Compression artifacts arise in images whenever a lossy compression algorithm is applied. These artifacts eliminate details present in the original image, or add noise and small structures; because of these effects they make images less pleasant for the human eye, and may also lead to decreased performance of computer vision algorithms such as object detectors. To eliminate such artifacts, when decompressing an image, it is required to recover the original image from a disturbed version. To this end, we present a feed-forward fully convolutional residual network model trained using a generative adversarial framework. To provide a baseline, we show that our model can be also trained optimizing the Structural Similarity (SSIM), which is a better loss with respect to the simpler Mean Squared Error (MSE). Our GAN is able to produce images with more photorealistic details than MSE or SSIM based networks. Moreover we show that our approach can be used as a pre-processing step for object detection in case images are degraded by compression to a point that state-of-the art detectors fail. In this task, our GAN method obtains better performance than MSE or SSIM trained networks.
We make the following contributions. We define a deep convolutional residual generative network @cite_23 , that we train with two strategies. Similarly to @cite_14 our network is fully convolutional and is therefore able to restore images of any resolution. Differently from @cite_14 we avoid MSE loss and we use a loss based on SSIM, this improves results perceptually. Nonetheless, as also happening in the super-resolution task, networks trained to optimize the MSE produce overly smoothed images; this behavior unfortunately is also present in our SSIM trained feed-forward network.
@cite_14 @cite_23
2898677683 2523714292 2963470893 2174358748 2892998444 2963814095 2795824235 2963713691 2735224642 2963372104 2866634454 2950116990 2964013315 2771305881 2964277374 2129981175 2479644247 2563705555 2951402970 1971014294
Convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods have recently achieved great success for image super-resolution (SR). However, most deep CNN based SR models attempt to improve distortion measures (e.g. PSNR, SSIM, IFC, VIF) while resulting in poor quantified perceptual quality (e.g. human opinion score, no-reference quality measures such as NIQE). Few works have attempted to improve the perceptual quality at the cost of performance reduction in distortion measures. A very recent study has revealed that distortion and perceptual quality are at odds with each other and there is always a trade-off between the two. Often the restoration algorithms that are superior in terms of perceptual quality, are inferior in terms of distortion measures. Our work attempts to analyze the trade-off between distortion and perceptual quality for the problem of single image SR. To this end, we use the well-known SR architecture- enhanced deep super-resolution (EDSR) network and show that it can be adapted to achieve better perceptual quality for a specific range of the distortion measure. While the original network of EDSR was trained to minimize the error defined based on per-pixel accuracy alone, we train our network using a generative adversarial network framework with EDSR as the generator module. Our proposed network, called enhanced perceptual super-resolution network (EPSR), is trained with a combination of mean squared error loss, perceptual loss, and adversarial loss. Our experiments reveal that EPSR achieves the state-of-the-art trade-off between distortion and perceptual quality while the existing methods perform well in either of these measures alone. Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method. Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method. Deep networks are increasingly being applied to problems involving image synthesis, e.g., generating images from textual descriptions and reconstructing an input image from a compact representation. Supervised training of image-synthesis networks typically uses a pixel-wise loss (PL) to indicate the mismatch between a generated image and its corresponding target image. We propose instead to use a loss function that is better calibrated to human perceptual judgments of image quality: the multiscale structural-similarity score (MS-SSIM). Because MS-SSIM is differentiable, it is easily incorporated into gradient-descent learning. We compare the consequences of using MS-SSIM versus PL loss on training deterministic and stochastic autoencoders. For three different architectures, we collected human judgments of the quality of image reconstructions. Observers reliably prefer images synthesized by MS-SSIM-optimized models over those synthesized by PL-optimized models, for two distinct PL measures ( @math and @math distances). We also explore the effect of training objective on image encoding and analyze conditions under which perceptually-optimized representations yield better performance on image classification. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of perceptually-optimized networks for super-resolution imaging. Just as computer vision has advanced through the use of convolutional architectures that mimic the structure of the mammalian visual system, we argue that significant additional advances can be made in modeling images through the use of training objectives that are well aligned to characteristics of human perception. The performance of single image super-resolution has achieved significant improvement by utilizing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The features in deep CNN contain different types of information which make different contributions to image reconstruction. However, most CNN-based models lack discriminative ability for different types of information and deal with them equally, which results in the representational capacity of the models being limited. On the other hand, as the depth of neural networks grows, the long-term information coming from preceding layers is easy to be weaken or lost in late layers, which is adverse to super-resolving image. To capture more informative features and maintain long-term information for image super-resolution, we propose a channel-wise and spatial feature modulation (CSFM) network in which a sequence of feature-modulation memory (FMM) modules is cascaded with a densely connected structure to transform low-resolution features to high informative features. In each FMM module, we construct a set of channel-wise and spatial attention residual (CSAR) blocks and stack them in a chain structure to dynamically modulate multi-level features in a global-and-local manner. This feature modulation strategy enables the high contribution information to be enhanced and the redundant information to be suppressed. Meanwhile, for long-term information persistence, a gated fusion (GF) node is attached at the end of the FMM module to adaptively fuse hierarchical features and distill more effective information via the dense skip connections and the gating mechanism. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets illustrate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods. Despite that convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for single-image super-resolution (SR), recovering natural and realistic texture remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we show that it is possible to recover textures faithful to semantic classes. In particular, we only need to modulate features of a few intermediate layers in a single network conditioned on semantic segmentation probability maps. This is made possible through a novel Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) layer that generates affine transformation parameters for spatial-wise feature modulation. SFT layers can be trained end-to-end together with the SR network using the same loss function. During testing, it accepts an input image of arbitrary size and generates a high-resolution image with just a single forward pass conditioned on the categorical priors. Our final results show that an SR network equipped with SFT can generate more realistic and visually pleasing textures in comparison to state-of-the-art SRGAN [27] and EnhanceNet [38]. Despite that convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for single-image super-resolution (SR), recovering natural and realistic texture remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we show that it is possible to recover textures faithful to semantic classes. In particular, we only need to modulate features of a few intermediate layers in a single network conditioned on semantic segmentation probability maps. This is made possible through a novel Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) layer that generates affine transformation parameters for spatial-wise feature modulation. SFT layers can be trained end-to-end together with the SR network using the same loss function. During testing, it accepts an input image of arbitrary size and generates a high-resolution image with just a single forward pass conditioned on the categorical priors. Our final results show that an SR network equipped with SFT can generate more realistic and visually pleasing textures in comparison to state-of-the-art SRGAN and EnhanceNet. Deep networks are increasingly being applied to problems involving image synthesis, e.g., generating images from textual descriptions and reconstructing an input image from a compact representation. Supervised training of image-synthesis networks typically uses a pixel-wise loss (PL) to indicate the mismatch between a generated image and its corresponding target image. We propose instead to use a loss function that is better calibrated to human perceptual judgments of image quality: the multiscale structural-similarity score (MS-SSIM) [1]. Because MS-SSIM is differentiable, it is easily incorporated into gradient-descent learning. We compare the consequences of using MS-SSIM versus PL loss on training autoencoders. Human observers reliably prefer images synthesized by MS-SSIM-optimized models over those synthesized by PL-optimized models, for two distinct PL measures (L 1 and L 2 distances). We also explore the effect of training objective on image encoding and analyze conditions under which perceptually-optimized representations yield better performance on image classification. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of perceptually-optimized networks for super-resolution imaging. We argue that significant advances can be made in modeling images through the use of training objectives that are well aligned to characteristics of human perception. Recent research on super-resolution has progressed with the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). In particular, residual learning techniques exhibit improved performance. In this paper, we develop an enhanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR) with performance exceeding those of current state-of-the-art SR methods. The significant performance improvement of our model is due to optimization by removing unnecessary modules in conventional residual networks. The performance is further improved by expanding the model size while we stabilize the training procedure. We also propose a new multi-scale deep super-resolution system (MDSR) and training method, which can reconstruct high-resolution images of different upscaling factors in a single model. The proposed methods show superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and prove its excellence by winning the NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge. Recent research on super-resolution has progressed with the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). In particular, residual learning techniques exhibit improved performance. In this paper, we develop an enhanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR) with performance exceeding those of current state-of-the-art SR methods. The significant performance improvement of our model is due to optimization by removing unnecessary modules in conventional residual networks. The performance is further improved by expanding the model size while we stabilize the training procedure. We also propose a new multi-scale deep super-resolution system (MDSR) and training method, which can reconstruct high-resolution images of different upscaling factors in a single model. The proposed methods show superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and prove its excellence by winning the NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge[26]. Convolutional neural network (CNN) depth is of crucial importance for image super-resolution (SR). However, we observe that deeper networks for image SR are more difficult to train. The low-resolution inputs and features contain abundant low-frequency information, which is treated equally across channels, hence hindering the representational ability of CNNs. To solve these problems, we propose the very deep residual channel attention networks (RCAN). Specifically, we propose a residual in residual (RIR) structure to form very deep network, which consists of several residual groups with long skip connections. Each residual group contains some residual blocks with short skip connections. Meanwhile, RIR allows abundant low-frequency information to be bypassed through multiple skip connections, making the main network focus on learning high-frequency information. Furthermore, we propose a channel attention mechanism to adaptively rescale channel-wise features by considering interdependencies among channels. Extensive experiments show that our RCAN achieves better accuracy and visual improvements against state-of-the-art methods. Convolutional neural network (CNN) depth is of crucial importance for image super-resolution (SR). However, we observe that deeper networks for image SR are more difficult to train. The low-resolution inputs and features contain abundant low-frequency information, which is treated equally across channels, hence hindering the representational ability of CNNs. To solve these problems, we propose the very deep residual channel attention networks (RCAN). Specifically, we propose a residual in residual (RIR) structure to form very deep network, which consists of several residual groups with long skip connections. Each residual group contains some residual blocks with short skip connections. Meanwhile, RIR allows abundant low-frequency information to be bypassed through multiple skip connections, making the main network focus on learning high-frequency information. Furthermore, we propose a channel attention mechanism to adaptively rescale channel-wise features by considering interdependencies among channels. Extensive experiments show that our RCAN achieves better accuracy and visual improvements against state-of-the-art methods. Deep convolutional networks have become a popular tool for image generation and restoration. Generally, their excellent performance is imputed to their ability to learn realistic image priors from a large number of example images. In this paper, we show that, on the contrary, the structure of a generator network is sufficient to capture a great deal of low-level image statistics prior to any learning. In order to do so, we show that a randomly-initialized neural network can be used as a handcrafted prior with excellent results in standard inverse problems such as denoising, superresolution, and inpainting. Furthermore, the same prior can be used to invert deep neural representations to diagnose them, and to restore images based on flash-no flash input pairs. Apart from its diverse applications, our approach highlights the inductive bias captured by standard generator network architectures. It also bridges the gap between two very popular families of image restoration methods: learning-based methods using deep convolutional networks and learning-free methods based on handcrafted image priors such as self-similarity. Deep convolutional networks have become a popular tool for image generation and restoration. Generally, their excellent performance is imputed to their ability to learn realistic image priors from a large number of example images. In this paper, we show that, on the contrary, the structure of a generator network is sufficient to capture a great deal of low-level image statistics prior to any learning. In order to do so, we show that a randomly-initialized neural network can be used as a handcrafted prior with excellent results in standard inverse problems such as denoising, super-resolution, and inpainting. Furthermore, the same prior can be used to invert deep neural representations to diagnose them, and to restore images based on flash-no flash input pairs. Apart from its diverse applications, our approach highlights the inductive bias captured by standard generator network architectures. It also bridges the gap between two very popular families of image restoration methods: learning-based methods using deep convolutional networks and learning-free methods based on handcrafted image priors such as self-similarity. Code and supplementary material are available at this https URL . Recent years have witnessed the unprecedented success of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in single image super-resolution (SISR). However, existing CNN-based SISR methods mostly assume that a low-resolution (LR) image is bicubicly downsampled from a high-resolution (HR) image, thus inevitably giving rise to poor performance when the true degradation does not follow this assumption. Moreover, they lack scalability in learning a single model to nonblindly deal with multiple degradations. To address these issues, we propose a general framework with dimensionality stretching strategy that enables a single convolutional super-resolution network to take two key factors of the SISR degradation process, i.e., blur kernel and noise level, as input. Consequently, the super-resolver can handle multiple and even spatially variant degradations, which significantly improves the practicability. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real LR images show that the proposed convolutional super-resolution network not only can produce favorable results on multiple degradations but also is computationally efficient, providing a highly effective and scalable solution to practical SISR applications. Convolutional networks have achieved a great deal of success in high-level vision problems such as object recognition. Here we show that they can also be used as a general method for low-level image processing. As an example of our approach, convolutional networks are trained using gradient learning to solve the problem of restoring noisy or degraded images. For our training data, we have used electron microscopic images of neural circuitry with ground truth restorations provided by human experts. On this dataset, Markov random field (MRF), conditional random field (CRF), and anisotropic diffusion algorithms perform about the same as simple thresholding, but superior performance is obtained with a convolutional network containing over 34,000 adjustable parameters. When restored by this convolutional network, the images are clean enough to be used for segmentation, whereas the other approaches fail in this respect. We do not believe that convolutional networks are fundamentally superior to MRFs as a representation for image processing algorithms. On the contrary, the two approaches are closely related. But in practice, it is possible to train complex convolutional networks, while even simple MRF models are hindered by problems with Bayesian learning and inference procedures. Our results suggest that high model complexity is the single most important factor for good performance, and this is possible with convolutional networks. In this paper, we propose a novel method for image inpainting based on a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN). We define a loss function consisting of two parts: (1) a contextual loss that preserves similarity between the input corrupted image and the recovered image, and (2) a perceptual loss that ensures a perceptually realistic output image. Given a corrupted image with missing values, we use back-propagation on this loss to map the corrupted image to a smaller latent space. The mapped vector is then passed through the generative model to predict the missing content. The proposed framework is evaluated on the CelebA and SVHN datasets for two challenging inpainting tasks with random 80 corruption and large blocky corruption. Experiments show that our method can successfully predict semantic information in the missing region and achieve pixel-level photorealism, which is impossible by almost all existing methods. Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance in object recognition and have also been the first choice for dense classification problems such as semantic segmentation. However, repeated subsampling operations like pooling or convolution striding in deep CNNs lead to a significant decrease in the initial image resolution. Here, we present RefineNet, a generic multi-path refinement network that explicitly exploits all the information available along the down-sampling process to enable high-resolution prediction using long-range residual connections. In this way, the deeper layers that capture high-level semantic features can be directly refined using fine-grained features from earlier convolutions. The individual components of RefineNet employ residual connections following the identity mapping mindset, which allows for effective end-to-end training. Further, we introduce chained residual pooling, which captures rich background context in an efficient manner. We carry out comprehensive experiments and set new state-of-the-art results on seven public datasets. In particular, we achieve an intersection-over-union score of 83.4 on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, which is the best reported result to date. Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance in object recognition and have also been the first choice for dense classification problems such as semantic segmentation. However, repeated subsampling operations like pooling or convolution striding in deep CNNs lead to a significant decrease in the initial image resolution. Here, we present RefineNet, a generic multi-path refinement network that explicitly exploits all the information available along the down-sampling process to enable high-resolution prediction using long-range residual connections. In this way, the deeper layers that capture high-level semantic features can be directly refined using fine-grained features from earlier convolutions. The individual components of RefineNet employ residual connections following the identity mapping mindset, which allows for effective end-to-end training. Further, we introduce chained residual pooling, which captures rich background context in an efficient manner. We carry out comprehensive experiments and set new state-of-the-art results on seven public datasets. In particular, we achieve an intersection-over-union score of 83.4 on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, which is the best reported result to date. There has been much interest in unsupervised learning of hierarchical generative models such as deep belief networks (DBNs); however, scaling such models to full-sized, high-dimensional images remains a difficult problem. To address this problem, we present the convolutional deep belief network, a hierarchical generative model that scales to realistic image sizes. This model is translation-invariant and supports efficient bottom-up and top-down probabilistic inference. Key to our approach is probabilistic max-pooling, a novel technique that shrinks the representations of higher layers in a probabilistically sound way. Our experiments show that the algorithm learns useful high-level visual features, such as object parts, from unlabeled images of objects and natural scenes. We demonstrate excellent performance on several visual recognition tasks and show that our model can perform hierarchical (bottom-up and top-down) inference over full-sized images.