Transparent surfaces, such as glass, create complex reflections that obscure images and challenge downstream computer vision applications. We introduce Flash-Split, a robust framework for separating transmitted and reflected light using a single (potentially misaligned) pair of flash/no-flash images. Our core idea is to perform flash-informed reflection separation iteratively in a low-dimensional latent space. Specifically, Flash-Split consists of two stages. Stage 1 separates the reflection latent and transmission latent via a dual-branch diffusion model that is conditioned on an encoded flash/no-flash latent pair. This stage effectively mitigates the flash/no-flash misalignment issue. Stage 2 restores high-resolution, faithful details to the separated latents via a cross-latent decoding process that is conditioned on the original images before separation. We validate Flash-Split on challenging real-world scenes and demonstrate it significantly outperforms existing methods. Our project webpage is at https://flash-split.github.io/.

Video Frame Interpolation aims to recover realistic missing frames between observed frames, generating a high-frame-rate video from a low-frame-rate video. However, without additional guidance, the large motion between frames makes this problem ill-posed. Event-based Video Frame Interpolation (EVFI) addresses this challenge by using sparse, high-temporal-resolution event measurements as motion guidance. This guidance allows EVFI methods to significantly outperform frame-only methods. However, to date, EVFI methods have relied on a limited set of paired event-frame training data, severely limiting their performance and generalization capabilities. In this work, we overcome the limited data challenge by adapting pre-trained video diffusion models trained on internet-scale datasets to EVFI. We experimentally validate our approach on real-world EVFI datasets, including a new one that we introduce. Our method outperforms existing methods and generalizes across cameras far better than existing approaches.

Text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating diverse portraits, but lack intuitive shadow control. Existing editing approaches, as post-processing, struggle to offer effective manipulation across diverse styles. Additionally, these methods either rely on expensive real-world light-stage data collection or require extensive computational resources for training. To address these limitations, we introduce Shadow Director, a method that extracts and manipulates hidden shadow attributes within well-trained diffusion models. Our approach uses a small estimation network that requires only a few thousand synthetic images and hours of training-no costly real-world light-stage data needed. Shadow Director enables parametric and intuitive control over shadow shape, placement, and intensity during portrait generation while preserving artistic integrity and identity across diverse styles. Despite training only on synthetic data built on real-world identities, it generalizes effectively to generated portraits with diverse styles, making it a more accessible and resource-friendly solution.

Point-spread-function (PSF) engineering is a well-established computational imaging technique that uses phase masks and other optical elements to embed extra information (e.g., depth) into the images captured by conventional CMOS image sensors. To date, however, PSF-engineering has not been applied to neuromorphic event cameras; a powerful new image sensing technology that responds to changes in the log-intensity of light. This paper establishes theoretical limits (Cramér Rao bounds) on 3D point localization and tracking with PSF-engineered event cameras. Using these bounds, we first demonstrate that existing Fisher phase masks are already near-optimal for localizing static flashing point sources (e.g., blinking fluorescent molecules). We then demonstrate that existing designs are sub-optimal for tracking moving point sources and proceed to use our theory to design optimal phase masks and binary amplitude masks for this task. To overcome the non-convexity of the design problem, we leverage novel implicit neural representation based parameterizations of the phase and amplitude masks. We demonstrate the efficacy of our designs through extensive simulations. We also validate our method with a simple prototype.

Atmospheric turbulence, caused by random fluctuations in the atmosphere's refractive index, introduces complex spatio-temporal distortions in imagery captured at long range. Video Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation (ATM) aims to restore videos affected by these distortions. However, existing video ATM methods, both supervised and self-supervised, struggle to maintain temporally consistent mitigation across frames, leading to visually incoherent results. This limitation arises from the stochastic nature of atmospheric turbulence, which varies across space and time. Inspired by the observation that atmospheric turbulence induces high-frequency temporal variations, we propose ConVRT, a novel framework for consistent video restoration through turbulence. ConVRT introduces a neural video representation that explicitly decouples spatial and temporal information into a spatial content field and a temporal deformation field, enabling targeted regularization of the network's temporal representation capability. By leveraging the low-pass filtering properties of the regularized temporal representations, ConVRT effectively mitigates turbulence-induced temporal frequency variations and promotes temporal consistency. Furthermore, our training framework seamlessly integrates supervised pre-training on synthetic turbulence data with self-supervised learning on real-world videos, significantly improving the temporally consistent mitigation of ATM methods on diverse real-world data. More information can be found on our project page: https://convrt-2024.github.io/

Snowfall is a common weather phenomenon that can severely affect computer vision tasks by obscuring objects and scenes. However, existing deep learning-based snow removal methods are designed for single images only. In this paper, we target a more complex task - video snow removal, which aims to restore the clear video from the snowy video. To facilitate this task, we propose the first high-quality video dataset, which simulates realistic physical characteristics of snow and haze using a rendering engine and augmentation techniques. We also develop a deep learning framework for video snow removal. Specifically, we propose a snow-query temporal aggregation module and a snow-aware contrastive learning loss function. The module aggregates features between video frames and removes snow effectively, while the loss function helps identify and eliminate snow features. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that our proposed dataset is more realistic than previous datasets, and the models trained on it achieve better performance in real-world snowing images. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art video and image-based methods on both synthetic and real snowy videos.

Blind Omnidirectional Image Quality Assessment (BOIQA) aims to objectively assess the human perceptual quality of omnidirectional images (ODIs) without relying on pristine-quality image information. It is becoming more significant with the increasing advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology. However, the quality assessment of ODIs is severely hampered by the fact that the existing BOIQA pipeline lacks the modeling of the observer's browsing process. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel multi-sequence network for BOIQA called Assessor360, which is derived from the realistic multi-assessor ODI quality assessment procedure. Specifically, we propose a generalized Recursive Probability Sampling (RPS) method for the BOIQA task, combining content and details information to generate multiple pseudo viewport sequences from a given starting point. Additionally, we design a Multi-scale Feature Aggregation (MFA) module with a Distortion-aware Block (DAB) to fuse distorted and semantic features of each viewport. We also devise Temporal Modeling Module (TMM) to learn the viewport transition in the temporal domain. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Assessor360 outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple OIQA datasets. The code and models are available at https://github.com/TianheWu/Assessor360.