WESPE: Weakly Supervised Photo Enhancer for Digital Cameras
Low-end and compact mobile cameras demonstrate limited photo quality mainly due to space, hardware and budget constraints. In this work, we propose a deep learning solution that translates photos taken by cameras with limited capabilities into DSLR-quality photos automatically. We tackle this problem by introducing a weakly supervised photo enhancer (WESPE) - a novel image-to-image Generative Adversarial Network-based architecture. The proposed model is trained by weakly supervised learning: unlike previous works, there is no need for strong supervision in the form of a large annotated dataset of aligned original/enhanced photo pairs. The sole requirement is two distinct datasets: one from the source camera, and one composed of arbitrary high-quality images that can be generally crawled from the Internet - the visual content they exhibit may be unrelated. Hence, our solution is repeatable for any camera: collecting the data and training can be achieved in a couple of hours. Our experiments on the DPED, Kitti and Cityscapes datasets as well as pictures from several generations of smartphones demonstrate that WESPE produces comparable qualitative results with state-of-the-art strongly supervised methods, while not requiring the tedious work to obtain aligned datasets.
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