Deep Neural Network–based Enhancement for Image and Video Streaming Systems: A Survey and Future Directions

Internet-enabled smartphones and ultra-wide displays are transforming a variety of visual apps spanning from on-demand movies and 360° videos to video-conferencing and live streaming. However, robustly delivering visual content under fluctuating networking conditions on devices of diverse capabilities remains an open problem. In recent years, advances in the field of deep learning on tasks such as super-resolution and image enhancement have led to unprecedented performance in generating high-quality images from low-quality ones, a process we refer to as neural enhancement. In this article, we survey state-of-the-art content delivery systems that employ neural enhancement as a key component in achieving both fast response time and high visual quality. We first present the components and architecture of existing content delivery systems, highlighting their challenges and motivating the use of neural enhancement models as a countermeasure. We then cover the deployment challenges of these models and analyze existing systems and their design decisions in efficiently overcoming these technical challenges. Additionally, we underline the key trends and common approaches across systems that target diverse use-cases. Finally, we present promising future directions based on the latest insights from deep learning research to further boost the quality of experience of content delivery systems.

Deep Learning-based Face Super-resolution: A Survey

Face super-resolution (FSR), also known as face hallucination, which is aimed at enhancing the resolution of low-resolution (LR) face images to generate high-resolution face images, is a domain-specific image super-resolution problem. Recently, FSR has received considerable attention and witnessed dazzling advances with the development of deep learning techniques. To date, few summaries of the studies on the deep learning-based FSR are available. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of deep learning-based FSR methods in a systematic manner. First, we summarize the problem formulation of FSR and introduce popular assessment metrics and loss functions. Second, we elaborate on the facial characteristics and popular datasets used in FSR. Third, we roughly categorize existing methods according to the utilization of facial characteristics. In each category, we start with a general description of design principles, present an overview of representative approaches, and then discuss the pros and cons among them. Fourth, we evaluate the performance of some state-of-the-art methods. Fifth, joint FSR and other tasks, and FSR-related applications are roughly introduced. Finally, we envision the prospects of further technological advancement in this field.

Single Image Super-Resolution with Arbitrary Magnification Based on High-Frequency Attention Network

Among various developments in the field of computer vision, single image super-resolution of images is one of the most essential tasks. However, compared to the integer magnification model for super-resolution, research on arbitrary magnification has been overlooked. In addition, the importance of single image super-resolution at arbitrary magnification is emphasized for tasks such as object recognition and satellite image magnification. In this study, we propose a model that performs arbitrary magnification while retaining the advantages of integer magnification. The proposed model extends the integer magnification image to the target magnification in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) spectral domain. The broadening of the DCT spectral domain results in a lack of high-frequency components. To solve this problem, we propose a high-frequency attention network for arbitrary magnification so that high-frequency information can be restored. In addition, only high-frequency components are extracted from the image with a mask generated by a hyperparameter in the DCT domain. Therefore, the high-frequency components that have a substantial impact on image quality are recovered by this procedure. The proposed framework achieves the performance of an integer magnification and correctly retrieves the high-frequency components lost between the arbitrary magnifications. We experimentally validated our model’s superiority over state-of-the-art models.