arXiv subjects

Jean-François Lalonde

Publications and source records attributed to Jean-François Lalonde.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Towards a Perceptual Evaluation Framework for Lighting Estimation

Progress in lighting estimation is tracked by computing existing image quality assessment (IQA) metrics on images from standard datasets. While this may appear to be a reasonable approach, we demonstrate that doing so does not correlate to human preference when the estimated lighting is used to relight a virtual scene into a real photograph. To study this, we design a controlled psychophysical experiment where human observers must choose their preference amongst rendered scenes lit using a set of lighting estimation algorithms selected from the recent literature, and use it to analyse how these algorithms perform according to human perception. Then, we demonstrate that none of the most popular IQA metrics from the literature, taken individually, correctly represent human perception. Finally, we show that by learning a combination of existing IQA metrics, we can more accurately represent human preference. This provides a new perceptual framework to help evaluate future lighting estimation algorithms.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Beyond the Pixel: a Photometrically Calibrated HDR Dataset for Luminance and Color Prediction

Light plays an important role in human well-being. However, most computer vision tasks treat pixels without considering their relationship to physical luminance. To address this shortcoming, we introduce the Laval Photometric Indoor HDR Dataset, the first large-scale photometrically calibrated dataset of high dynamic range 360° panoramas. Our key contribution is the calibration of an existing, uncalibrated HDR Dataset. We do so by accurately capturing RAW bracketed exposures simultaneously with a professional photometric measurement device (chroma meter) for multiple scenes across a variety of lighting conditions. Using the resulting measurements, we establish the calibration coefficients to be applied to the HDR images. The resulting dataset is a rich representation of indoor scenes which displays a wide range of illuminance and color, and varied types of light sources. We exploit the dataset to introduce three novel tasks, where: per-pixel luminance, per-pixel color and planar illuminance can be predicted from a single input image. Finally, we also capture another smaller photometric dataset with a commercial 360° camera, to experiment on generalization across cameras. We are optimistic that the release of our datasets and associated code will spark interest in physically accurate light estimation within the community. Dataset and code are available at https://lvsn.github.io/beyondthepixel/.

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arXiv2023

EverLight: Indoor-Outdoor Editable HDR Lighting Estimation

Because of the diversity in lighting environments, existing illumination estimation techniques have been designed explicitly on indoor or outdoor environments. Methods have focused specifically on capturing accurate energy (e.g., through parametric lighting models), which emphasizes shading and strong cast shadows; or producing plausible texture (e.g., with GANs), which prioritizes plausible reflections. Approaches which provide editable lighting capabilities have been proposed, but these tend to be with simplified lighting models, offering limited realism. In this work, we propose to bridge the gap between these recent trends in the literature, and propose a method which combines a parametric light model with 360° panoramas, ready to use as HDRI in rendering engines. We leverage recent advances in GAN-based LDR panorama extrapolation from a regular image, which we extend to HDR using parametric spherical gaussians. To achieve this, we introduce a novel lighting co-modulation method that injects lighting-related features throughout the generator, tightly coupling the original or edited scene illumination within the panorama generation process. In our representation, users can easily edit light direction, intensity, number, etc. to impact shading while providing rich, complex reflections while seamlessly blending with the edits. Furthermore, our method encompasses indoor and outdoor environments, demonstrating state-of-the-art results even when compared to domain-specific methods.

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arXiv2023

A Deep Perceptual Measure for Lens and Camera Calibration

Image editing and compositing have become ubiquitous in entertainment, from digital art to AR and VR experiences. To produce beautiful composites, the camera needs to be geometrically calibrated, which can be tedious and requires a physical calibration target. In place of the traditional multi-image calibration process, we propose to infer the camera calibration parameters such as pitch, roll, field of view, and lens distortion directly from a single image using a deep convolutional neural network. We train this network using automatically generated samples from a large-scale panorama dataset, yielding competitive accuracy in terms of standard `2 error. However, we argue that minimizing such standard error metrics might not be optimal for many applications. In this work, we investigate human sensitivity to inaccuracies in geometric camera calibration. To this end, we conduct a large-scale human perception study where we ask participants to judge the realism of 3D objects composited with correct and biased camera calibration parameters. Based on this study, we develop a new perceptual measure for camera calibration and demonstrate that our deep calibration network outperforms previous single-image based calibration methods both on standard metrics as well as on this novel perceptual measure. Finally, we demonstrate the use of our calibration network for several applications, including virtual object insertion, image retrieval, and compositing. A demonstration of our approach is available at https://lvsn.github.io/deepcalib .

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arXiv2023

Robust Unsupervised StyleGAN Image Restoration

GAN-based image restoration inverts the generative process to repair images corrupted by known degradations. Existing unsupervised methods must be carefully tuned for each task and degradation level. In this work, we make StyleGAN image restoration robust: a single set of hyperparameters works across a wide range of degradation levels. This makes it possible to handle combinations of several degradations, without the need to retune. Our proposed approach relies on a 3-phase progressive latent space extension and a conservative optimizer, which avoids the need for any additional regularization terms. Extensive experiments demonstrate robustness on inpainting, upsampling, denoising, and deartifacting at varying degradations levels, outperforming other StyleGAN-based inversion techniques. Our approach also favorably compares to diffusion-based restoration by yielding much more realistic inversion results. Code is available at https://lvsn.github.io/RobustUnsupervised/.

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arXiv2023

Domain Agnostic Image-to-image Translation using Low-Resolution Conditioning

Generally, image-to-image translation (i2i) methods aim at learning mappings across domains with the assumption that the images used for translation share content (e.g., pose) but have their own domain-specific information (a.k.a. style). Conditioned on a target image, such methods extract the target style and combine it with the source image content, keeping coherence between the domains. In our proposal, we depart from this traditional view and instead consider the scenario where the target domain is represented by a very low-resolution (LR) image, proposing a domain-agnostic i2i method for fine-grained problems, where the domains are related. More specifically, our domain-agnostic approach aims at generating an image that combines visual features from the source image with low-frequency information (e.g. pose, color) of the LR target image. To do so, we present a novel approach that relies on training the generative model to produce images that both share distinctive information of the associated source image and correctly match the LR target image when downscaled. We validate our method on the CelebA-HQ and AFHQ datasets by demonstrating improvements in terms of visual quality. Qualitative and quantitative results show that when dealing with intra-domain image translation, our method generates realistic samples compared to state-of-the-art methods such as StarGAN v2. Ablation studies also reveal that our method is robust to changes in color, it can be applied to out-of-distribution images, and it allows for manual control over the final results.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2023

The Differentiable Lens: Compound Lens Search over Glass Surfaces and Materials for Object Detection

Most camera lens systems are designed in isolation, separately from downstream computer vision methods. Recently, joint optimization approaches that design lenses alongside other components of the image acquisition and processing pipeline -- notably, downstream neural networks -- have achieved improved imaging quality or better performance on vision tasks. However, these existing methods optimize only a subset of lens parameters and cannot optimize glass materials given their categorical nature. In this work, we develop a differentiable spherical lens simulation model that accurately captures geometrical aberrations. We propose an optimization strategy to address the challenges of lens design -- notorious for non-convex loss function landscapes and many manufacturing constraints -- that are exacerbated in joint optimization tasks. Specifically, we introduce quantized continuous glass variables to facilitate the optimization and selection of glass materials in an end-to-end design context, and couple this with carefully designed constraints to support manufacturability. In automotive object detection, we report improved detection performance over existing designs even when simplifying designs to two- or three-element lenses, despite significantly degrading the image quality.

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arXiv2023

LM-GAN: A Photorealistic All-Weather Parametric Sky Model

We present LM-GAN, an HDR sky model that generates photorealistic environment maps with weathered skies. Our sky model retains the flexibility of traditional parametric models and enables the reproduction of photorealistic all-weather skies with visual diversity in cloud formations. This is achieved with flexible and intuitive user controls for parameters, including sun position, sky color, and atmospheric turbidity. Our method is trained directly from inputs fitted to real HDR skies, learning both to preserve the input's illumination and correlate it to the real reference's atmospheric components in an end-to-end manner. Our main contributions are a generative model trained on both sky appearance and scene rendering losses, as well as a novel sky-parameter fitting algorithm. We demonstrate that our fitting algorithm surpasses existing approaches in both accuracy and sky fidelity, and also provide quantitative and qualitative analyses, demonstrating LM-GAN's ability to match parametric input to photorealistic all-weather skies. The generated HDR environment maps are ready to use in 3D rendering engines and can be applied to a wide range of image-based lighting applications.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2022

Editable Indoor Lighting Estimation

We present a method for estimating lighting from a single perspective image of an indoor scene. Previous methods for predicting indoor illumination usually focus on either simple, parametric lighting that lack realism, or on richer representations that are difficult or even impossible to understand or modify after prediction. We propose a pipeline that estimates a parametric light that is easy to edit and allows renderings with strong shadows, alongside with a non-parametric texture with high-frequency information necessary for realistic rendering of specular objects. Once estimated, the predictions obtained with our model are interpretable and can easily be modified by an artist/user with a few mouse clicks. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our approach makes indoor lighting estimation easier to handle by a casual user, while still producing competitive results.

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arXiv2022

Casual Indoor HDR Radiance Capture from Omnidirectional Images

We present PanoHDR-NeRF, a neural representation of the full HDR radiance field of an indoor scene, and a pipeline to capture it casually, without elaborate setups or complex capture protocols. First, a user captures a low dynamic range (LDR) omnidirectional video of the scene by freely waving an off-the-shelf camera around the scene. Then, an LDR2HDR network uplifts the captured LDR frames to HDR, which are used to train a tailored NeRF++ model. The resulting PanoHDR-NeRF can render full HDR images from any location of the scene. Through experiments on a novel test dataset of real scenes with the ground truth HDR radiance captured at locations not seen during training, we show that PanoHDR-NeRF predicts plausible HDR radiance from any scene point. We also show that the predicted radiance can synthesize correct lighting effects, enabling the augmentation of indoor scenes with synthetic objects that are lit correctly. Datasets and code are available at https://lvsn.github.io/PanoHDR-NeRF/.

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arXiv2022

Guided Co-Modulated GAN for 360° Field of View Extrapolation

We propose a method to extrapolate a 360° field of view from a single image that allows for user-controlled synthesis of the out-painted content. To do so, we propose improvements to an existing GAN-based in-painting architecture for out-painting panoramic image representation. Our method obtains state-of-the-art results and outperforms previous methods on standard image quality metrics. To allow controlled synthesis of out-painting, we introduce a novel guided co-modulation framework, which drives the image generation process with a common pretrained discriminative model. Doing so maintains the high visual quality of generated panoramas while enabling user-controlled semantic content in the extrapolated field of view. We demonstrate the state-of-the-art results of our method on field of view extrapolation both qualitatively and quantitatively, providing thorough analysis of our novel editing capabilities. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach benefits the photorealistic virtual insertion of highly glossy objects in photographs.

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arXiv2022

Robust Scene Inference under Noise-Blur Dual Corruptions

Scene inference under low-light is a challenging problem due to severe noise in the captured images. One way to reduce noise is to use longer exposure during the capture. However, in the presence of motion (scene or camera motion), longer exposures lead to motion blur, resulting in loss of image information. This creates a trade-off between these two kinds of image degradations: motion blur (due to long exposure) vs. noise (due to short exposure), also referred as a dual image corruption pair in this paper. With the rise of cameras capable of capturing multiple exposures of the same scene simultaneously, it is possible to overcome this trade-off. Our key observation is that although the amount and nature of degradation varies for these different image captures, the semantic content remains the same across all images. To this end, we propose a method to leverage these multi exposure captures for robust inference under low-light and motion. Our method builds on a feature consistency loss to encourage similar results from these individual captures, and uses the ensemble of their final predictions for robust visual recognition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on simulated images as well as real captures with multiple exposures, and across the tasks of object detection and image classification.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

ManiFest: Manifold Deformation for Few-shot Image Translation

Most image-to-image translation methods require a large number of training images, which restricts their applicability. We instead propose ManiFest: a framework for few-shot image translation that learns a context-aware representation of a target domain from a few images only. To enforce feature consistency, our framework learns a style manifold between source and proxy anchor domains (assumed to be composed of large numbers of images). The learned manifold is interpolated and deformed towards the few-shot target domain via patch-based adversarial and feature statistics alignment losses. All of these components are trained simultaneously during a single end-to-end loop. In addition to the general few-shot translation task, our approach can alternatively be conditioned on a single exemplar image to reproduce its specific style. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of ManiFest on multiple tasks, outperforming the state-of-the-art on all metrics and in both the general- and exemplar-based scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/cv-rits/Manifest .

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arXiv2022

Overparameterization Improves StyleGAN Inversion

Deep generative models like StyleGAN hold the promise of semantic image editing: modifying images by their content, rather than their pixel values. Unfortunately, working with arbitrary images requires inverting the StyleGAN generator, which has remained challenging so far. Existing inversion approaches obtain promising yet imperfect results, having to trade-off between reconstruction quality and downstream editability. To improve quality, these approaches must resort to various techniques that extend the model latent space after training. Taking a step back, we observe that these methods essentially all propose, in one way or another, to increase the number of free parameters. This suggests that inversion might be difficult because it is underconstrained. In this work, we address this directly and dramatically overparameterize the latent space, before training, with simple changes to the original StyleGAN architecture. Our overparameterization increases the available degrees of freedom, which in turn facilitates inversion. We show that this allows us to obtain near-perfect image reconstruction without the need for encoders nor for altering the latent space after training. Our approach also retains editability, which we demonstrate by realistically interpolating between images.

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arXiv2022

Matching Feature Sets for Few-Shot Image Classification

In image classification, it is common practice to train deep networks to extract a single feature vector per input image. Few-shot classification methods also mostly follow this trend. In this work, we depart from this established direction and instead propose to extract sets of feature vectors for each image. We argue that a set-based representation intrinsically builds a richer representation of images from the base classes, which can subsequently better transfer to the few-shot classes. To do so, we propose to adapt existing feature extractors to instead produce sets of feature vectors from images. Our approach, dubbed SetFeat, embeds shallow self-attention mechanisms inside existing encoder architectures. The attention modules are lightweight, and as such our method results in encoders that have approximately the same number of parameters as their original versions. During training and inference, a set-to-set matching metric is used to perform image classification. The effectiveness of our proposed architecture and metrics is demonstrated via thorough experiments on standard few-shot datasets -- namely miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, and CUB -- in both the 1- and 5-shot scenarios. In all cases but one, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Mixture-based Feature Space Learning for Few-shot Image Classification

We introduce Mixture-based Feature Space Learning (MixtFSL) for obtaining a rich and robust feature representation in the context of few-shot image classification. Previous works have proposed to model each base class either with a single point or with a mixture model by relying on offline clustering algorithms. In contrast, we propose to model base classes with mixture models by simultaneously training the feature extractor and learning the mixture model parameters in an online manner. This results in a richer and more discriminative feature space which can be employed to classify novel examples from very few samples. Two main stages are proposed to train the MixtFSL model. First, the multimodal mixtures for each base class and the feature extractor parameters are learned using a combination of two loss functions. Second, the resulting network and mixture models are progressively refined through a leader-follower learning procedure, which uses the current estimate as a "target" network. This target network is used to make a consistent assignment of instances to mixture components, which increases performance and stabilizes training. The effectiveness of our end-to-end feature space learning approach is demonstrated with extensive experiments on four standard datasets and four backbones. Notably, we demonstrate that when we combine our robust representation with recent alignment-based approaches, we achieve new state-of-the-art results in the inductive setting, with an absolute accuracy for 5-shot classification of 82.45 on miniImageNet, 88.20 with tieredImageNet, and 60.70 in FC100 using the ResNet-12 backbone.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Image-to-Image Translation with Low Resolution Conditioning

Most image-to-image translation methods focus on learning mappings across domains with the assumption that images share content (e.g., pose) but have their own domain-specific information known as style. When conditioned on a target image, such methods aim to extract the style of the target and combine it with the content of the source image. In this work, we consider the scenario where the target image has a very low resolution. More specifically, our approach aims at transferring fine details from a high resolution (HR) source image to fit a coarse, low resolution (LR) image representation of the target. We therefore generate HR images that share features from both HR and LR inputs. This differs from previous methods that focus on translating a given image style into a target content, our translation approach being able to simultaneously imitate the style and merge the structural information of the LR target. Our approach relies on training the generative model to produce HR target images that both 1) share distinctive information of the associated source image; 2) correctly match the LR target image when downscaled. We validate our method on the CelebA-HQ and AFHQ datasets by demonstrating improvements in terms of visual quality, diversity and coverage. Qualitative and quantitative results show that when dealing with intra-domain image translation, our method generates more realistic samples compared to state-of-the-art methods such as Stargan-v2

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Deep Template-based Object Instance Detection

Much of the focus in the object detection literature has been on the problem of identifying the bounding box of a particular class of object in an image. Yet, in contexts such as robotics and augmented reality, it is often necessary to find a specific object instance---a unique toy or a custom industrial part for example---rather than a generic object class. Here, applications can require a rapid shift from one object instance to another, thus requiring fast turnaround which affords little-to-no training time. What is more, gathering a dataset and training a model for every new object instance to be detected can be an expensive and time-consuming process. In this context, we propose a generic 2D object instance detection approach that uses example viewpoints of the target object at test time to retrieve its 2D location in RGB images, without requiring any additional training (i.e. fine-tuning) step. To this end, we present an end-to-end architecture that extracts global and local information of the object from its viewpoints. The global information is used to tune early filters in the backbone while local viewpoints are correlated with the input image. Our method offers an improvement of almost 30 mAP over the previous template matching methods on the challenging Occluded Linemod dataset (overall mAP of 50.7). Our experiments also show that our single generic model (not trained on any of the test objects) yields detection results that are on par with approaches that are trained specifically on the target objects.

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