Qian Ye

Qian Ye, Masanori Suganuma, Jun Xiao et al.

Reconstructing ghosting-free high dynamic range (HDR) images of dynamic scenes from a set of multi-exposure images is a challenging task, especially with large object motion and occlusions, leading to visible artifacts using existing methods. To address this problem, we propose a deep network that tries to learn multi-scale feature flow guided by the regularized loss. It first extracts multi-scale features and then aligns features from non-reference images. After alignment, we use residual channel attention blocks to merge the features from different images. Extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and produces excellent results where color artifacts and geometric distortions are significantly reduced.

Qian Ye, Masanori Suganuma, Takayuki Okatani

In this paper, we consider the problem in defocus image deblurring. Previous classical methods follow two-steps approaches, i.e., first defocus map estimation and then the non-blind deblurring. In the era of deep learning, some researchers have tried to address these two problems by CNN. However, the simple concatenation of defocus map, which represents the blur level, leads to suboptimal performance. Considering the spatial variant property of the defocus blur and the blur level indicated in the defocus map, we employ the defocus map as conditional guidance to adjust the features from the input blurring images instead of simple concatenation. Then we propose a simple but effective network with spatial modulation based on the defocus map. To achieve this, we design a network consisting of three sub-networks, including the defocus map estimation network, a condition network that encodes the defocus map into condition features, and the defocus deblurring network that performs spatially dynamic modulation based on the condition features. Moreover, the spatially dynamic modulation is based on an affine transform function to adjust the features from the input blurry images. Experimental results show that our method can achieve better quantitative and qualitative evaluation performance than the existing state-of-the-art methods on the commonly used public test datasets.

Weichao Gan, Yuanping Lin, Guangbo Yu et al.

This paper describes our system, which placed third in the Multilingual Track (subtask 11), fourth in the Code-Mixed Track (subtask 12), and seventh in the Chinese Track (subtask 9) in the SemEval 2022 Task 11: MultiCoNER Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition. Our system's key contributions are as follows: 1) For multilingual NER tasks, we offer an unified framework with which one can easily execute single-language or multilingual NER tasks, 2) for low-resource code-mixed NER task, one can easily enhance his or her dataset through implementing several simple data augmentation methods and 3) for Chinese tasks, we propose a model that can capture Chinese lexical semantic, lexical border, and lexical graph structural information. Finally, our system achieves macro-f1 scores of 77.66, 84.35, and 74.00 on subtasks 11, 12, and 9, respectively, during the testing phase.

Jun Xiao, Qian Ye, Tianshan Liu et al.

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is an important task in image processing that aims to generate well-exposed images in scenes with varying illumination. Although existing multi-exposure fusion methods have achieved impressive results, generating high-quality HDR images in dynamic scenes is still difficult. The primary challenges are ghosting artifacts caused by object motion between low dynamic range images and distorted content in under and overexposed regions. In this paper, we propose a deep progressive feature aggregation network for improving HDR imaging quality in dynamic scenes. To address the issues of object motion, our method implicitly samples high-correspondence features and aggregates them in a coarse-to-fine manner for alignment. In addition, our method adopts a densely connected network structure based on the discrete wavelet transform, which aims to decompose the input features into multiple frequency subbands and adaptively restore corrupted contents. Experiments show that our proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance under different scenes, compared to other promising HDR imaging methods. Specifically, the HDR images generated by our method contain cleaner and more detailed content, with fewer distortions, leading to better visual quality.

Qian Ye, Ling Jiang, Wang Zhen et al.

Low-cost autonomous agents including autonomous driving vehicles chiefly adopt monocular 3D object detection to perceive surrounding environment. This paper studies 3D intermediate representation methods which generate intermediate 3D features for subsequent tasks. For example, the 3D features can be taken as input for not only detection, but also end-to-end prediction and/or planning that require a bird's-eye-view feature representation. In the study, we found that in generating 3D representation previous methods do not maintain the consistency between the objects' implicit poses in the latent space, especially orientations, and the explicitly observed poses in the Euclidean space, which can substantially hurt model performance. To tackle this problem, we present a novel monocular detection method, the first one being aware of the poses to purposefully guarantee that they are consistent between the implicit and explicit features. Additionally, we introduce a local ray attention mechanism to efficiently transform image features to voxels at accurate 3D locations. Thirdly, we propose a handcrafted Gaussian positional encoding function, which outperforms the sinusoidal encoding function while retaining the benefit of being continuous. Results show that our method improves the state-of-the-art 3D intermediate representation method by 3.15%. We are ranked 1st among all the reported monocular methods on both 3D and BEV detection benchmark on KITTI leaderboard as of th result's submission time.

Qian Ye, Jun Xiao, Kin-man Lam et al.

This paper considers the problem of generating an HDR image of a scene from its LDR images. Recent studies employ deep learning and solve the problem in an end-to-end fashion, leading to significant performance improvements. However, it is still hard to generate a good quality image from LDR images of a dynamic scene captured by a hand-held camera, e.g., occlusion due to the large motion of foreground objects, causing ghosting artifacts. The key to success relies on how well we can fuse the input images in their feature space, where we wish to remove the factors leading to low-quality image generation while performing the fundamental computations for HDR image generation, e.g., selecting the best-exposed image/region. We propose a novel method that can better fuse the features based on two ideas. One is multi-step feature fusion; our network gradually fuses the features in a stack of blocks having the same structure. The other is the design of the component block that effectively performs two operations essential to the problem, i.e., comparing and selecting appropriate images/regions. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on the standard benchmark tests.

Qian Ye, Xiaohong Chen, Onur Kalan et al.

This study explores how people view and respond to the proposals of NYC congestion pricing evolve in time. To understand these responses, Twitter data is collected and analyzed. Critical groups in the recurrent process are detected by statistically analyzing the active users and the most mentioned accounts, and the trends of people's attitudes and concerns over the years are identified with text mining and hybrid Nature Language Processing techniques, including LDA topic modeling and LSTM sentiment classification. The result shows that multiple interest groups were involved and played crucial roles during the proposal, especially Mayor and Governor, MTA, and outer-borough representatives. The public shifted the concern of focus from the plan details to a wider city's sustainability and fairness. Furthermore, the plan's approval relies on several elements, the joint agreement reached in the political process, strong motivation in the real-world, the scheme based on balancing multiple interests, and groups' awareness of tolling's benefits and necessity.