In this paper, a novel Unified Multi-Task Learning Framework of Real-Time Drone Supervision for Crowd Counting (MFCC) is proposed, which utilizes an image fusion network architecture to fuse images from the visible and thermal infrared image, and a crowd counting network architecture to estimate the density map. The purpose of our framework is to fuse two modalities, including visible and thermal infrared images captured by drones in real-time, that exploit the complementary information to accurately count the dense population and then automatically guide the flight of the drone to supervise the dense crowd. To this end, we propose the unified multi-task learning framework for crowd counting for the first time and re-design the unified training loss functions to align the image fusion network and crowd counting network. We also design the Assisted Learning Module (ALM) to fuse the density map feature to the image fusion encoder process for learning the counting features. To improve the accuracy, we propose the Extensive Context Extraction Module (ECEM) that is based on a dense connection architecture to encode multi-receptive-fields contextual information and apply the Multi-domain Attention Block (MAB) for concerning the head region in the drone view. Finally, we apply the prediction map to automatically guide the drones to supervise the dense crowd. The experimental results on the DroneRGBT dataset show that, compared with the existing methods, ours has comparable results on objective evaluations and an easier training process.
Natural image matting is a fundamental and challenging computer vision task. It has many applications in image editing and composition. Recently, deep learning-based approaches have achieved great improvements in image matting. However, most of them require a user-supplied trimap as an auxiliary input, which limits the matting applications in the real world. Although some trimap-free approaches have been proposed, the matting quality is still unsatisfactory compared to trimap-based ones. Without the trimap guidance, the matting models suffer from foreground-background ambiguity easily, and also generate blurry details in the transition area. In this work, we propose PP-Matting, a trimap-free architecture that can achieve high-accuracy natural image matting. Our method applies a high-resolution detail branch (HRDB) that extracts fine-grained details of the foreground with keeping feature resolution unchanged. Also, we propose a semantic context branch (SCB) that adopts a semantic segmentation subtask. It prevents the detail prediction from local ambiguity caused by semantic context missing. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments on two well-known benchmarks: Composition-1k and Distinctions-646. The results demonstrate the superiority of PP-Matting over previous methods. Furthermore, we provide a qualitative evaluation of our method on human matting which shows its outstanding performance in the practical application. The code and pre-trained models will be available at PaddleSeg: //github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg.
Most automatic matting methods try to separate the salient foreground from the background. However, the insufficient quantity and subjective bias of the current existing matting datasets make it difficult to fully explore the semantic association between object-to-object and object-to-environment in a given image. In this paper, we propose a Situational Perception Guided Image Matting (SPG-IM) method that mitigates subjective bias of matting annotations and captures sufficient situational perception information for better global saliency distilled from the visual-to-textual task. SPG-IM can better associate inter-objects and object-to-environment saliency, and compensate the subjective nature of image matting and its expensive annotation. We also introduce a textual Semantic Transformation (TST) module that can effectively transform and integrate the semantic feature stream to guide the visual representations. In addition, an Adaptive Focal Transformation (AFT) Refinement Network is proposed to adaptively switch multi-scale receptive fields and focal points to enhance both global and local details. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of situational perception guidance from the visual-to-textual tasks on image matting, and our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. We also analyze the significance of different components in our model. The code will be released soon.
Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to restore a sequence of high-resolution (HR) frames from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts. Although some progress has been made, there are grand challenges to effectively utilize temporal dependency in entire video sequences. Existing approaches usually align and aggregate video frames from limited adjacent frames (e.g., 5 or 7 frames), which prevents these approaches from satisfactory results. In this paper, we take one step further to enable effective spatio-temporal learning in videos. We propose a novel Trajectory-aware Transformer for Video Super-Resolution (TTVSR). In particular, we formulate video frames into several pre-aligned trajectories which consist of continuous visual tokens. For a query token, self-attention is only learned on relevant visual tokens along spatio-temporal trajectories. Compared with vanilla vision Transformers, such a design significantly reduces the computational cost and enables Transformers to model long-range features. We further propose a cross-scale feature tokenization module to overcome scale-changing problems that often occur in long-range videos. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed TTVSR over state-of-the-art models, by extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations in four widely-used video super-resolution benchmarks. Both code and pre-trained models can be downloaded at //github.com/researchmm/TTVSR.
Image-based virtual try-on strives to transfer the appearance of a clothing item onto the image of a target person. Prior work focuses mainly on upper-body clothes (e.g. t-shirts, shirts, and tops) and neglects full-body or lower-body items. This shortcoming arises from a main factor: current publicly available datasets for image-based virtual try-on do not account for this variety, thus limiting progress in the field. To address this deficiency, we introduce Dress Code, which contains images of multi-category clothes. Dress Code is more than 3x larger than publicly available datasets for image-based virtual try-on and features high-resolution paired images (1024 x 768) with front-view, full-body reference models. To generate HD try-on images with high visual quality and rich in details, we propose to learn fine-grained discriminating features. Specifically, we leverage a semantic-aware discriminator that makes predictions at pixel-level instead of image- or patch-level. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach surpasses the baselines and state-of-the-art competitors in terms of visual quality and quantitative results. The Dress Code dataset is publicly available at //github.com/aimagelab/dress-code.
Crowd counting based on density maps is generally regarded as a regression task.Deep learning is used to learn the mapping between image content and crowd density distribution. Although great success has been achieved, some pedestrians far away from the camera are difficult to be detected. And the number of hard examples is often larger. Existing methods with simple Euclidean distance algorithm indiscriminately optimize the hard and easy examples so that the densities of hard examples are usually incorrectly predicted to be lower or even zero, which results in large counting errors. To address this problem, we are the first to propose the Hard Example Focusing(HEF) algorithm for the regression task of crowd counting. The HEF algorithm makes our model rapidly focus on hard examples by attenuating the contribution of easy examples.Then higher importance will be given to the hard examples with wrong estimations. Moreover, the scale variations in crowd scenes are large, and the scale annotations are labor-intensive and expensive. By proposing a multi-Scale Semantic Refining (SSR) strategy, lower layers of our model can break through the limitation of deep learning to capture semantic features of different scales to sufficiently deal with the scale variation. We perform extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets to verify the proposed method. Results indicate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our designed model is smaller and faster.
Deep learning occupies an undisputed dominance in crowd counting. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture called SegCrowdNet. Despite the complex background in crowd scenes, the proposeSegCrowdNet still adaptively highlights the human head region and suppresses the non-head region by segmentation. With the guidance of an attention mechanism, the proposed SegCrowdNet pays more attention to the human head region and automatically encodes the highly refined density map. The crowd count can be obtained by integrating the density map. To adapt the variation of crowd counts, SegCrowdNet intelligently classifies the crowd count of each image into several groups. In addition, the multi-scale features are learned and extracted in the proposed SegCrowdNet to overcome the scale variations of the crowd. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed SegCrowdNet achieves excellent performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Crowd counting is a challenging problem due to the scene complexity and scale variation. Although deep learning has achieved great improvement in crowd counting, scene complexity affects the judgement of these methods and they usually regard some objects as people mistakenly; causing potentially enormous errors in the crowd counting result. To address the problem, we propose a novel end-to-end model called Crowd Attention Convolutional Neural Network (CAT-CNN). Our CAT-CNN can adaptively assess the importance of a human head at each pixel location by automatically encoding a confidence map. With the guidance of the confidence map, the position of human head in estimated density map gets more attention to encode the final density map, which can avoid enormous misjudgements effectively. The crowd count can be obtained by integrating the final density map. To encode a highly refined density map, the total crowd count of each image is classified in a designed classification task and we first explicitly map the prior of the population-level category to feature maps. To verify the efficiency of our proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on three highly challenging datasets. Results establish the superiority of our method over many state-of-the-art methods.
Training a generalizable 3D part segmentation network is quite challenging but of great importance in real-world applications. To tackle this problem, some works design task-specific solutions by translating human understanding of the task to machine's learning process, which faces the risk of missing the optimal strategy since machines do not necessarily understand in the exact human way. Others try to use conventional task-agnostic approaches designed for domain generalization problems with no task prior knowledge considered. To solve the above issues, we propose AutoGPart, a generic method enabling training generalizable 3D part segmentation networks with the task prior considered. AutoGPart builds a supervision space with geometric prior knowledge encoded, and lets the machine to search for the optimal supervisions from the space for a specific segmentation task automatically. Extensive experiments on three generalizable 3D part segmentation tasks are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of AutoGPart. We demonstrate that the performance of segmentation networks using simple backbones can be significantly improved when trained with supervisions searched by our method.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which incorporates recent advances in attention mechanisms. Our approach, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with task-specific soft-attention modules, which are trainable in an end-to-end manner. These attention modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global pool, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. Experiments on the CityScapes dataset show that our method outperforms several baselines in both single-task and multi-task learning, and is also more robust to the various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. We further explore the effectiveness of our method through experiments over a range of task complexities, and show how our method scales well with task complexity compared to baselines.