Abstract: Guided image processing techniques are widely used for extracting information from a guiding image to aid in the processing of the guided one. These images may be sourced from different modalities, such as 2D and 3D, or different spectral bands, like visible and infrared. In the case of guided cross-spectral super-resolution, features from the two modal images are extracted and efficiently merged to migrate guidance information from one image, usually high-resolution (HR), toward the guided one, usually low-resolution (LR). Different approaches have been recently proposed focusing on the development of architectures for feature extraction and merging in the cross-spectral domains, but none of them care about the different nature of the given images. This paper focuses on the specific problem of guided thermal image super-resolution, where an LR thermal image is enhanced by an HR visible spectrum image. To improve existing guided super-resolution techniques, a novel scheme is proposed that maps the original guiding information to a thermal image-like representation that is similar to the output. Experimental results evaluating five different approaches demonstrate that the best results are achieved when the guiding and guided images share the same domain.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel cycle generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) architecture for synthesizing high-quality depth maps from a given monocular image. The proposed architecture uses multiple loss functions, including cycle consistency, contrastive, identity, and least square losses, to enable the generation of realistic and high-fidelity depth maps. The proposed approach addresses this challenge by synthesizing depth maps from RGB images without requiring paired training data. Comparisons with several state-of-the-art approaches are provided showing the proposed approach overcome other approaches both in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel attention based architecture to remove non-homogeneous haze. The proposed model is focused on obtaining the most representative characteristics of the image, at each learning cycle, by means of adaptive attention modules coupled with a residual learning convolutional network. The latter is based on the Res2Net model. The proposed architecture is trained with just a few set of images. Its performance is evaluated on a public benchmark—images from the non-homogeneous haze NTIRE 2021 challenge—and compared with state of the art approaches reaching the best result.

Abstract: Vulnerable plaques are the major cause of carotid and coronary vascular problems, such as heart attack or stroke. A correct modeling of plaque echomorphology and composition can help the identification of such lesions. The Rayleigh distribution is widely used to describe (nearly) homogeneous areas in ultrasound images. Since plaques may contain tissues with heterogeneous regions, more complex distributions depending on multiple parameters are usually needed, such as Rice, K or Nakagami distributions. In such cases, the problem formulation becomes more complex, and the optimization procedure to estimate the plaque echomorphology is more difficult. Here, we propose to model the tissue echomorphology by means of a mixture of Rayleigh distributions, known as the Rayleigh mixture model (RMM). The problem formulation is still simple, but its ability to describe complex textural patterns is very powerful. In this paper, we present a method for the automatic estimation of the RMM mixture parameters by means of the expectation maximization algorithm, which aims at characterizing tissue echomorphology in ultrasound (US). The performance of the proposed model is evaluated with a database of in vitro intravascular US cases. We show that the mixture coefficients and Rayleigh parameters explicitly derived from the mixture model are able to accurately describe different plaque types and to significantly improve the characterization performance of an already existing methodology.

Abstract: Online continual learning aims to get closer to a live learning experience by learning directly on a stream of data with temporally shifting distribution and by storing a minimum amount of data from that stream. In this empirical evaluation, we evaluate various methods from the literature that tackle online continual learning. More specifically, we focus on the class-incremental setting in the context of image classification, where the learner must learn new classes incrementally from a stream of data. We compare these methods on the Split-CIFAR100 and Split-TinyImagenet benchmarks, and measure their average accuracy, forgetting, stability, and quality of the representations, to evaluate various aspects of the algorithm at the end but also during the whole training period. We find that most methods suffer from stability and underfitting issues. However, the learned representations are comparable to i.i.d. training under the same computational budget. No clear winner emerges from the results and basic experience replay, when properly tuned and implemented, is a very strong baseline. We release our modular and extensible codebase at this https URL based on the avalanche framework to reproduce our results and encourage future research.

Abstract: We present a method to estimate the direction and color of the scene light source from a single image. Our method is based on two main ideas: (a) we use a new synthetic dataset with strong shadow effects with similar constraints to the SID dataset; (b) we define a deep architecture trained on the mentioned dataset to estimate the direction and color of the scene light source. Apart from showing good performance on synthetic images, we additionally propose a preliminary procedure to obtain light positions of the Multi-Illumination dataset, and, in this way, we also prove that our trained model achieves good performance when it is applied to real scenes.

Abstract: A common goal of unpaired image-to-image translation is to preserve content consistency between source images and translated images while mimicking the style of the target domain. Due to biases between the datasets of both domains, many methods suffer from inconsistencies caused by the translation process. Most approaches introduced to mitigate these inconsistencies do not constrain the discriminator, leading to an even more ill-posed training setup. Moreover, none of these approaches is designed for larger crop sizes. In this work, we show that masking the inputs of a global discriminator for both domains with a content-based mask is sufficient to reduce content inconsistencies significantly. However, this strategy leads to artifacts that can be traced back to the masking process. To reduce these artifacts, we introduce a local discriminator that operates on pairs of small crops selected with a similarity sampling strategy. Furthermore, we apply this sampling strategy to sample global input crops from the source and target dataset. In addition, we propose feature-attentive denormalization to selectively incorporate content-based statistics into the generator stream. In our experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in photorealistic sim-to-real translation and weather translation and also performs well in day-to-night translation. Additionally, we propose the cKVD metric, which builds on the sKVD metric and enables the examination of translation quality at the class or category level.