Face Super-Resolution Network with Incremental Enhancement of Facial Parsing Information

Shuang Liu, Chengyi Xiong, Zhirong Gao

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Auto-TLDR; Learning-based Face Super-Resolution with Incremental Boosting Facial Parsing Information

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Recently, facial priors based face super-resolution (SR) methods have obtained significant performance gains in dealing with extremely degraded facial images, and facial priors have also been proved useful in facilitating the inference of face images. Based on this, how to fully fuse facial priors into deep features to improve face SR performance has attracted a major attention. In this paper, we propose a learning-based face SR approach with incremental boosting facial parsing information (IFPSR) for high-magnification of low-resolution faces. The proposed IFPSR method consists of three main parts: i) a three-stage parsing map embedded features upsampling network, in which image recovery and prior estimation processes are performed simultaneously and progressively to improve the image resolution; ii) a progressive training method and a joint facial attention and heatmap loss to obtain better facial attributes; iii) the channel attention strategy in residual dense blocks to adaptively learn facial features. Extensive experimental results show that compared with the state-of-the-art methods in terms of quantitative and qualitative metrics, our approach can achieve an outstanding balance between SR image quality and low network complexity.

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Residual Fractal Network for Single Image Super Resolution by Widening and Deepening

Jiahang Gu, Zhaowei Qu, Xiaoru Wang, Jiawang Dan, Junwei Sun

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Auto-TLDR; Residual fractal convolutional network for single image super-resolution

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The architecture of the convolutional neural network (CNN) plays an important role in single image super-resolution (SISR). However, most models proposed in recent years usually transplant methods or architectures that perform well in other vision fields. Thence they do not combine the characteristics of super-resolution (SR) and ignore the key information brought by the recurring texture feature in the image. To utilize patch-recurrence in SR and the high correlation of texture, we propose a residual fractal convolutional block (RFCB) and expand its depth and width to obtain residual fractal network (RFN), which contains deep residual fractal network (DRFN) and wide residual fractal network (WRFN). RFCB is recursive with multiple branches of magnified receptive field. Through the phased feature fusion module, the network focuses on extracting high-frequency texture feature that repeatedly appear in the image. We also introduce residual in residual (RIR) structure to RFCB that enables abundant low-frequency feature feed into deeper layers and reduce the difficulties of network training. RFN is the first supervised learning method to combine the patch-recurrence characteristic in SISR into network design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RFN outperforms state-of-the-art SISR methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality, while the amount of parameters has been greatly optimized.

Progressive Splitting and Upscaling Structure for Super-Resolution

Qiang Li, Tao Dai, Shutao Xia

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Auto-TLDR; PSUS: Progressive and Upscaling Layer for Single Image Super-Resolution

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Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great success in single image super-resolution (SISR). Most of these methods focus on the design of network architecture and adopt a sub-pixel convolution layer at the end of network, but few have paid attention to exploring potential representation ability of upscaling layer. Sub-pixel convolution layer aggregates several low resolution (LR) feature maps and builds super-resolution (SR) images in a single step. However, those LR feature maps share similar patterns as they are extracted from a single trunk network. We believe that the mapping relationships between input image and each LR feature map are not consistent. Inspired by this, we propose a novel progressive splitting and upscaling structure, termed PSUS, which generates decoupled feature maps for upscaling layer to get better SR image. Experiments show that our method can not only speed up the convergence, but also achieve considerable improvement on image quality with fewer parameters and lower computational complexity.

Multi-Laplacian GAN with Edge Enhancement for Face Super Resolution

Shanlei Ko, Bi-Ru Dai

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Auto-TLDR; Face Image Super-Resolution with Enhanced Edge Information

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Face image super-resolution has become a research hotspot in the field of image processing. Nowadays, more and more researches add additional information, such as landmark, identity, to reconstruct high resolution images from low resolution ones, and have a good performance in quantitative terms and perceptual quality. However, these additional information is hard to obtain in many cases. In this work, we focus on reconstructing face images by extracting useful information from face images directly rather than using additional information. By observing edge information in each scale of face images, we propose a method to reconstruct high resolution face images with enhanced edge information. In additional, with the proposed training procedure, our method reconstructs photo-realistic images in upscaling factor 8x and outperforms state-of-the-art methods both in quantitative terms and perceptual quality.

RSAN: Residual Subtraction and Attention Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Shuo Wei, Xin Sun, Haoran Zhao, Junyu Dong

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Auto-TLDR; RSAN: Residual subtraction and attention network for super-resolution

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The single-image super-resolution (SISR) aims to recover a potential high-resolution image from its low-resolution version. Recently, deep learning-based methods have played a significant role in super-resolution field due to its effectiveness and efficiency. However, most of the SISR methods neglect the importance among the feature map channels. Moreover, they can not eliminate the redundant noises, making the output image be blurred. In this paper, we propose the residual subtraction and attention network (RSAN) for powerful feature expression and channels importance learning. More specifically, RSAN firstly implements one redundance removal module to learn noise information in the feature map and subtract noise through residual learning. Then it introduces the channel attention module to amplify high-frequency information and suppress the weight of effectless channels. Experimental results on extensive public benchmarks demonstrate our RSAN achieves significant improvement over the previous SISR methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality.

Boosting High-Level Vision with Joint Compression Artifacts Reduction and Super-Resolution

Xiaoyu Xiang, Qian Lin, Jan Allebach

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Auto-TLDR; A Context-Aware Joint CAR and SR Neural Network for High-Resolution Text Recognition and Face Detection

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Due to the limits of bandwidth and storage space, digital images are usually down-scaled and compressed when transmitted over networks, resulting in loss of details and jarring artifacts that can lower the performance of high-level visual tasks. In this paper, we aim to generate an artifact-free high-resolution image from a low-resolution one compressed with an arbitrary quality factor by exploring joint compression artifacts reduction (CAR) and super-resolution (SR) tasks. First, we propose a context-aware joint CAR and SR neural network (CAJNN) that integrates both local and non-local features to solve CAR and SR in one-stage. Finally, a deep reconstruction network is adopted to predict high quality and high-resolution images. Evaluation on CAR and SR benchmark datasets shows that our CAJNN model outperforms previous methods and also takes 26.2% less runtime. Based on this model, we explore addressing two critical challenges in high-level computer vision: optical character recognition of low-resolution texts, and extremely tiny face detection. We demonstrate that CAJNN can serve as an effective image preprocessing method and improve the accuracy for real-scene text recognition (from 85.30% to 85.75%) and the average precision for tiny face detection (from 0.317 to 0.611).

LiNet: A Lightweight Network for Image Super Resolution

Armin Mehri, Parichehr Behjati Ardakani, Angel D. Sappa

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Auto-TLDR; LiNet: A Compact Dense Network for Lightweight Super Resolution

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This paper proposes a new lightweight network, LiNet, that enhancing technical efficiency in lightweight super resolution and operating approximately like very large and costly networks in terms of number of network parameters and operations. The proposed architecture allows the network to learn more abstract properties by avoiding low-level information via multiple links. LiNet introduces a Compact Dense Module, which contains set of inner and outer blocks, to efficiently extract meaningful information, to better leverage multi-level representations before upsampling stage, and to allow an efficient information and gradient flow within the network. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed LiNet achieves favorable performance against lightweight state-of-the-art methods.

Wavelet Attention Embedding Networks for Video Super-Resolution

Young-Ju Choi, Young-Woon Lee, Byung-Gyu Kim

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Auto-TLDR; Wavelet Attention Embedding Network for Video Super-Resolution

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Recently, Video super-resolution (VSR) has become more crucial as the resolution of display has been grown. The majority of deep learning-based VSR methods combine the convolutional neural networks (CNN) with motion compensation or alignment module to estimate high-resolution (HR) frame from low-resolution (LR) frames. However, most of previous methods deal with the spatial features equally and may result in the misaligned temporal features by pixel-based motion compensation and alignment module. It can lead to the damaging effect on the accuracy of the estimated HR feature. In this paper, we propose a wavelet attention embedding network (WAEN), including wavelet embedding network (WENet) and attention embedding network (AENet), to fully exploit the spatio-temporal informative features. The WENet is operated as a spatial feature extractor of individual low and high-frequency information based on 2-D Haar discrete wavelet transform. The meaningful temporal feature is extracted in the AENet through utilizing the weighted attention map between frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Single Image Super-Resolution with Dynamic Residual Connection

Karam Park, Jae Woong Soh, Nam Ik Cho

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Auto-TLDR; Dynamic Residual Attention Network for Lightweight Single Image Super-Residual Networks

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Deep convolutional neural networks have shown significant improvement in the single image super-resolution (SISR) field. Recently, there have been attempts to solve the SISR problem using lightweight networks, considering limited computational resources for real-world applications. Especially for lightweight networks, balancing between parameter demand and performance is very difficult to adjust, and most lightweight SISR networks are manually designed based on a huge number of brute-force experiments. Besides, a critical key to the network performance relies on the skip connection of building blocks that are repeatedly in the architecture. Notably, in previous works, these connections are pre-defined and manually determined by human researchers. Hence, they are less flexible to the input image statistics, and there can be a better solution for the given number of parameters. Therefore, we focus on the automated design of networks regarding the connection of basic building blocks (residual networks), and as a result, propose a dynamic residual attention network (DRAN). The proposed method allows the network to dynamically select residual paths depending on the input image, based on the idea of attention mechanism. For this, we design a dynamic residual module that determines the residual paths between the basic building blocks for the given input image. By finding optimal residual paths between the blocks, the network can selectively bypass informative features needed to reconstruct the target high-resolution (HR) image. Experimental results show that our proposed DRAN outperforms most of the existing state-of-the-arts lightweight models in SISR.

Cross-Layer Information Refining Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Hongyi Zhang, Wen Lu, Xiaopeng Sun

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Auto-TLDR; Interlaced Spatial Attention Block for Single Image Super-Resolution

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Recently, deep learning-based image super-resolution (SR) has made a remarkable progress. However, previous SR methods rarely focus on the correlation between adjacent layers, which leads to underutilization of the information extracted by each convolutional layer. To address these problem, we design a simple and efficient cross-layer information refining network (CIRN) for single image super-resolution. Concretely, we propose the interlaced spatial attention block (ISAB) to measure the correlation between the adjacent layers feature maps and adaptively rescale spatial-wise features for refining the information. Owing to the two stage information propagation strategy, the CIRN can distill the primary information of adjacent layers without introducing too many parameters. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets illustrate that our method achieves better accuracy than state-of-the-art methods even in 16× scale, spcifically it has a better banlance between performance and parameters.

Hierarchically Aggregated Residual Transformation for Single Image Super Resolution

Zejiang Hou, Sy Kung

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Auto-TLDR; HARTnet: Hierarchically Aggregated Residual Transformation for Multi-Scale Super-resolution

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Visual patterns usually appear at different scales/sizes in natural images. Multi-scale feature representation is of great importance for the single-image super-resolution(SISR) task to reconstruct image objects at different scales.However, such characteristic has been rarely considered by CNN-based SISR methods. In this work, we propose a novel build-ing block, i.e. hierarchically aggregated residual transformation(HART), to achieve multi-scale feature representation in each layer of the network. Within each HART block, we connect multiple convolutions in a hierarchical residual-like manner, which greatly expands the range of effective receptive fields and helps to detect image features at different scales. To theoretically understand the proposed HART block, we recast SISR as an optimal control problem and show that HART effectively approximates the classical4th-order Runge-Kutta method, which has the merit of small local truncation error for solving numerical ordinary differential equation. By cascading the proposed HART blocks, we establish our high-performing HARTnet. Comparedwith existing SR state-of-the-arts (including those in NTIRE2019 SR Challenge leaderboard), the proposed HARTnet demonstrates consistent PSNR/SSIM performance improvements on various benchmark datasets under different degradation models.Moreover, HARTnet can efficiently restore more faithful high-resolution images than comparative SR methods (cf. Figure 1).

Efficient Super Resolution by Recursive Aggregation

Zhengxiong Luo Zhengxiong Luo, Yan Huang, Shang Li, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan

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Auto-TLDR; Recursive Aggregation Network for Efficient Deep Super Resolution

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Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable results on image super resolution (SR), but the efficiency problem of deep SR networks is rarely studied. We experimentally find that many sequentially stacked convolutional blocks in nowadays SR networks are far from being fully optimized, which largely damages their overall efficiency. It indicates that comparable or even better results could be achieved with less but sufficiently optimized blocks. In this paper, we try to construct more efficient SR model via the proposed recursive aggregation network (RAN). It recursively aggregates convolutional blocks in different orders, and avoids too many sequentially stacked blocks. In this way, multiple shortcuts are introduced in RAN, and help gradients easier flow to all inner layers, even for very deep SR networks. As a result, all blocks in RAN can be better optimized, thus RAN can achieve better performance with smaller model size than existing methods.

On-Device Text Image Super Resolution

Dhruval Jain, Arun Prabhu, Gopi Ramena, Manoj Goyal, Debi Mohanty, Naresh Purre, Sukumar Moharana

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Auto-TLDR; A Novel Deep Neural Network for Super-Resolution on Low Resolution Text Images

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Recent research on super-resolution (SR) has wit- nessed major developments with the advancements of deep convolutional neural networks. There is a need for information extraction from scenic text images or even document images on device, most of which are low-resolution (LR) images. Therefore, SR becomes an essential pre-processing step as Bicubic Upsampling, which is conventionally present in smartphones, performs poorly on LR images. To give the user more control over his privacy, and to reduce the carbon footprint by reducing the overhead of cloud computing and hours of GPU usage, executing SR models on the edge is a necessity in the recent times. There are various challenges in running and optimizing a model on resource-constrained platforms like smartphones. In this paper, we present a novel deep neural network that reconstructs sharper character edges and thus boosts OCR confidence. The proposed architecture not only achieves significant improvement in PSNR over bicubic upsampling on various benchmark datasets but also runs with an average inference time of 11.7 ms per image. We have outperformed state-of-the-art on the Text330 dataset. We also achieve an OCR accuracy of 75.89% on the ICDAR 2015 TextSR dataset, where ground truth has an accuracy of 78.10%.

Neural Architecture Search for Image Super-Resolution Using Densely Connected Search Space: DeCoNAS

Joon Young Ahn, Nam Ik Cho

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Auto-TLDR; DeCoNASNet: Automated Neural Architecture Search for Super-Resolution

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Abstract—The recent progress of deep convolutional neural networks has enabled great success in single image superresolution (SISR) and many other vision tasks. Their performances are also being increased by deepening the networks and developing more sophisticated network structures. However, finding an optimal structure for the given problem is a difficult task, even for human experts. For this reason, neural architecture search (NAS) methods have been introduced, which automate the procedure of constructing the structures. In this paper, we expand the NAS to the super-resolution domain and find a lightweight densely connected network named DeCoNASNet. We use a hierarchical search strategy to find the best connection with local and global features. In this process, we define a complexitybased penalty for solving image super-resolution, which can be considered a multi-objective problem. Experiments show that our DeCoNASNet outperforms the state-of-the-art lightweight superresolution networks designed by handcraft methods and existing NAS-based design.

DID: A Nested Dense in Dense Structure with Variable Local Dense Blocks for Super-Resolution Image Reconstruction

Longxi Li, Hesen Feng, Bing Zheng, Lihong Ma, Jing Tian

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Auto-TLDR; DID: Deep Super-Residual Dense Network for Image Super-resolution Reconstruction

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The success of single image super-resolution reconstruction (SR) relies on a refined mapping from low-resolution (LR) examples to high-resolution (HR) signals. However, the relation is sometimes chaos, especially in a deep SR network. We try to improve the mapping interpretability in two folds: i) The variable local dense blocks (VLDB) are suggested to match receptive fields in different depths of a residual dense network (RDN), with each VLDB a dyadic increment of layer numbers than its predecessor. ii) Based on VLDBs, a dense in dense (DID) network is created. It substitutes nodes in a regular RDN with super nodes, i.e. VLDBs; and formulates a joint learning by flexible hierarchical feature scaling, reusing and long-short term aggregating. VLDBs deal with feature underfitting occurred when a big receptive field meets a fixed-depth dense block, and the DID network provides a relative complete feature dictionary to preserve details for feature shift, dilating and grouping in high dimension image reconstruction. To demonstrate the validness of DID structure, detail experiments are performed on the benchmark datasets Set5, Set14, B100 and Urban100, where the accuracy PSNR and the visual perceptive SSIM are superior to most state-of-the-art methods. Besides, due to the depth adaption of VLDBs and its nesting in generalized RDN，DID network is converged easily and gradient explosion or disappearance are alleviated even when network deepens.

Deep Iterative Residual Convolutional Network for Single Image Super-Resolution

Rao Muhammad Umer, Gian Luca Foresti, Christian Micheloni

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Auto-TLDR; ISRResCNet: Deep Iterative Super-Resolution Residual Convolutional Network for Single Image Super-resolution

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Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success for single image super-resolution (SISR) task due to their powerful feature representation capabilities. Most recent deep learning based SISR methods focus on designing deeper / wider models to learn the non-linear mapping between low-resolution (LR) inputs and the high-resolution (HR) outputs. These existing SR methods do not take into account the image observation (physical) model and thus require a large number of network's trainable parameters with a huge volume of training data. To address these issues, we propose a deep Iterative Super-Resolution Residual Convolutional Network (ISRResCNet) that exploits the powerful image regularization and large-scale optimization techniques by training the deep network in an iterative manner with a residual learning approach. Extensive experimental results on various super-resolution benchmarks demonstrate that our method with a few trainable parameters improves results for different scaling factors in comparison with the state-of-art methods.

Detail-Revealing Deep Low-Dose CT Reconstruction

Xinchen Ye, Yuyao Xu, Rui Xu, Shoji Kido, Noriyuki Tomiyama

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Auto-TLDR; A Dual-branch Aggregation Network for Low-Dose CT Reconstruction

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Low-dose CT imaging emerges with low radiation risk due to the reduction of radiation dose, but brings negative impact on the imaging quality. This paper addresses the problem of low-dose CT reconstruction. Previous methods are unsatisfactory due to the inaccurate recovery of image details under the strong noise generated by the reduction of radiation dose, which directly affects the final diagnosis. To suppress the noise effectively while retain the structures well, we propose a detail-revealing dual-branch aggregation network to effectively reconstruct the degraded CT image. Specifically, the main reconstruction branch iteratively exploits and compensates the reconstruction errors to gradually refine the CT image, while the prior branch is to learn the structure details as prior knowledge to help recover the CT image. A sophisticated detail-revealing loss is designed to fuse the information from both branches and guide the learning to obtain better performance from pixel-wise and holistic perspectives respectively. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-art methods in both PSNR and SSIM metrics.

TinyVIRAT: Low-Resolution Video Action Recognition

Ugur Demir, Yogesh Rawat, Mubarak Shah

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Auto-TLDR; TinyVIRAT: A Progressive Generative Approach for Action Recognition in Videos

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The existing research in action recognition is mostly focused on high-quality videos where the action is distinctly visible. In real-world surveillance environments, the actions in videos are captured at a wide range of resolutions. Most activities occur at a distance with a small resolution and recognizing such activities is a challenging problem. In this work, we focus on recognizing tiny actions in videos. We introduce a benchmark dataset, TinyVIRAT, which contains natural low-resolution activities. The actions in TinyVIRAT videos have multiple labels and they are extracted from surveillance videos which makes them realistic and more challenging. We propose a novel method for recognizing tiny actions in videos which utilizes a progressive generative approach to improve the quality of low-resolution actions. The proposed method also consists of a weakly trained attention mechanism which helps in focusing on the activity regions in the video. We perform extensive experiments to benchmark the proposed TinyVIRAT dataset and observe that the proposed method significantly improves the action recognition performance over baselines. We also evaluate the proposed approach on synthetically resized action recognition datasets and achieve state-of-the-art results when compared with existing methods. The dataset and code will be publicly available.

Improving Low-Resolution Image Classification by Super-Resolution with Enhancing High-Frequency Content

Liguo Zhou, Guang Chen, Mingyue Feng, Alois Knoll

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Auto-TLDR; Super-resolution for Low-Resolution Image Classification

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With the prosperous development of Convolutional Neural Networks, currently they can perform excellently on visual understanding tasks when the input images are high quality and common quality images. However, large degradation in performance always occur when the input images are low quality images. In this paper, we propose a new super-resolution method in order to improve the classification performance for low-resolution images. In an image, the regions in which pixel values vary dramatically contain more abundant high frequency contents compared to other parts. Based on this fact, we design a weight map and integrate it with a super-resolution CNN training framework. During the process of training, this weight map can find out positions of the high frequency pixels in ground truth high-resolution images. After that, the pixel-level loss function takes effect only at these found positions to minimize the difference between reconstructed high-resolution images and ground truth high-resolution images. Compared with other state-of-the-art super-resolution methods, the experiment results show that our method can recover more high-frequency contents in high-resolution image reconstructing, and better improve the classification accuracy after low-resolution image preprocessing.

Free-Form Image Inpainting Via Contrastive Attention Network

Xin Ma, Xiaoqiang Zhou, Huaibo Huang, Zhenhua Chai, Xiaolin Wei, Ran He

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Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Siamese inference for image inpainting

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Most deep learning based image inpainting approaches adopt autoencoder or its variants to fill missing regions in images. Encoders are usually utilized to learn powerful representational spaces, which are important for dealing with sophisticated learning tasks. Specifically, in the image inpainting task, masks with any shapes can appear anywhere in images (i.e., free-form masks) forming complex patterns. It is difficult for encoders to capture such powerful representations under this complex situation. To tackle this problem, we propose a self-supervised Siamese inference network to improve the robustness and generalization. Moreover, the restored image usually can not be harmoniously integrated into the exiting content, especially in the boundary area. To address this problem, we propose a novel Dual Attention Fusion module (DAF), which can combine both the restored and known regions in a smoother way and be inserted into decoder layers in a plug-and-play way. DAF is developed to not only adaptively rescale channel-wise features by taking interdependencies between channels into account but also force deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) focusing more on unknown regions. In this way, the unknown region will be naturally filled from the outside to the inside. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on multiple datasets, including facial and natural datasets (i.e., Celeb-HQ, Pairs Street View, Places2 and ImageNet), demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms against state-of-the-arts in generating high-quality inpainting results.

Joint Face Alignment and 3D Face Reconstruction with Efficient Convolution Neural Networks

Keqiang Li, Huaiyu Wu, Xiuqin Shang, Zhen Shen, Gang Xiong, Xisong Dong, Bin Hu, Fei-Yue Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Mobile-FRNet: Efficient 3D Morphable Model Alignment and 3D Face Reconstruction from a Single 2D Facial Image

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3D face reconstruction from a single 2D facial image is a challenging and concerned problem. Recent methods based on CNN typically aim to learn parameters of 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) from 2D images to render face alignment and 3D face reconstruction. Most algorithms are designed for faces with small, medium yaw angles, which is extremely challenging to align faces in large poses. At the same time, they are not efficient usually. The main challenge is that it takes time to determine the parameters accurately. In order to address this challenge with the goal of improving performance, this paper proposes a novel and efficient end-to-end framework. We design an efficient and lightweight network model combined with Depthwise Separable Convolution and Muti-scale Representation, Lightweight Attention Mechanism, named Mobile-FRNet. Simultaneously, different loss functions are used to constrain and optimize 3DMM parameters and 3D vertices during training to improve the performance of the network. Meanwhile, extensive experiments on the challenging datasets show that our method significantly improves the accuracy of face alignment and 3D face reconstruction. The model parameters and complexity of our method are also improved greatly.

Deep Residual Attention Network for Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction

Kohei Yorimoto, Xian-Hua Han

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction from a Snapshot

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Coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging (CASSI) captures a full frame spectral image as a single compressive image and is mandatory to reconstruct the underlying hyperspectral image (HSI) from the snapshot as the post-processing, which is challenge inverse problem due to its ill-posed nature. Existing methods for HSI reconstruction from a snapshot usually employs optimization for solving the formulated image degradation model regularized with the empirically designed priors, and still cannot achieve enough reconstruction accuracy for real HS image analysis systems. Motivated by the recent advances of deep learning for different inverse problems, deep learning based HSI reconstruction method has attracted a lot of attention, and can boost the reconstruction performance. This study proposes a novel deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) based framework for effectively learning the spatial structure and spectral attribute in the underlying HSI with the reciprocal spatial and spectral modules. Further, to adaptively leverage the useful learned feature for better HSI image reconstruction, we integrate residual attention modules into our DCNN via exploring both spatial and spectral attention maps. Experimental results on two benchmark HSI datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative values and visual effect.

Unsupervised Face Manipulation Via Hallucination

Keerthy Kusumam, Enrique Sanchez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos

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Auto-TLDR; Unpaired Face Image Manipulation using Autoencoders

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This paper addresses the problem of manipulatinga face image in terms of changing its pose. To achieve this, wepropose a new method that can be trained under the very general“unpaired” setting. To this end, we firstly propose to modelthe general appearance, layout and background of the inputimage using a low-resolution version of it which is progressivelypassed through a hallucination network to generate featuresat higher resolutions. We show that such a formulation issignificantly simpler than previous approaches for appearancemodelling based on autoencoders. Secondly, we propose a fullylearnable and spatially-aware appearance transfer module whichcan cope with misalignment between the input source image andthe target pose and can effectively combine the features fromthe hallucination network with the features produced by ourgenerator. Thirdly, we introduce an identity preserving methodthat is trained in an unsupervised way, by using an auxiliaryfeature extractor and a contrastive loss between the real andgenerated images. We compare our method against the state-of-the-art reporting significant improvements both quantitatively, interms of FID and IS, and qualitatively.

Small Object Detection Leveraging on Simultaneous Super-Resolution

Hong Ji, Zhi Gao, Xiaodong Liu, Tiancan Mei

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Auto-TLDR; Super-Resolution via Generative Adversarial Network for Small Object Detection

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Despite the impressive advancement achieved in object detection, the detection performance of small object is still far from satisfactory due to the lack of sufficient detailed appearance to distinguish it from similar objects. Inspired by the positive effects of super-resolution for object detection, we propose a general framework that can be incorporated with most available detector networks to significantly improve the performance of small object detection, in which the low-resolution image is super-resolved via generative adversarial network (GAN) in an unsupervised manner. In our method, the super-resolution network and the detection network are trained jointly and alternately with each other fixed. In particular, the detection loss is back-propagated into the super-resolution network during training to facilitate detection. Compared with available simultaneous super-resolution and detection methods which heavily rely on low-/high-resolution image pairs, our work breaks through such restriction via applying the CycleGAN strategy, achieving increased generality and applicability, while remaining an elegant structure. Extensive experiments on datasets from both computer vision and remote sensing communities demonstrate that our method works effectively on a wide range of complex scenarios, resulting in best performance that significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches.

Unsupervised Learning of Landmarks Based on Inter-Intra Subject Consistencies

Weijian Li, Haofu Liao, Shun Miao, Le Lu, Jiebo Luo

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Learning for Facial Landmark Discovery using Inter-subject Landmark consistencies

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We present a novel unsupervised learning approach to image landmark discovery by incorporating the inter-subject landmark consistencies on facial images. This is achieved via an inter-subject mapping module that transforms original subject landmarks based on an auxiliary subject-related structure. To recover from the transformed images back to the original subject, the landmark detector is forced to learn spatial locations that contain the consistent semantic meanings both for the paired intra-subject images and between the paired inter-subject images. Our proposed method is extensively evaluated on two public facial image datasets (MAFL, AFLW) with various settings. Experimental results indicate that our method can extract the consistent landmarks for both datasets and achieve better performances compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively.

Multi-Attribute Regression Network for Face Reconstruction

Xiangzheng Li, Suping Wu

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Auto-TLDR; A Multi-Attribute Regression Network for Face Reconstruction

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In this paper, we propose a multi-attribute regression network (MARN) to investigate the problem of face reconstruction, especially in challenging cases when faces undergo large variations including severe poses, extreme expressions, and partial occlusions in unconstrained environments. The traditional 3DMM parametric regression method is absent from the learning of identity, expression, and attitude attributes, resulting in lacking geometric details in the reconstructed face. Our MARN method is to enable the network to better extract the feature information of face identity, expression, and pose attributes. We introduced identity, expression, and pose attribute loss functions to enhance the learning of details in each attribute. At the same time, we carefully design the geometric contour constraint loss function and use the constraints of sparse 2D face landmarks to improve the reconstructed geometric contour information. The experimental results show that our face reconstruction method has achieved significant results on the AFLW2000-3D and AFLW datasets compared with the most advanced methods. In addition, there has been a great improvement in dense face alignment. .

Super-Resolution Guided Pore Detection for Fingerprint Recognition

Syeda Nyma Ferdous, Ali Dabouei, Jeremy Dawson, Nasser M. Nasarabadi

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Auto-TLDR; Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network for Fingerprint Recognition Using Pore Features

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Performance of fingerprint recognition algorithms substantially rely on fine features extracted from fingerprints. Apart from minutiae and ridge patterns, pore features have proven to be usable for fingerprint recognition. Although features from minutiae and ridge patterns are quite attainable from low-resolution images, using pore features is practical only if the fingerprint image is of high resolution which necessitates a model that enhances the image quality of the conventional 500 ppi legacy fingerprints preserving the fine details. To find a solution for recovering pore information from low-resolution fingerprints, we adopt a joint learning-based approach that combines both super-resolution and pore detection networks. Our modified single image Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) framework helps to reliably reconstruct high-resolution fingerprint samples from low-resolution ones assisting the pore detection network to identify pores with a high accuracy. The network jointly learns a distinctive feature representation from a real low-resolution fingerprint sample and successfully synthesizes a high-resolution sample from it. To add discriminative information and uniqueness for all the subjects, we have integrated features extracted from a deep fingerprint verifier with the SRGAN quality discriminator. We also add ridge reconstruction loss, utilizing ridge patterns to make the best use of extracted features. Our proposed method solves the recognition problem by improving the quality of fingerprint images. High recognition accuracy of the synthesized samples that is close to the accuracy achieved using the original high-resolution images validate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Adaptive Feature Fusion Network for Gaze Tracking in Mobile Tablets

Yiwei Bao, Yihua Cheng, Yunfei Liu, Feng Lu

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Feature Fusion Network for Multi-stream Gaze Estimation in Mobile Tablets

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Recently, many multi-stream gaze estimation methods have been proposed. They estimate gaze from eye and face appearances and achieve reasonable accuracy. However, most of the methods simply concatenate the features extracted from eye and face appearance. The feature fusion process has been ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Feature Fusion Network (AFF-Net), which performs gaze tracking task in mobile tablets. We stack two-eye feature maps and utilize Squeeze-and-Excitation layers to adaptively fuse two-eye features based on different eye features. Meanwhile, we also propose Adaptive Group Normalization to recalibrate eye features with the guidance of face appearance characteristics. Extensive experiments on both GazeCapture and MPIIFaceGaze datasets demonstrate consistently superior performance of the proposed method.

Deep Universal Blind Image Denoising

Jae Woong Soh, Nam Ik Cho

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Auto-TLDR; Image Denoising with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

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Image denoising is an essential part of many image processing and computer vision tasks due to inevitable noise corruption during image acquisition. Traditionally, many researchers have investigated image priors for the denoising, within the Bayesian perspective based on image properties and statistics. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown great success in image denoising by incorporating large-scale synthetic datasets. However, they both have pros and cons. While the deep CNNs are powerful for removing the noise with known statistics, they tend to lack flexibility and practicality for the blind and real-world noise. Moreover, they cannot easily employ explicit priors. On the other hand, traditional non-learning methods can involve explicit image priors, but they require considerable computation time and cannot exploit large-scale external datasets. In this paper, we present a CNN-based method that leverages the advantages of both methods based on the Bayesian perspective. Concretely, we divide the blind image denoising problem into sub-problems and conquer each inference problem separately. As the CNN is a powerful tool for inference, our method is rooted in CNNs and propose a novel design of network for efficient inference. With our proposed method, we can successfully remove blind and real-world noise, with a moderate number of parameters of universal CNN.

Automatical Enhancement and Denoising of Extremely Low-Light Images

Yuda Song, Yunfang Zhu, Xin Du

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Auto-TLDR; INSNet: Illumination and Noise Separation Network for Low-Light Image Restoring

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Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) based methodologies have achieved remarkable performance on various low-level vision tasks recently. Restoring images captured at night is one of the trickiest low-level vision tasks due to its high-level noise and low-level intensity. We propose a DCNN-based methodology, Illumination and Noise Separation Network (INSNet), which performs both denoising and enhancement on these extremely low-light images. INSNet fully utilizes global-ware features and local-ware features using the modified network structure and image sampling scheme. Compared to well-designed complex neural networks, our proposed methodology only needs to add a bypass network to the existing network. However, it can boost the quality of recovered images dramatically but only increase the computational cost by less than 0.1%. Even without any manual settings, INSNet can stably restore the extremely low-light images to desired high-quality images.

Talking Face Generation Via Learning Semantic and Temporal Synchronous Landmarks

Aihua Zheng, Feixia Zhu, Hao Zhu, Mandi Luo, Ran He

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Auto-TLDR; A semantic and temporal synchronous landmark learning method for talking face generation

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Abstract—Given a speech clip and facial image, the goal of talking face generation is to synthesize a talking face video with accurate mouth synchronization and natural face motion. Recent progress has proven the effectiveness of the landmarks as the intermediate information during talking face generation. However,the large gap between audio and visual modalities makes the prediction of landmarks challenging and limits generation ability. This paper proposes a semantic and temporal synchronous landmark learning method for talking face generation. First, we propose to introduce a word detector to enforce richer semantic information. Then, we propose to preserve the temporal synchronization and consistency between landmarks and audio via the proposed temporal residual loss. Lastly, we employ a U-Net generation network with adaptive reconstruction loss to generate facial images for the predicted landmarks. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets LRW and GRID demonstrate the effectiveness of our model compared to the state-of-the-art methods of talking face generation.

Lightweight Low-Resolution Face Recognition for Surveillance Applications

Yoanna Martínez-Díaz, Heydi Mendez-Vazquez, Luis S. Luevano, Leonardo Chang, Miguel Gonzalez-Mendoza

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Auto-TLDR; Efficiency of Lightweight Deep Face Networks on Low-Resolution Surveillance Imagery

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Typically, real-world requirements to deploy face recognition models in unconstrained surveillance scenarios demand to identify low-resolution faces with extremely low computational cost. In the last years, several methods based on complex deep learning models have been proposed with promising recognition results but at a high computational cost. Inspired by the compactness and computation efficiency of lightweight deep face networks and their high accuracy on general face recognition tasks, in this work we propose to benchmark two recently introduced lightweight face models on low-resolution surveillance imagery to enable efficient system deployment. In this way, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the two typical settings: LR-to-HR and LR-to-LR matching. In addition, we investigate the effect of using trained models with down-sampled synthetic data from high-resolution images, as well as the combination of different models, for face recognition on real low-resolution images. Experimental results show that the used lightweight face models achieve state-of-the-art results on low-resolution benchmarks with low memory footprint and computational complexity. Moreover, we observed that combining models trained with different degradations improves the recognition accuracy on low-resolution surveillance imagery, which is feasible due to their low computational cost.

Attentive Hybrid Feature Based a Two-Step Fusion for Facial Expression Recognition

Jun Weng, Yang Yang, Zichang Tan, Zhen Lei

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Auto-TLDR; Attentive Hybrid Architecture for Facial Expression Recognition

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Facial expression recognition is inherently a challenging task, especially for the in-the-wild images with various occlusions and large pose variations, which may lead to the loss of some crucial information. To address it, in this paper, we propose an attentive hybrid architecture (AHA) which learns global, local and integrated features based on different face regions. Compared with one type of feature, our extracted features own complementary information and can reduce the loss of crucial information. Specifically, AHA contains three branches, where all sub-networks in those branches employ the attention mechanism to further localize the interested pixels/regions. Moreover, we propose a two-step fusion strategy based on LSTM to deeply explore the hidden correlations among different face regions. Extensive experiments on four popular expression databases (i.e., CK+, FER-2013, SFEW 2.0, RAF-DB) show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Local-Global Interactive Network for Face Age Transformation

Jie Song, Ping Wei, Huan Li, Yongchi Zhang, Nanning Zheng

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Auto-TLDR; A Novel Local-Global Interaction Framework for Long-span Face Age Transformation

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Face age transformation, which aims to generate a face image in the past or future, has receiving increasing attention due to its significant application value in some special fields, such as looking for a lost child, tracking criminals and entertainment, etc. Currently, most existing methods mainly focus on unidirectional short-span face aging. In this paper, we propose a novel local-global interaction framework for long-span face age transformation. Firstly, we divide a face image into five independent parts and design a local generative network for each of them to learn the local structure changes of a face image, while we utilize a global generative network to learn the global structure changes. Then we introduce an interactive network and an age classification network, which are respectively used to integrate the local and global features and maintain the corresponding age features in different age groups. Given any face image at a certain age, our network can produce a clear and realistic image of face aging or rejuvenation. We test and evaluate the model on complex datasets, and extensive qualitative comparison experiments has proved the effectiveness and immense potential of our proposed method.

Attributes Aware Face Generation with Generative Adversarial Networks

Zheng Yuan, Jie Zhang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen

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Auto-TLDR; AFGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Attributes Aware Face Image Generation

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Recent studies have shown remarkable success in face image generations. However, most of the existing methods only generate face images from random noise, and cannot generate face images according to the specific attributes. In this paper, we focus on the problem of face synthesis from attributes, which aims at generating faces with specific characteristics corresponding to the given attributes. To this end, we propose a novel attributes aware face image generator method with generative adversarial networks called AFGAN. Specifically, we firstly propose a two-path embedding layer and self-attention mechanism to convert binary attribute vector to rich attribute features. Then three stacked generators generate 64 * 64, 128 * 128 and 256 * 256 resolution face images respectively by taking the attribute features as input. In addition, an image-attribute matching loss is proposed to enhance the correlation between the generated images and input attributes. Extensive experiments on CelebA demonstrate the superiority of our AFGAN in terms of both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

Fast, Accurate and Lightweight Super-Resolution with Neural Architecture Search

Chu Xiangxiang, Bo Zhang, Micheal Ma Hailong, Ruijun Xu, Jixiang Li, Qingyuan Li

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-Objective Neural Architecture Search for Super-Resolution

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Deep convolutional neural networks demonstrate impressive results in the super-resolution domain. A series of studies concentrate on improving peak signal noise ratio (PSNR) by using much deeper layers, which are not friendly to constrained resources. Pursuing a trade-off between the restoration capacity and the simplicity of models is still non-trivial. Recent contributions are struggling to manually maximize this balance, while our work achieves the same goal automatically with neural architecture search. Specifically, we handle super-resolution with a multi-objective approach. We also propose an elastic search tactic at both micro and macro level, based on a hybrid controller that profits from evolutionary computation and reinforcement learning. Quantitative experiments help us to draw a conclusion that our generated models dominate most of the state-of-the-art methods with respect to the individual FLOPS.

Single Image Deblurring Using Bi-Attention Network

Yaowei Li, Ye Luo, Jianwei Lu

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Auto-TLDR; Bi-Attention Neural Network for Single Image Deblurring

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Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have been extensively applied into image deblurring and have achieved remarkable performance. However, most CNN-based image deblurring methods focus on simply increasing network depth, neglecting the contextual information of the blurred image and the reconstructed image. Meanwhile, most encoder-decoder based methods rarely exploit encoder's multi-layer features. To address these issues, we propose a bi-attention neural network for single image deblurring, which mainly consists of a bi-attention network and a feature fusion network. Specifically, two criss-cross attention modules are plugged before and after the encoder-decoder to capture long-range spatial contextual information in the blurred image and the reconstructed image simultaneously, and the feature fusion network combines multi-layer features from encoder to enable the decoder reconstruct the image with multi-scale features. The whole network is end-to-end trainable. Quantitative and qualitative experiment results validate that the proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR and SSIM on benchmark datasets.

Learning Disentangled Representations for Identity Preserving Surveillance Face Camouflage

Jingzhi Li, Lutong Han, Hua Zhang, Xiaoguang Han, Jingguo Ge, Xiaochu Cao

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Auto-TLDR; Individual Face Privacy under Surveillance Scenario with Multi-task Loss Function

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In this paper, we focus on protecting the person face privacy under the surveillance scenarios, whose goal is to change the visual appearances of faces while keep them to be recognizable by current face recognition systems. This is a challenging problem as that we should retain the most important structures of captured facial images, while alter the salient facial regions to protect personal privacy. To address this problem, we introduce a novel individual face protection model, which can camouflage the face appearance from the perspective of human visual perception and preserve the identity features of faces used for face authentication. To that end, we develop an encoder-decoder network architecture that can separately disentangle the person feature representation into an appearance code and an identity code. Specifically, we first randomly divide the face image into two groups, the source set and the target set, where the source set is used to extract the identity code and the target set provides the appearance code. Then, we recombine the identity and appearance codes to synthesize a new face, which has the same identity with the source subject. Finally, the synthesized faces are used to replace the original face to protect the privacy of individual. Furthermore, our model is trained end-to-end with a multi-task loss function, which can better preserve the identity and stabilize the training loss. Experiments conducted on Cross-Age Celebrity dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and validate our superiority in terms of visual quality and scalability.

Dynamic Guided Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

Xiaoxia Xing, Yinghao Cai, Yiping Yang, Dayong Wen

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Auto-TLDR; DGNet: Dynamic Guidance Upsampling for Self-attention-Decoding for Monocular Depth Estimation

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Self-attention or encoder-decoder structure has been widely used in deep neural networks for monocular depth estimation tasks. The former mechanism are capable to capture long-range information by computing the representation of each position by a weighted sum of the features at all positions, while the latter networks can capture structural details information by gradually recovering the spatial information. In this work, we combine the advantages of both methods. Specifically, our proposed model, DGNet, extends EMANet Network by adding an effective decoder module to refine the depth results. In the decoder stage, we further design dynamic guidance upsampling which uses local neighboring information of low-level features guide coarser depth to upsample. In this way, dynamic guidance upsampling generates content-dependent and spatially-variant kernels for depth upsampling which makes full use of spatial details information from low-level features. Experimental results demonstrate that our method obtains higher accuracy and generates the desired depth map.

SIDGAN: Single Image Dehazing without Paired Supervision

Pan Wei, Xin Wang, Lei Wang, Ji Xiang, Zihan Wang

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Auto-TLDR; DehazeGAN: An End-to-End Generative Adversarial Network for Image Dehazing

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Single image dehazing is challenging without scene airlight and transmission map. Most of existing dehazing algorithms tend to estimate key parameters based on manual designed priors or statistics, which may be invalid in some scenarios. Although deep learning-based dehazing methods provide an effective solution, most of them rely on paired training datasets, which are prohibitively difficult to be collected in real world. In this paper, we propose an effective end-to-end generative adversarial network for image dehazing, named DehazeGAN. The proposed DehazeGAN adopts a U-net architecture with a novel color-consistency loss derived from dark channel prior and perceptual loss, which can be trained in an unsupervised fashion without paired synthetic datasets. We create a RealHaze dataset for network training, including 4,000 outdoor hazy images and 4,000 haze-free images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DehazeGAN achieves better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic datasets and real-world datasets in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and subjective visual experience.

Continuous Learning of Face Attribute Synthesis

Ning Xin, Shaohui Xu, Fangzhe Nan, Xiaoli Dong, Weijun Li, Yuanzhou Yao

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Auto-TLDR; Continuous Learning for Face Attribute Synthesis

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The generative adversarial network (GAN) exhibits great superiority in the face attribute synthesis task. However, existing methods have very limited effects on the expansion of new attributes. To overcome the limitations of a single network in new attribute synthesis, a continuous learning method for face attribute synthesis is proposed in this work. First, the feature vector of the input image is extracted and attribute direction regression is performed in the feature space to obtain the axes of different attributes. The feature vector is then linearly guided along the axis so that images with target attributes can be synthesized by the decoder. Finally, to make the network capable of continuous learning, the orthogonal direction modification module is used to extend the newly-added attributes. Experimental results show that the proposed method can endow a single network with the ability to learn attributes continuously, and, as compared to those produced by the current state-of-the-art methods, the synthetic attributes have higher accuracy.

Boundary Guided Image Translation for Pose Estimation from Ultra-Low Resolution Thermal Sensor

Kohei Kurihara, Tianren Wang, Teng Zhang, Brian Carrington Lovell

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Auto-TLDR; Pose Estimation on Low-Resolution Thermal Images Using Image-to-Image Translation Architecture

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This work addresses the pose estimation task on low-resolution images captured using thermal sensors which can operate in a no-light environment. Low-resolution thermal sensors have been widely adopted in various applications for cost control and privacy protection purposes. In this paper, targeting the challenging scenario of ultra-low resolution thermal imaging (3232 pixels), we aim to estimate human poses for the purpose of monitoring health conditions and indoor events. To overcome the challenges in ultra-low resolution thermal imaging such as blurred boundaries and data scarcity, we propose a new Image-to-Image (I2I) translation architecture which can translate the original blurred thermal image into a visible light image with sharper boundaries. Then the generated visible light image can be fed into the off-the-shelf pose estimator which was well-trained in the visible domain. Experimental results suggest that the proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the I2I based pose estimation task for our thermal image dataset. Furthermore, we also demonstrated the merits of the proposed method on the publicly available FLIR dataset by measuring the quality of translated images.

PSDNet: A Balanced Architecture of Accuracy and Parameters for Semantic Segmentation

Yue Liu, Zhichao Lian

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Auto-TLDR; Pyramid Pooling Module with SE1Cblock and D2SUpsample Network (PSDNet)

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Abstract—In this paper, we present our Pyramid Pooling Module （PPM） with SE1Cblock and D2SUpsample Network (PSDNet), a novel architecture for accurate semantic segmentation. Started from the known work called Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSPNet), PSDNet takes advantage of pyramid pooling structure with channel attention module and feature transform module in Pyramid Pooling Module (PPM). The enhanced PPM with these two components can strengthen context information flowing in the network instead of damaging it. The channel attention module we mentioned is an improved “Squeeze and Excitation with 1D Convolution” (SE1C) block which can explicitly model interrelationship between channels with fewer number of parameters. We propose a feature transform module named “Depth to Space Upsampling” (D2SUpsample) in the PPM which keeps integrity of features by transforming features while interpolating features, at the same time reducing parameters. In addition, we introduce a joint strategy in SE1Cblock which combines two variants of global pooling without increasing parameters. Compared with PSPNet, our work achieves higher accuracy on public datasets with 73.97% mIoU and 82.89% mAcc accuracy on Cityscapes Dataset based on ResNet50 backbone.

Simple Multi-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation

Trung Tran Quang, Van Giang Nguyen, Daeyoung Kim

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-resolution Heatmap Learning for Human Pose Estimation

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Human pose estimation - the process of recognizing human keypoints in a given image - is one of the most important tasks in computer vision and has a wide range of applications including movement diagnostics, surveillance, or self-driving vehicle. The accuracy of human keypoint prediction is increasingly improved thanks to the burgeoning development of deep learning. Most existing methods solved human pose estimation by generating heatmaps in which the ith heatmap indicates the location confidence of the ith keypoint. In this paper, we introduce novel network structures referred to as multi-resolution representation learning for human keypoint prediction. At different resolutions in the learning process, our networks branch off and use extra layers to learn heatmap generation. We firstly consider the architectures for generating the multi-resolution heatmaps after obtaining the lowest-resolution feature maps. Our second approach allows learning during the process of feature extraction in which the heatmaps are generated at each resolution of the feature extractor. The first and second approaches are referred to as multi-resolution heatmap learning and multi-resolution feature map learning respectively. Our architectures are simple yet effective, achieving good performance. We conducted experiments on two common benchmarks for human pose estimation: MS-COCO and MPII dataset.

Learning Semantic Representations Via Joint 3D Face Reconstruction and Facial Attribute Estimation

Zichun Weng, Youjun Xiang, Xianfeng Li, Juntao Liang, Wanliang Huo, Yuli Fu

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Auto-TLDR; Joint Framework for 3D Face Reconstruction with Facial Attribute Estimation

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We propose a novel joint framework for 3D face reconstruction (3DFR) that integrates facial attribute estimation (FAE) as an auxiliary task. One of the essential problems of 3DFR is to extract semantic facial features (e.g., Big Nose, High Cheekbones, and Asian) from in-the-wild 2D images, which is inherently involved with FAE. These two tasks, though heterogeneous, are highly relevant to each other. To achieve this, we leverage a Convolutional Neural Network to extract shared facial representations for both shape decoder and attribute classifier. We further develop an in-batch hybrid-task training scheme that enables our model to learn from heterogeneous facial datasets jointly within a mini-batch. Thanks to the joint loss that provides supervision from both 3DFR and FAE domains, our model learns the correlations between 3D shapes and facial attributes, which benefit both feature extraction and shape inference. Quantitative evaluation and qualitative visualization results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our joint framework.

Thermal Image Enhancement Using Generative Adversarial Network for Pedestrian Detection

Mohamed Amine Marnissi, Hajer Fradi, Anis Sahbani, Najoua Essoukri Ben Amara

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Auto-TLDR; Improving Visual Quality of Infrared Images for Pedestrian Detection Using Generative Adversarial Network

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Infrared imaging has recently played an important role in a wide range of applications including surveillance, robotics and night vision. However, infrared cameras often suffer from some limitations, essentially about low-contrast and blurred details. These problems contribute to the loss of observation of target objects in infrared images, which could limit the feasibility of different infrared imaging applications. In this paper, we mainly focus on the problem of pedestrian detection on thermal images. Particularly, we emphasis the need for enhancing the visual quality of images beforehand performing the detection step. % to ensure effective results. To address that, we propose a novel thermal enhancement architecture based on Generative Adversarial Network, and composed of two modules contrast enhancement and denoising modules with a post-processing step for edge restoration in order to improve the overall quality. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is assessed by means of visual quality metrics and better results are obtained compared to the original thermal images and to the obtained results by other existing enhancement methods. These results have been conduced on a subset of KAIST dataset. Using the same dataset, the impact of the proposed enhancement architecture has been demonstrated on the detection results by obtaining better performance with a significant margin using YOLOv3 detector.

High Resolution Face Age Editing

Xu Yao, Gilles Puy, Alasdair Newson, Yann Gousseau, Pierre Hellier

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Auto-TLDR; An Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Face Age editing on High Resolution Images

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Face age editing has become a crucial task in film post-production, and is also becoming popular for general purpose photography. Recently, adversarial training has produced some of the most visually impressive results for image manipulation, including the face aging/de-aging task. In spite of considerable progress, current methods often present visual artifacts and can only deal with low-resolution images. In order to achieve aging/de-aging with the high quality and robustness necessary for wider use, these problems need to be addressed. This is the goal of the present work. We present an encoder-decoder architecture for face age editing. The core idea of our network is to encode a face image to age-invariant features, and learn a modulation vector corresponding to a target age. We then combine these two elements to produce a realistic image of the person with the desired target age. Our architecture is greatly simplified with respect to other approaches, and allows for fine-grained age editing on high resolution images in a single unified model. Source codes are available at https://github.com/InterDigitalInc/HRFAE.

SATGAN: Augmenting Age Biased Dataset for Cross-Age Face Recognition

Wenshuang Liu, Wenting Chen, Yuanlue Zhu, Linlin Shen

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Auto-TLDR; SATGAN: Stable Age Translation GAN for Cross-Age Face Recognition

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In this paper, we propose a Stable Age Translation GAN (SATGAN) to generate fake face images at different ages to augment age biased face datasets for Cross-Age Face Recognition (CAFR) . The proposed SATGAN consists of both generator and discriminator. As a part of the generator, a novel Mask Attention Module (MAM) is introduced to make the generator focus on the face area. In addition, the generator employs a Uniform Distribution Discriminator (UDD) to supervise the learning of latent feature map and enforce the uniform distribution. Besides, the discriminator employs a Feature Separation Module (FSM) to disentangle identity information from the age information. The quantitative and qualitative evaluations on Morph dataset prove that SATGAN achieves much better performance than existing methods. The face recognition model trained using dataset (VGGFace2 and MS-Celeb-1M) augmented using our SATGAN achieves better accuracy on cross age dataset like Cross-Age LFW and AgeDB-30.

Let's Play Music: Audio-Driven Performance Video Generation

Hao Zhu, Yi Li, Feixia Zhu, Aihua Zheng, Ran He

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Auto-TLDR; APVG: Audio-driven Performance Video Generation Using Structured Temporal UNet

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We propose a new task named Audio-driven Performance Video Generation (APVG), which aims to synthesize the video of a person playing a certain instrument guided by a given music audio clip. It is a challenging task to generate the high-dimensional temporal consistent videos from low-dimensional audio modality. In this paper, we propose a multi-staged framework to achieve this new task to generate realistic and synchronized performance video from given music. Firstly, we provide both global appearance and local spatial information by generating the coarse videos and keypoints of body and hands from a given music respectively. Then, we propose to transform the generated keypoints to heatmap via a differentiable space transformer, since the heatmap offers more spatial information but is harder to generate directly from audio. Finally, we propose a Structured Temporal UNet (STU) to extract both intra-frame structured information and inter-frame temporal consistency. They are obtained via graph-based structure module, and CNN-GRU based high-level temporal module respectively for final video generation. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.