the propagation of global features to constrain CNNs for frame restoration. We show that exploring the domain knowledge of videos can make CNNs more compact and efficient, where the CNN with the non-local spatial-temporal similarity is 3× smaller than the state-of-the-art methods in terms of model parameters while its performance gains are at least 1 dB higher in terms of PSNRs. Extensive experimental results show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches on benchmarks and real-world videos.

We propose an effective image dehazing algorithm which explores useful information from the input hazy image itself as the guidance for the haze removal. The proposed algorithm first uses a deep pre-dehazer to generate an intermediate result, and takes it as the reference image due to the clear structures it contains. To better explore the guidance information in the generated reference image, it then develops a progressive feature fusion module to fuse the features of the hazy image and the reference image. Finally, the image restoration module takes the fused features as input to use the guidance information for better clear image restoration. All the proposed modules are trained in an end-to-end fashion, and we show that the proposed deep pre-dehazer with progressive feature fusion module is able to help haze removal. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on the widely-used dehazing benchmark datasets as well as real-world hazy images.

Existing video super-resolution (SR) algorithms usually assume that the blur kernels in the degradation process are known and do not model the blur kernels in the restoration. However, this assumption does not hold for blind video SR and usually leads to over-smoothed super-resolved frames. In this paper, we propose an effective blind video SR algorithm based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our algorithm first estimates blur kernels from low-resolution (LR) input videos. Then, with the estimated blur kernels, we develop an effective image deconvolution method based on the image formation model of blind video SR to generate intermediate latent frames so that sharp image contents can be restored well. To effectively explore the information from adjacent frames, we estimate the motion fields from LR input videos, extract features from LR videos by a feature extraction network, and warp the extracted features from LR inputs based on the motion fields. Moreover, we develop an effective sharp feature exploration method which first extracts sharp features from restored intermediate latent frames and then uses a transformation operation based on the extracted sharp features and warped features from LR inputs to generate better features for HR video restoration. We formulate the proposed algorithm into an end-to-end trainable framework and show that it performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.

We present a simple and effective deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model for video deblurring. The proposed algorithm mainly consists of optical flow estimation from intermediate latent frames and latent frame restoration steps. It first develops a deep CNN model to estimate optical flow from intermediate latent frames and then restores the latent frames based on the estimated optical flow. To better explore the temporal information from videos, we develop a temporal sharpness prior to constrain the deep CNN model to help the latent frame restoration. We develop an effective cascaded training approach and jointly train the proposed CNN model in an end-to-end manner. We show that exploring the domain knowledge of video deblurring is able to make the deep CNN model more compact and efficient. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark datasets as well as real-world videos.