In this paper, we address a new problem of reversing the effect of an image filter, which can be linear or nonlinear. The assumption is that the algorithm of the filter is unknown and the filter is available as a black box. We formulate this inverse problem as minimizing a local patch-based cost function and use total derivative to approximate the gradient which is used in gradient descent to solve the problem. We analyze factors affecting the convergence and quality of the output in the Fourier domain. We also study the application of accelerated gradient descent algorithms in three gradient-free reverse filters, including the one proposed in this paper. We present results from extensive experiments to evaluate the complexity and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art in that (1) it is at the same level of complexity as that of the fastest reverse filter, but it can reverse a larger number of filters, and (2) it can reverse the same list of filters as that of the very complex reverse filter, but its complexity is much smaller.
We propose a collocation method based on multivariate polynomial splines over triangulation or tetrahedralization for the numerical solution of partial differential equations. We start with a detailed explanation of the method for the Poisson equation and then extend the study to the second-order elliptic PDE in non-divergence form. We shall show that the numerical solution can approximate the exact PDE solution very well. Then we present a large amount of numerical experimental results to demonstrate the performance of the method over the 2D and 3D settings. In addition, we present a comparison with the existing multivariate spline methods in \cite{ALW06} and \cite{LW17} to show that the new method produces a similar and sometimes more accurate approximation in a more efficient fashion.
Smooth minimax games often proceed by simultaneous or alternating gradient updates. Although algorithms with alternating updates are commonly used in practice, the majority of existing theoretical analyses focus on simultaneous algorithms for convenience of analysis. In this paper, we study alternating gradient descent-ascent (Alt-GDA) in minimax games and show that Alt-GDA is superior to its simultaneous counterpart~(Sim-GDA) in many settings. We prove that Alt-GDA achieves a near-optimal local convergence rate for strongly convex-strongly concave (SCSC) problems while Sim-GDA converges at a much slower rate. To our knowledge, this is the \emph{first} result of any setting showing that Alt-GDA converges faster than Sim-GDA by more than a constant. We further adapt the theory of integral quadratic constraints (IQC) and show that Alt-GDA attains the same rate \emph{globally} for a subclass of SCSC minimax problems. Empirically, we demonstrate that alternating updates speed up GAN training significantly and the use of optimism only helps for simultaneous algorithms.
Assume that we observe i.i.d.~points lying close to some unknown $d$-dimensional $\mathcal{C}^k$ submanifold $M$ in a possibly high-dimensional space. We study the problem of reconstructing the probability distribution generating the sample. After remarking that this problem is degenerate for a large class of standard losses ($L_p$, Hellinger, total variation, etc.), we focus on the Wasserstein loss, for which we build an estimator, based on kernel density estimation, whose rate of convergence depends on $d$ and the regularity $s\leq k-1$ of the underlying density, but not on the ambient dimension. In particular, we show that the estimator is minimax and matches previous rates in the literature in the case where the manifold $M$ is a $d$-dimensional cube. The related problem of the estimation of the volume measure of $M$ for the Wasserstein loss is also considered, for which a minimax estimator is exhibited.
Partially linear additive models generalize linear ones since they model the relation between a response variable and covariates by assuming that some covariates have a linear relation with the response but each of the others enter through unknown univariate smooth functions. The harmful effect of outliers either in the residuals or in the covariates involved in the linear component has been described in the situation of partially linear models, that is, when only one nonparametric component is involved in the model. When dealing with additive components, the problem of providing reliable estimators when atypical data arise, is of practical importance motivating the need of robust procedures. Hence, we propose a family of robust estimators for partially linear additive models by combining $B-$splines with robust linear regression estimators. We obtain consistency results, rates of convergence and asymptotic normality for the linear components, under mild assumptions. A Monte Carlo study is carried out to compare the performance of the robust proposal with its classical counterpart under different models and contamination schemes. The numerical experiments show the advantage of the proposed methodology for finite samples. We also illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach on a real data set.
We propose accelerated randomized coordinate descent algorithms for stochastic optimization and online learning. Our algorithms have significantly less per-iteration complexity than the known accelerated gradient algorithms. The proposed algorithms for online learning have better regret performance than the known randomized online coordinate descent algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms for stochastic optimization exhibit as good convergence rates as the best known randomized coordinate descent algorithms. We also show simulation results to demonstrate performance of the proposed algorithms.
Image segmentation is the process of partitioning the image into significant regions easier to analyze. Nowadays, segmentation has become a necessity in many practical medical imaging methods as locating tumors and diseases. Hidden Markov Random Field model is one of several techniques used in image segmentation. It provides an elegant way to model the segmentation process. This modeling leads to the minimization of an objective function. Conjugate Gradient algorithm (CG) is one of the best known optimization techniques. This paper proposes the use of the Conjugate Gradient algorithm (CG) for image segmentation, based on the Hidden Markov Random Field. Since derivatives are not available for this expression, finite differences are used in the CG algorithm to approximate the first derivative. The approach is evaluated using a number of publicly available images, where ground truth is known. The Dice Coefficient is used as an objective criterion to measure the quality of segmentation. The results show that the proposed CG approach compares favorably with other variants of Hidden Markov Random Field segmentation algorithms.
Monocular cameras are one of the most commonly used sensors in the automotive industry for autonomous vehicles. One major drawback using a monocular camera is that it only makes observations in the two dimensional image plane and can not directly measure the distance to objects. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by developing a multi-object tracking algorithm that takes an image as input and produces trajectories of detected objects in a world coordinate system. We solve this by using a deep neural network trained to detect and estimate the distance to objects from a single input image. The detections from a sequence of images are fed in to a state-of-the art Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture tracking filter. The combination of the learned detector and the PMBM filter results in an algorithm that achieves 3D tracking using only mono-camera images as input. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated both in 3D world coordinates, and 2D image coordinates, using the publicly available KITTI object tracking dataset. The algorithm shows the ability to accurately track objects, correctly handle data associations, even when there is a big overlap of the objects in the image, and is one of the top performing algorithms on the KITTI object tracking benchmark. Furthermore, the algorithm is efficient, running on average close to 20 frames per second.
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.
Are we using the right potential functions in the Conditional Random Field models that are popular in the Vision community? Semantic segmentation and other pixel-level labelling tasks have made significant progress recently due to the deep learning paradigm. However, most state-of-the-art structured prediction methods also include a random field model with a hand-crafted Gaussian potential to model spatial priors, label consistencies and feature-based image conditioning. In this paper, we challenge this view by developing a new inference and learning framework which can learn pairwise CRF potentials restricted only by their dependence on the image pixel values and the size of the support. Both standard spatial and high-dimensional bilateral kernels are considered. Our framework is based on the observation that CRF inference can be achieved via projected gradient descent and consequently, can easily be integrated in deep neural networks to allow for end-to-end training. It is empirically demonstrated that such learned potentials can improve segmentation accuracy and that certain label class interactions are indeed better modelled by a non-Gaussian potential. In addition, we compare our inference method to the commonly used mean-field algorithm. Our framework is evaluated on several public benchmarks for semantic segmentation with improved performance compared to previous state-of-the-art CNN+CRF models.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.