This paper tackles high-dynamic-range (HDR) image reconstruction given only a single low-dynamic-range (LDR) image as input. While the existing methods focus on minimizing the mean-squared-error (MSE) between the target and reconstructed images, we minimize a hybrid loss that consists of perceptual and adversarial losses in addition to HDR-reconstruction loss. The reconstruction loss instead of MSE is more suitable for HDR since it puts more weight on both over- and under- exposed areas. It makes the reconstruction faithful to the input. Perceptual loss enables the networks to utilize knowledge about objects and image structure for recovering the intensity gradients of saturated and grossly quantized areas. Adversarial loss helps to select the most plausible appearance from multiple solutions. The hybrid loss that combines all the three losses is calculated in logarithmic space of image intensity so that the outputs retain a large dynamic range and meanwhile the learning becomes tractable. Comparative experiments conducted with other state-of-the-art methods demonstrated that our method produces a leap in image quality.
With the growing popularity of end-to-end learning, single-step networks that directly estimate the desired HDR images may be preferable to multi-step methods. HDR-CNN @cite_31 and Deep Reciprocating HDR @cite_29 share the same encoder-decoder structure that directly generates an HDR image from an LDR image. While the architecture itself is similar to UNet for segmentation @cite_34 , they train networks to recover from over- under-exposures of moderate extent that are artificially added to the training LDR images. ExpandNet @cite_6 has a three-branch architecture designed for single-step HDR image generation, and the branches are for global, semi-local, and local feature extraction. In contrast, we show that the simple encoder-decoder architecture performs well with our augmented loss functions.
@cite_31 @cite_29 @cite_6 @cite_34
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High dynamic range (HDR) imaging provides the capability of handling real world lighting as opposed to the traditional low dynamic range (LDR) which struggles to accurately represent images with higher dynamic range. However, most imaging content is still available only in LDR. This paper presents a method for generating HDR content from LDR content based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) termed ExpandNet. ExpandNet accepts LDR images as input and generates images with an expanded range in an end-to-end fashion. The model attempts to reconstruct missing information that was lost from the original signal due to quantization, clipping, tone mapping or gamma correction. The added information is reconstructed from learned features, as the network is trained in a supervised fashion using a dataset of HDR images. The approach is fully automatic and data driven; it does not require any heuristics or human expertise. ExpandNet uses a multiscale architecture which avoids the use of upsampling layers to improve image quality. The method performs well compared to expansion inverse tone mapping operators quantitatively on multiple metrics, even for badly exposed inputs. Inferring a high dynamic range (HDR) image from a single low dynamic range (LDR) input is an ill-posed problem where we must compensate lost data caused by under- over-exposure and color quantization. To tackle this, we propose the first deep-learning-based approach for fully automatic inference using convolutional neural networks. Because a naive way of directly inferring a 32-bit HDR image from an 8-bit LDR image is intractable due to the difficulty of training, we take an indirect approach; the key idea of our method is to synthesize LDR images taken with different exposures (i.e., bracketed images) based on supervised learning, and then reconstruct an HDR image by merging them. By learning the relative changes of pixel values due to increased decreased exposures using 3D deconvolutional networks, our method can reproduce not only natural tones without introducing visible noise but also the colors of saturated pixels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by comparing our results not only with those of conventional methods but also with ground-truth HDR images. We study the design of deep architectures for lossy image compression. We present two architectural recipes in the context of multi-stage progressive encoders and empirically demonstrate their importance on compression performance. Specifically, we show that: (a) predicting the original image data from residuals in a multi-stage progressive architecture facilitates learning and leads to improved performance at approximating the original content and (b) learning to inpaint (from neighboring image pixels) before performing compression reduces the amount of information that must be stored to achieve a high-quality approximation. Incorporating these design choices in a baseline progressive encoder yields an average reduction of over @math in file size with similar quality compared to the original residual encoder. In this paper, a hierarchical deep multi-task learning (HD-MTL) algorithm is developed to support large-scale visual recognition (e.g., recognizing thousands or even tens of thousands of atomic object classes automatically). To achieve more effective accomplishment of the coarse-to-fine tasks for hierarchical visual recognition, multiple sets of deep features are first extracted from the different layers of deep convolutional neural networks (deep CNNs). A visual tree is then learned by assigning the visually-similar atomic object classes with similar learning complexities into the same group, and it can provide a good environment for identifying the inter-related learning tasks automatically. By leveraging the inter-task relatedness (inter-class similarities) to learn more discriminative group-specific deep representations, our deep multi-task learning algorithm can achieve the global optimum easily and obtain more discriminative node classifiers for distinguishing the visually-similar atomic object classes (in the same group) effectively. Our HD-MTL algorithm can control the inter-level error propagation effectively by using an end-to-end approach for jointly learning more representative deep CNNs (for image representation) and more discriminative tree classifier (for large-scale visual recognition) and updating them simultaneously. Our incremental deep learning algorithms can effectively adapt both the deep CNNs and the tree classifier to the new training images and the new object classes. Our experimental results have demonstrated that our HD-MTL algorithm can achieve very competitive results on both the accuracy rates and the computational efficiency for large-scale visual recognition.