OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Unified Structured Learning for Simultaneous Human Pose Estimation and Garment Attribute Classification
Venue: Journal TIP 2014
Year: 2014

In this paper, we utilize structured learning to simultaneously address two intertwined problems: human pose estimation (HPE) and garment attribute classification (GAC), which are valuable for a variety of computer vision and multimedia applications. Unlike previous works that usually handle the two problems separately, our approach aims to produce a jointly optimal estimation for both HPE and GAC via a unified inference procedure. To this end, we adopt a preprocessing step to detect potential human parts from each image (i.e., a set of "candidates") that allows us to have a manageable input space. In this way, the simultaneous inference of HPE and GAC is converted to a structured learning problem, where the inputs are the collections of candidate ensembles, the outputs are the joint labels of human parts and garment attributes, and the joint feature representation involves various cues such as pose-specific features, garment-specific features, and cross-task features that encode correlations between human parts and garment attributes. Furthermore, we explore the "strong edge" evidence around the potential human parts so as to derive more powerful representations for oriented human parts. Such evidences can be seamlessly integrated into our structured learning model as a kind of energy function, and the learning process could be performed by standard structured Support Vector Machines (SVM) algorithm. However, the joint structure of the two problems is a cyclic graph, which hinders efficient inference. To resolve this issue, we compute instead approximate optima by using an iterative procedure, where in each iteration the variables of one problem are fixed. In this way, satisfactory solutions can be efficiently computed by dynamic programming. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.
Bayesian Nonparametric Dictionary Learning for Compressed Sensing MRI
Venue: Journal TIP 2014
Year: 2014

We develop a Bayesian nonparametric model for reconstructing magnetic resonance images (MRI) from highly undersampled k-space data. We perform dictionary learning as part of the image reconstruction process. To this end, we use the beta process as a nonparametric dictionary learning prior for representing an image patch as a sparse combination of dictionary elements. The size of the dictionary and the patch-specific sparsity pattern are inferred from the data, in addition to other dictionary learning variables. Dictionary learning is performed directly on the compressed image, and so is tailored to the MRI being considered. In addition, we investigate a total variation penalty term in combination with the dictionary learning model, and show how the denoising property of dictionary learning removes dependence on regularization parameters in the noisy setting. We derive a stochastic optimization algorithm based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for the Bayesian model, and use the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for efficiently performing total variation minimization. We present empirical results on several MRI, which show that the proposed regularization framework can improve reconstruction accuracy over other methods.
Sparsity-Based Poisson Denoising With Dictionary Learning
Venue: Journal TIP 2014
Year: 2014

The problem of Poisson denoising appears in various imaging applications, such as low-light photography, medical imaging and microscopy. In cases of high SNR, several transformations exist so as to convert the Poisson noise into an additive i.i.d. Gaussian noise, for which many effective algorithms are available. However, in a low SNR regime, these transformations are significantly less accurate, and a strategy that relies directly on the true noise statistics is required. A recent work by Salmon et al. took this route, proposing a patch-based exponential image representation model based on GMM (Gaussian mixture model), leading to state-of-the-art results. In this paper, we propose to harness sparse-representation modeling to the image patches, adopting the same exponential idea. Our scheme uses a greedy pursuit with boot-strapping based stopping condition and dictionary learning within the denoising process. The reconstruction performance of the proposed scheme is competitive with leading methods in high SNR, and achieving state-of-the-art results in cases of low SNR.
Spectral Unmixing via Data-Guided Sparsity
Venue: Journal TIP 2014
Year: 2014

Hyperspectral unmixing, the process of estimating a common set of spectral bases and their corresponding composite percentages at each pixel, is an important task for hyperspectral analysis, visualization and understanding. From an unsupervised learning perspective, this problem is very challenging---both the spectral bases and their composite percentages are unknown, making the solution space too large. To reduce the solution space, many approaches have been proposed by exploiting various priors. In practice, these priors would easily lead to some unsuitable solution. This is because they are achieved by applying an identical strength of constraints to all the factors, which does not hold in practice. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel sparsity based method by learning a data-guided map to describe the individual mixed level of each pixel. Through this data-guided map, the $\ell_{p}(0<p<1)$ constraint is applied in an adaptive manner. Such implementation not only meets the practical situation, but also guides the spectral bases toward the pixels under highly sparse constraint. What's more, an elegant optimization scheme as well as its convergence proof have been provided in this paper. Extensive experiments on several datasets also demonstrate that the data-guided map is feasible, and high quality unmixing results could be obtained by our method.
Video Tracking Using Learned Hierarchical Features
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, we propose an approach to learn hierarchical features for visual object tracking. First, we offline learn features robust to diverse motion patterns from auxiliary video sequences. The hierarchical features are learned via a two-layer convolutional neural network. Embedding the temporal slowness constraint in the stacked architecture makes the learned features robust to complicated motion transformations, which is important for visual object tracking. Then, given a target video sequence, we propose a domain adaptation module to online adapt the pre-learned features according to the specific target object. The adaptation is conducted in both layers of the deep feature learning module so as to include appearance information of the specific target object. As a result, the learned hierarchical features can be robust to both complicated motion transformations and appearance changes of target objects. We integrate our feature learning algorithm into three tracking methods. Experimental results demonstrate that significant improvement can be achieved using our learned hierarchical features, especially on video sequences with complicated motion transformations.
Depth Reconstruction From Sparse Samples Representation Algorithm and Sampling
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

The rapid development of 3D technology and computer vision applications have motivated a thrust of methodologies for depth acquisition and estimation. However, most existing hardware and software methods have limited performance due to poor depth precision, low resolution and high computational cost. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient method to recover dense depth maps from sparse measurements. We make three contributions. First, we provide empirical evidence that depth maps can be encoded much more sparsely than natural images by using common dictionaries such as wavelets and contourlets. We also show that a combined wavelet-contourlet dictionary achieves better performance than using either dictionary alone. Second, we propose an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to achieve fast reconstruction. A multi-scale warm start procedure is proposed to speed up the convergence. Third, we propose a two-stage randomized sampling scheme to optimally choose the sampling locations, thus maximizing the reconstruction performance for any given sampling budget. Experimental results show that the proposed method produces high quality dense depth estimates, and is robust to noisy measurements. Applications to real data in stereo matching are demonstrated.
A Comparison of Dense Region Detectors for Image Search and Fine-Grained Classification
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

We consider a pipeline for image classification or search based on coding approaches like Bag of Words or Fisher vectors. In this context, the most common approach is to extract the image patches regularly in a dense manner on several scales. This paper proposes and evaluates alternative choices to extract patches densely. Beyond simple strategies derived from regular interest region detectors, we propose approaches based on super-pixels, edges, and a bank of Zernike filters used as detectors. The different approaches are evaluated on recent image retrieval and fine-grain classification benchmarks. Our results show that the regular dense detector is outperformed by other methods in most situations, leading us to improve the state of the art in comparable setups on standard retrieval and fined-grain benchmarks. As a byproduct of our study, we show that existing methods for blob and super-pixel extraction achieve high accuracy if the patches are extracted along the edges and not around the detected regions.
Attentive Monitoring of Multiple Video Streams Driven by a Bayesian Foraging Strategy
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper we shall consider the problem of deploying attention to subsets of the video streams for collating the most relevant data and information of interest related to a given task. We formalize this monitoring problem as a foraging problem. We propose a probabilistic framework to model observer's attentive behavior as the behavior of a forager. The forager, moment to moment, focuses its attention on the most informative stream/camera, detects interesting objects or activities, or switches to a more profitable stream. The approach proposed here is suitable to be exploited for multi-stream video summarization. Meanwhile, it can serve as a preliminary step for more sophisticated video surveillance, e.g. activity and behavior analysis. Experimental results achieved on the UCR Videoweb Activities Dataset, a publicly available dataset, are presented to illustrate the utility of the proposed technique.
PISA Pixelwise Image Saliency by Aggregating Complementary Appearance Contrast Measures With Edge-Preserving Coherence
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

Driven by recent vision and graphics applications such as image segmentation and object recognition, computing pixel-accurate saliency values to uniformly highlight foreground objects becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we propose a unified framework called PISA, which stands for Pixelwise Image Saliency Aggregating various bottom-up cues and priors. It generates spatially coherent yet detail-preserving, pixel-accurate and fine-grained saliency, and overcomes the limitations of previous methods which use homogeneous superpixel-based and color only treatment. PISA aggregates multiple saliency cues in a global context such as complementary color and structure contrast measures with their spatial priors in the image domain. The saliency confidence is further jointly modeled with a neighborhood consistence constraint into an energy minimization formulation, in which each pixel will be evaluated with multiple hypothetical saliency levels. Instead of using global discrete optimization methods, we employ the cost-volume filtering technique to solve our formulation, assigning the saliency levels smoothly while preserving the edge-aware structure details. In addition, a faster version of PISA is developed using a gradient-driven image sub-sampling strategy to greatly improve the runtime efficiency while keeping comparable detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on a number of public datasets suggest that PISA convincingly outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, with this work we also create a new dataset containing $800$ commodity images for evaluating saliency detection. The dataset and source code of PISA can be downloaded at http://vision.sysu.edu.cn/project/PISA/
Inner and Inter Label Propagation Salient Object Detection in the Wild
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

In this paper, we propose a novel label propagation based method for saliency detection. A key observation is that saliency in an image can be estimated by propagating the labels extracted from the most certain background and object regions. For most natural images, some boundary superpixels serve as the background labels and the saliency of other superpixels are determined by ranking their similarities to the boundary labels based on an inner propagation scheme. For images of complex scenes, we further deploy a 3-cue-center-biased objectness measure to pick out and propagate foreground labels. A co-transduction algorithm is devised to fuse both boundary and objectness labels based on an inter propagation scheme. The compactness criterion decides whether the incorporation of objectness labels is necessary, thus greatly enhancing computational efficiency. Results on five benchmark datasets with pixel-wise accurate annotations show that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with the newest state-of-the-arts in terms of different evaluation metrics.
Removing Camera Shake via Weighted Fourier Burst Accumulation
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

Numerous recent approaches attempt to remove image blur due to camera shake, either with one or multiple input images, by explicitly solving an inverse and inherently ill-posed deconvolution problem. If the photographer takes a burst of images, a modality available in virtually all modern digital cameras, we show that it is possible to combine them to get a clean sharp version. This is done without explicitly solving any blur estimation and subsequent inverse problem. The proposed algorithm is strikingly simple: it performs a weighted average in the Fourier domain, with weights depending on the Fourier spectrum magnitude. The method can be seen as a generalization of the align and average procedure, with a weighted average, motivated by hand-shake physiology and theoretically supported, taking place in the Fourier domain. The method's rationale is that camera shake has a random nature and therefore each image in the burst is generally blurred differently. Experiments with real camera data, and extensive comparisons, show that the proposed Fourier Burst Accumulation (FBA) algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results an order of magnitude faster, with simplicity for on-board implementation on camera phones. Finally, we also present experiments in real high dynamic range (HDR) scenes, showing how the method can be straightforwardly extended to HDR photography.
Coding Local and Global Binary Visual Features Extracted From Video Sequences
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

Binary local features represent an effective alternative to real-valued descriptors, leading to comparable results for many visual analysis tasks, while being characterized by significantly lower computational complexity and memory requirements. When dealing with large collections, a more compact representation based on global features is often preferred, which can be obtained from local features by means of, e.g., the Bag-of-Visual-Word (BoVW) model. Several applications, including for example visual sensor networks and mobile augmented reality, require visual features to be transmitted over a bandwidth-limited network, thus calling for coding techniques that aim at reducing the required bit budget, while attaining a target level of efficiency. In this paper we investigate a coding scheme tailored to both local and global binary features, which aims at exploiting both spatial and temporal redundancy by means of intra- and inter-frame coding. In this respect, the proposed coding scheme can be conveniently adopted to support the Analyze-Then-Compress (ATC) paradigm. That is, visual features are extracted from the acquired content, encoded at remote nodes, and finally transmitted to a central controller that performs visual analysis. This is in contrast with the traditional approach, in which visual content is acquired at a node, compressed and then sent to a central unit for further processing, according to the Compress-Then-Analyze (CTA) paradigm. In this paper we experimentally compare ATC and CTA by means of rate-efficiency curves in the context of two different visual analysis tasks: homography estimation and content-based retrieval. Our results show that the novel ATC paradigm based on the proposed coding primitives can be competitive with CTA, especially in bandwidth limited scenarios.
Fast Fusion of Multi-Band Images Based on Solving a Sylvester Equation
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

This paper proposes a fast multi-band image fusion algorithm, which combines a high-spatial low-spectral resolution image and a low-spatial high-spectral resolution image. The well admitted forward model is explored to form the likelihoods of the observations. Maximizing the likelihoods leads to solving a Sylvester equation. By exploiting the properties of the circulant and downsampling matrices associated with the fusion problem, a closed-form solution for the corresponding Sylvester equation is obtained explicitly, getting rid of any iterative update step. Coupled with the alternating direction method of multipliers and the block coordinate descent method, the proposed algorithm can be easily generalized to incorporate prior information for the fusion problem, allowing a Bayesian estimator. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves the same performance as existing algorithms with the advantage of significantly decreasing the computational complexity of these algorithms.
Learning Super-Resolution Jointly From External and Internal Examples
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

Single image super-resolution (SR) aims to estimate a high-resolution (HR) image from a lowresolution (LR) input. Image priors are commonly learned to regularize the otherwise seriously ill-posed SR problem, either using external LR-HR pairs or internal similar patterns. We propose joint SR to adaptively combine the advantages of both external and internal SR methods. We define two loss functions using sparse coding based external examples, and epitomic matching based on internal examples, as well as a corresponding adaptive weight to automatically balance their contributions according to their reconstruction errors. Extensive SR results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over the existing state-of-the-art methods, and is also verified by our subjective evaluation study.
Local Multi-Grouped Binary Descriptor With Ring-Based Pooling Configuration and Optimization
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

Local binary descriptors are attracting increasingly attention due to their great advantages in computational speed, which are able to achieve real-time performance in numerous image/vision applications. Various methods have been proposed to learn data-dependent binary descriptors. However, most existing binary descriptors aim overly at computational simplicity at the expense of significant information loss which causes ambiguity in similarity measure using Hamming distance. In this paper, by considering multiple features might share complementary information, we present a novel local binary descriptor, referred as Ring-based Multi-Grouped Descriptor (RMGD), to successfully bridge the performance gap between current binary and floated-point descriptors. Our contributions are two-fold. Firstly, we introduce a new pooling configuration based on spatial ring-region sampling, allowing for involving binary tests on the full set of pairwise regions with different shapes, scales and distances. This leads to a more meaningful description than existing methods which normally apply a limited set of pooling configurations. Then, an extended Adaboost is proposed for efficient bit selection by emphasizing high variance and low correlation, achieving a highly compact representation. Secondly, the RMGD is computed from multiple image properties where binary strings are extracted. We cast multi-grouped features integration as rankSVM or sparse SVM learning problem, so that different features can compensate strongly for each other, which is the key to discriminativeness and robustness. The performance of RMGD was evaluated on a number of publicly available benchmarks, where the RMGD outperforms the state-of-the-art binary descriptors significantly.
Dot-Diffused Halftoning With Improved Homogeneity
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

Compared to the error diffusion, dot diffusion provides an additional pixel-level parallelism for digital halftoning. However, even though its periodic and blocking artifacts had been eased by previous works, it was still far from satisfactory in terms of the blue noise spectrum perspective. In this work, we strengthen the relationship among the pixel locations of the same processing order by an iterative halftoning method, and the results demonstrate a significant improvement. Moreover, a new approach of deriving the averaged power spectrum density (APSD) is proposed to avoid the regular sampling of the well-known Bartlett's procedure which inaccurately presents the halftone periodicity of certain halftoning techniques with parallelism. As a result, the proposed dot diffusion is substantially superior to the state-of-the-art parallel halftoning methods in terms of visual quality and artifact-free property, and competitive runtime to the theoretical fastest ordered dithering is offered simultaneously.
Efficient Nonnegative Tucker Decompositions Algorithms and Uniqueness
Venue: Journal TIP 2015
Year: 2015

Nonnegative Tucker decomposition (NTD) is a powerful tool for the extraction of nonnegative parts-based and physically meaningful latent components from high-dimensional tensor data while preserving the natural multilinear structure of data. However, as the data tensor often has multiple modes and is large-scale, existing NTD algorithms suffer from a very high computational complexity in terms of both storage and computation time, which has been one major obstacle for practical applications of NTD. To overcome these disadvantages, we show how low (multilinear) rank approximation (LRA) of tensors is able to significantly simplify the computation of the gradients of the cost function, upon which a family of efficient first-order NTD algorithms are developed. Besides dramatically reducing the storage complexity and running time, the new algorithms are quite flexible and robust to noise because any well-established LRA approaches can be applied. We also show how nonnegativity incorporating sparsity substantially improves the uniqueness property and partially alleviates the curse of dimensionality of the Tucker decompositions. Simulation results on synthetic and real-world data justify the validity and high efficiency of the proposed NTD algorithms.