Controllable image denoising aims to generate clean samples with human perceptual priors and balance sharpness and smoothness. In traditional filter-based denoising methods, this can be easily achieved by adjusting the filtering strength. However, for NN (Neural Network)-based models, adjusting the final denoising strength requires performing network inference each time, making it almost impossible for real-time user interaction. In this paper, we introduce Real-time Controllable Denoising (RCD), the first deep image and video denoising pipeline that provides a fully controllable user interface to edit arbitrary denoising levels in real-time with only one-time network inference. Unlike existing controllable denoising methods that require multiple denoisers and training stages, RCD replaces the last output layer (which usually outputs a single noise map) of an existing CNN-based model with a lightweight module that outputs multiple noise maps. We propose a novel Noise Decorrelation process to enforce the orthogonality of the noise feature maps, allowing arbitrary noise level control through noise map interpolation. This process is network-free and does not require network inference. Our experiments show that RCD can enable real-time editable image and video denoising for various existing heavy-weight models without sacrificing their original performance.

Modern smartphone cameras can match traditional DSLR cameras in many areas thanks to the introduction of camera arrays and multi-frame processing. Among all types of DSLR effects, the narrow depth of field (DoF) or so called bokeh probably arouses most interest. Today's smartphones try to overcome the physical lens and sensor limitations by introducing computational methods that utilize a depth map to synthesize the narrow DoF effect from all-in-focus images. However, a high quality depth map remains to be the key differentiator between computational bokeh and DSLR optical bokeh. Empowered by a novel wavelet synthesis network architecture, we have greatly narrowed the gap between DSLR and smartphone camera in terms of the bokeh more than ever before. We describe three key Modern smartphone cameras can match traditional digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras in many areas thanks to the introduction of camera arrays and multi-frame processing. Among all types of DSLR effects, the narrow depth of field (DoF) or so called bokeh probably arouses most interest. Today's smartphones try to overcome the physical lens and sensor limitations by introducing computational methods that utilize a depth map to synthesize the narrow DoF effect from all-in-focus images. However, a high quality depth map remains to be the key differentiator between computational bokeh and DSLR optical bokeh. Empowered by a novel wavelet synthesis network architecture, we have narrowed the gap between DSLR and smartphone camera in terms of bokeh more than ever before. We describe three key enablers of our bokeh solution: a synthetic graphics engine to generate training data with precisely prescribed characteristics that match the real smartphone captures, a novel wavelet synthesis neural network (WSN) architecture to produce unprecedented high definition disparity map promptly on smartphones, and a new evaluation metric to quantify the quality of the disparity map for real images from the bokeh rendering perspective. Experimental results show that the disparity map produced from our neural network achieves much better accuracy than the other state-of-the-art CNN based algorithms. Combining the high resolution disparity map with our rendering algorithm, we demonstrate visually superior bokeh pictures compared with existing top rated flagship smartphones listed on the DXOMARK mobiles.

The choice of motion models is vital in applications like image/video stitching and video stabilization. Conventional methods explored different approaches ranging from simple global parametric models to complex per-pixel optical flow. Mesh-based warping methods achieve a good balance between computational complexity and model flexibility. However, they typically require high quality feature correspondences and suffer from mismatches and low-textured image content. In this paper, we propose a mesh-based photometric alignment method that minimizes pixel intensity difference instead of Euclidean distance of known feature correspondences. The proposed method combines the superior performance of dense photometric alignment with the efficiency of mesh-based image warping. It achieves better global alignment quality than the feature-based counterpart in textured images, and more importantly, it is also robust to low-textured image content. Abundant experiments show that our method can handle a variety of images and videos, and outperforms representative state-of-the-art methods in both image stitching and video stabilization tasks.

Intrinsic image decomposition is an important technique that decomposes an image into reflectance and shading components. In this paper, we enable intrinsic decomposition for stereoscopic images. Traditional approaches cannot be directly applied to decompose stereoscopic images, yielding inconsistent reflectance and 3D artifacts after recoloring. To solve this problem, we propose a straight yet effective method for stereoscopic intrinsic decomposition, which consists of classical retinex constraint as well as disparity constraint. The former encodes the shading smoothness prior while the latter controls the reflectance similarity between two views. To further reduce ambiguity, we employ local and non-local texture cues by using superpixels within and across two views. The experiments show that our method can effectively decompose stereoscopic images with high quality and offer a comfortable 3D viewing experience.

Abstract Images/videos captured by portable devices (e.g., cellphones, DV cameras) often have limited fields of view. Image stitching, also referred to as mosaics or panorama, can produce a wide angle image by compositing several photographs together. Although various methods have been developed for image stitching in recent years, few works address the video stitching problem. In this paper, we present the first system to stitch videos captured by hand‐held cameras. We first recover the 3D camera paths and a sparse set of 3D scene points using CoSLAM system, and densely reconstruct the 3D scene in the overlapping regions. Then, we generate a smooth virtual camera path, which stays in the middle of the original paths. Finally, the stitched video is synthesized along the virtual path as if it was taken from this new trajectory. The warping required for the stitching is obtained by optimizing over both temporal stability and alignment quality, while leveraging on 3D information at our disposal. The experiments show that our method can produce high quality stitching results for various challenging scenarios.