Image and Video Processing (eess.IV)

Abstract: Image segmentation is a branch of computer vision that is widely used in real world applications including biomedical image processing. With recent advancement of deep learning, image segmentation has achieved at a very high level performance. Recently, UNet architecture is found as the core of novel deep learning segmentation methods. In this paper we implement UNet architecture from scratch with using basic blocks in Pytorch and evaluate its performance on multiple biomedical image datasets. We also use transfer learning to apply novel modified UNet segmentation packages on the biomedical image datasets. We fine tune the pre-trained transferred model with each specific dataset. We compare its performance with our fundamental UNet implementation. We show that transferred learning model has better performance in image segmentation than UNet model that is implemented from scratch.

Abstract: This paper uses a crowdsourced dataset of online video streaming sessions to investigate opportunities to reduce the power consumption while considering QoE. For this, we base our work on prior studies which model both the end-user's QoE and the end-user device's power consumption with the help of high-level video features such as the bitrate, the frame rate, and the resolution. On top of existing research, which focused on reducing the power consumption at the same QoE optimizing video parameters, we investigate potential power savings by other means such as using a different playback device, a different codec, or a predefined maximum quality level. We find that based on the power consumption of the streaming sessions from the crowdsourcing dataset, devices could save more than 55% of power if all participants adhere to low-power settings.

Abstract: Diffusion models, as a kind of powerful generative model, have given impressive results on image super-resolution (SR) tasks. However, due to the randomness introduced in the reverse process of diffusion models, the performances of diffusion-based SR models are fluctuating at every time of sampling, especially for samplers with few resampled steps. This inherent randomness of diffusion models results in ineffectiveness and instability, making it challenging for users to guarantee the quality of SR results. However, our work takes this randomness as an opportunity: fully analyzing and leveraging it leads to the construction of an effective plug-and-play sampling method that owns the potential to benefit a series of diffusion-based SR methods. More in detail, we propose to steadily sample high-quality SR images from pretrained diffusion-based SR models by solving diffusion ordinary differential equations (diffusion ODEs) with optimal boundary conditions (BCs) and analyze the characteristics between the choices of BCs and their corresponding SR results. Our analysis shows the route to obtain an approximately optimal BC via an efficient exploration in the whole space. The quality of SR results sampled by the proposed method with fewer steps outperforms the quality of results sampled by current methods with randomness from the same pretrained diffusion-based SR model, which means that our sampling method ``boosts'' current diffusion-based SR models without any additional training.