No Arabic abstract
The research of visual signal compression has a long history. Fueled by deep learning, exciting progress has been made recently. Despite achieving better compression performance, existing end-to-end compression algorithms are still designed towards better signal quality in terms of rate-distortion optimization. In this paper, we show that the design and optimization of network architecture could be further improved for compression towards machine vision. We propose an inverted bottleneck structure for end-to-end compression towards machine vision, which specifically accounts for efficient representation of the semantic information. Moreover, we quest the capability of optimization by incorporating the analytics accuracy into the optimization process, and the optimality is further explored with generalized rate-accuracy optimization in an iterative manner. We use object detection as a showcase for end-to-end compression towards machine vision, and extensive experiments show that the proposed scheme achieves significant BD-rate savings in terms of analysis performance. Moreover, the promise of the scheme is also demonstrated with strong generalization capability towards other machine vision tasks, due to the enabling of signal-level reconstruction.
We propose an end-to-end trainable network that can simultaneously detect and recognize text of arbitrary shape, making substantial progress on the open problem of reading scene text of irregular shape. We formulate arbitrary shape text detection as an instance segmentation problem; an attention model is then used to decode the textual content of each irregularly shaped text region without rectification. To extract useful irregularly shaped text instance features from image scale features, we propose a simple yet effective RoI masking step. Additionally, we show that predictions from an existing multi-step OCR engine can be leveraged as partially labeled training data, which leads to significant improvements in both the detection and recognition accuracy of our model. Our method surpasses the state-of-the-art for end-to-end recognition tasks on the ICDAR15 (straight) benchmark by 4.6%, and on the Total-Text (curved) benchmark by more than 16%.
Multi-view stereopsis (MVS) tries to recover the 3D model from 2D images. As the observations become sparser, the significant 3D information loss makes the MVS problem more challenging. Instead of only focusing on densely sampled conditions, we investigate sparse-MVS with large baseline angles since the sparser sensation is more practical and more cost-efficient. By investigating various observation sparsities, we show that the classical depth-fusion pipeline becomes powerless for the case with a larger baseline angle that worsens the photo-consistency check. As another line of the solution, we present SurfaceNet+, a volumetric method to handle the incompleteness and the inaccuracy problems induced by a very sparse MVS setup. Specifically, the former problem is handled by a novel volume-wise view selection approach. It owns superiority in selecting valid views while discarding invalid occluded views by considering the geometric prior. Furthermore, the latter problem is handled via a multi-scale strategy that consequently refines the recovered geometry around the region with the repeating pattern. The experiments demonstrate the tremendous performance gap between SurfaceNet+ and state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision and recall. Under the extreme sparse-MVS settings in two datasets, where existing methods can only return very few points, SurfaceNet+ still works as well as in the dense MVS setting. The benchmark and the implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/mjiUST/SurfaceNet-plus.
Search space design is very critical to neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms. We propose a fine-grained search space comprised of atomic blocks, a minimal search unit that is much smaller than the ones used in recent NAS algorithms. This search space allows a mix of operations by composing different types of atomic blocks, while the search space in previous methods only allows homogeneous operations. Based on this search space, we propose a resource-aware architecture search framework which automatically assigns the computational resources (e.g., output channel numbers) for each operation by jointly considering the performance and the computational cost. In addition, to accelerate the search process, we propose a dynamic network shrinkage technique which prunes the atomic blocks with negligible influence on outputs on the fly. Instead of a search-and-retrain two-stage paradigm, our method simultaneously searches and trains the target architecture. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under several FLOPs configurations on ImageNet with a small searching cost. We open our entire codebase at: https://github.com/meijieru/AtomNAS.
Both images and music can convey rich semantics and are widely used to induce specific emotions. Matching images and music with similar emotions might help to make emotion perceptions more vivid and stronger. Existing emotion-based image and music matching methods either employ limited categorical emotion states which cannot well reflect the complexity and subtlety of emotions, or train the matching model using an impractical multi-stage pipeline. In this paper, we study end-to-end matching between image and music based on emotions in the continuous valence-arousal (VA) space. First, we construct a large-scale dataset, termed Image-Music-Emotion-Matching-Net (IMEMNet), with over 140K image-music pairs. Second, we propose cross-modal deep continuous metric learning (CDCML) to learn a shared latent embedding space which preserves the cross-modal similarity relationship in the continuous matching space. Finally, we refine the embedding space by further preserving the single-modal emotion relationship in the VA spaces of both images and music. The metric learning in the embedding space and task regression in the label space are jointly optimized for both cross-modal matching and single-modal VA prediction. The extensive experiments conducted on IMEMNet demonstrate the superiority of CDCML for emotion-based image and music matching as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
Quick Response (QR) code is one of the most worldwide used two-dimensional codes.~Traditional QR codes appear as random collections of black-and-white modules that lack visual semantics and aesthetic elements, which inspires the recent works to beautify the appearances of QR codes. However, these works adopt fixed generation algorithms and therefore can only generate QR codes with a pre-defined style. In this paper, combining the Neural Style Transfer technique, we propose a novel end-to-end method, named ArtCoder, to generate the stylized QR codes that are personalized, diverse, attractive, and scanning-robust.~To guarantee that the generated stylized QR codes are still scanning-robust, we propose a Sampling-Simulation layer, a module-based code loss, and a competition mechanism. The experimental results show that our stylized QR codes have high-quality in both the visual effect and the scanning-robustness, and they are able to support the real-world application.