Abstract

Intrinsic Image Decomposition (IID) is a challenging and interesting computer vision problem with various applications in several fields. We present novel semantic priors and an integrated approach for single image IID that involves analyzing image at three hierarchical context levels. Local context priors capture scene properties at each pixel within a small neighbourhood. Mid-level context priors encode object level semantics. Global context priors establish correspondences at the scene level. Our semantic priors are designed on both fixed and flexible regions, using selective search method and Convolutional Neural Network features. Our IID method is an iterative multistage optimization scheme and consists of two complementary formulations: L2 smoothing for shading and L1 sparsity for reflectance. Experiments and analysis of our method indicate the utility of our semantic priors and structured hierarchical analysis in an IID framework. We compare our method with other contemporary IID solutions and show results with lesser artifacts. Finally, we highlight that proper choice and encoding of prior knowledge can produce competitive results even when compared to end-to-end deep learning IID methods, signifying the importance of such priors. We believe that the insights and techniques presented in this paper would be useful in the future IID research.

Abstract

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Abstract

Photo realism in computer generated imagery is crucially dependent on how well an artist is able to recreate real-world materials in the scene. The workflow for material modeling and editing typically involves manual tweaking of material parameters and uses a standard path tracing engine for visual feedback. A lot of time may be spent in iterative selection and rendering of materials at an appropriate quality. In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network based workflow which quickly generates high-quality ray traced material visualizations on a shaderball. Our novel architecture allows for control over environment lighting and assists material selection along with the ability to render spatially-varying materials. Additionally, our network enables control over environment lighting which gives an artist more freedom and provides better visualization of the rendered material. Comparison with state-of-the-art denoising and neural rendering techniques suggests that our neural renderer performs faster and better. We provide a interactive visualization tool and release our training dataset to foster further research in this area.

Abstract

Monocular head pose estimation requires learning a model that computes the intrinsic Euler angles for pose (yaw, pitch, roll) from an input image of human face. Annotating ground truth head pose angles for images in the wild is difficult and requires ad-hoc fitting procedures (which provides only coarse and approximate annotations). This highlights the need for approaches which can train on data captured in controlled environment and generalize on the images in the wild (with varying appearance and illumination of the face). Most present day deep learning approaches which learn a regression function directly on the input images fail to do so. To this end, we propose to use a higher level representation to regress the head pose while using deep learning architectures. More specifically, we use the uncertainty maps in the form of 2D soft localization heatmap images over five facial keypoints, namely left ear, right ear, left eye, right eye and nose, and pass them through an convolutional neural network to regress the head-pose. We show head pose estimation results on two challenging benchmarks BIWI and AFLW and our approach surpasses the state of the art on both the datasets. Index Terms— Image analysis, Pose estimation

Abstract

The problem of estimating scene-depth from a single im- age has seen great progress lately. Recent unsupervised methods are based on view-synthesis and learn depth by minimizing photometric reconstruction error. In this pa- per, we introduce Structured Adversarial Training (StrAT) to this problem. We generate multiple novel views using depth (or disparity), with the stereo-baseline changing in an increasing order. Adversarial training that goes from easy examples to harder ones produces richer losses and better models. The impact of StrAT is shown to exceed tra- ditional data augmentation using random new views. The combination of an adversarial framework, multiview learn- ing, and structured adversarial training produces state-of- the-art performance on unsupervised depth estimation for monocular images. The StrAT framework can benefit sev- eral problems that use adversarial training

Abstract

Post-capture control of the focus position of an image is a useful photographic tool. Changing the focus of a single image involves the complex task of simultaneously estimating the radiance and the defocus radius of all scene points. We introduce RefocusGAN, a deblurthen-reblur approach to single image refocusing. We train conditional adversarial networks for deblurring and refocusing using wide-aperture images created from light-fields. By appropriately conditioning our networks with a focus measure, an in-focus image and a refocus control parameter δ, we are able to achieve generic free-form refocusing over a single image.

Abstract

Intrinsic Image Decomposition (IID) is a challenging and interesting computer vision problem with various applications in several fields. We present novel semantic priors and an integrated approach for single image IID that involves analyzing image at three hierarchical context levels. Local context priors capture scene properties at each pixel within a small neighborhood. Mid-level context priors encode object level semantics. Global context priors establish correspondences at the scene level. Our semantic priors are designed on both fixed and flexible regions, using selective search method and Convolutional Neural Network features. Experiments and analysis of our method indicate the utility of our weak semantic priors and structured hierarchical analysis in an IID framework. We compare our method with the current state-of-the-art and show results with lesser artifacts. Finally, we highlight that proper choice and encoding of prior knowledge can produce competitive results compared to end-to-end deep learning IID methods, signifying the importance of such priors. We believe that the insights and techniques presented in this paper would be useful in the future IID research.

Abstract

Replacing overexposed or dull skies in outdoor photographs is a desirable photo manipulation. It is often necessary to color correct the foreground after replacement to make it consistent with the new sky. Methods have been proposed to automate the process of sky replacement and color correction. However, many times a color correction is unwanted by the artist or may produce unrealistic results. We propose a data-driven approach to sky-replacement that avoids color correction by finding a diverse set of skies that are consistent in color and natural illumination with the query image foreground. Our database consists of ∼ 1200 natural images spanning many outdoor categories. Given a query image, we retrieve the most consistent images from the database according to L2 similarity in feature space and produce candidate composites. The candidates are re-ranked based on realism and diversity. We used pre-trained CNN features and a rich set of hand-crafted features that encode color statistics, structural layout, and natural illumination statistics, but observed color statistics to be the most effective for this task. We share our findings on feature selection and show qualitative results and a user-study based evaluation to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Abstract

View-graph selection is a crucial step for accurate and efficient large-scale structure from motion (sfm). Most sfm methods remove undesirable images and pairs using several fixed heuristic criteria, and propose tailor-made solutions to achieve specific reconstruction objectives such as efficiency, accuracy, or disambiguation. In contrast to these disparate solutions, we propose an optimization based formulation that can be used to achieve these different reconstruction objectives with taskspecific cost modeling and construct a very efficient network-flow based formulation for its approximate solution. The abstraction brought on by this selection mechanism separates the challenges specific to datasets and reconstruction objectives from the standard sfm pipeline and improves its generalization. This paper mainly focuses on application of this framework with standard sfm pipeline for accurate and ghost-free reconstructions of highly ambiguous datasets. To model selection costs for this task, we introduce new disambiguation priors based on local geometry. We further demonstrate versatility of the method by using it for the general objective of accurate and efficient reconstruction of largescale Internet datasets using costs based on well-known sfm priors.

Abstract

Post-capture control of the focus position of an image is a useful photographic tool. Changing the focus of a single image involves the complex task of simultaneously estimating the radiance and the defocus radius of all scene points. We introduce RefocusGAN, a deblurthen-reblur approach to single image refocusing. We train conditional adversarial networks for deblurring and refocusing using wide-aperture images created from light-fields. By appropriately conditioning our networks with a focus measure, an in-focus image and a refocus control parameter δ, we are able to achieve generic free-form refocusing over a single image.