In time-lapse microscopy, inherent noise significantly limits imaging sensitivity and increases measurement uncertainty. Due to the scarcity of clean data, zero-shot approaches have emerged as highly data-efficient solutions for microscopy denoising. However, existing methods typically process video frames independently, resulting in long training times and issues such as temporal noise and over-smoothing. In this paper, we introduce MDSR-Zero, a zero-shot online learning method designed for plug-and-play noise suppression and super-resolution of microscopy videos. Our approach leverages an efficient online training strategy that reuses denoising models from previous frames. By treating the video as a continuous stream, our model significantly reduces training time and ensures temporally consistent denoising. Additionally, we propose a novel loss function tailored for denoising in the context of super-resolution, which enhances the detail in the denoised results. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world noise demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot denoising approaches and is competitive with self-supervised methods. Notably, our method can reduce training time by up to 10x compared to the previous SOTA method.

Live-cell imaging is a powerful tool for studying dynamic subcellular processes by capturing the spatiotemporal organization of the biological microenvironment. However, limitations due to phototoxicity and photobleaching prevent microscopes from achieving high frame rates and high-quality images. Although current deep learning methods can enhance both frame rates and image resolution without compromising cell health, they often overlook the continuity of subcellular trajectories, which leads to discontinuous temporal modeling. It also incurs prohibitive computational costs due to exhaustive correlation computation that hinder real-time applications. To address these issues with high efficiency, we propose Trajectory Space-Time Super-Resolution (T-STSR), a method designed to boost frame rates and resolution in fast subcellular imaging while significantly reducing computational overhead. Our approach incorporates Spatial-Temporal Trajectory Modeling (STTM), which learns a state-space model over spatiotemporal slices to reconstruct particle trajectories at low cost. In addition, our novel Trajectory-Aware Loss randomly subsamples trajectory data during training, promoting continuous trajectory representation and mitigating noise with minimal additional computation. We validated T-STSR on both synthesized and real-world datasets with various particle types and noise conditions, demonstrating that our method achieves superior restoration results while saving 75% inference time compared to the previous SOTA model.

Existing recurrent optical flow estimation networks are computationally expensive since they use a fixed large number of iterations to update the flow field for each sample. An efficient network should skip iterations when the flow improvement is limited. In this paper, we develop a Context-Aware Iteration Policy Network for efficient optical flow estimation, which determines the optimal number of iterations per sample. The policy network achieves this by learning contextual information to realize whether flow improvement is bottlenecked or minimal. On the one hand, we use iteration embedding and historical hidden cell, which include previous iterations information, to convey how flow has changed from previous iterations. On the other hand, we use the incremental loss to make the policy network implicitly perceive the magnitude of optical flow improvement in the subsequent iteration. Furthermore, the computational complexity in our dynamic network is controllable, allowing us to satisfy various resource preferences with a single trained model. Our policy network can be easily integrated into state-of-the-art optical flow networks. Extensive experiments show that our method maintains performance while reducing FLOPs by about 40%/20% for the Sintel/KITTI datasets.

With the rise of real-time rendering and the evolution of display devices, there is a growing demand for post-processing methods that offer high-resolution content in a high frame rate. Existing techniques often suffer from quality and latency issues due to the disjointed treatment of frame supersampling and extrapolation. In this paper, we recognize the shared context and mechanisms between frame supersampling and extrapolation, and present a novel framework, Space-time Supersampling (STSS). By integrating them into a unified framework, STSS can improve the overall quality with lower latency. To implement an efficient architecture, we treat the aliasing and warping holes unified as reshading regions and put forth two key components to compensate the regions, namely Random Reshading Masking (RRM) and Efficient Reshading Module (ERM). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior visual fidelity compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Notably, the performance is achieved within only 4ms, saving up to 75\% of time against the conventional two-stage pipeline that necessitates 17ms.

Optical Flow Estimation aims to find the 2D dense motion field between two frames. Due to the limitation of model structures and training datasets, existing methods often rely too much on local clues and ignore the integrity of objects, resulting in fragmented motion estimation. Through theoretical analysis, we find the pre-trained large vision models are helpful in optical flow estimation, and we notice that the recently famous Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates a strong ability to segment complete objects, which is suitable for solving the fragmentation problem. We thus propose a solution to embed the frozen SAM image encoder into FlowFormer to enhance object perception. To address the challenge of in-depth utilizing SAM in non-segmentation tasks like optical flow estimation, we propose an Optical Flow Task-Specific Adaption scheme, including a Context Fusion Module to fuse the SAM encoder with the optical flow context encoder, and a Context Adaption Module to adapt the SAM features for optical flow task with Learned Task-Specific Embedding. Our proposed SAMFlow model reaches 0.86/2.10 clean/final EPE and 3.55/12.32 EPE/F1-all on Sintel and KITTI-15 training set, surpassing Flowformer by 8.5%/9.9% and 13.2%/16.3%. Furthermore, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Sintel and KITTI-15 benchmarks, ranking #1 among all two-frame methods on Sintel clean pass.

Facial movements play a crucial role in conveying altitude and intentions, and facial optical flow provides a dynamic and detailed representation of it. However, the scarcity of datasets and a modern baseline hinders the progress in facial optical flow research. This paper proposes FacialFlowNet (FFN), a novel large-scale facial optical flow dataset, and the Decomposed Facial Flow Model (DecFlow), the first method capable of decomposing facial flow. FFN comprises 9,635 identities and 105,970 image pairs, offering unprecedented diversity for detailed facial and head motion analysis. DecFlow features a facial semantic-aware encoder and a decomposed flow decoder, excelling in accurately estimating and decomposing facial flow into head and expression components. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FFN significantly enhances the accuracy of facial flow estimation across various optical flow methods, achieving up to an 11% reduction in Endpoint Error (EPE) (from 3.91 to 3.48). Moreover, DecFlow, when coupled with FFN, outperforms existing methods in both synthetic and real-world scenarios, enhancing facial expression analysis. The decomposed expression flow achieves a substantial accuracy improvement of 18% (from 69.1% to 82.1%) in micro-expressions recognition. These contributions represent a significant advancement in facial motion analysis and optical flow estimation. Codes and datasets can be found.

Inpainting is a task to restore occlusion or other corruption on images. However, previous works require mask of the occluded area to restore the occluded image, which is inconvenient for application. Blind face inpainting aims to automatically restore the occluded face without position information of the corrupt region. In this paper, we propose a novel fine-grained blind face inpainting framework, combining 3D face components disentanglement with generative network. Canonical face texture and shape disentangled by unsupervised 3D face model is restored separately to get occlusion-free rendered result. Finally, the pixel-to-pixel generative module utilize the occlusion image and the coarse de-occlusion face to get refined inpainted result. We also build up a new dataset called CelebO-3D which consists of occluded face images synthesized with 3D occlusion and rendered by 3D face model. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is effective and robust in face blind inpainting both in synthesized and real images. Extensive evaluations and comparison with previous methods also show our superior effectiveness and lightweight architecture.

The video frame interpolation (VFI) model applies the convolution operation to all locations, leading to redundant computations in regions with easy motion. We can use dynamic spatial pruning method to skip redundant computation, but this method cannot properly identify easy regions in VFI tasks without supervision. In this paper, we develop an Uncertainty-Guided Spatial Pruning (UGSP) architecture to skip redundant computation for efficient frame interpolation dynamically. Specifically, pixels with low uncertainty indicate easy regions, where the calculation can be reduced without bringing undesirable visual results. Therefore, we utilize uncertainty-generated mask labels to guide our UGSP in properly locating the easy region. Furthermore, we propose a self-contrast training strategy that leverages an auxiliary non-pruning branch to improve the performance of our UGSP. Extensive experiments show that UGSP maintains performance but reduces FLOPs by 34%/52%/30% compared to baseline without pruning on Vimeo90K/UCF101/MiddleBury datasets. In addition, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with lower FLOPs on multiple benchmarks.

In recent years, many deep learning-based methods have been proposed to tackle the problem of optical flow estimation and achieved promising results. However, they hardly consider that most videos are compressed and thus ignore the pre-computed information in compressed video streams. Motion vectors, one of the compression information, record the motion of the video frames. They can be directly extracted from the compression code stream without computational cost and serve as a solid prior for optical flow estimation. Therefore, we propose an optical flow model, MVFlow, which uses motion vectors to improve the speed and accuracy of optical flow estimation for compressed videos. In detail, MVFlow includes a key Motion-Vector Converting Module, which ensures that the motion vectors can be transformed into the same domain of optical flow and then be utilized fully by the flow estimation module. Meanwhile, we construct four optical flow datasets for compressed videos containing frames and motion vectors in pairs. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MVFlow, which can reduce the AEPE by 1.09 compared to existing models or save 52% time to achieve similar accuracy to existing models.

The existence of occlusions brings in semantically irrelevant visual patterns and leads to the content loss of occluded regions. Although previous works have made improvement on occluded facial expression recognition, they do not explicitly handle the interference factors aforementioned. In this paper, we propose an intuitive and simplified workflow, Co-Completion, which combines occlusion discarding and feature completion together to reduce the impact of occlusions on facial expression recognition. To protect key features from being contaminated and reduce the dependency of feature completion on occlusion discarding, guidance from discriminative regions is also introduced for joint feature completion. Moreover, we release the COO-RW database for occlusion simulation and refine the occlusion generation protocol for fair comparison in this filed. Experiments on synthetic and realistic databases demonstrate the superiority of our method. The COO-RW database can be downloaded from https://github.com/loveSmallOrange/COO-RW.