With many practical applications in human life, including manufacturing surveillance cameras, analyzing and processing customer behavior, many researchers are noticing face detection and head pose estimation on digital images. A large number of proposed deep learning models have state-of-the-art accuracy such as YOLO, SSD, MTCNN, solving the problem of face detection or HopeNet, FSA-Net, RankPose model used for head pose estimation problem. According to many state-of-the-art methods, the pipeline of this task consists of two parts, from face detection to head pose estimation. These two steps are completely independent and do not share information. This makes the model clear in setup but does not leverage most of the featured resources extracted in each model. In this paper, we proposed the Multitask-Net model with the motivation to leverage the features extracted from the face detection model, sharing them with the head pose estimation branch to improve accuracy. Also, with the variety of data, the Euler angle domain representing the face is large, our model can predict with results in the 360 Euler angle domain. Applying the multitask learning method, the Multitask-Net model can simultaneously predict the position and direction of the human head. To increase the ability to predict the head direction of the model, we change there presentation of the human face from the Euler angle to vectors of the Rotation matrix.
This work addresses a novel and challenging problem of estimating the full 3D hand shape and pose from a single RGB image. Most current methods in 3D hand analysis from monocular RGB images only focus on estimating the 3D locations of hand keypoints, which cannot fully express the 3D shape of hand. In contrast, we propose a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (Graph CNN) based method to reconstruct a full 3D mesh of hand surface that contains richer information of both 3D hand shape and pose. To train networks with full supervision, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset containing both ground truth 3D meshes and 3D poses. When fine-tuning the networks on real-world datasets without 3D ground truth, we propose a weakly-supervised approach by leveraging the depth map as a weak supervision in training. Through extensive evaluations on our proposed new datasets and two public datasets, we show that our proposed method can produce accurate and reasonable 3D hand mesh, and can achieve superior 3D hand pose estimation accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
In this work we propose a new method for simultaneous object detection and 6DoF pose estimation. Unlike most recent techniques for CNN-based object detection and pose estimation, we do not base our approach on the common 2D counterparts, i.e. SSD and YOLO, but propose a new scheme. Instead of regressing 2D or 3D bounding boxes, we output full-sized 2D images containing multiclass object masks and dense 2D-3D correspondences. Having them at hand, a 6D pose is computed for each detected object using the PnP algorithm supplemented with RANSAC. This strategy allows for substantially better pose estimates due to a much higher number of relevant pose correspondences. Furthermore, the method is real-time capable, conceptually simple and not bound to any particular detection paradigms, such as R-CNN, SSD or YOLO. We test our method for single- and multiple-object pose estimation and compare the performance with the former state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we demonstrate how to use our pipeline when only synthetic renderings are available. In both cases, we outperform the former state-of-the-art by a large margin.
Facial motion retargeting is an important problem in both computer graphics and vision, which involves capturing the performance of a human face and transferring it to another 3D character. Learning 3D morphable model (3DMM) parameters from 2D face images using convolutional neural networks is common in 2D face alignment, 3D face reconstruction etc. However, existing methods either require an additional face detection step before retargeting or use a cascade of separate networks to perform detection followed by retargeting in a sequence. In this paper, we present a single end-to-end network to jointly predict the bounding box locations and 3DMM parameters for multiple faces. First, we design a novel multitask learning framework that learns a disentangled representation of 3DMM parameters for a single face. Then, we leverage the trained single face model to generate ground truth 3DMM parameters for multiple faces to train another network that performs joint face detection and motion retargeting for images with multiple faces. Experimental results show that our joint detection and retargeting network has high face detection accuracy and is robust to extreme expressions and poses while being faster than state-of-the-art methods.
Despite huge success in the image domain, modern detection models such as Faster R-CNN have not been used nearly as much for video analysis. This is arguably due to the fact that detection models are designed to operate on single frames and as a result do not have a mechanism for learning motion representations directly from video. We propose a learning procedure that allows detection models such as Faster R-CNN to learn motion features directly from the RGB video data while being optimized with respect to a pose estimation task. Given a pair of video frames---Frame A and Frame B---we force our model to predict human pose in Frame A using the features from Frame B. We do so by leveraging deformable convolutions across space and time. Our network learns to spatially sample features from Frame B in order to maximize pose detection accuracy in Frame A. This naturally encourages our network to learn motion offsets encoding the spatial correspondences between the two frames. We refer to these motion offsets as DiMoFs (Discriminative Motion Features). In our experiments we show that our training scheme helps learn effective motion cues, which can be used to estimate and localize salient human motion. Furthermore, we demonstrate that as a byproduct, our model also learns features that lead to improved pose detection in still-images, and better keypoint tracking. Finally, we show how to leverage our learned model for the tasks of spatiotemporal action localization and fine-grained action recognition.
This work aims to solve the challenging few-shot object detection problem where only a few annotated examples are available for each object category to train a detection model. Such an ability of learning to detect an object from just a few examples is common for human vision systems, but remains absent for computer vision systems. Though few-shot meta learning offers a promising solution technique, previous works mostly target the task of image classification and are not directly applicable for the much more complicated object detection task. In this work, we propose a novel meta-learning based model with carefully designed architecture, which consists of a meta-model and a base detection model. The base detection model is trained on several base classes with sufficient samples to offer basis features. The meta-model is trained to reweight importance of features from the base detection model over the input image and adapt these features to assist novel object detection from a few examples. The meta-model is light-weight, end-to-end trainable and able to entail the base model with detection ability for novel objects fast. Through experiments we demonstrated our model can outperform baselines by a large margin for few-shot object detection, on multiple datasets and settings. Our model also exhibits fast adaptation speed to novel few-shot classes.
Accurate detection and tracking of objects is vital for effective video understanding. In previous work, the two tasks have been combined in a way that tracking is based heavily on detection, but the detection benefits marginally from the tracking. To increase synergy, we propose to more tightly integrate the tasks by conditioning the object detection in the current frame on tracklets computed in prior frames. With this approach, the object detection results not only have high detection responses, but also improved coherence with the existing tracklets. This greater coherence leads to estimated object trajectories that are smoother and more stable than the jittered paths obtained without tracklet-conditioned detection. Over extensive experiments, this approach is shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of both detection and tracking accuracy, as well as noticeable improvements in tracking stability.
Recent CNN based object detectors, no matter one-stage methods like YOLO, SSD, and RetinaNe or two-stage detectors like Faster R-CNN, R-FCN and FPN are usually trying to directly finetune from ImageNet pre-trained models designed for image classification. There has been little work discussing on the backbone feature extractor specifically designed for the object detection. More importantly, there are several differences between the tasks of image classification and object detection. 1. Recent object detectors like FPN and RetinaNet usually involve extra stages against the task of image classification to handle the objects with various scales. 2. Object detection not only needs to recognize the category of the object instances but also spatially locate the position. Large downsampling factor brings large valid receptive field, which is good for image classification but compromises the object location ability. Due to the gap between the image classification and object detection, we propose DetNet in this paper, which is a novel backbone network specifically designed for object detection. Moreover, DetNet includes the extra stages against traditional backbone network for image classification, while maintains high spatial resolution in deeper layers. Without any bells and whistles, state-of-the-art results have been obtained for both object detection and instance segmentation on the MSCOCO benchmark based on our DetNet~(4.8G FLOPs) backbone. The code will be released for the reproduction.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
Detecting objects and estimating their pose remains as one of the major challenges of the computer vision research community. There exists a compromise between localizing the objects and estimating their viewpoints. The detector ideally needs to be view-invariant, while the pose estimation process should be able to generalize towards the category-level. This work is an exploration of using deep learning models for solving both problems simultaneously. For doing so, we propose three novel deep learning architectures, which are able to perform a joint detection and pose estimation, where we gradually decouple the two tasks. We also investigate whether the pose estimation problem should be solved as a classification or regression problem, being this still an open question in the computer vision community. We detail a comparative analysis of all our solutions and the methods that currently define the state of the art for this problem. We use PASCAL3D+ and ObjectNet3D datasets to present the thorough experimental evaluation and main results. With the proposed models we achieve the state-of-the-art performance in both datasets.
Image forensics aims to detect the manipulation of digital images. Currently, splicing detection, copy-move detection and image retouching detection are drawing much attentions from researchers. However, image editing techniques develop with time goes by. One emerging image editing technique is colorization, which can colorize grayscale images with realistic colors. Unfortunately, this technique may also be intentionally applied to certain images to confound object recognition algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, no forensic technique has yet been invented to identify whether an image is colorized. We observed that, compared to natural images, colorized images, which are generated by three state-of-the-art methods, possess statistical differences for the hue and saturation channels. Besides, we also observe statistical inconsistencies in the dark and bright channels, because the colorization process will inevitably affect the dark and bright channel values. Based on our observations, i.e., potential traces in the hue, saturation, dark and bright channels, we propose two simple yet effective detection methods for fake colorized images: Histogram based Fake Colorized Image Detection (FCID-HIST) and Feature Encoding based Fake Colorized Image Detection (FCID-FE). Experimental results demonstrate that both proposed methods exhibit a decent performance against multiple state-of-the-art colorization approaches.