Jae-Young Sim

An adaptive rain streak removal algorithm for a single image is proposed in this work. We observe that a typical rain streak has an elongated elliptical shape with a vertical orientation. Thus, we first detect rain streak regions by analyzing the rotation angle and the aspect ratio of the elliptical kernel at each pixel location. We then perform the nonlocal means filtering on the detected rain streak regions by selecting nonlocal neighbor pixels and their weights adaptively. Experimental result

A novel algorithm to remove rain or snow streaks from a video sequence using temporal correlation and low-rank matrix completion is proposed in this paper. Based on the observation that rain streaks are too small and move too fast to affect the optical flow estimation between consecutive frames, we obtain an initial rain map by subtracting temporally warped frames from a current frame. Then, we decompose the initial rain map into basis vectors based on the sparse representation, and classify tho

A novel saliency detection algorithm for video sequences based on the random walk with restart (RWR) is proposed in this paper. We adopt RWR to detect spatially and temporally salient regions. More specifically, we first find a temporal saliency distribution using the features of motion distinctiveness, temporal consistency, and abrupt change. Among them, the motion distinctiveness is derived by comparing the motion profiles of image patches. Then, we employ the temporal saliency distribution as

A simple yet effective object descriptor for visual tracking is proposed in this paper. We first decompose the bounding box of a target object into multiple patches, which are described by color and gradient histograms. Then, we concatenate the features of the spatially ordered patches to represent the object appearance. Moreover, to alleviate the impacts of background information possibly included in the bounding box, we determine patch weights using random walk with restart (RWR) simulations.

Image stitching techniques align two images captured at different viewing positions onto a single wider image. When the captured 3D scene is not planar and the camera baseline is large, two images exhibit parallax where the relative positions of scene structures are quite different from each view. The existing image stitching methods often fail to work on the images with large parallax. In this paper, we propose an image stitching algorithm robust to large parallax based on the novel concept of

This work reviews the results of the NTIRE 2021 Challenge on Non-Homogeneous Dehazing. The proposed techniques and their results have been evaluated on a novel dataset that extends the NH-Haze datset. It consists of additional 35 pairs of real haze free and nonhomogeneous hazy images recorded outdoor. The nonhomogeneous haze has been introduced in the outdoor scenes by using a a professional setup that imitates the real conditions of haze scenes. 327 participants registered in the challenge and

A simple and adaptive single image dehazing algorithm is proposed in this work. Based on the observation that a hazy image has low contrast in general, we attempt to restore the original image by enhancing the contrast. First, the proposed algorithm estimates the airlight in a given hazy image based on the quad-tree subdivision. Then, the proposed algorithm estimates the transmission map to maximize the contrast of the output image. To measure the contrast, we develop a cost function, which cons

A graph-based system to simulate the movements and interactions of multiple random walkers (MRW) is proposed in this work. In the MRW system, multiple agents traverse a single graph simultaneously. To achieve desired interactions among those agents, a restart rule can be designed, which determines the restart distribution of each agent according to the probability distributions of all agents. In particular, we develop the repulsive rule for data clustering. We illustrate that the MRW clustering

The images taken through glass often capture a target transmitted scene as well as undesired reflected scenes. In this paper, we propose a low-rank matrix completion algorithm to remove reflection artifacts automatically from multiple glass images taken at slightly different camera locations. We assume that the transmitted scenes are more dominant than the reflected scenes in typical glass images. We first warp the multiple glass images to a reference image, where the gradients are consistent in

In this paper, we propose a graph-based multiscale saliency-detection algorithm by modeling eye movements as a random walk on a graph. The proposed algorithm first extracts intensity, color, and compactness features from an input image. It then constructs a fully connected graph by employing image blocks as the nodes. It assigns a high edge weight if the two connected nodes have dissimilar intensity and color features and if the ending node is more compact than the starting node. Then, the propo

A novel visual tracking algorithm using patch-based appearance models is proposed in this paper. We first divide the bounding box of a target object into multiple patches and then select only pertinent patches, which occur repeatedly near the center of the bounding box, to construct the foreground appearance model. We also divide the input image into non-overlapping blocks, construct a background model at each block location, and integrate these background models for tracking. Using the appearan

Person search suffers from the conflicting objectives of commonness and uniqueness between the person detection and re-identification tasks that make the end-to-end training of person search networks difficult. In this paper, we propose a trident network for person search that performs detection, re-identification, and part classification together. We also devise a novel end-to-end training method using adaptive gradient weighting that controls the flow of backpropagated gradients through the re

In this paper, we summarize the 1st NTIRE challenge on stereo image super-resolution (restoration of rich details in a pair of low-resolution stereo images) with a focus on new solutions and results. This challenge has 1 track aiming at the stereo image super-resolution problem under a standard bicubic degradation. In total, 238 participants were successfully registered, and 21 teams competed in the final testing phase. Among those participants, 20 teams successfully submitted results with PSNR

In this paper, we propose adaptive and flexible quantization and compression algorithms for 3-D point data using vector quantization (VQ) and rate-distortion (R-D) optimization. The point data are composed of the position and the radius of sphere based on QSplat representation. The positions of child spheres are first transformed to the local coordinate system, which is determined by the parent-children relationship. The local coordinate transform makes the positions more compactly distributed i