This paper addresses the problem of enhancing underexposed photos. Existing methods have tackled this problem from many different perspectives and achieved remarkable progress. However, they may fail to produce satisfactory results due to the presence of visual artifacts such as color distortion, loss of details and uneven exposure, etc. To obtain high-quality results free of these artifacts, we present a novel underexposed photo enhancement approach in this paper. Our main observation is that, the reason why existing methods induce the artifacts is because they break a perceptual consistency between the input and the enhanced output. Based on this observation, an effective criterion, called perceptually bidirectional similarity (PBS) is proposed for preserving the perceptual consistency during enhancement. Particularly, we cast the underexposed photo enhancement as PBS-constrained illumination estimation optimization, where the PBS is defined as three constraints for estimating the illumination that can recover the enhancement results with normal exposure, distinct contrast, clear details and vivid color. To make our method more efficient and scalable to high-resolution images, we introduce a sampling-based strategy for accelerating the illumination estimation. Moreover, we extend our method to handle underexposed videos. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons as well as the user study demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art methods.
An increasing amount of efforts focus on investigating learning-based enhancement methods since the pioneering work of Bychkovsky al @cite_43 , which provides the first and largest MIT-Adobe FiveK dataset consisting of input output image pairs for tone adjustment. Yan al @cite_23 achieved automatic color enhancement by tackling a learning-to-rank problem, while Yan al @cite_14 enabled semantic-aware image enhancement. Recently, Lore al @cite_36 presented a deep autoencoder-based approach for enhancing low-light images. Gharbi al @cite_4 proposed bilateral learning to enable real-time image enhancement, while Chen al @cite_39 designed an unpaired learning model for image enhancement based on a two-way generative adversarial networks (GANs). The main limitation of learning-based methods is that they typically do not generalize well to images that do not exist in the training datasets.
@cite_14 @cite_4 @cite_36 @cite_39 @cite_43 @cite_23
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This paper proposes an unpaired learning method for image enhancement. Given a set of photographs with the desired characteristics, the proposed method learns a photo enhancer which transforms an input image into an enhanced image with those characteristics. The method is based on the framework of two-way generative adversarial networks (GANs) with several improvements. First, we augment the U-Net with global features and show that it is more effective. The global U-Net acts as the generator in our GAN model. Second, we improve Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) with an adaptive weighting scheme. With this scheme, training converges faster and better, and is less sensitive to parameters than WGAN-GP. Finally, we propose to use individual batch normalization layers for generators in two-way GANs. It helps generators better adapt to their own input distributions. All together, they significantly improve the stability of GAN training for our application. Both quantitative and visual results show that the proposed method is effective for enhancing images. Collecting well-annotated image datasets to train modern machine learning algorithms is prohibitively expensive for many tasks. One appealing alternative is rendering synthetic data where ground-truth annotations are generated automatically. Unfortunately, models trained purely on rendered images often fail to generalize to real images. To address this shortcoming, prior work introduced unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms that attempt to map representations between the two domains or learn to extract features that are domain-invariant. In this work, we present a new approach that learns, in an unsupervised manner, a transformation in the pixel space from one domain to the other. Our generative adversarial network (GAN)-based method adapts source-domain images to appear as if drawn from the target domain. Our approach not only produces plausible samples, but also outperforms the state-of-the-art on a number of unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios by large margins. Finally, we demonstrate that the adaptation process generalizes to object classes unseen during training. Recently, Image-to-Image Translation (IIT) has achieved great progress in image style transfer and semantic context manipulation for images. However, existing approaches require exhaustively labelling training data, which is labor demanding, difficult to scale up, and hard to adapt to a new domain. To overcome such a key limitation, we propose Sparsely Grouped Generative Adversarial Networks (SG-GAN) as a novel approach that can translate images in sparsely grouped datasets where only a few train samples are labelled. Using a one-input multi-output architecture, SG-GAN is well-suited for tackling multi-task learning and sparsely grouped learning tasks. The new model is able to translate images among multiple groups using only a single trained model. To experimentally validate the advantages of the new model, we apply the proposed method to tackle a series of attribute manipulation tasks for facial images as a case study. Experimental results show that SG-GAN can achieve comparable results with state-of-the-art methods on adequately labelled datasets while attaining a superior image translation quality on sparsely grouped datasets is available at https: github.com zhangqianhui SGGAN-tensorflow.. Despite the promising results on paired unpaired image-to-image translation achieved by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), prior works often only transfer the low-level information (e.g. color or texture changes), but fail to manipulate high-level semantic meanings (e.g., geometric structure or content) of different object regions. On the other hand, while some researches can synthesize compelling real-world images given a class label or caption, they cannot condition on arbitrary shapes or structures, which largely limits their application scenarios and interpretive capability of model results. In this work, we focus on a more challenging semantic manipulation task, aiming at modifying the semantic meaning of an object while preserving its own characteristics (e.g. viewpoints and shapes), such as cow ( )sheep, motor ( )bicycle, cat ( )dog. To tackle such large semantic changes, we introduce a contrasting GAN (contrast-GAN) with a novel adversarial contrasting objective which is able to perform all types of semantic translations with one category-conditional generator. Instead of directly making the synthesized samples close to target data as previous GANs did, our adversarial contrasting objective optimizes over the distance comparisons between samples, that is, enforcing the manipulated data be semantically closer to the real data with target category than the input data. Equipped with the new contrasting objective, a novel mask-conditional contrast-GAN architecture is proposed to enable disentangle image background with object semantic changes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on several semantic manipulation tasks on ImageNet and MSCOCO dataset show considerable performance gain by our contrast-GAN over other conditional GANs.