OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
View-Volume Network for Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce a View-Volume convolutional neural network (VVNet) for inferring the occupancy and semantic labels of a volumetric 3D scene from a single depth image. The VVNet concatenates a 2D view CNN and a 3D volume CNN with a differentiable projection layer. Given a single RGBD image, our method extracts the detailed geometric features from the input depth image with a 2D view CNN and then projects the features into a 3D volume according to the input depth map via a projection layer. After that, we learn the 3D context information of the scene with a 3D volume CNN for computing the result volumetric occupancy and semantic labels. With combined 2D and 3D representations, the VVNet efficiently reduces the computational cost, enables feature extraction from multi-channel high resolution inputs, and thus significantly improves the result accuracy. We validate our method and demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness on both synthetic SUNCG and real NYU dataset.
Deep CNN Denoiser and Multi-layer Neighbor Component Embedding for Face Hallucination
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Most of the current face hallucination methods, whether they are shallow learning-based or deep learning-based, all try to learn a relationship model between Low-Resolution (LR) and High-Resolution (HR) spaces with the help of a training set. They mainly focus on modeling image prior through either model-based optimization or discriminative inference learning. However, when the input LR face is tiny, the learned prior knowledge is no longer effective and their performance will drop sharply. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a general face hallucination method that can integrate model-based optimization and discriminative inference. In particular, to exploit the model based prior, the Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) denoiser prior is plugged into the super-resolution optimization model with the aid of image-adaptive Laplacian regularization. Additionally, we further develop a high-frequency details compensation method by dividing the face image to facial components and performing face hallucination in a multi-layer neighbor embedding manner. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve promising super-resolution results for tiny input LR faces.
Co-occurrence Feature Learning from Skeleton Data for Action Recognition and Detection with Hierarchical Aggregation
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Skeleton-based human action recognition has recently drawn increasing attentions with the availability of large-scale skeleton datasets. The most crucial factors for this task lie in two aspects: the intra-frame representation for joint co-occurrences and the inter-frame representation for skeletons' temporal evolutions. In this paper we propose an end-to-end convolutional co-occurrence feature learning framework. The co-occurrence features are learned with a hierarchical methodology, in which different levels of contextual information are aggregated gradually. Firstly point-level information of each joint is encoded independently. Then they are assembled into semantic representation in both spatial and temporal domains. Specifically, we introduce a global spatial aggregation scheme, which is able to learn superior joint co-occurrence features over local aggregation. Besides, raw skeleton coordinates as well as their temporal difference are integrated with a two-stream paradigm. Experiments show that our approach consistently outperforms other state-of-the-arts on action recognition and detection benchmarks like NTU RGB+D, SBU Kinect Interaction and PKU-MMD.
When Image Denoising Meets High-Level Vision Tasks: A Deep Learning Approach
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Conventionally, image denoising and high-level vision tasks are handled separately in computer vision. In this paper, we cope with the two jointly and explore the mutual influence between them. First we propose a convolutional neural network for image denoising which achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Second we propose a deep neural network solution that cascades two modules for image denoising and various high-level tasks, respectively, and use the joint loss for updating only the denoising network via back-propagation. We demonstrate that on one hand, the proposed denoiser has the generality to overcome the performance degradation of different high-level vision tasks. On the other hand, with the guidance of high-level vision information, the denoising network can generate more visually appealing results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work investigating the benefit of exploiting image semantics simultaneously for image denoising and high-level vision tasks via deep learning. The code is available online https://github.com/Ding-Liu/DeepDenoising.
Crowd Counting using Deep Recurrent Spatial-Aware Network
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Crowd counting from unconstrained scene images is a crucial task in many real-world applications like urban surveillance and management, but it is greatly challenged by the camera's perspective that causes huge appearance variations in people's scales and rotations. Conventional methods address such challenges by resorting to fixed multi-scale architectures that are often unable to cover the largely varied scales while ignoring the rotation variations. In this paper, we propose a unified neural network framework, named Deep Recurrent Spatial-Aware Network, which adaptively addresses the two issues in a learnable spatial transform module with a region-wise refinement process. Specifically, our framework incorporates a Recurrent Spatial-Aware Refinement (RSAR) module iteratively conducting two components: i) a Spatial Transformer Network that dynamically locates an attentional region from the crowd density map and transforms it to the suitable scale and rotation for optimal crowd estimation; ii) a Local Refinement Network that refines the density map of the attended region with residual learning. Extensive experiments on four challenging benchmarks show the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, comparing with the existing best-performing methods, we achieve an improvement of 12% on the largest dataset WorldExpo'10 and 22.8% on the most challenging dataset UCF_CC_50.
MEGAN: Mixture of Experts of Generative Adversarial Networks for Multimodal Image Generation
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown promising performance in generating realistic images. However, they often struggle in learning complex underlying modalities in a given dataset, resulting in poor-quality generated images. To mitigate this problem, we present a novel approach called mixture of experts GAN (MEGAN), an ensemble approach of multiple generator networks. Each generator network in MEGAN specializes in generating images with a particular subset of modalities, e.g., an image class. Instead of incorporating a separate step of handcrafted clustering of multiple modalities, our proposed model is trained through an end-to-end learning of multiple generators via gating networks, which is responsible for choosing the appropriate generator network for a given condition. We adopt the categorical reparameterization trick for a categorical decision to be made in selecting a generator while maintaining the flow of the gradients. We demonstrate that individual generators learn different and salient subparts of the data and achieve a multiscale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) score of 0.2470 for CelebA and a competitive unsupervised inception score of 8.33 in CIFAR-10.
Cross-media Multi-level Alignment with Relation Attention Network
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

With the rapid growth of multimedia data, such as image and text, it is a highly challenging problem to effectively correlate and retrieve the data of different media types. Naturally, when correlating an image with textual description, people focus on not only the alignment between discriminative image regions and key words, but also the relations lying in the visual and textual context. Relation understanding is essential for cross-media correlation learning, which is ignored by prior cross-media retrieval works. To address the above issue, we propose Cross-media Relation Attention Network (CRAN) with multi-level alignment. First, we propose visual-language relation attention model to explore both fine-grained patches and their relations of different media types. We aim to not only exploit cross-media fine-grained local information, but also capture the intrinsic relation information, which can provide complementary hints for correlation learning. Second, we propose cross-media multi-level alignment to explore global, local and relation alignments across different media types, which can mutually boost to learn more precise cross-media correlation. We conduct experiments on 2 cross-media datasets, and compare with 10 state-of-the-art methods to verify the effectiveness of proposed approach.
Learning to Write Stylized Chinese Characters by Reading a Handful of Examples
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Automatically writing stylized Chinese characters is an attractive yet challenging task due to its wide applicabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Style-Aware Variational Auto-Encoder (SA-VAE) to flexibly generate Chinese characters. Specifically, we propose to capture the different characteristics of a Chinese character by disentangling the latent features into content-related and style-related components. Considering of the complex shapes and structures, we incorporate the structure information as prior knowledge into our framework to guide the generation. Our framework shows a powerful one-shot/low-shot generalization ability by inferring the style component given a character with unseen style. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to learn to write new-style Chinese characters by observing only one or a few examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in generating different stylized Chinese characters by fusing the feature vectors corresponding to different contents and styles, which is of significant importance in real-world applications.
CR-GAN: Learning Complete Representations for Multi-view Generation
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Generating multi-view images from a single-view input is an essential yet challenging problem. It has broad applications in vision, graphics, and robotics. Our study indicates that the widely-used generative adversarial network (GAN) may learn "incomplete" representations due to the single-pathway framework: an encoder-decoder network followed by a discriminator network. We propose CR-GAN to address this problem. In addition to the single reconstruction path, we introduce a generation sideway to maintain the completeness of the learned embedding space. The two learning pathways collaborate and compete in a parameter-sharing manner, yielding considerably improved generalization ability to "unseen" dataset. More importantly, the two-pathway framework makes it possible to combine both labeled and unlabeled data for self-supervised learning, which further enriches the embedding space for realistic generations. The experimental results prove that CR-GAN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially when generating from "unseen" inputs in wild conditions.
Collaborative Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Weakly supervised object detection has recently received much attention, since it only requires image-level labels instead of the bounding-box labels consumed in strongly supervised learning. Nevertheless, the save in labeling expense is usually at the cost of model accuracy. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective weakly supervised collaborative learning framework to resolve this problem, which trains a weakly supervised learner and a strongly supervised learner jointly by enforcing partial feature sharing and prediction consistency. For object detection, taking WSDDN-like architecture as weakly supervised detector sub-network and Faster-RCNN-like architecture as strongly supervised detector sub-network, we propose an end-to-end Weakly Supervised Collaborative Detection Network. As there is no strong supervision available to train the Faster-RCNN-like sub-network, a new prediction consistency loss is defined to enforce consistency of predictions between the two sub-networks as well as within the Faster-RCNN-like sub-networks. At the same time, the two detectors are designed to partially share features to further guarantee the model consistency at perceptual level. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 data sets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
DRPose3D: Depth Ranking in 3D Human Pose Estimation
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a two-stage depth ranking based method (DRPose3D) to tackle the problem of 3D human pose estimation. Instead of accurate 3D positions, the depth ranking can be identified by human intuitively and learned using the deep neural network more easily by solving classification problems. Moreover, depth ranking contains rich 3D information. It prevents the 2D-to-3D pose regression in two-stage methods from being ill-posed. In our method, firstly, we design a Pairwise Ranking Convolutional Neural Network (PRCNN) to extract depth rankings of human joints from images. Secondly, a coarse-to-fine 3D Pose Network(DPNet) is proposed to estimate 3D poses from both depth rankings and 2D human joint locations. Additionally, to improve the generality of our model, we introduce a statistical method to augment depth rankings. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the Human3.6M benchmark for all three testing protocols, indicating that depth ranking is an essential geometric feature which can be learned to improve the 3D pose estimation.
Ensemble Soft-Margin Softmax Loss for Image Classification
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Softmax loss is arguably one of the most popular losses to train CNN models for image classification. However, recent works have exposed its limitation on feature discriminability. This paper casts a new viewpoint on the weakness of softmax loss. On the one hand, the CNN features learned using the softmax loss are often inadequately discriminative. We hence introduce a soft-margin softmax function to explicitly encourage the discrimination between different classes. On the other hand, the learned classifier of softmax loss is weak. We propose to assemble multiple these weak classifiers to a strong one, inspired by the recognition that the diversity among weak classifiers is critical to a good ensemble. To achieve the diversity, we adopt the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC). Considering these two aspects in one framework, we design a novel loss, named as Ensemble soft-Margin Softmax (EM-Softmax). Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets are conducted to show the superiority of our design over the baseline softmax loss and several state-of-the-art alternatives.
Deep Reasoning with Knowledge Graph for Social Relationship Understanding
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Social relationships (e.g., friends, couple etc.) form the basis of the social network in our daily life. Automatically interpreting such relationships bears a great potential for the intelligent systems to understand human behavior in depth and to better interact with people at a social level. Human beings interpret the social relationships within a group not only based on the people alone, and the interplay between such social relationships and the contextual information around the people also plays a significant role. However, these additional cues are largely overlooked by the previous studies. We found that the interplay between these two factors can be effectively modeled by a novel structured knowledge graph with proper message propagation and attention. And this structured knowledge can be efficiently integrated into the deep neural network architecture to promote social relationship understanding by an end-to-end trainable Graph Reasoning Model (GRM), in which a propagation mechanism is learned to propagate node message through the graph to explore the interaction between persons of interest and the contextual objects. Meanwhile, a graph attentional mechanism is introduced to explicitly reason about the discriminative objects to promote recognition. Extensive experiments on the public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over the existing leading competitors.
Annotation-Free and One-Shot Learning for Instance Segmentation of Homogeneous Object Clusters
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

We propose a novel approach for instance segmen- tation given an image of homogeneous object clus- ter (HOC). Our learning approach is one-shot be- cause a single video of an object instance is cap- tured and it requires no human annotation. Our in- tuition is that images of homogeneous objects can be effectively synthesized based on structure and illumination priors derived from real images. A novel solver is proposed that iteratively maximizes our structured likelihood to generate realistic im- ages of HOC. Illumination transformation scheme is applied to make the real and synthetic images share the same illumination condition. Extensive experiments and comparisons are performed to ver- ify our method. We build a dataset consisting of pixel-level annotated images of HOC. The dataset and code will be published with the paper.
IncepText: A New Inception-Text Module with Deformable PSROI Pooling for Multi-Oriented Scene Text Detection
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Incidental scene text detection, especially for multi-oriented text regions, is one of the most challenging tasks in many computer vision applications. Different from the common object detection task, scene text often suffers from a large variance of aspect ratio, scale, and orientation. To solve this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end scene text detector IncepText from an instance-aware segmentation perspective. We design a novel Inception-Text module and introduce deformable PSROI pooling to deal with multi-oriented text detection. Extensive experiments on ICDAR2015, RCTW-17, and MSRA-TD500 datasets demonstrate our method's superiority in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Our proposed method achieves 1st place result on ICDAR2015 challenge and the state-of-the-art performance on other datasets. Moreover, we have released our implementation as an OCR product which is available for public access.
Adversarial Attribute-Image Person Re-identification
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

While attributes have been widely used for person re-identification (Re-ID) which aims at matching the same person images across disjoint camera views, they are used either as extra features or for performing multi-task learning to assist the image-image matching task. However, how to find a set of person images according to a given attribute description, which is very practical in many surveillance applications, remains a rarely investigated cross-modality matching problem in person Re-ID. In this work, we present this challenge and formulate this task as a joint space learning problem. By imposing an attribute-guided attention mechanism for images and a semantic consistent adversary strategy for attributes, each modality, i.e., images and attributes, successfully learns semantically correlated concepts under the guidance of the other. We conducted extensive experiments on three attribute datasets and demonstrated that the proposed joint space learning method is so far the most effective method for the attribute-image cross-modality person Re-ID problem.
Exploiting Images for Video Recognition with Hierarchical Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Existing deep learning methods of video recognition usually require a large number of labeled videos for training. But for a new task, videos are often unlabeled and it is also time-consuming and labor-intensive to annotate them. Instead of human annotation, we try to make use of existing fully labeled images to help recognize those videos. However, due to the problem of domain shifts and heterogeneous feature representations, the performance of classifiers trained on images may be dramatically degraded for video recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Hierarchical Generative Adversarial Networks (HiGAN), to enhance recognition in videos (i.e., target domain) by transferring knowledge from images (i.e., source domain). The HiGAN model consists of a \emph{low-level} conditional GAN and a \emph{high-level} conditional GAN. By taking advantage of these two-level adversarial learning, our method is capable of learning a domain-invariant feature representation of source images and target videos. Comprehensive experiments on two challenging video recognition datasets (i.e. UCF101 and HMDB51) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method when compared with the existing state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.
Rethinking Diversified and Discriminative Proposal Generation for Visual Grounding
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Visual grounding aims to localize an object in an image referred to by a textual query phrase. Various visual grounding approaches have been proposed, and the problem can be modularized into a general framework: proposal generation, multi-modal feature representation, and proposal ranking. Of these three modules, most existing approaches focus on the latter two, with the importance of proposal generation generally neglected. In this paper, we rethink the problem of what properties make a good proposal generator. We introduce the diversity and discrimination simultaneously when generating proposals, and in doing so propose Diversified and Discriminative Proposal Networks model (DDPN). Based on the proposals generated by DDPN, we propose a high performance baseline model for visual grounding and evaluate it on four benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our model delivers significant improvements on all the tested data-sets (e.g., 18.8\% improvement on ReferItGame and 8.2\% improvement on Flickr30k Entities over the existing state-of-the-arts respectively)
Visual Data Synthesis via GAN for Zero-Shot Video Classification
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2018
Year: 2018

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) in video classification is a promising research direction, which aims to tackle the challenge from explosive growth of video categories. Most existing methods exploit seen-to-unseen correlation via learning a projection between visual and semantic spaces. However, such projection-based paradigms cannot fully utilize the discriminative information implied in data distribution, and commonly suffer from the information degradation issue caused by "heterogeneity gap". In this paper, we propose a visual data synthesis framework via GAN to address these problems. Specifically, both semantic knowledge and visual distribution are leveraged to synthesize video feature of unseen categories, and ZSL can be turned into typical supervised problem with the synthetic features. First, we propose multi-level semantic inference to boost video feature synthesis, which captures the discriminative information implied in joint visual-semantic distribution via feature-level and label-level semantic inference. Second, we propose Matching-aware Mutual Information Correlation to overcome information degradation issue, which captures seen-to-unseen correlation in matched and mismatched visual-semantic pairs by mutual information, providing the zero-shot synthesis procedure with robust guidance signals. Experimental results on four video datasets demonstrate that our approach can improve the zero-shot video classification performance significantly.