  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 under weak supervision: 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. In this
work, we emphasize on extensive evaluation of obtained results. Besides
standard objective metrics and subjective user study, we train a virtual rater
in the form of a separate CNN that mimics human raters on Flickr data and use
this network to get reference scores for both original and enhanced photos. Our
experiments on the DPED, KITTI and Cityscapes datasets as well as pictures from
several generations of smartphones demonstrate that WESPE produces comparable
or improved qualitative results with state-of-the-art strongly supervised
methods.
