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SubscribeHierarchical Spatial Algorithms for High-Resolution Image Quantization and Feature Extraction
This study introduces a modular framework for spatial image processing, integrating grayscale quantization, color and brightness enhancement, image sharpening, bidirectional transformation pipelines, and geometric feature extraction. A stepwise intensity transformation quantizes grayscale images into eight discrete levels, producing a posterization effect that simplifies representation while preserving structural detail. Color enhancement is achieved via histogram equalization in both RGB and YCrCb color spaces, with the latter improving contrast while maintaining chrominance fidelity. Brightness adjustment is implemented through HSV value-channel manipulation, and image sharpening is performed using a 3 * 3 convolution kernel to enhance high-frequency details. A bidirectional transformation pipeline that integrates unsharp masking, gamma correction, and noise amplification achieved accuracy levels of 76.10% and 74.80% for the forward and reverse processes, respectively. Geometric feature extraction employed Canny edge detection, Hough-based line estimation (e.g., 51.50{\deg} for billiard cue alignment), Harris corner detection, and morphological window localization. Cue isolation further yielded 81.87\% similarity against ground truth images. Experimental evaluation across diverse datasets demonstrates robust and deterministic performance, highlighting its potential for real-time image analysis and computer vision.
Low-light Image Enhancement via Breaking Down the Darkness
Images captured in low-light environment often suffer from complex degradation. Simply adjusting light would inevitably result in burst of hidden noise and color distortion. To seek results with satisfied lighting, cleanliness, and realism from degraded inputs, this paper presents a novel framework inspired by the divide-and-rule principle, greatly alleviating the degradation entanglement. Assuming that an image can be decomposed into texture (with possible noise) and color components, one can specifically execute noise removal and color correction along with light adjustment. Towards this purpose, we propose to convert an image from the RGB space into a luminance-chrominance one. An adjustable noise suppression network is designed to eliminate noise in the brightened luminance, having the illumination map estimated to indicate noise boosting levels. The enhanced luminance further serves as guidance for the chrominance mapper to generate realistic colors. Extensive experiments are conducted to reveal the effectiveness of our design, and demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively on several benchmark datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/mingcv/Bread.
Rethinking Efficient Hierarchical Mixing Architecture for Low-light RAW Image Enhancement
Low-light RAW image enhancement remains a challenging task. Although numerous deep learning based approaches have been proposed, they still suffer from inherent limitations. A key challenge is how to simultaneously achieve strong enhancement quality and high efficiency. In this paper, we rethink the architecture for efficient low-light image signal processing (ISP) and introduce a Hierarchical Mixing Architecture (HiMA). HiMA leverages the complementary strengths of Transformer and Mamba modules to handle features at large and small scales, respectively, thereby improving efficiency while avoiding the ambiguities observed in prior two-stage frameworks. To further address uneven illumination with strong local variations, we propose Local Distribution Adjustment (LoDA), which adaptively aligns feature distributions across different local regions. In addition, to fully exploit the denoised outputs from the first stage, we design a Multi-prior Fusion (MPF) module that integrates spatial and frequency-domain priors for detail enhancement. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving superior performance with fewer parameters. Code will be released at https://github.com/Cynicarlos/HiMA.
ColorFlow: Retrieval-Augmented Image Sequence Colorization
Automatic black-and-white image sequence colorization while preserving character and object identity (ID) is a complex task with significant market demand, such as in cartoon or comic series colorization. Despite advancements in visual colorization using large-scale generative models like diffusion models, challenges with controllability and identity consistency persist, making current solutions unsuitable for industrial application.To address this, we propose ColorFlow, a three-stage diffusion-based framework tailored for image sequence colorization in industrial applications. Unlike existing methods that require per-ID finetuning or explicit ID embedding extraction, we propose a novel robust and generalizable Retrieval Augmented Colorization pipeline for colorizing images with relevant color references. Our pipeline also features a dual-branch design: one branch for color identity extraction and the other for colorization, leveraging the strengths of diffusion models. We utilize the self-attention mechanism in diffusion models for strong in-context learning and color identity matching. To evaluate our model, we introduce ColorFlow-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for reference-based colorization. Results show that ColorFlow outperforms existing models across multiple metrics, setting a new standard in sequential image colorization and potentially benefiting the art industry. We release our codes and models on our project page: https://zhuang2002.github.io/ColorFlow/.
NamedCurves: Learned Image Enhancement via Color Naming
A popular method for enhancing images involves learning the style of a professional photo editor using pairs of training images comprised of the original input with the editor-enhanced version. When manipulating images, many editing tools offer a feature that allows the user to manipulate a limited selection of familiar colors. Editing by color name allows easy adjustment of elements like the "blue" of the sky or the "green" of trees. Inspired by this approach to color manipulation, we propose NamedCurves, a learning-based image enhancement technique that separates the image into a small set of named colors. Our method learns to globally adjust the image for each specific named color via tone curves and then combines the images using an attention-based fusion mechanism to mimic spatial editing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against several competing methods on the well-known Adobe 5K dataset and the PPR10K dataset, showing notable improvements.
Fancy123: One Image to High-Quality 3D Mesh Generation via Plug-and-Play Deformation
Generating 3D meshes from a single image is an important but ill-posed task. Existing methods mainly adopt 2D multiview diffusion models to generate intermediate multiview images, and use the Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) to create the final meshes. However, the multiview images exhibit local inconsistencies, and the meshes often lack fidelity to the input image or look blurry. We propose Fancy123, featuring two enhancement modules and an unprojection operation to address the above three issues, respectively. The appearance enhancement module deforms the 2D multiview images to realign misaligned pixels for better multiview consistency. The fidelity enhancement module deforms the 3D mesh to match the input image. The unprojection of the input image and deformed multiview images onto LRM's generated mesh ensures high clarity, discarding LRM's predicted blurry-looking mesh colors. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify Fancy123's SoTA performance with significant improvement. Also, the two enhancement modules are plug-and-play and work at inference time, allowing seamless integration into various existing single-image-to-3D methods. Code at: https://github.com/YuQiao0303/Fancy123
Colorful Image Colorization
Given a grayscale photograph as input, this paper attacks the problem of hallucinating a plausible color version of the photograph. This problem is clearly underconstrained, so previous approaches have either relied on significant user interaction or resulted in desaturated colorizations. We propose a fully automatic approach that produces vibrant and realistic colorizations. We embrace the underlying uncertainty of the problem by posing it as a classification task and use class-rebalancing at training time to increase the diversity of colors in the result. The system is implemented as a feed-forward pass in a CNN at test time and is trained on over a million color images. We evaluate our algorithm using a "colorization Turing test," asking human participants to choose between a generated and ground truth color image. Our method successfully fools humans on 32% of the trials, significantly higher than previous methods. Moreover, we show that colorization can be a powerful pretext task for self-supervised feature learning, acting as a cross-channel encoder. This approach results in state-of-the-art performance on several feature learning benchmarks.
Compound Multi-branch Feature Fusion for Real Image Restoration
Image restoration is a challenging and ill-posed problem which also has been a long-standing issue. However, most of learning based restoration methods are proposed to target one degradation type which means they are lack of generalization. In this paper, we proposed a multi-branch restoration model inspired from the Human Visual System (i.e., Retinal Ganglion Cells) which can achieve multiple restoration tasks in a general framework. The experiments show that the proposed multi-branch architecture, called CMFNet, has competitive performance results on four datasets, including image dehazing, deraindrop, and deblurring, which are very common applications for autonomous cars. The source code and pretrained models of three restoration tasks are available at https://github.com/FanChiMao/CMFNet.
LYT-NET: Lightweight YUV Transformer-based Network for Low-light Image Enhancement
This letter introduces LYT-Net, a novel lightweight transformer-based model for low-light image enhancement (LLIE). LYT-Net consists of several layers and detachable blocks, including our novel blocks--Channel-Wise Denoiser (CWD) and Multi-Stage Squeeze & Excite Fusion (MSEF)--along with the traditional Transformer block, Multi-Headed Self-Attention (MHSA). In our method we adopt a dual-path approach, treating chrominance channels U and V and luminance channel Y as separate entities to help the model better handle illumination adjustment and corruption restoration. Our comprehensive evaluation on established LLIE datasets demonstrates that, despite its low complexity, our model outperforms recent LLIE methods. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/albrateanu/LYT-Net
DDColor: Towards Photo-Realistic Image Colorization via Dual Decoders
Image colorization is a challenging problem due to multi-modal uncertainty and high ill-posedness. Directly training a deep neural network usually leads to incorrect semantic colors and low color richness. While transformer-based methods can deliver better results, they often rely on manually designed priors, suffer from poor generalization ability, and introduce color bleeding effects. To address these issues, we propose DDColor, an end-to-end method with dual decoders for image colorization. Our approach includes a pixel decoder and a query-based color decoder. The former restores the spatial resolution of the image, while the latter utilizes rich visual features to refine color queries, thus avoiding hand-crafted priors. Our two decoders work together to establish correlations between color and multi-scale semantic representations via cross-attention, significantly alleviating the color bleeding effect. Additionally, a simple yet effective colorfulness loss is introduced to enhance the color richness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DDColor achieves superior performance to existing state-of-the-art works both quantitatively and qualitatively. The codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/piddnad/DDColor.
StarEnhancer: Learning Real-Time and Style-Aware Image Enhancement
Image enhancement is a subjective process whose targets vary with user preferences. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based image enhancement method covering multiple tonal styles using only a single model dubbed StarEnhancer. It can transform an image from one tonal style to another, even if that style is unseen. With a simple one-time setting, users can customize the model to make the enhanced images more in line with their aesthetics. To make the method more practical, we propose a well-designed enhancer that can process a 4K-resolution image over 200 FPS but surpasses the contemporaneous single style image enhancement methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. Finally, our proposed enhancement method has good interactability, which allows the user to fine-tune the enhanced image using intuitive options.
Real-World Remote Sensing Image Dehazing: Benchmark and Baseline
Remote Sensing Image Dehazing (RSID) poses significant challenges in real-world scenarios due to the complex atmospheric conditions and severe color distortions that degrade image quality. The scarcity of real-world remote sensing hazy image pairs has compelled existing methods to rely primarily on synthetic datasets. However, these methods struggle with real-world applications due to the inherent domain gap between synthetic and real data. To address this, we introduce Real-World Remote Sensing Hazy Image Dataset (RRSHID), the first large-scale dataset featuring real-world hazy and dehazed image pairs across diverse atmospheric conditions. Based on this, we propose MCAF-Net, a novel framework tailored for real-world RSID. Its effectiveness arises from three innovative components: Multi-branch Feature Integration Block Aggregator (MFIBA), which enables robust feature extraction through cascaded integration blocks and parallel multi-branch processing; Color-Calibrated Self-Supervised Attention Module (CSAM), which mitigates complex color distortions via self-supervised learning and attention-guided refinement; and Multi-Scale Feature Adaptive Fusion Module (MFAFM), which integrates features effectively while preserving local details and global context. Extensive experiments validate that MCAF-Net demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in real-world RSID, while maintaining competitive performance on synthetic datasets. The introduction of RRSHID and MCAF-Net sets new benchmarks for real-world RSID research, advancing practical solutions for this complex task. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/lwCVer/RRSHID.
Retinex-RAWMamba: Bridging Demosaicing and Denoising for Low-Light RAW Image Enhancement
Low-light image enhancement, particularly in cross-domain tasks such as mapping from the raw domain to the sRGB domain, remains a significant challenge. Many deep learning-based methods have been developed to address this issue and have shown promising results in recent years. However, single-stage methods, which attempt to unify the complex mapping across both domains, leading to limited denoising performance. In contrast, existing two-stage approaches typically overlook the characteristic of demosaicing within the Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline, leading to color distortions under varying lighting conditions, especially in low-light scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel Mamba-based method customized for low light RAW images, called RAWMamba, to effectively handle raw images with different CFAs. Furthermore, we introduce a Retinex Decomposition Module (RDM) grounded in Retinex prior, which decouples illumination from reflectance to facilitate more effective denoising and automatic non-linear exposure correction, reducing the effect of manual linear illumination enhancement. By bridging demosaicing and denoising, better enhancement for low light RAW images is achieved. Experimental evaluations conducted on public datasets SID and MCR demonstrate that our proposed RAWMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance on cross-domain mapping. The code is available at https://github.com/Cynicarlos/RetinexRawMamba.
UniRGB-IR: A Unified Framework for RGB-Infrared Semantic Tasks via Adapter Tuning
Semantic analysis on visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) images has gained attention for its ability to be more accurate and robust under low-illumination and complex weather conditions. Due to the lack of pre-trained foundation models on the large-scale infrared image datasets, existing methods prefer to design task-specific frameworks and directly fine-tune them with pre-trained foundation models on their RGB-IR semantic relevance datasets, which results in poor scalability and limited generalization. In this work, we propose a general and efficient framework called UniRGB-IR to unify RGB-IR semantic tasks, in which a novel adapter is developed to efficiently introduce richer RGB-IR features into the pre-trained RGB-based foundation model. Specifically, our framework consists of a RGB-based foundation model, a Multi-modal Feature Pool (MFP) module and a Supplementary Feature Injector (SFI) module. The MFP and SFI modules cooperate with each other as an adapter to effectively complement the RGB-based features with the rich RGB-IR features. During training process, we freeze the entire foundation model to inherit prior knowledge and only optimize the proposed adapter. Furthermore, to verify the effectiveness of our framework, we utilize the vanilla vision transformer (ViT-Base) as the pre-trained foundation model to perform extensive experiments. Experimental results on various RGB-IR downstream tasks demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance. The source code and results are available at https://github.com/PoTsui99/UniRGB-IR.git.
Bifurcated backbone strategy for RGB-D salient object detection
Multi-level feature fusion is a fundamental topic in computer vision. It has been exploited to detect, segment and classify objects at various scales. When multi-level features meet multi-modal cues, the optimal feature aggregation and multi-modal learning strategy become a hot potato. In this paper, we leverage the inherent multi-modal and multi-level nature of RGB-D salient object detection to devise a novel cascaded refinement network. In particular, first, we propose to regroup the multi-level features into teacher and student features using a bifurcated backbone strategy (BBS). Second, we introduce a depth-enhanced module (DEM) to excavate informative depth cues from the channel and spatial views. Then, RGB and depth modalities are fused in a complementary way. Our architecture, named Bifurcated Backbone Strategy Network (BBS-Net), is simple, efficient, and backbone-independent. Extensive experiments show that BBS-Net significantly outperforms eighteen SOTA models on eight challenging datasets under five evaluation measures, demonstrating the superiority of our approach (sim 4 % improvement in S-measure vs. the top-ranked model: DMRA-iccv2019). In addition, we provide a comprehensive analysis on the generalization ability of different RGB-D datasets and provide a powerful training set for future research.
Color Matching Using Hypernetwork-Based Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
We present cmKAN, a versatile framework for color matching. Given an input image with colors from a source color distribution, our method effectively and accurately maps these colors to match a target color distribution in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Our framework leverages the spline capabilities of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to model the color matching between source and target distributions. Specifically, we developed a hypernetwork that generates spatially varying weight maps to control the nonlinear splines of a KAN, enabling accurate color matching. As part of this work, we introduce a first large-scale dataset of paired images captured by two distinct cameras and evaluate the efficacy of our and existing methods in matching colors. We evaluated our approach across various color-matching tasks, including: (1) raw-to-raw mapping, where the source color distribution is in one camera's raw color space and the target in another camera's raw space; (2) raw-to-sRGB mapping, where the source color distribution is in a camera's raw space and the target is in the display sRGB space, emulating the color rendering of a camera ISP; and (3) sRGB-to-sRGB mapping, where the goal is to transfer colors from a source sRGB space (e.g., produced by a source camera ISP) to a target sRGB space (e.g., from a different camera ISP). The results show that our method outperforms existing approaches by 37.3% on average for supervised and unsupervised cases while remaining lightweight compared to other methods. The codes, dataset, and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/gosha20777/cmKAN
Revisiting Image Fusion for Multi-Illuminant White-Balance Correction
White balance (WB) correction in scenes with multiple illuminants remains a persistent challenge in computer vision. Recent methods explored fusion-based approaches, where a neural network linearly blends multiple sRGB versions of an input image, each processed with predefined WB presets. However, we demonstrate that these methods are suboptimal for common multi-illuminant scenarios. Additionally, existing fusion-based methods rely on sRGB WB datasets lacking dedicated multi-illuminant images, limiting both training and evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce two key contributions. First, we propose an efficient transformer-based model that effectively captures spatial dependencies across sRGB WB presets, substantially improving upon linear fusion techniques. Second, we introduce a large-scale multi-illuminant dataset comprising over 16,000 sRGB images rendered with five different WB settings, along with WB-corrected images. Our method achieves up to 100\% improvement over existing techniques on our new multi-illuminant image fusion dataset.
Name Your Colour For the Task: Artificially Discover Colour Naming via Colour Quantisation Transformer
The long-standing theory that a colour-naming system evolves under dual pressure of efficient communication and perceptual mechanism is supported by more and more linguistic studies, including analysing four decades of diachronic data from the Nafaanra language. This inspires us to explore whether machine learning could evolve and discover a similar colour-naming system via optimising the communication efficiency represented by high-level recognition performance. Here, we propose a novel colour quantisation transformer, CQFormer, that quantises colour space while maintaining the accuracy of machine recognition on the quantised images. Given an RGB image, Annotation Branch maps it into an index map before generating the quantised image with a colour palette; meanwhile the Palette Branch utilises a key-point detection way to find proper colours in the palette among the whole colour space. By interacting with colour annotation, CQFormer is able to balance both the machine vision accuracy and colour perceptual structure such as distinct and stable colour distribution for discovered colour system. Very interestingly, we even observe the consistent evolution pattern between our artificial colour system and basic colour terms across human languages. Besides, our colour quantisation method also offers an efficient quantisation method that effectively compresses the image storage while maintaining high performance in high-level recognition tasks such as classification and detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method with extremely low bit-rate colours, showing potential to integrate into quantisation network to quantities from image to network activation. The source code is available at https://github.com/ryeocthiv/CQFormer
CURL: Neural Curve Layers for Global Image Enhancement
We present a novel approach to adjust global image properties such as colour, saturation, and luminance using human-interpretable image enhancement curves, inspired by the Photoshop curves tool. Our method, dubbed neural CURve Layers (CURL), is designed as a multi-colour space neural retouching block trained jointly in three different colour spaces (HSV, CIELab, RGB) guided by a novel multi-colour space loss. The curves are fully differentiable and are trained end-to-end for different computer vision problems including photo enhancement (RGB-to-RGB) and as part of the image signal processing pipeline for image formation (RAW-to-RGB). To demonstrate the effectiveness of CURL we combine this global image transformation block with a pixel-level (local) image multi-scale encoder-decoder backbone network. In an extensive experimental evaluation we show that CURL produces state-of-the-art image quality versus recently proposed deep learning approaches in both objective and perceptual metrics, setting new state-of-the-art performance on multiple public datasets. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/sjmoran/CURL.
Color Space Learning for Cross-Color Person Re-Identification
The primary color profile of the same identity is assumed to remain consistent in typical Person Re-identification (Person ReID) tasks. However, this assumption may be invalid in real-world situations and images hold variant color profiles, because of cross-modality cameras or identity with different clothing. To address this issue, we propose Color Space Learning (CSL) for those Cross-Color Person ReID problems. Specifically, CSL guides the model to be less color-sensitive with two modules: Image-level Color-Augmentation and Pixel-level Color-Transformation. The first module increases the color diversity of the inputs and guides the model to focus more on the non-color information. The second module projects every pixel of input images onto a new color space. In addition, we introduce a new Person ReID benchmark across RGB and Infrared modalities, NTU-Corridor, which is the first with privacy agreements from all participants. To evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed CSL, we evaluate it on several Cross-Color Person ReID benchmarks. Our method surpasses the state-of-the-art methods consistently. The code and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/niejiahao1998/CSL
ModalFormer: Multimodal Transformer for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the presence of noise, loss of detail, and poor contrast in images captured under insufficient lighting conditions. Recent methods often rely solely on pixel-level transformations of RGB images, neglecting the rich contextual information available from multiple visual modalities. In this paper, we present ModalFormer, the first large-scale multimodal framework for LLIE that fully exploits nine auxiliary modalities to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our model comprises two main components: a Cross-modal Transformer (CM-T) designed to restore corrupted images while seamlessly integrating multimodal information, and multiple auxiliary subnetworks dedicated to multimodal feature reconstruction. Central to the CM-T is our novel Cross-modal Multi-headed Self-Attention mechanism (CM-MSA), which effectively fuses RGB data with modality-specific features--including deep feature embeddings, segmentation information, geometric cues, and color information--to generate information-rich hybrid attention maps. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate ModalFormer's state-of-the-art performance in LLIE. Pre-trained models and results are made available at https://github.com/albrateanu/ModalFormer.
Real-Time User-Guided Image Colorization with Learned Deep Priors
We propose a deep learning approach for user-guided image colorization. The system directly maps a grayscale image, along with sparse, local user "hints" to an output colorization with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Rather than using hand-defined rules, the network propagates user edits by fusing low-level cues along with high-level semantic information, learned from large-scale data. We train on a million images, with simulated user inputs. To guide the user towards efficient input selection, the system recommends likely colors based on the input image and current user inputs. The colorization is performed in a single feed-forward pass, enabling real-time use. Even with randomly simulated user inputs, we show that the proposed system helps novice users quickly create realistic colorizations, and offers large improvements in colorization quality with just a minute of use. In addition, we demonstrate that the framework can incorporate other user "hints" to the desired colorization, showing an application to color histogram transfer. Our code and models are available at https://richzhang.github.io/ideepcolor.
inkn'hue: Enhancing Manga Colorization from Multiple Priors with Alignment Multi-Encoder VAE
Manga, a form of Japanese comics and distinct visual storytelling, has captivated readers worldwide. Traditionally presented in black and white, manga's appeal lies in its ability to convey complex narratives and emotions through intricate line art and shading. Yet, the desire to experience manga in vibrant colors has sparked the pursuit of manga colorization, a task of paramount significance for artists. However, existing methods, originally designed for line art and sketches, face challenges when applied to manga. These methods often fall short in achieving the desired results, leading to the need for specialized manga-specific solutions. Existing approaches frequently rely on a single training step or extensive manual artist intervention, which can yield less satisfactory outcomes. To address these challenges, we propose a specialized framework for manga colorization. Leveraging established models for shading and vibrant coloring, our approach aligns both using a multi-encoder VAE. This structured workflow ensures clear and colorful results, with the option to incorporate reference images and manual hints.
iColoriT: Towards Propagating Local Hint to the Right Region in Interactive Colorization by Leveraging Vision Transformer
Point-interactive image colorization aims to colorize grayscale images when a user provides the colors for specific locations. It is essential for point-interactive colorization methods to appropriately propagate user-provided colors (i.e., user hints) in the entire image to obtain a reasonably colorized image with minimal user effort. However, existing approaches often produce partially colorized results due to the inefficient design of stacking convolutional layers to propagate hints to distant relevant regions. To address this problem, we present iColoriT, a novel point-interactive colorization Vision Transformer capable of propagating user hints to relevant regions, leveraging the global receptive field of Transformers. The self-attention mechanism of Transformers enables iColoriT to selectively colorize relevant regions with only a few local hints. Our approach colorizes images in real-time by utilizing pixel shuffling, an efficient upsampling technique that replaces the decoder architecture. Also, in order to mitigate the artifacts caused by pixel shuffling with large upsampling ratios, we present the local stabilizing layer. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that our approach highly outperforms existing methods for point-interactive colorization, producing accurately colorized images with a user's minimal effort. Official codes are available at https://pmh9960.github.io/research/iColoriT
MagicColor: Multi-Instance Sketch Colorization
We present MagicColor, a diffusion-based framework for multi-instance sketch colorization. The production of multi-instance 2D line art colorization adheres to an industry-standard workflow, which consists of three crucial stages: the design of line art characters, the coloring of individual objects, and the refinement process. The artists are required to repeat the process of coloring each instance one by one, which is inaccurate and inefficient. Meanwhile, current generative methods fail to solve this task due to the challenge of multi-instance pair data collection. To tackle these challenges, we incorporate three technical designs to ensure precise character detail transcription and achieve multi-instance sketch colorization in a single forward. Specifically, we first propose the self-play training strategy to solve the lack of training data. Then we introduce an instance guider to feed the color of the instance. To achieve accurate color matching, we present fine-grained color matching with edge loss to enhance visual quality. Equipped with the proposed modules, MagicColor enables automatically transforming sketches into vividly-colored images with accurate consistency and multi-instance control. Experiments on our collected datasets show that our model outperforms existing methods regarding chromatic precision. Specifically, our model critically automates the colorization process with zero manual adjustments, so novice users can produce stylistically consistent artwork by providing reference instances and the original line art. Our code and additional details are available at https://yinhan-zhang.github.io/color
Towards High-Quality Specular Highlight Removal by Leveraging Large-Scale Synthetic Data
This paper aims to remove specular highlights from a single object-level image. Although previous methods have made some progresses, their performance remains somewhat limited, particularly for real images with complex specular highlights. To this end, we propose a three-stage network to address them. Specifically, given an input image, we first decompose it into the albedo, shading, and specular residue components to estimate a coarse specular-free image. Then, we further refine the coarse result to alleviate its visual artifacts such as color distortion. Finally, we adjust the tone of the refined result to match that of the input as closely as possible. In addition, to facilitate network training and quantitative evaluation, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of object-level images, covering diverse objects and illumination conditions. Extensive experiments illustrate that our network is able to generalize well to unseen real object-level images, and even produce good results for scene-level images with multiple background objects and complex lighting.
Color Transfer with Modulated Flows
In this work, we introduce Modulated Flows (ModFlows), a novel approach for color transfer between images based on rectified flows. The primary goal of the color transfer is to adjust the colors of a target image to match the color distribution of a reference image. Our technique is based on optimal transport and executes color transfer as an invertible transformation within the RGB color space. The ModFlows utilizes the bijective property of flows, enabling us to introduce a common intermediate color distribution and build a dataset of rectified flows. We train an encoder on this dataset to predict the weights of a rectified model for new images. After training on a set of optimal transport plans, our approach can generate plans for new pairs of distributions without additional fine-tuning. We additionally show that the trained encoder provides an image embedding, associated only with its color style. The presented method is capable of processing 4K images and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of content and style similarity. Our source code is available at https://github.com/maria-larchenko/modflows
DP-Adapter: Dual-Pathway Adapter for Boosting Fidelity and Text Consistency in Customizable Human Image Generation
With the growing popularity of personalized human content creation and sharing, there is a rising demand for advanced techniques in customized human image generation. However, current methods struggle to simultaneously maintain the fidelity of human identity and ensure the consistency of textual prompts, often resulting in suboptimal outcomes. This shortcoming is primarily due to the lack of effective constraints during the simultaneous integration of visual and textual prompts, leading to unhealthy mutual interference that compromises the full expression of both types of input. Building on prior research that suggests visual and textual conditions influence different regions of an image in distinct ways, we introduce a novel Dual-Pathway Adapter (DP-Adapter) to enhance both high-fidelity identity preservation and textual consistency in personalized human image generation. Our approach begins by decoupling the target human image into visually sensitive and text-sensitive regions. For visually sensitive regions, DP-Adapter employs an Identity-Enhancing Adapter (IEA) to preserve detailed identity features. For text-sensitive regions, we introduce a Textual-Consistency Adapter (TCA) to minimize visual interference and ensure the consistency of textual semantics. To seamlessly integrate these pathways, we develop a Fine-Grained Feature-Level Blending (FFB) module that efficiently combines hierarchical semantic features from both pathways, resulting in more natural and coherent synthesis outcomes. Additionally, DP-Adapter supports various innovative applications, including controllable headshot-to-full-body portrait generation, age editing, old-photo to reality, and expression editing.
DEYOLO: Dual-Feature-Enhancement YOLO for Cross-Modality Object Detection
Object detection in poor-illumination environments is a challenging task as objects are usually not clearly visible in RGB images. As infrared images provide additional clear edge information that complements RGB images, fusing RGB and infrared images has potential to enhance the detection ability in poor-illumination environments. However, existing works involving both visible and infrared images only focus on image fusion, instead of object detection. Moreover, they directly fuse the two kinds of image modalities, which ignores the mutual interference between them. To fuse the two modalities to maximize the advantages of cross-modality, we design a dual-enhancement-based cross-modality object detection network DEYOLO, in which semantic-spatial cross modality and novel bi-directional decoupled focus modules are designed to achieve the detection-centered mutual enhancement of RGB-infrared (RGB-IR). Specifically, a dual semantic enhancing channel weight assignment module (DECA) and a dual spatial enhancing pixel weight assignment module (DEPA) are firstly proposed to aggregate cross-modality information in the feature space to improve the feature representation ability, such that feature fusion can aim at the object detection task. Meanwhile, a dual-enhancement mechanism, including enhancements for two-modality fusion and single modality, is designed in both DECAand DEPAto reduce interference between the two kinds of image modalities. Then, a novel bi-directional decoupled focus is developed to enlarge the receptive field of the backbone network in different directions, which improves the representation quality of DEYOLO. Extensive experiments on M3FD and LLVIP show that our approach outperforms SOTA object detection algorithms by a clear margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/chips96/DEYOLO.
Attentive Illumination Decomposition Model for Multi-Illuminant White Balancing
White balance (WB) algorithms in many commercial cameras assume single and uniform illumination, leading to undesirable results when multiple lighting sources with different chromaticities exist in the scene. Prior research on multi-illuminant WB typically predicts illumination at the pixel level without fully grasping the scene's actual lighting conditions, including the number and color of light sources. This often results in unnatural outcomes lacking in overall consistency. To handle this problem, we present a deep white balancing model that leverages the slot attention, where each slot is in charge of representing individual illuminants. This design enables the model to generate chromaticities and weight maps for individual illuminants, which are then fused to compose the final illumination map. Furthermore, we propose the centroid-matching loss, which regulates the activation of each slot based on the color range, thereby enhancing the model to separate illumination more effectively. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both single- and multi-illuminant WB benchmarks, and also offers additional information such as the number of illuminants in the scene and their chromaticity. This capability allows for illumination editing, an application not feasible with prior methods.
ColorMNet: A Memory-based Deep Spatial-Temporal Feature Propagation Network for Video Colorization
How to effectively explore spatial-temporal features is important for video colorization. Instead of stacking multiple frames along the temporal dimension or recurrently propagating estimated features that will accumulate errors or cannot explore information from far-apart frames, we develop a memory-based feature propagation module that can establish reliable connections with features from far-apart frames and alleviate the influence of inaccurately estimated features. To extract better features from each frame for the above-mentioned feature propagation, we explore the features from large-pretrained visual models to guide the feature estimation of each frame so that the estimated features can model complex scenarios. In addition, we note that adjacent frames usually contain similar contents. To explore this property for better spatial and temporal feature utilization, we develop a local attention module to aggregate the features from adjacent frames in a spatial-temporal neighborhood. We formulate our memory-based feature propagation module, large-pretrained visual model guided feature estimation module, and local attention module into an end-to-end trainable network (named ColorMNet) and show that it performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on both the benchmark datasets and real-world scenarios. The source code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/yyang181/colormnet.
Half Wavelet Attention on M-Net+ for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Low-Light Image Enhancement is a computer vision task which intensifies the dark images to appropriate brightness. It can also be seen as an ill-posed problem in image restoration domain. With the success of deep neural networks, the convolutional neural networks surpass the traditional algorithm-based methods and become the mainstream in the computer vision area. To advance the performance of enhancement algorithms, we propose an image enhancement network (HWMNet) based on an improved hierarchical model: M-Net+. Specifically, we use a half wavelet attention block on M-Net+ to enrich the features from wavelet domain. Furthermore, our HWMNet has competitive performance results on two image enhancement datasets in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/FanChiMao/HWMNet.
DreamColour: Controllable Video Colour Editing without Training
Video colour editing is a crucial task for content creation, yet existing solutions either require painstaking frame-by-frame manipulation or produce unrealistic results with temporal artefacts. We present a practical, training-free framework that makes precise video colour editing accessible through an intuitive interface while maintaining professional-quality output. Our key insight is that by decoupling spatial and temporal aspects of colour editing, we can better align with users' natural workflow -- allowing them to focus on precise colour selection in key frames before automatically propagating changes across time. We achieve this through a novel technical framework that combines: (i) a simple point-and-click interface merging grid-based colour selection with automatic instance segmentation for precise spatial control, (ii) bidirectional colour propagation that leverages inherent video motion patterns, and (iii) motion-aware blending that ensures smooth transitions even with complex object movements. Through extensive evaluation on diverse scenarios, we demonstrate that our approach matches or exceeds state-of-the-art methods while eliminating the need for training or specialized hardware, making professional-quality video colour editing accessible to everyone.
Good Colour Maps: How to Design Them
Many colour maps provided by vendors have highly uneven perceptual contrast over their range. It is not uncommon for colour maps to have perceptual flat spots that can hide a feature as large as one tenth of the total data range. Colour maps may also have perceptual discontinuities that induce the appearance of false features. Previous work in the design of perceptually uniform colour maps has mostly failed to recognise that CIELAB space is only designed to be perceptually uniform at very low spatial frequencies. The most important factor in designing a colour map is to ensure that the magnitude of the incremental change in perceptual lightness of the colours is uniform. The specific requirements for linear, diverging, rainbow and cyclic colour maps are developed in detail. To support this work two test images for evaluating colour maps are presented. The use of colour maps in combination with relief shading is considered and the conditions under which colour can enhance or disrupt relief shading are identified. Finally, a set of new basis colours for the construction of ternary images are presented. Unlike the RGB primaries these basis colours produce images whereby the salience of structures are consistent irrespective of the assignment of basis colours to data channels.
INF-LLaVA: Dual-perspective Perception for High-Resolution Multimodal Large Language Model
With advancements in data availability and computing resources, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have showcased capabilities across various fields. However, the quadratic complexity of the vision encoder in MLLMs constrains the resolution of input images. Most current approaches mitigate this issue by cropping high-resolution images into smaller sub-images, which are then processed independently by the vision encoder. Despite capturing sufficient local details, these sub-images lack global context and fail to interact with one another. To address this limitation, we propose a novel MLLM, INF-LLaVA, designed for effective high-resolution image perception. INF-LLaVA incorporates two innovative components. First, we introduce a Dual-perspective Cropping Module (DCM), which ensures that each sub-image contains continuous details from a local perspective and comprehensive information from a global perspective. Second, we introduce Dual-perspective Enhancement Module (DEM) to enable the mutual enhancement of global and local features, allowing INF-LLaVA to effectively process high-resolution images by simultaneously capturing detailed local information and comprehensive global context. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of these components, and experiments on a diverse set of benchmarks demonstrate that INF-LLaVA outperforms existing MLLMs. Code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/WeihuangLin/INF-LLaVA.
Photorealistic Style Transfer via Wavelet Transforms
Recent style transfer models have provided promising artistic results. However, given a photograph as a reference style, existing methods are limited by spatial distortions or unrealistic artifacts, which should not happen in real photographs. We introduce a theoretically sound correction to the network architecture that remarkably enhances photorealism and faithfully transfers the style. The key ingredient of our method is wavelet transforms that naturally fits in deep networks. We propose a wavelet corrected transfer based on whitening and coloring transforms (WCT^2) that allows features to preserve their structural information and statistical properties of VGG feature space during stylization. This is the first and the only end-to-end model that can stylize a 1024times1024 resolution image in 4.7 seconds, giving a pleasing and photorealistic quality without any post-processing. Last but not least, our model provides a stable video stylization without temporal constraints. Our code, generated images, and pre-trained models are all available at https://github.com/ClovaAI/WCT2.
Color2Embed: Fast Exemplar-Based Image Colorization using Color Embeddings
In this paper, we present a fast exemplar-based image colorization approach using color embeddings named Color2Embed. Generally, due to the difficulty of obtaining input and ground truth image pairs, it is hard to train a exemplar-based colorization model with unsupervised and unpaired training manner. Current algorithms usually strive to achieve two procedures: i) retrieving a large number of reference images with high similarity for preparing training dataset, which is inevitably time-consuming and tedious; ii) designing complicated modules to transfer the colors of the reference image to the target image, by calculating and leveraging the deep semantic correspondence between them (e.g., non-local operation), which is computationally expensive during testing. Contrary to the previous methods, we adopt a self-augmented self-reference learning scheme, where the reference image is generated by graphical transformations from the original colorful one whereby the training can be formulated in a paired manner. Second, in order to reduce the process time, our method explicitly extracts the color embeddings and exploits a progressive style feature Transformation network, which injects the color embeddings into the reconstruction of the final image. Such design is much more lightweight and intelligible, achieving appealing performance with fast processing speed.
UNICE: Training A Universal Image Contrast Enhancer
Existing image contrast enhancement methods are typically designed for specific tasks such as under-/over-exposure correction, low-light and backlit image enhancement, etc. The learned models, however, exhibit poor generalization performance across different tasks, even across different datasets of a specific task. It is important to explore whether we can learn a universal and generalized model for various contrast enhancement tasks. In this work, we observe that the common key factor of these tasks lies in the need of exposure and contrast adjustment, which can be well-addressed if high-dynamic range (HDR) inputs are available. We hence collect 46,928 HDR raw images from public sources, and render 328,496 sRGB images to build multi-exposure sequences (MES) and the corresponding pseudo sRGB ground-truths via multi-exposure fusion. Consequently, we train a network to generate an MES from a single sRGB image, followed by training another network to fuse the generated MES into an enhanced image. Our proposed method, namely UNiversal Image Contrast Enhancer (UNICE), is free of costly human labeling. However, it demonstrates significantly stronger generalization performance than existing image contrast enhancement methods across and within different tasks, even outperforming manually created ground-truths in multiple no-reference image quality metrics. The dataset, code and model are available at https://github.com/BeyondHeaven/UNICE.
3D Object Manipulation in a Single Image using Generative Models
Object manipulation in images aims to not only edit the object's presentation but also gift objects with motion. Previous methods encountered challenges in concurrently handling static editing and dynamic generation, while also struggling to achieve fidelity in object appearance and scene lighting. In this work, we introduce OMG3D, a novel framework that integrates the precise geometric control with the generative power of diffusion models, thus achieving significant enhancements in visual performance. Our framework first converts 2D objects into 3D, enabling user-directed modifications and lifelike motions at the geometric level. To address texture realism, we propose CustomRefiner, a texture refinement module that pre-train a customized diffusion model, aligning the details and style of coarse renderings of 3D rough model with the original image, further refine the texture. Additionally, we introduce IllumiCombiner, a lighting processing module that estimates and corrects background lighting to match human visual perception, resulting in more realistic shadow effects. Extensive experiments demonstrate the outstanding visual performance of our approach in both static and dynamic scenarios. Remarkably, all these steps can be done using one NVIDIA 3090. Project page is at https://whalesong-zrs.github.io/OMG3D-projectpage/
Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement
When enhancing low-light images, many deep learning algorithms are based on the Retinex theory. However, the Retinex model does not consider the corruptions hidden in the dark or introduced by the light-up process. Besides, these methods usually require a tedious multi-stage training pipeline and rely on convolutional neural networks, showing limitations in capturing long-range dependencies. In this paper, we formulate a simple yet principled One-stage Retinex-based Framework (ORF). ORF first estimates the illumination information to light up the low-light image and then restores the corruption to produce the enhanced image. We design an Illumination-Guided Transformer (IGT) that utilizes illumination representations to direct the modeling of non-local interactions of regions with different lighting conditions. By plugging IGT into ORF, we obtain our algorithm, Retinexformer. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our Retinexformer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on thirteen benchmarks. The user study and application on low-light object detection also reveal the latent practical values of our method. Code, models, and results are available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Retinexformer
Parameter-Inverted Image Pyramid Networks for Visual Perception and Multimodal Understanding
Image pyramids are widely adopted in top-performing methods to obtain multi-scale features for precise visual perception and understanding. However, current image pyramids use the same large-scale model to process multiple resolutions of images, leading to significant computational cost. To address this challenge, we propose a novel network architecture, called Parameter-Inverted Image Pyramid Networks (PIIP). Specifically, PIIP uses pretrained models (ViTs or CNNs) as branches to process multi-scale images, where images of higher resolutions are processed by smaller network branches to balance computational cost and performance. To integrate information from different spatial scales, we further propose a novel cross-branch feature interaction mechanism. To validate PIIP, we apply it to various perception models and a representative multimodal large language model called LLaVA, and conduct extensive experiments on various tasks such as object detection, segmentation, image classification and multimodal understanding. PIIP achieves superior performance compared to single-branch and existing multi-resolution approaches with lower computational cost. When applied to InternViT-6B, a large-scale vision foundation model, PIIP can improve its performance by 1%-2% on detection and segmentation with only 40%-60% of the original computation, finally achieving 60.0 box AP on MS COCO and 59.7 mIoU on ADE20K. For multimodal understanding, our PIIP-LLaVA achieves 73.0% accuracy on TextVQA and 74.5% on MMBench with only 2.8M training data. Our code is released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/PIIP.
ColorizeDiffusion v2: Enhancing Reference-based Sketch Colorization Through Separating Utilities
Reference-based sketch colorization methods have garnered significant attention due to their potential applications in the animation production industry. However, most existing methods are trained with image triplets of sketch, reference, and ground truth that are semantically and spatially well-aligned, while real-world references and sketches often exhibit substantial misalignment. This mismatch in data distribution between training and inference leads to overfitting, consequently resulting in spatial artifacts and significant degradation in overall colorization quality, limiting potential applications of current methods for general purposes. To address this limitation, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the carrier, defined as the latent representation facilitating information transfer from reference to sketch. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel workflow that dynamically adapts the carrier to optimize distinct aspects of colorization. Specifically, for spatially misaligned artifacts, we introduce a split cross-attention mechanism with spatial masks, enabling region-specific reference injection within the diffusion process. To mitigate semantic neglect of sketches, we employ dedicated background and style encoders to transfer detailed reference information in the latent feature space, achieving enhanced spatial control and richer detail synthesis. Furthermore, we propose character-mask merging and background bleaching as preprocessing steps to improve foreground-background integration and background generation. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, including a user study, demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to existing approaches. An ablation study further validates the efficacy of each proposed component.
Troublemaker Learning for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) restores the color and brightness of underexposed images. Supervised methods suffer from high costs in collecting low/normal-light image pairs. Unsupervised methods invest substantial effort in crafting complex loss functions. We address these two challenges through the proposed TroubleMaker Learning (TML) strategy, which employs normal-light images as inputs for training. TML is simple: we first dim the input and then increase its brightness. TML is based on two core components. First, the troublemaker model (TM) constructs pseudo low-light images from normal images to relieve the cost of pairwise data. Second, the predicting model (PM) enhances the brightness of pseudo low-light images. Additionally, we incorporate an enhancing model (EM) to further improve the visual performance of PM outputs. Moreover, in LLIE tasks, characterizing global element correlations is important because more information on the same object can be captured. CNN cannot achieve this well, and self-attention has high time complexity. Accordingly, we propose Global Dynamic Convolution (GDC) with O(n) time complexity, which essentially imitates the partial calculation process of self-attention to formulate elementwise correlations. Based on the GDC module, we build the UGDC model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that UGDC trained with TML can achieve competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches on public datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Rainbowman0/TML_LLIE.
LongAnimation: Long Animation Generation with Dynamic Global-Local Memory
Animation colorization is a crucial part of real animation industry production. Long animation colorization has high labor costs. Therefore, automated long animation colorization based on the video generation model has significant research value. Existing studies are limited to short-term colorization. These studies adopt a local paradigm, fusing overlapping features to achieve smooth transitions between local segments. However, the local paradigm neglects global information, failing to maintain long-term color consistency. In this study, we argue that ideal long-term color consistency can be achieved through a dynamic global-local paradigm, i.e., dynamically extracting global color-consistent features relevant to the current generation. Specifically, we propose LongAnimation, a novel framework, which mainly includes a SketchDiT, a Dynamic Global-Local Memory (DGLM), and a Color Consistency Reward. The SketchDiT captures hybrid reference features to support the DGLM module. The DGLM module employs a long video understanding model to dynamically compress global historical features and adaptively fuse them with the current generation features. To refine the color consistency, we introduce a Color Consistency Reward. During inference, we propose a color consistency fusion to smooth the video segment transition. Extensive experiments on both short-term (14 frames) and long-term (average 500 frames) animations show the effectiveness of LongAnimation in maintaining short-term and long-term color consistency for open-domain animation colorization task. The code can be found at https://cn-makers.github.io/long_animation_web/.
Modernizing Old Photos Using Multiple References via Photorealistic Style Transfer
This paper firstly presents old photo modernization using multiple references by performing stylization and enhancement in a unified manner. In order to modernize old photos, we propose a novel multi-reference-based old photo modernization (MROPM) framework consisting of a network MROPM-Net and a novel synthetic data generation scheme. MROPM-Net stylizes old photos using multiple references via photorealistic style transfer (PST) and further enhances the results to produce modern-looking images. Meanwhile, the synthetic data generation scheme trains the network to effectively utilize multiple references to perform modernization. To evaluate the performance, we propose a new old photos benchmark dataset (CHD) consisting of diverse natural indoor and outdoor scenes. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms other baselines in performing modernization on real old photos, even though no old photos were used during training. Moreover, our method can appropriately select styles from multiple references for each semantic region in the old photo to further improve the modernization performance.
FeatEnHancer: Enhancing Hierarchical Features for Object Detection and Beyond Under Low-Light Vision
Extracting useful visual cues for the downstream tasks is especially challenging under low-light vision. Prior works create enhanced representations by either correlating visual quality with machine perception or designing illumination-degrading transformation methods that require pre-training on synthetic datasets. We argue that optimizing enhanced image representation pertaining to the loss of the downstream task can result in more expressive representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel module, FeatEnHancer, that hierarchically combines multiscale features using multiheaded attention guided by task-related loss function to create suitable representations. Furthermore, our intra-scale enhancement improves the quality of features extracted at each scale or level, as well as combines features from different scales in a way that reflects their relative importance for the task at hand. FeatEnHancer is a general-purpose plug-and-play module and can be incorporated into any low-light vision pipeline. We show with extensive experimentation that the enhanced representation produced with FeatEnHancer significantly and consistently improves results in several low-light vision tasks, including dark object detection (+5.7 mAP on ExDark), face detection (+1.5 mAPon DARK FACE), nighttime semantic segmentation (+5.1 mIoU on ACDC ), and video object detection (+1.8 mAP on DarkVision), highlighting the effectiveness of enhancing hierarchical features under low-light vision.
Unsupervised Night Image Enhancement: When Layer Decomposition Meets Light-Effects Suppression
Night images suffer not only from low light, but also from uneven distributions of light. Most existing night visibility enhancement methods focus mainly on enhancing low-light regions. This inevitably leads to over enhancement and saturation in bright regions, such as those regions affected by light effects (glare, floodlight, etc). To address this problem, we need to suppress the light effects in bright regions while, at the same time, boosting the intensity of dark regions. With this idea in mind, we introduce an unsupervised method that integrates a layer decomposition network and a light-effects suppression network. Given a single night image as input, our decomposition network learns to decompose shading, reflectance and light-effects layers, guided by unsupervised layer-specific prior losses. Our light-effects suppression network further suppresses the light effects and, at the same time, enhances the illumination in dark regions. This light-effects suppression network exploits the estimated light-effects layer as the guidance to focus on the light-effects regions. To recover the background details and reduce hallucination/artefacts, we propose structure and high-frequency consistency losses. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations on real images show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in suppressing night light effects and boosting the intensity of dark regions.
GS^3: Efficient Relighting with Triple Gaussian Splatting
We present a spatial and angular Gaussian based representation and a triple splatting process, for real-time, high-quality novel lighting-and-view synthesis from multi-view point-lit input images. To describe complex appearance, we employ a Lambertian plus a mixture of angular Gaussians as an effective reflectance function for each spatial Gaussian. To generate self-shadow, we splat all spatial Gaussians towards the light source to obtain shadow values, which are further refined by a small multi-layer perceptron. To compensate for other effects like global illumination, another network is trained to compute and add a per-spatial-Gaussian RGB tuple. The effectiveness of our representation is demonstrated on 30 samples with a wide variation in geometry (from solid to fluffy) and appearance (from translucent to anisotropic), as well as using different forms of input data, including rendered images of synthetic/reconstructed objects, photographs captured with a handheld camera and a flash, or from a professional lightstage. We achieve a training time of 40-70 minutes and a rendering speed of 90 fps on a single commodity GPU. Our results compare favorably with state-of-the-art techniques in terms of quality/performance. Our code and data are publicly available at https://GSrelight.github.io/.
Detecting Recolored Image by Spatial Correlation
Image forensics, aiming to ensure the authenticity of the image, has made great progress in dealing with common image manipulation such as copy-move, splicing, and inpainting in the past decades. However, only a few researchers pay attention to an emerging editing technique called image recoloring, which can manipulate the color values of an image to give it a new style. To prevent it from being used maliciously, the previous approaches address the conventional recoloring from the perspective of inter-channel correlation and illumination consistency. In this paper, we try to explore a solution from the perspective of the spatial correlation, which exhibits the generic detection capability for both conventional and deep learning-based recoloring. Through theoretical and numerical analysis, we find that the recoloring operation will inevitably destroy the spatial correlation between pixels, implying a new prior of statistical discriminability. Based on such fact, we generate a set of spatial correlation features and learn the informative representation from the set via a convolutional neural network. To train our network, we use three recoloring methods to generate a large-scale and high-quality data set. Extensive experimental results in two recoloring scenes demonstrate that the spatial correlation features are highly discriminative. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art detection accuracy on multiple benchmark datasets and exhibits well generalization for unknown types of recoloring methods.
Paint Bucket Colorization Using Anime Character Color Design Sheets
Line art colorization plays a crucial role in hand-drawn animation production, where digital artists manually colorize segments using a paint bucket tool, guided by RGB values from character color design sheets. This process, often called paint bucket colorization, involves two main tasks: keyframe colorization, where colors are applied according to the character's color design sheet, and consecutive frame colorization, where these colors are replicated across adjacent frames. Current automated colorization methods primarily focus on reference-based and segment-matching approaches. However, reference-based methods often fail to accurately assign specific colors to each region, while matching-based methods are limited to consecutive frame colorization and struggle with issues like significant deformation and occlusion. In this work, we introduce inclusion matching, which allows the network to understand the inclusion relationships between segments, rather than relying solely on direct visual correspondences. By integrating this approach with segment parsing and color warping modules, our inclusion matching pipeline significantly improves performance in both keyframe colorization and consecutive frame colorization. To support our network's training, we have developed a unique dataset named PaintBucket-Character, which includes rendered line arts alongside their colorized versions and shading annotations for various 3D characters. To replicate industry animation data formats, we also created color design sheets for each character, with semantic information for each color and standard pose reference images. Experiments highlight the superiority of our method, demonstrating accurate and consistent colorization across both our proposed benchmarks and hand-drawn animations.
Low-light Image Enhancement via CLIP-Fourier Guided Wavelet Diffusion
Low-light image enhancement techniques have significantly progressed, but unstable image quality recovery and unsatisfactory visual perception are still significant challenges. To solve these problems, we propose a novel and robust low-light image enhancement method via CLIP-Fourier Guided Wavelet Diffusion, abbreviated as CFWD. Specifically, CFWD leverages multimodal visual-language information in the frequency domain space created by multiple wavelet transforms to guide the enhancement process. Multi-scale supervision across different modalities facilitates the alignment of image features with semantic features during the wavelet diffusion process, effectively bridging the gap between degraded and normal domains. Moreover, to further promote the effective recovery of the image details, we combine the Fourier transform based on the wavelet transform and construct a Hybrid High Frequency Perception Module (HFPM) with a significant perception of the detailed features. This module avoids the diversity confusion of the wavelet diffusion process by guiding the fine-grained structure recovery of the enhancement results to achieve favourable metric and perceptually oriented enhancement. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on publicly available real-world benchmarks show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant progress in image quality and noise suppression. The project code is available at https://github.com/hejh8/CFWD.
The Photographer Eye: Teaching Multimodal Large Language Models to See and Critique like Photographers
While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky. Photographer and curator, Szarkowski insightfully revealed one of the notable gaps between general and aesthetic visual understanding: while the former focuses on identifying the factual element in an image (sky), the latter transcends such object identification, viewing it instead as an aesthetic component--a pure color block (blue). Such fundamental distinctions between general (detection, localization, etc.) and aesthetic (color, lighting, composition, etc.) visual understanding present a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Although some recent works have made initial explorations, they are often limited to general and basic aesthetic commonsense. As a result, they frequently fall short in real-world scenarios (Fig. 1), which require extensive expertise--including photographic techniques, photo pre/post-processing knowledge, and more, to provide a detailed analysis and description. To fundamentally enhance the aesthetics understanding of MLLMs, we first introduce a novel dataset, PhotoCritique, derived from extensive discussions among professional photographers and enthusiasts, and characterized by the large scale, expertise, and diversity. Then, to better learn visual aesthetics from PhotoCritique, we furthur propose a novel model, PhotoEye, featuring a languageguided multi-view vision fusion mechanism to understand image aesthetics from multiple perspectives. Finally, we present a novel benchmark, PhotoBench, a comprehensive and professional benchmark for aesthetic visual understanding. On existing benchmarks and PhotoBench, our model demonstrates clear advantages over existing models.
Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement
We present an approach to enhancing the realism of synthetic images. The images are enhanced by a convolutional network that leverages intermediate representations produced by conventional rendering pipelines. The network is trained via a novel adversarial objective, which provides strong supervision at multiple perceptual levels. We analyze scene layout distributions in commonly used datasets and find that they differ in important ways. We hypothesize that this is one of the causes of strong artifacts that can be observed in the results of many prior methods. To address this we propose a new strategy for sampling image patches during training. We also introduce multiple architectural improvements in the deep network modules used for photorealism enhancement. We confirm the benefits of our contributions in controlled experiments and report substantial gains in stability and realism in comparison to recent image-to-image translation methods and a variety of other baselines.
Improved Diffusion-based Image Colorization via Piggybacked Models
Image colorization has been attracting the research interests of the community for decades. However, existing methods still struggle to provide satisfactory colorized results given grayscale images due to a lack of human-like global understanding of colors. Recently, large-scale Text-to-Image (T2I) models have been exploited to transfer the semantic information from the text prompts to the image domain, where text provides a global control for semantic objects in the image. In this work, we introduce a colorization model piggybacking on the existing powerful T2I diffusion model. Our key idea is to exploit the color prior knowledge in the pre-trained T2I diffusion model for realistic and diverse colorization. A diffusion guider is designed to incorporate the pre-trained weights of the latent diffusion model to output a latent color prior that conforms to the visual semantics of the grayscale input. A lightness-aware VQVAE will then generate the colorized result with pixel-perfect alignment to the given grayscale image. Our model can also achieve conditional colorization with additional inputs (e.g. user hints and texts). Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of perceptual quality.
Attentions Help CNNs See Better: Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network
Image quality assessment (IQA) algorithm aims to quantify the human perception of image quality. Unfortunately, there is a performance drop when assessing the distortion images generated by generative adversarial network (GAN) with seemingly realistic texture. In this work, we conjecture that this maladaptation lies in the backbone of IQA models, where patch-level prediction methods use independent image patches as input to calculate their scores separately, but lack spatial relationship modeling among image patches. Therefore, we propose an Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network (AHIQ) to deal with the challenge and get better performance on the GAN-based IQA task. Firstly, we adopt a two-branch architecture, including a vision transformer (ViT) branch and a convolutional neural network (CNN) branch for feature extraction. The hybrid architecture combines interaction information among image patches captured by ViT and local texture details from CNN. To make the features from shallow CNN more focused on the visually salient region, a deformable convolution is applied with the help of semantic information from the ViT branch. Finally, we use a patch-wise score prediction module to obtain the final score. The experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four standard IQA datasets and AHIQ ranked first on the Full Reference (FR) track of the NTIRE 2022 Perceptual Image Quality Assessment Challenge.
SEE: See Everything Every Time -- Adaptive Brightness Adjustment for Broad Light Range Images via Events
Event cameras, with a high dynamic range exceeding 120dB, significantly outperform traditional embedded cameras, robustly recording detailed changing information under various lighting conditions, including both low- and high-light situations. However, recent research on utilizing event data has primarily focused on low-light image enhancement, neglecting image enhancement and brightness adjustment across a broader range of lighting conditions, such as normal or high illumination. Based on this, we propose a novel research question: how to employ events to enhance and adaptively adjust the brightness of images captured under broad lighting conditions? To investigate this question, we first collected a new dataset, SEE-600K, consisting of 610,126 images and corresponding events across 202 scenarios, each featuring an average of four lighting conditions with over a 1000-fold variation in illumination. Subsequently, we propose a framework that effectively utilizes events to smoothly adjust image brightness through the use of prompts. Our framework captures color through sensor patterns, uses cross-attention to model events as a brightness dictionary, and adjusts the image's dynamic range to form a broad light-range representation (BLR), which is then decoded at the pixel level based on the brightness prompt. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only performs well on the low-light enhancement dataset but also shows robust performance on broader light-range image enhancement using the SEE-600K dataset. Additionally, our approach enables pixel-level brightness adjustment, providing flexibility for post-processing and inspiring more imaging applications. The dataset and source code are publicly available at:https://github.com/yunfanLu/SEE.
Deep Exemplar-based Colorization
We propose the first deep learning approach for exemplar-based local colorization. Given a reference color image, our convolutional neural network directly maps a grayscale image to an output colorized image. Rather than using hand-crafted rules as in traditional exemplar-based methods, our end-to-end colorization network learns how to select, propagate, and predict colors from the large-scale data. The approach performs robustly and generalizes well even when using reference images that are unrelated to the input grayscale image. More importantly, as opposed to other learning-based colorization methods, our network allows the user to achieve customizable results by simply feeding different references. In order to further reduce manual effort in selecting the references, the system automatically recommends references with our proposed image retrieval algorithm, which considers both semantic and luminance information. The colorization can be performed fully automatically by simply picking the top reference suggestion. Our approach is validated through a user study and favorable quantitative comparisons to the-state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our approach can be naturally extended to video colorization. Our code and models will be freely available for public use.
Deep Image Harmonization with Globally Guided Feature Transformation and Relation Distillation
Given a composite image, image harmonization aims to adjust the foreground illumination to be consistent with background. Previous methods have explored transforming foreground features to achieve competitive performance. In this work, we show that using global information to guide foreground feature transformation could achieve significant improvement. Besides, we propose to transfer the foreground-background relation from real images to composite images, which can provide intermediate supervision for the transformed encoder features. Additionally, considering the drawbacks of existing harmonization datasets, we also contribute a ccHarmony dataset which simulates the natural illumination variation. Extensive experiments on iHarmony4 and our contributed dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our ccHarmony dataset is released at https://github.com/bcmi/Image-Harmonization-Dataset-ccHarmony.
Cobra: Efficient Line Art COlorization with BRoAder References
The comic production industry requires reference-based line art colorization with high accuracy, efficiency, contextual consistency, and flexible control. A comic page often involves diverse characters, objects, and backgrounds, which complicates the coloring process. Despite advancements in diffusion models for image generation, their application in line art colorization remains limited, facing challenges related to handling extensive reference images, time-consuming inference, and flexible control. We investigate the necessity of extensive contextual image guidance on the quality of line art colorization. To address these challenges, we introduce Cobra, an efficient and versatile method that supports color hints and utilizes over 200 reference images while maintaining low latency. Central to Cobra is a Causal Sparse DiT architecture, which leverages specially designed positional encodings, causal sparse attention, and Key-Value Cache to effectively manage long-context references and ensure color identity consistency. Results demonstrate that Cobra achieves accurate line art colorization through extensive contextual reference, significantly enhancing inference speed and interactivity, thereby meeting critical industrial demands. We release our codes and models on our project page: https://zhuang2002.github.io/Cobra/.
Spatial-Spectral Morphological Mamba for Hyperspectral Image Classification
In recent years, the emergence of Transformers with self-attention mechanism has revolutionized the hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, these models face major challenges in computational efficiency, as their complexity increases quadratically with the sequence length. The Mamba architecture, leveraging a state space model (SSM), offers a more efficient alternative to Transformers. This paper introduces the Spatial-Spectral Morphological Mamba (MorpMamba) model in which, a token generation module first converts the HSI patch into spatial-spectral tokens. These tokens are then processed by morphological operations, which compute structural and shape information using depthwise separable convolutional operations. The extracted information is enhanced in a feature enhancement module that adjusts the spatial and spectral tokens based on the center region of the HSI sample, allowing for effective information fusion within each block. Subsequently, the tokens are refined through a multi-head self-attention which further improves the feature space. Finally, the combined information is fed into the state space block for classification and the creation of the ground truth map. Experiments on widely used HSI datasets demonstrate that the MorpMamba model outperforms (parametric efficiency) both CNN and Transformer models. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/MHassaanButt/MorpMamba.
MOSAIC: Multi-Object Segmented Arbitrary Stylization Using CLIP
Style transfer driven by text prompts paved a new path for creatively stylizing the images without collecting an actual style image. Despite having promising results, with text-driven stylization, the user has no control over the stylization. If a user wants to create an artistic image, the user requires fine control over the stylization of various entities individually in the content image, which is not addressed by the current state-of-the-art approaches. On the other hand, diffusion style transfer methods also suffer from the same issue because the regional stylization control over the stylized output is ineffective. To address this problem, We propose a new method Multi-Object Segmented Arbitrary Stylization Using CLIP (MOSAIC), that can apply styles to different objects in the image based on the context extracted from the input prompt. Text-based segmentation and stylization modules which are based on vision transformer architecture, were used to segment and stylize the objects. Our method can extend to any arbitrary objects, styles and produce high-quality images compared to the current state of art methods. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to perform text-guided arbitrary object-wise stylization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing that it can generate visually appealing stylized images with enhanced control over stylization and the ability to generalize to unseen object classes.
Learning Inclusion Matching for Animation Paint Bucket Colorization
Colorizing line art is a pivotal task in the production of hand-drawn cel animation. This typically involves digital painters using a paint bucket tool to manually color each segment enclosed by lines, based on RGB values predetermined by a color designer. This frame-by-frame process is both arduous and time-intensive. Current automated methods mainly focus on segment matching. This technique migrates colors from a reference to the target frame by aligning features within line-enclosed segments across frames. However, issues like occlusion and wrinkles in animations often disrupt these direct correspondences, leading to mismatches. In this work, we introduce a new learning-based inclusion matching pipeline, which directs the network to comprehend the inclusion relationships between segments rather than relying solely on direct visual correspondences. Our method features a two-stage pipeline that integrates a coarse color warping module with an inclusion matching module, enabling more nuanced and accurate colorization. To facilitate the training of our network, we also develope a unique dataset, referred to as PaintBucket-Character. This dataset includes rendered line arts alongside their colorized counterparts, featuring various 3D characters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method over existing techniques.
CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification
The recently developed vision transformer (ViT) has achieved promising results on image classification compared to convolutional neural networks. Inspired by this, in this paper, we study how to learn multi-scale feature representations in transformer models for image classification. To this end, we propose a dual-branch transformer to combine image patches (i.e., tokens in a transformer) of different sizes to produce stronger image features. Our approach processes small-patch and large-patch tokens with two separate branches of different computational complexity and these tokens are then fused purely by attention multiple times to complement each other. Furthermore, to reduce computation, we develop a simple yet effective token fusion module based on cross attention, which uses a single token for each branch as a query to exchange information with other branches. Our proposed cross-attention only requires linear time for both computational and memory complexity instead of quadratic time otherwise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs better than or on par with several concurrent works on vision transformer, in addition to efficient CNN models. For example, on the ImageNet1K dataset, with some architectural changes, our approach outperforms the recent DeiT by a large margin of 2\% with a small to moderate increase in FLOPs and model parameters. Our source codes and models are available at https://github.com/IBM/CrossViT.
Color Recognition in Challenging Lighting Environments: CNN Approach
Light plays a vital role in vision either human or machine vision, the perceived color is always based on the lighting conditions of the surroundings. Researchers are working to enhance the color detection techniques for the application of computer vision. They have implemented proposed several methods using different color detection approaches but still, there is a gap that can be filled. To address this issue, a color detection method, which is based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), is proposed. Firstly, image segmentation is performed using the edge detection segmentation technique to specify the object and then the segmented object is fed to the Convolutional Neural Network trained to detect the color of an object in different lighting conditions. It is experimentally verified that our method can substantially enhance the robustness of color detection in different lighting conditions, and our method performed better results than existing methods.
MHS-VM: Multi-Head Scanning in Parallel Subspaces for Vision Mamba
Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), with Mamba as a prime example, have shown great promise for long-range dependency modeling with linear complexity. Then, Vision Mamba and the subsequent architectures are presented successively, and they perform well on visual tasks. The crucial step of applying Mamba to visual tasks is to construct 2D visual features in sequential manners. To effectively organize and construct visual features within the 2D image space through 1D selective scan, we propose a novel Multi-Head Scan (MHS) module. The embeddings extracted from the preceding layer are projected into multiple lower-dimensional subspaces. Subsequently, within each subspace, the selective scan is performed along distinct scan routes. The resulting sub-embeddings, obtained from the multi-head scan process, are then integrated and ultimately projected back into the high-dimensional space. Moreover, we incorporate a Scan Route Attention (SRA) mechanism to enhance the module's capability to discern complex structures. To validate the efficacy of our module, we exclusively substitute the 2D-Selective-Scan (SS2D) block in VM-UNet with our proposed module, and we train our models from scratch without using any pre-trained weights. The results indicate a significant improvement in performance while reducing the parameters of the original VM-UNet. The code for this study is publicly available at https://github.com/PixDeep/MHS-VM.
Exploring Multi-modal Neural Scene Representations With Applications on Thermal Imaging
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) quickly evolved as the new de-facto standard for the task of novel view synthesis when trained on a set of RGB images. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of neural scene representations, such as NeRFs, in the context of multi-modal learning. Specifically, we present four different strategies of how to incorporate a second modality, other than RGB, into NeRFs: (1) training from scratch independently on both modalities; (2) pre-training on RGB and fine-tuning on the second modality; (3) adding a second branch; and (4) adding a separate component to predict (color) values of the additional modality. We chose thermal imaging as second modality since it strongly differs from RGB in terms of radiosity, making it challenging to integrate into neural scene representations. For the evaluation of the proposed strategies, we captured a new publicly available multi-view dataset, ThermalMix, consisting of six common objects and about 360 RGB and thermal images in total. We employ cross-modality calibration prior to data capturing, leading to high-quality alignments between RGB and thermal images. Our findings reveal that adding a second branch to NeRF performs best for novel view synthesis on thermal images while also yielding compelling results on RGB. Finally, we also show that our analysis generalizes to other modalities, including near-infrared images and depth maps. Project page: https://mert-o.github.io/ThermalNeRF/.
RSFNet: A White-Box Image Retouching Approach using Region-Specific Color Filters
Retouching images is an essential aspect of enhancing the visual appeal of photos. Although users often share common aesthetic preferences, their retouching methods may vary based on their individual preferences. Therefore, there is a need for white-box approaches that produce satisfying results and enable users to conveniently edit their images simultaneously. Recent white-box retouching methods rely on cascaded global filters that provide image-level filter arguments but cannot perform fine-grained retouching. In contrast, colorists typically employ a divide-and-conquer approach, performing a series of region-specific fine-grained enhancements when using traditional tools like Davinci Resolve. We draw on this insight to develop a white-box framework for photo retouching using parallel region-specific filters, called RSFNet. Our model generates filter arguments (e.g., saturation, contrast, hue) and attention maps of regions for each filter simultaneously. Instead of cascading filters, RSFNet employs linear summations of filters, allowing for a more diverse range of filter classes that can be trained more easily. Our experiments demonstrate that RSFNet achieves state-of-the-art results, offering satisfying aesthetic appeal and increased user convenience for editable white-box retouching.
Image Referenced Sketch Colorization Based on Animation Creation Workflow
Sketch colorization plays an important role in animation and digital illustration production tasks. However, existing methods still meet problems in that text-guided methods fail to provide accurate color and style reference, hint-guided methods still involve manual operation, and image-referenced methods are prone to cause artifacts. To address these limitations, we propose a diffusion-based framework inspired by real-world animation production workflows. Our approach leverages the sketch as the spatial guidance and an RGB image as the color reference, and separately extracts foreground and background from the reference image with spatial masks. Particularly, we introduce a split cross-attention mechanism with LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) modules. They are trained separately with foreground and background regions to control the corresponding embeddings for keys and values in cross-attention. This design allows the diffusion model to integrate information from foreground and background independently, preventing interference and eliminating the spatial artifacts. During inference, we design switchable inference modes for diverse use scenarios by changing modules activated in the framework. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, along with user studies, demonstrate our advantages over existing methods in generating high-qualigy artifact-free results with geometric mismatched references. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component. Codes are available at https://github.com/ tellurion-kanata/colorizeDiffusion.
Deep Image Harmonization with Learnable Augmentation
The goal of image harmonization is adjusting the foreground appearance in a composite image to make the whole image harmonious. To construct paired training images, existing datasets adopt different ways to adjust the illumination statistics of foregrounds of real images to produce synthetic composite images. However, different datasets have considerable domain gap and the performances on small-scale datasets are limited by insufficient training data. In this work, we explore learnable augmentation to enrich the illumination diversity of small-scale datasets for better harmonization performance. In particular, our designed SYthetic COmposite Network (SycoNet) takes in a real image with foreground mask and a random vector to learn suitable color transformation, which is applied to the foreground of this real image to produce a synthetic composite image. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed learnable augmentation for image harmonization. The code of SycoNet is released at https://github.com/bcmi/SycoNet-Adaptive-Image-Harmonization.
LWGANet: A Lightweight Group Attention Backbone for Remote Sensing Visual Tasks
Remote sensing (RS) visual tasks have gained significant academic and practical importance. However, they encounter numerous challenges that hinder effective feature extraction, including the detection and recognition of multiple objects exhibiting substantial variations in scale within a single image. While prior dual-branch or multi-branch architectural strategies have been effective in managing these object variances, they have concurrently resulted in considerable increases in computational demands and parameter counts. Consequently, these architectures are rendered less viable for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Contemporary lightweight backbone networks, designed primarily for natural images, frequently encounter difficulties in effectively extracting features from multi-scale objects, which compromises their efficacy in RS visual tasks. This article introduces LWGANet, a specialized lightweight backbone network tailored for RS visual tasks, incorporating a novel lightweight group attention (LWGA) module designed to address these specific challenges. LWGA module, tailored for RS imagery, adeptly harnesses redundant features to extract a wide range of spatial information, from local to global scales, without introducing additional complexity or computational overhead. This facilitates precise feature extraction across multiple scales within an efficient framework.LWGANet was rigorously evaluated across twelve datasets, which span four crucial RS visual tasks: scene classification, oriented object detection, semantic segmentation, and change detection. The results confirm LWGANet's widespread applicability and its ability to maintain an optimal balance between high performance and low complexity, achieving SOTA results across diverse datasets. LWGANet emerged as a novel solution for resource-limited scenarios requiring robust RS image processing capabilities.
Lightweight Image Inpainting by Stripe Window Transformer with Joint Attention to CNN
Image inpainting is an important task in computer vision. As admirable methods are presented, the inpainted image is getting closer to reality. However, the result is still not good enough in the reconstructed texture and structure based on human vision. Although recent advances in computer hardware have enabled the development of larger and more complex models, there is still a need for lightweight models that can be used by individuals and small-sized institutions. Therefore, we propose a lightweight model that combines a specialized transformer with a traditional convolutional neural network (CNN). Furthermore, we have noticed most researchers only consider three primary colors (RGB) in inpainted images, but we think this is not enough. So we propose a new loss function to intensify color details. Extensive experiments on commonly seen datasets (Places2 and CelebA) validate the efficacy of our proposed model compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Index Terms: HSV color space, image inpainting, joint attention, stripe window, transformer
StainFuser: Controlling Diffusion for Faster Neural Style Transfer in Multi-Gigapixel Histology Images
Stain normalization algorithms aim to transform the color and intensity characteristics of a source multi-gigapixel histology image to match those of a target image, mitigating inconsistencies in the appearance of stains used to highlight cellular components in the images. We propose a new approach, StainFuser, which treats this problem as a style transfer task using a novel Conditional Latent Diffusion architecture, eliminating the need for handcrafted color components. With this method, we curate SPI-2M the largest stain normalization dataset to date of over 2 million histology images with neural style transfer for high-quality transformations. Trained on this data, StainFuser outperforms current state-of-the-art GAN and handcrafted methods in terms of the quality of normalized images. Additionally, compared to existing approaches, it improves the performance of nuclei instance segmentation and classification models when used as a test time augmentation method on the challenging CoNIC dataset. Finally, we apply StainFuser on multi-gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs) and demonstrate improved performance in terms of computational efficiency, image quality and consistency across tiles over current methods.
Playground v2.5: Three Insights towards Enhancing Aesthetic Quality in Text-to-Image Generation
In this work, we share three insights for achieving state-of-the-art aesthetic quality in text-to-image generative models. We focus on three critical aspects for model improvement: enhancing color and contrast, improving generation across multiple aspect ratios, and improving human-centric fine details. First, we delve into the significance of the noise schedule in training a diffusion model, demonstrating its profound impact on realism and visual fidelity. Second, we address the challenge of accommodating various aspect ratios in image generation, emphasizing the importance of preparing a balanced bucketed dataset. Lastly, we investigate the crucial role of aligning model outputs with human preferences, ensuring that generated images resonate with human perceptual expectations. Through extensive analysis and experiments, Playground v2.5 demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in terms of aesthetic quality under various conditions and aspect ratios, outperforming both widely-used open-source models like SDXL and Playground v2, and closed-source commercial systems such as DALLE 3 and Midjourney v5.2. Our model is open-source, and we hope the development of Playground v2.5 provides valuable guidelines for researchers aiming to elevate the aesthetic quality of diffusion-based image generation models.
Image Colorization with Generative Adversarial Networks
Over the last decade, the process of automatic image colorization has been of significant interest for several application areas including restoration of aged or degraded images. This problem is highly ill-posed due to the large degrees of freedom during the assignment of color information. Many of the recent developments in automatic colorization involve images that contain a common theme or require highly processed data such as semantic maps as input. In our approach, we attempt to fully generalize the colorization procedure using a conditional Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN), extend current methods to high-resolution images and suggest training strategies that speed up the process and greatly stabilize it. The network is trained over datasets that are publicly available such as CIFAR-10 and Places365. The results of the generative model and traditional deep neural networks are compared.
MobileMamba: Lightweight Multi-Receptive Visual Mamba Network
Previous research on lightweight models has primarily focused on CNNs and Transformer-based designs. CNNs, with their local receptive fields, struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Transformers, despite their global modeling capabilities, are limited by quadratic computational complexity in high-resolution scenarios. Recently, state-space models have gained popularity in the visual domain due to their linear computational complexity. Despite their low FLOPs, current lightweight Mamba-based models exhibit suboptimal throughput. In this work, we propose the MobileMamba framework, which balances efficiency and performance. We design a three-stage network to enhance inference speed significantly. At a fine-grained level, we introduce the Multi-Receptive Field Feature Interaction(MRFFI) module, comprising the Long-Range Wavelet Transform-Enhanced Mamba(WTE-Mamba), Efficient Multi-Kernel Depthwise Convolution(MK-DeConv), and Eliminate Redundant Identity components. This module integrates multi-receptive field information and enhances high-frequency detail extraction. Additionally, we employ training and testing strategies to further improve performance and efficiency. MobileMamba achieves up to 83.6% on Top-1, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods which is maximum x21 faster than LocalVim on GPU. Extensive experiments on high-resolution downstream tasks demonstrate that MobileMamba surpasses current efficient models, achieving an optimal balance between speed and accuracy.
Is Vanilla MLP in Neural Radiance Field Enough for Few-shot View Synthesis?
Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has achieved superior performance for novel view synthesis by modeling the scene with a Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) and a volume rendering procedure, however, when fewer known views are given (i.e., few-shot view synthesis), the model is prone to overfit the given views. To handle this issue, previous efforts have been made towards leveraging learned priors or introducing additional regularizations. In contrast, in this paper, we for the first time provide an orthogonal method from the perspective of network structure. Given the observation that trivially reducing the number of model parameters alleviates the overfitting issue, but at the cost of missing details, we propose the multi-input MLP (mi-MLP) that incorporates the inputs (i.e., location and viewing direction) of the vanilla MLP into each layer to prevent the overfitting issue without harming detailed synthesis. To further reduce the artifacts, we propose to model colors and volume density separately and present two regularization terms. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that: 1) although the proposed mi-MLP is easy to implement, it is surprisingly effective as it boosts the PSNR of the baseline from 14.73 to 24.23. 2) the overall framework achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of benchmarks. We will release the code upon publication.
Generalized Lightness Adaptation with Channel Selective Normalization
Lightness adaptation is vital to the success of image processing to avoid unexpected visual deterioration, which covers multiple aspects, e.g., low-light image enhancement, image retouching, and inverse tone mapping. Existing methods typically work well on their trained lightness conditions but perform poorly in unknown ones due to their limited generalization ability. To address this limitation, we propose a novel generalized lightness adaptation algorithm that extends conventional normalization techniques through a channel filtering design, dubbed Channel Selective Normalization (CSNorm). The proposed CSNorm purposely normalizes the statistics of lightness-relevant channels and keeps other channels unchanged, so as to improve feature generalization and discrimination. To optimize CSNorm, we propose an alternating training strategy that effectively identifies lightness-relevant channels. The model equipped with our CSNorm only needs to be trained on one lightness condition and can be well generalized to unknown lightness conditions. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CSNorm in enhancing the generalization ability for the existing lightness adaptation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mdyao/CSNorm.
Multi-dimensional Visual Prompt Enhanced Image Restoration via Mamba-Transformer Aggregation
Recent efforts on image restoration have focused on developing "all-in-one" models that can handle different degradation types and levels within single model. However, most of mainstream Transformer-based ones confronted with dilemma between model capabilities and computation burdens, since self-attention mechanism quadratically increase in computational complexity with respect to image size, and has inadequacies in capturing long-range dependencies. Most of Mamba-related ones solely scanned feature map in spatial dimension for global modeling, failing to fully utilize information in channel dimension. To address aforementioned problems, this paper has proposed to fully utilize complementary advantages from Mamba and Transformer without sacrificing computation efficiency. Specifically, the selective scanning mechanism of Mamba is employed to focus on spatial modeling, enabling capture long-range spatial dependencies under linear complexity. The self-attention mechanism of Transformer is applied to focus on channel modeling, avoiding high computation burdens that are in quadratic growth with image's spatial dimensions. Moreover, to enrich informative prompts for effective image restoration, multi-dimensional prompt learning modules are proposed to learn prompt-flows from multi-scale encoder/decoder layers, benefiting for revealing underlying characteristic of various degradations from both spatial and channel perspectives, therefore, enhancing the capabilities of "all-in-one" model to solve various restoration tasks. Extensive experiment results on several image restoration benchmark tasks such as image denoising, dehazing, and deraining, have demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve new state-of-the-art performance, compared with many popular mainstream methods. Related source codes and pre-trained parameters will be public on github https://github.com/12138-chr/MTAIR.
SARA: Controllable Makeup Transfer with Spatial Alignment and Region-Adaptive Normalization
Makeup transfer is a process of transferring the makeup style from a reference image to the source images, while preserving the source images' identities. This technique is highly desirable and finds many applications. However, existing methods lack fine-level control of the makeup style, making it challenging to achieve high-quality results when dealing with large spatial misalignments. To address this problem, we propose a novel Spatial Alignment and Region-Adaptive normalization method (SARA) in this paper. Our method generates detailed makeup transfer results that can handle large spatial misalignments and achieve part-specific and shade-controllable makeup transfer. Specifically, SARA comprises three modules: Firstly, a spatial alignment module that preserves the spatial context of makeup and provides a target semantic map for guiding the shape-independent style codes. Secondly, a region-adaptive normalization module that decouples shape and makeup style using per-region encoding and normalization, which facilitates the elimination of spatial misalignments. Lastly, a makeup fusion module blends identity features and makeup style by injecting learned scale and bias parameters. Experimental results show that our SARA method outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public datasets.
Recasting Regional Lighting for Shadow Removal
Removing shadows requires an understanding of both lighting conditions and object textures in a scene. Existing methods typically learn pixel-level color mappings between shadow and non-shadow images, in which the joint modeling of lighting and object textures is implicit and inadequate. We observe that in a shadow region, the degradation degree of object textures depends on the local illumination, while simply enhancing the local illumination cannot fully recover the attenuated textures. Based on this observation, we propose to condition the restoration of attenuated textures on the corrected local lighting in the shadow region. Specifically, We first design a shadow-aware decomposition network to estimate the illumination and reflectance layers of shadow regions explicitly. We then propose a novel bilateral correction network to recast the lighting of shadow regions in the illumination layer via a novel local lighting correction module, and to restore the textures conditioned on the corrected illumination layer via a novel illumination-guided texture restoration module. We further annotate pixel-wise shadow masks for the public SRD dataset, which originally contains only image pairs. Experiments on three benchmarks show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art shadow removal methods.
Uni4Eye: Unified 2D and 3D Self-supervised Pre-training via Masked Image Modeling Transformer for Ophthalmic Image Classification
A large-scale labeled dataset is a key factor for the success of supervised deep learning in computer vision. However, a limited number of annotated data is very common, especially in ophthalmic image analysis, since manual annotation is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods bring huge opportunities for better utilizing unlabeled data, as they do not need massive annotations. With an attempt to use as many as possible unlabeled ophthalmic images, it is necessary to break the dimension barrier, simultaneously making use of both 2D and 3D images. In this paper, we propose a universal self-supervised Transformer framework, named Uni4Eye, to discover the inherent image property and capture domain-specific feature embedding in ophthalmic images. Uni4Eye can serve as a global feature extractor, which builds its basis on a Masked Image Modeling task with a Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture. We employ a Unified Patch Embedding module to replace the origin patch embedding module in ViT for jointly processing both 2D and 3D input images. Besides, we design a dual-branch multitask decoder module to simultaneously perform two reconstruction tasks on the input image and its gradient map, delivering discriminative representations for better convergence. We evaluate the performance of our pre-trained Uni4Eye encoder by fine-tuning it on six downstream ophthalmic image classification tasks. The superiority of Uni4Eye is successfully established through comparisons to other state-of-the-art SSL pre-training methods.
Optimizing Illuminant Estimation in Dual-Exposure HDR Imaging
High dynamic range (HDR) imaging involves capturing a series of frames of the same scene, each with different exposure settings, to broaden the dynamic range of light. This can be achieved through burst capturing or using staggered HDR sensors that capture long and short exposures simultaneously in the camera image signal processor (ISP). Within camera ISP pipeline, illuminant estimation is a crucial step aiming to estimate the color of the global illuminant in the scene. This estimation is used in camera ISP white-balance module to remove undesirable color cast in the final image. Despite the multiple frames captured in the HDR pipeline, conventional illuminant estimation methods often rely only on a single frame of the scene. In this paper, we explore leveraging information from frames captured with different exposure times. Specifically, we introduce a simple feature extracted from dual-exposure images to guide illuminant estimators, referred to as the dual-exposure feature (DEF). To validate the efficiency of DEF, we employed two illuminant estimators using the proposed DEF: 1) a multilayer perceptron network (MLP), referred to as exposure-based MLP (EMLP), and 2) a modified version of the convolutional color constancy (CCC) to integrate our DEF, that we call ECCC. Both EMLP and ECCC achieve promising results, in some cases surpassing prior methods that require hundreds of thousands or millions of parameters, with only a few hundred parameters for EMLP and a few thousand parameters for ECCC.
Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement
Retinex model is an effective tool for low-light image enhancement. It assumes that observed images can be decomposed into the reflectance and illumination. Most existing Retinex-based methods have carefully designed hand-crafted constraints and parameters for this highly ill-posed decomposition, which may be limited by model capacity when applied in various scenes. In this paper, we collect a LOw-Light dataset (LOL) containing low/normal-light image pairs and propose a deep Retinex-Net learned on this dataset, including a Decom-Net for decomposition and an Enhance-Net for illumination adjustment. In the training process for Decom-Net, there is no ground truth of decomposed reflectance and illumination. The network is learned with only key constraints including the consistent reflectance shared by paired low/normal-light images, and the smoothness of illumination. Based on the decomposition, subsequent lightness enhancement is conducted on illumination by an enhancement network called Enhance-Net, and for joint denoising there is a denoising operation on reflectance. The Retinex-Net is end-to-end trainable, so that the learned decomposition is by nature good for lightness adjustment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves visually pleasing quality for low-light enhancement but also provides a good representation of image decomposition.
Scale-Aware Modulation Meet Transformer
This paper presents a new vision Transformer, Scale-Aware Modulation Transformer (SMT), that can handle various downstream tasks efficiently by combining the convolutional network and vision Transformer. The proposed Scale-Aware Modulation (SAM) in the SMT includes two primary novel designs. Firstly, we introduce the Multi-Head Mixed Convolution (MHMC) module, which can capture multi-scale features and expand the receptive field. Secondly, we propose the Scale-Aware Aggregation (SAA) module, which is lightweight but effective, enabling information fusion across different heads. By leveraging these two modules, convolutional modulation is further enhanced. Furthermore, in contrast to prior works that utilized modulations throughout all stages to build an attention-free network, we propose an Evolutionary Hybrid Network (EHN), which can effectively simulate the shift from capturing local to global dependencies as the network becomes deeper, resulting in superior performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across a wide range of visual tasks. Specifically, SMT with 11.5M / 2.4GFLOPs and 32M / 7.7GFLOPs can achieve 82.2% and 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, respectively. After pretrained on ImageNet-22K in 224^2 resolution, it attains 87.1% and 88.1% top-1 accuracy when finetuned with resolution 224^2 and 384^2, respectively. For object detection with Mask R-CNN, the SMT base trained with 1x and 3x schedule outperforms the Swin Transformer counterpart by 4.2 and 1.3 mAP on COCO, respectively. For semantic segmentation with UPerNet, the SMT base test at single- and multi-scale surpasses Swin by 2.0 and 1.1 mIoU respectively on the ADE20K.
PIDNet: A Real-time Semantic Segmentation Network Inspired by PID Controllers
Two-branch network architecture has shown its efficiency and effectiveness in real-time semantic segmentation tasks. However, direct fusion of high-resolution details and low-frequency context has the drawback of detailed features being easily overwhelmed by surrounding contextual information. This overshoot phenomenon limits the improvement of the segmentation accuracy of existing two-branch models. In this paper, we make a connection between Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers and reveal that a two-branch network is equivalent to a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller, which inherently suffers from similar overshoot issues. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel three-branch network architecture: PIDNet, which contains three branches to parse detailed, context and boundary information, respectively, and employs boundary attention to guide the fusion of detailed and context branches. Our family of PIDNets achieve the best trade-off between inference speed and accuracy and their accuracy surpasses all the existing models with similar inference speed on the Cityscapes and CamVid datasets. Specifically, PIDNet-S achieves 78.6% mIOU with inference speed of 93.2 FPS on Cityscapes and 80.1% mIOU with speed of 153.7 FPS on CamVid.
MultiEdits: Simultaneous Multi-Aspect Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Text-driven image synthesis has made significant advancements with the development of diffusion models, transforming how visual content is generated from text prompts. Despite these advances, text-driven image editing, a key area in computer graphics, faces unique challenges. A major challenge is making simultaneous edits across multiple objects or attributes. Applying these methods sequentially for multi-aspect edits increases computational demands and efficiency losses. In this paper, we address these challenges with significant contributions. Our main contribution is the development of MultiEdits, a method that seamlessly manages simultaneous edits across multiple attributes. In contrast to previous approaches, MultiEdits not only preserves the quality of single attribute edits but also significantly improves the performance of multitasking edits. This is achieved through an innovative attention distribution mechanism and a multi-branch design that operates across several processing heads. Additionally, we introduce the PIE-Bench++ dataset, an expansion of the original PIE-Bench dataset, to better support evaluating image-editing tasks involving multiple objects and attributes simultaneously. This dataset is a benchmark for evaluating text-driven image editing methods in multifaceted scenarios. Dataset and code are available at https://mingzhenhuang.com/projects/MultiEdits.html.
SA-LUT: Spatial Adaptive 4D Look-Up Table for Photorealistic Style Transfer
Photorealistic style transfer (PST) enables real-world color grading by adapting reference image colors while preserving content structure. Existing methods mainly follow either approaches: generation-based methods that prioritize stylistic fidelity at the cost of content integrity and efficiency, or global color transformation methods such as LUT, which preserve structure but lack local adaptability. To bridge this gap, we propose Spatial Adaptive 4D Look-Up Table (SA-LUT), combining LUT efficiency with neural network adaptability. SA-LUT features: (1) a Style-guided 4D LUT Generator that extracts multi-scale features from the style image to predict a 4D LUT, and (2) a Context Generator using content-style cross-attention to produce a context map. This context map enables spatially-adaptive adjustments, allowing our 4D LUT to apply precise color transformations while preserving structural integrity. To establish a rigorous evaluation framework for photorealistic style transfer, we introduce PST50, the first benchmark specifically designed for PST assessment. Experiments demonstrate that SA-LUT substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 66.7% reduction in LPIPS score compared to 3D LUT approaches, while maintaining real-time performance at 16 FPS for video stylization. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Ry3nG/SA-LUT
Metropolis Theorem and Its Applications in Single Image Detail Enhancement
Traditional image detail enhancement is local filter-based or global filter-based. In both approaches, the original image is first divided into the base layer and the detail layer, and then the enhanced image is obtained by amplifying the detail layer. Our method is different, and its innovation lies in the special way to get the image detail layer. The detail layer in our method is obtained by updating the residual features, and the updating mechanism is usually based on searching and matching similar patches. However, due to the diversity of image texture features, perfect matching is often not possible. In this paper, the process of searching and matching is treated as a thermodynamic process, where the Metropolis theorem can minimize the internal energy and get the global optimal solution of this task, that is, to find a more suitable feature for a better detail enhancement performance. Extensive experiments have proven that our algorithm can achieve better results in quantitative metrics testing and visual effects evaluation. The source code can be obtained from the link.
Enabling Region-Specific Control via Lassos in Point-Based Colorization
Point-based interactive colorization techniques allow users to effortlessly colorize grayscale images using user-provided color hints. However, point-based methods often face challenges when different colors are given to semantically similar areas, leading to color intermingling and unsatisfactory results-an issue we refer to as color collapse. The fundamental cause of color collapse is the inadequacy of points for defining the boundaries for each color. To mitigate color collapse, we introduce a lasso tool that can control the scope of each color hint. Additionally, we design a framework that leverages the user-provided lassos to localize the attention masks. The experimental results show that using a single lasso is as effective as applying 4.18 individual color hints and can achieve the desired outcomes in 30% less time than using points alone.
Multi-turn Consistent Image Editing
Many real-world applications, such as interactive photo retouching, artistic content creation, and product design, require flexible and iterative image editing. However, existing image editing methods primarily focus on achieving the desired modifications in a single step, which often struggles with ambiguous user intent, complex transformations, or the need for progressive refinements. As a result, these methods frequently produce inconsistent outcomes or fail to meet user expectations. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-turn image editing framework that enables users to iteratively refine their edits, progressively achieving more satisfactory results. Our approach leverages flow matching for accurate image inversion and a dual-objective Linear Quadratic Regulators (LQR) for stable sampling, effectively mitigating error accumulation. Additionally, by analyzing the layer-wise roles of transformers, we introduce a adaptive attention highlighting method that enhances editability while preserving multi-turn coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly improves edit success rates and visual fidelity compared to existing methods.
SaMam: Style-aware State Space Model for Arbitrary Image Style Transfer
Global effective receptive field plays a crucial role for image style transfer (ST) to obtain high-quality stylized results. However, existing ST backbones (e.g., CNNs and Transformers) suffer huge computational complexity to achieve global receptive fields. Recently, the State Space Model (SSM), especially the improved variant Mamba, has shown great potential for long-range dependency modeling with linear complexity, which offers a approach to resolve the above dilemma. In this paper, we develop a Mamba-based style transfer framework, termed SaMam. Specifically, a mamba encoder is designed to efficiently extract content and style information. In addition, a style-aware mamba decoder is developed to flexibly adapt to various styles. Moreover, to address the problems of local pixel forgetting, channel redundancy and spatial discontinuity of existing SSMs, we introduce both local enhancement and zigzag scan. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our SaMam outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
Colorful Diffuse Intrinsic Image Decomposition in the Wild
Intrinsic image decomposition aims to separate the surface reflectance and the effects from the illumination given a single photograph. Due to the complexity of the problem, most prior works assume a single-color illumination and a Lambertian world, which limits their use in illumination-aware image editing applications. In this work, we separate an input image into its diffuse albedo, colorful diffuse shading, and specular residual components. We arrive at our result by gradually removing first the single-color illumination and then the Lambertian-world assumptions. We show that by dividing the problem into easier sub-problems, in-the-wild colorful diffuse shading estimation can be achieved despite the limited ground-truth datasets. Our extended intrinsic model enables illumination-aware analysis of photographs and can be used for image editing applications such as specularity removal and per-pixel white balancing.
Dual Associated Encoder for Face Restoration
Restoring facial details from low-quality (LQ) images has remained a challenging problem due to its ill-posedness induced by various degradations in the wild. The existing codebook prior mitigates the ill-posedness by leveraging an autoencoder and learned codebook of high-quality (HQ) features, achieving remarkable quality. However, existing approaches in this paradigm frequently depend on a single encoder pre-trained on HQ data for restoring HQ images, disregarding the domain gap between LQ and HQ images. As a result, the encoding of LQ inputs may be insufficient, resulting in suboptimal performance. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel dual-branch framework named DAEFR. Our method introduces an auxiliary LQ branch that extracts crucial information from the LQ inputs. Additionally, we incorporate association training to promote effective synergy between the two branches, enhancing code prediction and output quality. We evaluate the effectiveness of DAEFR on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior performance in restoring facial details. Project page: https://liagm.github.io/DAEFR/
HVI: A New color space for Low-light Image Enhancement
Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) is a crucial computer vision task that aims to restore detailed visual information from corrupted low-light images. Many existing LLIE methods are based on standard RGB (sRGB) space, which often produce color bias and brightness artifacts due to inherent high color sensitivity in sRGB. While converting the images using Hue, Saturation and Value (HSV) color space helps resolve the brightness issue, it introduces significant red and black noise artifacts. To address this issue, we propose a new color space for LLIE, namely Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI), defined by polarized HS maps and learnable intensity. The former enforces small distances for red coordinates to remove the red artifacts, while the latter compresses the low-light regions to remove the black artifacts. To fully leverage the chromatic and intensity information, a novel Color and Intensity Decoupling Network (CIDNet) is further introduced to learn accurate photometric mapping function under different lighting conditions in the HVI space. Comprehensive results from benchmark and ablation experiments show that the proposed HVI color space with CIDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 10 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Fediory/HVI-CIDNet.
UniRelight: Learning Joint Decomposition and Synthesis for Video Relighting
We address the challenge of relighting a single image or video, a task that demands precise scene intrinsic understanding and high-quality light transport synthesis. Existing end-to-end relighting models are often limited by the scarcity of paired multi-illumination data, restricting their ability to generalize across diverse scenes. Conversely, two-stage pipelines that combine inverse and forward rendering can mitigate data requirements but are susceptible to error accumulation and often fail to produce realistic outputs under complex lighting conditions or with sophisticated materials. In this work, we introduce a general-purpose approach that jointly estimates albedo and synthesizes relit outputs in a single pass, harnessing the generative capabilities of video diffusion models. This joint formulation enhances implicit scene comprehension and facilitates the creation of realistic lighting effects and intricate material interactions, such as shadows, reflections, and transparency. Trained on synthetic multi-illumination data and extensive automatically labeled real-world videos, our model demonstrates strong generalization across diverse domains and surpasses previous methods in both visual fidelity and temporal consistency.
GCC: Generative Color Constancy via Diffusing a Color Checker
Color constancy methods often struggle to generalize across different camera sensors due to varying spectral sensitivities. We present GCC, which leverages diffusion models to inpaint color checkers into images for illumination estimation. Our key innovations include (1) a single-step deterministic inference approach that inpaints color checkers reflecting scene illumination, (2) a Laplacian decomposition technique that preserves checker structure while allowing illumination-dependent color adaptation, and (3) a mask-based data augmentation strategy for handling imprecise color checker annotations. GCC demonstrates superior robustness in cross-camera scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art worst-25% error rates of 5.15{\deg} and 4.32{\deg} in bi-directional evaluations. These results highlight our method's stability and generalization capability across different camera characteristics without requiring sensor-specific training, making it a versatile solution for real-world applications.
Towards Multi-View Consistent Style Transfer with One-Step Diffusion via Vision Conditioning
The stylization of 3D scenes is an increasingly attractive topic in 3D vision. Although image style transfer has been extensively researched with promising results, directly applying 2D style transfer methods to 3D scenes often fails to preserve the structural and multi-view properties of 3D environments, resulting in unpleasant distortions in images from different viewpoints. To address these issues, we leverage the remarkable generative prior of diffusion-based models and propose a novel style transfer method, OSDiffST, based on a pre-trained one-step diffusion model (i.e., SD-Turbo) for rendering diverse styles in multi-view images of 3D scenes. To efficiently adapt the pre-trained model for multi-view style transfer on small datasets, we introduce a vision condition module to extract style information from the reference style image to serve as conditional input for the diffusion model and employ LoRA in diffusion model for adaptation. Additionally, we consider color distribution alignment and structural similarity between the stylized and content images using two specific loss functions. As a result, our method effectively preserves the structural information and multi-view consistency in stylized images without any 3D information. Experiments show that our method surpasses other promising style transfer methods in synthesizing various styles for multi-view images of 3D scenes. Stylized images from different viewpoints generated by our method achieve superior visual quality, with better structural integrity and less distortion. The source code is available at https://github.com/YushenZuo/OSDiffST.
Image-to-Image Translation via Group-wise Deep Whitening-and-Coloring Transformation
Recently, unsupervised exemplar-based image-to-image translation, conditioned on a given exemplar without the paired data, has accomplished substantial advancements. In order to transfer the information from an exemplar to an input image, existing methods often use a normalization technique, e.g., adaptive instance normalization, that controls the channel-wise statistics of an input activation map at a particular layer, such as the mean and the variance. Meanwhile, style transfer approaches similar task to image translation by nature, demonstrated superior performance by using the higher-order statistics such as covariance among channels in representing a style. In detail, it works via whitening (given a zero-mean input feature, transforming its covariance matrix into the identity). followed by coloring (changing the covariance matrix of the whitened feature to those of the style feature). However, applying this approach in image translation is computationally intensive and error-prone due to the expensive time complexity and its non-trivial backpropagation. In response, this paper proposes an end-to-end approach tailored for image translation that efficiently approximates this transformation with our novel regularization methods. We further extend our approach to a group-wise form for memory and time efficiency as well as image quality. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is fast, both in training and inference, and highly effective in reflecting the style of an exemplar. Finally, our code is available at https://github.com/WonwoongCho/GDWCT.
DenseSR: Image Shadow Removal as Dense Prediction
Shadows are a common factor degrading image quality. Single-image shadow removal (SR), particularly under challenging indirect illumination, is hampered by non-uniform content degradation and inherent ambiguity. Consequently, traditional methods often fail to simultaneously recover intra-shadow details and maintain sharp boundaries, resulting in inconsistent restoration and blurring that negatively affect both downstream applications and the overall viewing experience. To overcome these limitations, we propose the DenseSR, approaching the problem from a dense prediction perspective to emphasize restoration quality. This framework uniquely synergizes two key strategies: (1) deep scene understanding guided by geometric-semantic priors to resolve ambiguity and implicitly localize shadows, and (2) high-fidelity restoration via a novel Dense Fusion Block (DFB) in the decoder. The DFB employs adaptive component processing-using an Adaptive Content Smoothing Module (ACSM) for consistent appearance and a Texture-Boundary Recuperation Module (TBRM) for fine textures and sharp boundaries-thereby directly tackling the inconsistent restoration and blurring issues. These purposefully processed components are effectively fused, yielding an optimized feature representation preserving both consistency and fidelity. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the merits of our approach over existing methods. Our code can be available on https://github.com/VanLinLin/DenseSR
Low-Light Image Enhancement with Illumination-Aware Gamma Correction and Complete Image Modelling Network
This paper presents a novel network structure with illumination-aware gamma correction and complete image modelling to solve the low-light image enhancement problem. Low-light environments usually lead to less informative large-scale dark areas, directly learning deep representations from low-light images is insensitive to recovering normal illumination. We propose to integrate the effectiveness of gamma correction with the strong modelling capacities of deep networks, which enables the correction factor gamma to be learned in a coarse to elaborate manner via adaptively perceiving the deviated illumination. Because exponential operation introduces high computational complexity, we propose to use Taylor Series to approximate gamma correction, accelerating the training and inference speed. Dark areas usually occupy large scales in low-light images, common local modelling structures, e.g., CNN, SwinIR, are thus insufficient to recover accurate illumination across whole low-light images. We propose a novel Transformer block to completely simulate the dependencies of all pixels across images via a local-to-global hierarchical attention mechanism, so that dark areas could be inferred by borrowing the information from far informative regions in a highly effective manner. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
MiPa: Mixed Patch Infrared-Visible Modality Agnostic Object Detection
In real-world scenarios, using multiple modalities like visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) can greatly improve the performance of a predictive task such as object detection (OD). Multimodal learning is a common way to leverage these modalities, where multiple modality-specific encoders and a fusion module are used to improve performance. In this paper, we tackle a different way to employ RGB and IR modalities, where only one modality or the other is observed by a single shared vision encoder. This realistic setting requires a lower memory footprint and is more suitable for applications such as autonomous driving and surveillance, which commonly rely on RGB and IR data. However, when learning a single encoder on multiple modalities, one modality can dominate the other, producing uneven recognition results. This work investigates how to efficiently leverage RGB and IR modalities to train a common transformer-based OD vision encoder, while countering the effects of modality imbalance. For this, we introduce a novel training technique to Mix Patches (MiPa) from the two modalities, in conjunction with a patch-wise modality agnostic module, for learning a common representation of both modalities. Our experiments show that MiPa can learn a representation to reach competitive results on traditional RGB/IR benchmarks while only requiring a single modality during inference. Our code is available at: https://github.com/heitorrapela/MiPa.
PRISM: A Unified Framework for Photorealistic Reconstruction and Intrinsic Scene Modeling
We present PRISM, a unified framework that enables multiple image generation and editing tasks in a single foundational model. Starting from a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, PRISM proposes an effective fine-tuning strategy to produce RGB images along with intrinsic maps (referred to as X layers) simultaneously. Unlike previous approaches, which infer intrinsic properties individually or require separate models for decomposition and conditional generation, PRISM maintains consistency across modalities by generating all intrinsic layers jointly. It supports diverse tasks, including text-to-RGBX generation, RGB-to-X decomposition, and X-to-RGBX conditional generation. Additionally, PRISM enables both global and local image editing through conditioning on selected intrinsic layers and text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the competitive performance of PRISM both for intrinsic image decomposition and conditional image generation while preserving the base model's text-to-image generation capability.
Anywhere: A Multi-Agent Framework for Reliable and Diverse Foreground-Conditioned Image Inpainting
Recent advancements in image inpainting, particularly through diffusion modeling, have yielded promising outcomes. However, when tested in scenarios involving the completion of images based on the foreground objects, current methods that aim to inpaint an image in an end-to-end manner encounter challenges such as "over-imagination", inconsistency between foreground and background, and limited diversity. In response, we introduce Anywhere, a pioneering multi-agent framework designed to address these issues. Anywhere utilizes a sophisticated pipeline framework comprising various agents such as Visual Language Model (VLM), Large Language Model (LLM), and image generation models. This framework consists of three principal components: the prompt generation module, the image generation module, and the outcome analyzer. The prompt generation module conducts a semantic analysis of the input foreground image, leveraging VLM to predict relevant language descriptions and LLM to recommend optimal language prompts. In the image generation module, we employ a text-guided canny-to-image generation model to create a template image based on the edge map of the foreground image and language prompts, and an image refiner to produce the outcome by blending the input foreground and the template image. The outcome analyzer employs VLM to evaluate image content rationality, aesthetic score, and foreground-background relevance, triggering prompt and image regeneration as needed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Anywhere framework excels in foreground-conditioned image inpainting, mitigating "over-imagination", resolving foreground-background discrepancies, and enhancing diversity. It successfully elevates foreground-conditioned image inpainting to produce more reliable and diverse results.
YCB-LUMA: YCB Object Dataset with Luminance Keying for Object Localization
Localizing target objects in images is an important task in computer vision. Often it is the first step towards solving a variety of applications in autonomous driving, maintenance, quality insurance, robotics, and augmented reality. Best in class solutions for this task rely on deep neural networks, which require a set of representative training data for best performance. Creating sets of sufficient quality, variety, and size is often difficult, error prone, and expensive. This is where the method of luminance keying can help: it provides a simple yet effective solution to record high quality data for training object detection and segmentation. We extend previous work that presented luminance keying on the common YCB-V set of household objects by recording the remaining objects of the YCB superset. The additional variety of objects - addition of transparency, multiple color variations, non-rigid objects - further demonstrates the usefulness of luminance keying and might be used to test the applicability of the approach on new 2D object detection and segmentation algorithms.
Implicit Style-Content Separation using B-LoRA
Image stylization involves manipulating the visual appearance and texture (style) of an image while preserving its underlying objects, structures, and concepts (content). The separation of style and content is essential for manipulating the image's style independently from its content, ensuring a harmonious and visually pleasing result. Achieving this separation requires a deep understanding of both the visual and semantic characteristics of images, often necessitating the training of specialized models or employing heavy optimization. In this paper, we introduce B-LoRA, a method that leverages LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) to implicitly separate the style and content components of a single image, facilitating various image stylization tasks. By analyzing the architecture of SDXL combined with LoRA, we find that jointly learning the LoRA weights of two specific blocks (referred to as B-LoRAs) achieves style-content separation that cannot be achieved by training each B-LoRA independently. Consolidating the training into only two blocks and separating style and content allows for significantly improving style manipulation and overcoming overfitting issues often associated with model fine-tuning. Once trained, the two B-LoRAs can be used as independent components to allow various image stylization tasks, including image style transfer, text-based image stylization, consistent style generation, and style-content mixing.
Learning Global-aware Kernel for Image Harmonization
Image harmonization aims to solve the visual inconsistency problem in composited images by adaptively adjusting the foreground pixels with the background as references. Existing methods employ local color transformation or region matching between foreground and background, which neglects powerful proximity prior and independently distinguishes fore-/back-ground as a whole part for harmonization. As a result, they still show a limited performance across varied foreground objects and scenes. To address this issue, we propose a novel Global-aware Kernel Network (GKNet) to harmonize local regions with comprehensive consideration of long-distance background references. Specifically, GKNet includes two parts, \ie, harmony kernel prediction and harmony kernel modulation branches. The former includes a Long-distance Reference Extractor (LRE) to obtain long-distance context and Kernel Prediction Blocks (KPB) to predict multi-level harmony kernels by fusing global information with local features. To achieve this goal, a novel Selective Correlation Fusion (SCF) module is proposed to better select relevant long-distance background references for local harmonization. The latter employs the predicted kernels to harmonize foreground regions with both local and global awareness. Abundant experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method for image harmonization over state-of-the-art methods, \eg, achieving 39.53dB PSNR that surpasses the best counterpart by +0.78dB uparrow; decreasing fMSE/MSE by 11.5\%downarrow/6.7\%downarrow compared with the SoTA method. Code will be available at https://github.com/XintianShen/GKNet{here}.
UIEC^2-Net: CNN-based Underwater Image Enhancement Using Two Color Space
Underwater image enhancement has attracted much attention due to the rise of marine resource development in recent years. Benefit from the powerful representation capabilities of Convolution Neural Networks(CNNs), multiple underwater image enhancement algorithms based on CNNs have been proposed in the last few years. However, almost all of these algorithms employ RGB color space setting, which is insensitive to image properties such as luminance and saturation. To address this problem, we proposed Underwater Image Enhancement Convolution Neural Network using 2 Color Space (UICE^2-Net) that efficiently and effectively integrate both RGB Color Space and HSV Color Space in one single CNN. To our best knowledge, this method is the first to use HSV color space for underwater image enhancement based on deep learning. UIEC^2-Net is an end-to-end trainable network, consisting of three blocks as follow: a RGB pixel-level block implements fundamental operations such as denoising and removing color cast, a HSV global-adjust block for globally adjusting underwater image luminance, color and saturation by adopting a novel neural curve layer, and an attention map block for combining the advantages of RGB and HSV block output images by distributing weight to each pixel. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world underwater images show the good performance of our proposed method in both subjective comparisons and objective metrics. The code are available at https://github.com/BIGWangYuDong/UWEnhancement.
Generating Diverse Structure for Image Inpainting With Hierarchical VQ-VAE
Given an incomplete image without additional constraint, image inpainting natively allows for multiple solutions as long as they appear plausible. Recently, multiplesolution inpainting methods have been proposed and shown the potential of generating diverse results. However, these methods have difficulty in ensuring the quality of each solution, e.g. they produce distorted structure and/or blurry texture. We propose a two-stage model for diverse inpainting, where the first stage generates multiple coarse results each of which has a different structure, and the second stage refines each coarse result separately by augmenting texture. The proposed model is inspired by the hierarchical vector quantized variational auto-encoder (VQ-VAE), whose hierarchical architecture isentangles structural and textural information. In addition, the vector quantization in VQVAE enables autoregressive modeling of the discrete distribution over the structural information. Sampling from the distribution can easily generate diverse and high-quality structures, making up the first stage of our model. In the second stage, we propose a structural attention module inside the texture generation network, where the module utilizes the structural information to capture distant correlations. We further reuse the VQ-VAE to calculate two feature losses, which help improve structure coherence and texture realism, respectively. Experimental results on CelebA-HQ, Places2, and ImageNet datasets show that our method not only enhances the diversity of the inpainting solutions but also improves the visual quality of the generated multiple images. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/USTC-JialunPeng/Diverse-Structure-Inpainting.
Making Images Real Again: A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Image Composition
As a common image editing operation, image composition (object insertion) aims to combine the foreground from one image and another background image, resulting in a composite image. However, there are many issues that could make the composite images unrealistic. These issues can be summarized as the inconsistency between foreground and background, which includes appearance inconsistency (e.g., incompatible illumination), geometry inconsistency (e.g., unreasonable size), and semantic inconsistency (e.g., mismatched semantic context). Image composition task could be decomposed into multiple sub-tasks, in which each sub-task targets at one or more issues. Specifically, object placement aims to find reasonable scale, location, and shape for the foreground. Image blending aims to address the unnatural boundary between foreground and background. Image harmonization aims to adjust the illumination statistics of foreground. Shadow (resp., reflection) generation aims to generate plausible shadow (resp., reflection) for the foreground. These sub-tasks can be executed sequentially or parallelly to acquire realistic composite images. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous survey on image composition (object insertion). In this paper, we conduct comprehensive survey over the sub-tasks and combinatorial task of image composition (object insertion). For each one, we summarize the existing methods, available datasets, and common evaluation metrics. We have also contributed the first image composition toolbox libcom, which assembles 10+ image composition related functions (e.g., image blending, image harmonization, object placement, shadow generation, generative composition). The ultimate goal of this toolbox is solving all the problems related to image composition with simple `import libcom'.
Regional Attention for Shadow Removal
Shadow, as a natural consequence of light interacting with objects, plays a crucial role in shaping the aesthetics of an image, which however also impairs the content visibility and overall visual quality. Recent shadow removal approaches employ the mechanism of attention, due to its effectiveness, as a key component. However, they often suffer from two issues including large model size and high computational complexity for practical use. To address these shortcomings, this work devises a lightweight yet accurate shadow removal framework. First, we analyze the characteristics of the shadow removal task to seek the key information required for reconstructing shadow regions and designing a novel regional attention mechanism to effectively capture such information. Then, we customize a Regional Attention Shadow Removal Model (RASM, in short), which leverages non-shadow areas to assist in restoring shadow ones. Unlike existing attention-based models, our regional attention strategy allows each shadow region to interact more rationally with its surrounding non-shadow areas, for seeking the regional contextual correlation between shadow and non-shadow areas. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our proposed method delivers superior performance over other state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and efficiency, making it appealing for practical applications.
Learning multi-domain feature relation for visible and Long-wave Infrared image patch matching
Recently, learning-based algorithms have achieved promising performance on cross-spectral image patch matching, which, however, is still far from satisfactory for practical application. On the one hand, a lack of large-scale dataset with diverse scenes haunts its further improvement for learning-based algorithms, whose performances and generalization rely heavily on the dataset size and diversity. On the other hand, more emphasis has been put on feature relation in the spatial domain whereas the scale dependency between features has often been ignored, leading to performance degeneration especially when encountering significant appearance variations for cross-spectral patches. To address these issues, we publish, to be best of our knowledge, the largest visible and Long-wave Infrared (LWIR) image patch matching dataset, termed VL-CMIM, which contains 1300 pairs of strictly aligned visible and LWIR images and over 2 million patch pairs covering diverse scenes such as asteroid, field, country, build, street and water.In addition, a multi-domain feature relation learning network (MD-FRN) is proposed. Input by the features extracted from a four-branch network, both feature relations in spatial and scale domains are learned via a spatial correlation module (SCM) and multi-scale adaptive aggregation module (MSAG), respectively. To further aggregate the multi-domain relations, a deep domain interactive mechanism (DIM) is applied, where the learnt spatial-relation and scale-relation features are exchanged and further input into MSCRM and SCM. This mechanism allows our model to learn interactive cross-domain feature relations, leading to improved robustness to significant appearance changes due to different modality.
Under-Display Camera Image Restoration with Scattering Effect
The under-display camera (UDC) provides consumers with a full-screen visual experience without any obstruction due to notches or punched holes. However, the semi-transparent nature of the display inevitably introduces the severe degradation into UDC images. In this work, we address the UDC image restoration problem with the specific consideration of the scattering effect caused by the display. We explicitly model the scattering effect by treating the display as a piece of homogeneous scattering medium. With the physical model of the scattering effect, we improve the image formation pipeline for the image synthesis to construct a realistic UDC dataset with ground truths. To suppress the scattering effect for the eventual UDC image recovery, a two-branch restoration network is designed. More specifically, the scattering branch leverages global modeling capabilities of the channel-wise self-attention to estimate parameters of the scattering effect from degraded images. While the image branch exploits the local representation advantage of CNN to recover clear scenes, implicitly guided by the scattering branch. Extensive experiments are conducted on both real-world and synthesized data, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art UDC restoration techniques. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/NamecantbeNULL/SRUDC.
FDS: Frequency-Aware Denoising Score for Text-Guided Latent Diffusion Image Editing
Text-guided image editing using Text-to-Image (T2I) models often fails to yield satisfactory results, frequently introducing unintended modifications, such as the loss of local detail and color changes. In this paper, we analyze these failure cases and attribute them to the indiscriminate optimization across all frequency bands, even though only specific frequencies may require adjustment. To address this, we introduce a simple yet effective approach that enables the selective optimization of specific frequency bands within localized spatial regions for precise edits. Our method leverages wavelets to decompose images into different spatial resolutions across multiple frequency bands, enabling precise modifications at various levels of detail. To extend the applicability of our approach, we provide a comparative analysis of different frequency-domain techniques. Additionally, we extend our method to 3D texture editing by performing frequency decomposition on the triplane representation, enabling frequency-aware adjustments for 3D textures. Quantitative evaluations and user studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in producing high-quality and precise edits.
MetaShadow: Object-Centered Shadow Detection, Removal, and Synthesis
Shadows are often under-considered or even ignored in image editing applications, limiting the realism of the edited results. In this paper, we introduce MetaShadow, a three-in-one versatile framework that enables detection, removal, and controllable synthesis of shadows in natural images in an object-centered fashion. MetaShadow combines the strengths of two cooperative components: Shadow Analyzer, for object-centered shadow detection and removal, and Shadow Synthesizer, for reference-based controllable shadow synthesis. Notably, we optimize the learning of the intermediate features from Shadow Analyzer to guide Shadow Synthesizer to generate more realistic shadows that blend seamlessly with the scene. Extensive evaluations on multiple shadow benchmark datasets show significant improvements of MetaShadow over the existing state-of-the-art methods on object-centered shadow detection, removal, and synthesis. MetaShadow excels in image-editing tasks such as object removal, relocation, and insertion, pushing the boundaries of object-centered image editing.
DRWKV: Focusing on Object Edges for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Low-light image enhancement remains a challenging task, particularly in preserving object edge continuity and fine structural details under extreme illumination degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel model, DRWKV (Detailed Receptance Weighted Key Value), which integrates our proposed Global Edge Retinex (GER) theory, enabling effective decoupling of illumination and edge structures for enhanced edge fidelity. Secondly, we introduce Evolving WKV Attention, a spiral-scanning mechanism that captures spatial edge continuity and models irregular structures more effectively. Thirdly, we design the Bilateral Spectrum Aligner (Bi-SAB) and a tailored MS2-Loss to jointly align luminance and chrominance features, improving visual naturalness and mitigating artifacts. Extensive experiments on five LLIE benchmarks demonstrate that DRWKV achieves leading performance in PSNR, SSIM, and NIQE while maintaining low computational complexity. Furthermore, DRWKV enhances downstream performance in low-light multi-object tracking tasks, validating its generalization capabilities.
Controlling Perceptual Factors in Neural Style Transfer
Neural Style Transfer has shown very exciting results enabling new forms of image manipulation. Here we extend the existing method to introduce control over spatial location, colour information and across spatial scale. We demonstrate how this enhances the method by allowing high-resolution controlled stylisation and helps to alleviate common failure cases such as applying ground textures to sky regions. Furthermore, by decomposing style into these perceptual factors we enable the combination of style information from multiple sources to generate new, perceptually appealing styles from existing ones. We also describe how these methods can be used to more efficiently produce large size, high-quality stylisation. Finally we show how the introduced control measures can be applied in recent methods for Fast Neural Style Transfer.
DB-SAM: Delving into High Quality Universal Medical Image Segmentation
Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated promising segmentation capabilities in a variety of downstream segmentation tasks. However in the context of universal medical image segmentation there exists a notable performance discrepancy when directly applying SAM due to the domain gap between natural and 2D/3D medical data. In this work, we propose a dual-branch adapted SAM framework, named DB-SAM, that strives to effectively bridge this domain gap. Our dual-branch adapted SAM contains two branches in parallel: a ViT branch and a convolution branch. The ViT branch incorporates a learnable channel attention block after each frozen attention block, which captures domain-specific local features. On the other hand, the convolution branch employs a light-weight convolutional block to extract domain-specific shallow features from the input medical image. To perform cross-branch feature fusion, we design a bilateral cross-attention block and a ViT convolution fusion block, which dynamically combine diverse information of two branches for mask decoder. Extensive experiments on large-scale medical image dataset with various 3D and 2D medical segmentation tasks reveal the merits of our proposed contributions. On 21 3D medical image segmentation tasks, our proposed DB-SAM achieves an absolute gain of 8.8%, compared to a recent medical SAM adapter in the literature. The code and model are available at https://github.com/AlfredQin/DB-SAM.
StyleAdapter: A Single-Pass LoRA-Free Model for Stylized Image Generation
This paper presents a LoRA-free method for stylized image generation that takes a text prompt and style reference images as inputs and produces an output image in a single pass. Unlike existing methods that rely on training a separate LoRA for each style, our method can adapt to various styles with a unified model. However, this poses two challenges: 1) the prompt loses controllability over the generated content, and 2) the output image inherits both the semantic and style features of the style reference image, compromising its content fidelity. To address these challenges, we introduce StyleAdapter, a model that comprises two components: a two-path cross-attention module (TPCA) and three decoupling strategies. These components enable our model to process the prompt and style reference features separately and reduce the strong coupling between the semantic and style information in the style references. StyleAdapter can generate high-quality images that match the content of the prompts and adopt the style of the references (even for unseen styles) in a single pass, which is more flexible and efficient than previous methods. Experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous works.
Iterative Prompt Learning for Unsupervised Backlit Image Enhancement
We propose a novel unsupervised backlit image enhancement method, abbreviated as CLIP-LIT, by exploring the potential of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) for pixel-level image enhancement. We show that the open-world CLIP prior not only aids in distinguishing between backlit and well-lit images, but also in perceiving heterogeneous regions with different luminance, facilitating the optimization of the enhancement network. Unlike high-level and image manipulation tasks, directly applying CLIP to enhancement tasks is non-trivial, owing to the difficulty in finding accurate prompts. To solve this issue, we devise a prompt learning framework that first learns an initial prompt pair by constraining the text-image similarity between the prompt (negative/positive sample) and the corresponding image (backlit image/well-lit image) in the CLIP latent space. Then, we train the enhancement network based on the text-image similarity between the enhanced result and the initial prompt pair. To further improve the accuracy of the initial prompt pair, we iteratively fine-tune the prompt learning framework to reduce the distribution gaps between the backlit images, enhanced results, and well-lit images via rank learning, boosting the enhancement performance. Our method alternates between updating the prompt learning framework and enhancement network until visually pleasing results are achieved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and generalization ability, without requiring any paired data.
CCMNet: Leveraging Calibrated Color Correction Matrices for Cross-Camera Color Constancy
Computational color constancy, or white balancing, is a key module in a camera's image signal processor (ISP) that corrects color casts from scene lighting. Because this operation occurs in the camera-specific raw color space, white balance algorithms must adapt to different cameras. This paper introduces a learning-based method for cross-camera color constancy that generalizes to new cameras without retraining. Our method leverages pre-calibrated color correction matrices (CCMs) available on ISPs that map the camera's raw color space to a standard space (e.g., CIE XYZ). Our method uses these CCMs to transform predefined illumination colors (i.e., along the Planckian locus) into the test camera's raw space. The mapped illuminants are encoded into a compact camera fingerprint embedding (CFE) that enables the network to adapt to unseen cameras. To prevent overfitting due to limited cameras and CCMs during training, we introduce a data augmentation technique that interpolates between cameras and their CCMs. Experimental results across multiple datasets and backbones show that our method achieves state-of-the-art cross-camera color constancy while remaining lightweight and relying only on data readily available in camera ISPs.
Implicit Neural Representation for Cooperative Low-light Image Enhancement
The following three factors restrict the application of existing low-light image enhancement methods: unpredictable brightness degradation and noise, inherent gap between metric-favorable and visual-friendly versions, and the limited paired training data. To address these limitations, we propose an implicit Neural Representation method for Cooperative low-light image enhancement, dubbed NeRCo. It robustly recovers perceptual-friendly results in an unsupervised manner. Concretely, NeRCo unifies the diverse degradation factors of real-world scenes with a controllable fitting function, leading to better robustness. In addition, for the output results, we introduce semantic-orientated supervision with priors from the pre-trained vision-language model. Instead of merely following reference images, it encourages results to meet subjective expectations, finding more visual-friendly solutions. Further, to ease the reliance on paired data and reduce solution space, we develop a dual-closed-loop constrained enhancement module. It is trained cooperatively with other affiliated modules in a self-supervised manner. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness and superior effectiveness of our proposed NeRCo. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ysz2022/NeRCo.
Empowering Low-Light Image Enhancer through Customized Learnable Priors
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable progress in enhancing low-light images by improving their brightness and eliminating noise. However, most existing methods construct end-to-end mapping networks heuristically, neglecting the intrinsic prior of image enhancement task and lacking transparency and interpretability. Although some unfolding solutions have been proposed to relieve these issues, they rely on proximal operator networks that deliver ambiguous and implicit priors. In this work, we propose a paradigm for low-light image enhancement that explores the potential of customized learnable priors to improve the transparency of the deep unfolding paradigm. Motivated by the powerful feature representation capability of Masked Autoencoder (MAE), we customize MAE-based illumination and noise priors and redevelop them from two perspectives: 1) structure flow: we train the MAE from a normal-light image to its illumination properties and then embed it into the proximal operator design of the unfolding architecture; and m2) optimization flow: we train MAE from a normal-light image to its gradient representation and then employ it as a regularization term to constrain noise in the model output. These designs improve the interpretability and representation capability of the model.Extensive experiments on multiple low-light image enhancement datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed paradigm over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zheng980629/CUE.
Spherical Space Feature Decomposition for Guided Depth Map Super-Resolution
Guided depth map super-resolution (GDSR), as a hot topic in multi-modal image processing, aims to upsample low-resolution (LR) depth maps with additional information involved in high-resolution (HR) RGB images from the same scene. The critical step of this task is to effectively extract domain-shared and domain-private RGB/depth features. In addition, three detailed issues, namely blurry edges, noisy surfaces, and over-transferred RGB texture, need to be addressed. In this paper, we propose the Spherical Space feature Decomposition Network (SSDNet) to solve the above issues. To better model cross-modality features, Restormer block-based RGB/depth encoders are employed for extracting local-global features. Then, the extracted features are mapped to the spherical space to complete the separation of private features and the alignment of shared features. Shared features of RGB are fused with the depth features to complete the GDSR task. Subsequently, a spherical contrast refinement (SCR) module is proposed to further address the detail issues. Patches that are classified according to imperfect categories are input into the SCR module, where the patch features are pulled closer to the ground truth and pushed away from the corresponding imperfect samples in the spherical feature space via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results on four test datasets, as well as successfully generalize to real-world scenes. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhaozixiang1228/GDSR-SSDNet.
ColorPeel: Color Prompt Learning with Diffusion Models via Color and Shape Disentanglement
Text-to-Image (T2I) generation has made significant advancements with the advent of diffusion models. These models exhibit remarkable abilities to produce images based on textual prompts. Current T2I models allow users to specify object colors using linguistic color names. However, these labels encompass broad color ranges, making it difficult to achieve precise color matching. To tackle this challenging task, named color prompt learning, we propose to learn specific color prompts tailored to user-selected colors. Existing T2I personalization methods tend to result in color-shape entanglement. To overcome this, we generate several basic geometric objects in the target color, allowing for color and shape disentanglement during the color prompt learning. Our method, denoted as ColorPeel, successfully assists the T2I models to peel off the novel color prompts from these colored shapes. In the experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of ColorPeel in achieving precise color generation with T2I models. Furthermore, we generalize ColorPeel to effectively learn abstract attribute concepts, including textures, materials, etc. Our findings represent a significant step towards improving precision and versatility of T2I models, offering new opportunities for creative applications and design tasks. Our project is available at https://moatifbutt.github.io/colorpeel/.
Image Inpainting with External-internal Learning and Monochromic Bottleneck
Although recent inpainting approaches have demonstrated significant improvements with deep neural networks, they still suffer from artifacts such as blunt structures and abrupt colors when filling in the missing regions. To address these issues, we propose an external-internal inpainting scheme with a monochromic bottleneck that helps image inpainting models remove these artifacts. In the external learning stage, we reconstruct missing structures and details in the monochromic space to reduce the learning dimension. In the internal learning stage, we propose a novel internal color propagation method with progressive learning strategies for consistent color restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme helps image inpainting models produce more structure-preserved and visually compelling results.
RelitLRM: Generative Relightable Radiance for Large Reconstruction Models
We propose RelitLRM, a Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) for generating high-quality Gaussian splatting representations of 3D objects under novel illuminations from sparse (4-8) posed images captured under unknown static lighting. Unlike prior inverse rendering methods requiring dense captures and slow optimization, often causing artifacts like incorrect highlights or shadow baking, RelitLRM adopts a feed-forward transformer-based model with a novel combination of a geometry reconstructor and a relightable appearance generator based on diffusion. The model is trained end-to-end on synthetic multi-view renderings of objects under varying known illuminations. This architecture design enables to effectively decompose geometry and appearance, resolve the ambiguity between material and lighting, and capture the multi-modal distribution of shadows and specularity in the relit appearance. We show our sparse-view feed-forward RelitLRM offers competitive relighting results to state-of-the-art dense-view optimization-based baselines while being significantly faster. Our project page is available at: https://relit-lrm.github.io/.
Cached Multi-Lora Composition for Multi-Concept Image Generation
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a widely adopted technique in text-to-image models, enabling precise rendering of multiple distinct elements, such as characters and styles, in multi-concept image generation. However, current approaches face significant challenges when composing these LoRAs for multi-concept image generation, resulting in diminished generated image quality. In this paper, we initially investigate the role of LoRAs in the denoising process through the lens of the Fourier frequency domain. Based on the hypothesis that applying multiple LoRAs could lead to "semantic conflicts", we find that certain LoRAs amplify high-frequency features such as edges and textures, whereas others mainly focus on low-frequency elements, including the overall structure and smooth color gradients. Building on these insights, we devise a frequency domain based sequencing strategy to determine the optimal order in which LoRAs should be integrated during inference. This strategy offers a methodical and generalizable solution compared to the naive integration commonly found in existing LoRA fusion techniques. To fully leverage our proposed LoRA order sequence determination method in multi-LoRA composition tasks, we introduce a novel, training-free framework, Cached Multi-LoRA (CMLoRA), designed to efficiently integrate multiple LoRAs while maintaining cohesive image generation. With its flexible backbone for multi-LoRA fusion and a non-uniform caching strategy tailored to individual LoRAs, CMLoRA has the potential to reduce semantic conflicts in LoRA composition and improve computational efficiency. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that CMLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art training-free LoRA fusion methods by a significant margin -- it achieves an average improvement of 2.19% in CLIPScore, and 11.25% in MLLM win rate compared to LoraHub, LoRA Composite, and LoRA Switch.
DDI-CoCo: A Dataset For Understanding The Effect Of Color Contrast In Machine-Assisted Skin Disease Detection
Skin tone as a demographic bias and inconsistent human labeling poses challenges in dermatology AI. We take another angle to investigate color contrast's impact, beyond skin tones, on malignancy detection in skin disease datasets: We hypothesize that in addition to skin tones, the color difference between the lesion area and skin also plays a role in malignancy detection performance of dermatology AI models. To study this, we first propose a robust labeling method to quantify color contrast scores of each image and validate our method by showing small labeling variations. More importantly, applying our method to the only diverse-skin tone and pathologically-confirmed skin disease dataset DDI, yields DDI-CoCo Dataset, and we observe a performance gap between the high and low color difference groups. This disparity remains consistent across various state-of-the-art (SoTA) image classification models, which supports our hypothesis. Furthermore, we study the interaction between skin tone and color difference effects and suggest that color difference can be an additional reason behind model performance bias between skin tones. Our work provides a complementary angle to dermatology AI for improving skin disease detection.
A Simple Approach to Unifying Diffusion-based Conditional Generation
Recent progress in image generation has sparked research into controlling these models through condition signals, with various methods addressing specific challenges in conditional generation. Instead of proposing another specialized technique, we introduce a simple, unified framework to handle diverse conditional generation tasks involving a specific image-condition correlation. By learning a joint distribution over a correlated image pair (e.g. image and depth) with a diffusion model, our approach enables versatile capabilities via different inference-time sampling schemes, including controllable image generation (e.g. depth to image), estimation (e.g. image to depth), signal guidance, joint generation (image & depth), and coarse control. Previous attempts at unification often introduce significant complexity through multi-stage training, architectural modification, or increased parameter counts. In contrast, our simple formulation requires a single, computationally efficient training stage, maintains the standard model input, and adds minimal learned parameters (15% of the base model). Moreover, our model supports additional capabilities like non-spatially aligned and coarse conditioning. Extensive results show that our single model can produce comparable results with specialized methods and better results than prior unified methods. We also demonstrate that multiple models can be effectively combined for multi-signal conditional generation.
MAIR++: Improving Multi-view Attention Inverse Rendering with Implicit Lighting Representation
In this paper, we propose a scene-level inverse rendering framework that uses multi-view images to decompose the scene into geometry, SVBRDF, and 3D spatially-varying lighting. While multi-view images have been widely used for object-level inverse rendering, scene-level inverse rendering has primarily been studied using single-view images due to the lack of a dataset containing high dynamic range multi-view images with ground-truth geometry, material, and spatially-varying lighting. To improve the quality of scene-level inverse rendering, a novel framework called Multi-view Attention Inverse Rendering (MAIR) was recently introduced. MAIR performs scene-level multi-view inverse rendering by expanding the OpenRooms dataset, designing efficient pipelines to handle multi-view images, and splitting spatially-varying lighting. Although MAIR showed impressive results, its lighting representation is fixed to spherical Gaussians, which limits its ability to render images realistically. Consequently, MAIR cannot be directly used in applications such as material editing. Moreover, its multi-view aggregation networks have difficulties extracting rich features because they only focus on the mean and variance between multi-view features. In this paper, we propose its extended version, called MAIR++. MAIR++ addresses the aforementioned limitations by introducing an implicit lighting representation that accurately captures the lighting conditions of an image while facilitating realistic rendering. Furthermore, we design a directional attention-based multi-view aggregation network to infer more intricate relationships between views. Experimental results show that MAIR++ not only achieves better performance than MAIR and single-view-based methods, but also displays robust performance on unseen real-world scenes.
CSFMamba: Cross State Fusion Mamba Operator for Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Classification
Multimodal fusion has made great progress in the field of remote sensing image classification due to its ability to exploit the complementary spatial-spectral information. Deep learning methods such as CNN and Transformer have been widely used in these domains. State Space Models recently highlighted that prior methods suffer from quadratic computational complexity. As a result, modeling longer-range dependencies of spatial-spectral features imposes an overwhelming burden on the network. Mamba solves this problem by incorporating time-varying parameters into ordinary SSM and performing hardware optimization, but it cannot perform feature fusion directly. In order to make full use of Mamba's low computational burden and explore the potential of internal structure in multimodal feature fusion, we propose Cross State Fusion Mamba (CSFMamba) Network. Specifically, we first design the preprocessing module of remote sensing image information for the needs of Mamba structure, and combine it with CNN to extract multi-layer features. Secondly, a cross-state module based on Mamba operator is creatively designed to fully fuse the feature of the two modalities. The advantages of Mamba and CNN are combined by designing a more powerful backbone. We capture the fusion relationship between HSI and LiDAR modalities with stronger full-image understanding. The experimental results on two datasets of MUUFL and Houston2018 show that the proposed method outperforms the experimental results of Transformer under the premise of reducing the network training burden.
T^3-S2S: Training-free Triplet Tuning for Sketch to Scene Generation
Scene generation is crucial to many computer graphics applications. Recent advances in generative AI have streamlined sketch-to-image workflows, easing the workload for artists and designers in creating scene concept art. However, these methods often struggle for complex scenes with multiple detailed objects, sometimes missing small or uncommon instances. In this paper, we propose a Training-free Triplet Tuning for Sketch-to-Scene (T3-S2S) generation after reviewing the entire cross-attention mechanism. This scheme revitalizes the existing ControlNet model, enabling effective handling of multi-instance generations, involving prompt balance, characteristics prominence, and dense tuning. Specifically, this approach enhances keyword representation via the prompt balance module, reducing the risk of missing critical instances. It also includes a characteristics prominence module that highlights TopK indices in each channel, ensuring essential features are better represented based on token sketches. Additionally, it employs dense tuning to refine contour details in the attention map, compensating for instance-related regions. Experiments validate that our triplet tuning approach substantially improves the performance of existing sketch-to-image models. It consistently generates detailed, multi-instance 2D images, closely adhering to the input prompts and enhancing visual quality in complex multi-instance scenes. Code is available at https://github.com/chaos-sun/t3s2s.git.
Neural-PIL: Neural Pre-Integrated Lighting for Reflectance Decomposition
Decomposing a scene into its shape, reflectance and illumination is a fundamental problem in computer vision and graphics. Neural approaches such as NeRF have achieved remarkable success in view synthesis, but do not explicitly perform decomposition and instead operate exclusively on radiance (the product of reflectance and illumination). Extensions to NeRF, such as NeRD, can perform decomposition but struggle to accurately recover detailed illumination, thereby significantly limiting realism. We propose a novel reflectance decomposition network that can estimate shape, BRDF, and per-image illumination given a set of object images captured under varying illumination. Our key technique is a novel illumination integration network called Neural-PIL that replaces a costly illumination integral operation in the rendering with a simple network query. In addition, we also learn deep low-dimensional priors on BRDF and illumination representations using novel smooth manifold auto-encoders. Our decompositions can result in considerably better BRDF and light estimates enabling more accurate novel view-synthesis and relighting compared to prior art. Project page: https://markboss.me/publication/2021-neural-pil/
MODNet-V: Improving Portrait Video Matting via Background Restoration
To address the challenging portrait video matting problem more precisely, existing works typically apply some matting priors that require additional user efforts to obtain, such as annotated trimaps or background images. In this work, we observe that instead of asking the user to explicitly provide a background image, we may recover it from the input video itself. To this end, we first propose a novel background restoration module (BRM) to recover the background image dynamically from the input video. BRM is extremely lightweight and can be easily integrated into existing matting models. By combining BRM with a recent image matting model, MODNet, we then present MODNet-V for portrait video matting. Benefited from the strong background prior provided by BRM, MODNet-V has only 1/3 of the parameters of MODNet but achieves comparable or even better performances. Our design allows MODNet-V to be trained in an end-to-end manner on a single NVIDIA 3090 GPU. Finally, we introduce a new patch refinement module (PRM) to adapt MODNet-V for high-resolution videos while keeping MODNet-V lightweight and fast.
SPEGNet: Synergistic Perception-Guided Network for Camouflaged Object Detection
Camouflaged object detection segments objects with intrinsic similarity and edge disruption. Current detection methods rely on accumulated complex components. Each approach adds components such as boundary modules, attention mechanisms, and multi-scale processors independently. This accumulation creates a computational burden without proportional gains. To manage this complexity, they process at reduced resolutions, eliminating fine details essential for camouflage. We present SPEGNet, addressing fragmentation through a unified design. The architecture integrates multi-scale features via channel calibration and spatial enhancement. Boundaries emerge directly from context-rich representations, maintaining semantic-spatial alignment. Progressive refinement implements scale-adaptive edge modulation with peak influence at intermediate resolutions. This design strikes a balance between boundary precision and regional consistency. SPEGNet achieves 0.887 S_alpha on CAMO, 0.890 on COD10K, and 0.895 on NC4K, with real-time inference speed. Our approach excels across scales, from tiny, intricate objects to large, pattern-similar ones, while handling occlusion and ambiguous boundaries. Code, model weights, and results are available on https://github.com/Baber-Jan/SPEGNet{https://github.com/Baber-Jan/SPEGNet}.
Styl3R: Instant 3D Stylized Reconstruction for Arbitrary Scenes and Styles
Stylizing 3D scenes instantly while maintaining multi-view consistency and faithfully resembling a style image remains a significant challenge. Current state-of-the-art 3D stylization methods typically involve computationally intensive test-time optimization to transfer artistic features into a pretrained 3D representation, often requiring dense posed input images. In contrast, leveraging recent advances in feed-forward reconstruction models, we demonstrate a novel approach to achieve direct 3D stylization in less than a second using unposed sparse-view scene images and an arbitrary style image. To address the inherent decoupling between reconstruction and stylization, we introduce a branched architecture that separates structure modeling and appearance shading, effectively preventing stylistic transfer from distorting the underlying 3D scene structure. Furthermore, we adapt an identity loss to facilitate pre-training our stylization model through the novel view synthesis task. This strategy also allows our model to retain its original reconstruction capabilities while being fine-tuned for stylization. Comprehensive evaluations, using both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, demonstrate that our approach produces high-quality stylized 3D content that achieve a superior blend of style and scene appearance, while also outperforming existing methods in terms of multi-view consistency and efficiency.
Diff-Retinex: Rethinking Low-light Image Enhancement with A Generative Diffusion Model
In this paper, we rethink the low-light image enhancement task and propose a physically explainable and generative diffusion model for low-light image enhancement, termed as Diff-Retinex. We aim to integrate the advantages of the physical model and the generative network. Furthermore, we hope to supplement and even deduce the information missing in the low-light image through the generative network. Therefore, Diff-Retinex formulates the low-light image enhancement problem into Retinex decomposition and conditional image generation. In the Retinex decomposition, we integrate the superiority of attention in Transformer and meticulously design a Retinex Transformer decomposition network (TDN) to decompose the image into illumination and reflectance maps. Then, we design multi-path generative diffusion networks to reconstruct the normal-light Retinex probability distribution and solve the various degradations in these components respectively, including dark illumination, noise, color deviation, loss of scene contents, etc. Owing to generative diffusion model, Diff-Retinex puts the restoration of low-light subtle detail into practice. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world low-light datasets qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness, superiority, and generalization of the proposed method.
Specifying Object Attributes and Relations in Interactive Scene Generation
We introduce a method for the generation of images from an input scene graph. The method separates between a layout embedding and an appearance embedding. The dual embedding leads to generated images that better match the scene graph, have higher visual quality, and support more complex scene graphs. In addition, the embedding scheme supports multiple and diverse output images per scene graph, which can be further controlled by the user. We demonstrate two modes of per-object control: (i) importing elements from other images, and (ii) navigation in the object space, by selecting an appearance archetype. Our code is publicly available at https://www.github.com/ashual/scene_generation
LoRAShop: Training-Free Multi-Concept Image Generation and Editing with Rectified Flow Transformers
We introduce LoRAShop, the first framework for multi-concept image editing with LoRA models. LoRAShop builds on a key observation about the feature interaction patterns inside Flux-style diffusion transformers: concept-specific transformer features activate spatially coherent regions early in the denoising process. We harness this observation to derive a disentangled latent mask for each concept in a prior forward pass and blend the corresponding LoRA weights only within regions bounding the concepts to be personalized. The resulting edits seamlessly integrate multiple subjects or styles into the original scene while preserving global context, lighting, and fine details. Our experiments demonstrate that LoRAShop delivers better identity preservation compared to baselines. By eliminating retraining and external constraints, LoRAShop turns personalized diffusion models into a practical `photoshop-with-LoRAs' tool and opens new avenues for compositional visual storytelling and rapid creative iteration.
Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Using Vision Mamba and Multi-Scale Multi-Frequency Feature Fusion
As remote sensing imaging technology continues to advance and evolve, processing high-resolution and diversified satellite imagery to improve segmentation accuracy and enhance interpretation efficiency emerg as a pivotal area of investigation within the realm of remote sensing. Although segmentation algorithms based on CNNs and Transformers achieve significant progress in performance, balancing segmentation accuracy and computational complexity remains challenging, limiting their wide application in practical tasks. To address this, this paper introduces state space model (SSM) and proposes a novel hybrid semantic segmentation network based on vision Mamba (CVMH-UNet). This method designs a cross-scanning visual state space block (CVSSBlock) that uses cross 2D scanning (CS2D) to fully capture global information from multiple directions, while by incorporating convolutional neural network branches to overcome the constraints of Vision Mamba (VMamba) in acquiring local information, this approach facilitates a comprehensive analysis of both global and local features. Furthermore, to address the issue of limited discriminative power and the difficulty in achieving detailed fusion with direct skip connections, a multi-frequency multi-scale feature fusion block (MFMSBlock) is designed. This module introduces multi-frequency information through 2D discrete cosine transform (2D DCT) to enhance information utilization and provides additional scale local detail information through point-wise convolution branches. Finally, it aggregates multi-scale information along the channel dimension, achieving refined feature fusion. Findings from experiments conducted on renowned datasets of remote sensing imagery demonstrate that proposed CVMH-UNet achieves superior segmentation performance while maintaining low computational complexity, outperforming surpassing current leading-edge segmentation algorithms.
Multi-head Spatial-Spectral Mamba for Hyperspectral Image Classification
Spatial-Spectral Mamba (SSM) improves computational efficiency and captures long-range dependencies, addressing Transformer limitations. However, traditional Mamba models overlook rich spectral information in HSIs and struggle with high dimensionality and sequential data. To address these issues, we propose the SSM with multi-head self-attention and token enhancement (MHSSMamba). This model integrates spectral and spatial information by enhancing spectral tokens and using multi-head attention to capture complex relationships between spectral bands and spatial locations. It also manages long-range dependencies and the sequential nature of HSI data, preserving contextual information across spectral bands. MHSSMamba achieved remarkable classification accuracies of 97.62\% on Pavia University, 96.92\% on the University of Houston, 96.85\% on Salinas, and 99.49\% on Wuhan-longKou datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/MHassaanButt/MHA\_SS\_Mamba{GitHub}.
Applying a Color Palette with Local Control using Diffusion Models
We demonstrate two novel editing procedures in the context of fantasy card art. Palette transfer applies a specified reference palette to a given card. For fantasy art, the desired change in palette can be very large, leading to huge changes in the "look" of the art. We demonstrate that a pipeline of vector quantization; matching; and "vector dequantization" (using a diffusion model) produces successful extreme palette transfers. Segment control allows an artist to move one or more image segments, and to optionally specify the desired color of the result. The combination of these two types of edit yields valuable workflows, including: move a segment, then recolor; recolor, then force some segments to take a prescribed color. We demonstrate our methods on the challenging Yu-Gi-Oh card art dataset.
Improving Lens Flare Removal with General Purpose Pipeline and Multiple Light Sources Recovery
When taking images against strong light sources, the resulting images often contain heterogeneous flare artifacts. These artifacts can importantly affect image visual quality and downstream computer vision tasks. While collecting real data pairs of flare-corrupted/flare-free images for training flare removal models is challenging, current methods utilize the direct-add approach to synthesize data. However, these methods do not consider automatic exposure and tone mapping in image signal processing pipeline (ISP), leading to the limited generalization capability of deep models training using such data. Besides, existing methods struggle to handle multiple light sources due to the different sizes, shapes and illuminance of various light sources. In this paper, we propose a solution to improve the performance of lens flare removal by revisiting the ISP and remodeling the principle of automatic exposure in the synthesis pipeline and design a more reliable light sources recovery strategy. The new pipeline approaches realistic imaging by discriminating the local and global illumination through convex combination, avoiding global illumination shifting and local over-saturation. Our strategy for recovering multiple light sources convexly averages the input and output of the neural network based on illuminance levels, thereby avoiding the need for a hard threshold in identifying light sources. We also contribute a new flare removal testing dataset containing the flare-corrupted images captured by ten types of consumer electronics. The dataset facilitates the verification of the generalization capability of flare removal methods. Extensive experiments show that our solution can effectively improve the performance of lens flare removal and push the frontier toward more general situations.
MangaNinja: Line Art Colorization with Precise Reference Following
Derived from diffusion models, MangaNinjia specializes in the task of reference-guided line art colorization. We incorporate two thoughtful designs to ensure precise character detail transcription, including a patch shuffling module to facilitate correspondence learning between the reference color image and the target line art, and a point-driven control scheme to enable fine-grained color matching. Experiments on a self-collected benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our model over current solutions in terms of precise colorization. We further showcase the potential of the proposed interactive point control in handling challenging cases, cross-character colorization, multi-reference harmonization, beyond the reach of existing algorithms.
Rethinking RGB Color Representation for Image Restoration Models
Image restoration models are typically trained with a pixel-wise distance loss defined over the RGB color representation space, which is well known to be a source of blurry and unrealistic textures in the restored images. The reason, we believe, is that the three-channel RGB space is insufficient for supervising the restoration models. To this end, we augment the representation to hold structural information of local neighborhoods at each pixel while keeping the color information and pixel-grainedness unharmed. The result is a new representation space, dubbed augmented RGB (aRGB) space. Substituting the underlying representation space for the per-pixel losses facilitates the training of image restoration models, thereby improving the performance without affecting the evaluation phase. Notably, when combined with auxiliary objectives such as adversarial or perceptual losses, our aRGB space consistently improves overall metrics by reconstructing both color and local structures, overcoming the conventional perception-distortion trade-off.
Hyperspectral Pansharpening: Critical Review, Tools and Future Perspectives
Hyperspectral pansharpening consists of fusing a high-resolution panchromatic band and a low-resolution hyperspectral image to obtain a new image with high resolution in both the spatial and spectral domains. These remote sensing products are valuable for a wide range of applications, driving ever growing research efforts. Nonetheless, results still do not meet application demands. In part, this comes from the technical complexity of the task: compared to multispectral pansharpening, many more bands are involved, in a spectral range only partially covered by the panchromatic component and with overwhelming noise. However, another major limiting factor is the absence of a comprehensive framework for the rapid development and accurate evaluation of new methods. This paper attempts to address this issue. We started by designing a dataset large and diverse enough to allow reliable training (for data-driven methods) and testing of new methods. Then, we selected a set of state-of-the-art methods, following different approaches, characterized by promising performance, and reimplemented them in a single PyTorch framework. Finally, we carried out a critical comparative analysis of all methods, using the most accredited quality indicators. The analysis highlights the main limitations of current solutions in terms of spectral/spatial quality and computational efficiency, and suggests promising research directions. To ensure full reproducibility of the results and support future research, the framework (including codes, evaluation procedures and links to the dataset) is shared on https://github.com/matciotola/hyperspectral_pansharpening_toolbox, as a single Python-based reference benchmark toolbox.
Illuminating Darkness: Learning to Enhance Low-light Images In-the-Wild
Single-shot low-light image enhancement (SLLIE) remains challenging due to the limited availability of diverse, real-world paired datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Low-Light Smartphone Dataset (LSD), a large-scale, high-resolution (4K+) dataset collected in the wild across a wide range of challenging lighting conditions (0.1 to 200 lux). LSD contains 6,425 precisely aligned low and normal-light image pairs, selected from over 8,000 dynamic indoor and outdoor scenes through multi-frame acquisition and expert evaluation. To evaluate generalization and aesthetic quality, we collect 2,117 unpaired low-light images from previously unseen devices. To fully exploit LSD, we propose TFFormer, a hybrid model that encodes luminance and chrominance (LC) separately to reduce color-structure entanglement. We further propose a cross-attention-driven joint decoder for context-aware fusion of LC representations, along with LC refinement and LC-guided supervision to significantly enhance perceptual fidelity and structural consistency. TFFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on LSD (+2.45 dB PSNR) and substantially improves downstream vision tasks, such as low-light object detection (+6.80 mAP on ExDark).
Bilateral Guided Radiance Field Processing
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieves unprecedented performance in synthesizing novel view synthesis, utilizing multi-view consistency. When capturing multiple inputs, image signal processing (ISP) in modern cameras will independently enhance them, including exposure adjustment, color correction, local tone mapping, etc. While these processings greatly improve image quality, they often break the multi-view consistency assumption, leading to "floaters" in the reconstructed radiance fields. To address this concern without compromising visual aesthetics, we aim to first disentangle the enhancement by ISP at the NeRF training stage and re-apply user-desired enhancements to the reconstructed radiance fields at the finishing stage. Furthermore, to make the re-applied enhancements consistent between novel views, we need to perform imaging signal processing in 3D space (i.e. "3D ISP"). For this goal, we adopt the bilateral grid, a locally-affine model, as a generalized representation of ISP processing. Specifically, we optimize per-view 3D bilateral grids with radiance fields to approximate the effects of camera pipelines for each input view. To achieve user-adjustable 3D finishing, we propose to learn a low-rank 4D bilateral grid from a given single view edit, lifting photo enhancements to the whole 3D scene. We demonstrate our approach can boost the visual quality of novel view synthesis by effectively removing floaters and performing enhancements from user retouching. The source code and our data are available at: https://bilarfpro.github.io.
Training-Free Text-Guided Color Editing with Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer
Text-guided color editing in images and videos is a fundamental yet unsolved problem, requiring fine-grained manipulation of color attributes, including albedo, light source color, and ambient lighting, while preserving physical consistency in geometry, material properties, and light-matter interactions. Existing training-free methods offer broad applicability across editing tasks but struggle with precise color control and often introduce visual inconsistency in both edited and non-edited regions. In this work, we present ColorCtrl, a training-free color editing method that leverages the attention mechanisms of modern Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiT). By disentangling structure and color through targeted manipulation of attention maps and value tokens, our method enables accurate and consistent color editing, along with word-level control of attribute intensity. Our method modifies only the intended regions specified by the prompt, leaving unrelated areas untouched. Extensive experiments on both SD3 and FLUX.1-dev demonstrate that ColorCtrl outperforms existing training-free approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performances in both edit quality and consistency. Furthermore, our method surpasses strong commercial models such as FLUX.1 Kontext Max and GPT-4o Image Generation in terms of consistency. When extended to video models like CogVideoX, our approach exhibits greater advantages, particularly in maintaining temporal coherence and editing stability. Finally, our method also generalizes to instruction-based editing diffusion models such as Step1X-Edit and FLUX.1 Kontext dev, further demonstrating its versatility.
Toward Moiré-Free and Detail-Preserving Demosaicking
3D convolutions are commonly employed by demosaicking neural models, in the same way as solving other image restoration problems. Counter-intuitively, we show that 3D convolutions implicitly impede the RGB color spectra from exchanging complementary information, resulting in spectral-inconsistent inference of the local spatial high frequency components. As a consequence, shallow 3D convolution networks suffer the Moir\'e artifacts, but deep 3D convolutions cause over-smoothness. We analyze the fundamental difference between demosaicking and other problems that predict lost pixels between available ones (e.g., super-resolution reconstruction), and present the underlying reasons for the confliction between Moir\'e-free and detail-preserving. From the new perspective, our work decouples the common standard convolution procedure to spectral and spatial feature aggregations, which allow strengthening global communication in the spectral dimension while respecting local contrast in the spatial dimension. We apply our demosaicking model to two tasks: Joint Demosaicking-Denoising and Independently Demosaicking. In both applications, our model substantially alleviates artifacts such as Moir\'e and over-smoothness at similar or lower computational cost to currently top-performing models, as validated by diverse evaluations. Source code will be released along with paper publication.
Deep Line Art Video Colorization with a Few References
Coloring line art images based on the colors of reference images is an important stage in animation production, which is time-consuming and tedious. In this paper, we propose a deep architecture to automatically color line art videos with the same color style as the given reference images. Our framework consists of a color transform network and a temporal constraint network. The color transform network takes the target line art images as well as the line art and color images of one or more reference images as input, and generates corresponding target color images. To cope with larger differences between the target line art image and reference color images, our architecture utilizes non-local similarity matching to determine the region correspondences between the target image and the reference images, which are used to transform the local color information from the references to the target. To ensure global color style consistency, we further incorporate Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) with the transformation parameters obtained from a style embedding vector that describes the global color style of the references, extracted by an embedder. The temporal constraint network takes the reference images and the target image together in chronological order, and learns the spatiotemporal features through 3D convolution to ensure the temporal consistency of the target image and the reference image. Our model can achieve even better coloring results by fine-tuning the parameters with only a small amount of samples when dealing with an animation of a new style. To evaluate our method, we build a line art coloring dataset. Experiments show that our method achieves the best performance on line art video coloring compared to the state-of-the-art methods and other baselines.
SimROD: A Simple Baseline for Raw Object Detection with Global and Local Enhancements
Most visual models are designed for sRGB images, yet RAW data offers significant advantages for object detection by preserving sensor information before ISP processing. This enables improved detection accuracy and more efficient hardware designs by bypassing the ISP. However, RAW object detection is challenging due to limited training data, unbalanced pixel distributions, and sensor noise. To address this, we propose SimROD, a lightweight and effective approach for RAW object detection. We introduce a Global Gamma Enhancement (GGE) module, which applies a learnable global gamma transformation with only four parameters, improving feature representation while keeping the model efficient. Additionally, we leverage the green channel's richer signal to enhance local details, aligning with the human eye's sensitivity and Bayer filter design. Extensive experiments on multiple RAW object detection datasets and detectors demonstrate that SimROD outperforms state-of-the-art methods like RAW-Adapter and DIAP while maintaining efficiency. Our work highlights the potential of RAW data for real-world object detection. Code is available at https://ocean146.github.io/SimROD2025/.
