Image exposure correction enhances images captured under diverse real-world conditions by addressing issues of under- and over-exposure, which can result in the loss of critical details and hinder content recognition. While significant advancements have been made, current methods often fail to achieve optimal feature learning for effective correction. To overcome these challenges, we propose Exposure-slot, a novel framework that integrates a prompt-based slot-in-slot attention mechanism to cluster exposed feature regions and learn exposure-centric features for each cluster. By extending the Slot Attention algorithm with a hierarchical structure, our approach progressively clusters features, enabling precise and region-aware correction. In particular, learnable prompts tailored to exposure characteristics of slots further enhance feature quality, adapting dynamically to varying conditions. Our method delivers superior performance on benchmark datasets, surpassing the current state-of-the-art with a PSNR improvement of over 1.85 dB on the SICE dataset and 0.4 dB on the LCDP dataset, thereby establishing a new benchmark for multi-exposure correction. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/kdhRick2222/Exposure-slot.

Low-light image enhancement poses a significant challenge due to the limited information captured by image sensors in low-light environments. Despite recent improvements in deep learning models, the lack of paired training datasets remains a significant obstacle. Therefore, unsupervised methods have emerged as a promising solution. In this work, we focus on the strength of curve-adjustment-based approaches to tackle unsupervised methods. The majority of existing unsupervised curve-adjustment approaches iteratively estimate higher order curve parameters to enhance the exposure of images while efficiently preserving the details of the images. However, the convergence of the enhancement procedure cannot be guaranteed, leading to sensitivity to the number of iterations and limited performance. To address this problem, we consider the iterative curve-adjustment update process as a dynamic system and formulate it as a Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODE) for the first time, and this allows us to learn a continuous dynamics of the latent image. The strategy of utilizing NODE to leverage continuous dynamics in iterative methods enhances unsupervised learning and aids in achieving better convergence compared to discrete-space approaches. Consequently, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in unsupervised low-light image enhancement across various benchmark datasets.

Video stabilization is a longstanding computer vision problem, particularly pixel-level synthesis solutions for video stabilization which synthesize full frames add to the complexity of this task. These techniques aim to stabilize videos by synthesizing full frames while enhancing the sta-bility of the considered video. This intensifies the complexity of the task due to the distinct mix of unique motion profiles and visual content present in each video sequence, making robust generalization with fixed parameters difficult. In our study, we introduce a novel approach to enhance the performance of pixel-level synthesis solutions for video stabilization by adapting these models to individual input video sequences. The proposed adaptation exploits low-level visual cues accessible during test-time to improve both the stability and quality of resulting videos. We highlight the efficacy of our methodology of “test-time adaptation” through simple fine-tuning of one of these models, followed by significant stability gain via the integration of meta-learning techniques. Notably, significant improvement is achieved with only a single adaptation step. The versatility of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by consistently improving the performance of various pixel-level synthesis models for video stabilization in real-world scenarios.

Removing noise from images, a.k.a image denoising, can be a very challenging task since the type and amount of noise can greatly vary for each image due to many factors including a camera model and capturing environments. While there have been striking improvements in image Denoising with the emergence of advanced deep learning architectures and real-world datasets, recent denoising net-works struggle to maintain performance on images with noise that has not been seen during training. One typical approach to address the challenge would be to adapt a Denoising network to new noise distribution. Instead, in this work, we shift our focus to adapting the input noise itself, rather than adapting a network. Thus, we keep a pretrained network frozen, and adapt an input noise to capture the fine-grained deviations. As such, we propose a new denoising algorithm, dubbed Learning-to-Adapt-Noise (LAN), where a learnable noise offset is directly added to a given noisy image to bring a given input noise closer towards the noise distribution a denoising network is trained to handle. Consequently, the proposed framework exhibits performance improvement on images with unseen noise, displaying the potential of the proposed research direction.

Noise poses a widespread challenge in signal processing, particularly when it comes to denoising images. Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have exhibited remarkable success in this field, they are predicated upon the belief that noise follows established distributions, which restricts their practicality when dealing with real-world noise. To overcome this limitation, several efforts have been taken to collect noisy image datasets from the real world. Generative methods, employing techniques such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and normalizing flows (NFs), have emerged as a solution for generating realistic noisy images. Recent works model noise using camera metadata, however requiring metadata even for sampling phase. In contrast, in this work, we aim to estimate the underlying camera settings, enabling us to improve noise modeling and generate diverse noise distributions. To this end, we introduce a new NF framework that allows us to both classify noise based on camera settings and generate various noisy images. Through experimental results, our model demonstrates exceptional noise quality and leads in denoising performance on benchmark datasets.

Relying on the representation power of neural networks, most recent works have often neglected several factors involved in haze degradation, such as transmission (the amount of light reaching an observer from a scene over distance) and atmospheric light. These factors are generally unknown, making dehazing problems ill-posed and creating inherent uncertainties. To account for such uncertainties and factors involved in haze degradation, we introduce a variational Bayesian framework for single image dehazing. We propose to take not only a clean image and but also transmission map as latent variables, the posterior distributions of which are parameterized by corresponding neural networks: dehazing and transmission networks, respectively. Based on a physical model for haze degradation, our variational Bayesian framework leads to a new objective function that encourages the cooperation between them, facilitating the joint training of and thereby boosting the performance of each other. In our framework, a dehazing network can estimate a clean image independently of a transmission map estimation during inference, introducing no overhead. Furthermore, our model-agnostic framework can be seamlessly incorporated with other existing dehazing networks, greatly enhancing the performance consistently across datasets and models.

In many video restoration/translation tasks, image processing operations are naïvely extended to the video domain by processing each frame independently, disregarding the temporal connection of the video frames. This disregard for the temporal connection often leads to severe temporal inconsistencies. State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) techniques that address these inconsistencies rely on the availability of unprocessed videos to implicitly siphon and utilize consistent video dynamics to restore the temporal consistency of frame-wise processed videos which often jeopardizes the translation effect. We propose a general framework for this task that learns to infer and utilize consistent motion dynamics from inconsistent videos to mitigate the temporal flicker while preserving the perceptual quality for both the temporally neighboring and relatively distant frames without requiring the raw videos at test time. The proposed framework produces SOTA results on two benchmark datasets, DAVIS and videvo.net, processed by numerous image processing applications. The code and the trained models are available at https://github.com/MKashifAli/TARONVD.

Recent learning-based video inpainting approaches have achieved considerable progress. However, they still cannot fully utilize semantic information within the video frames and predict improper scene layout, failing to restore clear object boundaries for mixed scenes. To mitigate this problem, we introduce a new transformer-based video inpainting technique that can exploit semantic information within the input and considerably improve reconstruction quality. In this study, we use the mixture-of-experts scheme and train multiple experts to handle mixed scenes, including various semantics. We leverage these multiple experts and produce locally (token-wise) different network parameters to achieve semantic-aware inpainting results. Extensive experiments on YouTube-VOS and DAVIS benchmark datasets demonstrate that, compared with existing conventional video inpainting approaches, the proposed method has superior performance in synthesizing visually pleasing videos with much clearer semantic structures and textures.

Recent deep-learning-based super-resolution (SR) methods have been successful in recovering high-resolution (HR) images from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts, albeit on the synthetic and simple degradation setting: bicubic downscaling. On the other hand, super-resolution on real-world images demands the capability to handle complex downscaling mechanism which produces different artifacts (e.g., noise, blur, color distortion) upon downscaling factors. To account for complex downscaling mechanism in real-world LR images, there have been a few efforts in constructing datasets consisting of LR images with real-world downsampling degradation. However, making such datasets entails a tremendous amount of time and effort, thereby resorting to very few number of downscaling factors (e.g., $\times$2, $\times$3, $\times$4). To remedy the issue, we propose to generate realistic SR datasets for unseen degradation levels by exploring the latent space of real LR images and thereby producing more diverse yet realistic LR images with complex real-world artifacts. Our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the generated LR images, and we show that the various conventional SR networks trained with our newly generated SR datasets can produce much better HR images.

Visual anomaly detection, the task of detecting abnormal characteristics in images, is challenging due to the rarity and unpredictability of anomalies. In order to reliably model the distribution of normality and detect anomalies, a few works have attempted to exploit the density estimation ability of normalizing flow (NF). However, previous NF-based methods have relied solely on the capability of NF and forcibly transformed the distribution of all features to a single distribution (e.g., unit normal distribution), when features can have different semantic information and thus follow different distributions. We claim that forcibly learning to transform such diverse distributions to a single distribution with a single network will cause the learning difficulty, limiting the capacity of a network to discriminate normal and abnormal data. As such, we propose to transform the distribution of features at each location of a given image to different distributions. In particular, we train NF to map normal data distribution to distributions with the same mean but different variances at each location of the given image. To enhance the discriminability, we also train NF to map abnormal data distribution to a distribution with a mean that is different from that of normal data, where abnormal data is synthesized with data augmentation. The experimental results outline the effectiveness of the proposed framework in improving the density modeling and thus anomaly detection performance.

In this paper, we propose an instance-wise meta-learning algorithm for optical flow domain adaptation. Typical optical flow algorithms with deep learning suffer from weak cross-domain performance since their trainings largely rely on synthetic datasets in specific domains. This prevents optical flow performance on different scenes from carrying similar performance in practice. Meanwhile, test-time do-main adaptation approaches for optical flow estimation are yet to be studied. Our proposed method, with some training data, learns to adapt more sensitively to incoming in-puts in the target domain. During the inference process, our method readily exploits the information only accessible in the test-time. Since our algorithm adapts to each input image, we incorporate traditional unsupervised losses for optical flow estimation. Moreover, with the observation that optical flows in a single domain typically contain many similar motions, we show that our method demonstrates high performance with only a small number of training data. This allows to save labeling efforts. Through the experiments on KITTI and MPI-Sintel datasets, our algorithm significantly outperforms the results without adaptation and shows consistently better performance in comparison to typical fine-tuning with the same amount of data. Also qualitatively our proposed method demonstrates more accurate results for the images with high errors in the original networks.

Recent transformer-based super-resolution (SR) methods have achieved promising results against conventional CNN-based methods. However, these approaches suffer from essential shortsightedness created by only utilizing the standard self-attention-based reasoning. In this paper, we introduce an effective hybrid SR network to aggregate enriched features, including local features from CNNs and long-range multi-scale dependencies captured by transformers. Specifically, our network comprises transformer and convolutional branches, which synergetically complement each representation during the restoration procedure. Furthermore, we propose a cross-scale token attention module, allowing the transformer branch to exploit the informative relationships among tokens across different scales efficiently. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art SR results on numerous benchmark datasets.

We propose a new approach for the image super-resolution (SR) task that progressively restores a high-resolution (HR) image from an input low-resolution (LR) image on the basis of a neural ordinary differential equation. In particular, we newly formulate the SR problem as an initial value problem, where the initial value is the input LR image. Unlike conventional progressive SR methods that perform gradual updates using straightforward iterative mechanisms, our SR process is formulated in a concrete manner based on explicit modeling with a much clearer understanding. Our method can be easily implemented using conventional neural networks for image restoration. Moreover, the proposed method can super-resolve an image with arbitrary scale factors on continuous domain, and achieves superior SR performance over state-ofthe-art SR methods.

Video frame interpolation is a challenging problem that involves various scenarios depending on the variety of foreground and background motions, frame rate, and occlusion. Therefore, generalizing across different scenes is difficult for a single network with fixed parameters. Ideally, one could have a different network for each scenario, but this will be computationally infeasible for practical applications. In this work, we propose MetaVFI, an adaptive video frame interpolation algorithm that uses additional information readily available at test time but has not been exploited in previous works. We initially show the benefits of test-time adaptation through simple fine-tuning of a network and then greatly improve its efficiency by incorporating meta-learning. Thus, we obtain significant performance gains with only a single gradient update without introducing any additional parameters. Moreover, the proposed MetaVFI algorithm is model-agnostic which can be easily combined with any video frame interpolation network. We show that our adaptive framework greatly improves the performance of baseline video frame interpolation networks on multiple benchmark datasets.

In this study, we propose a self-supervised video denoising method called "restore-from-restored." This method fine-tunes a pre-trained network by using a pseudo clean video during the test phase. The pseudo clean video is obtained by applying a noisy video to the baseline network. By adopting a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) as the baseline, we can improve video denoising performance without accurate optical flow estimation and registration steps, in contrast to many conventional video restoration methods, due to the translation equivariant property of the FCN. Specifically, the proposed method can take advantage of plentiful similar patches existing across multiple consecutive frames (i.e., patch-recurrence); these patches can boost the performance of the baseline network by a large margin. We analyze the restoration performance of the fine-tuned video denoising networks with the proposed self-supervision-based learning algorithm, and demonstrate that the FCN can utilize recurring patches without requiring accurate registration among adjacent frames. In our experiments, we apply the proposed method to state-of-the-art denoisers and show that our fine-tuned networks achieve a considerable improvement in denoising performance.

Video frame interpolation is a challenging problem because there are different scenarios for each video depending on the variety of foreground and background motion, frame rate, and occlusion. It is therefore difficult for a single network with fixed parameters to generalize across different videos. Ideally, one could have a different network for each scenario, but this is computationally infeasible for practical applications. In this work, we propose to adapt the model to each video by making use of additional information that is readily available at test time and yet has not been exploited in previous works. We first show the benefits of 'test-time adaptation' through simple fine-tuning of a network, then we greatly improve its efficiency by incorporating meta-learning. We obtain significant performance gains with only a single gradient update without any additional parameters. Finally, we show that our meta-learning framework can be easily employed to any video frame interpolation network and can consistently improve its performance on multiple benchmark datasets.

The popularity of parallax-based image processing is increasing while in contrast early works on recovering sharp light field from its blurry input (deblurring) remain stagnant. State-of-the-art blind light field deblurring methods suffer from several problems such as slow processing, reduced spatial size, and simplified motion blur model. In this paper, we solve these challenging problems by proposing a novel light field recurrent deblurring network that is trained under 6 degree-of-freedom camera motion-blur model. By combining the real light field captured using Lytro Illum and synthetic light field rendering of 3D scenes from UnrealCV, we provide a large-scale blurry light field dataset to train the network. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of deblurring quality, the capability of handling full-resolution, and a fast runtime.

State-of-the-art video deblurring methods cannot handle blurry videos recorded in dynamic scenes since they are built under a strong assumption that the captured scenes are static. Contrary to the existing methods, we propose a new video deblurring algorithm that can deal with general blurs inherent in dynamic scenes. To handle general and locally varying blurs caused by various sources, such as moving objects, camera shake, depth variation, and defocus, we estimate pixel-wise varying non-uniform blur kernels. We infer bidirectional optical flows to handle motion blurs, and also estimate Gaussian blur maps to remove optical blur from defocus. Therefore, we propose a single energy model that jointly estimates optical flows, defocus blur maps and latent frames. We also provide a framework and efficient solvers to minimize the proposed energy model. By optimizing the energy model, we achieve significant improvements in removing general blurs, estimating optical flows, and extending depth-of-field in blurry frames. Moreover, in this work, to evaluate the performance of non-uniform deblurring methods objectively, we have constructed a new realistic dataset with ground truths. In addition, extensive experimental results on publicly available challenging videos demonstrate that the proposed method produces qualitatively superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods which often fail in either deblurring or optical flow estimation.

Non-uniform blind deblurring for general dynamic scenes is a challenging computer vision problem as blurs arise not only from multiple object motions but also from camera shake, scene depth variation. To remove these complicated motion blurs, conventional energy optimization based methods rely on simple assumptions such that blur kernel is partially uniform or locally linear. Moreover, recent machine learning based methods also depend on synthetic blur datasets generated under these assumptions. This makes conventional deblurring methods fail to remove blurs where blur kernel is difficult to approximate or parameterize (e.g. object motion boundaries). In this work, we propose a multi-scale convolutional neural network that restores sharp images in an end-to-end manner where blur is caused by various sources. Together, we present multi-scale loss function that mimics conventional coarse-to-fine approaches. Furthermore, we propose a new large-scale dataset that provides pairs of realistic blurry image and the corresponding ground truth sharp image that are obtained by a high-speed camera. With the proposed model trained on this dataset, we demonstrate empirically that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in dynamic scene deblurring not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively.

Several state-of-the-art video deblurring methods are based on a strong assumption that the captured scenes are static. These methods fail to deblur blurry videos in dynamic scenes. We propose a video deblurring method to deal with general blurs inherent in dynamic scenes, contrary to other methods. To handle locally varying and general blurs caused by various sources, such as camera shake, moving objects, and depth variation in a scene, we approximate pixel-wise kernel with bidirectional optical flows. Therefore, we propose a single energy model that simultaneously estimates optical flows and latent frames to solve our deblurring problem. We also provide a framework and efficient solvers to optimize the energy model. By minimizing the proposed energy function, we achieve significant improvements in removing blurs and estimating accurate optical flows in blurry frames. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in real and challenging videos that state-of-the-art methods fail in either deblurring or optical flow estimation.

Most state-of-the-art dynamic scene deblurring methods based on accurate motion segmentation assume that motion blur is small or that the specific type of motion causing the blur is known. In this paper, we study a motion segmentation-free dynamic scene deblurring method, which is unlike other conventional methods. When the motion can be approximated to linear motion that is locally (pixel-wise) varying, we can handle various types of blur caused by camera shake, including out-of-plane motion, depth variation, radial distortion, and so on. Thus, we propose a new energy model simultaneously estimating motion flow and the latent image based on robust total variation (TV)-L1 model. This approach is necessary to handle abrupt changes in motion without segmentation. Furthermore, we address the problem of the traditional coarse-to-fine deblurring framework, which gives rise to artifacts when restoring small structures with distinct motion. We thus propose a novel kernel re-initialization method which reduces the error of motion flow propagated from a coarser level. Moreover, a highly effective convex optimization-based solution mitigating the computational difficulties of the TV-L1 model is established. Comparative experimental results on challenging real blurry images demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.

Most conventional single image deblurring methods assume that the underlying scene is static and the blur is caused by only camera shake. In this paper, in contrast to this restrictive assumption, we address the deblurring problem of general dynamic scenes which contain multiple moving objects as well as camera shake. In case of dynamic scenes, moving objects and background have different blur motions, so the segmentation of the motion blur is required for deblurring each distinct blur motion accurately. Thus, we propose a novel energy model designed with the weighted sum of multiple blur data models, which estimates different motion blurs and their associated pixel-wise weights, and resulting sharp image. In this framework, the local weights are determined adaptively and get high values when the corresponding data models have high data fidelity. And, the weight information is used for the segmentation of the motion blur. Non-local regularization of weights are also incorporated to produce more reliable segmentation results. A convex optimization-based method is used for the solution of the proposed energy model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms conventional approaches in deblurring both dynamic scenes and static scenes.

Many state-of-the-art optical flow estimation algorithms optimize the data and regularization terms to solve ill-posed problems. In this paper, in contrast to the conventional optical flow framework that uses a single or fixed data model, we study a novel framework that employs locally varying data term that adaptively combines different multiple types of data models. The locally adaptive data term greatly reduces the matching ambiguity due to the complementary nature of the multiple data models. The optimal number of complementary data models is learnt by minimizing the redundancy among them under the minimum description length constraint (MDL). From these chosen data models, a new optical flow estimation energy model is designed with the weighted sum of the multiple data models, and a convex optimization-based highly effective and practical solution that finds the optical flow, as well as the weights is proposed. Comparative experimental results on the Middlebury optical flow benchmark show that the proposed method using the complementary data models outperforms the state-of-the art methods.