Under-Display Camera Image Enhancement via Cascaded Curve Estimation

The new trend of full-screen devices encourages manufacturers to position a camera behind a screen, i.e., the newly-defined Under-Display Camera (UDC). Therefore, UDC image restoration has been a new realistic single image enhancement problem. In this work, we propose a curve estimation network operating on the hue (H) and saturation (S) channels to perform adaptive enhancement for degraded images captured by UDCs. The proposed network aims to match the complicated relationship between the images captured by under-display and display-free cameras. To extract effective features, we cascade the proposed curve estimation network with sharing weights, and we introduce a spatial and channel attention module in each curve estimation network to exploit attention-aware features. In addition, we learn the curve estimation network in a semi-supervised manner to alleviate the restriction of the requirement for amounts of labeled images and improve the generalization ability for unseen degraded images in various realistic scenes. The semi-supervised network consists of a supervised branch trained on labeled data and an unsupervised branch trained on unlabeled data. To train the proposed model, we build a new dataset comprised of real-world labeled and unlabeled images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art image enhancement methods for UDC images in terms of accuracy and speed, especially on ultra-high-definition (UHD) images.