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In image enhancement tasks, such as low-light and underwater image enhancement, a degraded image can correspond to multiple plausible target images due to dynamic photography conditions, such as variations in illumination. This naturally results in a one-to-many mapping challenge. To address this, we propose a Bayesian Enhancement Model (BEM) that incorporates Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) to capture data uncertainty and produce diverse outputs. To achieve real-time inference, we introduce a two-stage approach: Stage I employs a BNN to model the one-to-many mappings in the low-dimensional space, while Stage II refines fine-grained image details using a Deterministic Neural Network (DNN). To accelerate BNN training and convergence, we introduce a dynamic Momentum Prior. Extensive experiments on multiple low-light and underwater image enhancement benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over deterministic models.

Learning lighting adaption is a key step in obtaining a good visual perception and supporting downstream vision tasks. There are multiple light-related tasks (e.g., image retouching and exposure correction) and previous studies have mainly investigated these tasks individually. However, we observe that the light-related tasks share fundamental properties: i) different color channels have different light properties, and ii) the channel differences reflected in the time and frequency domains are different. Based on the common light property guidance, we propose a Learning Adaptive Lighting Network (LALNet), a unified framework capable of processing different light-related tasks. Specifically, we introduce the color-separated features that emphasize the light difference of different color channels and combine them with the traditional color-mixed features by Light Guided Attention (LGA). The LGA utilizes color-separated features to guide color-mixed features focusing on channel differences and ensuring visual consistency across channels. We introduce dual domain channel modulation to generate color-separated features and a wavelet followed by a vision state space module to generate color-mixed features. Extensive experiments on four representative light-related tasks demonstrate that LALNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark tests and requires fewer computational resources. We provide an anonymous online demo at https://xxxxxx2025.github.io/LALNet/.

Previous tone mapping methods mainly focus on how to enhance tones in low-resolution images and recover details using the high-frequent components extracted from the input image. These methods typically rely on traditional feature pyramids to artificially extract high-frequency components, such as Laplacian and Gaussian pyramids with handcrafted kernels. However, traditional handcrafted features struggle to effectively capture the high-frequency components in HDR images, resulting in excessive smoothing and loss of detail in the output image. To mitigate the above issue, we introduce a learnable Differential Pyramid Representation Network (DPRNet). Based on the learnable differential pyramid, our DPRNet can capture detailed textures and structures, which is crucial for high-quality tone mapping recovery. In addition, to achieve global consistency and local contrast harmonization, we design a global tone perception module and a local tone tuning module that ensure the consistency of global tuning and the accuracy of local tuning, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving PSNR by 2.58 dB in the HDR+ dataset and 3.31 dB in the HDRI Haven dataset respectively compared with the second-best method. Notably, our method exhibits the best generalization ability in the non-homologous image and video tone mapping operation. We provide an anonymous online demo at https://xxxxxx2024.github.io/DPRNet/.

This paper presents a review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge on night photography rendering. The goal of the challenge was to find solutions that process raw camera images taken in nighttime conditions, and thereby produce a photo-quality output images in the standard RGB (sRGB) space. Unlike the previous year's competition, the challenge images were collected with a mobile phone and the speed of algorithms was also measured alongside the quality of their output. To evaluate the results, a sufficient number of viewers were asked to assess the visual quality of the proposed solutions, considering the subjective nature of the task. There were 2 nominations: quality and efficiency. Top 5 solutions in terms of output quality were sorted by evaluation time (see Fig. 1). The top ranking participants' solutions effectively represent the state-of-the-art in nighttime photography rendering. More results can be found at https://nightimaging.org., Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures

Topology optimization (TO) is a powerful method to design innovative structures with improved heat transfer performance. In the present study, a multi-fidelity TO method with a delicately defined objective function is developed for flow boiling heat transfer in microchannels. Low-fidelity TO is conducted for the reduced-order process of single-phase laminar convective heat transfer, which generates a set of structure candidates for subsequent high-fidelity evaluation of flow boiling heat transfer. To avoid the possible iteration between the low-fidelity TO and high-fidelity evaluation which leads to inefficient solution of the multi-fidelity TO, distributions of velocity, temperature and two-phase in microchannels with single-phase and/or flow boiling heat transfer are investigated and compared in detail, based on which a new objective function is delicately defined, which can be employed in the low-fidelity TO yet can stand for the performance of the high-fidelity problem. With the help of the new objective function, the efficiency of the multi-fidelity TO is significantly improved and TO structures are designed with hot spots eliminated, thermal resistance reduced and temperature uniformity improved. The present work provides a new method for TO of complicated heat and mass transfer problems. Keywords: topology optimization, flow boiling, multi-fidelity optimization, microchannels, convective heat transfer

The increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms has led to the widespread development and integration of advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems. However, the scarcity of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). Building on the achievements of the previous MIPI Workshops held at ECCV 2022 and CVPR 2023, we introduce our third MIPI challenge including three tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Nighttime Flare Removal track on MIPI 2024. In total, 170 participants were successfully registered, and 14 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Nighttime Flare Removal. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://mipi-challenge.org/MIPI2024/., Comment: CVPR 2024 Mobile Intelligent Photography and Imaging (MIPI) Workshop--Nighttime Flare Removal Challenge Report. Website: https://mipi-challenge.org/MIPI2024/

Raw low light image enhancement (LLIE) has achieved much better performance than the sRGB domain enhancement methods due to the merits of raw data. However, the ambiguity between noisy to clean and raw to sRGB mappings may mislead the single-stage enhancement networks. The two-stage networks avoid ambiguity by decoupling the two mappings but usually have large computing complexity. To solve this problem, we propose a single-stage network empowered by Feature Domain Adaptation (FDA) to decouple the denoising and color mapping tasks in raw LLIE. The denoising encoder is supervised by the clean raw image, and then the denoised features are adapted for the color mapping task by an FDA module. We propose a Lineformer to serve as the FDA, which can well explore the global and local correlations with fewer line buffers (friendly to the line-based imaging process). During inference, the raw supervision branch is removed. In this way, our network combines the advantage of a two-stage enhancement process with the efficiency of single-stage inference. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer computing costs (60% FLOPs of the two-stage method DNF). Our codes will be released after the acceptance of this work.

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities across a range of tasks. Questions, however, persist about the nature of LLMs and their potential to integrate common-sense human knowledge when performing tasks involving information about the real physical world. This paper delves into these questions by exploring how LLMs can be extended to interact with and reason about the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators, a concept that we term "Penetrative AI". The paper explores such an extension at two levels of LLMs' ability to penetrate into the physical world via the processing of sensory signals. Our preliminary findings indicate that LLMs, with ChatGPT being the representative example in our exploration, have considerable and unique proficiency in employing the embedded world knowledge for interpreting IoT sensor data and reasoning over them about tasks in the physical realm. Not only this opens up new applications for LLMs beyond traditional text-based tasks, but also enables new ways of incorporating human knowledge in cyber-physical systems., Comment: ACL Findings 2024

The proliferation of edge devices and the rapid growth of IoT data have called forth the edge computing paradigm. Function-as-a-service (FaaS) is a promising computing paradigm to realize edge computing. This paper explores the feasibility and advantages of FaaS-based edge computing. It also studies the research challenges that should be addressed in the design of such systems, which are 1) the quick decomposing and recomposing of applications, 2) the trade-off between performance and isolation of sandbox mechanisms, and 3) distributed scheduling. The challenges are illustrated by evaluating existing FaaS-based edge platforms, AWS IoT Greengrass, and OpenFaaS.

NVMe SSD caching has demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving cloud block storage's I/O bottleneck and enhancing application performance in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. However, traditional host-side caching solutions have several serious limitations. First, the cache cannot be shared across hosts, leading to low cache utilization. Second, the commonly-used fix-sized cache block allocation mechanism is unable to provide good cache performance with low memory overhead for diverse cloud workloads with vastly different I/O patterns. This paper presents AdaCache, a novel userspace disaggregated cache system that utilizes adaptive cache block allocation for cloud block storage. First, AdaCache proposes an innovative adaptive cache block allocation scheme that allocates cache blocks based on the request size to achieve both good cache performance and low memory overhead. Second, AdaCache proposes a group-based cache organization that stores cache blocks into groups to solve the fragmentation problem brought by variable-sized cache blocks. Third, AdaCache designs a two-level cache replacement policy that replaces cache blocks in both single blocks and groups to improve the hit ratio. Experimental results with real-world traces show that AdaCache can substantially improve I/O performance and reduce storage access caused by cache miss with a much lower memory usage compared to traditional fix-sized cache systems.

The widespread usage of high-definition screens on edge devices stimulates a strong demand for efficient high dynamic range (HDR) algorithms. However, many existing HDR methods either deliver unsatisfactory results or consume too much computational and memory resources, hindering their application to high-resolution images (usually with more than 12 megapixels) in practice. In addition, existing HDR dataset collection methods often are labor-intensive. In this work, in a new aspect, we discover an excellent opportunity for HDR reconstructing directly from raw images and investigating novel neural network structures that benefit the deployment of mobile devices. Our key insights are threefold: (1) we develop a lightweight-efficient HDR model, RepUNet, using the structural re-parameterization technique to achieve fast and robust HDR; (2) we design a new computational raw HDR data formation pipeline and construct a real-world raw HDR dataset, RealRaw-HDR; (3) we propose a plug-and-play motion alignment loss to mitigate motion ghosting under limited bandwidth conditions. Our model contains less than 830K parameters and takes less than 3 ms to process an image of 4K resolution using one RTX 3090 GPU. While being highly efficient, our model also outperforms the state-of-the-art HDR methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and a color difference metric.

The rapid growth of data generated from Internet of Things (IoTs) such as smart phones and smart home devices presents new challenges to cloud computing in transferring, storing, and processing the data. With increasingly more powerful edge devices, edge computing, on the other hand, has the potential to better responsiveness, privacy, and cost efficiency. However, resources across the cloud and edge are highly distributed and highly diverse. To address these challenges, this paper proposes EdgeFaaS, a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) based computing framework that supports the flexible, convenient, and optimized use of distributed and heterogeneous resources across IoT, edge, and cloud systems. EdgeFaaS allows cluster resources and individual devices to be managed under the same framework and provide computational and storage resources for functions. It provides virtual function and virtual storage interfaces for consistent function management and storage management across heterogeneous compute and storage resources. It automatically optimizes the scheduling of functions and placement of data according to their performance and privacy requirements. EdgeFaaS is evaluated based on two edge workflows: video analytics workflow and federated learning workflow, both of which are representative edge applications and involve large amounts of input data generated from edge devices.

We use first-principles simulation and virtual crystal approximation to reveal the unique double band inversion and topological phase transition in Ge1-xSnx alloys. Wavefunction parity, spatial charge distribution and surface state spectrum analyses suggest that the band inversion in Ge1-xSnx is relayed by its first valence band. As the system evolves from Ge to {\alpha}-Sn, its conduction band moves down, and inverts with the first and the second valence bands consecutively. The first band inversion makes the system nontrivial, while the second one does not change the topological invariant of the system. Both the band inversions yield surface modes spanning the individual inverted gaps, but only the surface mode in the upper gap associates with the nontrivial nature of tensile-strained {\alpha}-Sn., Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures

Edge computing has been developed to utilize multiple tiers of resources for privacy, cost and Quality of Service (QoS) reasons. Edge workloads have the characteristics of data-driven and latency-sensitive. Because of this, edge systems have developed to be both heterogeneous and distributed. The unique characteristics of edge workloads and edge systems have motivated EdgeBench, a workflow-based benchmark aims to provide the ability to explore the full design space of edge workloads and edge systems. EdgeBench is both customizable and representative. It allows users to customize the workflow logic of edge workloads, the data storage backends, and the distribution of the individual workflow stages to different computing tiers. To illustrate the usability of EdgeBench, we also implements two representative edge workflows, a video analytics workflow and an IoT hub workflow that represents two distinct but common edge workloads. Both workflows are evaluated using the workflow-level and function-level metrics reported by EdgeBench to illustrate both the performance bottlenecks of the edge systems and the edge workloads.

This paper is the report of the first Under-Display Camera (UDC) image restoration challenge in conjunction with the RLQ workshop at ECCV 2020. The challenge is based on a newly-collected database of Under-Display Camera. The challenge tracks correspond to two types of display: a 4k Transparent OLED (T-OLED) and a phone Pentile OLED (P-OLED). Along with about 150 teams registered the challenge, eight and nine teams submitted the results during the testing phase for each track. The results in the paper are state-of-the-art restoration performance of Under-Display Camera Restoration. Datasets and paper are available at https://yzhouas.github.io/projects/UDC/udc.html., Comment: 15 pages