OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Visual Translation Embedding Network for Visual Relation Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

Visual relations, such as "person ride bike" and "bike next to car", offer a comprehensive scene understanding of an image, and have already shown their great utility in connecting computer vision and natural language. However, due to the challenging combinatorial complexity of modeling subject-predicate-object relation triplets, very little work has been done to localize and predict visual relations. Inspired by the recent advances in relational representation learning of knowledge bases and convolutional object detection networks, we propose a Visual Translation Embedding network (VTransE) for visual relation detection. VTransE places objects in a low-dimensional relation space where a relation can be modeled as a simple vector translation, i.e., subject + predicate $\approx$ object. We propose a novel feature extraction layer that enables object-relation knowledge transfer in a fully-convolutional fashion that supports training and inference in a single forward/backward pass. To the best of our knowledge, VTransE is the first end-to-end relation detection network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VTransE over other state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale datasets: Visual Relationship and Visual Genome. Note that even though VTransE is a purely visual model, it is still competitive to the Lu's multi-modal model with language priors.
Neural Face Editing With Intrinsic Image Disentangling
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

Traditional face editing methods often require a number of sophisticated and task specific algorithms to be applied one after the other --- a process that is tedious, fragile, and computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end generative adversarial network that infers a face-specific disentangled representation of intrinsic face properties, including shape (i.e. normals), albedo, and lighting, and an alpha matte. We show that this network can be trained on "in-the-wild" images by incorporating an in-network physically-based image formation module and appropriate loss functions. Our disentangling latent representation allows for semantically relevant edits, where one aspect of facial appearance can be manipulated while keeping orthogonal properties fixed, and we demonstrate its use for a number of facial editing applications.
EAST: An Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

Previous approaches for scene text detection have already achieved promising performances across various benchmarks. However, they usually fall short when dealing with challenging scenarios, even when equipped with deep neural network models, because the overall performance is determined by the interplay of multiple stages and components in the pipelines. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful pipeline that yields fast and accurate text detection in natural scenes. The pipeline directly predicts words or text lines of arbitrary orientations and quadrilateral shapes in full images, eliminating unnecessary intermediate steps (e.g., candidate aggregation and word partitioning), with a single neural network. The simplicity of our pipeline allows concentrating efforts on designing loss functions and neural network architecture. Experiments on standard datasets including ICDAR 2015, COCO-Text and MSRA-TD500 demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. On the ICDAR 2015 dataset, the proposed algorithm achieves an F-score of 0.7820 at 13.2fps at 720p resolution.
Connecting Look and Feel: Associating the Visual and Tactile Properties of Physical Materials
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

For machines to interact with the physical world, they must understand the physical properties of objects and materials they encounter. We use fabrics as an example of a deformable material with a rich set of mechanical properties. A thin flexible fabric, when draped, tends to look different from a heavy stiff fabric. It also feels different when touched. Using a collection of 118 fabric sample, we captured color and depth images of draped fabrics along with tactile data from a high resolution touch sensor. We then sought to associate the information from vision and touch by jointly training CNNs across the three modalities. Through the CNN, each input, regardless of the modality, generates an embedding vector that records the fabric's physical property. By comparing the embeddings, our system is able to look at a fabric image and predict how it will feel, and vice versa. We also show that a system jointly trained on vision and touch data can outperform a similar system trained only on visual data when tested purely with visual inputs.
Semantic Compositional Networks for Visual Captioning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

A Semantic Compositional Network (SCN) is developed for image captioning, in which semantic concepts (i.e., tags) are detected from the image, and the probability of each tag is used to compose the parameters in a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The SCN extends each weight matrix of the LSTM to an ensemble of tag-dependent weight matrices. The degree to which each member of the ensemble is used to generate an image caption is tied to the image-dependent probability of the corresponding tag. In addition to captioning images, we also extend the SCN to generate captions for video clips. We qualitatively analyze semantic composition in SCNs, and quantitatively evaluate the algorithm on three benchmark datasets: COCO, Flickr30k, and Youtube2Text. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, across multiple evaluation metrics.
Link the Head to the "Beak": Zero Shot Learning From Noisy Text Description at Part Precision
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we study learning visual classifiers from unstructured text descriptions at part precision with no training images. We propose a learning framework that is able to connect text terms to its relevant parts and suppress connections to non-visual text terms without any part-text annotations. For instance, this learning process enables terms like "beak" to be sparsely linked to the visual representation of parts like head, while reduces the effect of non-visual terms like "migrate" on classifier prediction. Images are encoded by a part-based CNN that detect bird parts and learn part-specific representation. Part-based visual classifiers are predicted from text descriptions of unseen visual classifiers to facilitate classification without training images (also known as zero-shot recognition). We performed our experiments on CUBirds 2011 dataset and improves the state-of-the-art text-based zero-shot recognition results from 34.7\% to 43.6\%. We also created large scale benchmarks on North American Bird Images augmented with text descriptions, where we also show that our approach outperforms existing methods. Our code, data, and models are publically available.
SCA-CNN: Spatial and Channel-Wise Attention in Convolutional Networks for Image Captioning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

Visual attention has been successfully applied in structural prediction tasks such as visual captioning and question answering. Existing visual attention models are generally spatial, i.e., the attention is modeled as spatial probabilities that re-weight the last conv-layer feature map of a CNN encoding an input image. However, we argue that such spatial attention does not necessarily conform to the attention mechanism --- a dynamic feature extractor that combines contextual fixations over time, as CNN features are naturally spatial, channel-wise and multi-layer. In this paper, we introduce a novel convolutional neural network dubbed SCA-CNN that incorporates Spatial and Channel-wise Attentions in a CNN. In the task of image captioning, SCA-CNN dynamically modulates the sentence generation context in multi-layer feature maps, encoding where (i.e., attentive spatial locations at multiple layers) and what (i.e., attentive channels) the visual attention is. We evaluate the proposed SCA-CNN architecture on three benchmark image captioning datasets: Flickr8K, Flickr30K, and MSCOCO. It is consistently observed that SCA-CNN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art visual attention-based image captioning methods.
A Compact DNN: Approaching GoogLeNet-Level Accuracy of Classification and Domain Adaptation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

Recently, DNN model compression based on network architecture design, e.g., SqueezeNet, attracted a lot attention. No accuracy drop on image classification is observed on these extremely compact networks, compared to well-known models. An emerging question, however, is whether these model compression techniques hurt DNN's learning ability other than classifying images on a single dataset. Our preliminary experiment shows that these compression methods could degrade domain adaptation (DA) ability, though the classification performance is preserved. Therefore, we propose a new compact network architecture and unsupervised DA method in this paper. The DNN is built on a new basic module Conv-M which provides more diverse feature extractors without significantly increasing parameters. The unified framework of our DA method will simultaneously learn invariance across domains, reduce divergence of feature representations, and adapt label prediction. Our DNN has 4.1M parameters, which is only 6.7% of AlexNet or 59% of GoogLeNet. Experiments show that our DNN obtains GoogLeNet-level accuracy both on classification and DA, and our DA method slightly outperforms previous competitive ones. Put all together, our DA strategy based on our DNN achieves state-of-the-art on sixteen of total eighteen DA tasks on popular Office-31 and Office-Caltech datasets.
Designing Energy-Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks Using Energy-Aware Pruning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are indispensable to state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms. However, they are still rarely deployed on battery-powered mobile devices, such as smartphones and wearable gadgets, where vision algorithms can enable many revolutionary real-world applications. The key limiting factor is the high energy consumption of CNN processing due to its high computational complexity. While there are many previous efforts that try to reduce the CNN model size or amount of computation, we find that they do not necessarily result in lower energy consumption, and therefore do not serve as a good metric for energy cost estimation. To close the gap between CNN design and energy consumption optimization, we propose an energy-aware pruning algorithm for CNNs that directly uses energy consumption estimation of a CNN to guide the pruning process. The energy estimation methodology uses parameters extrapolated from actual hardware measurements that target realistic battery-powered system setups. The proposed layer-by-layer pruning algorithm also prunes more aggressively than previously proposed pruning methods by minimizing the error in output feature maps instead of filter weights. For each layer, the weights are first pruned and then locally fine-tuned with a closed-form least-square solution to quickly restore the accuracy. After all layers are pruned, the entire network is further globally fine-tuned using back-propagation. With the proposed pruning method, the energy consumption of AlexNet and GoogLeNet are reduced by 3.7x and 1.6x, respectively, with less than 1% top-5 accuracy loss. Finally, we show that pruning the AlexNet with a reduced number of target classes can greatly decrease the number of weights but the energy reduction is limited. Energy modeling tool and energy-aware pruned models available at http://eyeriss.mit.edu/energy.html
Boundary-Aware Instance Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

We address the problem of instance-level semantic segmentation, which aims at jointly detecting, segmenting and classifying every individual object in an image. In this context, existing methods typically propose candidate objects, usually as bounding boxes, and directly predict a binary mask within each such proposal. As a consequence, they cannot recover from errors in the object candidate generation process, such as too small or shifted boxes. In this paper, we introduce a novel object segment representation based on the distance transform of the object masks. We then design an object mask network (OMN) with a new residual-deconvolution architecture that infers such a representation and decodes it into the final binary object mask. This allows us to predict masks that go beyond the scope of the bounding boxes and are thus robust to inaccurate object candidates. We integrate our OMN into a Multitask Network Cascade framework, and learn the resulting boundary-aware instance segmentation (BAIS) network in an end-to-end manner. Our experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and the Cityscapes datasets demonstrate the benefits of our approach, which outperforms the state-of-the-art in both object proposal generation and instance segmentation.
Seeing What Is Not There: Learning Context to Determine Where Objects Are Missing
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

Most of computer vision focuses on what is in an image. We propose to train a standalone object-centric context representation to perform the opposite task: seeing what is not there. Given an image, our context model can predict where objects should exist, even when no object instances are present. Combined with object detection results, we can perform a novel vision task: finding where objects are missing in an image. Our model is based on a convolutional neural network structure. With a specially designed training strategy, the model learns to ignore objects and focus on context only. It is fully convolutional thus highly efficient. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in one important accessibility task: finding city street regions where curb ramps are missing, which could help millions of people with mobility disabilities.
CDC: Convolutional-De-Convolutional Networks for Precise Temporal Action Localization in Untrimmed Videos
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

Temporal action localization is an important yet challenging problem. Given a long, untrimmed video consisting of multiple action instances and complex background contents, we need not only to recognize their action categories, but also to localize the start time and end time of each instance. Many state-of-the-art systems use segment-level classifiers to select and rank proposal segments of pre-determined boundaries. However, a desirable model should move beyond segment-level and make dense predictions at a fine granularity in time to determine precise temporal boundaries. To this end, we design a novel Convolutional-De-Convolutional (CDC) network that places CDC filters on top of 3D ConvNets, which have been shown to be effective for abstracting action semantics but reduce the temporal length of the input data. The proposed CDC filter performs the required temporal upsampling and spatial downsampling operations simultaneously to predict actions at the frame-level granularity. It is unique in jointly modeling action semantics in space-time and fine-grained temporal dynamics. We train the CDC network in an end-to-end manner efficiently. Our model not only achieves superior performance in detecting actions in every frame, but also significantly boosts the precision of localizing temporal boundaries. Finally, the CDC network demonstrates a very high efficiency with the ability to process 500 frames per second on a single GPU server. We will update the camera-ready version and publish the source codes online soon.
Switching Convolutional Neural Network for Crowd Counting
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

We propose a novel crowd counting model that maps a given crowd scene to its density. Crowd analysis is compounded by myriad of factors like inter-occlusion between people due to extreme crowding, high similarity of appearance between people and background elements, and large variability of camera view-points. Current state-of-the art approaches tackle these factors by using multi-scale CNN architectures, recurrent networks and late fusion of features from multi-column CNN with different receptive fields. We propose switching convolutional neural network that leverages variation of crowd density within an image to improve the accuracy and localization of the predicted crowd count. Patches from a grid within a crowd scene are relayed to independent CNN regressors based on crowd count prediction quality of the CNN established during training. The independent CNN regressors are designed to have different receptive fields and a switch classifier is trained to relay the crowd scene patch to the best CNN regressor. We perform extensive experiments on all major crowd counting datasets and evidence better performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods. We provide interpretable representations of the multichotomy of space of crowd scene patches inferred from the switch. It is observed that the switch relays an image patch to a particular CNN column based on density of crowd.
Captioning Images With Diverse Objects
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

Recent captioning models are limited in their ability to scale and describe concepts unseen in paired image-text corpora. We propose the Novel Object Captioner (NOC), a deep visual semantic captioning model that can describe a large number of object categories not present in existing image-caption datasets. Our model takes advantage of external sources -- labeled images from object recognition datasets, and semantic knowledge extracted from unannotated text. We propose minimizing a joint objective which can learn from these diverse data sources and leverage distributional semantic embeddings, enabling the model to generalize and describe novel objects outside of image-caption datasets. We demonstrate that our model exploits semantic information to generate captions for hundreds of object categories in the ImageNet object recognition dataset that are not observed in MSCOCO image-caption training data, as well as many categories that are observed very rarely. Both automatic evaluations and human judgements show that our model considerably outperforms prior work in being able to describe many more categories of objects.
Quality Aware Network for Set to Set Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

This paper targets on the problem of set to set recognition, which learns the metric between two image sets. Images in each set belong to the same identity. Since images in a set can be complementary, they hopefully lead to higher accuracy in practical applications. However, the quality of each sample cannot be guaranteed, and samples with poor quality will hurt the metric. In this paper, the quality aware network (QAN) is proposed to confront this problem, where the quality of each sample can be automatically learned although such information is not explicitly provided in the training stage. The network has two branches, where the first branch extracts appearance feature embedding for each sample and the other branch predicts quality score for each sample. Features and quality scores of all samples in a set are then aggregated to generate the final feature embedding. We show that the two branches can be trained in an end-to-end manner given only the set-level identity annotation. Analysis on gradient spread of this mechanism indicates that the quality learned by the network is beneficial to set-to-set recognition and simplifies the distribution that the network needs to fit. Experiments on both face verification and person re-identification show advantages of the proposed QAN. The source code and network structure can be downloaded at https://github.com/sciencefans/Quality-Aware-Network.
Spatially-Varying Blur Detection Based on Multiscale Fused and Sorted Transform Coefficients of Gradient Magnitudes
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

The detection of spatially-varying blur without having any information about the blur type is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel effective approach to address the blur detection problem from a single image without requiring any knowledge about the blur type, level, or camera settings. Our approach computes blur detection maps based on a novel High-frequency multiscale Fusion and Sort Transform (HiFST) of gradient magnitudes. The evaluations of the proposed approach on a diverse set of blurry images with different blur types, levels, and contents demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively.
Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

"If I provide you a face image of mine (without telling you the actual age when I took the picture) and a large amount of face images that I crawled (containing labeled faces of different ages but not necessarily paired), can you show me what I would look like when I am 80 or what I was like when I was 5?" The answer is probably a "No." Most existing face aging works attempt to learn the transformation between age groups and thus would require the paired samples as well as the labeled query image. In this paper, we look at the problem from a generative modeling perspective such that no paired samples is required. In addition, given an unlabeled image, the generative model can directly produce the image with desired age attribute. We propose a conditional adversarial autoencoder (CAAE) that learns a face manifold, traversing on which smooth age progression and regression can be realized simultaneously. In CAAE, the face is first mapped to a latent vector through a convolutional encoder, and then the vector is projected to the face manifold conditional on age through a deconvolutional generator. The latent vector preserves personalized face features (i.e., personality) and the age condition controls progression vs. regression. Two adversarial networks are imposed on the encoder and generator, respectively, forcing to generate more photo-realistic faces. Experimental results demonstrate the appealing performance and flexibility of the proposed framework by comparing with the state-of-the-art and ground truth.
Residual Expansion Algorithm: Fast and Effective Optimization for Nonconvex Least Squares Problems
Venue: Conference CVPR 2017
Year: 2017

We propose the residual expansion (RE) algorithm: a global (or near-global) optimization method for nonconvex least squares problems. Unlike most existing nonconvex optimization techniques, the RE algorithm is not based on either stochastic or multi-point searches; therefore, it can achieve fast global optimization. Moreover, the RE algorithm is easy to implement and successful in high-dimensional optimization. The RE algorithm exhibits excellent empirical performance in terms of k-means clustering, point-set registration, optimized product quantization, and blind image deblurring.