Abstract: Continuous unsupervised representation learning (CURL) research has greatly benefited from improvements in self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques. As a result, existing CURL methods using SSL can learn high-quality representations without any labels, but with a notable performance drop when learning on a many-tasks data stream. We hypothesize that this is caused by the regularization losses that are imposed to prevent forgetting, leading to a suboptimal plasticity-stability trade-off: they either do not adapt fully to the incoming data (low plasticity), or incur significant forgetting when allowed to fully adapt to a new SSL pretext-task (low stability). In this work, we propose to train an expert network that is relieved of the duty of keeping the previous knowledge and can focus on performing optimally on the new tasks (optimizing plasticity). In the second phase, we combine this new knowledge with the previous network in an adaptation-retrospection phase to avoid forgetting and initialize a new expert with the knowledge of the old network. We perform several experiments showing that our proposed approach outperforms other CURL exemplar-free methods in few- and many-task split settings. Furthermore, we show how to adapt our approach to semi-supervised continual learning (Semi-SCL) and show that we surpass the accuracy of other exemplar-free Semi-SCL methods and reach the results of some others that use exemplars.

Abstract: Given the often enormous effort required to train GANs, both computationally as well as in dataset collection, the re-use of pretrained GANs largely increases the potential impact of generative models. Therefore, we propose a novel knowledge transfer method for generative models based on mining the knowledge that is most beneficial to a specific target domain, either from a single or multiple pretrained GANs. This is done using a miner network that identifies which part of the generative distribution of each pretrained GAN outputs samples closest to the target domain. Mining effectively steers GAN sampling towards suitable regions of the latent space, which facilitates the posterior finetuning and avoids pathologies of other methods, such as mode collapse and lack of flexibility. Furthermore, to prevent overfitting on small target domains, we introduce sparse subnetwork selection, that restricts the set of trainable neurons to those that are relevant for the target dataset. We perform comprehensive experiments on several challenging datasets using various GAN architectures (BigGAN, Progressive GAN, and StyleGAN) and show that the proposed method, called MineGAN, effectively transfers knowledge to domains with few target images, outperforming existing methods. In addition, MineGAN can successfully transfer knowledge from multiple pretrained GANs. MineGAN.

Abstract: Improving images captured under low-light conditions has become an important topic in computational color imaging, as it has a wide range of applications. Most current methods are either based on handcrafted features or on end-to-end training of deep neural networks that mostly focus on minimizing some distortion metric —such as PSNR or SSIM— on a set of training images. However, the minimization of distortion metrics does not mean that the results are optimal in terms of perception (i.e. perceptual quality). As an example, the perception-distortion trade-off states that, close to the optimal results, improving distortion results in worsening perception. This means that current low-light image enhancement methods —that focus on distortion minimization— cannot be optimal in the sense of obtaining a good image in terms of perception errors. In this paper, we propose a post-processing approach in which, given the original low-light image and the result of a specific method, we are able to obtain a result that resembles as much as possible that of the original method, but, at the same time, giving an improvement in the perception of the final image. More in detail, our method follows the hypothesis that in order to minimally modify the perception of an input image, any modification should be a combination of a local change in the shading across a scene and a global change in illumination color. We demonstrate the ability of our method quantitatively using perceptual blind image metrics such as BRISQUE, NIQE, or UNIQUE, and through user preference tests.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for thermal super-resolution based on a fusion prior, low-resolution thermal image and H brightness channel of the corresponding visible spectrum image. The method combines bicubic interpolation of the ×8 scale target image with the brightness component. To enhance the guidance process, the original RGB image is converted to HSV, and the brightness channel is extracted. Bicubic interpolation is then applied to the low-resolution thermal image, resulting in a Bicubic-Brightness channel blend. This luminance-bicubic fusion is used as an input image to help the training process. With this fused image, the cyclic adversarial generative network obtains high-resolution thermal image results. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach significantly improves spatial resolution and pixel intensity levels compared to other state-of-the-art techniques, making it a promising method to obtain high-resolution thermal.

Abstract: Guided image processing techniques are widely used to extract meaningful information from a guiding image and facilitate the enhancement of the guided one. This paper specifically addresses the challenge of guided thermal image super-resolution, where a low-resolution thermal image is enhanced using a high-resolution visible spectrum image. We propose a new strategy that enhances outcomes from current guided super-resolution methods. This is achieved by transforming the initial guiding data into a representation resembling a thermal-like image, which is more closely in sync with the intended output. Experimental results with upscale factors of 8 and 16, demonstrate the outstanding performance of our approach in guided thermal image super-resolution obtained by mapping the original guiding information to a thermal-like image representation.

Abstract: Visual content is increasingly being processed by machines for various automated content analysis tasks instead of being consumed by humans. Despite the existence of several compression methods tailored for machine tasks, few consider real-world scenarios with multiple tasks. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by proposing a task-switchable pre-processor that optimizes input images specifically for machine consumption prior to encoding by an off-the-shelf codec designed for human consumption. The proposed task-switchable pre-processor adeptly maintains relevant semantic information based on the specific characteristics of different downstream tasks, while effectively suppressing irrelevant information to reduce bitrate. To enhance the processing of semantic information for diverse tasks, we leverage pre-extracted semantic features to modulate the pixel-to-pixel mapping within the pre-processor. By switching between different modulations, multiple tasks can be seamlessly incorporated into the system. Extensive experiments demonstrate the practicality and simplicity of our approach. It significantly reduces the number of parameters required for handling multiple tasks while still delivering impressive performance. Our method showcases the potential to achieve efficient and effective compression for machine vision tasks, supporting the evolving demands of real-world applications.