Boundary-aware Decoupled Flow Networks for Realistic Extreme Rescaling

Boundary-aware Decoupled Flow Networks for Realistic Extreme Rescaling

Jinmin Li, Tao Dai, Jingyun Zhang, Kang Liu, Jun Wang, Shaoming Wang, Shu-Tao Xia, Rizen Guo

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 992-1000. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/110

Recently developed generative methods, including invertible rescaling network (IRN) based and generative adversarial network (GAN) based methods, have demonstrated exceptional performance in image rescaling. However, IRN-based methods tend to produce over-smoothed results, while GAN-based methods easily generate fake details, which thus hinders their real applications. To address this issue, we propose Boundary-aware Decoupled Flow Networks (BDFlow) to generate realistic and visually pleasing results. Unlike previous methods that model high-frequency information as standard Gaussian distribution directly, our BDFlow first decouples the high-frequency information into semantic high-frequency that adheres to a Boundary distribution and non-semantic high-frequency counterpart that adheres to a Gaussian distribution. Specifically, to capture semantic high-frequency parts accurately, we use Boundary-aware Mask (BAM) to constrain the model to produce rich textures, while non-semantic high-frequency part is randomly sampled from a Gaussian distribution. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our BDFlow significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods while maintaining lower complexity. Notably, our BDFlow improves the PSNR by 4.4 dB and the SSIM by 0.1 on average over GRAIN, utilizing only 74% of the parameters and 20% of the computation. The code will be available at https://github.com/THU-Kingmin/BAFlow.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Image and video synthesis and generation 
Computer Vision: CV: Applications