In So Kweon

Robust High Dynamic Range Imaging by Rank Minimization

This paper introduces a new high dynamic range (HDR) imaging algorithm which utilizes rank minimization. Assuming a camera responses linearly to scene radiance, the input low dynamic range (LDR) images captured with different exposure time exhibit a linear dependency and form a rank-1 matrix when stacking intensity of each corresponding pixel together. In practice, misalignments caused by camera motion, presences of moving objects, saturations and image noise break the rank-1 structure of the LDR images. To address these problems, we present a rank minimization algorithm which simultaneously aligns LDR images and detects outliers for robust HDR generation. We evaluate the performances of our algorithm systematically using synthetic examples and qualitatively compare our results with results from the state-of-the-art HDR algorithms using challenging real world examples.

Partial Sum Minimization of Singular Values in Robust PCA: Algorithm and Applications

Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) via rank minimization is a powerful tool for recovering underlying low-rank structure of clean data corrupted with sparse noise/outliers. In many low-level vision problems, not only it is known that the underlying structure of clean data is low-rank, but the exact rank of clean data is also known. Yet, when applying conventional rank minimization for those problems, the objective function is formulated in a way that does not fully utilize a priori target rank information about the problems. This observation motivates us to investigate whether there is a better alternative solution when using rank minimization. In this paper, instead of minimizing the nuclear norm, we propose to minimize the partial sum of singular values, which implicitly encourages the target rank constraint. Our experimental analyses show that, when the number of samples is deficient, our approach leads to a higher success rate than conventional rank minimization, while the solutions obtained by the two approaches are almost identical when the number of samples is more than sufficient. We apply our approach to various low-level vision problems, e.g., high dynamic range imaging, motion edge detection, photometric stereo, image alignment and recovery, and show that our results outperform those obtained by the conventional nuclear norm rank minimization method.

Pixel-Level Domain Transfer

We present an image-conditional image generation model. The model transfers an input domain to a target domain in semantic level, and generates the target image in pixel level. To generate realistic target images, we employ the real/fake-discriminator as in Generative Adversarial Nets, but also introduce a novel domain-discriminator to make the generated image relevant to the input image. We verify our model through a challenging task of generating a piece of clothing from an input image of a dressed person. We present a high quality clothing dataset containing the two domains, and succeed in demonstrating decent results.

Multiview Photometric Stereo Using Planar Mesh Parameterization

We propose a method for accurate 3D shape reconstruction using uncalibrated multiview photometric stereo. A coarse mesh reconstructed using multiview stereo is first parameterized using a planar mesh parameterization technique. Subsequently, multiview photometric stereo is performed in the 2D parameter domain of the mesh, where all geometric and photometric cues from multiple images can be treated uniformly. Unlike traditional methods, there is no need for merging view-dependent surface normal maps. Our key contribution is a new photometric stereo based mesh refinement technique that can efficiently reconstruct meshes with extremely fine geometric details by directly estimating a displacement texture map in the 2D parameter domain. We demonstrate that intricate surface geometry can be reconstructed using several challenging datasets containing surfaces with specular reflections, multiple albedos and complex topologies.

Natural Image Matting Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

We propose a deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) method for natural image matting. Our method takes results of the closed form matting, results of the KNN matting and normalized RGB color images as inputs, and directly learns an end-to-end mapping between the inputs, and reconstructed alpha mattes. We analyze pros and cons of the closed form matting, and the KNN matting in terms of local and nonlocal principle, and show that they are complementary to each other. A major benefit of our method is that it can “recognize” different local image structures, and then combine results of local (closed form matting), and nonlocal (KNN matting) matting effectively to achieve higher quality alpha mattes than both of its inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed deep CNN matting produces visually and quantitatively high-quality alpha mattes. In addition, our method has achieved the highest ranking in the public alpha matting evaluation dataset in terms of the sum of absolute differences, mean squared errors, and gradient errors.

High-Quality Depth from Uncalibrated Small Motion Clip

We propose a novel approach that generates a high-quality depth map from a set of images captured with a small viewpoint variation, namely small motion clip. As opposed to prior methods that recover scene geometry and camera motions using pre-calibrated cameras, we introduce a self-calibrating bundle adjustment tailored for small motion. This allows our dense stereo algorithm to produce a high-quality depth map for the user without the need for camera calibration. In the dense matching, the distributions of intensity profiles are analyzed to leverage the benefit of having negligible intensity changes within the scene due to the minuscule variation in viewpoint. The depth maps obtained by the proposed framework show accurate and extremely fine structures that are unmatched by previous literature under the same small motion configuration.

Automatic Content-Aware Color and Tone Stylization

We introduce a new technique that automatically generates diverse, visually compelling stylizations for a photograph in an unsupervised manner. We achieve this by learning style ranking for a given input using a large photo collection and selecting a diverse subset of matching styles for final style transfer. We also propose an improved technique that transfers the global color and tone of the chosen exemplars to the input photograph while avoiding the common visual artifacts produced by the existing style transfer methods. Together, our style selection and transfer techniques produce compelling, artifact-free results on a wide range of input photographs, and a user study shows that our results are preferred over other techniques.

Efficient and Robust Color Consistency for Community Photo Collections

We present an efficient technique to optimize color consistency of a collection of images depicting a common scene. Our method first recovers sparse pixel correspondences in the input images and stacks them into a matrix with many missing entries. We show that this matrix satisfies a rank two constraint under a simple color correction model. These parameters can be viewed as pseudo white balance and gamma correction parameters for each input image. We present a robust low-rank matrix factorization method to estimate the unknown parameters of this model. Using them, we improve color consistency of the input images or perform color transfer with any input image as the source. Our approach is insensitive to outliers in the pixel correspondences thereby precluding the need for complex pre-processing steps. We demonstrate high quality color consistency results on large photo collections of popular tourist landmarks and personal photo collections containing images of people.

A Real-Time Augmented Reality System to See-Through Cars

One of the most hazardous driving scenario is the overtaking of a slower vehicle, indeed, in this case the front vehicle (being overtaken) can occlude an important part of the field of view of the rear vehicles driver. This lack of visibility is the most probable cause of accidents in this context. Recent research works tend to prove that augmented reality applied to assisted driving can significantly reduce the risk of accidents. In this paper, we present a real-time marker-less system to see through cars. For this purpose, two cars are equipped with cameras and an appropriate wireless communication system. The stereo vision system mounted on the front car allows to create a sparse 3D map of the environment where the rear car can be localized. Using this inter-car pose estimation, a synthetic image is generated to overcome the occlusion and to create a seamless see-through effect which preserves the structure of the scene.

Light-Field Image Super-Resolution Using Convolutional Neural Network

Commercial light field cameras provide spatial and angular information, but their limited resolution becomes an important problem in practical use. In this letter, we present a novel method for light field image super-resolution (SR) to simultaneously up-sample both the spatial and angular resolutions of a light field image via a deep convolutional neural network. We first augment the spatial resolution of each subaperture image by a spatial SR network, then novel views between super-resolved subaperture images are generated by three different angular SR networks according to the novel view locations. We improve both the efficiency of training and the quality of angular SR results by using weight sharing. In addition, we provide a new light field image dataset for training and validating the network. We train our whole network end-to-end, and show state-of-the-art performances on quantitative and qualitative evaluations.