NTIRE 2019 Challenge on Image Enhancement: Methods and Results

Abstract

This paper reviews the first NTIRE challenge on perceptual image enhancement with the focus on proposed solutions and results. The participating teams were solving a real-world photo enhancement problem, where the goal was to map low-quality photos from the iPhone 3GS device to the same photos captured with Canon 70D DSLR camera. The considered problem embraced a number of computer vision subtasks, such as image denoising, image resolution and sharpness enhancement, image color/contrast/exposure adjustment, etc. The target metric used in this challenge combined fidelity scores (PSNR and SSIM) with solutions’ perceptual results measured in a user study. From above 200 registered participants, 13 teams submitted solutions for the final test phase of the challenge. The proposed solutions significantly improved baseline results, defining the state-of-the-art for practical image enhancement.