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The Surprising Effectiveness of Linear Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation

Eitan Richardson, Yair Weiss

Auto-TLDR; linear encoder-decoder architectures for unsupervised image-to-image translation

Abstract Slides Poster

Unsupervised image-to-image translation is an inherently ill-posed problem. Recent methods based on deep encoder-decoder architectures have shown impressive results, but we show that they only succeed due to a strong locality bias, and they fail to learn very simple nonlocal transformations (e.g. mapping upside down faces to upright faces). When the locality bias is removed, the methods are too powerful and may fail to learn simple local transformations. In this paper we introduce linear encoder-decoder architectures for unsupervised image to image translation. We show that learning is much easier and faster with these architectures and yet the results are surprisingly effective. In particular, we show a number of local problems for which the results of the linear methods are comparable to those of state-of-the-art architectures but with a fraction of the training time, and a number of nonlocal problems for which the state-of-the-art fails while linear methods succeed.

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Local Facial Attribute Transfer through Inpainting

Ricard Durall, Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Janis Keuper

Auto-TLDR; Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network

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The term attribute transfer refers to the tasks of altering images in such a way, that the semantic interpretation of a given input image is shifted towards an intended direction, which is quantified by semantic attributes. Prominent example applications are photo realistic changes of facial features and expressions, like changing the hair color, adding a smile, enlarging the nose or altering the entire context of a scene, like transforming a summer landscape into a winter panorama. Recent advances in attribute transfer are mostly based on generative deep neural networks, using various techniques to manipulate images in the latent space of the generator. In this paper, we present a novel method for the common sub-task of local attribute transfers, where only parts of a face have to be altered in order to achieve semantic changes (e.g. removing a mustache). In contrast to previous methods, where such local changes have been implemented by generating new (global) images, we propose to formulate local attribute transfers as an inpainting problem. Removing and regenerating only parts of images, our Attribute Transfer Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network (ATI-GAN) is able to utilize local context information to focus on the attributes while keeping the background unmodified resulting in visually sound results.

High Resolution Face Age Editing

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

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.

Detail Fusion GAN: High-Quality Translation for Unpaired Images with GAN-Based Data Augmentation

Ling Li, Yaochen Li, Chuan Wu, Hang Dong, Peilin Jiang, Fei Wang

Auto-TLDR; Data Augmentation with GAN-based Generative Adversarial Network

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Image-to-image translation, a task to learn the mapping relation between two different domains, is a rapid-growing research field in deep learning. Although existing Generative Adversarial Network(GAN)-based methods have achieved decent results in this field, there are still some limitations in generating high-quality images for practical applications (e.g., data augmentation and image inpainting). In this work, we aim to propose a GAN-based network for data augmentation which can generate translated images with more details and less artifacts. The proposed Detail Fusion Generative Adversarial Network(DFGAN) consists of a detail branch, a transfer branch, a filter module, and a reconstruction module. The detail branch is trained by a super-resolution loss and its intermediate features can be used to introduce more details to the transfer branch by the filter module. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our model generates more satisfactory images against the state-of-the-art approaches for data augmentation.

Phase Retrieval Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks

Tobias Uelwer, Alexander Oberstraß, Stefan Harmeling

Auto-TLDR; Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Phase Retrieval

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In this paper, we propose the application of conditional generative adversarial networks to solve various phase retrieval problems. We show that including knowledge of the measurement process at training time leads to an optimization at test time that is more robust to initialization than existing approaches involving generative models. In addition, conditioning the generator network on the measurements enables us to achieve much more detailed results. We empirically demonstrate that these advantages provide meaningful solutions to the Fourier and the compressive phase retrieval problem and that our method outperforms well-established projection-based methods as well as existing methods that are based on neural networks. Like other deep learning methods, our approach is very robust to noise and can therefore be very useful for real-world applications.

Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks and Fast Adaptive Bi-Dimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition for Style Transfer

Elissavet Batziou, Petros Alvanitopoulos, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Ioannis Patras, Stefanos Vrochidis, Ioannis Kompatsiaris

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

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Recently, research endeavors have shown the potentiality of Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN) in style transfer. In Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks, the consistency loss is introduced to measure the difference between the original images and the reconstructed in both directions, forward and backward. In this work, the combination of Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks with Fast and Adaptive Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition (FABEMD) is proposed to perform style transfer on images. In the proposed approach the cycle-consistency loss is modified to include the differences between the extracted Intrinsic Mode Functions (BIMFs) images. Instead of an estimation of pixel-to-pixel difference between the produced and input images, the FABEMD is applied and the extracted BIMFs are involved in the computation of the total cycle loss. This method enriches the computation of the total loss in a content-to-content and style-to-style comparison by connecting the spatial information to the frequency components. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is efficient and produces qualitative results comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

Unsupervised Contrastive Photo-To-Caricature Translation Based on Auto-Distortion

Yuhe Ding, Xin Ma, Mandi Luo, Aihua Zheng, Ran He

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

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Photo-to-caricature aims to synthesize the caricature as a rendered image exaggerating the features through sketching, pencil strokes, or other artistic drawings. Style rendering and geometry deformation are the most important aspects in photo-to-caricature translation task. To take both into consideration, we propose an unsupervised contrastive photo-to-caricature translation architecture. Considering the intuitive artifacts in the existing methods, we propose a contrastive style loss for style rendering to enforce the similarity between the style of rendered photo and the caricature, and simultaneously enhance its discrepancy to the photos. To obtain an exaggerating deformation in an unpaired/unsupervised fashion, we propose a Distortion Prediction Module (DPM) to predict a set of displacements vectors for each input image while fixing some controlling points, followed by the thin plate spline interpolation for warping. The model is trained on unpaired photo and caricature while can offer bidirectional synthesizing via inputting either a photo or a caricature. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model is effective to generate hand-drawn like caricatures compared with existing competitors.

Galaxy Image Translation with Semi-Supervised Noise-Reconstructed Generative Adversarial Networks

Qiufan Lin, Dominique Fouchez, Jérôme Pasquet

Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Image Translation with Generative Adversarial Networks Using Paired and Unpaired Images

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Image-to-image translation with Deep Learning neural networks, particularly with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), is one of the most powerful methods for simulating astronomical images. However, current work is limited to utilizing paired images with supervised translation, and there has been rare discussion on reconstructing noise background that encodes instrumental and observational effects. These limitations might be harmful for subsequent scientific applications in astrophysics. Therefore, we aim to develop methods for using unpaired images and preserving noise characteristics in image translation. In this work, we propose a two-way image translation model using GANs that exploits both paired and unpaired images in a semi-supervised manner, and introduce a noise emulating module that is able to learn and reconstruct noise characterized by high-frequency features. By experimenting on multi-band galaxy images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHT), we show that our method recovers global and local properties effectively and outperforms benchmark image translation models. To our best knowledge, this work is the first attempt to apply semi-supervised methods and noise reconstruction techniques in astrophysical studies.

Learning Disentangled Representations for Identity Preserving Surveillance Face Camouflage

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

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.

Multi-Domain Image-To-Image Translation with Adaptive Inference Graph

The Phuc Nguyen, Stéphane Lathuiliere, Elisa Ricci

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Graph Structure for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation

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In this work, we address the problem of multi-domain image-to-image translation with particular attention paid to computational cost. In particular, current state of the art models require a large and deep model in order to handle the visual diversity of multiple domains. In a context of limited computational resources, increasing the network size may not be possible. Therefore, we propose to increase the network capacity by using an adaptive graph structure. At inference time, the network estimates its own graph by selecting specific sub-networks. Sub-network selection is implemented using Gumble-Softmax in order to allow end-to-end training. This approach leads to an adjustable increase in number of parameters while preserving an almost constant computational cost. Our evaluation on two publicly available datasets of facial and painting images shows that our adaptive strategy generates better images with fewer artifacts than literature methods.

Continuous Learning of Face Attribute Synthesis

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

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.

Future Urban Scenes Generation through Vehicles Synthesis

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

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.

Towards Artifacts-Free Image Defogging

Gabriele Graffieti, Davide Maltoni

Auto-TLDR; CurL-Defog: Learning Based Defogging with CycleGAN and HArD

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In this paper we present a novel defogging technique, named CurL-Defog, aimed at minimizing the creation of artifacts. The majority of learning based defogging approaches relies on paired data (i.e., the same images with and without fog), where fog is artificially added to clear images: this often provides good results on mildly fogged images but does not generalize well to real difficult cases. On the other hand, the models trained with real unpaired data (e.g. CycleGAN) can provide visually impressive results but often produce unwanted artifacts. In this paper we propose a curriculum learning strategy coupled with an enhanced CycleGAN model in order to reduce the number of produced artifacts, while maintaining state-of-the- art performance in terms of contrast enhancement and image reconstruction. We also introduce a new metric, called HArD (Hazy Artifact Detector) to numerically quantify the amount of artifacts in the defogged images, thus avoiding the tedious and subjective manual inspection of the results. The proposed approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art techniques on both real and synthetic datasets.

AVAE: Adversarial Variational Auto Encoder

Antoine Plumerault, Hervé Le Borgne, Celine Hudelot

Auto-TLDR; Combining VAE and GAN for Realistic Image Generation

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Among the wide variety of image generative models, two models stand out: Variational Auto Encoders (VAE) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). GANs can produce realistic images, but they suffer from mode collapse and do not provide simple ways to get the latent representation of an image. On the other hand, VAEs do not have these problems, but they often generate images less realistic than GANs. In this article, we explain that this lack of realism is partially due to a common underestimation of the natural image manifold dimensionality. To solve this issue we introduce a new framework that combines VAE and GAN in a novel and complementary way to produce an auto-encoding model that keeps VAEs properties while generating images of GAN-quality. We evaluate our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively on five image datasets.

Augmented Cyclic Consistency Regularization for Unpaired Image-To-Image Translation

Takehiko Ohkawa, Naoto Inoue, Hirokatsu Kataoka, Nakamasa Inoue

Auto-TLDR; Augmented Cyclic Consistency Regularization for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation

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Unpaired image-to-image (I2I) translation has received considerable attention in pattern recognition and computer vision because of recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, due to the lack of explicit supervision, unpaired I2I models often fail to generate realistic images, especially in challenging datasets with different backgrounds and poses. Hence, stabilization is indispensable for real-world applications and GANs. Herein, we propose Augmented Cyclic Consistency Regularization (ACCR), a novel regularization method for unpaired I2I translation. Our main idea is to enforce consistency regularization originating from semi-supervised learning on the discriminators leveraging real, fake, reconstructed, and augmented samples. We regularize the discriminators to output similar predictions when fed pairs of original and perturbed images. We qualitatively clarify the generation property between unpaired I2I models and standard GANs, and explain why consistency regularization on fake and reconstructed samples works well. Quantitatively, our method outperforms the consistency regularized GAN (CR-GAN) in real-world translations and demonstrates efficacy against several data augmentation variants and cycle-consistent constraints.

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

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

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.

Pixel-based Facial Expression Synthesis

Arbish Akram, Nazar Khan

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.

Stylized-Colorization for Line Arts

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

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

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We address a novel problem of stylized-colorization which colorizes a given line art using a given coloring style in text. This problem can be stated as multi-domain image translation and is more challenging than the current colorization problem because it requires not only capturing the illustration distribution but also satisfying the required coloring styles specific to anime such as lightness, shading, or saturation. We propose a GAN-based end-to-end model for stylized-colorization where the model has one generator and two discriminators. Our generator is based on the U-Net architecture and receives a pair of a line art and a coloring style in text as its input to produce a stylized-colorization image of the line art. Two discriminators, on the other hand, share weights at early layers to judge the stylized-colorization image in two different aspects: one for color and one for style. One generator and two discriminators are jointly trained in an adversarial and end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Learning Low-Shot Generative Networks for Cross-Domain Data

Hsuan-Kai Kao, Cheng-Che Lee, Wei-Chen Chiu

Auto-TLDR; Learning Generators for Cross-Domain Data under Low-Shot Learning

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We tackle a novel problem of learning generators for cross-domain data under a specific scenario of low-shot learning. Basically, given a source domain with sufficient amount of training data, we aim to transfer the knowledge of its generative process to another target domain, which not only has few data samples but also contains the domain shift with respect to the source domain. This problem has great potential in practical use and is different from the well-known image translation task, as the target-domain data can be generated without requiring any source-domain ones and the large data consumption for learning target-domain generator can be alleviated. Built upon a cross-domain dataset where (1) each of the low shots in the target domain has its correspondence in the source and (2) these two domains share the similar content information but different appearance, two approaches are proposed: a Latent-Disentanglement-Orientated model (LaDo) and a Generative-Hierarchy-Oriented (GenHo) model. Our LaDo and GenHo approaches address the problem from different perspectives, where the former relies on learning the disentangled representation composed of domain-invariant content features and domain-specific appearance ones; while the later decomposes the generative process of a generator into two parts for synthesizing the content and appearance sequentially. We perform extensive experiments under various settings of cross-domain data and show the efficacy of our models for generating target-domain data with the abundant content variance as in the source domain, which lead to the favourable performance in comparison to several baselines.

Learning Image Inpainting from Incomplete Images using Self-Supervision

Sriram Yenamandra, Rohit Kumar Jena, Ansh Khurana, Suyash Awate

Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Deep Neural Network for Semantic Image Inpainting

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Current approaches for semantic image inpainting rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) that learn under full supervision, i.e., using a training set comprising pairs of (i)corrupted images with holes and (ii)corresponding uncorrupted images. However, for several real-world applications, obtaining large sets of uncorrupted images is challenging or infeasible. Current methods also rely on adversarial training involving min-max optimization that is prone to instability during learning. We propose a novel image-inpainting DNN framework that can learn in both completely unsupervised and semi-supervised modes. Moreover, our DNN learning formulation bypasses adversarial training and, thereby, lends itself to more stable training. Results on the publicly available CelebA dataset show that our method, even when learning unsupervisedly, outperforms the state of the art that learns with full supervision.

Mask-Based Style-Controlled Image Synthesis Using a Mask Style Encoder

Jaehyeong Cho, Wataru Shimoda, Keiji Yanai

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

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In recent years, the advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive results for image generation and translation tasks. In particular, the image-to-image translation is a method of learning mapping from a source domain to a target domain and synthesizing an image. Image-to-image translation can be applied to a variety of tasks, making it possible to quickly and easily synthesize realistic images from semantic segmentation masks. However, in the existing image-to-image translation method, there is a limitation on controlling the style of the translated image, and it is not easy to synthesize an image by controlling the style of each mask element in detail. Therefore, we propose an image synthesis method that controls the style of each element by improving the existing image-to-image translation method. In the proposed method, we implement a style encoder that extracts style features for each mask element. The extracted style features are concatenated to the semantic mask in the normalization layer, and used the style-controlled image synthesis of each mask element. In experiments, we train style-controlled images synthesis using the datasets consisting of semantic segmentation masks and real images. The results show that the proposed method has excellent performance for style-controlled images synthesis for each element.

Image Inpainting with Contrastive Relation Network

Xiaoqiang Zhou, Junjie Li, Zilei Wang, Ran He, Tieniu Tan

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

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Image inpainting faces the challenging issue of the requirements on structure reasonableness and texture coherence. In this paper, we propose a two-stage inpainting framework to address this issue. The basic idea is to address the two requirements in two separate stages. Completed segmentation of the corrupted image is firstly predicted through segmentation reconstruction network, while fine-grained image details are restored in the second stage through an image generator. The two stages are connected in series as the image details are generated under the guidance of completed segmentation map that predicted in the first stage. Specifically, in the second stage, we propose a novel graph-based relation network to model the relationship existed in corrupted image. In relation network, both intra-relationship for pixels in the same semantic region and inter-relationship between different semantic parts are considered, improving the consistency and compatibility of image textures. Besides, contrastive loss is designed to facilitate the relation network training. Such a framework not only simplifies the inpainting problem directly, but also exploits the relationship in corrupted image explicitly. Extensive experiments on various public datasets quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art.

DEN: Disentangling and Exchanging Network for Depth Completion

You-Feng Wu, Vu-Hoang Tran, Ting-Wei Chang, Wei-Chen Chiu, Ching-Chun Huang

Auto-TLDR; Disentangling and Exchanging Network for Depth Completion

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In this paper, we tackle the depth completion problem. Conventional depth sensors usually produce incomplete depth maps due to the property of surface reflection, especially for the window areas, metal surfaces, and object boundaries. However, we observe that the corresponding RGB images are still dense and preserve all of the useful structural information. This brings us to the question of whether we can borrow this structural information from RGB images to inpaint the corresponding incomplete depth maps. In this paper, we answer that question by proposing a Disentangling and Exchanging Network (DEN) for depth completion. The network is designed based on an assumption that after suitable feature disentanglement, RGB images and depth maps share a common domain for representing structural information. So we firstly disentangle both RGB and depth images into domain-invariant content parts, which contain structural information, and domain-specific style parts. Then, by exchanging the complete structural information extracted from RGB image with incomplete information extracted from depth map, we can generate the complete version of depth map. Furthermore, to address the mixed-depth problem, a newly proposed depth representation is applied. By modeling depth estimation as a classification problem coupled with coefficient estimation, blurry edges are enhanced in the depth map. At last, we have implemented ablation experiments to verify the effectiveness of our proposed DEN model. The results also demonstrate the superiority of DEN over some state-of-the-art approaches.

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

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

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

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Facial makeup style transfer is an extremely challenging sub-field of image-to-image-translation. Due to this difficulty, state-of-the-art results are mostly reliant on the Face Parsing Algorithm, which segments a face into parts in order to easily extract makeup features. However, we find that this algorithm can only work well on high-definition images where facial features can be accurately extracted. Faces in many real-world photos, such as those including a large background or multiple people, are typically of low-resolution, which considerably hinders state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end holistic approach to effectively transfer makeup styles between two low-resolution images. The idea is built upon a novel weighted multi-scale spatial attention module, which identifies salient pixel regions on low-resolution images in multiple scales, and uses channel attention to determine the most effective attention map. This design provides two benefits: low-resolution images are usually blurry to different extents, so a multi-scale architecture can select the most effective convolution kernel size to implement spatial attention; makeup is applied on both a macro-level (foundation, fake tan) and a micro-level (eyeliner, lipstick) so different scales can excel in extracting different makeup features. We develop an Augmented CycleGAN network that embeds our attention modules at selected layers to most effectively transfer makeup. We test our system with the FBD data set, which consists of many low-resolution facial images, and demonstrates that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in transferring makeup for blurry images and partially occluded images.

Image Representation Learning by Transformation Regression

Xifeng Guo, Jiyuan Liu, Sihang Zhou, En Zhu, Shihao Dong

Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Image Representation Learning using Continuous Parameter Prediction

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Self-supervised learning is a thriving research direction since it can relieve the burden of human labeling for machine learning by seeking for supervision from data instead of human annotation. Although demonstrating promising performance in various applications, we observe that the existing methods usually model the auxiliary learning tasks as classification tasks with finite discrete labels, leading to insufficient supervisory signals, which in turn restricts the representation quality. In this paper, to solve the above problem and make full use of the supervision from data, we design a regression model to predict the continuous parameters of a group of transformations, i.e., image rotation, translation, and scaling. Surprisingly, this naive modification stimulates tremendous potential from data and the resulting supervisory signal has largely improved the performance of image representation learning. Extensive experiments on four image datasets, including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, STL10, and SVHN, indicate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning methods by a large margin in terms of classification accuracy. Crucially, we find that with our proposed training mechanism as an initialization, the performance of the existing state-of-the-art classification deep architectures can be preferably improved.

Free-Form Image Inpainting Via Contrastive Attention Network

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

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.

SIDGAN: Single Image Dehazing without Paired Supervision

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

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.

Semi-Supervised Outdoor Image Generation Conditioned on Weather Signals

Sota Kawakami, Kei Okada, Naoko Nitta, Kazuaki Nakamura, Noboru Babaguchi

Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Generative Adversarial Network for Prediction of Weather Signals from Outdoor Images

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In recent years, various types of sensors observe the real world. Especially, weather sensors are densely installed all over the world to observe current weather situations at various places. However, weather signals such as the temperature or humidity obtained by weather sensors are intuitively difficult for humans to understand. On the other hand, images captured by typical RGB cameras can tell weather situations at the captured places in a more comprehensible way for humans; however, cameras are only installed at limited places and are not necessarily open to public due to privacy issues. In order to solve this problem, the goal of our work is to generate images which can tell weather situations at arbitrary time and locations. This can be realized by using a conditional generative adversarial network architecture that takes an image and a condition to transform the image accordingly to the condition. Training such network requires a large number of image and condition pairs as the training data. Although weather signals can be easily collected from weather sensors, collecting their spatially and temporally synchronized outdoor images is not easy. Thus, we propose a semi-supervised method for training the image transformer. A relatively small number of pairs of an outdoor image and weather signals is collected, each from different web services, by considering their semantic consistency. The collected pairs are used to train a predictor for predicting weather signals from a given outdoor image. Then, the image transformer is trained by using a large number of pairs of an outdoor image and pseudo weather signals predicted by the predictor as the training data.

A Simple Domain Shifting Network for Generating Low Quality Images

Guruprasad Hegde, Avinash Nittur Ramesh, Kanchana Vaishnavi Gandikota, Michael Möller, Roman Obermaisser

Auto-TLDR; Robotic Image Classification Using Quality degrading networks

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Deep Learning systems have proven to be extremely successful for image recognition tasks for which significant amounts of training data is available, e.g., on the famous ImageNet dataset. We demonstrate that for robotics applications with cheap camera equipment, the low image quality, however, influences the classification accuracy, and freely available data bases cannot be exploited in a straight forward way to train classifiers to be used on a robot. As a solution we propose to train a network on degrading the quality images in order to mimic specific low quality imaging systems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that classification networks trained by using images produced by our quality degrading network along with the high quality images outperform classification networks trained only on high quality data when used on a real robot system, while being significantly easier to use than competing zero-shot domain adaptation techniques.

Dual-MTGAN: Stochastic and Deterministic Motion Transfer for Image-To-Video Synthesis

Fu-En Yang, Jing-Cheng Chang, Yuan-Hao Lee, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

Auto-TLDR; Dual Motion Transfer GAN for Convolutional Neural Networks

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Generating videos with content and motion variations is a challenging task in computer vision. While the recent development of GAN allows video generation from latent representations, it is not easy to produce videos with particular content of motion patterns of interest. In this paper, we propose Dual Motion Transfer GAN (Dual-MTGAN), which takes image and video data as inputs while learning disentangled content and motion representations. Our Dual-MTGAN is able to perform deterministic motion transfer and stochastic motion generation. Based on a given image, the former preserves the input content and transfers motion patterns observed from another video sequence, and the latter directly produces videos with plausible yet diverse motion patterns based on the input image. The proposed model is trained in an end-to-end manner, without the need to utilize pre-defined motion features like pose or facial landmarks. Our quantitative and qualitative results would confirm the effectiveness and robustness of our model in addressing such conditioned image-to-video tasks.

Shape Consistent 2D Keypoint Estimation under Domain Shift

Levi Vasconcelos, Massimiliano Mancini, Davide Boscaini, Barbara Caputo, Elisa Ricci

Auto-TLDR; Deep Adaptation for Keypoint Prediction under Domain Shift

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Recent unsupervised domain adaptation methods based on deep architectures have shown remarkable performance not only in traditional classification tasks but also in more complex problems involving structured predictions (e.g. semantic segmentation, depth estimation). Following this trend, in this paper we present a novel deep adaptation framework for estimating keypoints under \textit{domain shift}, i.e. when the training (\textit{source}) and the test (\textit{target}) images significantly differ in terms of visual appearance. Our method seamlessly combines three different components: feature alignment, adversarial training and self-supervision. Specifically, our deep architecture leverages from domain-specific distribution alignment layers to perform target adaptation at the feature level. Furthermore, a novel loss is proposed which combines an adversarial term for ensuring aligned predictions in the output space and a geometric consistency term which guarantees coherent predictions between a target sample and its perturbed version. Our extensive experimental evaluation conducted on three publicly available benchmarks shows that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods in the 2D keypoint prediction task.

The Role of Cycle Consistency for Generating Better Human Action Videos from a Single Frame

Runze Li, Bir Bhanu

Auto-TLDR; Generating Videos with Human Action Semantics using Cycle Constraints

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This paper addresses the challenging problem of generating videos with human action semantics. Unlike previous work which predict future frames in a single forward pass, this paper introduces the cycle constraints in both forward and backward passes in the generation of human actions. This is achieved by enforcing the appearance and motion consistency across a sequence of frames generated in the future. The approach consists of two stages. In the first stage, the pose of a human body is generated. In the second stage, an image generator is used to generate future frames by using (a) generated human poses in the future from the first stage, (b) the single observed human pose, and (c) the single corresponding future frame. The experiments are performed on three datasets: Weizmann dataset involving simple human actions, Penn Action dataset and UCF-101 dataset containing complicated human actions, especially in sports. The results from these experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Efficient Shadow Detection and Removal Using Synthetic Data with Domain Adaptation

Rui Guo, Babajide Ayinde, Hao Sun

Auto-TLDR; Shadow Detection and Removal with Domain Adaptation and Synthetic Image Database

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In recent years, learning based shadow detection and removal approaches have shown prospects and, in most cases, yielded state-of-the-art results. The performance of these approaches, however, relies heavily on the construction of training database of shadow images, shadow-free versions, and shadow maps as ground truth. This conventional data gathering method is time-consuming, expensive, or even practically intractable to realize especially for outdoor scenes with complicated shadow patterns, thus limiting the size of the data available for training. In this paper, we leverage on large high quality synthetic image database and domain adaptation to eliminate the bottlenecks resulting from insufficient training samples and domain bias. Specifically, our approach utilizes adversarial training to predict near-pixel-perfect shadow map from synthetic shadow image for downstream shadow removal steps. At inference time, we capitalize on domain adaptation via image style transfer to map the style of real- world scene to that of synthetic scene for the purpose of detecting and subsequently removing shadow. Comprehensive experiments indicate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on select benchmark datasets.

UCCTGAN: Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network

Shuming Sun, Xiaoqiang Li, Jide Li

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

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Clothing color transformation refers to changing the clothes color in an original image to the clothes color in a target image. In this paper, we propose an Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network (UCCTGAN) for the task. UCCTGAN adopts the color histogram of a target clothes as color guidance and an improved U-net architecture called AntennaNet is put forward to fuse the extracted color information with the original image. Meanwhile, to accomplish unsupervised learning, the loss function is carefully designed according to color moment, which evaluates the chromatic aberration between the target clothing and the generated clothing. Experimental results show that our network has the ability to generate convincing color transformation results.

Hybrid Approach for 3D Head Reconstruction: Using Neural Networks and Visual Geometry

Oussema Bouafif, Bogdan Khomutenko, Mohammed Daoudi

Auto-TLDR; Recovering 3D Head Geometry from a Single Image using Deep Learning and Geometric Techniques

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Recovering the 3D geometric structure of a face from a single input image is a challenging active research area in computer vision. In this paper, we present a novel method for reconstructing 3D heads from a single or multiple image(s) using a hybrid approach based on deep learning and geometric techniques. We propose an encoder-decoder network based on the U-net architecture and trained on synthetic data only. It predicts both pixel-wise normal vectors and landmarks maps from a single input photo. Landmarks are used for the pose computation and the initialization of the optimization problem, which, in turn, reconstructs the 3D head geometry by using a parametric morphable model and normal vector fields. State-of-the-art results are achieved through qualitative and quantitative evaluation tests on both single and multi-view settings. Despite the fact that the model was trained only on synthetic data, it successfully recovers 3D geometry and precise poses for real-world images.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Object Detection in Cultural Sites

Giovanni Pasqualino, Antonino Furnari, Giovanni Maria Farinella

Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Object Detection in Cultural Sites

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The ability to detect objects in cultural sites from the egocentric point of view of the user can enable interesting applications for both the visitors and the manager of the site. Unfortunately, current object detection algorithms have to be trained on large amounts of labeled data, the collection of which is costly and time-consuming. While synthetic data generated from the 3D model of the cultural site can be used to train object detection algorithms, a significant drop in performance is generally observed when such algorithms are deployed to work with real images. In this paper, we consider the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for object detection in cultural sites. Specifically, we assume the availability of synthetic labeled images and real unlabeled images for training. To study the problem, we propose a dataset containing 75244 synthetic and 2190 real images with annotations for 16 different artworks. We hence investigate different domain adaptation techniques based on image-to-image translation and feature alignment. Our analysis points out that such techniques can be useful to address the domain adaptation issue, while there is still plenty of space for improvement on the proposed dataset. We release the dataset at our web page to encourage research on this challenging topic: https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/EGO-CH-OBJ-ADAPT/.

Adaptive Image Compression Using GAN Based Semantic-Perceptual Residual Compensation

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

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.

Unsupervised Learning of Landmarks Based on Inter-Intra Subject Consistencies

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

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.

A NoGAN Approach for Image and Video Restoration and Compression Artifact Removal

Mameli Filippo, Marco Bertini, Leonardo Galteri, Alberto Del Bimbo

Auto-TLDR; Deep Neural Network for Image and Video Compression Artifact Removal and Restoration

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Lossy image and video compression algorithms introduce several different types of visual artifacts that reduce the visual quality of the compressed media, and the higher the compression rate the higher is the strength of these artifacts. In this work, we describe an approach for visual quality improvement of compressed images and videos to be performed at presentation time, so to obtain the benefits of fast data transfer and reduced data storage, while enjoying a visual quality that could be obtained only reducing the compression rate. To obtain this result we propose to use a deep neural network trained using the NoGAN approach, adapting the popular DeOldify architecture used for colorization. We show how the proposed method can be applied both to image and video compression artifact removal and restoration.

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

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

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.

LFIEM: Lightweight Filter-Based Image Enhancement Model

Oktai Tatanov, Aleksei Samarin

Auto-TLDR; Image Retouching Using Semi-supervised Learning for Mobile Devices

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Photo retouching features are being integrated into a growing number of mobile applications. Current learning-based approaches enhance images using large convolutional neural network-based models, where the result is received directly from the neural network outputs. This method can lead to artifacts in the resulting images, models that are complicated to interpret, and can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we explore the application of a filter-based approach in order to overcome the problems outlined above. We focus on creating a lightweight solution suitable for use on mobile devices when designing our model. A significant performance increase was achieved through implementing consistency regularization used in semi-supervised learning. The proposed model can be used on mobile devices and achieves competitive results compared to known models.

Exemplar Guided Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination Via Mutual Information Disentanglement

Haoxue Wu, Huaibo Huang, Aijing Yu, Jie Cao, Zhen Lei, Ran He

Auto-TLDR; Exemplar Guided Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination with Structural Representation Learning

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Recently, many Near infrared-visible (NIR-VIS) heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) methods have been proposed in the community. But it remains a challenging problem because of the sensing gap along with large pose variations. In this paper, we propose an Exemplar Guided Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination (EGCH) to reduce the domain discrepancy through disentangled representation learning. For each modality, EGCH contains a spectral encoder as well as a structure encoder to disentangle spectral and structure representation, respectively. It also contains a traditional generator that reconstructs the input from the above two representations, and a structure generator that predicts the facial parsing map from the structure representation. Besides, mutual information minimization and maximization are conducted to boost disentanglement and make representations adequately expressed. Then the translation is built on structure representations between two modalities. Provided with the transformed NIR structure representation and original VIS spectral representation, EGCH is capable to produce high-fidelity VIS images that preserve the topology structure of the input NIR while transfer the spectral information of an arbitrary VIS exemplar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves more promising results both qualitatively and quantitatively than the state-of-the-art NIR-VIS methods.

Robust Pedestrian Detection in Thermal Imagery Using Synthesized Images

My Kieu, Lorenzo Berlincioni, Leonardo Galteri, Marco Bertini, Andrew Bagdanov, Alberto Del Bimbo

Auto-TLDR; Improving Pedestrian Detection in the thermal domain using Generative Adversarial Network

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In this paper we propose a method for improving pedestrian detection in the thermal domain using two stages: first, a generative data augmentation approach is used, then a domain adaptation method using generated data adapts an RGB pedestrian detector. Our model, based on the Least-Squares Generative Adversarial Network, is trained to synthesize realistic thermal versions of input RGB images which are then used to augment the limited amount of labeled thermal pedestrian images available for training. We apply our generative data augmentation strategy in order to adapt a pretrained YOLOv3 pedestrian detector to detection in the thermal-only domain. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: using less than 50% of available real thermal training data, and relying on synthesized data generated by our model in the domain adaptation phase, our detector achieves state-of-the-art results on the KAIST Multispectral Pedestrian Detection Benchmark; even if more real thermal data is available adding GAN generated images to the training data results in improved performance, thus showing that these images act as an effective form of data augmentation. To the best of our knowledge, our detector achieves the best single-modality detection results on KAIST with respect to the state-of-the-art.

Feature Point Matching in Cross-Spectral Images with Cycle Consistency Learning

Ryosuke Furuta, Naoaki Noguchi, Xueting Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki

Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Learning for General Feature Point Matching in Cross-Spectral Settings

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Feature point matching is an important problem because its applications cover a wide range of tasks in computer vision. Deep learning-based methods for learning local features have recently shown superior performance. However, it is not easy to collect the training data in these methods, especially in cross-spectral settings such as the correspondence between RGB and near-infrared images. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning method for general feature point matching. Because we train a convolutional neural network as a feature extractor in order to satisfy the cycle consistency of the correspondences between an input image pair, the proposed method does not require supervision and works even in cross-spectral settings. In our experiments, we apply the proposed method to stereo matching, which is a dense feature point matching problem. The experimental results, which simulate cross-spectral settings with three different settings, i.e., RGB stereo, RGB vs gray-scale, and anaglyph (red vs cyan), show that our proposed method outperforms the compared methods, which employ handcrafted features for stereo matching, by a significant margin.

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

Li Song, Edmund Y. Lam

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).

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

Wenshuang Liu, Wenting Chen, Yuanlue Zhu, Linlin Shen

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.

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

Xiaoyu Xiang, Qian Lin, Jan Allebach

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).

A Joint Representation Learning and Feature Modeling Approach for One-Class Recognition

Pramuditha Perera, Vishal Patel

Auto-TLDR; Combining Generative Features and One-Class Classification for Effective One-class Recognition

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One-class recognition is traditionally approached either as a representation learning problem or a feature modelling problem. In this work, we argue that both of these approaches have their own limitations; and a more effective solution can be obtained by combining the two. The proposed approach is based on the combination of a generative framework and a one-class classification method. First, we learn generative features using the one-class data with a generative framework. We augment the learned features with the corresponding reconstruction errors to obtain augmented features. Then, we qualitatively identify a suitable feature distribution that reduces the redundancy in the chosen classifier space. Finally, we force the augmented features to take the form of this distribution using an adversarial framework. We test the effectiveness of the proposed method on three one-class classification tasks and obtain state-of-the-art results.

Deep Realistic Novel View Generation for City-Scale Aerial Images

Koundinya Nouduri, Ke Gao, Joshua Fraser, Shizeng Yao, Hadi Aliakbarpour, Filiz Bunyak, Kannappan Palaniappan

Auto-TLDR; End-to-End 3D Voxel Renderer for Multi-View Stereo Data Generation and Evaluation

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In this paper we introduce a novel end-to-end frameworkfor generation of large, aerial, city-scale, realistic syntheticimage sequences with associated accurate and precise camerametadata. The two main purposes for this data are (i) to en-able objective, quantitative evaluation of computer vision al-gorithms and methods such as feature detection, description,and matching or full computer vision pipelines such as 3D re-construction; and (ii) to supply large amounts of high qualitytraining data for deep learning guided computer vision meth-ods. The proposed framework consists of three main mod-ules, a 3D voxel renderer for data generation, a deep neu-ral network for artifact removal, and a quantitative evaluationmodule for Multi-View Stereo (MVS) as an example. The3D voxel renderer enables generation of seen or unseen viewsof a scene from arbitary camera poses with accurate camerametadata parameters. The artifact removal module proposes anovel edge-augmented deep learning network with an explicitedgemap processing stream to remove image artifacts whilepreserving and recovering scene structures for more realis-tic results. Our experiments on two urban, city-scale, aerialdatasets for Albuquerque (ABQ), NM and Los Angeles (LA),CA show promising results in terms structural similarity toreal data and accuracy of reconstructed 3D point clouds