1. |
- Beal, Jacob, et al.
(author)
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Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density
- 2020
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In: Communications Biology. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2399-3642. ; 3:1
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data.
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3. |
- Bhat, Goutam, et al.
(author)
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NTIRE 2022 Burst Super-Resolution Challenge
- 2022
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In: 2022 IEEE/CVF CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER VISION AND PATTERN RECOGNITION WORKSHOPS (CVPRW 2022). - : IEEE. - 9781665487399 - 9781665487405 ; , s. 1040-1060
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Burst super-resolution has received increased attention in recent years due to its applications in mobile photography. By merging information from multiple shifted images of a scene, burst super-resolution aims to recover details which otherwise cannot be obtained using a simple input image. This paper reviews the NTIRE 2022 challenge on burst super-resolution. In the challenge, the participants were tasked with generating a clean RGB image with 4x higher resolution, given a RAW noisy burst as input. That is, the methods need to perform joint denoising, demosaicking, and super-resolution. The challenge consisted of 2 tracks. Track 1 employed synthetic data, where pixel-accurate high-resolution ground truths are available. Track 2 on the other hand used real-world bursts captured from a handheld camera, along with approximately aligned reference images captured using a DSLR. 14 teams participated in the final testing phase. The top performing methods establish a new state-of-the-art on the burst super-resolution task.
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4. |
- Ancuti, Codruta O., et al.
(author)
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NTIRE 2023 HR NonHomogeneous Dehazing Challenge Report
- 2023
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In: 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW). - Vancover : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This study assesses the outcomes of the NTIRE 2023 Challenge on Non-Homogeneous Dehazing, wherein novel techniques were proposed and evaluated on new image dataset called HD-NH-HAZE. The HD-NH-HAZE dataset contains 50 high resolution pairs of real-life outdoor images featuring nonhomogeneous hazy images and corresponding haze-free images of the same scene. The nonhomogeneous haze was simulated using a professional setup that replicated real-world conditions of hazy scenarios. The competition had 246 participants and 17 teams that competed in the final testing phase, and the proposed solutions demonstrated the cutting-edge in image dehazing technology.
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5. |
- Conde, Marcus V., et al.
(author)
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Lens-to-Lens Bokeh Effect Transformation : NTIRE 2023 Challenge Report
- 2023
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In: 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops. - Vancover : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). ; , s. 1643-1659
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- We present the new Bokeh Effect Transformation Dataset (BETD), and review the proposed solutions for this novel task at the NTIRE 2023 Bokeh Effect Transformation Challenge. Recent advancements of mobile photography aim to reach the visual quality of full-frame cameras. Now, a goal in computational photography is to optimize the Bokeh effect itself, which is the aesthetic quality of the blur in out-of-focus areas of an image. Photographers create this aesthetic effect by benefiting from the lens optical properties. The aim of this work is to design a neural network capable of converting the the Bokeh effect of one lens to the effect of another lens without harming the sharp foreground regions in the image. For a given input image, knowing the target lens type, we render or transform the Bokeh effect accordingly to the lens properties. We build the BETD using two full-frame Sony cameras, and diverse lens setups. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first attempt to solve this novel task, and we provide the first BETD dataset and benchmark for it. The challenge had 99 registered participants. The submitted methods gauge the state-of-the-art in Bokeh effect rendering and transformation.
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6. |
- Luo, Ziwei, et al.
(author)
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Image Restoration with Mean-Reverting Stochastic Differential Equations
- 2023
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In: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning. ; , s. 23045-23066
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This paper presents a stochastic differential equation (SDE) approach for general-purpose image restoration. The key construction consists in a mean-reverting SDE that transforms a high-quality image into a degraded counterpart as a mean state with fixed Gaussian noise. Then, by simulating the corresponding reverse-time SDE, we are able to restore the origin of the low-quality image without relying on any task-specific prior knowledge. Crucially, the proposed mean-reverting SDE has a closed-form solution, allowing us to compute the ground truth time-dependent score and learn it with a neural network. Moreover, we propose a maximum likelihood objective to learn an optimal reverse trajectory that stabilizes the training and improves the restoration results. The experiments show that our proposed method achieves highly competitive performance in quantitative comparisons on image deraining, deblurring, and denoising, setting a new state-of-the-art on two deraining datasets. Finally, the general applicability of our approach is further demonstrated via qualitative results on image super-resolution, inpainting, and dehazing. Code is available at https://github.com/Algolzw/image-restoration-sde.
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7. |
- Luo, Ziwei, et al.
(author)
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Refusion : Enabling Large-Size Realistic Image Restoration With Latent-Space Diffusion Models
- 2023
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In: 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW). - : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). ; , s. 1680-1691
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This work aims to improve the applicability of diffusion models in realistic image restoration. Specifically, we enhance the diffusion model in several aspects such as network architecture, noise level, denoising steps, training image size, and optimizer/scheduler. We show that tuning these hyperparameters allows us to achieve better performance on both distortion and perceptual scores. We also propose a U-Net based latent diffusion model which performs diffusion in a low-resolution latent space while preserving high-resolution information from the original input for the decoding process. Compared to the previous latent-diffusion model which trains a VAE-GAN to compress the image, our proposed U-Net compression strategy is significantly more stable and can recover highly accurate images without relying on adversarial optimization. Importantly, these modifications allow us to apply diffusion models to various image restoration tasks, including real-world shadow removal, HR non-homogeneous dehazing, stereo super-resolution, and bokeh effect transformation. By simply replacing the datasets and slightly changing the noise network, our model, named Refusion, is able to deal with large-size images (e.g., 6000 x 4000 x 3 in HR dehazing) and produces good results on all the above restoration problems. Our Refusion achieves the best perceptual performance in the NTIRE 2023 Image Shadow Removal Challenge and wins 2nd place overall.
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8. |
- Vasluianu, Florin -Alexandru, et al.
(author)
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NTIRE 2023 Image Shadow Removal Challenge Report
- 2023
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In: 2023 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW). - Vancover : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). ; , s. 1788-1807
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This work reviews the results of the NTIRE 2023 Challenge on Image Shadow Removal. The described set of solutions were proposed for a novel dataset, which captures a wide range of object-light interactions. It consists of 1200 roughly pixel aligned pairs of real shadow free and shadow affected images, captured in a controlled environment. The data was captured in a white-box setup, using professional equipment for lights and data acquisition. The challenge had a number of 144 participants registered, out of which 19 teams were compared in the final ranking. The proposed solutions extend the work on shadow removal, improving over well-established state-of-the-art methods.
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9. |
- Wang, Longguang, et al.
(author)
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NTIRE 2023 Challenge on Stereo Image Super-Resolution : Methods and Results
- 2023
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In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW). - Vancover : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). - 9798350302493 - 9798350302509 ; , s. 1346-1372
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In this paper, we summarize the 2nd NTIRE challenge on stereo image super-resolution (SR) with a focus on new solutions and results. The task of the challenge is to super-resolve a low-resolution stereo image pair to a high-resolution one with a magnification factor of x4. Compared with single image SR, the major challenge of this challenge lies in how to exploit additional information in another viewpoint and how to maintain stereo consistency in the results. This challenge has 3 tracks, including one track on distortion (e.g., PSNR) and bicubic degradation, one track on perceptual quality (e.g., LPIPS) and bicubic degradation, as well as another track on real degradations. In total, 175, 93, and 103 participants were successfully registered for each track, respectively. In the test phase, 21, 17, and 12 teams successfully submitted results with PSNR (RGB) scores better than the baseline. This challenge establishes a new benchmark for stereo image SR.
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