Fast Deep Matting for Portrait Animation on Mobile Phone

Image matting plays an important role in image and video editing. However, the formulation of image matting is inherently ill-posed. Traditional methods usually employ interaction to deal with the image matting problem with trimaps and strokes, and cannot run on the mobile phone in real-time. In this paper, we propose a real-time automatic deep matting approach for mobile devices. By leveraging the densely connected blocks and the dilated convolution, a light full convolutional network is designed to predict a coarse binary mask for portrait image. And a feathering block, which is edge-preserving and matting adaptive, is further developed to learn the guided filter and transform the binary mask into alpha matte. Finally, an automatic portrait animation system based on fast deep matting is built on mobile devices, which does not need any interaction and can realize real-time matting with 15 fps. The experiments show that the proposed approach achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art matting solvers.

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title: YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger
abstract: We introduce YOLO9000, a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system that can detect over 9000 object categories. First we propose various improvements to the YOLO detection method, both novel and drawn from prior work. The improved model, YOLOv2, is state-of-the-art on standard detection tasks like PASCAL VOC and COCO. Using a novel, multi-scale training method the same YOLOv2 model can run at varying sizes, offering an easy tradeoff between speed and accuracy. At 67 FPS, YOLOv2 gets 76.8 mAP on VOC 2007. At 40 FPS, YOLOv2 gets 78.6 mAP, outperforming state-of-the-art methods like Faster RCNN with ResNet and SSD while still running significantly faster. Finally we propose a method to jointly train on object detection and classification. Using this method we train YOLO9000 simultaneously on the COCO detection dataset and the ImageNet classification dataset. Our joint training allows YOLO9000 to predict detections for object classes that dont have labelled detection data. We validate our approach on the ImageNet detection task. YOLO9000 gets 19.7 mAP on the ImageNet detection validation set despite only having detection data for 44 of the 200 classes. On the 156 classes not in COCO, YOLO9000 gets 16.0 mAP. YOLO9000 predicts detections for more than 9000 different object categories, all in real-time.

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abstract: State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet and Fast R-CNN have reduced the running time of these detection networks, exposing region proposal computation as a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. An RPN is a fully convolutional network that simultaneously predicts object bounds and objectness scores at each position. The RPN is trained end-to-end to generate high-quality region proposals, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. We further merge RPN and Fast R-CNN into a single network by sharing their convolutional features---using the recently popular terminology of neural networks with 'attention' mechanisms, the RPN component tells the unified network where to look. For the very deep VGG-16 model, our detection system has a frame rate of 5fps (including all steps) on a GPU, while achieving state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007, 2012, and MS COCO datasets with only 300 proposals per image. In ILSVRC and COCO 2015 competitions, Faster R-CNN and RPN are the foundations of the 1st-place winning entries in several tracks. Code has been made publicly available

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abstract: An ideal thumbnail generator should effectively condense unimportant regions and keep the important content undeformed, completed, and at a proper scale, i.e., accuracy, completeness, and sufficiency. Each retargeting method has its own advantage for resizing arbitrary images. However, they often ignore the completeness and sufficiency for information presentation in thumbnails. In this paper, we formulate thumbnail generation as an image content condensation problem and propose a unified grid optimization framework to fuse multiple operators. From the view of accuracy, completeness, and sufficiency for information presentation, we exploit complementary relationships among three condensation operators and fuse them into a unified grid-based convex programming problem, which could be solved simultaneously and efficiently through numerical optimization. Besides warping energy to preserve the geometric structure of important objects, we put forward two grid-based energy terms to keep the completeness of important objects and retain them at a proper size. Finally, an adaptive procedure is proposed to dynamically adjust the contribution of loss functions for achieving optimal content condensation. Both qualitative and quantitative comparison results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an excellent tradeoff among accuracy, completeness, and sufficiency of information preservation. The experimental results show that our approach is obviously superior to the state-of-the-art techniques.

title: Finding Tiny Faces
abstract: Though tremendous strides have been made in object recognition, one of the remaining open challenges is detecting small objects. We explore three aspects of the problem in the context of finding small faces: the role of scale invariance, image resolution, and contextual reasoning. While most recognition approaches aim to be scale-invariant, the cues for recognizing a 3px tall face are fundamentally different than those for recognizing a 300px tall face. We take a different approach and train separate detectors for different scales. To maintain efficiency, detectors are trained in a multi-task fashion: they make use of features extracted from multiple layers of single (deep) feature hierarchy. While training detectors for large objects is straightforward, the crucial challenge remains training detectors for small objects. We show that context is crucial, and define templates that make use of massively-large receptive fields (where 99% of the template extends beyond the object of interest). Finally, we explore the role of scale in pre-trained deep networks, providing ways to extrapolate networks tuned for limited scales to rather extreme ranges. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on massively-benchmarked face datasets (FDDB and WIDER FACE). In particular, when compared to prior art on WIDER FACE, our results reduce error by a factor of 2 (our models produce an AP of 82% while prior art ranges from 29-64%).

title: Joint Training of Cascaded CNN for Face Detection
abstract: Cascade has been widely used in face detection, where classifier with low computation cost can be firstly used to shrink most of the background while keeping the recall. The cascade in detection is popularized by seminal Viola-Jones framework and then widely used in other pipelines, such as DPM and CNN. However, to our best knowledge, most of the previous detection methods use cascade in a greedy manner, where previous stages in cascade are fixed when training a new stage. So optimizations of different CNNs are isolated. In this paper, we propose joint training to achieve end-to-end optimization for CNN cascade. We show that the back propagation algorithm used in training CNN can be naturally used in training CNN cascade. We present how jointly training can be conducted on naive CNN cascade and more sophisticated region proposal network (RPN) and fast R-CNN. Experiments on face detection benchmarks verify the advantages of the joint training.

title: FaceNet: A unified embedding for face recognition and clustering
abstract: Despite significant recent advances in the field of face recognition [10, 14, 15, 17], implementing face verification and recognition efficiently at scale presents serious challenges to current approaches. In this paper we present a system, called FaceNet, that directly learns a mapping from face images to a compact Euclidean space where distances directly correspond to a measure offace similarity. Once this space has been produced, tasks such as face recognition, verification and clustering can be easily implemented using standard techniques with FaceNet embeddings asfeature vectors. Our method uses a deep convolutional network trained to directly optimize the embedding itself, rather than an intermediate bottleneck layer as in previous deep learning approaches. To train, we use triplets of roughly aligned matching / non-matching face patches generated using a novel online triplet mining method. The benefit of our approach is much greater representational efficiency: we achieve state-of-the-artface recognition performance using only 128-bytes perface. On the widely used Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, our system achieves a new record accuracy of 99.63%. On YouTube Faces DB it achieves 95.12%. Our system cuts the error rate in comparison to the best published result  by 30% on both datasets.