We propose a novel method for high-quality facial texture reconstruction from RGB images using a novel capturing routine based on a single smartphone which we equip with an inexpensive polarization foil. Specifically, we turn the flashlight into a polarized light source and add a polarization filter on top of the camera. Leveraging this setup, we capture the face of a subject with cross-polarized and parallel-polarized light. For each subject, we record two short sequences in a dark environment under flash illumination with different light polarization using the modified smartphone. Based on these observations, we reconstruct an explicit surface mesh of the face using structure from motion. We then exploit the camera and light co-location within a differentiable renderer to optimize the facial textures using an analysis-by-synthesis approach. Our method optimizes for high-resolution normal textures, diffuse albedo, and specular albedo using a coarse-to-fine optimization scheme. We show that the optimized textures can be used in a standard rendering pipeline to synthesize high-quality photo-realistic 3D digital humans in novel environments.
Deep learning based methods for single-image super-resolution (SR) have drawn a lot of attention lately. In particular, various papers have shown that the learning stage can be performed on a single image, resulting in the so-called internal approaches. The SinGAN method is one of these contributions, where the distribution of image patches is learnt on the image at hand and propagated at finer scales. Now, there are situations where some statistical a priori can be assumed for the final image. In particular, many natural phenomena yield images having power law Fourier spectrum, such as clouds and other texture images. In this work, we show how such a priori information can be integrated into an internal super-resolution approach, by constraining the learned up-sampling procedure of SinGAN. We consider various types of constraints, related to the Fourier power spectrum, the color histograms and the consistency of the upsampling scheme. We demonstrate on various experiments that these constraints are indeed satisfied, but also that some perceptual quality measures can be improved by the proposed approach.
Conventional clustering methods based on pairwise affinity usually suffer from the concentration effect while processing huge dimensional features yet low sample sizes data, resulting in inaccuracy to encode the sample proximity and suboptimal performance in clustering. To address this issue, we propose a unified tensor clustering method (UTC) that characterizes sample proximity using multiple samples' affinity, thereby supplementing rich spatial sample distributions to boost clustering. Specifically, we find that the triadic tensor affinity can be constructed via the Khari-Rao product of two affinity matrices. Furthermore, our early work shows that the fourth-order tensor affinity is defined by the Kronecker product. Therefore, we utilize arithmetical products, Khatri-Rao and Kronecker products, to mathematically integrate different orders of affinity into a unified tensor clustering framework. Thus, the UTC jointly learns a joint low-dimensional embedding to combine various orders. Finally, a numerical scheme is designed to solve the problem. Experiments on synthetic datasets and real-world datasets demonstrate that 1) the usage of high-order tensor affinity could provide a supplementary characterization of sample proximity to the popular affinity matrix; 2) the proposed method of UTC is affirmed to enhance clustering by exploiting different order affinities when processing high-dimensional data.
The goal of inverse rendering is to decompose geometry, lights, and materials given pose multi-view images. To achieve this goal, we propose neural direct and joint inverse rendering, NDJIR. Different from prior works which relies on some approximations of the rendering equation, NDJIR directly addresses the integrals in the rendering equation and jointly decomposes geometry: signed distance function, lights: environment and implicit lights, materials: base color, roughness, specular reflectance using the powerful and flexible volume rendering framework, voxel grid feature, and Bayesian prior. Our method directly uses the physically-based rendering, so we can seamlessly export an extracted mesh with materials to DCC tools and show material conversion examples. We perform intensive experiments to show that our proposed method can decompose semantically well for real object in photogrammetric setting and what factors contribute towards accurate inverse rendering.
It is common in modern prediction problems for many predictor variables to be counts of rarely occurring events. This leads to design matrices in which many columns are highly sparse. The challenge posed by such "rare features" has received little attention despite its prevalence in diverse areas, ranging from natural language processing (e.g., rare words) to biology (e.g., rare species). We show, both theoretically and empirically, that not explicitly accounting for the rareness of features can greatly reduce the effectiveness of an analysis. We next propose a framework for aggregating rare features into denser features in a flexible manner that creates better predictors of the response. Our strategy leverages side information in the form of a tree that encodes feature similarity. We apply our method to data from TripAdvisor, in which we predict the numerical rating of a hotel based on the text of the associated review. Our method achieves high accuracy by making effective use of rare words; by contrast, the lasso is unable to identify highly predictive words if they are too rare. A companion R package, called rare, implements our new estimator, using the alternating direction method of multipliers.
Estimating human pose and shape from monocular images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Since the release of statistical body models, 3D human mesh recovery has been drawing broader attention. With the same goal of obtaining well-aligned and physically plausible mesh results, two paradigms have been developed to overcome challenges in the 2D-to-3D lifting process: i) an optimization-based paradigm, where different data terms and regularization terms are exploited as optimization objectives; and ii) a regression-based paradigm, where deep learning techniques are embraced to solve the problem in an end-to-end fashion. Meanwhile, continuous efforts are devoted to improving the quality of 3D mesh labels for a wide range of datasets. Though remarkable progress has been achieved in the past decade, the task is still challenging due to flexible body motions, diverse appearances, complex environments, and insufficient in-the-wild annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey to focus on the task of monocular 3D human mesh recovery. We start with the introduction of body models and then elaborate recovery frameworks and training objectives by providing in-depth analyses of their strengths and weaknesses. We also summarize datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmark results. Open issues and future directions are discussed in the end, hoping to motivate researchers and facilitate their research in this area. A regularly updated project page can be found at //github.com/tinatiansjz/hmr-survey.
It has been a long time that computer architecture and systems are optimized to enable efficient execution of machine learning (ML) algorithms or models. Now, it is time to reconsider the relationship between ML and systems, and let ML transform the way that computer architecture and systems are designed. This embraces a twofold meaning: the improvement of designers' productivity, and the completion of the virtuous cycle. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of work that applies ML for system design, which can be grouped into two major categories, ML-based modelling that involves predictions of performance metrics or some other criteria of interest, and ML-based design methodology that directly leverages ML as the design tool. For ML-based modelling, we discuss existing studies based on their target level of system, ranging from the circuit level to the architecture/system level. For ML-based design methodology, we follow a bottom-up path to review current work, with a scope of (micro-)architecture design (memory, branch prediction, NoC), coordination between architecture/system and workload (resource allocation and management, data center management, and security), compiler, and design automation. We further provide a future vision of opportunities and potential directions, and envision that applying ML for computer architecture and systems would thrive in the community.
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
The prevalence of networked sensors and actuators in many real-world systems such as smart buildings, factories, power plants, and data centers generate substantial amounts of multivariate time series data for these systems. The rich sensor data can be continuously monitored for intrusion events through anomaly detection. However, conventional threshold-based anomaly detection methods are inadequate due to the dynamic complexities of these systems, while supervised machine learning methods are unable to exploit the large amounts of data due to the lack of labeled data. On the other hand, current unsupervised machine learning approaches have not fully exploited the spatial-temporal correlation and other dependencies amongst the multiple variables (sensors/actuators) in the system for detecting anomalies. In this work, we propose an unsupervised multivariate anomaly detection method based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Instead of treating each data stream independently, our proposed MAD-GAN framework considers the entire variable set concurrently to capture the latent interactions amongst the variables. We also fully exploit both the generator and discriminator produced by the GAN, using a novel anomaly score called DR-score to detect anomalies by discrimination and reconstruction. We have tested our proposed MAD-GAN using two recent datasets collected from real-world CPS: the Secure Water Treatment (SWaT) and the Water Distribution (WADI) datasets. Our experimental results showed that the proposed MAD-GAN is effective in reporting anomalies caused by various cyber-intrusions compared in these complex real-world systems.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved impressive results for many real-world applications, and many GAN variants have emerged with improvements in sample quality and training stability. However, they have not been well visualized or understood. How does a GAN represent our visual world internally? What causes the artifacts in GAN results? How do architectural choices affect GAN learning? Answering such questions could enable us to develop new insights and better models. In this work, we present an analytic framework to visualize and understand GANs at the unit-, object-, and scene-level. We first identify a group of interpretable units that are closely related to object concepts using a segmentation-based network dissection method. Then, we quantify the causal effect of interpretable units by measuring the ability of interventions to control objects in the output. We examine the contextual relationship between these units and their surroundings by inserting the discovered object concepts into new images. We show several practical applications enabled by our framework, from comparing internal representations across different layers, models, and datasets, to improving GANs by locating and removing artifact-causing units, to interactively manipulating objects in a scene. We provide open source interpretation tools to help researchers and practitioners better understand their GAN models.
This paper introduces an online model for object detection in videos designed to run in real-time on low-powered mobile and embedded devices. Our approach combines fast single-image object detection with convolutional long short term memory (LSTM) layers to create an interweaved recurrent-convolutional architecture. Additionally, we propose an efficient Bottleneck-LSTM layer that significantly reduces computational cost compared to regular LSTMs. Our network achieves temporal awareness by using Bottleneck-LSTMs to refine and propagate feature maps across frames. This approach is substantially faster than existing detection methods in video, outperforming the fastest single-frame models in model size and computational cost while attaining accuracy comparable to much more expensive single-frame models on the Imagenet VID 2015 dataset. Our model reaches a real-time inference speed of up to 15 FPS on a mobile CPU.