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In this paper, we present a novel model for simultaneous stable co-saliency detection (CoSOD) and object co-segmentation (CoSEG). To detect co-saliency (segmentation) accurately, the core problem is to well model inter-image relations between an image group. Some methods design sophisticated modules, such as recurrent neural network (RNN), to address this problem. However, order-sensitive problem is the major drawback of RNN, which heavily affects the stability of proposed CoSOD (CoSEG) model. In this paper, inspired by RNN-based model, we first propose a multi-path stable recurrent unit (MSRU), containing dummy orders mechanisms (DOM) and recurrent unit (RU). Our proposed MSRU not only helps CoSOD (CoSEG) model captures robust inter-image relations, but also reduces order-sensitivity, resulting in a more stable inference and training process. Moreover, we design a cross-order contrastive loss (COCL) that can further address order-sensitive problem by pulling close the feature embedding generated from different input orders. We validate our model on five widely used CoSOD datasets (CoCA, CoSOD3k, Cosal2015, iCoseg and MSRC), and three widely used datasets (Internet, iCoseg and PASCAL-VOC) for object co-segmentation, the performance demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach as compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vanilla Few-shot Learning (FSL) learns to build a classifier for a new concept from one or very few target examples, with the general assumption that source and target classes are sampled from the same domain. Recently, the task of Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) aims at tackling the FSL where there is a huge domain shift between the source and target datasets. Extensive efforts on CD-FSL have been made via either directly extending the meta-learning paradigm of vanilla FSL methods, or employing massive unlabeled target data to help learn models. In this paper, we notice that in the CD-FSL task, the few labeled target images have never been explicitly leveraged to inform the model in the training stage. However, such a labeled target example set is very important to bridge the huge domain gap. Critically, this paper advocates a more practical training scenario for CD-FSL. And our key insight is to utilize a few labeled target data to guide the learning of the CD-FSL model. Technically, we propose a novel Generalized Meta-learning based Feature-Disentangled Mixup network, namely GMeta-FDMixup. We make three key contributions of utilizing GMeta-FDMixup to address CD-FSL. Firstly, we present two mixup modules – mixup-P and mixup-M that help facilitate utilizing the unbalanced and disjoint source and target datasets. These two novel modules enable diverse image generation for training the model on the source domain. Secondly, to narrow the domain gap explicitly, we contribute a novel feature disentanglement module that learns to decouple the domain-irrelevant and domain-specific features. By stripping the domain-specific features, we alleviate the negative effects caused by the domain inductive bias. Finally, we repurpose a new contrastive learning module, dubbed ConL. ConL prevents the model from only capturing category-related features via introducing contrastive loss. Thus, the generalization ability on novel categories is improved. Extensive experimental results on two benchmarks show the superiority of our setting and the effectiveness of our method. Code and models will be released. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous 2D saliency detection methods extract salient cues from a single view and directly predict the expected results. Both traditional and deep-learning-based 2D methods do not consider geometric information of 3D scenes. Therefore the relationship between scene understanding and salient objects cannot be effectively established. This limits the performance of 2D saliency detection in challenging scenes. In this paper, we show for the first time that saliency detection problem can be reformulated as two sub-problems: light field synthesis from a single view and light-field-driven saliency detection. This paper first introduces a high-quality light field synthesis network to produce reliable 4D light field information. Then a novel light-field-driven saliency detection network is proposed, in which a Direction-specific Screening Unit (DSU) is tailored to exploit the spatial correlation among multiple viewpoints. The whole pipeline can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art 2D, 3D and 4D saliency detection methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/OIPLab-DUT/ESCNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extracting robust and discriminative local features from images plays a vital role for long term visual localization, whose challenges are mainly caused by the severe appearance differences between matching images due to the day-night illuminations, seasonal changes, and human activities. Existing solutions resort to jointly learning both keypoints and their descriptors in an end-to-end manner, leveraged on large number of annotations of point correspondence which are harvested from the structure from motion and depth estimation algorithms. While these methods show improved performance over non-deep methods or those two-stage deep methods, i.e., detection and then description, they are still struggled to conquer the problems encountered in long term visual localization. Since the intrinsic semantics are invariant to the local appearance changes, this paper proposes to learn semantic-aware local features in order to improve robustness of local feature matching for long term localization. Based on a state of the art CNN architecture for local feature learning, i.e., ASLFeat, this paper leverages on the semantic information from an off-the-shelf semantic segmentation network to learn semantic-aware feature maps. The learned correspondence-aware feature descriptors and semantic features are then merged to form the final feature descriptors, for which the improved feature matching ability has been observed in experiments. In addition, the learned semantics embedded in the features can be further used to filter out noisy keypoints, leading to additional accuracy improvement and faster matching speed. Experiments on two popular long term visual localization benchmarks (Aachen Day and Night v1.1, Robotcar Seasons) and one challenging indoor benchmark (InLoc) demonstrate encouraging improvements of the localization accuracy over its counterpart and other competitive methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the complex computation and time-consuming problem during unordered image stitching, we present a method based on the binary tree and the estimated overlapping areas to stitch images without order in this paper. For image registration, the overlapping areas between input images are estimated, so that the extraction and matching of feature points are only performed in these areas. For image stitching, we build a model of the binary tree to stitch each two matched images without sorting. Compared to traditional methods, our method significantly reduces the computational time of matching irrelevant image pairs and improves the efficiency of image registration and stitching. Moreover, the stitching model of the binary tree proposed in this paper further reduces the distortion of the panorama. Experimental results show that the number of extracted feature points in the estimated overlapping area is approximately 0.3~0.6 times of that in the entire image by using the same method, which greatly reduces the computational time of feature extraction and matching. Compared to the exhaustive image matching method, our approach only takes about 1/3 of the time to find all matching images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effectively evaluating the perceptual quality of dehazed images remains an under-explored research issue. In this paper, we propose a no-reference complex-valued convolutional neural network (CV-CNN) model to conduct automatic dehazed image quality evaluation. Specifically, a novel CV-CNN is employed that exploits the advantages of complex-valued representations, achieving better generalization capability on perceptual feature learning than real-valued ones. To learn more discriminative features to analyze the perceptual quality of dehazed images, we design a dual-stream CV-CNN architecture. The dual-stream model comprises a distortion-sensitive stream that operates on the dehazed RGB image, and a haze-aware stream on a novel dark channel difference image. The distortion-sensitive stream accounts for perceptual distortion artifacts, while the haze-aware stream addresses the possible presence of residual haze. Experimental results on three publicly available dehazed image quality assessment (DQA) databases demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed CV-CNN DQA model as compared to state-of-the-art no-reference image quality assessment algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the facial micro-expression (FME) generation task, which has potential application in enlarging digital FME datasets, thereby alleviating the lack of training data with labels in existing micro-expression datasets. Despite obvious progress in the image animation task, FME generation remains challenging because existing image animation methods can hardly encode subtle and short-term facial motion information. To this end, we present a facial-prior-guided FME generation framework that takes advantage of facial priors for facial motion generation. Specifically, we first estimate the geometric locations of action units (AUs) with detected facial landmarks. We further calculate an adaptive weighted prior (AWP) map, which alleviates the estimation error of AUs while efficiently capturing subtle facial motion patterns. To achieve smooth and realistic synthesis results, we use our proposed facial prior module to guide motion representation and generation modules in mainstream image animation frameworks. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets consistently show that our proposed facial prior module can be adopted in image animation frameworks and significantly improve their performance on micro-expression generation. Moreover, we use the generation technique to enlarge existing datasets, thereby improving the performance of general action recognition backbones on the FME recognition task. Our code is available at https://github.com/sysu19351158/FPB-FOMM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small moving objects at far distance always occupy only one or a few pixels in image and exhibit extremely limited visual features, which bring great challenges to motion detection. Highly evolved visual systems endow flying insects with remarkable ability to pursue tiny mates and prey, providing a good template to develop image processing method for small target motion detection. The insects’ excellent sensitivity to small moving objects is believed to come from a class of specific neurons called small target motion detectors (STMDs). However, existing STMD-based methods often experience performance degradation when coping with complex natural scenes. In this paper, we propose a bio-inspired visual system with spatio-temporal feedback mechanism (called Spatio-Temporal Feedback STMD) to suppress false positive background movement while enhancing system responses to small targets. Specifically, the proposed visual system is composed of two complementary subnetworks and a feedback loop. The first subnetwork is designed to extract spatial and temporal movement patterns of cluttered background by neuronal ensemble coding. The second subnetwork is developed to capture small target motion information where its output and signal from the first subnetwork are integrated together via the feedback loop to filter out background false positives in a recurrent manner. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed spatio-temporal feedback visual system is more competitive than existing methods in discriminating small moving targets from complex natural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most researchers focus on designing accurate crowd counting models with heavy parameters and computations but ignore the resource burden during the model deployment. A real-world scenario demands an efficient counting model with low-latency and high-performance. Knowledge distillation provides an elegant way to transfer knowledge from a complicated teacher model to a compact student model while maintaining accuracy. However, the student model receives the wrong guidance with the supervision of the teacher model due to the inaccurate information understood by the teacher in some cases. In this paper, we propose a dual-knowledge distillation (DKD) framework, which aims to reduce the side effects of the teacher model and transfer hierarchical knowledge to obtain a more efficient counting model. First, the student model is initialized with global information transferred by the teacher model via adaptive perspectives. Then, the self-knowledge distillation forces the student model to learn the knowledge by itself, based on intermediate feature maps and target map. Specifically, the optimal transport distance is utilized to measure the difference of feature maps between the teacher and the student to perform the distribution alignment of the counting area. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets, demonstrating the superiority of DKD. When there are only approximately 6% of the parameters and computations from the original models, the student model achieves a faster and more accurate counting performance as the teacher model even surpasses it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automatic detection and identification of fish from underwater videos is of great significance for fishery resource assessment and ecological environment monitoring. However, due to the poor quality of underwater images and unconstrained fish movement, traditional hand-designed feature extraction methods or convolutional neural network (CNN)-based object detection algorithms cannot meet the detection requirements in real underwater scenes. Therefore, to realize fish recognition and localization in a complex underwater environment, this paper proposes a novel composite fish detection framework based on a composite backbone and an enhanced path aggregation network called Composited FishNet. By improving the residual network (ResNet), a new composite backbone network (CBresnet) is designed to learn the scene change information (source domain style), which is caused by the differences in the image brightness, fish orientation, seabed structure, aquatic plant movement, fish species shape and texture differences. Thus, the interference of underwater environmental information on the object characteristics is reduced, and the output of the main network to the object information is strengthened. In addition, to better integrate the high and low feature information output from CBresnet, the enhanced path aggregation network (EPANet) is also designed to solve the insufficient utilization of semantic information caused by linear upsampling. The experimental results show that the average precision (AP)0.5:0.95, AP50 and average recall (AR)max=10 of the proposed Composited FishNet are 75.2%, 92.8% and 81.1%, respectively. The composite backbone network enhances the characteristic information output of the detected object and improves the utilization of characteristic information. This method can be used for fish detection and identification in complex underwater environments such as oceans and aquaculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skeleton data have been extensively used for action recognition since they can robustly accommodate dynamic circumstances and complex backgrounds. To guarantee the action-recognition performance, we prefer to use advanced and time-consuming algorithms to get more accurate and complete skeletons from the scene. However, this may not be acceptable in time- and resource-stringent applications. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using low-quality skeletons, which can be quickly and easily estimated from the scene, for action recognition. While the use of low-quality skeletons will surely lead to degraded action-recognition accuracy, in this paper we propose a structural knowledge distillation scheme to minimize this accuracy degradations and improve recognition model’s robustness to uncontrollable skeleton corruptions. More specifically, a teacher which observes high-quality skeletons obtained from a scene is used to help train a student which only sees low-quality skeletons generated from the same scene. At inference time, only the student network is deployed for processing low-quality skeletons. In the proposed network, a graph matching loss is proposed to distill the graph structural knowledge at an intermediate representation level. We also propose a new gradient revision strategy to seek a balance between mimicking the teacher model and directly improving the student model’s accuracy. Experiments are conducted on Kenetics400, NTU RGB+D and Penn action recognition datasets and the comparison results demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an instance-level recognition problem, re-identification (re-ID) requires models to capture diverse features. However, with continuous training, re-ID models pay more and more attention to the salient areas. As a result, the model may only focus on few small regions with salient representations and ignore other important information. This phenomenon leads to inferior performance, especially when models are evaluated on small inter-identity variation data. In this paper, we propose a novel network, Erasing-Salient Net (ES-Net), to learn comprehensive features by erasing the salient areas in an image. ES-Net proposes a novel method to locate the salient areas by the confidence of objects and erases them efficiently in a training batch. Meanwhile, to mitigate the over-erasing problem, this paper uses a trainable pooling layer P-pooling that generalizes global max and global average pooling. Experiments are conducted on two specific re-identification tasks (i.e., Person re-ID, Vehicle re-ID). Our ES-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three Person re-ID benchmarks and two Vehicle re-ID benchmarks. Specifically, mAP / Rank-1 rate: 88.6% / 95.7% on Market1501, 78.8% / 89.2% on DuckMTMC-reID, 57.3% / 80.9% on MSMT17, 81.9% / 97.0% on Veri-776, respectively. Rank-1 / Rank-5 rate: 83.6% / 96.9% on VehicleID (Small), 79.9% / 93.5% on VehicleID (Medium), 76.9% / 90.7% on VehicleID (Large), respectively. Moreover, the visualized salient areas show human-interpretable visual explanations for the ranking results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain adaptation aims to alleviate the distribution discrepancy between source and target domains. Most conventional methods focus on one target domain setting adapted from one or multiple source domains while neglecting the multi-target domain setting. We argue that different target domains also have complementary information, which is very important for performance improvement. In this paper, we propose an Attention-guided Multiple source-and-target Domain Adaptation (AMDA) method to capture the context dependency information on transferable regions among multiple source and target domains. The innovation points of this paper are as follows: (1) We use numerous adversarial strategies to harvest sufficient information from multiple source and target domains, which extends the generalization and robustness of the feature pools. (2) We propose an intra-domain and inter-domain attention module to explore transferable context information. The proposed attention module can learn domain-invariant representations and reduce the negative transfer by focusing on transferable knowledge. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method with achieving state-of-the-art performance on several unsupervised domain adaptation datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common problem in wide-baseline matching is the sparse and non-uniform distribution of correspondences when using conventional detectors, such as SIFT, SURF, FAST, A-KAZE, and MSER. In this paper, we introduce a novel segmentation-based feature detector (SFD) that produces an increased number of accurate features for wide-baseline matching. A multi-scale SFD is proposed using bilateral image decomposition to produce a large number of scale-invariant features for wide-baseline reconstruction. All input images are over-segmented into regions using any existing segmentation technique, such as Watershed, Mean-shift, and simple linear iterative clustering. Feature points are then detected at the intersection of the boundaries of three or more regions. The detected feature points are local maxima of the image function. The key advantage of feature detection based on segmentation is that it does not require global threshold setting and can, therefore, detect features throughout the image. A comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SFD gives an increased number of features that are accurately localized and matched between wide-baseline camera views; the number of features for a given matching error increases by a factor of 3–5 compared with SIFT; feature detection and matching performance are maintained with increasing baseline between views; multi-scale SFD improves matching performance at varying scales. Application of SFD to sparse multi-view wide-baseline reconstruction demonstrates a factor of 10 increases in the number of reconstructed points with improved scene coverage compared with SIFT/MSER/A-KAZE. Evaluation against ground-truth shows that SFD produces an increased number of wide-baseline matches with a reduced error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient action recognition aims to classify a video clip into a specific action category with a low computational cost. It is challenging since the integrated spatial-temporal calculation (e. g., 3D convolution) introduces intensive operations and increases complexity. This paper explores the feasibility of the integration of channel splitting and filter decoupling for efficient architecture design and feature refinement by proposing a novel spatio-temporal collaborative (STC) module. STC splits the video feature channels into two groups and separately learns spatio-temporal representations in parallel with decoupled convolutional operators. Particularly, STC consists of two computation-efficient blocks, i.e., $\text {S}_{\mathrm{ T}}$ and $\text {T}_{\mathrm{ S}}$ , where they extract either spatial (${S}_{\cdot }$) or temporal (${T}_{\cdot }$) features and further refine their features with either temporal ($\cdot _{T}$) or spatial ($\cdot _{S}$) contexts globally. The spatial/temporal context refers to information dynamics aggregated from temporal/spatial axis. To thoroughly examine our method’s performance in video action recognition tasks, we conduct extensive experiments using five video benchmark datasets requiring temporal reasoning. Experimental results show that the proposed STC networks achieve a competitive trade-off between model efficiency and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) is quite a challenging problem requiring methods to overcome both 1) overfitting towards poorly annotated data and 2) distribution shift across domains. Unfortunately, a simple combination of domain adaptation (DA) and semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods often fail to address such two objects because of training data bias towards labeled samples. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive structure learning method to regularize the cooperation of SSL and DA. Inspired by the multi-views learning, our proposed framework is composed of a shared feature encoder network and two classifier networks, trained for contradictory purposes. Among them, one of the classifiers is applied to group target features to improve intra-class density, enlarging the gap of categorical clusters for robust representation learning. Meanwhile, the other classifier, serviced as a regularizer, attempts to scatter the source features to enhance the smoothness of the decision boundary. The iterations of target clustering and source expansion make the target features being well-enclosed inside the dilated boundary of the corresponding source points. For the joint address of cross-domain features alignment and partially labeled data learning, we apply the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) distance minimization and self-training (ST) to project the contradictory structures into a shared view to make the reliable final decision. The experimental results over the standard SSDA benchmarks, including DomainNet and Office-home, demonstrate both the accuracy and robustness of our method over the state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern top-performing object detectors depend heavily on backbone networks, whose advances bring consistent performance gains through exploring more effective network structures. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible backbone framework, namely CBNet, to construct high-performance detectors using existing open-source pre-trained backbones under the pre-training fine-tuning paradigm. In particular, CBNet architecture groups multiple identical backbones, which are connected through composite connections. Specifically, it integrates the high- and low-level features of multiple identical backbone networks and gradually expands the receptive field to more effectively perform object detection. We also propose a better training strategy with auxiliary supervision for CBNet-based detectors. CBNet has strong generalization capabilities for different backbones and head designs of the detector architecture. Without additional pre-training of the composite backbone, CBNet can be adapted to various backbones (i.e., CNN-based vs. Transformer-based) and head designs of most mainstream detectors (i.e., one-stage vs. two-stage, anchor-based vs. anchor-free-based). Experiments provide strong evidence that, compared with simply increasing the depth and width of the network, CBNet introduces a more efficient, effective, and resource-friendly way to build high-performance backbone networks. Particularly, our CB-Swin-L achieves 59.4% box AP and 51.6% mask AP on COCO test-dev under the single-model and single-scale testing protocol, which are significantly better than the state-of-the-art results (i.e., 57.7% box AP and 50.2% mask AP) achieved by Swin-L, while reducing the training time by $6\times $. With multi-scale testing, we push the current best single model result to a new record of 60.1% box AP and 52.3% mask AP without using extra training data. Code is available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/CBNetV2 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research advances in salient object detection (SOD) could largely be attributed to ever-stronger multi-scale feature representation empowered by the deep learning technologies. The existing SOD deep models extract multi-scale features via the off-the-shelf encoders and combine them smartly via various delicate decoders. However, the kernel sizes in this commonly-used thread are usually “fixed”. In our new experiments, we have observed that kernels of small size are preferable in scenarios containing tiny salient objects. In contrast, large kernel sizes could perform better for images with large salient objects. Inspired by this observation, we advocate the “dynamic” scale routing (as a brand-new idea) in this paper. It will result in a generic plug-in that could directly fit the existing feature backbone. This paper’s key technical innovations are two-fold. First, instead of using the vanilla convolution with fixed kernel sizes for the encoder design, we propose the dynamic pyramid convolution (DPConv), which dynamically selects the best-suited kernel sizes w.r.t. the given input. Second, we provide a self-adaptive bidirectional decoder design to accommodate the DPConv-based encoder best. The most significant highlight is its capability of routing between feature scales and their dynamic collection, making the inference process scale-aware. As a result, this paper continues to enhance the current SOTA performance. Both the code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/wuzhenyubuaa/DPNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early interlaced videos usually contain multiple and interlacing and complex compression artifacts, which significantly reduce the visual quality. Although the high-definition reconstruction technology for early videos has made great progress in recent years, related research on deinterlacing is still lacking. Traditional methods mainly focus on simple interlacing mechanism, and cannot deal with the complex artifacts in real-world early videos. Recent interlaced video reconstruction deep deinterlacing models only focus on single frame, while neglecting important temporal information. Therefore, this paper proposes a multiframe deinterlacing network joint enhancement network for early interlaced videos that consists of three modules, i.e., spatial vertical interpolation module, temporal alignment and fusion module, and final refinement module. The proposed method can effectively remove the complex artifacts in early videos by using temporal redundancy of multi-fields. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can recover high quality results for both synthetic dataset and real-world early interlaced videos. At the same time, the method also won the first place in the MSU Deinterlacer Benchmark. The code is available at: https://github.com/anymyb/MFDIN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain adaptation leverages rich knowledge from a related source domain so that it can be used to perform tasks in a target domain. For more knowledge to be obtained under relaxed conditions, domain adaptation methods have been widely used in pattern recognition and image classification. However, most of the existing domain adaptation methods only consider how to minimize different distributions of the source and target domains, which neglects what should be transferred for a specific task and suffers negative transfer by distribution outliers. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel domain adaptation method called weighted correlation embedding learning (WCEL) for image classification. In the WCEL approach, we seamlessly integrated correlation learning, graph embedding, and sample reweighting into a unified learning model. Specifically, we extracted the maximum correlated features from the source and target domains for image classification tasks. In addition, two graphs were designed to preserve the discriminant information from interclass samples and neighborhood relations in intraclass samples. Furthermore, to prevent the negative transfer problem, we developed an efficient sample reweighting strategy to predict the target with different confidence levels. To verify the performance of the proposed method in image classification, extensive experiments were conducted with several benchmark databases, verifying the superiority of the WCEL method over other state-of-the-art domain adaptation algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weakly supervised action localization is a challenging task with extensive applications, which aims to identify actions and the corresponding temporal intervals with only video-level annotations available. This paper analyzes the order-sensitive and location-insensitive properties of actions, and embodies them into a self-augmented learning framework to improve the weakly supervised action localization performance. To be specific, we propose a novel two-branch network architecture with intra/inter-action shuffling, referred to as ActShufNet. The intra-action shuffling branch lays out a self-supervised order prediction task to augment the video representation with inner-video relevance, whereas the inter-action shuffling branch imposes a reorganizing strategy on the existing action contents to augment the training set without resorting to any external resources. Furthermore, the global-local adversarial training is presented to enhance the model’s robustness to irrelevant noises. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets, and the results clearly demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary society full of stereoscopic images, how to assess visual quality of 3D images has attracted an increasing attention in field of Stereoscopic Image Quality Assessment (SIQA). Compared with 2D-IQA, SIQA is more challenging because some complicated features of Human Visual System (HVS), such as binocular interaction and binocular fusion, must be considered. In this paper, considering both binocular interaction and fusion mechanisms of the HVS, a hierarchical no-reference stereoscopic image quality assessment network (StereoIF-Net) is proposed to simulate the whole quality perception of 3D visual signals in human cortex, including two key modules: BIM and BFM. In particular, Binocular Interaction Modules (BIMs) are constructed to simulate binocular interaction in V2-V5 visual cortex regions, in which a novel cross convolution is designed to explore the interaction details in each region. In the BIMs, different output channel numbers are designed to imitate various receptive fields in V2-V5. Furthermore, a Binocular Fusion Module (BFM) with automatic learned weights is proposed to model binocular fusion of the HVS in higher cortex layers. The verification experiments are conducted on the LIVE 3D, IVC and Waterloo-IVC SIQA databases and three indices including PLCC, SROCC and RMSE are employed to evaluate the assessment consistency between StereoIF-Net and the HVS. The proposed StereoIF-Net achieves almost the best results compared with advanced SIQA methods. Specifically, the metric values on LIVE 3D, IVC and WIVC-I are the best, and are the second-best on the WIVC-II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a Multi-scale Contrastive Graph Convolutional Network (MC-GCN) method is proposed for unconstrained face recognition with image sets, which takes a set of media (orderless images and videos) as a face subject instead of single media (an image or video). Due to factors such as illumination, posture, media source, etc., there are huge intra-set variances in a face set, and the importance of different face prototypes varies considerably. How to model the attention mechanism according to the relationship between prototypes or images in a set is the main content of this paper. In this work, we formulate a framework based on graph convolutional network (GCN), which considers face prototypes as nodes to build relations. Specifically, we first present a multi-scale graph module to learn the relationship between prototypes at multiple scales. Moreover, a Contrastive Graph Convolutional (CGC) block is introduced to build attention control model, which focuses on those frames with similar prototypes (contrastive information) between pair of sets instead of simply evaluating the frame quality. The experiments on IJB-A, YouTube Face, and an animal face dataset clearly demonstrate that our proposed MC-GCN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single image super-resolution (SISR) using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Most existing SISR models mainly focus on pursuing high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and neglect textures and details. As a result, the recovered images are often perceptually unpleasant. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a texture and detail-preserving network (TDPN), which focuses not only on local region feature recovery but also on preserving textures and details. Specifically, the high-resolution image is recovered from its corresponding low-resolution input in two branches. First, a multi-reception field based branch is designed to let the network fully learn local region features by adaptively selecting local region features in different reception fields. Then, a texture and detail-learning branch supervised by the textures and details decomposed from the ground-truth high resolution image is proposed to provide additional textures and details for the super-resolution process to improve the perceptual quality. Finally, we introduce a gradient loss into the SISR field and define a novel hybrid loss to strengthen boundary information recovery and to avoid overly smooth boundary in the final recovered high-resolution image caused by using only the MAE loss. More importantly, the proposed method is model-agnostic, which can be applied to most off-the-shelf SISR networks. The experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our TDPN on most state-of-the-art SISR methods in PSNR, SSIM and perceptual quality. We will share our code on https://github.com/tocaiqing/TDPN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face recognition has witnessed significant progress with the advances of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and the central task of which is how to improve the feature discrimination. To this end, several margin-based (e.g., angular, additive and additive angular margins) softmax loss functions have been proposed to increase the feature margin between different classes. However, despite great achievements have been made, they mainly suffer from four issues: 1) They are based on the assumption of well-cleaned training sets, without considering the consequence of noisy labels inherently existing in most of face recognition datasets; 2) They ignore the importance of informative (e.g., semi-hard) features mining for discriminative learning; 3) They encourage the feature margin only from the perspective of ground truth class, without realizing the discriminability from other non-ground truth classes; and 4) They set the feature margin between different classes to be same and fixed, which may not adapt the situation of unbalanced data in different classes very well. To cope with these issues, this paper develops a novel loss function, which explicitly estimates the noisy labels to drop them and adaptively emphasizes the semi-hard feature vectors from the remaining reliable ones to guide the discriminative feature learning. Thus we can address all the above issues and achieve more discriminative features for face recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to inherit the advantages of feature-based noisy labels detection, feature mining and feature margin into a unified loss function. Extensive experimental results on a variety of face recognition benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method over state-of-the-art alternatives. Our source code is available at http://www.cbsr.ia.ac.cn/users/xiaobowang/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Graph Neural Networks (GNN), such as Graph Attention Networks (GAT), are two classic neural network models, which are applied to the processing of grid data and graph data respectively. They have achieved outstanding performance in hyperspectral images (HSIs) classification field, which have attracted great interest. However, CNN has been facing the problem of small samples and GNN has to pay a huge computational cost, which restrict the performance of the two models. In this paper, we propose Weighted Feature Fusion of Convolutional Neural Network and Graph Attention Network (WFCG) for HSI classification, by using the characteristics of superpixel-based GAT and pixel-based CNN, which proved to be complementary. We first establish GAT with the help of superpixel-based encoder and decoder modules. Then we combined the attention mechanism to construct CNN. Finally, the features are weighted fusion with the characteristics of two neural network models. Rigorous experiments on three real-world HSI data sets show WFCG can fully explore the high-dimensional feature of HSI, and obtain competitive results compared to other state-of-the art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the same persons across different views plays an important role in many vision applications. In this paper, we study this important problem, denoted as Multi-view Multi-Human Association (MvMHA), on multi-view images that are taken by different cameras at the same time. Different from previous works on human association across two views, this paper is focused on more general and challenging scenarios of more than two views, and none of these views are fixed or priorly known. In addition, each involved person may be present in all the views or only a subset of views, which are also not priorly known. We develop a new end-to-end deep-network based framework to address this problem. First, we use an appearance-based deep network to extract the feature of each detected subject on each image. We then compute pairwise-similarity scores between all the detected subjects and construct a comprehensive affinity matrix. Finally, we propose a Deep Assignment Network (DAN) to transform the affinity matrix into an assignment matrix, which provides a binary assignment result for MvMHA. We build both a synthetic dataset and a real image dataset to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. We also test the trained network on other three public datasets, resulting in very good cross-domain performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a solution based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for solving jigsaw puzzles. The problem assumes that an image is divided into equal square pieces, and asks to recover the image according to information provided by the pieces. Conventional jigsaw puzzle solvers often determine the relationships based on the boundaries of pieces, which ignore the important semantic information. In this paper, we propose JigsawGAN, a GAN-based auxiliary learning method for solving jigsaw puzzles with unpaired images (with no prior knowledge of the initial images). We design a multi-task pipeline that includes, (1) a classification branch to classify jigsaw permutations, and (2) a GAN branch to recover features to images in correct orders. The classification branch is constrained by the pseudo-labels generated according to the shuffled pieces. The GAN branch concentrates on the image semantic information, where the generator produces the natural images to fool the discriminator, while the discriminator distinguishes whether a given image belongs to the synthesized or the real target domain. These two branches are connected by a flow-based warp module that is applied to warp features to correct the order according to the classification results. The proposed method can solve jigsaw puzzles more efficiently by utilizing both semantic information and boundary information simultaneously. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons against several representative jigsaw puzzle solvers demonstrate the superiority of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video-based human action recognition is currently one of the most active research areas in computer vision. Various research studies indicate that the performance of action recognition is highly dependent on the type of features being extracted and how the actions are represented. Since the release of the Kinect camera, a large number of Kinect-based human action recognition techniques have been proposed in the literature. However, there still does not exist a thorough comparison of these Kinect-based techniques under the grouping of feature types, such as handcrafted versus deep learning features and depth-based versus skeleton-based features. In this paper, we analyze and compare 10 recent Kinect-based algorithms for both cross-subject action recognition and cross-view action recognition using six benchmark datasets. In addition, we have implemented and improved some of these techniques and included their variants in the comparison. Our experiments show that the majority of methods perform better on cross-subject action recognition than cross-view action recognition, that the skeleton-based features are more robust for cross-view recognition than the depth-based features, and that the deep learning features are suitable for large datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, food recognition has received more and more attention in image processing and computer vision for its great potential applications in human health. Most of the existing methods directly extracted deep visual features via convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for food recognition. Such methods ignore the characteristics of food images and are, thus, hard to achieve optimal recognition performance. In contrast to general object recognition, food images typically do not exhibit distinctive spatial arrangement and common semantic patterns. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale multi-view feature aggregation (MSMVFA) scheme for food recognition. MSMVFA can aggregate high-level semantic features, mid-level attribute features, and deep visual features into a unified representation. These three types of features describe the food image from different granularity. Therefore, the aggregated features can capture the semantics of food images with the greatest probability. For that solution, we utilize additional ingredient knowledge to obtain mid-level attribute representation via ingredient-supervised CNNs. High-level semantic features and deep visual features are extracted from class-supervised CNNs. Considering food images do not exhibit distinctive spatial layout in many cases, MSMVFA fuses multi-scale CNN activations for each type of features to make aggregated features more discriminative and invariable to geometrical deformation. Finally, the aggregated features are more robust, comprehensive, and discriminative via two-level fusion, namely multi-scale fusion for each type of features and multi-view aggregation for different types of features. In addition, MSMVFA is general and different deep networks can be easily applied into this scheme. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art recognition performance on three popular large-scale food benchmark datasets in Top-1 recognition accuracy. Furthermore, we expect this paper will further the agenda of food recognition in the community of image processing and computer vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domain adaptation manages to build an effective target classifier or regression model for unlabeled target data by utilizing the well-labeled source data but lying different distributions. Intuitively, to address domain shift problem, it is crucial to learn domain invariant features across domains, and most existing approaches have concentrated on it. However, they often do not directly constrain the learned features to be class discriminative for both source and target data, which is of vital importance for the final classification. Therefore, in this paper, we put forward a novel feature learning method for domain adaptation to construct both domain invariant and class discriminative representations, referred to as DICD. Specifically, DICD is to learn a latent feature space with important data properties preserved, which reduces the domain difference by jointly matching the marginal and class-conditional distributions of both domains, and simultaneously maximizes the inter-class dispersion and minimizes the intra-class scatter as much as possible. Experiments in this paper have demonstrated that the class discriminative properties will dramatically alleviate the cross-domain distribution inconsistency, which further boosts the classification performance. Moreover, we show that exploring both domain invariance and class discriminativeness of the learned representations can be integrated into one optimization framework, and the optimal solution can be derived effectively by solving a generalized eigen-decomposition problem. Comprehensive experiments on several visual cross-domain classification tasks verify that DICD can outperform the competitors significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of feature selection is to find the most representative features from the original high-dimensional data. Because of the absence of the information of class labels, selecting the appropriate features in unsupervised learning scenarios is much harder than that in supervised scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the potential of locally linear embedding (LLE), which is a popular manifold learning method, in feature selection task. It is straightforward to apply the idea of LLE to the graph-preserving feature selection framework. However, we find that this straightforward application suffers from some problems. For example, it fails when the elements in the feature are all equal; it does not enjoy the property of scaling invariance and cannot capture the change of the graph efficiently. To solve these problems, we propose a new filter-based feature selection method based on LLE in this paper, which is named as LLE score. The proposed criterion measures the difference between the local structure of each feature and that of the original data. Our experiments of classification task on two face image data sets, an object image data set, and a handwriting digits data set show that LLE score outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including data variance, Laplacian score, and sparsity score. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of 2D/3D registration, this paper introduces an approach that allows for matching features detected in two different modalities, photographs, and 3D models, by using a common 2D representation. More precisely, 2D images are matched with a set of depth images representing the 3D model. After introducing the concept of Curvilinear Saliency, which is related to curvature estimation, we propose a new ridge and valley detector for depth images rendered from 3D models. A variant of this detector is adapted to photographs, first by considering multi-scale features and second by integrating the focus curve principle. Finally, a registration algorithm determines the correct view of the 3D model and, thus, the pose of the photograph. This approach relies on the Histogram of Curvilinear Saliency (HCS), an adaptation of the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) to the proposed features in 2D and 3D. The presented results highlight both the quality of the features detected in terms of repeatability and the interest of the approach for registration and pose estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Camera shake or target movement often leads to undesired blur effects in videos captured by a hand-held camera. Despite significant efforts having been devoted to video-deblur research, two major challenges remain: 1) how to model the spatio-temporal characteristics across both the spatial domain (i.e., image plane) and the temporal domain (i.e., neighboring frames) and 2) how to restore sharp image details with respect to the conventionally adopted metric of pixel-wise errors. In this paper, to address the first challenge, we propose a deblurring network (DBLRNet) for spatial-temporal learning by applying a 3D convolution to both the spatial and temporal domains. Our DBLRNet is able to capture jointly spatial and temporal information encoded in neighboring frames, which directly contributes to the improved video deblur performance. To tackle the second challenge, we leverage the developed DBLRNet as a generator in the generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture and employ a content loss in addition to an adversarial loss for efficient adversarial training. The developed network, which we name as deblurring GAN, is tested on two standard benchmarks and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selfie photography from the hand-held camera is becoming a popular media type. Although being convenient and flexible, it suffers from low camera motion stability, small field of view, and limited background content. These limitations can annoy users, especially, when touring a place of interest and taking selfie videos. In this paper, we present a novel method to create what we call a BiggerSelfie that deals with these shortcomings. Using a video of the environment that has partial content overlap with the selfie video, we stitch plausible frames selected from the environment video to the original selfie frames and stabilize the composed video content with a portrait-preserving constraint. Using the proposed method, one can easily obtain a stable selfie video with expanded background content by merely capturing some background shots. We show various results and several evaluations to demonstrate the applicability of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human visual system pays attention to salient regions while perceiving an image. When viewing a stereoscopic 3-D (S3D) image, we hypothesize that while most of the contribution to saliency is provided by the 2-D image, a small but significant contribution is provided by the depth component. Further, we claim that only a subset of image edges contribute to depth perception while viewing an S3D image. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach for depth saliency estimation, called salient edges with respect to depth perception (SED) which localizes the depth-salient edges in an S3D image. We demonstrate the utility of SED in full reference stereoscopic image quality assessment. We consider gradient magnitude and inter-gradient maps for predicting structural similarity. A coarse quality map is estimated first by comparing the 2-D saliency and gradient maps of reference and test stereo pairs. We average this quality map to estimate luminance quality and refine this quality map using SED maps for evaluating depth quality. Finally, we combine this luminance and depth quality to obtain an overall stereo image quality. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of our metric on seven publicly available S3D IQA databases. The proposed metric shows competitive performance on all seven databases with state-of-the-art performance on three of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a competitive no-reference metric is proposed to assess the perceptive quality of screen content images (SCIs), which uses the human visual edge model and AdaBoosting neural network. Inspired by the existing theory that the edge information which reflects the visual quality of SCI is effectively captured by the human visual difference of the Gaussian (DOG) model, we compute two types of multi-scale edge maps via the DOG operator firstly. Specifically, two types of edge maps contain contour and edge information respectively. Then after locally normalizing edge maps, ${L}$ -moments distribution estimation is utilized to fit their DOG coefficients, and the fitted ${L}$ -moments parameters can be regarded as edge features. Finally, to obtain the final perceptive quality score, we use an AdaBoosting back-propagation neural network (ABPNN) to map the quality-aware features to the perceptual quality score of SCIs. The reason why the ABPNN is regarded as the appropriate approach for the visual quality assessment of SCIs is that we abandon the regression network with a shallow structure, try a regression network with a deep architecture, and achieve a good generalization ability. The proposed method delivers highly competitive performance and shows high consistency with the human visual system (HVS) on the public SCI-oriented databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a spherical measure based spherical image representation(SMSIR) and sphere-based resampling methods for generating our representation. On this basis, a spherical wavelet transform is also proposed. We first propose a formal recursive definition of the spherical triangle elements of SMSIR and a dyadic index scheme. The index scheme, which supports global random access and needs not to be pre-computed and stored, can efficiently index the elements of SMSIR like planar images. Two resampling methods to generate SMSIR from the most commonly used ERP(Equirectangular Projection) representation are presented. Notably, the spherical measure based resampling, which exploits the mapping between the spherical and the parameter domain, achieves higher computational efficiency than the spherical RBF(Radial Basis Function) based resampling. Finally, we design high-pass and low-pass filters with lifting schemes based on the dyadic index to further verify the efficiency of our index and deal with the spherical isotropy. It provides novel Multi-Resolution Analysis(MRA) for spherical images. Experiments on continuous synthetic spherical images indicate that our representation can recover the original image signals with higher accuracy than the ERP and CMP(Cubemap) representations at the same sampling rate. Besides, the resampling experiments on natural spherical images show that our resampling methods outperform the bilinear and bicubic interpolations concerning the subjective and objective quality. Particularly, as high as 2dB gain in terms of S-PSNR is achieved. Experiments also show that our spherical image transform can capture more geometric features of spherical images than traditional wavelet transform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of egocentric video has recently drawn attention of researchers in the computer vision as well as multimedia communities. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised superpixel level joint framework for localization, recognition and summarization of actions in an egocentric video. We first recognize and localize single as well as multiple action(s) in each frame of an egocentric video and then construct a summary of these detected actions. The superpixel level solution helps in precise localization of actions in addition to improving the recognition accuracy. Superpixels are extracted within the central regions of the egocentric video frames; these central regions being determined through a previously developed center-surround model. A sparse spatio-temporal video representation graph is constructed in the deep feature space with the superpixels as nodes. A weakly supervised solution using random walks yields action labels for each superpixel. After determining action label(s) for each frame from its constituent superpixels, we apply a fractional knapsack type formulation for obtaining a summary (of actions). Experimental comparisons on publicly available ADL, GTEA, EGTEA Gaze+, EgoGesture, and EPIC-Kitchens datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we aim to address issues of joint spatial-temporal modeling and side information injection for deep-learning based in-loop filter. For , we design a deep network with both progressive rethinking and collaborative learning mechanisms to improve quality of the reconstructed intra-frames and inter-frames, respectively. For intra coding, a Progressive Rethinking Network (PRN) is designed to simulate the human decision mechanism for effective spatial modeling. Our designed block introduces an additional inter-block connection to bypass a high-dimensional informative feature before the bottleneck module across blocks to review the complete past memorized experiences and rethinks progressively. For inter coding, the current reconstructed frame interacts with reference frames (peak quality frame and the nearest adjacent frame) collaboratively at the feature level. For , we extract both intra-frame and inter-frame side information for better context modeling. A coarse-to-fine partition map based on HEVC partition trees is built as the intra-frame side information. Furthermore, the warped features of the reference frames are offered as the inter-frame side information. Our PRN with intra-frame side information provides 9.0% BD-rate reduction on average compared to HEVC baseline under All-intra (AI) configuration. While under Low-Delay B (LDB), Low-Delay P (LDP) and Random Access (RA) configuration, our PRN with inter-frame side information provides 9.0%, 10.6% and 8.0% BD-rate reduction on average respectively. Our project webpage is https://dezhao-wang.github.io/PRN-v2/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, people are getting used to taking photos to record their daily life, however, the photos are actually not consistent with the real natural scenes. The two main differences are that the photos tend to have low dynamic range (LDR) and low resolution (LR), due to the inherent imaging limitations of cameras. The multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) and image super-resolution (SR) are two widely-used techniques to address these two issues. However, they are usually treated as independent researches. In this paper, we propose a deep Coupled Feedback Network (CF-Net) to achieve MEF and SR simultaneously. Given a pair of extremely over-exposed and under-exposed LDR images with low-resolution, our CF-Net is able to generate an image with both high dynamic range (HDR) and high-resolution. Specifically, the CF-Net is composed of two coupled recursive sub-networks, with LR over-exposed and under-exposed images as inputs, respectively. Each sub-network consists of one feature extraction block (FEB), one super-resolution block (SRB) and several coupled feedback blocks (CFB). The FEB and SRB are to extract high-level features from the input LDR image, which are required to be helpful for resolution enhancement. The CFB is arranged after SRB, and its role is to absorb the learned features from the SRBs of the two sub-networks, so that it can produce a high-resolution HDR image. We have a series of CFBs in order to progressively refine the fused high-resolution HDR image. Extensive experimental results show that our CF-Net drastically outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of both SR accuracy and fusion performance. The software code is available here https://github.com/ytZhang99/CF-Net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lane detection on road segments with complex topologies such as lane merge/split and highway ramps is not yet a solved problem. This paper presents a novel graph-embedded solution. It consists of two key parts, a learning-based low-level lane feature extraction algorithm, and a graph-embedded lane inference algorithm. The former reduces the over-reliance on customized annotated/labeled lane data. We leveraged several open-source semantic segmentation datasets (e.g., Cityscape, Vistas, and Apollo) and designed a dedicated network that can be trained across these heterogeneous datasets to extract lane attributes. The latter algorithm constructs a graph to represent the lane geometry and topology. It does not rely on strong geometric assumptions such as lane lines are a set of parallel polynomials. Instead, it constructs a graph based on detected lane nodes. The lane parameters in the world coordinate are inferred by efficient graph-based searching and calculation. The performance of the proposed method is verified on both open source and our own collected data. On-vehicle experiments were also conducted and the comparison with Mobileye EyeQ2 shows favorable results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automated Fingerprint Recognition Systems (AFRSs) have been threatened by Presentation Attack (PA) since its existence. It is thus desirable to develop effective presentation attack detection (PAD) methods. However, the unpredictable PAs make PAD be a challenging problem. This paper proposes a novel One-Class PAD (OCPAD) method for Optical Coherence Technology (OCT) images based fingerprint PA detection. The proposed OCPAD model is learned from a training set only consists of Bonafides (i.e. real fingerprints). The reconstruction error and latent code obtained from the trained auto-encoder network in the proposed model is taken as the basis for the following spoofness score calculation. To get more accurate reconstruction error, we propose an activation map based weighting model to further refine the accuracy of reconstruction error. We test different statistics and distance measures and finally use a decision level fusion to make the final prediction. Our experiments are performed using a dataset with 93200 bonafide scans and 48400 PA scans. The results show that the proposed OCPAD can achieve a True Positive Rate (TPR) of 99.43% when the False Positive Rate (FPR) equals to 10% and a TPR of 96.59% when FPR=5%, which significantly outperformed a feature based approach and a supervised learning based model requiring PAs for training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

image can be represented with different formats, such as the equirectangular projection (ERP) image, viewport images or spherical image, for its different processing procedures and applications. Accordingly, the 360-degree image quality assessment (360-IQA) can be performed on these different formats. However, the performance of 360-IQA with the ERP image is not equivalent with those with the viewport images or spherical image due to the over-sampling and the resulted obvious geometric distortion of ERP image. This imbalance problem brings challenge to ERP image based applications, such as 360-degree image/video compression and assessment. In this paper, we propose a new blind 360-IQA framework to handle this imbalance problem. In the proposed framework, cubemap projection (CMP) with six inter-related faces is used to realize the omnidirectional viewing of 360-degree image. A multi-distortions visual attention quality dataset for 360-degree images is firstly established as the benchmark to analyze the performance of objective 360-IQA methods. Then, the perception-driven blind 360-IQA framework is proposed based on six cubemap faces of CMP for 360-degree image, in which human attention behavior is taken into account to improve the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The cubemap quality feature subset of CMP image is first obtained, and additionally, attention feature matrices and subsets are also calculated to describe the human visual behavior. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves superior performances compared with state-of-the-art IQA methods, and the cross dataset validation also verifies the effectiveness of the proposed framework. In addition, the proposed framework can also be combined with new quality feature extraction method to further improve the performance of 360-IQA. All of these demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective in 360-IQA and has a good potential for future applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the potential values in many areas such as e-commerce and inventory management, fabric image retrieval, which is a special case in Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR), has recently become a research hotspot. It is also a challenging issue with serval obstacles: variety and complexity of fabric appearance, high requirements for retrieval accuracy. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel approach for fabric image retrieval based on multi-task learning and deep hashing. According to the cognitive system of fabric, a multi-classification-task learning model with uncertainty loss and constraint is presented to learn fabric image representation. Then we adopt an unsupervised deep network to encode the extracted features into 128-bits hashing codes. Further, the hashing codes are regarded as the index of fabrics image for image retrieval. To evaluate the proposed approach, we expanded and upgraded the dataset WFID, which was built in our previous research specifically for fabric image retrieval. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop new techniques for monitoring image processes under a fairly general setting with spatially correlated pixels in the image. Monitoring and handling the pixels directly is infeasible due to an extremely high image resolution. To overcome this problem, we suggest control charts that are based on regions of interest. The regions of interest cover the original image which leads to a dimension reduction. Nevertheless, the data are still high-dimensional. We consider residual charts based on the generalized likelihood ratio approach. Existing control statistics typically depend on the inverse of the covariance matrix of the process, involving high computing times and frequently generating instable results in a high-dimensional setting. As a solution of this issue, we suggest two further control charts that can be regarded as modifications of the generalized likelihood ratio statistic. Within an extensive simulation study, we compare the newly proposed control charts using the median run length as a performance criterion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image-to-image translation aims to learn the corresponding information between the source and target domains. Several state-of-the-art works have made significant progress based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, most existing one-to-one translation methods ignore the correlations among different domain pairs. We argue that there is common information among different domain pairs and it is vital to multiple domain pairs translation. In this paper, we propose a unified circular framework for multiple domain pairs translation, leveraging a shared knowledge module across numerous domains. One selected translation pair can benefit from the complementary information from other pairs, and the sharing knowledge is conducive to mutual learning between domains. Moreover, absolute consistency loss is proposed and applied in the corresponding feature maps to ensure intra-domain consistency. Furthermore, our model can be trained in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several complex translation scenarios, such as Thermal IR switching, weather changing, and semantic transfer tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning-based infrared small object detection methods currently rely heavily on the classification backbone network. This tends to result in tiny object loss and feature distinguishability limitations as the network depth increases. Furthermore, small objects in infrared images are frequently emerged bright and dark, posing severe demands for obtaining precise object contrast information. For this reason, we in this paper propose a simple and effective “U-Net in U-Net” framework, UIU-Net for short, and detect small objects in infrared images. As the name suggests, UIU-Net embeds a tiny U-Net into a larger U-Net backbone, enabling the multi-level and multi-scale representation learning of objects. Moreover, UIU-Net can be trained from scratch, and the learned features can enhance global and local contrast information effectively. More specifically, the UIU-Net model is divided into two modules: the resolution-maintenance deep supervision (RM-DS) module and the interactive-cross attention (IC-A) module. RM-DS integrates Residual U-blocks into a deep supervision network to generate deep multi-scale resolution-maintenance features while learning global context information. Further, IC-A encodes the local context information between the low-level details and high-level semantic features. Extensive experiments conducted on two infrared single-frame image datasets, i.e., SIRST and Synthetic datasets, show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed UIU-Net in comparison with several state-of-the-art infrared small object detection methods. The proposed UIU-Net also produces powerful generalization performance for video sequence infrared small object datasets, e.g., ATR ground/air video sequence dataset. The codes of this work are available openly at https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of video action recognition can be classified into two categories: the appearance-based methods and the pose-based methods. The appearance-based methods generally cannot model temporal dynamics of large motion well by virtue of optical flow estimation, while the pose-based methods ignore the visual context information such as typical scenes and objects, which are also important cues for action understanding. In this paper, we tackle these problems by proposing a Pose-Appearance Relational Network (PARNet), which models the correlation between human pose and image appearance, and combines the benefits of these two modalities to improve the robustness towards unconstrained real-world videos. There are three network streams in our model, namely pose stream, appearance stream and relation stream. For the pose stream, a Temporal Multi-Pose RNN module is constructed to obtain the dynamic representations through temporal modeling of 2D poses. For the appearance stream, a Spatial Appearance CNN module is employed to extract the global appearance representation of the video sequence. For the relation stream, a Pose-Aware RNN module is built to connect pose and appearance streams by modeling action-sensitive visual context information. Through jointly optimizing the three modules, PARNet achieves superior performances compared with the state-of-the-arts on both the pose-complete datasets (KTH, Penn-Action, UCF11) and the challenging pose-incomplete datasets (UCF101, HMDB51, JHMDB), demonstrating its robustness towards complex environments and noisy skeletons. Its effectiveness on NTU-RGBD dataset is also validated even compared with 3D skeleton-based methods. Furthermore, an appearance-enhanced PARNet equipped with a RGB-based I3D stream is proposed, which outperforms the Kinetics pre-trained competitors on UCF101 and HMDB51. The better experimental results verify the potentials of our framework by integrating various modules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different from Visual Question Answering task that requires to answer only one question about an image, Visual Dialogue task involves multiple rounds of dialogues which cover a broad range of visual content that could be related to any objects, relationships or high-level semantics. Thus one of the key challenges in Visual Dialogue task is to learn a more comprehensive and semantic-rich image representation that can adaptively attend to the visual content referred by variant questions. In this paper, we first propose a novel scheme to depict an image from both visual and semantic views. Specifically, the visual view aims to capture the appearance-level information in an image, including objects and their visual relationships, while the semantic view enables the agent to understand high-level visual semantics from the whole image to the local regions. Furthermore, on top of such dual-view image representations, we propose a Dual Encoding Visual Dialogue (DualVD) module, which is able to adaptively select question-relevant information from the visual and semantic views in a hierarchical mode. To demonstrate the effectiveness of DualVD, we propose two novel visual dialogue models by applying it to the Late Fusion framework and Memory Network framework. The proposed models achieve state-of-the-art results on three benchmark datasets. A critical advantage of the DualVD module lies in its interpretability. We can analyze which modality (visual or semantic) has more contribution in answering the current question by explicitly visualizing the gate values. It gives us insights in understanding of information selection mode in the Visual Dialogue task. The code is available at https://github.com/JXZe/Learning_DualVD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]