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Power demand side management (DSM) regulations stipulate that electric power grid enterprises of cities and provinces must complete their target of power saving through efficient power plant (EPP) programs. This investigation studies power DSM and establishes a supervision and evaluation system for the EPP program. The proposed system can be used to evaluate the performance of an EPP program such as electricity saving and investment benefit. A model of EPP is established. A cuckoo search algorithm is applied for the model optimization and its result gives an optimal decision scheme. Finally, a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method is used to assess an EPP program. The results show that the established supervision and evaluation system and the model of an EPP program are effective and applicable for power grid enterprises.

Interactive fashion image manipulation, which enables users to edit images with sketches and color strokes, is an interesting research problem with great application value. Existing works often treat it as a general inpainting task and do not fully leverage the semantic structural information in fashion images. Moreover, they directly utilize conventional convolution and normalization layers to restore the incomplete image, which tends to wash away the sketch and color information. In this paper, we propose a novel Fashion Editing Generative Adversarial Network (FE-GAN), which is capable of manipulating fashion images by free-form sketches and sparse color strokes. FE-GAN consists of two modules: 1) a free-form parsing network that learns to control the human parsing generation by manipulating sketch and color; 2) a parsing-aware inpainting network that renders detailed textures with semantic guidance from the human parsing map. A new attention normalization layer is further applied at multiple scales in the decoder of the inpainting network to enhance the quality of the synthesized image. Extensive experiments on high-resolution fashion image datasets demonstrate that the proposed FE-GAN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on fashion image manipulation.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of human motion transfer, where we synthesize novel motion video for a target person that imitates the movement from a reference video. It is a video-to-video translation task in which the estimated poses are used to bridge two domains. Despite substantial progress on the topic, there exist several problems with the previous methods. First, there is a domain gap between training and testing pose sequences–the model is tested on poses it has not seen during training, such as difficult dancing moves. Furthermore, pose detection errors are inevitable, making the job of the generator harder. Finally, generating realistic pixels from sparse poses is challenging in a single step. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel pose-to-video translation framework for generating high-quality videos that are temporally coherent even for in-the-wild pose sequences unseen during training. We propose a pose augmentation method to minimize the training-test gap, a unified paired and unpaired learning strategy to improve the robustness to detection errors, and two-stage network architecture to achieve superior texture quality. To further boost research on the topic, we build two human motion datasets. Finally, we show the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art studies through extensive experiments and evaluations on different datasets.

Despite the great progress in human motion prediction, it remains a challenging task due to the complicated structural dynamics of human behaviors. In this paper, we address this problem in three aspects. First, to capture the long-range spatial correlations and temporal dependencies, we apply a transformer-based architecture with the global attention mechanism. Speci cally, we feed the network with the sequential joints encoded with the temporal information for spatial and temporal explorations. Second, to further exploit the inherent kinematic chains for better 3D structures, we apply a progressive-decoding strategy, which performs in a central-to-peripheral extension according to the structural connectivity. Last, in order to incorporate a general motion space for high-quality prediction, we build a memory-based dictionary, which aims to preserve the global motion patterns in training data to guide the predictions.We evaluate the proposed method on two challenging benchmark datasets (Human3.6M and CMU-Mocap). Experimental results show our superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. National Research Foundation (NRF) Accepted version This research / project is supported by the National Research Foundation, Singapore under its International Research Centres in Singapore Funding Initiative. Any opinions, fndings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of National Research Foundation, Singapore. This research is partially supported by the Monash FIT Start-up Grant, start-up funds from University at Buffalo and SUTD project PIE-SGP-Al-2020-02.

Deep CNNs have been pushing the frontier of visual recognition over past years. Besides recognition accuracy, strong demands in understanding deep CNNs in the research community motivate developments of tools to dissect pre-trained models to visualize how they make predictions. Recent works further push the interpretability in the network learning stage to learn more meaningful representations. In this work, focusing on a specific area of visual recognition, we report our efforts towards interpretable face recognition. We propose a spatial activation diversity loss to learn more structured face representations. By leveraging the structure, we further design a feature activation diversity loss to push the interpretable representations to be discriminative and robust to occlusions. We demonstrate on three face recognition benchmarks that our proposed method is able to improve face recognition accuracy with easily interpretable face representations., 10 pages, 9 figures, 6 tables, To appear in ICCV 2019 as an oral paper

Deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable success in image restoration and enhancement, but are they still competitive when there is a lack of paired training data? As one such example, this paper explores the low-light image enhancement problem, where in practice it is extremely challenging to simultaneously take a low-light and a normal-light photo of the same visual scene. We propose a highly effective unsupervised generative adversarial network, dubbed EnlightenGAN , that can be trained without low/normal-light image pairs, yet proves to generalize very well on various real-world test images. Instead of supervising the learning using ground truth data, we propose to regularize the unpaired training using the information extracted from the input itself, and benchmark a series of innovations for the low-light image enhancement problem, including a global-local discriminator structure, a self-regularized perceptual loss fusion, and the attention mechanism. Through extensive experiments, our proposed approach outperforms recent methods under a variety of metrics in terms of visual quality and subjective user study. Thanks to the great flexibility brought by unpaired training, EnlightenGAN is demonstrated to be easily adaptable to enhancing real-world images from various domains. Our codes and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/EnlightenGAN .

Prior highly-tuned human parsing models tend to fit towards each dataset in a specific domain or with discrepant label granularity, and can hardly be adapted to other human parsing tasks without extensive re-training. In this paper, we aim to learn a single universal human parsing model that can tackle all kinds of human parsing needs by unifying label annotations from different domains or at various levels of granularity. This poses many fundamental learning challenges, e.g. discovering underlying semantic structures among different label granularity, performing proper transfer learning across different image domains, and identifying and utilizing label redundancies across related tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a new universal human parsing agent, named "Graphonomy", which incorporates hierarchical graph transfer learning upon the conventional parsing network to encode the underlying label semantic structures and propagate relevant semantic information. In particular, Graphonomy first learns and propagates compact high-level graph representation among the labels within one dataset via Intra-Graph Reasoning, and then transfers semantic information across multiple datasets via Inter-Graph Transfer. Various graph transfer dependencies (\eg, similarity, linguistic knowledge) between different datasets are analyzed and encoded to enhance graph transfer capability. By distilling universal semantic graph representation to each specific task, Graphonomy is able to predict all levels of parsing labels in one system without piling up the complexity. Experimental results show Graphonomy effectively achieves the state-of-the-art results on three human parsing benchmarks as well as advantageous universal human parsing performance., Accepted to CVPR 2019. The Code is available at https://github.com/Gaoyiminggithub/Graphonomy

In this work, we address the human parsing task with a novel Contextualized Convolutional Neural Network (Co-CNN) architecture, which well integrates the cross-layer context, global image-level context, semantic edge context, within-super-pixel context and cross-super-pixel neighborhood context into a unified network. Given an input human image, Co-CNN produces the pixel-wise categorization in an end-to-end way. First, the cross-layer context is captured by our basic local-to-global-to-local structure, which hierarchically combines the global semantic information and the local fine details across different convolutional layers. Second, the global image-level label prediction is used as an auxiliary objective in the intermediate layer of the Co-CNN, and its outputs are further used for guiding the feature learning in subsequent convolutional layers to leverage the global image-level context. Third, semantic edge context is further incorporated into Co-CNN, where the high-level semantic boundaries are leveraged to guide pixel-wise labeling. Finally, to further utilize the local super-pixel contexts, the within-super-pixel smoothing and cross-super-pixel neighbourhood voting are formulated as natural sub-components of the Co-CNN to achieve the local label consistency in both training and testing process. Comprehensive evaluations on two public datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Co-CNN over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F-1 score on the large dataset [1] reaches $81.72\,\text{percent}$ by Co-CNN, significantly higher than $62.81\,\text{percent}$ and $64.38\,\text{percent}$ by the state-of-the-art algorithms, M-CNN [2] and ATR [1] , respectively. By utilizing our newly collected large dataset for training, our Co-CNN can achieve $85.36\,\text{percent}$ in F-1 score.

Instance-level object segmentation is an important yet under-explored task. The few existing studies are almost all based on region proposal methods to extract candidate segments and then utilize object classification to produce final results. Nonetheless, generating accurate region proposals itself is quite challenging. In this work, we propose a Proposal-Free Network (PFN ) to address the instance-level object segmentation problem, which outputs the instance numbers of different categories and the pixel-level information on 1) the coordinates of the instance bounding box each pixel belongs to, and 2) the confidences of different categories for each pixel, based on pixel-to-pixel deep convolutional neural network. All the outputs together, by using any off-the-shelf clustering method for simple post-processing, can naturally generate the ultimate instance-level object segmentation results. The whole PFN can be easily trained in an end-to-end way without the requirement of a proposal generation stage. Extensive evaluations on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 semantic segmentation benchmark demonstrate that the proposed PFN solution well beats the state-of-the-arts for instance-level object segmentation. In particular, the $AP^r$ over 20 classes at 0.5 IoU reaches 58.7% by PFN, significantly higher than 43.8% and 46.3% by the state-of-the-art algorithms, SDS [9] and [16], respectively., 14 pages

Finding views with good photo composition is a challenging task for machine learning methods. A key difficulty is the lack of well annotated large scale datasets. Most existing datasets only provide a limited number of annotations for good views, while ignoring the comparative nature of view selection. In this work, we present the first large scale Comparative Photo Composition dataset, which contains over one million comparative view pairs annotated using a cost-effective crowdsourcing workflow. We show that these comparative view annotations are essential for training a robust neural network model for composition. In addition, we propose a novel knowledge transfer framework to train a fast view proposal network, which runs at 75+ FPS and achieves state-of-the-art performance in image cropping and thumbnail generation tasks on three benchmark datasets. The superiority of our method is also demonstrated in a user study on a challenging experiment, where our method significantly outperforms the baseline methods in producing diversified well-composed views.

In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive metric learning algorithm (AML) for visual saliency detection. A key observation is that the saliency of a superpixel can be estimated by the distance from the most certain foreground and background seeds. Instead of measuring distance on the Euclidean space, we present a learning method based on two complementary Mahalanobis distance metrics: 1) generic metric learning (GML) and 2) specific metric learning (SML). GML aims at the global distribution of the whole training set, while SML considers the specific structure of a single image. Considering that multiple similarity measures from different views may enhance the relevant information and alleviate the irrelevant one, we try to fuse the GML and SML together and experimentally find the combining result does work well. Different from the most existing methods which are directly based on low-level features, we devise a superpixelwise Fisher vector coding approach to better distinguish salient objects from the background. We also propose an accurate seeds selection mechanism and exploit contextual and multiscale information when constructing the final saliency map. Experimental results on various image sets show that the proposed AML performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts.

Existing works on semantic segmentation typically consider a small number of labels, ranging from tens to a few hundreds. With a large number of labels, training and evaluation of such task become extremely challenging due to correlation between labels and lack of datasets with complete annotations. We formulate semantic segmentation as a problem of image segmentation given a semantic concept, and propose a novel system which can potentially handle an unlimited number of concepts, including objects, parts, stuff, and attributes. We achieve this using a weakly and semi-supervised framework leveraging multiple datasets with different levels of supervision. We first train a deep neural network on a 6M stock image dataset with only image-level labels to learn visual-semantic embedding on 18K concepts. Then, we refine and extend the embedding network to predict an attention map, using a curated dataset with bounding box annotations on 750 concepts. Finally, we train an attention-driven class agnostic segmentation network using an 80-category fully annotated dataset. We perform extensive experiments to validate that the proposed system performs competitively to the state of the art on fully supervised concepts, and is capable of producing accurate segmentations for weakly learned and unseen concepts.

Multi-task learning has been widely adopted in many computer vision tasks to improve overall computation efficiency or boost the performance of individual tasks, under the assumption that those tasks are correlated and complementary to each other. However, the relationships between the tasks are complicated in practice, especially when the number of involved tasks scales up. When two tasks are of weak relevance, they may compete or even distract each other during joint training of shared parameters, and as a consequence undermine the learning of all the tasks. This will raise destructive interference which decreases learning efficiency of shared parameters and lead to low quality loss local optimum w.r.t. shared parameters. To address the this problem, we propose a general modulation module, which can be inserted into any convolutional neural network architecture, to encourage the coupling and feature sharing of relevant tasks while disentangling the learning of irrelevant tasks with minor parameters addition. Equipped with this module, gradient directions from different tasks can be enforced to be consistent for those shared parameters, which benefits multi-task joint training. The module is end-to-end learnable without ad-hoc design for specific tasks, and can naturally handle many tasks at the same time. We apply our approach on two retrieval tasks, face retrieval on the CelebA dataset [12] and product retrieval on the UT-Zappos50K dataset [34, 35], and demonstrate its advantage over other multi-task learning methods in both accuracy and storage efficiency.

Human parsing and pose estimation have recently received considerable interest due to their substantial application potentials. However, the existing datasets have limited numbers of images and annotations and lack a variety of human appearances and coverage of challenging cases in unconstrained environments. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark named "Look into Person (LIP)" that provides a significant advancement in terms of scalability, diversity, and difficulty, which are crucial for future developments in human-centric analysis. This comprehensive dataset contains over 50,000 elaborately annotated images with 19 semantic part labels and 16 body joints, which are captured from a broad range of viewpoints, occlusions, and background complexities. Using these rich annotations, we perform detailed analyses of the leading human parsing and pose estimation approaches, thereby obtaining insights into the successes and failures of these methods. To further explore and take advantage of the semantic correlation of these two tasks, we propose a novel joint human parsing and pose estimation network to explore efficient context modeling, which can simultaneously predict parsing and pose with extremely high quality. Furthermore, we simplify the network to solve human parsing by exploring a novel self-supervised structure-sensitive learning approach, which imposes human pose structures into the parsing results without resorting to extra supervision. The dataset, code and models are available at http://www.sysu-hcp.net/lip/., Comment: We proposed the most comprehensive dataset around the world for human-centric analysis! (Accepted By T-PAMI 2018) The dataset, code and models are available at http://www.sysu-hcp.net/lip/ . arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1703.05446

We present a scene parsing method that utilizes global context information based on both the parametric and nonparametric models. Compared to previous methods that only exploit the local relationship between objects, we train a context network based on scene similarities to generate feature representations for global contexts. In addition, these learned features are utilized to generate global and spatial priors for explicit classes inference. We then design modules to embed the feature representations and the priors into the segmentation network as additional global context cues. We show that the proposed method can eliminate false positives that are not compatible with the global context representations. Experiments on both the MIT ADE20K and PASCAL Context datasets show that the proposed method performs favorably against existing methods.

In this work, we address the challenging video scene parsing problem by developing effective representation learning methods given limited parsing annotations. In particular, we contribute two novel methods that constitute a unified parsing framework. (1) \textbf{Predictive feature learning}} from nearly unlimited unlabeled video data. Different from existing methods learning features from single frame parsing, we learn spatiotemporal discriminative features by enforcing a parsing network to predict future frames and their parsing maps (if available) given only historical frames. In this way, the network can effectively learn to capture video dynamics and temporal context, which are critical clues for video scene parsing, without requiring extra manual annotations. (2) \textbf{Prediction steering parsing}} architecture that effectively adapts the learned spatiotemporal features to scene parsing tasks and provides strong guidance for any off-the-shelf parsing model to achieve better video scene parsing performance. Extensive experiments over two challenging datasets, Cityscapes and Camvid, have demonstrated the effectiveness of our methods by showing significant improvement over well-established baselines., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables, currently v2

Parsing urban scene images benefits many applications, especially self-driving. Most of the current solutions employ generic image parsing models that treat all scales and locations in the images equally and do not consider the geometry property of car-captured urban scene images. Thus, they suffer from heterogeneous object scales caused by perspective projection of cameras on actual scenes and inevitably encounter parsing failures on distant objects as well as other boundary and recognition errors. In this work, we propose a new FoveaNet model to fully exploit the perspective geometry of scene images and address the common failures of generic parsing models. FoveaNet estimates the perspective geometry of a scene image through a convolutional network which integrates supportive evidence from contextual objects within the image. Based on the perspective geometry information, FoveaNet “undoes” the camera perspective projection — analyzing regions in the space of the actual scene, and thus provides much more reliable parsing results. Furthermore, to effectively address the recognition errors, FoveaNet introduces a new dense CRFs model that takes the perspective geometry as a prior potential. We evaluate FoveaNet on two urban scene parsing datasets, Cityspaces and CamVid, which demonstrates that FoveaNet can outperform all the well-established baselines and provide new state-of-the-art performance.

Human parsing has recently attracted a lot of research interests due to its huge application potentials. However existing datasets have limited number of images and annotations, and lack the variety of human appearances and the coverage of challenging cases in unconstrained environment. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark "Look into Person (LIP)" that makes a significant advance in terms of scalability, diversity and difficulty, a contribution that we feel is crucial for future developments in human-centric analysis. This comprehensive dataset contains over 50,000 elaborately annotated images with 19 semantic part labels, which are captured from a wider range of viewpoints, occlusions and background complexity. Given these rich annotations we perform detailed analyses of the leading human parsing approaches, gaining insights into the success and failures of these methods. Furthermore, in contrast to the existing efforts on improving the feature discriminative capability, we solve human parsing by exploring a novel self-supervised structure-sensitive learning approach, which imposes human pose structures into parsing results without resorting to extra supervision (i.e., no need for specifically labeling human joints in model training). Our self-supervised learning framework can be injected into any advanced neural networks to help incorporate rich high-level knowledge regarding human joints from a global perspective and improve the parsing results. Extensive evaluations on our LIP and the public PASCAL-Person-Part dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method., Comment: Accepted to appear in CVPR 2017

This paper develops a general framework for learning interpretable data representation via Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks over hierarchal graph structures. Instead of learning LSTM models over the pre-fixed structures, we propose to further learn the intermediate interpretable multi-level graph structures in a progressive and stochastic way from data during the LSTM network optimization. We thus call this model the structure-evolving LSTM. In particular, starting with an initial element-level graph representation where each node is a small data element, the structure-evolving LSTM gradually evolves the multi-level graph representations by stochastically merging the graph nodes with high compatibilities along the stacked LSTM layers. In each LSTM layer, we estimate the compatibility of two connected nodes from their corresponding LSTM gate outputs, which is used to generate a merging probability. The candidate graph structures are accordingly generated where the nodes are grouped into cliques with their merging probabilities. We then produce the new graph structure with a Metropolis-Hasting algorithm, which alleviates the risk of getting stuck in local optimums by stochastic sampling with an acceptance probability. Once a graph structure is accepted, a higher-level graph is then constructed by taking the partitioned cliques as its nodes. During the evolving process, representation becomes more abstracted in higher-levels where redundant information is filtered out, allowing more efficient propagation of long-range data dependencies. We evaluate the effectiveness of structure-evolving LSTM in the application of semantic object parsing and demonstrate its advantage over state-of-the-art LSTM models on standard benchmarks., To appear in CVPR 2017 as a spotlight paper

Semantic object parsing is a fundamental task for understanding objects in detail in computer vision community, where incorporating multi-level contextual information is critical for achieving such fine-grained pixel-level recognition. Prior methods often leverage the contextual information through post-processing predicted confidence maps. In this work, we propose a novel deep Local-Global Long Short-Term Memory (LG-LSTM) architecture to seamlessly incorporate short-distance and long-distance spatial dependencies into the feature learning over all pixel positions. In each LG-LSTM layer, local guidance from neighboring positions and global guidance from the whole image are imposed on each position to better exploit complex local and global contextual information. Individual LSTMs for distinct spatial dimensions are also utilized to intrinsically capture various spatial layouts of semantic parts in the images, yielding distinct hidden and memory cells of each position for each dimension. In our parsing approach, several LG-LSTM layers are stacked and appended to the intermediate convolutional layers to directly enhance visual features, allowing network parameters to be learned in an end-to-end way. The long chains of sequential computation by stacked LG-LSTM layers also enable each pixel to sense a much larger region for inference benefiting from the memorization of previous dependencies in all positions along all dimensions. Comprehensive evaluations on three public datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our LG-LSTM over other state-of-the-art methods., Comment: 10 pages

In this work, we propose a novel Reversible Recursive Instance-level Object Segmentation (R2-IOS) framework to address the challenging instance-level object segmentation task. R2-IOS consists of a reversible proposal refinement sub-network that predicts bounding box offsets for refining the object proposal locations, and an instance-level segmentation sub-network that generates the foreground mask of the dominant object instance in each proposal. By being recursive, R2-IOS iteratively optimizes the two sub-networks during joint training, in which the refined object proposals and improved segmentation predictions are alternately fed into each other to progressively increase the network capabilities. By being reversible, the proposal refinement sub-network adaptively determines an optimal number of refinement iterations required for each proposal during both training and testing. Furthermore, to handle multiple overlapped instances within a proposal, an instance-aware denoising autoencoder is introduced into the segmentation sub-network to distinguish the dominant object from other distracting instances. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of R2-IOS over other state-of-the-art methods. In particular, the $\text{AP}^r$ over $20$ classes at $0.5$ IoU achieves $66.7\%$, which significantly outperforms the results of $58.7\%$ by PFN~\cite{PFN} and $46.3\%$ by~\cite{liu2015multi}., Comment: 9 pages

When creating a photo album of an event, people typically select a few important images to keep or share. There is some consistency in the process of choosing the important images, and discarding the unimportant ones. Modeling this selection process will assist automatic photo selection and album summarization. In this paper, we show that the selection of important images is consistent among different viewers, and that this selection process is related to the event type of the album. We introduce the concept of event-specific image importance. We collected a new event album dataset with human annotation of the relative image importance with each event album. We also propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based method to predict the image importance score of a given event album, using a novel rank loss function and a progressive training scheme. Results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms various baseline methods.

Real-world applications could benefit from the ability to automatically generate a fine-grained ranking of photo aesthetics. However, previous methods for image aesthetics analysis have primarily focused on the coarse, binary categorization of images into high- or low-aesthetic categories. In this work, we propose to learn a deep convolutional neural network to rank photo aesthetics in which the relative ranking of photo aesthetics are directly modeled in the loss function. Our model incorporates joint learning of meaningful photographic attributes and image content information which can help regularize the complicated photo aesthetics rating problem.

We aim to model the top-down attention of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier for generating task-specific attention maps. Inspired by a top-down human visual attention model, we propose a new backpropagation scheme, called Excitation Backprop, to pass along top-down signals downwards in the network hierarchy via a probabilistic Winner-Take-All process. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of contrastive attention to make the top-down attention maps more discriminative. In experiments, we demonstrate the accuracy and generalizability of our method in weakly supervised localization tasks on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC07 and ImageNet datasets. The usefulness of our method is further validated in the text-to-region association task. On the Flickr30k Entities dataset, we achieve promising performance in phrase localization by leveraging the top-down attention of a CNN model that has been trained on weakly labeled web images.

By taking the semantic object parsing task as an exemplar application scenario, we propose the Graph Long Short-Term Memory (Graph LSTM) network, which is the generalization of LSTM from sequential data or multi-dimensional data to general graph-structured data. Particularly, instead of evenly and fixedly dividing an image to pixels or patches in existing multi-dimensional LSTM structures (e.g., Row, Grid and Diagonal LSTMs), we take each arbitrary-shaped superpixel as a semantically consistent node, and adaptively construct an undirected graph for each image, where the spatial relations of the superpixels are naturally used as edges. Constructed on such an adaptive graph topology, the Graph LSTM is more naturally aligned with the visual patterns in the image (e.g., object boundaries or appearance similarities) and provides a more economical information propagation route. Furthermore, for each optimization step over Graph LSTM, we propose to use a confidence-driven scheme to update the hidden and memory states of nodes progressively till all nodes are updated. In addition, for each node, the forgets gates are adaptively learned to capture different degrees of semantic correlation with neighboring nodes. Comprehensive evaluations on four diverse semantic object parsing datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Graph LSTM over other state-of-the-art solutions.

This paper investigates problems of image style, aesthetics, and quality estimation, which require fine-grained details from high-resolution images, utilizing deep neural network training approach. Existing deep convolutional neural networks mostly extracted one patch such as a down-sized crop from each image as a training example. However, one patch may not always well represent the entire image, which may cause ambiguity during training. We propose a deep multi-patch aggregation network training approach, which allows us to train models using multiple patches generated from one image. We achieve this by constructing multiple, shared columns in the neural network and feeding multiple patches to each of the columns. More importantly, we propose two novel network layers (statistics and sorting) to support aggregation of those patches. The proposed deep multi-patch aggregation network integrates shared feature learning and aggregation function learning into a unified framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the deep multi-patch aggregation network on the three problems, i.e., image style recognition, aesthetic quality categorization, and image quality estimation. Our models trained using the proposed networks significantly outperformed the state of the art in all three applications.

In this work, we address the human parsing task with a novel Contextualized Convolutional Neural Network (Co-CNN) architecture, which well integrates the cross-layer context, global image-level context, within-super-pixel context and cross-super-pixel neighborhood context into a unified network. Given an input human image, Co-CNN produces the pixel-wise categorization in an end-to-end way. First, the cross-layer context is captured by our basic local-to-global-to-local structure, which hierarchically combines the global semantic structure and the local fine details within the cross-layers. Second, the global image-level label prediction is used as an auxiliary objective in the intermediate layer of the Co-CNN, and its outputs are further used for guiding the feature learning in subsequent convolutional layers to leverage the global image-level context. Finally, to further utilize the local super-pixel contexts, the within-super-pixel smoothing and cross-super-pixel neighbourhood voting are formulated as natural sub-components of the Co-CNN to achieve the local label consistency in both training and testing process. Comprehensive evaluations on two public datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Co-CNN architecture over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F-1 score on the large dataset [15] reaches 76.95% by Co-CNN, significantly higher than 62.81% and 64.38% by the state-of-the-art algorithms, M-CNN [21] and ATR [15], respectively.

One fundamental problem in object retrieval with the bag-of-words model is its lack of spatial information. Although various approaches are proposed to incorporate spatial constraints into the model, most of them are either too strict or too loose so that they are only effective in limited cases. In this paper, a new spatially-constrained similarity measure (SCSM) is proposed to handle object rotation, scaling, view point change and appearance deformation. The similarity measure can be efficiently calculated by a voting-based method using inverted files. During the retrieval process, object localization in the database images can also be simultaneously achieved using SCSM without post-processing. Furthermore, based on the retrieval and localization results of SCSM, we introduce a novel and robust re-ranking method with the $k$ -nearest neighbors of the query for automatically refining the initial search results. Extensive performance evaluations on six public data sets show that SCSM significantly outperforms other spatial models including RANSAC-based spatial verification, while $k$ -NN re-ranking outperforms most state-of-the-art approaches using query expansion. We also adapted SCSM for mobile product image search with an iterative algorithm to simultaneously extract the product instance from the mobile query image, identify the instance, and retrieve visually similar product images. Experiments on two product image search data sets show that our approach can robustly localize and extract the product in the query image, and hence drastically improve the retrieval accuracy over baseline methods.

In this work, the human parsing task, namely decomposing a human image into semantic fashion/body regions, is formulated as an Active Template Regression (ATR) problem, where the normalized mask of each fashion/body item is expressed as the linear combination of the learned mask templates, and then morphed to a more precise mask with the active shape parameters, including position, scale and visibility of each semantic region. The mask template coefficients and the active shape parameters together can generate the human parsing results, and are thus called the structure outputs for human parsing. The deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is utilized to build the end-to-end relation between the input human image and the structure outputs for human parsing. More specifically, the structure outputs are predicted by two separate networks. The first CNN network is with max-pooling, and designed to predict the template coefficients for each label mask, while the second CNN network is without max-pooling to preserve sensitivity to label mask position and accurately predict the active shape parameters. For a new image, the structure outputs of the two networks are fused to generate the probability of each label for each pixel, and super-pixel smoothing is finally used to refine the human parsing result. Comprehensive evaluations on a large dataset well demonstrate the significant superiority of the ATR framework over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F1-score reaches $64.38\%$ by our ATR framework, significantly higher than $44.76\%$ based on the state-of-the-art algorithm., This manuscript is the accepted version for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2015

A new design idea, based on the “shape element”, is introduced to develop a roll forming pass design expert system. Shape elements recognizing knowledge base, bend angle distribution knowledge base, rolls arranging knowledge base and related reasoning engines are constructed in the system by using object-oriented method. Pass flower and rolls design can be automatically done. Some examples show that this expert system is practical and effective.

Both parametric and non-parametric approaches have demonstrated encouraging performances in the human parsing task, namely segmenting a human image into several semantic regions (e.g., hat, bag, left arm, face). In this work, we aim to develop a new solution with the advantages of both methodologies, namely supervision from annotated data and the flexibility to use newly annotated (possibly uncommon) images, and present a quasi-parametric human parsing model. Under the classic K Nearest Neighbor (KNN)-based nonparametric framework, the parametric Matching Convolutional Neural Network (M-CNN) is proposed to predict the matching confidence and displacements of the best matched region in the testing image for a particular semantic region in one KNN image. Given a testing image, we first retrieve its KNN images from the annotated/manually-parsed human image corpus. Then each semantic region in each KNN image is matched with confidence to the testing image using M-CNN, and the matched regions from all KNN images are further fused, followed by a superpixel smoothing procedure to obtain the ultimate human parsing result. The M-CNN differs from the classic CNN in that the tailored cross image matching filters are introduced to characterize the matching between the testing image and the semantic region of a KNN image. The cross image matching filters are defined at different convolutional layers, each aiming to capture a particular range of displacements. Comprehensive evaluations over a large dataset with 7,700 annotated human images well demonstrate the significant performance gain from the quasi-parametric model over the state-of-the-arts, for the human parsing task., Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for CVPR 2015

Segmenting semantic objects from images and parsing them into their respective semantic parts are fundamental steps towards detailed object understanding in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a joint solution that tackles semantic object and part segmentation simultaneously, in which higher object-level context is provided to guide part segmentation, and more detailed part-level localization is utilized to refine object segmentation. Specifically, we first introduce the concept of semantic compositional parts (SCP) in which similar semantic parts are grouped and shared among different objects. A two-channel fully convolutional network (FCN) is then trained to provide the SCP and object potentials at each pixel. At the same time, a compact set of segments can also be obtained from the SCP predictions of the network. Given the potentials and the generated segments, in order to explore long-range context, we finally construct an efficient fully connected conditional random field (FCRF) to jointly predict the final object and part labels. Extensive evaluation on three different datasets shows that our approach can mutually enhance the performance of object and part segmentation, and outperforms the current state-of-the-art on both tasks.

Cropping is one of the most common tasks in image editing for improving the aesthetic quality of a photograph. In this paper, we propose a new, aesthetic photo cropping system which combines three models: visual composition, boundary simplicity, and content preservation. The visual composition model measures the quality of composition for a given crop. Instead of manually defining rules or score functions for composition, we learn the model from a large set of well-composed images via discriminative classifier training. The boundary simplicity model measures the clearness of the crop boundary to avoid object cutting-through. The content preservation model computes the amount of salient information kept in the crop to avoid excluding important content. By assigning a hard lower bound constraint on the content preservation and linearly combining the scores from the visual composition and boundary simplicity models, the resulting system achieves significant improvement over recent cropping methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation.

Magnetic flux leakage (MFL) inspection is one of the most important and sensitive nondestructive testing approaches. For online MFL inspection of a long-range railway track or oil pipeline, a fast and effective defect profile estimating method based on a multi-power affine projection algorithm (MAPA) is proposed, where the depth of a sampling point is related with not only the MFL signals before it, but also the ones after it, and all of the sampling points related to one point appear as serials or multi-power. Defect profile estimation has two steps: regulating a weight vector in an MAPA filter and estimating a defect profile with the MAPA filter. Both simulation and experimental data are used to test the performance of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits high speed while maintaining the estimated profiles clearly close to the desired ones in a noisy environment, thereby meeting the demand of accurate online inspection.

We study the problem of human body configuration analysis, more specifically, human parsing and human pose estimation. These two tasks, ie identifying the semantic regions and body joints respectively over the human body image, are intrinsically highly correlated. However, previous works generally solve these two problems separately or iteratively. In this work, we propose a unified framework for simultaneous human parsing and pose estimation based on semantic parts. By utilizing Parselets and Mixture of Joint-Group Templates as the representations for these semantic parts, we seamlessly formulate the human parsing and pose estimation problem jointly within a unified framework via a tailored and-or graph. A novel Grid Layout Feature is then designed to effectively capture the spatial co-occurrence/occlusion information between/within the Parselets and MJGTs. Thus the mutually complementary nature of these two tasks can be harnessed to boost the performance of each other. The resultant unified model can be solved using the structure learning framework in a principled way. Comprehensive evaluations on two benchmark datasets for both tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Despite the fact that face detection has been studied intensively over the past several decades, the problem is still not completely solved. Challenging conditions, such as extreme pose, lighting, and occlusion, have historically hampered traditional, model-based methods. In contrast, exemplar-based face detection has been shown to be effective, even under these challenging conditions, primarily because a large exemplar database is leveraged to cover all possible visual variations. However, relying heavily on a large exemplar database to deal with the face appearance variations makes the detector impractical due to the high space and time complexity. We construct an efficient boosted exemplar-based face detector which overcomes the defect of the previous work by being faster, more memory efficient, and more accurate. In our method, exemplars as weak detectors are discriminatively trained and selectively assembled in the boosting framework which largely reduces the number of required exemplars. Notably, we propose to include non-face images as negative exemplars to actively suppress false detections to further improve the detection accuracy. We verify our approach over two public face detection benchmarks and one personal photo album, and achieve significant improvement over the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.

Model updating is a critical problem in tracking. Inaccurate extraction of the foreground and background information in model adaptation would cause the model to drift and degrade the tracking performance. The most direct but yet difficult solution to the drift problem is to obtain accurate boundaries of the target. We approach such a solution by proposing a novel closed-loop model adaptation framework based on the combination of matting and tracking. In our framework, the scribbles for matting are all automatically generated, which makes matting applicable in a tracking system. Meanwhile, accurate boundaries of the target can be obtained from matting results even when the target has large deformation. An effective model is further constructed and successfully updated based on such accurate boundaries. Extensive experiments show that our closed-loop adaptation scheme largely avoids model drift and significantly outperforms other discriminative tracking models as well as video matting approaches.

This paper shows the design of MiPFS, a parallel file system intended to be used as a low-level platform to develop more complex I/O entities on top of it. This parallel file system relies on the idea that the user should execute I/O operations using the data-types stored on each object, so that each file can be managed as a typed object. However, as we want to provide a mechanism, and not policies, MiPFS includes functions to manage fixed and variable length records, and their associated indexes. This approach, and the quality of service functionality, allows to use MiPFS as a continuous media parallel file system.