OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-Granularity Contrastive Cross-Modal Collaborative Generation for End-to-End Long-Term Video Question Answering
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

Long-term Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a challenging vision-and-language bridging task focusing on semantic understanding of untrimmed long-term videos and diverse free-form questions, simultaneously emphasizing comprehensive cross-modal reasoning to yield precise answers. The canonical approaches often rely on off-the-shelf feature extractors to detour the expensive computation overhead, but often result in domain-independent modality-unrelated representations. Furthermore, the inherent gradient blocking between unimodal comprehension and cross-modal interaction hinders reliable answer generation. In contrast, recent emerging successful video-language pre-training models enable cost-effective end-to-end modeling but fall short in domain-specific ratiocination and exhibit disparities in task formulation. Toward this end, we present an entirely end-to-end solution for long-term VideoQA: Multi-granularity Contrastive cross-modal collaborative Generation (MCG) model. To derive discriminative representations possessing high visual concepts, we introduce Joint Unimodal Modeling (JUM) on a clip-bone architecture and leverage Multi-granularity Contrastive Learning (MCL) to harness the intrinsically or explicitly exhibited semantic correspondences. To alleviate the task formulation discrepancy problem, we propose a Cross-modal Collaborative Generation (CCG) module to reformulate VideoQA as a generative task instead of the conventional classification scheme, empowering the model with the capability for cross-modal high-semantic fusion and generation so as to rationalize and answer. Extensive experiments conducted on six publicly available VideoQA datasets underscore the superiority of our proposed method.
Quality-Aware Selective Fusion Network for V-D-T Salient Object Detection
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

Depth images and thermal images contain the spatial geometry information and surface temperature information, which can act as complementary information for the RGB modality. However, the quality of the depth and thermal images is often unreliable in some challenging scenarios, which will result in the performance degradation of the two-modal based salient object detection (SOD). Meanwhile, some researchers pay attention to the triple-modal SOD task, where they attempt to explore the complementarity of the RGB image, the depth image, and the thermal image. However, existing triple-modal SOD methods fail to perceive the quality of depth maps and thermal images, which leads to performance degradation when dealing with scenes with low-quality depth and thermal images. Therefore, we propose a quality-aware selective fusion network (QSF-Net) to conduct VDT salient object detection, which contains three subnets including the initial feature extraction subnet, the quality-aware region selection subnet, and the region-guided selective fusion subnet. Firstly, except for extracting features, the initial feature extraction subnet can generate a preliminary prediction map from each modality via a shrinkage pyramid architecture. Then, we design the weakly-supervised quality-aware region selection subnet to generate the quality-aware maps. Concretely, we first find the high-quality and low-quality regions by using the preliminary predictions, which further constitute the pseudo label that can be used to train this subnet. Finally, the region-guided selective fusion subnet purifies the initial features under the guidance of the quality-aware maps, and then fuses the triple-modal features and refines the edge details of prediction maps through the intra-modality and inter-modality attention (IIA) module and the edge refinement (ER) module, respectively. Extensive experiments are performed on VDT-2048
Learning to Recover Spectral Reflectance From RGB Images
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

This paper tackles spectral reflectance recovery (SRR) from RGB images. Since capturing ground-truth spectral reflectance and camera spectral sensitivity are challenging and costly, most existing approaches are trained on synthetic images and utilize the same parameters for all unseen testing images, which are suboptimal especially when the trained models are tested on real images because they never exploit the internal information of the testing images. To address this issue, we adopt a self-supervised meta-auxiliary learning (MAXL) strategy that fine-tunes the well-trained network parameters with each testing image to combine external with internal information. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that successfully adapts the MAXL strategy to this problem. Instead of relying on naive end-to-end training, we also propose a novel architecture that integrates the physical relationship between the spectral reflectance and the corresponding RGB images into the network based on our mathematical analysis. Besides, since the spectral reflectance of a scene is independent to its illumination while the corresponding RGB images are not, we recover the spectral reflectance of a scene from its RGB images captured under multiple illuminations to further reduce the unknown. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed network and of the MAXL. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Dong-Huo/SRR-MAXL.
Deep Feature Statistics Mapping for Generalized Screen Content Image Quality Assessment
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

The statistical regularities of natural images, referred to as natural scene statistics, play an important role in no-reference image quality assessment. However, it has been widely acknowledged that screen content images (SCIs), which are typically computer generated, do not hold such statistics. Here we make the first attempt to learn the statistics of SCIs, based upon which the quality of SCIs can be effectively determined. The underlying mechanism of the proposed approach is based upon the mild assumption that the SCIs, which are not physically acquired, still obey certain statistics that could be understood in a learning fashion. We empirically show that the statistics deviation could be effectively leveraged in quality assessment, and the proposed method is superior when evaluated in different settings. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the Deep Feature Statistics based SCI Quality Assessment (DFSS-IQA) model delivers promising performance compared with existing NR-IQA models and shows a high generalization capability in the cross-dataset settings. The implementation of our method is publicly available at https://github.com/Baoliang93/DFSS-IQA.
Deep Boosting Learning A Brand-New Cooperative Approach for Image-Text Matching
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

Image-text matching remains a challenging task due to heterogeneous semantic diversity across modalities and insufficient distance separability within triplets. Different from previous approaches focusing on enhancing multi-modal representations or exploiting cross-modal correspondence for more accurate retrieval, in this paper we aim to leverage the knowledge transfer between peer branches in a boosting manner to seek a more powerful matching model. Specifically, we propose a brand-new Deep Boosting Learning (DBL) algorithm, where an anchor branch is first trained to provide insights into the data properties, with a target branch gaining more advanced knowledge to develop optimal features and distance metrics. Concretely, an anchor branch initially learns the absolute or relative distance between positive and negative pairs, providing a foundational understanding of the particular network and data distribution. Building upon this knowledge, a target branch is concurrently tasked with more adaptive margin constraints to further enlarge the relative distance between matched and unmatched samples. Extensive experiments validate that our DBL can achieve impressive and consistent improvements based on various recent state-of-the-art models in the image-text matching field, and outperform related popular cooperative strategies, e.g., Conventional Distillation, Mutual Learning, and Contrastive Learning. Beyond the above, we confirm that DBL can be seamlessly integrated into their training scenarios and achieve superior performance under the same computational costs, demonstrating the flexibility and broad applicability of our proposed method. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/DBL.
Sensitivity Decouple Learning for Image Compression Artifacts Reduction
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

With the benefit of deep learning techniques, recent researches have made significant progress in image compression artifacts reduction. Despite their improved performances, prevailing methods only focus on learning a mapping from the compressed image to the original one but ignore the intrinsic attributes of the given compressed images, which greatly harms the performance of downstream parsing tasks. Different from these methods, we propose to decouple the intrinsic attributes into two complementary features for artifacts reduction,ie, the compression-insensitive features to regularize the high-level semantic representations during training and the compression-sensitive features to be aware of the compression degree. To achieve this, we first employ adversarial training to regularize the compressed and original encoded features for retaining high-level semantics, and we then develop the compression quality-aware feature encoder for compression-sensitive features. Based on these dual complementary features, we propose a Dual Awareness Guidance Network (DAGN) to utilize these awareness features as transformation guidance during the decoding phase. In our proposed DAGN, we develop a cross-feature fusion module to maintain the consistency of compression-insensitive features by fusing compression-insensitive features into the artifacts reduction baseline. Our method achieves an average 2.06 dB PSNR gains on BSD500, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, and only requires 29.7 ms to process one image on BSD500. Besides, the experimental results on LIVE1 and LIU4K also demonstrate the efficiency, effectiveness, and superiority of the proposed method in terms of quantitative metrics, visual quality, and downstream machine vision tasks.
Learning Discriminative Features for Crowd Counting
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

Crowd counting models in highly congested areas confront two main challenges: weak localization ability and difficulty in differentiating between foreground and background, leading to inaccurate estimations. The reason is that objects in highly congested areas are normally small and high level features extracted by convolutional neural networks are less discriminative to represent small objects. To address these problems, we propose a learning discriminative features framework for crowd counting, which is composed of a masked feature prediction module (MPM) and a supervised pixel-level contrastive learning module (CLM). The MPM randomly masks feature vectors in the feature map and then reconstructs them, allowing the model to learn about what is present in the masked regions and improving the model's ability to localize objects in high density regions. The CLM pulls targets close to each other and pushes them far away from background in the feature space, enabling the model to discriminate foreground objects from background. Additionally, the proposed modules can be beneficial in various computer vision tasks, such as crowd counting and object detection, where dense scenes or cluttered environments pose challenges to accurate localization. The proposed two modules are plug-and-play, incorporating the proposed modules into existing models can potentially boost their performance in these scenarios.
Multi-Condition Latent Diffusion Network for Scene-Aware Neural Human Motion Prediction
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

Inferring 3D human motion is fundamental in many applications, including understanding human activity and analyzing one's intention. While many fruitful efforts have been made to human motion prediction, most approaches focus on pose-driven prediction and inferring human motion in isolation from the contextual environment, thus leaving the body location movement in the scene behind. However, real-world human movements are goal-directed and highly influenced by the spatial layout of their surrounding scenes. In this paper, instead of planning future human motion in a 'dark' room, we propose a Multi-Condition Latent Diffusion network (MCLD) that reformulates the human motion prediction task as a multi-condition joint inference problem based on the given historical 3D body motion and the current 3D scene contexts. Specifically, instead of directly modeling joint distribution over the raw motion sequences, MCLD performs a conditional diffusion process within the latent embedding space, characterizing the cross-modal mapping from the past body movement and current scene context condition embeddings to the future human motion embedding. Extensive experiments on large-scale human motion prediction datasets demonstrate that our MCLD achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods on both realistic and diverse predictions.
PIG Prompt Images Guidance for Night-Time Scene Parsing
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

Night-time scene parsing aims to extract pixel-level semantic information in night images, aiding downstream tasks in understanding scene object distribution. Due to limited labeled night image datasets, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has become the predominant method for studying night scenes. UDA typically relies on paired day-night image pairs to guide adaptation, but this approach hampers dataset construction and restricts generalization across night scenes in different datasets. Moreover, UDA, focusing on network architecture and training strategies, faces difficulties in handling classes with few domain similarities. In this paper, we leverage Prompt Images Guidance (PIG) to enhance UDA with supplementary night knowledge. We propose a Night-Focused Network (NFNet) to learn night-specific features from both target domain images and prompt images. To generate high-quality pseudo-labels, we propose Pseudo-label Fusion via Domain Similarity Guidance (FDSG). Classes with fewer domain similarities are predicted by NFNet, which excels in parsing night features, while classes with more domain similarities are predicted by UDA, which has rich labeled semantics. Additionally, we propose two data augmentation strategies: the Prompt Mixture Strategy (PMS) and the Alternate Mask Strategy (AMS), aimed at mitigating the overfitting of the NFNet to a few prompt images. We conduct extensive experiments on four night-time datasets: NightCity, NightCity+, Dark Zurich, and ACDC. The results indicate that utilizing PIG can enhance the parsing accuracy of UDA.
Enhancing Low-Light Light Field Images With a Deep Compensation Unfolding Network
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a novel and interpretable end-to-end learning framework, called the deep compensation unfolding network (DCUNet), for restoring light field (LF) images captured under low-light conditions. DCUNet is designed with a multi-stage architecture that mimics the optimization process of solving an inverse imaging problem in a data-driven fashion. The framework uses the intermediate enhanced result to estimate the illumination map, which is then employed in the unfolding process to produce a new enhanced result. Additionally, DCUNet includes a content-associated deep compensation module at each optimization stage to suppress noise and illumination map estimation errors. To properly mine and leverage the unique characteristics of LF images, this paper proposes a pseudo-explicit feature interaction module that comprehensively exploits redundant information in LF images. The experimental results on both simulated and real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DCUNet over state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Moreover, DCUNet preserves the essential geometric structure of enhanced LF images much better. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/lyuxianqiang/LFLL-DCU.
HAFormer Unleashing the Power of Hierarchy-Aware Features for Lightweight Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

Both Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers have shown great success in semantic segmentation tasks. Efforts have been made to integrate CNNs with Transformer models to capture both local and global context interactions. However, there is still room for enhancement, particularly when considering constraints on computational resources. In this paper, we introduce HAFormer, a model that combines the hierarchical features extraction ability of CNNs with the global dependency modeling capability of Transformers to tackle lightweight semantic segmentation challenges. Specifically, we design a Hierarchy-Aware Pixel-Excitation (HAPE) module for adaptive multi-scale local feature extraction. During the global perception modeling, we devise an Efficient Transformer (ET) module streamlining the quadratic calculations associated with traditional Transformers. Moreover, a correlation-weighted Fusion (cwF) module selectively merges diverse feature representations, significantly enhancing predictive accuracy. HAFormer achieves high performance with minimal computational overhead and compact model size, achieving 74.2% mIoU on Cityscapes and 71.1% mIoU on CamVid test datasets, with frame rates of 105FPS and 118FPS on a single 2080Ti GPU. The source codes are available at https://github.com/XU-GITHUB-curry/HAFormer.
Enhanced Long-Tailed Recognition With Contrastive CutMix Augmentation
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

Real-world data often follows a long-tailed distribution, where a few head classes occupy most of the data and a large number of tail classes only contain very limited samples. In practice, deep models often show poor generalization performance on tail classes due to the imbalanced distribution. To tackle this, data augmentation has become an effective way by synthesizing new samples for tail classes. Among them, one popular way is to use CutMix that explicitly mixups the images of tail classes and the others, while constructing the labels according to the ratio of areas cropped from two images. However, the area-based labels entirely ignore the inherent semantic information of the augmented samples, often leading to misleading training signals. To address this issue, we propose a Contrastive CutMix (ConCutMix) that constructs augmented samples with semantically consistent labels to boost the performance of long-tailed recognition. Specifically, we compute the similarities between samples in the semantic space learned by contrastive learning, and use them to rectify the area-based labels. Experiments show that our ConCutMix significantly improves the accuracy on tail classes as well as the overall performance. For example, based on ResNeXt-50, we improve the overall accuracy on ImageNet-LT by 3.0% thanks to the significant improvement of 3.3% on tail classes. We highlight that the improvement also generalizes well to other benchmarks and models. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/PanHaulin/ConCutMix.
An Embeddable Implicit IUVD Representation for Part-Based 3D Human Surface Reconstruction
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

To reconstruct a 3D human surface from a single image, it is crucial to simultaneously consider human pose, shape, and clothing details. Recent approaches have combined parametric body models (such as SMPL), which capture body pose and shape priors, with neural implicit functions that flexibly learn clothing details. However, this combined representation introduces additional computation, e.g. signed distance calculation in 3D body feature extraction, leading to redundancy in the implicit query-and-infer process and failing to preserve the underlying body shape prior. To address these issues, we propose a novel IUVD-Feedback representation, consisting of an IUVD occupancy function and a feedback query algorithm. This representation replaces the time-consuming signed distance calculation with a simple linear transformation in the IUVD space, leveraging the SMPL UV maps. Additionally, it reduces redundant query points through a feedback mechanism, leading to more reasonable 3D body features and more effective query points, thereby preserving the parametric body prior. Moreover, the IUVD-Feedback representation can be embedded into any existing implicit human reconstruction pipeline without requiring modifications to the trained neural networks. Experiments on the THuman2.0 dataset demonstrate that the proposed IUVD-Feedback representation improves the robustness of results and achieves three times faster acceleration in the query-and-infer process. Furthermore, this representation holds potential for generative applications by leveraging its inherent semantic information from the parametric body model.
CalibNet Dual-Branch Cross-Modal Calibration for RGB-D Salient Instance Segmentation
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a novel approach for RGB-D salient instance segmentation using a dual-branch cross-modal feature calibration architecture called CalibNet. Our method simultaneously calibrates depth and RGB features in the kernel and mask branches to generate instance-aware kernels and mask features. CalibNet consists of three simple modules, a dynamic interactive kernel (DIK) and a weight-sharing fusion (WSF), which work together to generate effective instance-aware kernels and integrate cross-modal features. To improve the quality of depth features, we incorporate a depth similarity assessment (DSA) module prior to DIK and WSF. In addition, we further contribute a new DSIS dataset, which contains 1,940 images with elaborate instance-level annotations. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks show that CalibNet yields a promising result, i.e., 58.0% AP with 320*480 input size on the COME15K-N test set, which significantly surpasses the alternative frameworks. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/PJLallen/CalibNet.
Unfolded Proximal Neural Networks for Robust Image Gaussian Denoising
Venue: Journal TIP 2024
Year: 2024

A common approach to solve inverse imaging problems relies on finding a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of the original unknown image, by solving a minimization problem. In thiscontext, iterative proximal algorithms are widely used, enabling to handle non-smooth functions and linear operators. Recently, these algorithms have been paired with deep learning strategies, to further improve the estimate quality. In particular, proximal neural networks (PNNs) have been introduced, obtained by unrolling a proximal algorithm as for finding a MAP estimate, but over a fixed number of iterations, with learned linear operators and parameters. As PNNs are based on optimization theory, they are very flexible, and can be adapted to any image restoration task, as soon as a proximal algorithm can solve it. They further have much lighter architectures than traditional networks. In this article we propose a unified framework to build PNNs for the Gaussian denoising task, based on both the dual-FB and the primal-dual Chambolle-Pock algorithms. We further show that accelerated inertial versions of these algorithms enable skip connections in the associated NN layers. We propose different learning strategies for our PNN framework, and investigate their robustness (Lipschitz property) and denoising efficiency. Finally, we assess the robustness of our PNNs when plugged in a forward-backward algorithm for an image deblurring problem.