Hiroshi Watanabe

Eito Ogawa, Taiga Hayami, Hiroshi Watanabe

Point cloud surface reconstruction has improved in accuracy with advances in deep learning, enabling applications such as infrastructure inspection. Recent approaches that reconstruct from small local regions rather than entire point clouds have attracted attention for their strong generalization capability. However, prior work typically places local regions uniformly and keeps their size fixed, limiting adaptability to variations in geometric complexity. In this study, we propose a method that improves reconstruction accuracy and efficiency by adaptively modulating the spacing and size of local regions based on the curvature of the input point cloud.

Kei Iino, Miho Takahashi, Hiroshi Watanabe et al.

In Collaborative Intelligence, a deep neural network (DNN) is partitioned and deployed at the edge and the cloud for bandwidth saving and system optimization. When a model input is an image, it has been confirmed that the intermediate feature map, the output from the edge, can be smaller than the input data size. However, its effectiveness has not been reported when the input is a video. In this study, we propose a method to compress the feature map of surveillance videos by applying inter-feature-map differential coding (IFMDC). IFMDC shows a compression ratio comparable to, or better than, HEVC to the input video in the case of small accuracy reduction. Our method is especially effective for videos that are sensitive to image quality degradation when HEVC is applied

Kei Iino, Shunsuke Akamatsu, Hiroshi Watanabe et al.

Image coding for machines (ICM) aims to compress images for machine analysis using recognition models rather than human vision. Hence, in ICM, it is important for the encoder to recognize and compress the information necessary for the machine recognition task. There are two main approaches in learned ICM; optimization of the compression model based on task loss, and Region of Interest (ROI) based bit allocation. These approaches provide the encoder with the recognition capability. However, optimization with task loss becomes difficult when the recognition model is deep, and ROI-based methods often involve extra overhead during evaluation. In this study, we propose a novel training method for learned ICM models that applies auxiliary loss to the encoder to improve its recognition capability and rate-distortion performance. Our method achieves Bjontegaard Delta rate improvements of 27.7% and 20.3% in object detection and semantic segmentation tasks, compared to the conventional training method. \c{opyright} 2024 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Kanako Marusaki, Hiroshi Watanabe

This paper presents Capsule GAN, a Generative adversarial network using Capsule Network not only in the discriminator but also in the generator. Recently, Generative adversarial networks (GANs) has been intensively studied. However, generating images by GANs is difficult. Therefore, GANs sometimes generate poor quality images. These GANs use convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, CNNs have the defect that the relational information between features of the image may be lost. Capsule Network, proposed by Hinton in 2017, overcomes the defect of CNNs. Capsule GAN reported previously uses Capsule Network in the discriminator. However, instead of using Capsule Network, Capsule GAN reported in previous studies uses CNNs in generator architecture like DCGAN. This paper introduces two approaches to use Capsule Network in the generator. One is to use DigitCaps layer from the discriminator as the input to the generator. DigitCaps layer is the output layer of Capsule Network. It has the features of the input images of the discriminator. The other is to use the reverse operation of recognition process in Capsule Network in the generator. We compare Capsule GAN proposed in this paper with conventional GAN using CNN and Capsule GAN which uses Capsule Network in the discriminator only. The datasets are MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and color images. We show that Capsule GAN outperforms the GAN using CNN and the GAN using Capsule Network in the discriminator only. The architecture of Capsule GAN proposed in this paper is a basic architecture using Capsule Network. Therefore, we can apply the existing improvement techniques for GANs to Capsule GAN.