Deep Photo Relighting by Integrating Both 2D and 3D Lighting Information

Takashi Machida, Satoru Nakanishi

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Auto-TLDR; DPR: Deep Photorelighting for Image Detection/Classification and Data Augmentation

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In this paper, we propose a novel framework called ``deep photorelighting'' (DPR) that can transform the lighting condition of an image for a virtual test of image detection/classification algorithm, city environment design, and data augmentation for machine learning. Our framework employs the deep neural network (DNN) approach based on U-Net. Specifically, DPR has two keypoints for transforming one lighting condition to another one by DNN. One is that we can support all factors that affect the lighting conditions (e.g., viewpoint, object materials/geometry, light position) by using 2D and 3D information such as omnidirectional image, omnidirectional depth image, and region segmentation image. The other keypoint is that we can reproduce indirect influences from outside the frame such as shadow by grasping the whole lighting environment with omnidirectional image/depth. As a result, DPR can generate relighting image without fatal artifacts such an unnatural shading/shadows of objects. In experiments, we confirmed that a generated image is well reproduced compared with the ground truth image. We also confirmed that shadows, which occur inside and outside the frame through obstacles, are properly added/deleted in the generated image compared with the ground truth image.

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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.

SIDGAN: Single Image Dehazing without Paired Supervision

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

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

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

UCCTGAN: Unsupervised Clothing Color Transformation Generative Adversarial Network

Shuming Sun, Xiaoqiang Li, Jide Li

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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.

5D Light Field Synthesis from a Monocular Video

Kyuho Bae, Andre Ivan, Hajime Nagahara, In Kyu Park

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Auto-TLDR; Synthesis of Light Field Video from Monocular Video using Deep Learning

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Commercially available light field cameras have difficulty in capturing 5D (4D + time) light field videos. They can only capture still light filed images or are excessively expensive for normal users to capture the light field video. To tackle this problem, we propose a deep learning-based method for synthesizing a light field video from a monocular video. We propose a new synthetic light field video dataset that renders photorealistic scenes using Unreal Engine because no light field video dataset is available. The proposed deep learning framework synthesizes the light field video with a full set (9x9) of sub-aperture images from a normal monocular video. The proposed network consists of three sub-networks, namely, feature extraction, 5D light field video synthesis, and temporal consistency refinement. Experimental results show that our model can successfully synthesize the light field video for synthetic and real scenes and outperforms the previous frame-by-frame method quantitatively and qualitatively.

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

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

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

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

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.

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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The garment transfer problem comprises two tasks: learning to separate a person's body (pose, shape, color) from their clothing (garment type, shape, style) and then generating new images of the wearer dressed in arbitrary garments. We present GarmentGAN, a new algorithm that performs image-based garment transfer through generative adversarial methods. The GarmentGAN framework allows users to virtually try-on items before purchase and generalizes to various apparel types. GarmentGAN requires as input only two images, namely, a picture of the target fashion item and an image containing the customer. The output is a synthetic image wherein the customer is wearing the target apparel. In order to make the generated image look photo-realistic, we employ the use of novel generative adversarial techniques. GarmentGAN improves on existing methods in the realism of generated imagery and solves various problems related to self-occlusions. Our proposed model incorporates additional information during training, utilizing both segmentation maps and body key-point information. We show qualitative and quantitative comparisons to several other networks to demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique.

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.

Lane Detection Based on Object Detection and Image-To-Image Translation

Hiroyuki Komori, Kazunori Onoguchi

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Auto-TLDR; Lane Marking and Road Boundary Detection from Monocular Camera Images using Inverse Perspective Mapping

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In this paper, we propose a method to detect various types of lane markings and road boundaries simultaneously from a monocular camera image. This method detects lane markings and road boundaries in IPM images obtained by the Inverse Perspective Mapping of input images. First, bounding boxes surrounding a lane marking or the road boundary are extracted by the object detection network. At the same time, these areas are labelled with a solid line, a dashed line, a zebra line, a curb, a grass, a sidewall and so on. Next, in each bounding box, lane marking boundaries or road boundaries are drawn by the image-to-image translation network. We use YOLOv3 for the object detection and pix2pix for the image translation. We create our own datasets including various types of lane markings and road boundaries and evaluate our approach using these datasets qualitatively and quantitatively.

Thermal Image Enhancement Using Generative Adversarial Network for Pedestrian Detection

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

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

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

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

Jaehyeong Cho, Wataru Shimoda, Keiji Yanai

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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.

A GAN-Based Blind Inpainting Method for Masonry Wall Images

Yahya Ibrahim, Balázs Nagy, Csaba Benedek

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Auto-TLDR; An End-to-End Blind Inpainting Algorithm for Masonry Wall Images

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In this paper we introduce a novel end-to-end blind inpainting algorithm for masonry wall images, performing the automatic detection and virtual completion of occluded or damaged wall regions. For this purpose, we propose a three-stage deep neural network that comprises a U-Net-based sub-network for wall segmentation into brick, mortar and occluded regions, which is followed by a two-stage adversarial inpainting model. The first adversarial network predicts the schematic mortar-brick pattern of the occluded areas based on the observed wall structure, providing in itself valuable structural information for archeological and architectural applications. Finally, the second adversarial network predicts the RGB pixel values yielding a realistic visual experience for the observer. While the three stages implement a sequential pipeline, they interact through dependencies of their loss functions admitting the consideration of hidden feature dependencies between the different network components. For training and testing the network a new dataset has been created, and an extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation versus the state-of-the-art is given.

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

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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.

Stylized-Colorization for Line Arts

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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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.

Removing Raindrops from a Single Image Using Synthetic Data

Yoshihito Kokubo, Shusaku Asada, Hirotaka Maruyama, Masaru Koide, Kohei Yamamoto, Yoshihisa Suetsugu

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Auto-TLDR; Raindrop Removal Using Synthetic Raindrop Data

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We simulated the exact features of raindrops on a camera lens and conducted an experiment to evaluate the performance of a network trained to remove raindrops using synthetic raindrop data. Although research has been conducted to precisely evaluate methods to remove raindrops, with some evaluation networks trained on images with real raindrops and others trained on images with synthetic raindrops, there have not been any studies that have directly compared the performance of two networks trained on each respective kind of image. In a previous study wherein images with synthetic raindrops were used for training, the network did not work effectively on images with real raindrops because the shapes of the raindrops were simulated using simple arithmetic expressions. In this study, we focused on generating raindrop shapes that are closer to reality with the aim of using these synthetic raindrops in images to develop a technique for removing real-world raindrops. After categorizing raindrops by type, we further separated each raindrop type into its constituent elements, generated each element separately, and finally combined the generated elements. The proposed technique was used to add images with synthetic raindrops to the training data, and when we evaluated the model, we confirmed that the technique's precision exceeded that of when only images with actual raindrops were used for training. The evaluation results proved that images with synthetic raindrops can be used as training data for real-world images.

Local Facial Attribute Transfer through Inpainting

Ricard Durall, Franz-Josef Pfreundt, Janis Keuper

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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.

Deep Realistic Novel View Generation for City-Scale Aerial Images

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

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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

Semi-Supervised Outdoor Image Generation Conditioned on Weather Signals

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

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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.

Efficient Shadow Detection and Removal Using Synthetic Data with Domain Adaptation

Rui Guo, Babajide Ayinde, Hao Sun

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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.

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.

Ω-GAN: Object Manifold Embedding GAN for Image Generation by Disentangling Parameters into Pose and Shape Manifolds

Yasutomo Kawanishi, Daisuke Deguchi, Ichiro Ide, Hiroshi Murase

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Auto-TLDR; Object Manifold Embedding GAN with Parametric Sampling and Object Identity Loss

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In this paper, we propose Object Manifold Embedding GAN (Ω-GAN) to generate images of variously shaped and arbitrarily posed objects from a noise variable sampled from a distribution defined over the pose and the shape manifolds in a vector space. We introduce Parametric Manifold Sampling to sample noise variables from a distribution over the pose manifold to conditionally generate object images in arbitrary poses by tuning the pose parameter. We also introduce Object Identity Loss for clearly disentangling the pose and shape parameters, which allows us to maintain the shape of the object instance when only the pose parameter is changed. Through evaluation, we confirmed that the proposed Ω-GAN could generate variously shaped object images in arbitrary poses by changing the pose and shape parameters independently. We also introduce an application of the proposed method for object pose estimation, through which we confirmed that the object poses in the generated images are accurate.

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

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

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

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

Extending Single Beam Lidar to Full Resolution by Fusing with Single Image Depth Estimation

Yawen Lu, Yuxing Wang, Devarth Parikh, Guoyu Lu

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Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised LIDAR for Low-Cost Depth Estimation

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Depth estimation is playing an important role in indoor and outdoor scene understanding, autonomous driving, augmented reality and many other tasks. Vehicles and robotics are able to use active illumination sensors such as LIDAR to receive high precision depth estimation. However, high-resolution Lidars are usually too expensive, which limits its massive production on various applications. Though single beam LIDAR enjoys the benefits of low cost, one beam depth sensing is not usually sufficient to perceive the surrounding environment in many scenarios. In this paper, we propose a learning-based framework to explore to replicate similar or even higher performance as costly LIDARs with our designed self-supervised network and a low-cost single-beam LIDAR. After the accurate calibration with a visible camera, the single beam LIDAR can adjust the scale uncertainty of the depth map estimated by the visible camera. The adjusted depth map enjoys the benefits of high resolution and sensing accuracy as high beam LIDAR and maintains low-cost as single beam LIDAR. Thus we can achieve similar sensing effect of high beam LIDAR with more than a 50-100 times cheaper price (e.g., \$80000 Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR v.s. \$1000 SICK TIM-781 2D LIDAR and normal camera). The proposed approach is verified on our collected dataset and public dataset with superior depth-sensing performance.

Towards Efficient 3D Point Cloud Scene Completion Via Novel Depth View Synthesis

Haiyan Wang, Liang Yang, Xuejian Rong, Ying-Li Tian

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Auto-TLDR; 3D Point Cloud Completion with Depth View Synthesis and Depth View synthesis

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3D point cloud completion has been a long-standing challenge at scale, and corresponding per-point supervised training strategies suffered from the cumbersome annotations. 2D supervision has recently emerged as a promising alternative for 3D tasks, but specific approaches for 3D point cloud completion still remain to be explored. To overcome these limitations, we propose an end-to-end method that directly lifts a single depth map to a completed point cloud. With one depth map as input, a multi-way novel depth view synthesis network (NDVNet) is designed to infer coarsely completed depth maps under various viewpoints. Meanwhile, a geometric depth perspective rendering module is introduced to utilize the raw input depth map to generate a re-projected depth map for each view. Therefore, the two parallelly generated depth maps for each view are further concatenated and refined by a depth completion network (DCNet). The final completed point cloud is fused from all refined depth views. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach composed of aforementioned components, to produce high-quality state-of-the-art results on the popular SUNCG benchmark.

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

Runze Li, Bir Bhanu

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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.

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).

Towards Artifacts-Free Image Defogging

Gabriele Graffieti, Davide Maltoni

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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.

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

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

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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.

Robust Pedestrian Detection in Thermal Imagery Using Synthesized Images

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

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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.

Continuous Learning of Face Attribute Synthesis

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

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Auto-TLDR; Continuous Learning for Face Attribute Synthesis

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

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

Oussema Bouafif, Bogdan Khomutenko, Mohammed Daoudi

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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.

Median-Shape Representation Learning for Category-Level Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Environments

Hiroki Tatemichi, Yasutomo Kawanishi, Daisuke Deguchi, Ichiro Ide, Hiroshi Murase, Ayako Amma

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Auto-TLDR; An Occlusion-Robust Pose Estimation Method from a Depth Image

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In this paper, we propose an occlusion-robust pose estimation method of an unknown object instance in an object category from a depth image. In a cluttered environment, objects are often occluded mutually. For estimating the pose of an object in such a situation, a method that de-occludes the unobservable area of the object would be effective. However, there are two difficulties; occlusion causes offset between the actual object center and the center of its observable area, and different instances in a category may have different shapes. To cope with these difficulties, we propose a two-stage Encoder-Decoder model to extract features with objects whose centers are aligned to the image center. In the model, we also propose the Median-shape Reconstructor as the second stage to absorb shape variations in a category. By evaluating the method with both a large-scale virtual dataset and a real dataset, we confirmed the proposed method achieves good performance on pose estimation of an occluded object from a depth image.

Free-Form Image Inpainting Via Contrastive Attention Network

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

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

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

Improving Image Matching with Varied Illumination

Sarah Braeger, Hassan Foroosh

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Auto-TLDR; Optimizing Feature Matching for Stereo Image Pairs by Stereo Illumination

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We present a method to maximize feature matching performance across stereo image pairs by varying illumination. We perform matching between views per lighting condition, finding unique SIFT correspondences for each condition. These feature matches are then collected together into a single set, selecting those features which present the highest quality match. Instead of capturing each view under each illumination, we approximate lighting changes with a pretrained relighting convo- lutional neural network which only requires each view captured under a single specified lighting condition. We then collect the best of these feature matches over all lighting conditions offered by the relighting network. We further present an optimization to limit the number of lighting conditions evaluated to gain a specified number of matches. Our method is evaluated on a set of indoor scenes excluded from training the network with comparison to features extracted from pretrained VGG16. Our method offers an average 5.5× improvement in number of correct matches while retaining similar precision than by the original lit image pair per scene alone.

Attributes Aware Face Generation with Generative Adversarial Networks

Zheng Yuan, Jie Zhang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen

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

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

Automatical Enhancement and Denoising of Extremely Low-Light Images

Yuda Song, Yunfang Zhu, Xin Du

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

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

VITON-GT: An Image-Based Virtual Try-On Model with Geometric Transformations

Matteo Fincato, Federico Landi, Marcella Cornia, Fabio Cesari, Rita Cucchiara

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Auto-TLDR; VITON-GT: An Image-based Virtual Try-on Architecture for Fashion Catalogs

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The large spread of online shopping has led computer vision researchers to develop different solutions for the fashion domain to potentially increase the online user experience and improve the efficiency of preparing fashion catalogs. Among them, image-based virtual try-on has recently attracted a lot of attention resulting in several architectures that can generate a new image of a person wearing an input try-on garment in a plausible and realistic way. In this paper, we present VITON-GT, a new model for virtual try-on that generates high-quality and photo-realistic images thanks to multiple geometric transformations. In particular, our model is composed of a two-stage geometric transformation module that performs two different projections on the input garment, and a transformation-guided try-on module that synthesize the new image. We experimentally validate the proposed solution on the most common dataset for this task, containing mainly t-shirts, and we demonstrate its effectiveness compared to different baselines and previous methods. Additionally, we assess the generalization capabilities of our model on a new set of fashion items composed of upper-body clothes from different categories. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to test virtual try-on architectures in this challenging experimental setting.

High Resolution Face Age Editing

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

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

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

Ghost Target Detection in 3D Radar Data Using Point Cloud Based Deep Neural Network

Mahdi Chamseddine, Jason Rambach, Oliver Wasenmüler, Didier Stricker

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Auto-TLDR; Point Based Deep Learning for Ghost Target Detection in 3D Radar Point Clouds

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Ghost targets are targets that appear at wrong locations in radar data and are caused by the presence of multiple indirect reflections between the target and the sensor. In this work, we introduce the first point based deep learning approach for ghost target detection in 3D radar point clouds. This is done by extending the PointNet network architecture by modifying its input to include radar point features beyond location and introducing skip connetions. We compare different input modalities and analyze the effects of the changes we introduced. We also propose an approach for automatic labeling of ghost targets 3D radar data using lidar as reference. The algorithm is trained and tested on real data in various driving scenarios and the tests show promising results in classifying real and ghost radar targets.

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.

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

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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.

Surface Material Dataset for Robotics Applications (SMDRA): A Dataset with Friction Coefficient and RGB-D for Surface Segmentation

Donghun Noh, Hyunwoo Nam, Min Sung Ahn, Hosik Chae, Sangjoon Lee, Kyle Gillespie, Dennis Hong

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Auto-TLDR; A Surface Material Dataset for Robotics Applications

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In this paper, we introduce the Surface Material Dataset for Robotics Applications (SMDRA), a collection of RGB color image, depth data, and pixel-wise friction coefficient data of 10 different materials for computer vision research specifically with robotics applications in mind that require physical contact between the robot and its environment such as robotic manipulators or walking robots. These selected surface materials are both easily accessible around our daily lives and cover a wide range of friction coefficients. Our dataset is unique in that while there is an abundance of RGB-D data due to the popularization of imaging sensors, additional pixel-wise aligned data of a different modality are not readily available. The depth data is collected by an active stereo camera which has shown promise on a variety of different robotic applications. In addition, this dataset is greatly expanded with friction coefficient data. Similarly to humans, this additional information can be helpful in ensuing proper decision making in tasks ranging from grasping orientation and strength to path determination in an unstructured environment. A newly developed friction measuring device was used to obtain this data. We verify that existing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures, the Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) and U-Net, can be trained on the SMDRA. This result demonstrates that the SMDRA can be utilized to train a neural network model for segmentation and these different modes are not just additional information, but valuable modes that researchers can incorporate and exploit when applying computer vision algorithms on robotic platforms.

Polarimetric Image Augmentation

Marc Blanchon, Fabrice Meriaudeau, Olivier Morel, Ralph Seulin, Desire Sidibe

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Auto-TLDR; Polarimetric Augmentation for Deep Learning in Robotics Applications

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This paper deals with new augmentation methods for an unconventional imaging modality sensitive to the physics of the observed scene called polarimetry. In nature, polarized light is obtained by reflection or scattering. Robotics applications in urban environments are subject to many obstacles that can be specular and therefore provide polarized light. These areas are prone to segmentation errors using standard modalities but could be solved using information carried by the polarized light. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown excellent segmentation results, but require a significant amount of data to achieve best performances. The lack of data is usually overcomed by using augmentation methods. However, unlike RGB images, polarization images are not only scalar (intensity) images and standard augmentation techniques cannot be applied straightforwardly. We propose enhancing deep learning models through a regularized augmentation procedure applied to polarimetric data in order to characterize scenes more effectively under challenging conditions. We subsequently observe an average of 18.1% improvement in IoU between not augmented and regularized training procedures on real world data.

Benchmarking Cameras for OpenVSLAM Indoors

Kevin Chappellet, Guillaume Caron, Fumio Kanehiro, Ken Sakurada, Abderrahmane Kheddar

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Auto-TLDR; OpenVSLAM: Benchmarking Camera Types for Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

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In this paper we benchmark different types of cameras and evaluate their performance in terms of reliable localization reliability and precision in Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM). Such benchmarking is merely found for visual odometry, but never for vSLAM. Existing studies usually compare several algorithms for a given camera. %This work is the first to handle the dual of the latter, i.e. comparing several cameras for a given SLAM algorithm. The evaluation methodology we propose is applied to the recent OpenVSLAM framework. The latter is versatile enough to natively deal with perspective, fisheye, 360 cameras in a monocular or stereoscopic setup, an in RGB or RGB-D modalities. Results in various sequences containing light variation and scenery modifications in the scene assess quantitatively the maximum localization rate for 360 vision. In the contrary, RGB-D vision shows the lowest localization rate, but highest precision when localization is possible. Stereo-fisheye trades-off with localization rates and precision between 360 vision and RGB-D vision. The dataset with ground truth will be made available in open access to allow evaluating other/future vSLAM algorithms with respect to these camera types.

Global Image Sentiment Transfer

Jie An, Tianlang Chen, Songyang Zhang, Jiebo Luo

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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.

A Fine-Grained Dataset and Its Efficient Semantic Segmentation for Unstructured Driving Scenarios

Kai Andreas Metzger, Peter Mortimer, Hans J "Joe" Wuensche

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Auto-TLDR; TAS500: A Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Environments

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Research in autonomous driving for unstructured environments suffers from a lack of semantically labeled datasets compared to its urban counterpart. Urban and unstructured outdoor environments are challenging due to the varying lighting and weather conditions during a day and across seasons. In this paper, we introduce TAS500, a novel semantic segmentation dataset for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. TAS500 offers fine-grained vegetation and terrain classes to learn drivable surfaces and natural obstacles in outdoor scenes effectively. We evaluate the performance of modern semantic segmentation models with an additional focus on their efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of fine-grained semantic classes to improve the overall prediction accuracy, especially along the class boundaries. The dataset, code, and pretrained model are available online.

Derivation of Geometrically and Semantically Annotated UAV Datasets at Large Scales from 3D City Models

Sidi Wu, Lukas Liebel, Marco Körner

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Auto-TLDR; Large-Scale Dataset of Synthetic UAV Imagery for Geometric and Semantic Annotation

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While in high demand for the development of deep learning approaches, extensive datasets of annotated UAV imagery are still scarce today. Manual annotation, however, is time-consuming and, thus, has limited the potential for creating large-scale datasets. We tackle this challenge by presenting a procedure for the automatic creation of simulated UAV image sequences in urban areas and pixel-level annotations from publicly available data sources. We synthesize photo-realistic UAV imagery from Goole Earth Studio and derive annotations from an open CityGML model that not only provides geometric but also semantic information. The first dataset we exemplarily created using our approach contains 144000 images of Berlin, Germany, with four types of annotations, namely semantic labels as well as depth, surface normals, and edge maps. In the future, a complete pipeline regarding all the technical problems will be provided, together with more accurate models to refine some of the empirical settings currently, to automatically generate a large-scale dataset with reliable ground-truth annotations over the whole city of Berlin. The dataset, as well as the source code, will be published by then. Different methods will also be facilitated to test the usability of the dataset. We believe our dataset can be used for, and not limited to, tasks like pose estimation, geo-localization, monocular depth estimation, edge detection, building/surface classification, and plane segmentation. A potential research pipeline for geo-localization based on the synthetic dataset is provided.

Residual Learning of Video Frame Interpolation Using Convolutional LSTM

Keito Suzuki, Masaaki Ikehara

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Auto-TLDR; Video Frame Interpolation Using Residual Learning and Convolutional LSTMs

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Video frame interpolation aims to generate interme- diate frames between the original frames. This produces videos with a higher frame r ate and creates smoother motion. Many video frame interpolation methods first estimate the motion vector between the input frames and then synthesizes the intermediate frame based on the motion. However, these methods rely on the accuracy of the motion estimation step and fail to accurately generate the interpolated frame when the estimated motion vectors are inaccurate. Therefore, to avoid the uncertainties caused by motion estimation, this paper proposes a method that directly generates the intermediate frame. Since two consecutive frames are relatively similar, our method takes the average of these two frames and utilizes residual learning to learn the difference between the average of these frames and the ground truth middle frame. In addition, our method uses Convolutional LSTMs and four input frames to better incorporate spatiotemporal information. This neural network can be easily trained end to end without difficult to obtain data such as optical flow. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can perform favorably against other state-of-the-art frame interpolation methods.