Performing an object detection task after the restoration of a hazy image, or rather detecting with the network backbone directly, will result in the inclusion of information mixed with dehazing, which tends to interfere with detection performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for detecting objects in dehazed images via Dual Cross-Stage Partial Learning (DCSP). Specifically, we introduce a Cross-Stage Partial (CSP) module for extracting clean feature information after dehazing. Secondly, to enhance data integrity, we employ a skip-input strategy to supplement information related to object detection features that may be lost during the dehazing task, while avoiding the gradient vanishing problem. In addition, CSP is also introduced to facilitate comprehensive learning of multiple feature representations. Finally, to avoid the inclusion of irrelevant dehazing information in detection, we apply a Ground-Truth Flow at detection network (at dark3), for fine feature information calibration. Additionally, we created a synthetic fog dataset to expand the training data for DCSP. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/zhaojinbiao/DCSP.

Recent advances in single image super-resolution (SISR) have achieved remarkable performance through deep learning. However, the high computational cost hinders the deployment of SISR models on edge devices. Instead of proposing new SISR models, a new trend is emerging to improve network efficiency by reducing parameters, FLOPs, and inference time through slight modifications to the original models. However, recent methods usually focus on reducing only one of three metrics, i.e., FLOPs, parameters and inference time, which inevitably increases the other two metrics. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Student Inference Network (ASIN) on popular SISR models, which aims at reducing FLOPs and inference time while maintaining the number of parameters and restoring clearer high-resolution images. Specifically, our ASIN divides a SISR model into three components (head, body and tail) and adopts various strategies for each part. For head and tail parts, to ensure the restored images contain more detailed information, a novel auxiliary Enhanced Teacher Network (ETNet) is designed, which is trained with the ground-truth images to obtain more prior knowledge to guide student network to extract more accurate textures using a new knowledge distillation method. For the body part, owing to the varying difficulties of the reconstructions in different regions, we propose an Adaptive Depth Predicted Module (ADPM) to dynamically shorten average depth of network to reduce the computational cost of overall network. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance of our ASIN compared to its counterparts.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)-guided deep models have obtained impressive performance for image representation, however the representation ability may still be restricted and usually needs more epochs to make the model converge in training, due to the useful information loss during the convolution and pooling operations. We therefore propose a general feature recovery layer, termed Low-rank Deep Feature Recovery (LDFR), to enhance the representation ability of the convolutional features by seamlessly integrating low-rank recovery into CNNs, which can be easily extended to all existing CNNs-based models. To be specific, to recover the lost information during the convolution operation, LDFR aims at learning the low-rank projections to embed the feature maps onto a low-rank subspace based on some selected informative convolutional feature maps. Such low-rank recovery operation can ensure all convolutional feature maps to be reconstructed easily to recover the underlying subspace with more useful and detailed information discovered, e.g., the strokes of characters or the texture information of clothes can be enhanced after LDFR. In addition, to make the learnt low-rank subspaces more powerful for feature recovery, we design a fusion strategy to obtain a generalized subspace, which averages over all learnt sub-spaces in each LDFR layer, so that the convolutional feature maps in test phase can be recovered effectively via low-rank embedding. Extensive results on several image datasets show that existing CNNs-based models equipped with our LDFR layer can obtain better performance.