Spatial omics has transformed our understanding of tissue architecture by preserving spatial context of gene expression patterns. Simultaneously, advances in imaging AI have enabled extraction of morphological features describing the tissue. The intersection of spatial omics and imaging AI presents opportunities for a more holistic understanding. In this review we introduce a framework for categorizing spatial omics-morphology combination methods, focusing on how morphological features can be translated or integrated into spatial omics analyses. By translation we mean finding morphological features that spatially correlate with gene expression patterns with the purpose of predicting gene expression. Such features can be used to generate super-resolution gene expression maps or infer genetic information from clinical H&E-stained samples. By integration we mean finding morphological features that spatially complement gene expression patterns with the purpose of enriching information. Such features can be used to define spatial domains, especially where gene expression has preceded morphological changes and where morphology remains after gene expression. We discuss learning strategies and directions for further development of the field.
Activation functions introduce nonlinearity into deep neural networks. Most popular activation functions allow positive values to pass through while blocking or suppressing negative values. From the idea that positive values and negative values are equally important, and they must compete for activation, we proposed a new Competition-based Adaptive ReLU (CAReLU). CAReLU scales the input values based on the competition results between positive values and negative values. It defines two parameters to adjust the scaling strategy and can be trained uniformly with other network parameters. We verify the effectiveness of CAReLU on image classification, super-resolution, and natural language processing tasks. In the experiment, our method performs better than other widely used activation functions. In the case of replacing ReLU in ResNet-18 with our proposed activation function, it improves the classification accuracy on the CIFAR-100 dataset. The effectiveness and the new perspective on the utilization of competition results between positive values and negative values make CAReLU a promising activation function.
With an increasing share of the electricity grid relying on wind to provide generating capacity and energy, there is an expanding global need for historically accurate high-resolution wind data. Conventional downscaling methods for generating these data have a high computational burden and require extensive tuning for historical accuracy. In this work, we present a novel deep learning-based spatiotemporal downscaling method, using generative adversarial networks (GANs), for generating historically accurate high-resolution wind resource data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting Reanalysis version 5 data (ERA5). We achieve results comparable in historical accuracy and spatiotemporal variability to conventional downscaling by training a GAN model with ERA5 low-resolution input and high-resolution targets from the Wind Integration National Dataset, while reducing computational costs over dynamical downscaling by two orders of magnitude. Spatiotemporal cross-validation shows low error and high correlations with observations and excellent agreement with holdout data across distributions of physical metrics. We apply this approach to downscale 30-km hourly ERA5 data to 2-km 5-minute wind data for January 2000 through December 2023 at multiple hub heights over Eastern Europe. Uncertainty is estimated over the period with observational data by additionally downscaling the members of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting Ensemble of Data Assimilations. Comparisons against observational data from the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System and multiple wind farms show comparable performance to the CONUS validation. This 24-year data record is the first member of the super resolution for renewable energy resource data with wind from reanalysis data dataset (Sup3rWind).
Face super-resolution aims to reconstruct a high-resolution face image from a low-resolution face image. Previous methods typically employ an encoder-decoder structure to extract facial structural features, where the direct downsampling inevitably introduces distortions, especially to high-frequency features such as edges. To address this issue, we propose a wavelet-based feature enhancement network, which mitigates feature distortion by losslessly decomposing the input feature into high and low-frequency components using the wavelet transform and processing them separately. To improve the efficiency of facial feature extraction, a full domain Transformer is further proposed to enhance local, regional, and global facial features. Such designs allow our method to perform better without stacking many modules as previous methods did. Experiments show that our method effectively balances performance, model size, and speed. Code link: https://github.com/PRIS-CV/WFEN.
The Quick-view (QV) technique serves as a primary method for detecting defects within sewerage systems. However, the effectiveness of QV is impeded by the limited visual range of its hardware, resulting in suboptimal image quality for distant portions of the sewer network. Image super-resolution is an effective way to improve image quality and has been applied in a variety of scenes. However, research on super-resolution for sewer images remains considerably unexplored. In response, this study leverages the inherent depth relationships present within QV images and introduces a novel Depth-guided, Reference-based Super-Resolution framework denoted as DSRNet. It comprises two core components: a depth extraction module and a depth information matching module (DMM). DSRNet utilizes the adjacent frames of the low-resolution image as reference images and helps them recover texture information based on the correlation. By combining these modules, the integration of depth priors significantly enhances both visual quality and performance benchmarks. Besides, in pursuit of computational efficiency and compactness, a super-resolution knowledge distillation model based on an attention mechanism is introduced. This mechanism facilitates the acquisition of feature similarity between a more complex teacher model and a streamlined student model, with the latter being a lightweight version of DSRNet. Experimental results demonstrate that DSRNet significantly improves PSNR and SSIM compared with other methods. This study also conducts experiments on sewer defect semantic segmentation, object detection, and classification on the Pipe dataset and Sewer-ML dataset. Experiments show that the method can improve the performance of low-resolution sewer images in these tasks.
The demand for high-resolution videos has been consistently rising across various domains, propelled by continuous advancements in science, technology, and societal. Nonetheless, challenges arising from limitations in imaging equipment capabilities, imaging conditions, as well as economic and temporal factors often result in obtaining low-resolution images in particular situations. Space-time video super-resolution aims to enhance the spatial and temporal resolutions of low-resolution and low-frame-rate videos. The currently available space-time video super-resolution methods often fail to fully exploit the abundant information existing within the spatio-temporal domain. To address this problem, we tackle the issue by conceptualizing the input low-resolution video as a cuboid structure. Drawing on this perspective, we introduce an innovative methodology called "Cuboid-Net," which incorporates a multi-branch convolutional neural network. Cuboid-Net is designed to collectively enhance the spatial and temporal resolutions of videos, enabling the extraction of rich and meaningful information across both spatial and temporal dimensions. Specifically, we take the input video as a cuboid to generate different directional slices as input for different branches of the network. The proposed network contains four modules, i.e., a multi-branch-based hybrid feature extraction (MBFE) module, a multi-branch-based reconstruction (MBR) module, a first stage quality enhancement (QE) module, and a second stage cross frame quality enhancement (CFQE) module for interpolated frames only. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is not only effective for spatial and temporal super-resolution of video but also for spatial and angular super-resolution of light field.
In many applications, including surveillance, entertainment, and restoration, there is a need to increase both the spatial resolution and the frame rate of a video sequence. The aim is to improve visual quality, refine details, and create a more realistic viewing experience. Existing space-time video super-resolution methods do not effectively use spatio-temporal information. To address this limitation, we propose a generative adversarial network for joint space-time video super-resolution. The generative network consists of three operations: shallow feature extraction, deep feature extraction, and reconstruction. It uses three-dimensional (3D) convolutions to process temporal and spatial information simultaneously and includes a novel 3D attention mechanism to extract the most important channel and spatial information. The discriminative network uses a two-branch structure to handle details and motion information, making the generated results more accurate. Experimental results on the Vid4, Vimeo-90K, and REDS datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/FCongRui/3DAttGan.git.
Implicit neural representations (INRs) have significantly advanced the field of arbitrary-scale super-resolution (ASSR) of images. Most existing INR-based ASSR networks first extract features from the given low-resolution image using an encoder, and then render the super-resolved result via a multi-layer perceptron decoder. Although these approaches have shown promising results, their performance is constrained by the limited representation ability of discrete latent codes in the encoded features. In this paper, we propose a novel ASSR method named GaussianSR that overcomes this limitation through 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS). Unlike traditional methods that treat pixels as discrete points, GaussianSR represents each pixel as a continuous Gaussian field. The encoded features are simultaneously refined and upsampled by rendering the mutually stacked Gaussian fields. As a result, long-range dependencies are established to enhance representation ability. In addition, a classifier is developed to dynamically assign Gaussian kernels to all pixels to further improve flexibility. All components of GaussianSR (i.e., encoder, classifier, Gaussian kernels, and decoder) are jointly learned end-to-end. Experiments demonstrate that GaussianSR achieves superior ASSR performance with fewer parameters than existing methods while enjoying interpretable and content-aware feature aggregations.
Recent studies on inverse problems have proposed posterior samplers that leverage the pre-trained diffusion models as powerful priors. These attempts have paved the way for using diffusion models in a wide range of inverse problems. However, the existing methods entail computationally demanding iterative sampling procedures and optimize a separate solution for each measurement, which leads to limited scalability and lack of generalization capability across unseen samples. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach, Diffusion prior-based Amortized Variational Inference (DAVI) that solves inverse problems with a diffusion prior from an amortized variational inference perspective. Specifically, instead of separate measurement-wise optimization, our amortized inference learns a function that directly maps measurements to the implicit posterior distributions of corresponding clean data, enabling a single-step posterior sampling even for unseen measurements. Extensive experiments on image restoration tasks, e.g., Gaussian deblur, 4$\times$ super-resolution, and box inpainting with two benchmark datasets, demonstrate our approach's superior performance over strong baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/DAVI.
Recently, window-based attention methods have shown great potential for computer vision tasks, particularly in Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). However, it may fall short in capturing long-range dependencies and relationships between distant tokens. Additionally, we find that learning on spatial domain does not convey the frequency content of the image, which is a crucial aspect in SISR. To tackle these issues, we propose a new Channel-Partitioned Attention Transformer (CPAT) to better capture long-range dependencies by sequentially expanding windows along the height and width of feature maps. In addition, we propose a novel Spatial-Frequency Interaction Module (SFIM), which incorporates information from spatial and frequency domains to provide a more comprehensive information from feature maps. This includes information about the frequency content and enhances the receptive field across the entire image. Experimental findings show the effectiveness of our proposed modules and architecture. In particular, CPAT surpasses current state-of-the-art methods by up to 0.31dB at x2 SR on Urban100.
Implicit Neural Representation (INR) has gained increasing popularity as a data representation method, serving as a prerequisite for innovative generation models. Unlike gradient-based methods, which exhibit lower efficiency in inference, the adoption of hyper-network for generating parameters in Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP), responsible for executing INR functions, has surfaced as a promising and efficient alternative. However, as a global continuous function, MLP is challenging in modeling highly discontinuous signals, resulting in slow convergence during the training phase and inaccurate reconstruction performance. Moreover, MLP requires massive representation parameters, which implies inefficiencies in data representation. In this paper, we propose a novel Attention-based Localized INR (ANR) composed of a localized attention layer (LAL) and a global MLP that integrates coordinate features with data features and converts them to meaningful outputs. Subsequently, we design an instance representation framework that delivers a transformer-like hyper-network to represent data instances as a compact representation vector. With instance-specific representation vector and instance-agnostic ANR parameters, the target signals are well reconstructed as a continuous function. We further address aliasing artifacts with variational coordinates when obtaining the super-resolution inference results. Extensive experimentation across four datasets showcases the notable efficacy of our ANR method, e.g. enhancing the PSNR value from 37.95dB to 47.25dB on the CelebA dataset. Code is released at https://github.com/Roninton/ANR.
Thermal imaging has a variety of applications, from agricultural monitoring to building inspection to imaging under poor visibility, such as in low light, fog, and rain. However, reconstructing thermal scenes in 3D presents several challenges due to the comparatively lower resolution and limited features present in long-wave infrared (LWIR) images. To overcome these challenges, we propose a unified framework for scene reconstruction from a set of LWIR and RGB images, using a multispectral radiance field to represent a scene viewed by both visible and infrared cameras, thus leveraging information across both spectra. We calibrate the RGB and infrared cameras with respect to each other, as a preprocessing step using a simple calibration target. We demonstrate our method on real-world sets of RGB and LWIR photographs captured from a handheld thermal camera, showing the effectiveness of our method at scene representation across the visible and infrared spectra. We show that our method is capable of thermal super-resolution, as well as visually removing obstacles to reveal objects that are occluded in either the RGB or thermal channels. Please see https://yvette256.github.io/thermalnerf for video results as well as our code and dataset release.
Recent Blind Image Super-Resolution (BSR) methods have shown proficiency in general images. However, we find that the efficacy of recent methods obviously diminishes when employed on image data with blur, while image data with intentional blur constitute a substantial proportion of general data. To further investigate and address this issue, we developed a new super-resolution dataset specifically tailored for blur images, named the Real-world Blur-kept Super-Resolution (ReBlurSR) dataset, which consists of nearly 3000 defocus and motion blur image samples with diverse blur sizes and varying blur intensities. Furthermore, we propose a new BSR framework for blur images called Perceptual-Blur-adaptive Super-Resolution (PBaSR), which comprises two main modules: the Cross Disentanglement Module (CDM) and the Cross Fusion Module (CFM). The CDM utilizes a dual-branch parallelism to isolate conflicting blur and general data during optimization. The CFM fuses the well-optimized prior from these distinct domains cost-effectively and efficiently based on model interpolation. By integrating these two modules, PBaSR achieves commendable performance on both general and blur data without any additional inference and deployment cost and is generalizable across multiple model architectures. Rich experiments show that PBaSR achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics without incurring extra inference costs. Within the widely adopted LPIPS metrics, PBaSR achieves an improvement range of approximately 0.02-0.10 with diverse anchor methods and blur types, across both the ReBlurSR and multiple common general BSR benchmarks. Code here: https://github.com/Imalne/PBaSR.
This paper presents the Multi-scale Disparity Transformer (MDT), a novel Transformer tailored for light field image super-resolution (LFSR) that addresses the issues of computational redundancy and disparity entanglement caused by the indiscriminate processing of sub-aperture images inherent in conventional methods. MDT features a multi-branch structure, with each branch utilising independent disparity self-attention (DSA) to target specific disparity ranges, effectively reducing computational complexity and disentangling disparities. Building on this architecture, we present LF-MDTNet, an efficient LFSR network. Experimental results demonstrate that LF-MDTNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by 0.37 dB and 0.41 dB PSNR at the 2x and 4x scales, achieving superior performance with fewer parameters and higher speed.
Efficient and lightweight single-image super-resolution (SISR) has achieved remarkable performance in recent years. One effective approach is the use of large kernel designs, which have been shown to improve the performance of SISR models while reducing their computational requirements. However, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models still face problems such as high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose the Large Kernel Distillation Network (LKDN) in this paper. Our approach simplifies the model structure and introduces more efficient attention modules to reduce computational costs while also improving performance. Specifically, we employ the reparameterization technique to enhance model performance without adding extra cost. We also introduce a new optimizer from other tasks to SISR, which improves training speed and performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that LKDN outperforms existing lightweight SR methods and achieves SOTA performance.
In real-world video super-resolution (VSR), videos suffer from in-the-wild degradations and artifacts. VSR methods, especially recurrent ones, tend to propagate artifacts over time in the real-world setting and are more vulnerable than image super-resolution. This paper investigates the influence of artifacts on commonly used covariance-based attention mechanisms in VSR. Comparing the widely-used spatial attention, which computes covariance over space, versus the channel attention, we observe that the latter is less sensitive to artifacts. However, channel attention leads to feature redundancy, as evidenced by the higher covariance among output channels. As such, we explore simple techniques such as the squeeze-excite mechanism and covariance-based rescaling to counter the effects of high channel covariance. Based on our findings, we propose RealViformer. This channel-attention-based real-world VSR framework surpasses state-of-the-art on two real-world VSR datasets with fewer parameters and faster runtimes. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yuehan717/RealViformer.
Transformers have revolutionized medical image restoration, but the quadratic complexity still poses limitations for their application to high-resolution medical images. The recent advent of the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) model in the natural language processing field has attracted much attention due to its ability to process long sequences efficiently. To leverage its advanced design, we propose Restore-RWKV, the first RWKV-based model for medical image restoration. Since the original RWKV model is designed for 1D sequences, we make two necessary modifications for modeling spatial relations in 2D medical images. First, we present a recurrent WKV (Re-WKV) attention mechanism that captures global dependencies with linear computational complexity. Re-WKV incorporates bidirectional attention as basic for a global receptive field and recurrent attention to effectively model 2D dependencies from various scan directions. Second, we develop an omnidirectional token shift (Omni-Shift) layer that enhances local dependencies by shifting tokens from all directions and across a wide context range. These adaptations make the proposed Restore-RWKV an efficient and effective model for medical image restoration. Even a lightweight variant of Restore-RWKV, with only 1.16 million parameters, achieves comparable or even superior results compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the resulting Restore-RWKV achieves SOTA performance across a range of medical image restoration tasks, including PET image synthesis, CT image denoising, MRI image super-resolution, and all-in-one medical image restoration. Code is available at: https://github.com/Yaziwel/Restore-RWKV.
Compressed Image Super-resolution (CSR) aims to simultaneously super-resolve the compressed images and tackle the challenging hybrid distortions caused by compression. However, existing works on CSR usually focuses on a single compression codec, i.e., JPEG, ignoring the diverse traditional or learning-based codecs in the practical application, e.g., HEVC, VVC, HIFIC, etc. In this work, we propose the first universal CSR framework, dubbed UCIP, with dynamic prompt learning, intending to jointly support the CSR distortions of any compression codecs/modes. Particularly, an efficient dynamic prompt strategy is proposed to mine the content/spatial-aware task-adaptive contextual information for the universal CSR task, using only a small amount of prompts with spatial size 1x1. To simplify contextual information mining, we introduce the novel MLP-like framework backbone for our UCIP by adapting the Active Token Mixer (ATM) to CSR tasks for the first time, where the global information modeling is only taken in horizontal and vertical directions with offset prediction. We also build an all-in-one benchmark dataset for the CSR task by collecting the datasets with the popular 6 diverse traditional and learning-based codecs, including JPEG, HEVC, VVC, HIFIC, etc., resulting in 23 common degradations. Extensive experiments have shown the consistent and excellent performance of our UCIP on universal CSR tasks. The project can be found in https://lixinustc.github.io/UCIP.github.io
Rendering realistic images from 3D reconstruction is an essential task of many Computer Vision and Robotics pipelines, notably for mixed-reality applications as well as training autonomous agents in simulated environments. However, the quality of novel views heavily depends of the source reconstruction which is often imperfect due to noisy or missing geometry and appearance. Inspired by the recent success of reference-based super-resolution networks, we propose MaRINeR, a refinement method that leverages information of a nearby mapping image to improve the rendering of a target viewpoint. We first establish matches between the raw rendered image of the scene geometry from the target viewpoint and the nearby reference based on deep features, followed by hierarchical detail transfer. We show improved renderings in quantitative metrics and qualitative examples from both explicit and implicit scene representations. We further employ our method on the downstream tasks of pseudo-ground-truth validation, synthetic data enhancement and detail recovery for renderings of reduced 3D reconstructions.
Super-resolution reconstruction techniques entail the utilization of software algorithms to transform one or more sets of low-resolution images captured from the same scene into high-resolution images. In recent years, considerable advancement has been observed in the domain of single-image super-resolution algorithms, particularly those based on deep learning techniques. Nevertheless, the extraction of image features and nonlinear mapping methods in the reconstruction process remain challenging for existing algorithms. These issues result in the network architecture being unable to effectively utilize the diverse range of information at different levels. The loss of high-frequency details is significant, and the final reconstructed image features are overly smooth, with a lack of fine texture details. This negatively impacts the subjective visual quality of the image. The objective is to recover high-quality, high-resolution images from low-resolution images. In this work, an enhanced deep convolutional neural network model is employed, comprising multiple convolutional layers, each of which is configured with specific filters and activation functions to effectively capture the diverse features of the image. Furthermore, a residual learning strategy is employed to accelerate training and enhance the convergence of the network, while sub-pixel convolutional layers are utilized to refine the high-frequency details and textures of the image. The experimental analysis demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed model on multiple public datasets when compared with the traditional bicubic interpolation method and several other learning-based super-resolution methods. Furthermore, it proves the model's efficacy in maintaining image edges and textures.