Meitu Imaging & Vision Lab (MTlab), the AI research and development hub of Meitu Inc., has secured the top place in the European Conference on Computer Vision's (ECCV) 2018 mobile AI competition 'Perceptual Image Enhancement on Smartphones'. 

The MTlab's 'Mt.Phoenix Team' scored significantly higher than the runner-up in all three validation tracks for results evaluation, namely the fidelity score, visual results, and the balance between the speed and perceptual/quantitative performance.

The MTlab's 'Mt.Phoenix Team' scored significantly higher than the runner-up.

Rather than using data augmentation, MTlab focused on the AI algorithm when training the deep neural network in for the competition, it also provided innovation in the existing deep neural network structure in two important ways. First, MTlab modified the way of extracting the global feature for a more natural visual effect. Second, the final combination of the network was changed to reduce the training time.

As a result, the image enhancement algorithm that MTlab team created stands out by its fast computation with reduced user wait time, smaller memory footprint, and better image quality on smartphones to fully satisfy the requirements of mobile processing.

Through this competition, Meitu has demonstrated that its AI-based image enhancement algorithm is practical on mobile devices with a small deep neural network. As the computing ability of mobile devices improves, an increasing number of image applications based on AI algorithms are being transferred from the server to the mobile terminal. Among them, image enhancement, image denoising and other technologies are frequently used to take photos on mobile phones to be shared on social media. However, it is difficult to make the deep neural network small and fast enough while ensuring good performance on mobile devices, which is exactly the challenge of the competition.

'Winning the ECCV mobile AI competition not only demonstrates that Meitu's technical capability in image enhancement is state of the art, but also shows great potential for practical applications. Soon, users can take photos from their Meitu app on their mobile phone and get DSLR-like quality photos,' said Zhu Pengfei, who led MTlab's 'Mt.Phoenix Team' in the competition.

ECCV is one of the best-known research conferences on computer vision. This is the first mobile image enhancement competition held by ECCV. MTlab will continue to participate in international competitions and academic conferences in related fields like computer vision, deep learning, and computer graphics to demonstrate its leadership and exchange learning with researchers.

Earlier this month, the MTlab won the first place in the International Biometric AI Contest 'ISIC Challenge 2018'.