Recently, video streams have occupied a large proportion of Internet traffic, most of which contain human faces. Hence, it is necessary to predict saliency on multiple-face videos, which can provide attention cues for many content based applications.
However, most of multiple-face saliency prediction works only consider visual information and ignore audio, which is not consistent with the naturalistic scenarios. Several behavioral studies have established that sound influences human attention, especially during the speech turn-taking in multiple-face videos. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate such influences by establishing a large-scale eye-tracking database of Multiple-face Video in Visual-Audio condition (MVVA). Inspired by the findings of our investigation, we propose a novel multi-modal video saliency model consisting of three branches: visual, audio and face. The visual branch takes the RGB frames as the input and encodes them into visual feature maps. The audio and face branches encode the audio signal and multiple cropped faces, respectively. A fusion module is introduced to integrate the information from three modalities, and to generate the final saliency map. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms 11 state-of-the-art saliency prediction works. It performs closer to human multi-modal attention.
Rain removal has recently attracted increasing research attention, as it is able to enhance the visibility of rain videos. However, the existing learning based rain removal approaches for videos suffer from insufficient training data, especially when
applying deep learning to remove rain. In this paper, we establish a large-scale video database for rain removal (LasVR), which consists of 316 rain videos. Then, we observe from our database that there exist the temporal correlation of clean content and similar patterns of rain across video frames. According to these two observations, we propose a two-stream convolutional long- and short- term memory (ConvLSTM) approach for rain removal in videos. The first stream is composed of the subnet for rain detection, while the second stream is the subnet of rain removal that leverages the features from the rain detection subnet. Finally, the experimental results on both synthetic and real rain videos show the proposed approach performs better than other state-of-the-art approaches.
When watching omnidirectional images (ODIs), subjects can access different viewports by moving their heads. Therefore, it is necessary to predict subjects head fixations on ODIs. Inspired by generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL), this pape
r proposes a novel approach to predict saliency of head fixations on ODIs, named SalGAIL. First, we establish a dataset for attention on ODIs (AOI). In contrast to traditional datasets, our AOI dataset is large-scale, which contains the head fixations of 30 subjects viewing 600 ODIs. Next, we mine our AOI dataset and determine three findings: (1) The consistency of head fixations are consistent among subjects, and it grows alongside the increased subject number; (2) The head fixations exist with a front center bias (FCB); and (3) The magnitude of head movement is similar across subjects. According to these findings, our SalGAIL approach applies deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to predict the head fixations of one subject, in which GAIL learns the reward of DRL, rather than the traditional human-designed reward. Then, multi-stream DRL is developed to yield the head fixations of different subjects, and the saliency map of an ODI is generated via convoluting predicted head fixations. Finally, experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach in predicting saliency maps of ODIs, significantly better than 10 state-of-the-art approaches.
Recently, the attention mechanism has been successfully applied in convolutional neural networks (CNNs), significantly boosting the performance of many computer vision tasks. Unfortunately, few medical image recognition approaches incorporate the att
ention mechanism in the CNNs. In particular, there exists high redundancy in fundus images for glaucoma detection, such that the attention mechanism has potential in improving the performance of CNN-based glaucoma detection. This paper proposes an attention-based CNN for glaucoma detection (AG-CNN). Specifically, we first establish a large-scale attention based glaucoma (LAG) database, which includes 5,824 fundus images labeled with either positive glaucoma (2,392) or negative glaucoma (3,432). The attention maps of the ophthalmologists are also collected in LAG database through a simulated eye-tracking experiment. Then, a new structure of AG-CNN is designed, including an attention prediction subnet, a pathological area localization subnet and a glaucoma classification subnet. Different from other attention-based CNN methods, the features are also visualized as the localized pathological area, which can advance the performance of glaucoma detection. Finally, the experiment results show that the proposed AG-CNN approach significantly advances state-of-the-art glaucoma detection.
The past few years have witnessed great success in applying deep learning to enhance the quality of compressed image/video. The existing approaches mainly focus on enhancing the quality of a single frame, not considering the similarity between consec
utive frames. Since heavy fluctuation exists across compressed video frames as investigated in this paper, frame similarity can be utilized for quality enhancement of low-quality frames given their neighboring high-quality frames. This task is Multi-Frame Quality Enhancement (MFQE). Accordingly, this paper proposes an MFQE approach for compressed video, as the first attempt in this direction. In our approach, we firstly develop a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) based detector to locate Peak Quality Frames (PQFs) in compressed video. Then, a novel Multi-Frame Convolutional Neural Network (MF-CNN) is designed to enhance the quality of compressed video, in which the non-PQF and its nearest two PQFs are the input. In MF-CNN, motion between the non-PQF and PQFs is compensated by a motion compensation subnet. Subsequently, a quality enhancement subnet fuses the non-PQF and compensated PQFs, and then reduces the compression artifacts of the non-PQF. Also, PQF quality is enhanced in the same way. Finally, experiments validate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our MFQE approach in advancing the state-of-the-art quality enhancement of compressed video. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanXingQL/MFQEv2.0.git.
Memorability measures how easily an image is to be memorized after glancing, which may contribute to designing magazine covers, tourism publicity materials, and so forth. Recent works have shed light on the visual features that make generic images, o
bject images or face photographs memorable. However, these methods are not able to effectively predict the memorability of outdoor natural scene images. To overcome this shortcoming of previous works, in this paper, we provide an attempt to answer: what exactly makes outdoor natural scenes memorable. To this end, we first establish a large-scale outdoor natural scene image memorability (LNSIM) database, containing 2,632 outdoor natural scene images with their ground truth memorability scores and the multi-label scene category annotations. Then, similar to previous works, we mine our database to investigate how low-, middle- and high-level handcrafted features affect the memorability of outdoor natural scenes. In particular, we find that the high-level feature of scene category is rather correlated with outdoor natural scene memorability, and the deep features learnt by deep neural network (DNN) are also effective in predicting the memorability scores. Moreover, combining the deep features with the category feature can further boost the performance of memorability prediction. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end DNN based outdoor natural scene memorability (DeepNSM) predictor, which takes advantage of the learned category-related features. Then, the experimental results validate the effectiveness of our DeepNSM model, exceeding the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we try to understand the reason of the good performance for our DeepNSM model, and also study the cases that our DeepNSM model succeeds or fails to accurately predict the memorability of outdoor natural scenes.
Recent studies on image memorability have shed light on the visual features that make generic images, object images or face photographs memorable. However, a clear understanding and reliable estimation of natural scene memorability remain elusive. In
this paper, we provide an attempt to answer: what exactly makes natural scene memorable. Specifically, we first build LNSIM, a large-scale natural scene image memorability database (containing 2,632 images and memorability annotations). Then, we mine our database to investigate how low-, middle- and high-level handcrafted features affect the memorability of natural scene. In particular, we find that high-level feature of scene category is rather correlated with natural scene memorability. Thus, we propose a deep neural network based natural scene memorability (DeepNSM) predictor, which takes advantage of scene category. Finally, the experimental results validate the effectiveness of DeepNSM.
Omnidirectional video enables spherical stimuli with the $360 times 180^ circ$ viewing range. Meanwhile, only the viewport region of omnidirectional video can be seen by the observer through head movement (HM), and an even smaller region within the v
iewport can be clearly perceived through eye movement (EM). Thus, the subjective quality of omnidirectional video may be correlated with HM and EM of human behavior. To fill in the gap between subjective quality and human behavior, this paper proposes a large-scale visual quality assessment (VQA) dataset of omnidirectional video, called VQA-OV, which collects 60 reference sequences and 540 impaired sequences. Our VQA-OV dataset provides not only the subjective quality scores of sequences but also the HM and EM data of subjects. By mining our dataset, we find that the subjective quality of omnidirectional video is indeed related to HM and EM. Hence, we develop a deep learning model, which embeds HM and EM, for objective VQA on omnidirectional video. Experimental results show that our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance of VQA on omnidirectional video.
The past few years have witnessed great success in applying deep learning to enhance the quality of compressed image/video. The existing approaches mainly focus on enhancing the quality of a single frame, ignoring the similarity between consecutive f
rames. In this paper, we investigate that heavy quality fluctuation exists across compressed video frames, and thus low quality frames can be enhanced using the neighboring high quality frames, seen as Multi-Frame Quality Enhancement (MFQE). Accordingly, this paper proposes an MFQE approach for compressed video, as a first attempt in this direction. In our approach, we firstly develop a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based detector to locate Peak Quality Frames (PQFs) in compressed video. Then, a novel Multi-Frame Convolutional Neural Network (MF-CNN) is designed to enhance the quality of compressed video, in which the non-PQF and its nearest two PQFs are as the input. The MF-CNN compensates motion between the non-PQF and PQFs through the Motion Compensation subnet (MC-subnet). Subsequently, the Quality Enhancement subnet (QE-subnet) reduces compression artifacts of the non-PQF with the help of its nearest PQFs. Finally, the experiments validate the effectiveness and generality of our MFQE approach in advancing the state-of-the-art quality enhancement of compressed video. The code of our MFQE approach is available at https://github.com/ryangBUAA/MFQE.git
The latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has been increasingly applied to generate video streams over the Internet. However, HEVC compressed videos may incur severe quality degradation, particularly at low bit-rates. Thus, it is necess
ary to enhance the visual quality of HEVC videos at the decoder side. To this end, this paper proposes a Quality Enhancement Convolutional Neural Network (QE-CNN) method that does not require any modification of the encoder to achieve quality enhancement for HEVC. In particular, our QE-CNN method learns QE-CNN-I and QE-CNN-P models to reduce the distortion of HEVC I and P frames, respectively. The proposed method differs from the existing CNN-based quality enhancement approaches, which only handle intra-coding distortion and are thus not suitable for P frames. Our experimental results validate that our QE-CNN method is effective in enhancing quality for both I and P frames of HEVC videos. To apply our QE-CNN method in time-constrained scenarios, we further propose a Time-constrained Quality Enhancement Optimization (TQEO) scheme. Our TQEO scheme controls the computational time of QE-CNN to meet a target, meanwhile maximizing the quality enhancement. Next, the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our TQEO scheme from the aspects of time control accuracy and quality enhancement under different time constraints. Finally, we design a prototype to implement our TQEO scheme in a real-time scenario.
