Neural image compression have reached or out-performed traditional methods (such as JPEG, BPG, WebP). However,their sophisticated network structures with cascaded convolution layers bring heavy computational burden for practical deployment. In this paper, we explore the structural sparsity in neural image compression network to obtain real-time acceleration without any specialized hardware design or algorithm. We propose a simple plug-in adaptive binary channel masking(ABCM) to judge the importance of each convolution channel and introduce sparsity during training. During inference, the unimportant channels are pruned to obtain slimmer network and less computation. We implement our method into three neural image compression networks with different entropy models to verify its effectiveness and generalization, the experiment results show that up to 7x computation reduction and 3x acceleration can be achieved with negligible performance drop.
Numerous sand dust image enhancement algorithms have been proposed in recent years. To our best acknowledge, however, most methods evaluated their performance with no-reference way using few selected real-world images from internet. It is unclear how to quantitatively analysis the performance of the algorithms in a supervised way and how we could gauge the progress in the field. Moreover, due to the absence of large-scale benchmark datasets, there are no well-known reports of data-driven based method for sand dust image enhancement up till now. To advance the development of deep learning-based algorithms for sand dust image reconstruction, while enabling supervised objective evaluation of algorithm performance. In this paper, we presented a comprehensive perceptual study and analysis of real-world sand dust images, then constructed a Sand-dust Image Reconstruction Benchmark (SIRB) for training Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and evaluating algorithms performance. In addition, we adopted the existing image transformation neural network trained on SIRB as baseline to illustrate the generalization of SIRB for training CNNs. Finally, we conducted the qualitative and quantitative evaluation to demonstrate the performance and limitations of the state-of-the-arts (SOTA), which shed light on future research in sand dust image reconstruction.
Recently, deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) steered face super-resolution methods have achieved great progress in restoring degraded facial details by jointly training with facial priors. However, these methods have some obvious limitations. On the one hand, multi-task joint learning requires additional marking on the dataset, and the introduced prior network will significantly increase the computational cost of the model. On the other hand, the limited receptive field of CNN will reduce the fidelity and naturalness of the reconstructed facial images, resulting in suboptimal reconstructed images. In this work, we propose an efficient CNN-Transformer Cooperation Network (CTCNet) for face super-resolution tasks, which uses the multi-scale connected encoder-decoder architecture as the backbone. Specifically, we first devise a novel Local-Global Feature Cooperation Module (LGCM), which is composed of a Facial Structure Attention Unit (FSAU) and a Transformer block, to promote the consistency of local facial detail and global facial structure restoration simultaneously. Then, we design an efficient Local Feature Refinement Module (LFRM) to enhance the local facial structure information. Finally, to further improve the restoration of fine facial details, we present a Multi-scale Feature Fusion Unit (MFFU) to adaptively fuse the features from different stages in the encoder procedure. Comprehensive evaluations on various datasets have assessed that the proposed CTCNet can outperform other state-of-the-art methods significantly.
This paper addresses the color image completion problem in accordance with low-rank quatenrion matrix optimization that is characterized by sparse regularization in a transformed domain. This research was inspired by an appreciation of the fact that different signal types, including audio formats and images, possess structures that are inherently sparse in respect of their respective bases. Since color images can be processed as a whole in the quaternion domain, we depicted the sparsity of the color image in the quaternion discrete cosine transform (QDCT) domain. In addition, the representation of a low-rank structure that is intrinsic to the color image is a vital issue in the quaternion matrix completion problem. To achieve a more superior low-rank approximation, the quatenrion-based truncated nuclear norm (QTNN) is employed in the proposed model. Moreover, this model is facilitated by a competent alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) based on the algorithm. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can yield vastly superior completion performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art low-rank matrix/quaternion matrix approximation methods tested on color image recovery.
In this paper, we consider the challenging task of simultaneously locating and recovering multiple hands from single 2D image. Previous studies either focus on single hand reconstruction or solve this problem in a multi-stage way. Moreover, the conventional two-stage pipeline firstly detects hand areas, and then estimates 3D hand pose from each cropped patch. To reduce the computational redundancy in preprocessing and feature extraction, we propose a concise but efficient single-stage pipeline. Specifically, we design a multi-head auto-encoder structure for multi-hand reconstruction, where each head network shares the same feature map and outputs the hand center, pose and texture, respectively. Besides, we adopt a weakly-supervised scheme to alleviate the burden of expensive 3D real-world data annotations. To this end, we propose a series of losses optimized by a stage-wise training scheme, where a multi-hand dataset with 2D annotations is generated based on the publicly available single hand datasets. In order to further improve the accuracy of the weakly supervised model, we adopt several feature consistency constraints in both single and multiple hand settings. Specifically, the keypoints of each hand estimated from local features should be consistent with the re-projected points predicted from global features. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks including FreiHAND, HO3D, InterHand2.6M and RHD demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art model-based methods in both weakly-supervised and fully-supervised manners.
Recent advances in computer vision has led to a growth of interest in deploying visual analytics model on mobile devices. However, most mobile devices have limited computing power, which prohibits them from running large scale visual analytics neural networks. An emerging approach to solve this problem is to offload the computation of these neural networks to computing resources at an edge server. Efficient computation offloading requires optimizing the trade-off between multiple objectives including compressed data rate, analytics performance, and computation speed. In this work, we consider a "split computation" system to offload a part of the computation of the YOLO object detection model. We propose a learnable feature compression approach to compress the intermediate YOLO features with light-weight computation. We train the feature compression and decompression module together with the YOLO model to optimize the object detection accuracy under a rate constraint. Compared to baseline methods that apply either standard image compression or learned image compression at the mobile and perform image decompression and YOLO at the edge, the proposed system achieves higher detection accuracy at the low to medium rate range. Furthermore, the proposed system requires substantially lower computation time on the mobile device with CPU only.
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are the dominant deep neural network (DNN) architecture for computer vision. Recently, Transformer and multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based models, such as Vision Transformer and MLP-Mixer, started to lead new trends as they showed promising results in the ImageNet classification task. In this paper, we conduct empirical studies on these DNN structures and try to understand their respective pros and cons. To ensure a fair comparison, we first develop a unified framework called SPACH which adopts separate modules for spatial and channel processing. Our experiments under the SPACH framework reveal that all structures can achieve competitive performance at a moderate scale. However, they demonstrate distinctive behaviors when the network size scales up. Based on our findings, we propose two hybrid models using convolution and Transformer modules. The resulting Hybrid-MS-S+ model achieves 83.9% top-1 accuracy with 63M parameters and 12.3G FLOPS. It is already on par with the SOTA models with sophisticated designs. The code and models will be made publicly available.
The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at //github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
State-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) benefits a lot from multi-task learning (MTL), which learns multiple related tasks simultaneously to obtain shared or mutually related representations for different tasks. The most widely-used MTL CNN structure is based on an empirical or heuristic split on a specific layer (e.g., the last convolutional layer) to minimize different task-specific losses. However, this heuristic sharing/splitting strategy may be harmful to the final performance of one or multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel CNN structure for MTL, which enables automatic feature fusing at every layer. Specifically, we first concatenate features from different tasks according to their channel dimension, and then formulate the feature fusing problem as discriminative dimensionality reduction. We show that this discriminative dimensionality reduction can be done by 1x1 Convolution, Batch Normalization, and Weight Decay in one CNN, which we refer to as Neural Discriminative Dimensionality Reduction (NDDR). We perform ablation analysis in details for different configurations in training the network. The experiments carried out on different network structures and different task sets demonstrate the promising performance and desirable generalizability of our proposed method.