Traditional image resizing methods usually work in pixel space and use various saliency measures. The challenge is to adjust the image shape while trying to preserve important content. In this paper we perform image resizing in feature space where the deep layers of a neural network contain rich important semantic information. We directly adjust the image feature maps, extracted from a pre-trained classification network, and reconstruct the resized image using a neural-network based optimization. This novel approach leverages the hierarchical encoding of the network, and in particular, the high-level discriminative power of its deeper layers, that recognizes semantic objects and regions and allows maintaining their aspect ratio. Our use of reconstruction from deep features diminishes the artifacts introduced by image-space resizing operators. We evaluate our method on benchmarks, compare to alternative approaches, and demonstrate its strength on challenging images.
Image reconstruction and synthesis have witnessed remarkable progress thanks to the development of generative models. Nonetheless, gaps could still exist between the real and generated images, especially in the frequency domain. In this study, we show that narrowing gaps in the frequency domain can ameliorate image reconstruction and synthesis quality further. We propose a novel focal frequency loss, which allows a model to adaptively focus on frequency components that are hard to synthesize by down-weighting the easy ones. This objective function is complementary to existing spatial losses, offering great impedance against the loss of important frequency information due to the inherent bias of neural networks. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of focal frequency loss to improve popular models, such as VAE, pix2pix, and SPADE, in both perceptual quality and quantitative performance. We further show its potential on StyleGAN2.
Deep generative approaches have recently made considerable progress in image inpainting by introducing structure priors. Due to the lack of proper interaction with image texture during structure reconstruction, however, current solutions are incompetent in handling the cases with large corruptions, and they generally suffer from distorted results. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stream network for image inpainting, which models the structure-constrained texture synthesis and texture-guided structure reconstruction in a coupled manner so that they better leverage each other for more plausible generation. Furthermore, to enhance the global consistency, a Bi-directional Gated Feature Fusion (Bi-GFF) module is designed to exchange and combine the structure and texture information and a Contextual Feature Aggregation (CFA) module is developed to refine the generated contents by region affinity learning and multi-scale feature aggregation. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on the CelebA, Paris StreetView and Places2 datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. Our code is available at //github.com/Xiefan-Guo/CTSDG.
The precision anticipated from next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys will create opportunities for characteristically new insights into cosmology. Secondary anisotropies of the CMB will have an increased importance in forthcoming surveys, due both to the cosmological information they encode and the role they play in obscuring our view of the primary fluctuations. Quadratic estimators have become the standard tools for reconstructing the fields that distort the primary CMB and produce secondary anisotropies. While successful for lensing reconstruction with current data, quadratic estimators will be sub-optimal for the reconstruction of lensing and other effects at the expected sensitivity of the upcoming CMB surveys. In this paper we describe a convolutional neural network, ResUNet-CMB, that is capable of the simultaneous reconstruction of two sources of secondary CMB anisotropies, gravitational lensing and patchy reionization. We show that the ResUNet-CMB network significantly outperforms the quadratic estimator at low noise levels and is not subject to the lensing-induced bias on the patchy reionization reconstruction that would be present with a straightforward application of the quadratic estimator.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
Single-image piece-wise planar 3D reconstruction aims to simultaneously segment plane instances and recover 3D plane parameters from an image. Most recent approaches leverage convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and achieve promising results. However, these methods are limited to detecting a fixed number of planes with certain learned order. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel two-stage method based on associative embedding, inspired by its recent success in instance segmentation. In the first stage, we train a CNN to map each pixel to an embedding space where pixels from the same plane instance have similar embeddings. Then, the plane instances are obtained by grouping the embedding vectors in planar regions via an efficient mean shift clustering algorithm. In the second stage, we estimate the parameter for each plane instance by considering both pixel-level and instance-level consistencies. With the proposed method, we are able to detect an arbitrary number of planes. Extensive experiments on public datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Furthermore, our method runs at 30 fps at the testing time, thus could facilitate many real-time applications such as visual SLAM and human-robot interaction. Code is available at //github.com/svip-lab/PlanarReconstruction.
With the advent of deep neural networks, learning-based approaches for 3D reconstruction have gained popularity. However, unlike for images, in 3D there is no canonical representation which is both computationally and memory efficient yet allows for representing high-resolution geometry of arbitrary topology. Many of the state-of-the-art learning-based 3D reconstruction approaches can hence only represent very coarse 3D geometry or are limited to a restricted domain. In this paper, we propose occupancy networks, a new representation for learning-based 3D reconstruction methods. Occupancy networks implicitly represent the 3D surface as the continuous decision boundary of a deep neural network classifier. In contrast to existing approaches, our representation encodes a description of the 3D output at infinite resolution without excessive memory footprint. We validate that our representation can efficiently encode 3D structure and can be inferred from various kinds of input. Our experiments demonstrate competitive results, both qualitatively and quantitatively, for the challenging tasks of 3D reconstruction from single images, noisy point clouds and coarse discrete voxel grids. We believe that occupancy networks will become a useful tool in a wide variety of learning-based 3D tasks.
Image-level feature descriptors obtained from convolutional neural networks have shown powerful representation capabilities for image retrieval. In this paper, we present an unsupervised method to aggregate deep convolutional features into compact yet discriminative image vectors by simulating the dynamics of heat diffusion. A distinctive problem in image retrieval is that repetitive or bursty features tend to dominate feature representations, leading to less than ideal matches. We show that by leveraging elegant properties of the heat equation, our method is able to avoiding over-representation of bursty features. We additionally present a theoretical time complexity analysis showing the efficiency of our method, which is further demonstrated in our experimental evaluation. Finally, we extensively evaluate the proposed approach with pre-trained and fine-tuned deep networks on common public benchmarks, and show superior performance compared to previous work.
Person re-identification is being widely used in the forensic, and security and surveillance system, but person re-identification is a challenging task in real life scenario. Hence, in this work, a new feature descriptor model has been proposed using a multilayer framework of Gaussian distribution model on pixel features, which include color moments, color space values and Schmid filter responses. An image of a person usually consists of distinct body regions, usually with differentiable clothing followed by local colors and texture patterns. Thus, the image is evaluated locally by dividing the image into overlapping regions. Each region is further fragmented into a set of local Gaussians on small patches. A global Gaussian encodes, these local Gaussians for each region creating a multi-level structure. Hence, the global picture of a person is described by local level information present in it, which is often ignored. Also, we have analyzed the efficiency of earlier metric learning methods on this descriptor. The performance of the descriptor is evaluated on four public available challenging datasets and the highest accuracy achieved on these datasets are compared with similar state-of-the-arts, which demonstrate the superior performance.
Image manipulation detection is different from traditional semantic object detection because it pays more attention to tampering artifacts than to image content, which suggests that richer features need to be learned. We propose a two-stream Faster R-CNN network and train it endto- end to detect the tampered regions given a manipulated image. One of the two streams is an RGB stream whose purpose is to extract features from the RGB image input to find tampering artifacts like strong contrast difference, unnatural tampered boundaries, and so on. The other is a noise stream that leverages the noise features extracted from a steganalysis rich model filter layer to discover the noise inconsistency between authentic and tampered regions. We then fuse features from the two streams through a bilinear pooling layer to further incorporate spatial co-occurrence of these two modalities. Experiments on four standard image manipulation datasets demonstrate that our two-stream framework outperforms each individual stream, and also achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to alternative methods with robustness to resizing and compression.
In this paper, the problem of describing visual contents of a video sequence with natural language is addressed. Unlike previous video captioning work mainly exploiting the cues of video contents to make a language description, we propose a reconstruction network (RecNet) with a novel encoder-decoder-reconstructor architecture, which leverages both the forward (video to sentence) and backward (sentence to video) flows for video captioning. Specifically, the encoder-decoder makes use of the forward flow to produce the sentence description based on the encoded video semantic features. Two types of reconstructors are customized to employ the backward flow and reproduce the video features based on the hidden state sequence generated by the decoder. The generation loss yielded by the encoder-decoder and the reconstruction loss introduced by the reconstructor are jointly drawn into training the proposed RecNet in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed reconstructor can boost the encoder-decoder models and leads to significant gains in video caption accuracy.