Depth cues are known to be useful for visual perception. However, direct measurement of depth is often impracticable. Fortunately, though, modern learning-based methods offer promising depth maps by inference in the wild. In this work, we adapt such depth inference models for object segmentation using the objects' ``pop-out'' prior in 3D. The ``pop-out'' is a simple composition prior that assumes objects reside on the background surface. Such compositional prior allows us to reason about objects in the 3D space. More specifically, we adapt the inferred depth maps such that objects can be localized using only 3D information. Such separation, however, requires knowledge about contact surface which we learn using the weak supervision of the segmentation mask. Our intermediate representation of contact surface, and thereby reasoning about objects purely in 3D, allows us to better transfer the depth knowledge into semantics. The proposed adaptation method uses only the depth model without needing the source data used for training, making the learning process efficient and practical. Our experiments on eight datasets of two challenging tasks, namely camouflaged object detection and salient object detection, consistently demonstrate the benefit of our method in terms of both performance and generalizability.

Learning continuous image representations is recently gaining popularity for image super-resolution (SR) because of its ability to reconstruct high-resolution images with arbitrary scales from low-resolution inputs. Existing methods mostly ensemble nearby features to predict the new pixel at any queried coordinate in the SR image. Such a local ensemble suffers from some limitations: i) it has no learnable parameters and it neglects the similarity of the visual features; ii) it has a limited receptive field and cannot ensemble relevant features in a large field which are important in an image; iii) it inherently has a gap with real camera imaging since it only depends on the coordinate. To address these issues, this paper proposes a continuous implicit attention-in-attention network, called CiaoSR. We explicitly design an implicit attention network to learn the ensemble weights for the nearby local features. Furthermore, we embed a scale-aware attention in this implicit attention network to exploit additional non-local information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate CiaoSR significantly outperforms the existing single image super resolution (SISR) methods with the same backbone. In addition, the proposed method also achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the arbitrary-scale SR task. The effectiveness of the method is also demonstrated on the real-world SR setting. More importantly, CiaoSR can be flexibly integrated into any backbone to improve the SR performance.

Blind image super-resolution (Blind-SR) aims to recover a high-resolution (HR) image from its corresponding low-resolution (LR) input image with unknown degradations. Most of the existing works design an explicit degradation estimator for each degradation to guide SR. However, it is infeasible to provide concrete labels of multiple degradation combinations (\eg, blur, noise, jpeg compression) to supervise the degradation estimator training. In addition, these special designs for certain degradation, such as blur, impedes the models from being generalized to handle different degradations. To this end, it is necessary to design an implicit degradation estimator that can extract discriminative degradation representation for all degradations without relying on the supervision of degradation ground-truth. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Distillation based Blind-SR network (KDSR). It consists of a knowledge distillation based implicit degradation estimator network (KD-IDE) and an efficient SR network. To learn the KDSR model, we first train a teacher network: KD-IDE$_{T}$. It takes paired HR and LR patches as inputs and is optimized with the SR network jointly. Then, we further train a student network KD-IDE$_{S}$, which only takes LR images as input and learns to extract the same implicit degradation representation (IDR) as KD-IDE$_{T}$. In addition, to fully use extracted IDR, we design a simple, strong, and efficient IDR based dynamic convolution residual block (IDR-DCRB) to build an SR network. We conduct extensive experiments under classic and real-world degradation settings. The results show that KDSR achieves SOTA performance and can generalize to various degradation processes. The source codes and pre-trained models will be released.

The increased importance of mobile photography created a need for fast and performant RAW image processing pipelines capable of producing good visual results in spite of the mobile camera sensor limitations. While deep learning-based approaches can efficiently solve this problem, their computational requirements usually remain too large for high-resolution on-device image processing. To address this limitation, we propose a novel PyNET-V2 Mobile CNN architecture designed specifically for edge devices, being able to process RAW 12MP photos directly on mobile phones under 1.5 second and producing high perceptual photo quality. To train and to evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, we use the real-world Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting on thousands of RAW-RGB image pairs captured with a professional medium-format 102MP Fujifilm camera and a popular Sony mobile camera sensor. The results demonstrate that the PyNET-V2 Mobile model can substantially surpass the quality of tradition ISP pipelines, while outperforming the previously introduced neural network-based solutions designed for fast image processing. Furthermore, we show that the proposed architecture is also compatible with the latest mobile AI accelerators such as NPUs or APUs that can be used to further reduce the latency of the model to as little as 0.5 second. The dataset, code and pre-trained models used in this paper are available on the project website: https://github.com/gmalivenko/PyNET-v2

Video super-resolution is one of the most popular tasks on mobile devices, being widely used for an automatic improvement of low-bitrate and low-resolution video streams. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem, they are usually quite computationally demanding, demonstrating low FPS rates and power efficiency on mobile devices. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an end-to-end real-time video super-resolution solution for mobile NPUs optimized for low energy consumption. The participants were provided with the REDS training dataset containing video sequences for a 4X video upscaling task. The runtime and power efficiency of all models was evaluated on the powerful MediaTek Dimensity 9000 platform with a dedicated AI processing unit capable of accelerating floating-point and quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 500 FPS rate and 0.2 [Watt / 30 FPS] power consumption. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Image super-resolution is a common task on mobile and IoT devices, where one often needs to upscale and enhance low-resolution images and video frames. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem in the past, they are usually not compatible with low-power mobile NPUs having many computational and memory constraints. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an efficient quantized image super-resolution solution that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile NPUs. The participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained INT8 models to do a high-quality 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated edge NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 60 FPS rate when reconstructing Full HD resolution images. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Various depth estimation models are now widely used on many mobile and IoT devices for image segmentation, bokeh effect rendering, object tracking and many other mobile tasks. Thus, it is very crucial to have efficient and accurate depth estimation models that can run fast on low-power mobile chipsets. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop deep learning-based single image depth estimation solutions that can show a real-time performance on IoT platforms and smartphones. For this, the participants used a large-scale RGB-to-depth dataset that was collected with the ZED stereo camera capable to generated depth maps for objects located at up to 50 meters. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Raspberry Pi 4 platform, where the developed solutions were able to generate VGA resolution depth maps at up to 27 FPS while achieving high fidelity results. All models developed in the challenge are also compatible with any Android or Linux-based mobile devices, their detailed description is provided in this paper.

The role of mobile cameras increased dramatically over the past few years, leading to more and more research in automatic image quality enhancement and RAW photo processing. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop an efficient end-to-end AI-based image signal processing (ISP) pipeline replacing the standard mobile ISPs that can run on modern smartphone GPUs using TensorFlow Lite. The participants were provided with a large-scale Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting of thousands of paired photos captured with a normal mobile camera sensor and a professional 102MP medium-format FujiFilm GFX100 camera. The runtime of the resulting models was evaluated on the Snapdragon's 8 Gen 1 GPU that provides excellent acceleration results for the majority of common deep learning ops. The proposed solutions are compatible with all recent mobile GPUs, being able to process Full HD photos in less than 20-50 milliseconds while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper.

压缩在通过限制系统（例如流媒体服务，虚拟现实或视频游戏）等系统的有效传输和存储图像和视频中起着重要作用。但是，不可避免地会导致伪影和原始信息的丢失，这可能会严重降低视觉质量。由于这些原因，压缩图像的质量增强已成为流行的研究主题。尽管大多数最先进的图像恢复方法基于卷积神经网络，但基于Swinir等其他基于变压器的方法在这些任务上表现出令人印象深刻的性能。在本文中，我们探索了新型的Swin Transformer V2，以改善图像超分辨率的Swinir，尤其是压缩输入方案。使用这种方法，我们可以解决训练变压器视觉模型中的主要问题，例如训练不稳定性，预训练和微调之间的分辨率差距以及数据饥饿。我们对三个代表性任务进行实验：JPEG压缩伪像去除，图像超分辨率（经典和轻巧）以及压缩的图像超分辨率。实验结果表明，我们的方法SWIN2SR可以改善SWINIR的训练收敛性和性能，并且是“ AIM 2022挑战压缩图像和视频的超分辨率”的前5个解决方案。

本文回顾了AIM 2022上压缩图像和视频超级分辨率的挑战。这项挑战包括两条曲目。轨道1的目标是压缩图像的超分辨率，轨迹〜2靶向压缩视频的超分辨率。在轨道1中，我们使用流行的数据集DIV2K作为培训，验证和测试集。在轨道2中，我们提出了LDV 3.0数据集，其中包含365个视频，包括LDV 2.0数据集（335个视频）和30个其他视频。在这一挑战中，有12支球队和2支球队分别提交了赛道1和赛道2的最终结果。所提出的方法和解决方案衡量了压缩图像和视频上超分辨率的最先进。提出的LDV 3.0数据集可在https://github.com/renyang-home/ldv_dataset上找到。此挑战的首页是在https://github.com/renyang-home/aim22_compresssr。