Interactive Style Space of Deep Features and Style Innovation

Bingqing Guo, Pengwei Hao

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Auto-TLDR; Interactive Style Space of Convolutional Neural Network Features

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Stylizing images as paintings has been a popular computer vision technique for a long time. However, most studies only consider the art styles known today, and rarely have investigated styles that have not been painted yet. We fill this gap by projecting the high-dimensional style space of Convolutional Neural Network features to the latent low-dimensional style manifold space. It is worth noting that in our visualized space, simple style linear interpolation is enabled to generate new artistic styles that would revolutionize the future of art in technology. We propose a model of an Interactive Style Space (ISS) to prove that in a manifold style space, the unknown styles are obtainable through interpolation of known styles. We verify the correctness and feasibility of our Interactive Style Space (ISS) and validate style interpolation within the space.

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

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Few-Shot Font Generation with Deep Metric Learning

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Metric Learning for Japanese Typographic Font Synthesis

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Auto-TLDR; FABEMD: Fast and Adaptive Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition for Style Transfer on Images

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised contrastive photo-to-caricature translation with style loss

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Auto-TLDR; A Deep Convolutional Embedding Model for Clustering Artworks

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Auto-TLDR; Self-Attention-Based Arbitrary Style Transfer Using Adaptive Instance Normalization

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Auto-TLDR; Two-Stage Inpainting with Graph-based Relation Network

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Auto-TLDR; Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network

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Auto-TLDR; Q-Gaussian distributed stochastic neighbor embedding for 2-dimensional mapping and classification

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Auto-TLDR; An Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network

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Auto-TLDR; Image Sentiment Transfer Using DenseNet121 Architecture

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Transferring the sentiment of an image is an unexplored research topic in computer vision. This work proposes a novel framework consisting of a reference image retrieval step and a global sentiment transfer step to transfer image sentiment according to a given sentiment tag. The proposed image retrieval algorithm is based on the SSIM index. The retrieved reference images by the proposed algorithm are more content-related than the algorithm based on the perceptual loss. Therefore, it can lead to a better image sentiment transfer result. In addition, we propose a global sentiment transfer step, which employs an optimization algorithm to iteratively transfer image sentiment based on the feature maps produced by the DenseNet121 architecture. The proposed sentiment transfer algorithm can transfer image sentiment while keeping the content of the input image intact. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed sentiment transfer framework outperforms existing artistic and photo-realistic style transfer algorithms in producing satisfactory sentiment transfer results with fine and exact details.

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Auto-TLDR; Style-controlled Image Synthesis from Semantic Segmentation masks using GANs

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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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GarmentGAN: Photo-Realistic Adversarial Fashion Transfer

Amir Hossein Raffiee, Michael Sollami

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Auto-TLDR; GarmentGAN: A Generative Adversarial Network for Image-Based Garment Transfer

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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.

N2D: (Not Too) Deep Clustering Via Clustering the Local Manifold of an Autoencoded Embedding

Ryan Mcconville, Raul Santos-Rodriguez, Robert Piechocki, Ian Craddock

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Auto-TLDR; Local Manifold Learning for Deep Clustering on Autoencoded Embeddings

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Deep clustering has increasingly been demonstrating superiority over conventional shallow clustering algorithms. Deep clustering algorithms usually combine representation learning with deep neural networks to achieve this performance, typically optimizing a clustering and non-clustering loss. In such cases, an autoencoder is typically connected with a clustering network, and the final clustering is jointly learned by both the autoencoder and clustering network. Instead, we propose to learn an autoencoded embedding and then search this further for the underlying manifold. For simplicity, we then cluster this with a shallow clustering algorithm, rather than a deeper network. We study a number of local and global manifold learning methods on both the raw data and autoencoded embedding, concluding that UMAP in our framework is able to find the best clusterable manifold of the embedding. This suggests that local manifold learning on an autoencoded embedding is effective for discovering higher quality clusters. We quantitatively show across a range of image and time-series datasets that our method has competitive performance against the latest deep clustering algorithms, including out-performing current state-of-the-art on several. We postulate that these results show a promising research direction for deep clustering. The code can be found at https://github.com/rymc/n2d.

VGG-Embedded Adaptive Layer-Normalized Crowd Counting Net with Scale-Shuffling Modules

Dewen Guo, Jie Feng, Bingfeng Zhou

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Auto-TLDR; VadaLN: VGG-embedded Adaptive Layer Normalization for Crowd Counting

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Crowd counting is widely used in real-time congestion monitoring and public security. Due to the limited data, many methods have little ability to be generalized because the differences between feature domains are not taken into consideration. We propose VGG-embedded adaptive layer normalization (VadaLN) to filter the features that irrelevant to the counting tasks in order that the counting results should not be affected by the image quality, color or illumination. VadaLN is implemented on the pretrained VGG-16 backbone. There is no additional learning parameters required through our method. VadaLN incoporates the proposed scale-shuffling modules (SSM) to relax the distortions in upsampling operations. Besides, non-aligned training methdology for the estimation of density maps is leveraged by an adversarial contextual loss (ACL) to improve the counting performance. Based on the proposed method, we construct an end-to-end trainable baseline model without bells and whistles, namely VadaLNet, which outperforms several recent state-of-the-art methods on commonly used challenging standard benchmarks. The intermediate scale-shuffled results are combined to formulate a scale-complementary strategy as a more powerful network, namely as VadaLNeSt. We implement VadaLNeSt on standard benchmarks, e.g. ShanghaiTech (Part A & Part B), UCF_CC_50, and UCF_QNRF, to show the superiority of our method.

DAPC: Domain Adaptation People Counting Via Style-Level Transfer Learning and Scene-Aware Estimation

Na Jiang, Xingsen Wen, Zhiping Shi

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Auto-TLDR; Domain Adaptation People counting via Style-Level Transfer Learning and Scene-Aware Estimation

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Makeup Style Transfer on Low-Quality Images with Weighted Multi-Scale Attention

Daniel Organisciak, Edmond S. L. Ho, Shum Hubert P. H.

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Auto-TLDR; Facial Makeup Style Transfer for Low-Resolution Images Using Multi-Scale Spatial Attention

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Tzu-Ting Fang, Minh Duc Vo, Akihiro Sugimoto, Shang-Hong Lai

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Auto-TLDR; Stylized-colorization using GAN-based End-to-End Model for Anime

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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.

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.

Semantic-Guided Inpainting Network for Complex Urban Scenes Manipulation

Pierfrancesco Ardino, Yahui Liu, Elisa Ricci, Bruno Lepri, Marco De Nadai

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Auto-TLDR; Semantic-Guided Inpainting of Complex Urban Scene Using Semantic Segmentation and Generation

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Manipulating images of complex scenes to reconstruct, insert and/or remove specific object instances is a challenging task. Complex scenes contain multiple semantics and objects, which are frequently cluttered or ambiguous, thus hampering the performance of inpainting models. Conventional techniques often rely on structural information such as object contours in multi-stage approaches that generate unreliable results and boundaries. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning model to alter a complex urban scene by removing a user-specified portion of the image and coherently inserting a new object (e.g. car or pedestrian) in that scene. Inspired by recent works on image inpainting, our proposed method leverages the semantic segmentation to model the content and structure of the image, and learn the best shape and location of the object to insert. To generate reliable results, we design a new decoder block that combines the semantic segmentation and generation task to guide better the generation of new objects and scenes, which have to be semantically consistent with the image. Our experiments, conducted on two large-scale datasets of urban scenes (Cityscapes and Indian Driving), show that our proposed approach successfully address the problem of semantically-guided inpainting of complex urban scene.

Novel View Synthesis from a 6-DoF Pose by Two-Stage Networks

Xiang Guo, Bo Li, Yuchao Dai, Tongxin Zhang, Hui Deng

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Auto-TLDR; Novel View Synthesis from a 6-DoF Pose Using Generative Adversarial Network

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Novel view synthesis is a challenging problem in 3D vision and robotics. Different from the existing works, which need the reference images or 3D model, we propose a novel paradigm to this problem. That is, we synthesize the novel view from a 6-DoF pose directly. Although this setting is the most straightforward way, there are few works addressing it. While, our experiments demonstrate that, with a concise CNN, we could get a meaningful parametric model which could reconstruct the correct scenery images only from the 6-DoF pose. To this end, we propose a two-stage learning strategy, which consists of two consecutive CNNs: GenNet and RefineNet. The GenNet generates a coarse image from a camera pose. The RefineNet is a generative adversarial network that could refine the coarse image. In this way, we decouple the geometric relationship mapping and texture detail rendering. Extensive experiments conducted on the public datasets prove the effectiveness of our method. We believe this paradigm is of high research and application value and could be an important direction in novel view synthesis. We will share our code after the acceptance of this work.

Attention2AngioGAN: Synthesizing Fluorescein Angiography from Retinal Fundus Images Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Sharif Amit Kamran, Khondker Fariha Hossain, Alireza Tavakkoli, Stewart Lee Zuckerbrod

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Auto-TLDR; Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus Images using Attention-based Generative Networks

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Fluorescein Angiography (FA) is a technique that employs the designated camera for Fundus photography incorporating excitation and barrier filters. FA also requires fluorescein dye that is injected intravenously, which might cause adverse effects ranging from nausea, vomiting to even fatal anaphylaxis. Currently, no other fast and non-invasive technique exists that can generate FA without coupling with Fundus photography. To eradicate the need for an invasive FA extraction procedure, we introduce an Attention-based Generative network that can synthesize Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus images. The proposed gan incorporates multiple attention based skip connections in generators and comprises novel residual blocks for both generators and discriminators. It utilizes reconstruction, feature-matching, and perceptual loss along with adversarial training to produces realistic Angiograms that is hard for experts to distinguish from real ones. Our experiments confirm that the proposed architecture surpasses recent state-of-the-art generative networks for fundus-to-angio translation task.

From Early Biological Models to CNNs: Do They Look Where Humans Look?

Marinella Iole Cadoni, Andrea Lagorio, Enrico Grosso, Jia Huei Tan, Chee Seng Chan

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Auto-TLDR; Comparing Neural Networks to Human Fixations for Semantic Learning

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Early hierarchical computational visual models as well as recent deep neural networks have been inspired by the functioning of the primate visual cortex system. Although much effort has been made to dissect neural networks to visualize the features they learn at the individual units, the scope of the visualizations has been limited to a categorization of the features in terms of their semantic level. Considering the ability humans have to select high semantic level regions of a scene, the question whether neural networks can match this ability, and if similarity with humans attention is correlated with neural networks performance naturally arise. To address this question we propose a pipeline to select and compare sets of feature points that maximally activate individual networks units to human fixations. We extract features from a variety of neural networks, from early hierarchical models such as HMAX up to recent deep convolutional neural netwoks such as Densnet, to compare them to human fixations. Experiments over the ETD database show that human fixations correlate with CNNs features from deep layers significantly better than with random sets of points, while they do not with features extracted from the first layers of CNNs, nor with the HMAX features, which seem to have low semantic level compared with the features that respond to the automatically learned filters of CNNs. It also turns out that there is a correlation between CNN’s human similarity and classification performance.

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.

Anime Sketch Colorization by Component-Based Matching Using Deep Appearance Features and Graph Representation

Thien Do, Pham Van, Anh Nguyen, Trung Dang, Quoc Nguyen, Bach Hoang, Giao Nguyen

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Auto-TLDR; Combining Deep Learning and Graph Representation for Sketch Colorization

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Sketch colorization is usually expensive and time-consuming for artists, and automating this process can have many pragmatic applications in the animation, comic book, and video game industry. However, automatic image colorization faces many challenges, because sketches not only lack texture information but also potentially entail complicated objects that require acute coloring. These difficulties usually result in incorrect color assignments that can ruin the aesthetic appeal of the final output. In this paper, we present a novel component-based matching framework that combines deep learned features and quadratic programming {\color{red} with a new cost function} to solve this colorization problem. The proposed framework inputs a character's sketches as well as a colored image in the same cut of a movie, and outputs a high-quality sequence of colorized frames based on the color assignment in the reference colored image. To carry out this colorization task, we first utilize a pretrained ResNet-34 model to extract elementary components' features to match certain pairs of components (one component from the sketch and one from reference). Next, a graph representation is constructed in order to process and match the remaining components that could not be done in the first step. Since the first step has reduced the number of components to be matched by the graph, we can solve this graph problem in a short computing time even when there are hundreds of different components present in each sketch. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution by conducting comprehensive experiments and producing aesthetically pleasing results. To the best of our knowledge, our framework is the first work that combines deep learning and graph representation to colorize anime and achieves a high pixel-level accuracy at a reasonable time cost.

Pixel-based Facial Expression Synthesis

Arbish Akram, Nazar Khan

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Auto-TLDR; pixel-based facial expression synthesis using GANs

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Recently, Facial expression synthesis has shown remarkable advances with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, these GAN-based approaches mostly generate photo-realistic results as long as the target data distribution is close to the training data distribution. The quality of GANs results significantly degrades when testing images are from a slightly different distribution. In this work, we propose a pixel-based facial expression synthesis method. Recent work has shown that facial expression synthesis changes only local regions of faces. In the proposed method, each output pixel observes only one input pixel. The proposed method achieves generalization capability by leveraging only few hundred images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs comparably with the recent GANs on in-dataset images and significantly outperforms on in the wild images. In addition, the proposed method is faster and it also achieves significantly better performance with two orders of magnitudes lesser computational and storage cost as compared to state-of-the-art GAN-based methods.

Supervised Domain Adaptation Using Graph Embedding

Lukas Hedegaard, Omar Ali Sheikh-Omar, Alexandros Iosifidis

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Auto-TLDR; Domain Adaptation from the Perspective of Multi-view Graph Embedding and Dimensionality Reduction

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Getting deep convolutional neural networks to perform well requires a large amount of training data. When the available labelled data is small, it is often beneficial to use transfer learning to leverage a related larger dataset (source) in order to improve the performance on the small dataset (target). Among the transfer learning approaches, domain adaptation methods assume that distributions between the two domains are shifted and attempt to realign them. In this paper, we consider the domain adaptation problem from the perspective of multi-view graph embedding and dimensionality reduction. Instead of solving the generalised eigenvalue problem to perform the embedding, we formulate the graph-preserving criterion as loss in the neural network and learn a domain-invariant feature transformation in an end-to-end fashion. We show that the proposed approach leads to a powerful Domain Adaptation framework which generalises the prior methods CCSA and d-SNE, and enables simple and effective loss designs; an LDA-inspired instantiation of the framework leads to performance on par with the state-of-the-art on the most widely used Domain Adaptation benchmarks, Office31 and MNIST to USPS datasets.

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).

Disentangle, Assemble, and Synthesize: Unsupervised Learning to Disentangle Appearance and Location

Hiroaki Aizawa, Hirokatsu Kataoka, Yutaka Satoh, Kunihito Kato

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Auto-TLDR; Generative Adversarial Networks with Structural Constraint for controllability of latent space

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The next step for the generative adversarial networks~(GAN) is to learn representations that allow us to control only a certain factor in the image explicitly. Since such a representation of the factor is independent of other factors, the controllability obtained from these representations leads to interpretability by identifying the variation of the synthesized image and the transferability for downstream tasks by inference. However, since it is difficult to identify and strictly define latent factors, the annotation is laborious. Moreover, learning such representations by a GAN is challenging due to the complex generation process. Therefore, we resolve this limitation using a novel generative model that can disentangle latent space into the appearance, the x-axis, and the y-axis of the object, and reassemble these components in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, based on the concept of packing the appearance and location in each position of the feature map, we introduce a novel structural constraint technique that prevents these representations from interacting with each other. The proposed structural constraint promotes the disentanglement of these factors. In experiments, we found that the proposed method is simple but effective for controllability and allows us to control the appearance and location via latent space without supervision, as compared with the conditional GAN.

Nearest Neighbor Classification Based on Activation Space of Convolutional Neural Network

Xinbo Ju, Shuo Shao, Huan Long, Weizhe Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Convolutional Neural Network with Convex Hull Based Classifier

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In this paper, we propose a new image classifier based on the incorporation of the nearest neighbor algorithm and the activation space of convolutional neural network. The classifier has been successfully used on some state-of-the-art models and further improve their performance. Main technique tools we used are convex hull based classification and its acceleration. We find that 1) in several cases, the classifier can reach higher accuracy than original CNN; 2) by sampling, the classifier can work more efficiently; 3) centroid of each convex hull shows surprising ability in classification. Most of the work has strong geometry meanings, which helps us have a new understanding about convolutional layers.

One Step Clustering Based on A-Contrario Framework for Detection of Alterations in Historical Violins

Alireza Rezaei, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Emanuel Aldea, Piercarlo Dondi, Marco Malagodi

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Auto-TLDR; A-Contrario Clustering for the Detection of Altered Violins using UVIFL Images

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Preventive conservation is an important practice in Cultural Heritage. The constant monitoring of the state of conservation of an artwork helps us reduce the risk of damage and number of interventions necessary. In this work, we propose a probabilistic approach for the detection of alterations on the surface of historical violins based on an a-contrario framework. Our method is a one step NFA clustering solution which considers grey-level and spatial density information in one background model. The proposed method is robust to noise and avoids parameter tuning and any assumption about the quantity of the worn out areas. We have used as input UV induced fluorescence (UVIFL) images for considering details not perceivable with visible light. Tests were conducted on image sequences included in the ``Violins UVIFL imagery'' dataset. Results illustrate the ability of the algorithm to distinguish the worn area from the surrounding regions. Comparisons with the state of the art clustering methods shows improved overall precision and recall.

SECI-GAN: Semantic and Edge Completion for Dynamic Objects Removal

Francesco Pinto, Andrea Romanoni, Matteo Matteucci, Phil Torr

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Auto-TLDR; SECI-GAN: Semantic and Edge Conditioned Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network

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Image inpainting aims at synthesizing the missing content of damaged and corrupted images to produce visually realistic restorations; typical applications are in image restoration, automatic scene editing, super-resolution, and dynamic object removal. In this paper, we propose Semantic and Edge Conditioned Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network (SECI-GAN), an architecture that jointly exploits the high-level cues extracted by semantic segmentation and the fine-grained details captured by edge extraction to condition the image inpainting process. SECI-GAN is designed with a particular focus on recovering big regions belonging to the same object (e.g. cars or pedestrians) in the context of dynamic object removal from complex street views. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SECI-GAN, we evaluate our results on the Cityscapes dataset, showing that SECI-GAN is better than competing state-of-the-art models at recovering the structure and the content of the missing parts while producing consistent predictions.

Learning Interpretable Representation for 3D Point Clouds

Feng-Guang Su, Ci-Siang Lin, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Disentangling Body-type and Pose Information from 3D Point Clouds Using Adversarial Learning

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Point clouds have emerged as a popular representation of 3D visual data. With a set of unordered 3D points, one typically needs to transform them into latent representation before further classification and segmentation tasks. However, one cannot easily interpret such encoded latent representation. To address this issue, we propose a unique deep learning framework for disentangling body-type and pose information from 3D point clouds. Extending from autoenoder, we advance adversarial learning a selected feature type, while classification and data recovery can be additionally observed. Our experiments confirm that our model can be successfully applied to perform a wide range of 3D applications like shape synthesis, action translation, shape/action interpolation, and synchronization.

3D Semantic Labeling of Photogrammetry Meshes Based on Active Learning

Mengqi Rong, Shuhan Shen, Zhanyi Hu

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Auto-TLDR; 3D Semantic Expression of Urban Scenes Based on Active Learning

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As different urban scenes are similar but still not completely consistent, coupled with the complexity of labeling directly in 3D, high-level understanding of 3D scenes has always been a tricky problem. In this paper, we propose a procedural approach for 3D semantic expression of urban scenes based on active learning. We first start with a small labeled image set to fine-tune a semantic segmentation network and then project its probability map onto a 3D mesh model for fusion, finally outputs a 3D semantic mesh model in which each facet has a semantic label and a heat model showing each facet’s confidence. Our key observation is that our algorithm is iterative, in each iteration, we use the output semantic model as a supervision to select several valuable images for annotation to co-participate in the fine-tuning for overall improvement. In this way, we reduce the workload of labeling but not the quality of 3D semantic model. Using urban areas from two different cities, we show the potential of our method and demonstrate its effectiveness.

Adaptive Image Compression Using GAN Based Semantic-Perceptual Residual Compensation

Ruojing Wang, Zitang Sun, Sei-Ichiro Kamata, Weili Chen

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Image Compression using GAN based Semantic-Perceptual Residual Compensation

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Image compression is a basic task in image processing. In this paper, We present an adaptive image compression algorithm that relies on GAN based semantic-perceptual residual compensation, which is available to offer visually pleasing reconstruction at a low bitrate. Our method adopt an U-shaped encoding and decoding structure accompanied by a well-designed dense residual connection with strip pooling module to improve the original auto-encoder. Besides, we introduce the idea of adversarial learning by introducing a discriminator thus constructed a complete GAN. To improve the coding efficiency, we creatively designed an adaptive semantic-perception residual compensation block based on Grad-CAM algorithm. In the improvement of the quantizer, we embed the method of soft-quantization so as to solve the problem to some extent that back propagation process is irreversible. Simultaneously, we use the latest FLIF lossless compression algorithm and BPG vector compression algorithm to perform deeper compression on the image. More importantly experimental results including PSNR, MS-SSIM demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art image compression methods.

Learning Embeddings for Image Clustering: An Empirical Study of Triplet Loss Approaches

Kalun Ho, Janis Keuper, Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Margret Keuper

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Auto-TLDR; Clustering Objectives for K-means and Correlation Clustering Using Triplet Loss

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In this work, we evaluate two different image clustering objectives, k-means clustering and correlation clustering, in the context of Triplet Loss induced feature space embeddings. Specifically, we train a convolutional neural network to learn discriminative features by optimizing two popular versions of the Triplet Loss in order to study their clustering properties under the assumption of noisy labels. Additionally, we propose a new, simple Triplet Loss formulation, which shows desirable properties with respect to formal clustering objectives and outperforms the existing methods. We evaluate all three Triplet loss formulations for K-means and correlation clustering on the CIFAR-10 image classification dataset.

Identity-Preserved Face Beauty Transformation with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Zhitong Huang, Ching Y Suen

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Auto-TLDR; Identity-preserved face beauty transformation using conditional GANs

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Identity-preserved face beauty transformation aims to change the beauty scale of a face image while preserving the identity of the original face. In our framework of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs), the synthesized face produced by the generator would have the same beauty scale indicated by the input condition. Unlike the discrete class labels used in most cGANs, the condition of target beauty scale in our framework is given by a continuous real-valued beauty score in the range [1 to 5], which makes the work challenging. To tackle the problem, we have implemented a triple structure, in which the conditional discriminator is divided into a normal discriminator and a separate face beauty predictor. We have also developed another new structure called Conditioned Instance Normalization to replace the original concatenation used in cGANs, which makes the combination of the input image and condition more effective. Furthermore, Self-Consistency Loss is introduced as a new parameter to improve the stability of training and quality of the generated image. In the end, the objectives of beauty transformation and identity preservation are evaluated by the pretrained face beauty predictor and state-of-the-art face recognition network. The result is encouraging and it also shows that certain facial features could be synthesized by the generator according to the target beauty scale, while preserving the original identity.

MBD-GAN: Model-Based Image Deblurring with a Generative Adversarial Network

Li Song, Edmund Y. Lam

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Auto-TLDR; Model-Based Deblurring GAN for Inverse Imaging

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This paper presents a methodology to tackle inverse imaging problems by leveraging the synergistic power of imaging model and deep learning. The premise is that while learning-based techniques have quickly become the methods of choice in various applications, they often ignore the prior knowledge embedded in imaging models. Incorporating the latter has the potential to improve the image estimation. Specifically, we first provide a mathematical basis of using generative adversarial network (GAN) in inverse imaging through considering an optimization framework. Then, we develop the specific architecture that connects the generator and discriminator networks with the imaging model. While this technique can be applied to a variety of problems, from image reconstruction to super-resolution, we take image deblurring as the example here, where we show in detail the implementation and experimental results of what we call the model-based deblurring GAN (MBD-GAN).

Attentional Wavelet Network for Traditional Chinese Painting Transfer

Rui Wang, Huaibo Huang, Aihua Zheng, Ran He

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Auto-TLDR; Attentional Wavelet Network for Photo to Chinese Painting Transfer

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Traditional Chinese paintings pay more attention to ’Gongbi’ and ’Xieyi’ in artworks, which raises a challenging task to generate Chinese paintings from photos. ’Xieyi’ creates high-level conception for paintings, while ’Gongbi’ refers to portraying local details in paintings. This paper proposes an attentional wavelet network for photo to Chinese painting transferring. We first introduce wavelets to obtain high-level conception and local details in Chinese paintings via 2-D haar wavelet transform. Moreover, we design high-level transform stream and local enhancement stream to dispose high frequencies and low frequency respectively. Furthermore, we exploit self-attention mechanism to compatibly pick up high-level information which is used to remedy the missing details when reconstructing the Chinese painting. To advance our experiment, we set up a new dataset named P2ADataset, with diverse photos and Chinese paintings on famous mountains around China. Experimental results comparing with the state-of-the-art style transferring algorithms verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. We will release the codes and data to the public.

Controllable Face Aging

Haien Zeng, Hanjiang Lai

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Auto-TLDR; A controllable face aging method via attribute disentanglement generative adversarial network

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Motivated by the following two observations: 1) people are aging differently under different conditions for changeable facial attributes, e.g., skin color may become darker when working outside, and 2) it needs to keep some unchanged facial attributes during the aging process, e.g., race and gender, we propose a controllable face aging method via attribute disentanglement generative adversarial network. To offer fine control over the synthesized face images, first, an individual embedding of the face is directly learned from an image that contains the desired facial attribute. Second, since the image may contain other unwanted attributes, an attribute disentanglement network is used to separate the individual embedding and learn the common embedding that contains information about the face attribute (e.g., race). With the common embedding, we can manipulate the generated face image with the desired attribute in an explicit manner. Experimental results on two common benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed generator achieves comparable performance on the aging effect with state-of-the-art baselines while gaining more flexibility for attribute control. Code is available at supplementary material.

Deep Composer: A Hash-Based Duplicative Neural Network for Generating Multi-Instrument Songs

Jacob Galajda, Brandon Royal, Kien Hua

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Composer for Intelligence Duplication

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Music is one of the most appreciated forms of art, and generating songs has become a popular subject in the artificial intelligence community. There are various networks that can produce pleasant sounding music, but no model has been able to produce music that duplicates the style of a specific artist or artists. In this paper, we extend a previous single-instrument model: the Deep Composer -a model we believe to be capable of achieving this. Deep Composer originates from the Deep Segment Hash Learning (DSHL) single instrument model and is designed to learn how a specific artist would place individual segments of music together rather than create music similar to a specific genre. To the best of our knowledge, no other network has been designed to achieve this. For these reasons, we introduce a new field of study, Intelligence Duplication (ID). AI research generally focuses on developing techniques to mimic universal intelligence. Intelligence Duplication (ID) research focuses on techniques to artificially duplicate or clone a specific mind such as Mozart. Additionally, we present a new retrieval algorithm, Segment Barrier Retrieval (SBR), to improve retrieval accuracy within the hash-space as opposed to a more traditionally used feature-space. SBR prevents retrieval branches from entering areas of low-density within the hash-space, a phenomena we identify and label as segment sparsity. To test our Deep Composer and the effectiveness of SBR, we evaluate various models with different SBR threshold values and conduct qualitative surveys for each model. The survey results indicate that our Deep Composer model is capable of learning music generation from multiple composers. Our extended Deep Composer model provides a more suitable platform for Intelligence Duplication. Future work can apply this platform to duplicate great composers such as Mozart or allow them to collaborate in the virtual space.

Semantics-Guided Representation Learning with Applications to Visual Synthesis

Jia-Wei Yan, Ci-Siang Lin, Fu-En Yang, Yu-Jhe Li, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Learning Interpretable and Interpolatable Latent Representations for Visual Synthesis

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Learning interpretable and interpolatable latent representations has been an emerging research direction, allowing researchers to understand and utilize the derived latent space for further applications such as visual synthesis or recognition. While most existing approaches derive an interpolatable latent space and induces smooth transition in image appearance, it is still not clear how to observe desirable representations which would contain semantic information of interest. In this paper, we aim to learn meaningful representations and simultaneously perform semantic-oriented and visually-smooth interpolation. To this end, we propose an angular triplet-neighbor loss (ATNL) that enables learning a latent representation whose distribution matches the semantic information of interest. With the latent space guided by ATNL, we further utilize spherical semantic interpolation for generating semantic warping of images, allowing synthesis of desirable visual data. Experiments on MNIST and CMU Multi-PIE datasets qualitatively and quantitatively verify the effectiveness of our method.

Generative Latent Implicit Conditional Optimization When Learning from Small Sample

Idan Azuri, Daphna Weinshall

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Auto-TLDR; GLICO: Generative Latent Implicit Conditional Optimization for Small Sample Learning

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We revisit the long-standing problem of learning from small sample. The generation of new samples from a small training set of labeled points has attracted increased attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel such method called GLICO (Generative Latent Implicit Conditional Optimization). GLICO learns a mapping from the training examples to a latent space and a generator that generates images from vectors in the latent space. Unlike most recent work, which rely on access to large amounts of unlabeled data, GLICO does not require access to any additional data other than the small set of labeled points. In fact, GLICO learns to synthesize completely new samples for every class using as little as 5 or 10 examples per class, with as few as 10 such classes and no data from unknown classes. GLICO is then used to augment the small training set while training a classifier on the small sample. To this end, our proposed method samples the learned latent space using spherical interpolation (slerp) and generates new examples using the trained generator. Empirical results show that the new sampled set is diverse enough, leading to improvement in image classification in comparison with the state of the art when trained on small samples obtained from CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CUB-200.

A Quantitative Evaluation Framework of Video De-Identification Methods

Sathya Bursic, Alessandro D'Amelio, Marco Granato, Giuliano Grossi, Raffaella Lanzarotti

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Auto-TLDR; Face de-identification using photo-reality and facial expressions

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We live in an era of privacy concerns, motivating a large research effort in face de-identification. As in other fields, we are observing a general movement from hand-crafted methods to deep learning methods, mainly involving generative models. Although these methods produce more natural de-identified images or videos, we claim that the mere evaluation of the de-identification is not sufficient, especially when it comes to processing the images/videos further. In this note, we take into account the issue of preserving privacy, facial expressions, and photo-reality simultaneously, proposing a general testing framework. The method is applied to four open-source tools, producing a baseline for future de-identification methods.

Future Urban Scenes Generation through Vehicles Synthesis

Alessandro Simoni, Luca Bergamini, Andrea Palazzi, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara

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Auto-TLDR; Predicting the Future of an Urban Scene with a Novel View Synthesis Paradigm

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In this work we propose a deep learning pipeline to predict the visual future appearance of an urban scene. Despite recent advances, generating the entire scene in an end-to-end fashion is still far from being achieved. Instead, here we follow a two stages approach, where interpretable information is included in the loop and each actor is modelled independently. We leverage a per-object novel view synthesis paradigm; i.e. generating a synthetic representation of an object undergoing a geometrical roto-translation in the 3D space. Our model can be easily conditioned with constraints (e.g. input trajectories) provided by state-of-the-art tracking methods or by the user itself. This allows us to generate a set of diverse realistic futures starting from the same input in a multi-modal fashion. We visually and quantitatively show the superiority of this approach over traditional end-to-end scene-generation methods on CityFlow, a challenging real world dataset.