Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection aims at separating small targets from clutter backgrounds. With the advances of deep learning, CNN-based methods have yielded promising results in generic object detection due to their powerful modeling capability. However, existing CNN-based methods cannot be directly applied to infrared small targets since pooling layers in their networks could lead to the loss of targets in deep layers. To handle this problem, we propose a dense nested attention network (DNA-Net) in this paper. Specifically, we design a dense nested interactive module (DNIM) to achieve progressive interaction among high-level and low-level features. With the repetitive interaction in DNIM, the information of infrared small targets in deep layers can be maintained. Based on DNIM, we further propose a cascaded channel and spatial attention module (CSAM) to adaptively enhance multi-level features. With our DNA-Net, contextual information of small targets can be well incorporated and fully exploited by repetitive fusion and enhancement. Moreover, we develop an infrared small target dataset (namely, NUDT-SIRST) and propose a set of evaluation metrics to conduct comprehensive performance evaluation. Experiments on both public and our self-developed datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves better performance in terms of probability of detection (P_d), false-alarm rate (F_a), and intersection of union (I_oU).

Video super-resolution (SR) aims at generating a sequence of high-resolution (HR) frames with plausible and temporally consistent details from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts. The key challenge for video SR lies in the effective exploitation of temporal dependency between consecutive frames. Existing deep learning based methods commonly estimate optical flows between LR frames to provide temporal dependency. However, the resolution conflict between LR optical flows and HR outputs hinders the recovery of fine details. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end video SR network to super-resolve both optical flows and images. Optical flow SR from LR frames provides accurate temporal dependency and ultimately improves video SR performance. Specifically, we first propose an optical flow reconstruction network (OFRnet) to infer HR optical flows in a coarse-to-fine manner. Then, motion compensation is performed using HR optical flows to encode temporal dependency. Finally, compensated LR inputs are fed to a super-resolution network (SRnet) to generate SR results. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of HR optical flows for SR performance improvement. Comparative results on the Vid4 and DAVIS-10 datasets show that our network achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Light field (LF) image super-resolution (SR) aims at reconstructing high-resolution LF images from their low-resolution counterparts. Although CNN-based methods have achieved remarkable performance in LF image SR, these methods cannot fully model the non-local properties of the 4D LF data. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective Transformer-based method for LF image SR. In our method, an angular Transformer is designed to incorporate complementary information among different views, and a spatial Transformer is developed to capture both local and long-range dependencies within each sub-aperture image. With the proposed angular and spatial Transformers, the beneficial information in an LF can be fully exploited and the SR performance is boosted. We validate the effectiveness of our angular and spatial Transformers through extensive ablation studies, and compare our method to recent state-of-the-art methods on five public LF datasets. Our method achieves superior SR performance with a small model size and low computational cost. Code is available at. ¹

Light field (LF) cameras can record scenes from multiple perspectives, and thus introduce beneficial angular information for image super-resolution (SR). However, it is challenging to incorporate angular information due to disparities among LF images. In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution network (i.e., LF-DFnet) to handle the disparity problem for LF image SR. Specifically, we design an angular deformable alignment module (ADAM) for feature-level alignment. Based on ADAM, we further propose a collect-and-distribute approach to perform bidirectional alignment between the center-view feature and each side-view feature. Using our approach, angular information can be well incorporated and encoded into features of each view, which benefits the SR reconstruction of all LF images. Moreover, we develop a baseline-adjustable LF dataset to evaluate SR performance under different disparity variations. Experiments on both public and our self-developed datasets have demonstrated the superiority of our method. Our LF-DFnet can generate high-resolution images with more faithful details and achieve state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy. Besides, our LF-DFnet is more robust to disparity variations, which has not been well addressed in literature.

The spatio-temporal information among video sequences is significant for video super-resolution (SR). However, the spatio-temporal information cannot be fully used by existing video SR methods since spatial feature extraction and temporal motion compensation are usually performed sequentially. In this paper, we propose a deformable 3D convolution network (D3Dnet) to incorporate spatio-temporal information from both spatial and temporal dimensions for video SR. Specifically, we introduce deformable 3D convolution (D3D) to integrate deformable convolution with 3D convolution, obtaining both superior spatio-temporal modeling capability and motion-aware modeling flexibility. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of D3D in exploiting spatio-temporal information. Comparative results show that our network achieves state-of-the-art SR performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/XinyiYing/D3Dnet.

Light field (LF) cameras record both intensity and directions of light rays, and encode 3D scenes into 4D LF images. Recently, many convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been proposed for various LF image processing tasks. However, it is challenging for CNNs to effectively process LF images since the spatial and angular information are highly inter-twined with varying disparities. In this paper, we propose a generic mechanism to disentangle these coupled information for LF image processing. Specifically, we first design a class of domain-specific convolutions to disentangle LFs from different dimensions, and then leverage these disentangled features by designing task-specific modules. Our disentangling mechanism can well incorporate the LF structure prior and effectively handle 4D LF data. Based on the proposed mechanism, we develop three networks (i.e., DistgSSR, DistgASR and DistgDisp) for spatial super-resolution, angular super-resolution and disparity estimation. Experimental results show that our networks achieve state-of-the-art performance on all these three tasks, which demonstrates the effectiveness, efficiency, and generality of our disentangling mechanism. Project page: https://yingqianwang.github.io/DistgLF/ .