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

Dewen Guo, Jie Feng, Bingfeng Zhou

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

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

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Auto-TLDR; Spatial Attention for Crowd Counting

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Crowd counting aims to estimate the number of people in images. Although promising progresses have been made with the prevalence of deep Convolutional Neural Networks, there still remains a challenging task due to cluttered backgrounds and varying scales of people within an image. In this paper, we propose a learnable spatial attention module which can get the spatial relations to diminish the negative impact of backgrounds. Besides, a dense hybrid dilated convolution module is also brought up to preserve information derived from varied scales. With these two modules, our network can deal with the problem caused by scale variance and background interference. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we compare it with state-of-the-art algorithms on three representative crowd counting benchmarks (ShanghaiTech UCF-QNRF,UCF_CC_50). Experimental results show that our proposed network can achieve significant improvements on all the three datasets.

Encoder-Decoder Based Convolutional Neural Networks with Multi-Scale-Aware Modules for Crowd Counting

Pongpisit Thanasutives, Ken-Ichi Fukui, Masayuki Numao, Boonserm Kijsirikul

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Auto-TLDR; M-SFANet and M-SegNet for Crowd Counting Using Multi-Scale Fusion Networks

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HANet: Hybrid Attention-Aware Network for Crowd Counting

Xinxing Su, Yuchen Yuan, Xiangbo Su, Zhikang Zou, Shilei Wen, Pan Zhou

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Auto-TLDR; HANet: Hybrid Attention-Aware Network for Crowd Counting with Adaptive Compensation Loss

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An essential yet challenging issue in crowd counting is the diverse background variations under complicated real-life environments, which makes attention based methods favorable in recent years. However, most existing methods only rely on first-order attention schemes (e.g. 2D position-wise attention), while ignoring the higher-order information within the congested scenes completely. In this paper, we propose a hybrid attention-aware network (HANet) with a high-order attention module (HAM) and an adaptive compensation loss (ACLoss) to tackle this problem. On the one hand, the HAM applies 3D attention to capture the subtle discriminative features around each people in the crowd. On the other hand, with the distributed supervision, the ACLoss exploits the prior knowledge from higher-level stages to guide the density map prediction at a lower level. The proposed HANet is then established with HAM and ACLoss working as different roles and promoting each other. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of our HANet against the state-of-the-arts on three challenging benchmarks.

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Usman Sajid, Wenchi Ma, Guanghui Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-resolution Fusion Based End-to-End Crowd Counting in Still Images

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PHNet: Parasite-Host Network for Video Crowd Counting

Shiqiao Meng, Jiajie Li, Weiwei Guo, Jinfeng Jiang, Lai Ye

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Auto-TLDR; PHNet: A Parasite-Host Network for Video Crowd Counting

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Crowd counting plays an increasingly important role in public security. Recently, many crowd counting methods for a single image have been proposed but few studies have focused on using temporal information from image sequences of videos to improve prediction performance. In the existing methods using videos for crowd estimation, temporal features and spatial features are modeled jointly for the prediction, which makes the model less efficient in extracting spatiotemporal features and difficult to improve the performance of predictions. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a Parasite-Host Network(PHNet) which is composed of Parasite branch and Host branch to extract temporal features and spatial features respectively. To specifically extract the transform features in the time domain, we propose a novel architecture termed as “Relational Extractor”(RE) which models the multiplicative interaction features of adjacent frames. In addition, the Host branch extracts the spatial features from a current frame which can be replaced with any model that uses a single image for the prediction. We conducted experiments by using our PHNet on four video crowd counting benchmarks: Venice,UCSD,FDST and CrowdFlow. Experimental results show that PHnet achieves superior performance on these four datasets to the state-of-the-art methods.

Learning from Web Data: Improving Crowd Counting Via Semi-Supervised Learning

Tao Peng, Pengfei Zhu

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Crowd Counting Baseline for Deep Neural Networks

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Learning Error-Driven Curriculum for Crowd Counting

Wenxi Li, Zhuoqun Cao, Qian Wang, Songjian Chen, Rui Feng

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Auto-TLDR; Learning Error-Driven Curriculum for Crowd Counting with TutorNet

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Density regression has been widely employed in crowd counting. However, the frequency imbalance of pixel values in the density map is still an obstacle to improve the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel learning strategy for learning error-driven curriculum, which uses an additional network to supervise the training of the main network. A tutoring network called TutorNet is proposed to repetitively indicate the critical errors of the main network. TutorNet generates pixel-level weights to formulate the curriculum for the main network during training, so that the main network will assign a higher weight to those hard examples than easy examples. Furthermore, we scale the density map by a factor to enlarge the distance among inter-examples, which is well known to improve the performance. Extensive experiments on two challenging benchmark datasets show that our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance.

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Na Jiang, Xingsen Wen, Zhiping Shi

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

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People counting concentrates on predicting the number of people in surveillance images. It remains challenging due to the rich variations in scene type and crowd density. Besides, the limited closed-set with ground truth from reality significantly increase the difficulty of people counting in actual open-set. Targeting to solve these problems, this paper proposes a domain adaptation people counting via style-level transfer learning (STL) and scene-aware estimation (SAE). The style-level transfer learning explicitly leverages the style constraint and content similarity between images to learn effective knowledge transfer, which narrows the gap between closed-set and open-set by generating domain adaptation images. The scene-aware estimation introduces scene classifier to provide scene-aware weights for adaptively fusing density maps, which alleviates interference of variations in scene type and crowd density on domain adaptation people counting. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that images generated by STL are more suitable for domain adaptation learning and our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on multiple cross-domain pairs.

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Auto-TLDR; Weakly Tree counting using Deep Segmentation Network with Localization and Mask Prediction

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

Xiaoyu Xiang, Qian Lin, Jan Allebach

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

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

Learning a Dynamic High-Resolution Network for Multi-Scale Pedestrian Detection

Mengyuan Ding, Shanshan Zhang, Jian Yang

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Auto-TLDR; Learningable Dynamic HRNet for Pedestrian Detection

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Pedestrian detection is a canonical instance of object detection in computer vision. In practice, scale variation is one of the key challenges, resulting in unbalanced performance across different scales. Recently, the High-Resolution Network (HRNet) has become popular because high-resolution feature representations are more friendly to small objects. However, when we apply HRNet for pedestrian detection, we observe that it improves for small pedestrians on one hand, but hurts the performance for larger ones on the other hand. To overcome this problem, we propose a learnable Dynamic HRNet (DHRNet) aiming to generate different network paths adaptive to different scales. Specifically, we construct a parallel multi-branch architecture and add a soft conditional gate module allowing for dynamic feature fusion. Both branches share all the same parameters except the soft gate module. Experimental results on CityPersons and Caltech benchmarks indicate that our proposed dynamic HRNet is more capable of dealing with pedestrians of various scales, and thus improves the performance across different scales consistently.

MagnifierNet: Learning Efficient Small-Scale Pedestrian Detector towards Multiple Dense Regions

Qi Cheng, Mingqin Chen, Yingjie Wu, Fei Chen, Shiping Lin

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Auto-TLDR; MagnifierNet: A Simple but Effective Small-Scale Pedestrian Detection Towards Multiple Dense Regions

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Despite the success of pedestrian detection, there is still a significant gap in the performance of the detection of pedestrians at different scales. Detecting small-scale pedestrians is extremely challenging due to the low resolution of their convolution features which is essential for downstream classifiers. To address this issue, we observed pedestrian datasets and found that pedestrians often gather together in crowded public places. Then we propose MagnifierNet, a simple but effective small-scale pedestrian detector towards multiple dense regions. MagnifierNet uses our proposed sweep-line based grouping algorithm to find dense regions based on the number of pedestrians in the grouped region. And we adopt a new definition of small-scale pedestrians through grid search and KL-divergence. Besides, our grouping method can also be used as a new strategy for pedestrian data augmentation. The ablation study demonstrates that MagnifierNet improves the representation of small-scale pedestrians. We validate the effectiveness of MagnifierNet on CityPersons and KITTI datasets. Experimental results show that MagnifierNet achieves the best small-scale pedestrian detection performance on CityPersons benchmark without any external data, and also achieves competitive performance for detecting small-scale pedestrians on KITTI dataset without bells and whistles.

Distortion-Adaptive Grape Bunch Counting for Omnidirectional Images

Ryota Akai, Yuzuko Utsumi, Yuka Miwa, Masakazu Iwamura, Koichi Kise

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Auto-TLDR; Object Counting for Omnidirectional Images Using Stereographic Projection

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This paper proposes the first object counting method for omnidirectional images. Because conventional object counting methods cannot handle the distortion of omnidirectional images, we propose to process them using stereographic projection, which enables conventional methods to obtain a good approximation of the density function. However, the images obtained by stereographic projection are still distorted. Hence, to manage this distortion, we propose two methods. One is a new data augmentation method designed for the stereographic projection of omnidirectional images. The other is a distortion-adaptive Gaussian kernel that generates a density map ground truth while taking into account the distortion of stereographic projection. Using the counting of grape bunches as a case study, we constructed an original grape-bunch image dataset consisting of omnidirectional images and conducted experiments to evaluate the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method performs better than a direct application of the conventional method, improving mean absolute error by 14.7% and mean squared error by 10.5%.

Hierarchically Aggregated Residual Transformation for Single Image Super Resolution

Zejiang Hou, Sy Kung

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

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

PRF-Ped: Multi-Scale Pedestrian Detector with Prior-Based Receptive Field

Yuzhi Tan, Hongxun Yao, Haoran Li, Xiusheng Lu, Haozhe Xie

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Auto-TLDR; Bidirectional Feature Enhancement Module for Multi-Scale Pedestrian Detection

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Multi-scale feature representation is a common strategy to handle the scale variation in pedestrian detection. Existing methods simply utilize the convolutional pyramidal features for multi-scale representation. However, they rarely pay attention to the differences among different feature scales and extract multi-scale features from a single feature map, which may make the detectors sensitive to scale-variance in multi-scale pedestrian detection. In this paper, we introduce a bidirectional feature enhancement module (BFEM) to augment the semantic information of low-level features and the localization information of high-level features. In addition, we propose a prior-based receptive field block (PRFB) for multi-scale pedestrian feature extraction, where the receptive field is closer to the aspect ratio of the pedestrian target. Consequently, it is less affected by the surrounding background when extracting features. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperform the state-of-the-art methods on the CityPersons and Caltech datasets.

Delivering Meaningful Representation for Monocular Depth Estimation

Doyeon Kim, Donggyu Joo, Junmo Kim

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Auto-TLDR; Monocular Depth Estimation by Bridging the Context between Encoding and Decoding

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Monocular depth estimation plays a key role in 3D scene understanding, and a number of recent papers have achieved significant improvements using deep learning based algorithms. Most papers among them proposed methods that use a pre-trained network as a deep feature extractor and then decode the obtained features to create a depth map. In this study, we focus on how to use this encoder-decoder structure to deliver meaningful representation throughout the entire network. We propose a new network architecture with our suggested modules to create a more accurate depth map by bridging the context between the encoding and decoding phase. First, we place the pyramid block at the bottleneck of the network to enlarge the view and convey rich information about the global context to the decoder. Second, we suggest a skip connection with the fuse module to aggregate the encoder and decoder feature. Finally, we validate our approach on the NYU Depth V2 and KITTI datasets. The experimental results prove the efficacy of the suggested model and show performance gains over the state-of-the-art model.

Bidirectional Matrix Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

Wei Xu, Yi Gan, Jianbo Su

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Auto-TLDR; BMFPN: Bidirectional Matrix Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

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Feature pyramids are widely used to improve scale invariance for object detection. Most methods just map the objects to feature maps with relevant square receptive fields, but rarely pay attention to the aspect ratio variation, which is also an important property of object instances. It will lead to a poor match between rectangular objects and assigned features with square receptive fields, thus preventing from accurate recognition and location. Besides, the information propagation among feature layers is sparse, namely, each feature in the pyramid may mainly or only contain single-level information, which is not representative enough for classification and localization sub-tasks. In this paper, Bidirectional Matrix Feature Pyramid Network (BMFPN) is proposed to address these issues. It consists of three modules: Diagonal Layer Generation Module (DLGM), Top-down Module (TDM) and Bottom-up Module (BUM). First, multi-level features extracted by backbone are fed into DLGM to produce the base features. Then these base features are utilized to construct the final feature pyramid through TDM and BUM in series. The receptive fields of the designed feature layers in BMFPN have various scales and aspect ratios. Objects can be correctly assigned to appropriate and representative feature maps with relevant receptive fields depending on its scale and aspect ratio properties. Moreover, TDM and BUM form bidirectional and reticular information flow, which effectively fuses multi level information in top-down and bottom-up manner respectively. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed architecture, an end-toend anchor-free detector is designed and trained by integrating BMFPN into FCOS. And the center ness branch in FCOS is modified with our Gaussian center-ness branch (GCB), which brings another slight improvement. Without bells and whistles, our method gains +3.3%, +2.4% and +2.6% AP on MS COCO dataset from baselines with ResNet-50, ResNet-101 and ResNeXt-101 backbones, respectively.

Mutual-Supervised Feature Modulation Network for Occluded Pedestrian Detection

Ye He, Chao Zhu, Xu-Cheng Yin

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Auto-TLDR; A Mutual-Supervised Feature Modulation Network for Occluded Pedestrian Detection

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State-of-the-art pedestrian detectors have achieved significant progress on non-occluded pedestrians, yet they are still struggling under heavy occlusions. The recent occlusion handling strategy of popular two-stage approaches is to build a two-branch architecture with the help of additional visible body annotations. Nonetheless, these methods still have some weaknesses. Either the two branches are trained independently with only score-level fusion, which cannot guarantee the detectors to learn robust enough pedestrian features. Or the attention mechanisms are exploited to only emphasize on the visible body features. However, the visible body features of heavily occluded pedestrians are concentrated on a relatively small area, which will easily cause missing detections. To address the above issues, we propose in this paper a novel Mutual-Supervised Feature Modulation (MSFM) network, to better handle occluded pedestrian detection. The key MSFM module in our network calculates the similarity loss of full body boxes and visible body boxes corresponding to the same pedestrian, so that the full-body detector could learn more complete and robust pedestrian features with the assist of contextual features from the occluding parts. To facilitate the MSFM module, we also propose a novel two-branch architecture, consisting of a standard full body detection branch and an extra visible body classification branch. These two branches are trained in a mutual-supervised way with full body annotations and visible body annotations, respectively. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging pedestrian datasets: Caltech and CityPersons, and our approach achieves superior performances compared to other state-of-the-art methods on both datasets, especially in heavy occlusion cases.

Small Object Detection by Generative and Discriminative Learning

Yi Gu, Jie Li, Chentao Wu, Weijia Jia, Jianping Chen

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Auto-TLDR; Generative and Discriminative Learning for Small Object Detection

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With the development of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the object detection accuracy has been greatly improved. But the performance of small object detection is still far from satisfactory, mainly because small objects are so tiny that the information contained in the feature map is limited. Existing methods focus on improving classification accuracy but still suffer from the limitation of bounding box prediction. To solve this issue, we propose a detection framework by generative and discriminative learning. First, a reconstruction generator network is designed to reconstruct the mapping from low frequency to high frequency for anchor box prediction. Then, a detector module extracts the regions of interest (ROIs) from generated results and implements a RoI-Head to predict object category and refine bounding box. In order to guide the reconstructed image related to the corresponding one, a discriminator module is adopted to tell from the generated result and the original image. Extensive evaluations on the challenging MS-COCO dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms most state-of-the-art models in detecting small objects, especially the reconstruction module improves the average precision for small object (APs) by 7.7%.

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

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

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

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

Dynamic Guided Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

Xiaoxia Xing, Yinghao Cai, Yiping Yang, Dayong Wen

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

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

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.

Multi-Scale Residual Pyramid Attention Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

Jing Liu, Xiaona Zhang, Zhaoxin Li, Tianlu Mao

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-scale Residual Pyramid Attention Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

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Monocular depth estimation is a challenging problem in computer vision and is crucial for understanding 3D scene geometry. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) based methods have improved the estimation accuracy significantly. However, existing methods fail to consider complex textures and geometries in scenes, thereby resulting in loss of local details, distorted object boundaries, and blurry reconstruction. In this paper, we proposed an end-to-end Multi-scale Residual Pyramid Attention Network (MRPAN) to mitigate these problems.First,we propose a Multi-scale Attention Context Aggregation (MACA) module, which consists of Spatial Attention Module (SAM) and Global Attention Module (GAM). By considering the position and scale correlation of pixels from spatial and global perspectives, the proposed module can adaptively learn the similarity between pixels so as to obtain more global context information of the image and recover the complex structure in the scene. Then we proposed an improved Residual Refinement Module (RRM) to further refine the scene structure, giving rise to deeper semantic information and retain more local details. Experimental results show that our method achieves more promisin performance in object boundaries and local details compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

TinyVIRAT: Low-Resolution Video Action Recognition

Ugur Demir, Yogesh Rawat, Mubarak Shah

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

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

Nighttime Pedestrian Detection Based on Feature Attention and Transformation

Gang Li, Shanshan Zhang, Jian Yang

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Auto-TLDR; FAM and FTM: Enhanced Feature Attention Module and Feature Transformation Module for nighttime pedestrian detection

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Pedestrian detection at nighttime is an important yet challenging task, which is fundamental for many practical applications, e.g. autonomous driving, video surveillance. To address this problem, in this work we start with some analysis, from which we find that the nighttime features have much more noise than that of daytime, resulting in low discrimination ability. Besides, we also observe some pedestrian examples are under adverse illumination conditions, and they can hardly provide sufficient information for accurate detection. Based on these findings, we propose the Feature Attention Module (FAM) and Feature Transformation Module (FTM) to enhance nighttime features. In FAM, guided by progressive segmentation supervision, hierarchical feature attention is produced to enhance multi-level features. On the other hand, FTM is introduced to enforce features from adverse illumination to approach that from better illumination. Based on feature attention and transformation (FAT) mechanism, a two-stage detector called FATNet is constructed for nighttime pedestrian detection. We conduct extensive experiments on nighttime datasets of EuroCity Persons (Night) and NightOwls to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. On both two datasets, our method achieves significant improvements to the baseline and also outperforms state-of-the-art detectors.

Efficient-Receptive Field Block with Group Spatial Attention Mechanism for Object Detection

Jiacheng Zhang, Zhicheng Zhao, Fei Su

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Auto-TLDR; E-RFB: Efficient-Receptive Field Block for Deep Neural Network for Object Detection

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Object detection has been paid rising attention in computer vision field. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) extract high-level semantic features of images, which directly determine the performance of object detection. As a common solution, embedding integration modules into CNNs can enrich extracted features and thereby improve the performance. However, the instability and inconsistency of internal multiple branches exist in these modules. To address this problem, we propose a novel multibranch module called Efficient-Receptive Field Block (E-RFB), in which multiple levels of features are combined for network optimization. Specifically, by downsampling and increasing depth, the E-RFB provides sufficient RF. Second, in order to eliminate the inconsistency across different branches, a novel spatial attention mechanism, namely, Group Spatial Attention Module (GSAM) is proposed. The GSAM gradually narrows a feature map by channel grouping; thus it encodes the information between spatial and channel dimensions into the final attention heat map. Third, the proposed module can be easily joined in various CNNs to enhance feature representation as a plug-and-play component. With SSD-style detectors, our method halves the parameters of the original detection head and achieves high accuracy on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets. Moreover, the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods based on similar framework.

Attention Pyramid Module for Scene Recognition

Zhinan Qiao, Xiaohui Yuan, Chengyuan Zhuang, Abolfazl Meyarian

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Auto-TLDR; Attention Pyramid Module for Multi-Scale Scene Recognition

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The unrestricted open vocabulary and diverse substances of scenery images bring significant challenges to scene recognition. However, most deep learning architectures and attention methods are developed on general-purpose datasets and omit the characteristics of scene data. In this paper, we exploit the attention pyramid module (APM) to tackle the predicament of scene recognition. Our method streamlines the multi-scale scene recognition pipeline, learns comprehensive scene features at various scales and locations, addresses the interdependency among scales, and further assists feature re-calibration as well as aggregation process. APM is extremely light-weighted and can be easily plugged into existing network architectures in a parameter-efficient manner. By simply integrating APM into ResNet-50, we obtain a 3.54\% boost in terms of top-1 accuracy on the benchmark scene dataset. Comprehensive experiments show that APM achieves better performance comparing with state-of-the-art attention methods using significant less computation budget. Code and pre-trained models will be made publicly available.

Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network for Semantic Segmentation

Mucong Ye, Ouyang Jinpeng, Ge Chen, Jing Zhang, Xiaogang Yu

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Auto-TLDR; EFPN: Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network for Semantic Segmentation

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Multi-scale feature fusion has been an effective way for improving the performance of semantic segmentation. However, current methods generally fail to consider the semantic gaps between the shallow (low-level) and deep (high-level) features and thus the fusion methods may not be optimal. In this paper, to address the issues of the semantic gap between the feature from different layers, we propose a unified framework based on the U-shape encoder-decoder architecture, named Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (EFPN). Specifically, the semantic enhancement module (SEM), boundary extraction module (BEM), and context aggregation model (CAM) are incorporated into the decoder network to improve the robustness of the multi-level features aggregation. In addition, a global fusion model (GFM) in encoder branch is proposed to capture more semantic information in the deep layers and effectively transmit the high-level semantic features to each layer. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results show that the proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art results on three public datasets, namely PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, and PASCAL Context. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for other visual tasks that require frequent fusing features and upsampling.

Coarse to Fine: Progressive and Multi-Task Learning for Salient Object Detection

Dong-Goo Kang, Sangwoo Park, Joonki Paik

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Auto-TLDR; Progressive and mutl-task learning scheme for salient object detection

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Most deep learning-based salient object detection (SOD) methods tried to manipulate the convolution block to effectively capture the context of object. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called progressive and mutl-task learning scheme, to extract the context of object by only manipulating the learning scheme without changing the network architecture. The progressive learning scheme is a method to grow the decoder progressively in the train phase. In other words, starting from easier low-resolution layers, it gradually adds high-resolution layers. Although the progressive learning successfullyl captures the context of object, its output boundary tends to be rough. To solve this problem, we also propose a multi-task learning (MTL) scheme that processes the object saliency map and contour in a single network jointly. The proposed MTL scheme trains the network in an edge-preserved direction through an auxiliary branch that learns contours. The proposed a learning scheme can be combined with other convolution block manipulation methods. Extensive experiments on five datasets show that the proposed method performs best compared with state-of-the-art methods in most cases.

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.

Triplet-Path Dilated Network for Detection and Segmentation of General Pathological Images

Jiaqi Luo, Zhicheng Zhao, Fei Su, Limei Guo

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Auto-TLDR; Triplet-path Network for One-Stage Object Detection and Segmentation in Pathological Images

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Deep learning has been widely applied in the field of medical image processing. However, compared with flourishing visual tasks in natural images, the progress achieved in pathological images is not remarkable, and detection and segmentation, which are among basic tasks of computer vision, are regarded as two independent tasks. In this paper, we make full use of existing datasets and construct a triplet-path network using dilated convolutions to cooperatively accomplish one-stage object detection and nuclei segmentation for general pathological images. First, in order to meet the requirement of detection and segmentation, a novel structure called triplet feature generation (TFG) is designed to extract high-resolution and multiscale features, where features from different layers can be properly integrated. Second, considering that pathological datasets are usually small, a location-aware and partially truncated loss function is proposed to improve the classification accuracy of datasets with few images and widely varying targets. We compare the performance of both object detection and instance segmentation with state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed network on two datasets collected from multiple organs.

Progressive Splitting and Upscaling Structure for Super-Resolution

Qiang Li, Tao Dai, Shutao Xia

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

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

SFPN: Semantic Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

Yi Gan, Wei Xu, Jianbo Su

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Auto-TLDR; SFPN: Semantic Feature Pyramid Network to Address Information Dilution Issue in FPN

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Feature Pyramid Network(FPN) employs a top-down path to enhance low level feature by utilizing high level feature.However, further improvement of detector is greatly hindered by the inner defect of FPN. The dilution issue in FPN is analyzed in this paper, and a new architecture named Semantic Feature Pyramid Network(SFPN) is introduced to address the information imbalance problem caused by information dilution. The proposed method consists of two simple and effective components: Semantic Pyramid Module(SPM) and Semantic Feature Fusion Module(SFFM). To compensate for the weaknesses of FPN, the semantic segmentation result is utilized as an extra information source in our architecture.By constructing a semantic pyramid based on the segmentation result and fusing it with FPN, feature maps at each level can obtain the necessary information without suffering from the dilution issue. The proposed architecture could be applied on many detectors, and non-negligible improvement could be achieved. Although this method is designed for object detection, other tasks such as instance segmentation can also largely benefit from it. The proposed method brings Faster R-CNN and Mask R-CNN with ResNet-50 as backbone both 1.8 AP improvements respectively. Furthermore, SFPN improves Cascade R-CNN with backbone ResNet-101 from 42.4 AP to 43.5 AP.

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

Shuang Liu, Chengyi Xiong, Zhirong Gao

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

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

Wavelet Attention Embedding Networks for Video Super-Resolution

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

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

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

TSMSAN: A Three-Stream Multi-Scale Attentive Network for Video Saliency Detection

Jingwen Yang, Guanwen Zhang, Wei Zhou

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Auto-TLDR; Three-stream Multi-scale attentive network for video saliency detection in dynamic scenes

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Video saliency detection is an important low-level task that has been used in a large range of high-level applications. In this paper, we proposed a three-stream multi-scale attentive network (TSMSAN) for saliency detection in dynamic scenes. TSMSAN integrates motion vector representation, static saliency map, and RGB information in multi-scales together into one framework on the basis of Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) and spatial attention mechanism. On the one hand, the respective motion features, spatial features, as well as the scene features can provide abundant information for video saliency detection. On the other hand, spatial attention mechanism can combine features with multi-scales to focus on key information in dynamic scenes. In this manner, the proposed TSMSAN can encode the spatiotemporal features of the dynamic scene comprehensively. We evaluate the proposed approach on two public dynamic saliency data sets. The experimental results demonstrate TSMSAN is able to achieve the state-of-the-art performance as well as the excellent generalization ability. Furthermore, the proposed TSMSAN can provide more convincing video saliency information, in line with human perception.

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

Yue Liu, Zhichao Lian

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

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

FastSal: A Computationally Efficient Network for Visual Saliency Prediction

Feiyan Hu, Kevin Mcguinness

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Auto-TLDR; MobileNetV2: A Convolutional Neural Network for Saliency Prediction

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This paper focuses on the problem of visual saliency prediction, predicting regions of an image that tend to attract human visual attention, under a constrained computational budget. We modify and test various recent efficient convolutional neural network architectures like EfficientNet and MobileNetV2 and compare them with existing state-of-the-art saliency models such as SalGAN and DeepGaze II both in terms of standard accuracy metrics like AUC and NSS, and in terms of the computational complexity and model size. We find that MobileNetV2 makes an excellent backbone for a visual saliency model and can be effective even without a complex decoder. We also show that knowledge transfer from a more computationally expensive model like DeepGaze II can be achieved via pseudo-labelling an unlabelled dataset, and that this approach gives result on-par with many state-of-the-art algorithms with a fraction of the computational cost and model size.

P2 Net: Augmented Parallel-Pyramid Net for Attention Guided Pose Estimation

Luanxuan Hou, Jie Cao, Yuan Zhao, Haifeng Shen, Jian Tang, Ran He

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Auto-TLDR; Parallel-Pyramid Net with Partial Attention for Human Pose Estimation

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The target of human pose estimation is to determine the body parts and joint locations of persons in the image. Angular changes, motion blur and occlusion etc. in the natural scenes make this task challenging, while some joints are more difficult to be detected than others. In this paper, we propose an augmented Parallel-Pyramid Net (P^2Net) with an partial attention module. During data preprocessing, we proposed a differentiable auto data augmentation (DA^2) method in which sequences of data augmentations are formulated as a trainable and operational Convolution Neural Network (CNN) component. DA^2 improves the training efficiency and effectiveness. A parallel pyramid structure is followed to compensate the information loss introduced by the network. For the information loss problem in the backbone network, we optimize the backbone network by adopting a new parallel structure without increasing the overall computational complexity. To further refine the predictions after completion of global predictions, an Partial Attention Module (PAM) is defined to extract weighted features from different scale feature maps generated by the parallel pyramid structure. Compared with the traditional up-sampling refining, PAM can better capture the relationship between channels. Experiments corroborate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Notably, our method achieves the best performance on the challenging MSCOCO and MPII datasets.

Small Object Detection Leveraging on Simultaneous Super-Resolution

Hong Ji, Zhi Gao, Xiaodong Liu, Tiancan Mei

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

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

Boundary-Aware Graph Convolution for Semantic Segmentation

Hanzhe Hu, Jinshi Cui, Jinshi Hongbin Zha

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Auto-TLDR; Boundary-Aware Graph Convolution for Semantic Segmentation

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Recent works have made great progress in semantic segmentation by exploiting contextual information in a local or global manner with dilated convolutions, pyramid pooling or self-attention mechanism. However, few works have focused on harvesting boundary information to improve the segmentation performance. In order to enhance the feature similarity within the object and keep discrimination from other objects, we propose a boundary-aware graph convolution (BGC) module to propagate features within the object. The graph reasoning is performed among pixels of the same object apart from the boundary pixels. Based on the proposed BGC module, we further introduce the Boundary-aware Graph Convolution Network(BGCNet), which consists of two main components including a basic segmentation network and the BGC module, forming a coarse-to-fine paradigm. Specifically, the BGC module takes the coarse segmentation feature map as node features and boundary prediction to guide graph construction. After graph convolution, the reasoned feature and the input feature are fused together to get the refined feature, producing the refined segmentation result. We conduct extensive experiments on three popular semantic segmentation benchmarks including Cityscapes, PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO Stuff, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on all three benchmarks.

Super-Resolution Guided Pore Detection for Fingerprint Recognition

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

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

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

Cascade Saliency Attention Network for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Dayang Yu, Rong Zhang, Shan Qin

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Auto-TLDR; Cascade Saliency Attention Network for Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images

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Object detection in remote sensing images is a challenging task due to objects in the bird-view perspective appearing with arbitrary orientations. Though considerable progress has been made, there still exist challenges with the interference from complex backgrounds, dense arrangement, and large-scale variations. In this paper, we propose an oriented detector named Cascade Saliency Attention Network (CSAN), designed for comprehensively suppressing interference in remote sensing images. Specifically, we first combine context and pixel attention on feature maps to enhance saliency of objects for suppressing interference from backgrounds. Then, in cascade network, we apply instance segmentation on ROI to increase saliency of the central object, thus preventing object features from mutual interference in dense arrangement. Additionally, to alleviate large-scale variations, we devise a multi-scale merge module during FPN merging process to learn richer scale representations. Experimental results on DOTA and HRSC2016 datasets outperform other state-of-the-art object detection methods and verify the effectiveness of our method.

Global-Local Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation in Aerial Images

Minglong Li, Lianlei Shan, Weiqiang Wang

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Auto-TLDR; GLANet: Global-Local Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation

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Errors in semantic segmentation task could be classified into two types: large area misclassification and local inaccurate boundaries. Previously attention based methods capture rich global contextual information, this is beneficial to diminish the first type of error, but local imprecision still exists. In this paper we propose Global-Local Attention Network (GLANet) with a simultaneous consideration of global context and local details. Specifically, our GLANet is composed of two branches namely global attention branch and local attention branch, and three different modules are embedded in the two branches for the purpose of modeling semantic interdependencies in spatial, channel and boundary dimensions respectively. We sum the outputs of the two branches to further improve feature representation, leading to more precise segmentation results. The proposed method achieves very competitive segmentation accuracy on two public aerial image datasets, bringing significant improvements over baseline.

Deeply-Fused Attentive Network for Stereo Matching

Zuliu Yang, Xindong Ai, Weida Yang, Yong Zhao, Qifei Dai, Fuchi Li

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Auto-TLDR; DF-Net: Deep Learning-based Network for Stereo Matching

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In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based network for stereo matching called DF-Net, which makes three main contributions that are experimentally shown to have practical merit. Firstly, we further increase the accuracy by using the deeply fused spatial pyramid pooling (DF-SPP) module, which can acquire the continuous multi-scale context information in both parallel and cascade manners. Secondly, we introduce channel attention block to dynamically boost the informative features. Finally, we propose a stacked encoder-decoder structure with 3D attention gate for cost regularization. More precisely, the module fuses the coding features to their next encoder-decoder structure under the supervision of attention gate with long-range skip connection, and thus exploit deep and hierarchical context information for disparity prediction. The performance on SceneFlow and KITTI datasets shows that our model is able to generate better results against several state-of-the-art algorithms.

Single Image Super-Resolution with Dynamic Residual Connection

Karam Park, Jae Woong Soh, Nam Ik Cho

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

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

Learning to Rank for Active Learning: A Listwise Approach

Minghan Li, Xialei Liu, Joost Van De Weijer, Bogdan Raducanu

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Auto-TLDR; Learning Loss for Active Learning

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Active learning emerged as an alternative to alleviate the effort to label huge amount of data for data-hungry applications (such as image/video indexing and retrieval, autonomous driving, etc.). The goal of active learning is to automatically select a number of unlabeled samples for annotation (according to a budget), based on an acquisition function, which indicates how valuable a sample is for training the model. The learning loss method is a task-agnostic approach which attaches a module to learn to predict the target loss of unlabeled data, and select data with the highest loss for labeling. In this work, we follow this strategy but we define the acquisition function as a learning to rank problem and rethink the structure of the loss prediction module, using a simple but effective listwise approach. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art active learning approaches for both image classification and regression tasks.

Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes Via Multi-Level Feature Alignment

Bin Zhang, Shengjie Zhao, Rongqing Zhang

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Auto-TLDR; Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation Using Generative Adversarial Networks

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Semantic segmentation is an essential task in plenty of real-life applications such as virtual reality, video analysis, autonomous driving, etc. Recent advancements in fundamental vision-based tasks ranging from image classification to semantic segmentation have demonstrated deep learning-based models' high capability in learning complicated representation on large datasets. Nevertheless, manually labeling semantic segmentation dataset with pixel-level annotation is extremely labor-intensive. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-level feature alignment framework for cross-domain semantic segmentation of urban scenes by exploiting generative adversarial networks. In the proposed multi-level feature alignment method, we first translate images from one domain to another one. Then the discriminative feature representations extracted by the deep neural network are concatenated, followed by domain adversarial learning to make the intermediate feature distribution of the target domain images close to those in the source domain. With these domain adaptation techniques, models trained with images in the source domain where the labels are easy to acquire can be deployed to the target domain where the labels are scarce. Experimental evaluations on various mainstream benchmarks confirm the effectiveness as well as robustness of our approach.