Xiaobo Lu

Yichao Cao, Qingfei Tang, Xiu Su et al.

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to comprehend the intricate relationships between humans and objects, predicting $<human, action, object>$ triplets, and serving as the foundation for numerous computer vision tasks. The complexity and diversity of human-object interactions in the real world, however, pose significant challenges for both annotation and recognition, particularly in recognizing interactions within an open world context. This study explores the universal interaction recognition in an open-world setting through the use of Vision-Language (VL) foundation models and large language models (LLMs). The proposed method is dubbed as \emph{\textbf{UniHOI}}. We conduct a deep analysis of the three hierarchical features inherent in visual HOI detectors and propose a method for high-level relation extraction aimed at VL foundation models, which we call HO prompt-based learning. Our design includes an HO Prompt-guided Decoder (HOPD), facilitates the association of high-level relation representations in the foundation model with various HO pairs within the image. Furthermore, we utilize a LLM (\emph{i.e.} GPT) for interaction interpretation, generating a richer linguistic understanding for complex HOIs. For open-category interaction recognition, our method supports either of two input types: interaction phrase or interpretive sentence. Our efficient architecture design and learning methods effectively unleash the potential of the VL foundation models and LLMs, allowing UniHOI to surpass all existing methods with a substantial margin, under both supervised and zero-shot settings. The code and pre-trained weights are available at: \url{https://github.com/Caoyichao/UniHOI}.

Yichao Cao, Qingfei Tang, Feng Yang et al.

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is a challenging computer vision task that requires visual models to address the complex interactive relationship between humans and objects and predict HOI triplets. Despite the challenges posed by the numerous interaction combinations, they also offer opportunities for multimodal learning of visual texts. In this paper, we present a systematic and unified framework (RmLR) that enhances HOI detection by incorporating structured text knowledge. Firstly, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the loss of interaction information in the two-stage HOI detector and propose a re-mining strategy to generate more comprehensive visual representation.Secondly, we design more fine-grained sentence- and word-level alignment and knowledge transfer strategies to effectively address the many-to-many matching problem between multiple interactions and multiple texts.These strategies alleviate the matching confusion problem that arises when multiple interactions occur simultaneously, thereby improving the effectiveness of the alignment process. Finally, HOI reasoning by visual features augmented with textual knowledge substantially improves the understanding of interactions. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, where state-of-the-art performance is achieved on public benchmarks. We further analyze the effects of different components of our approach to provide insights into its efficacy.

Xin Lu, Shikun Chen, Yichao Cao et al.

In recent years, hashing methods have been popular in the large-scale media search for low storage and strong representation capabilities. To describe objects with similar overall appearance but subtle differences, more and more studies focus on hashing-based fine-grained image retrieval. Existing hashing networks usually generate both local and global features through attention guidance on the same deep activation tensor, which limits the diversity of feature representations. To handle this limitation, we substitute convolutional descriptors for attention-guided features and propose an Attributes Grouping and Mining Hashing (AGMH), which groups and embeds the category-specific visual attributes in multiple descriptors to generate a comprehensive feature representation for efficient fine-grained image retrieval. Specifically, an Attention Dispersion Loss (ADL) is designed to force the descriptors to attend to various local regions and capture diverse subtle details. Moreover, we propose a Stepwise Interactive External Attention (SIEA) to mine critical attributes in each descriptor and construct correlations between fine-grained attributes and objects. The attention mechanism is dedicated to learning discrete attributes, which will not cost additional computations in hash codes generation. Finally, the compact binary codes are learned by preserving pairwise similarities. Experimental results demonstrate that AGMH consistently yields the best performance against state-of-the-art methods on fine-grained benchmark datasets.

Shukun Jia, Shiyu Hu, Yichao Cao et al.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is dominated by two paradigms: tracking-by-detection (TBD) and tracking-by-query (TBQ). While TBD is decoupled and efficient, its fragmented association steps and heuristic matching pipelines often compromise robustness in complex scenarios. TBQ provides stronger semantic modeling through end-to-end learning, but suffers from high training cost and slow inference due to tight coupling between detection and association. To address these challenges, we propose TBDQ-Net, a unified tracking-by-detection-and-query (TBDQ) framework that effectively combines the strengths of both paradigms. Our method efficiently integrates pretrained, high-performance detectors with an MOT-tailored associator. The associator is lightweight and directly fetches information from the inference of detectors, enhancing the overall efficiency of the framework. The associator is also learnable, making it essential for fully end-to-end optimization, ensuring robust tracking capabilities. Specifically, the associator comprises two key modules: basic information interaction (BII) for comprehensive semantic interaction, and content-position alignment (CPA) for semantic and positional consistency. TBDQ-Net's effectiveness is extensively demonstrated on DanceTrack, SportsMOT and MOT20 benchmarks. As a structurally efficient and semantically robust tracking framework, it outperforms the leading TBD method by 6.0 IDF1 points on DanceTrack and achieves at least 37.5% faster inference than prominent TBQ methods.

Yang Zhang, Xin Yu, Xiaobo Lu et al.

In this paper, we study the task of hallucinating an authentic high-resolution (HR) face from an occluded thumbnail. We propose a multi-stage Progressive Upsampling and Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network, dubbed Pro-UIGAN, which exploits facial geometry priors to replenish and upsample (8*) the occluded and tiny faces (16*16 pixels). Pro-UIGAN iteratively (1) estimates facial geometry priors for low-resolution (LR) faces and (2) acquires non-occluded HR face images under the guidance of the estimated priors. Our multi-stage hallucination network super-resolves and inpaints occluded LR faces in a coarse-to-fine manner, thus reducing unwanted blurriness and artifacts significantly. Specifically, we design a novel cross-modal transformer module for facial priors estimation, in which an input face and its landmark features are formulated as queries and keys, respectively. Such a design encourages joint feature learning across the input facial and landmark features, and deep feature correspondences will be discovered by attention. Thus, facial appearance features and facial geometry priors are learned in a mutual promotion manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Pro-UIGAN achieves visually pleasing HR faces, reaching superior performance in downstream tasks, i.e., face alignment, face parsing, face recognition and expression classification, compared with other state-of-the-art (SotA) methods.

Yang Zhang, Changhui Hu, Xiaobo Lu

The technology of vehicle and driver detection in Intelligent Transportation System(ITS) is a hot topic in recent years. In particular, the driver detection is still a challenging problem which is conductive to supervising traffic order and maintaining public safety. In this paper, an algorithm based on YOLOv3 is proposed to realize the detection and classification of vehicles, drivers, and people on the highway, so as to achieve the purpose of distinguishing driver and passenger and form a one-to-one correspondence between vehicles and drivers. The proposed model and contrast experiment are conducted on our self-build traffic driver's face database. The effectiveness of our proposed algorithm is validated by extensive experiments and verified under various complex highway conditions. Compared with other advanced vehicle and driver detection technologies, the model has a good performance and is robust to road blocking, different attitudes, and extreme lighting.

Yang Zhang, Changhui Hu, Xiaobo Lu

This paper presents an novel illumination-invariant feature representation approach used to eliminate the varying illumination affection in undersampled face recognition. Firstly, a new illumination level classification technique based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is proposed to judge the illumination level of input image. Secondly, we construct the logarithm edgemaps feature (LEF) based on lambertian model and local near neighbor feature of the face image, applying to local region within multiple scales. Then, the illumination level is referenced to construct the high performance LEF as well realize adaptive fusion for multiple scales LEFs for the face image, performing JLEF-feature. In addition, the constrain operation is used to remove the useless high-frequency interference, disentangling useful facial feature edges and constructing AJLEF-face. Finally, the effects of the our methods and other state-of-the-art algorithms including deep learning methods are tested on Extended Yale B, CMU PIE, AR as well as our Self-build Driver database (SDB). The experimental results demonstrate that the JLEF-feature and AJLEF-face outperform other related approaches for undersampled face recognition under varying illumination.

Yang Zhang, Changhui Hu, Xiaobo Lu

Most of current display devices are with eight or higher bit-depth. However, the quality of most multimedia tools cannot achieve this bit-depth standard for the generating images. De-quantization can improve the visual quality of low bit-depth image to display on high bit-depth screen. This paper proposes DAGAN algorithm to perform super-resolution on image intensity resolution, which is orthogonal to the spatial resolution, realizing photo-realistic de-quantization via an end-to-end learning pattern. Until now, this is the first attempt to apply Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework for image de-quantization. Specifically, we propose the Dense Residual Self-attention (DenseResAtt) module, which is consisted of dense residual blocks armed with self-attention mechanism, to pay more attention on high-frequency information. Moreover, the series connection of sequential DenseResAtt modules forms deep attentive network with superior discriminative learning ability in image de-quantization, modeling representative feature maps to recover as much useful information as possible. In addition, due to the adversarial learning framework can reliably produce high quality natural images, the specified content loss as well as the adversarial loss are back-propagated to optimize the training of model. Above all, DAGAN is able to generate the photo-realistic high bit-depth image without banding artifacts. Experiment results on several public benchmarks prove that the DAGAN algorithm possesses ability to achieve excellent visual effect and satisfied quantitative performance.

Yang Zhang, Ivor Tsang, Yawei Luo et al.

Existing face hallucination methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved impressive performance on low-resolution (LR) faces in a normal illumination condition. However, their performance degrades dramatically when LR faces are captured in low or non-uniform illumination conditions. This paper proposes a Copy and Paste Generative Adversarial Network (CPGAN) to recover authentic high-resolution (HR) face images while compensating for low and non-uniform illumination. To this end, we develop two key components in our CPGAN: internal and external Copy and Paste nets (CPnets). Specifically, our internal CPnet exploits facial information residing in the input image to enhance facial details; while our external CPnet leverages an external HR face for illumination compensation. A new illumination compensation loss is thus developed to capture illumination from the external guided face image effectively. Furthermore, our method offsets illumination and upsamples facial details alternately in a coarse-to-fine fashion, thus alleviating the correspondence ambiguity between LR inputs and external HR inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method manifests authentic HR face images in a uniform illumination condition and outperforms state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively.

Yang Zhang, Ivor W. Tsang, Jun Li et al.

Obtaining a high-quality frontal face image from a low-resolution (LR) non-frontal face image is primarily important for many facial analysis applications. However, mainstreams either focus on super-resolving near-frontal LR faces or frontalizing non-frontal high-resolution (HR) faces. It is desirable to perform both tasks seamlessly for daily-life unconstrained face images. In this paper, we present a novel Vivid Face Hallucination Generative Adversarial Network (VividGAN) for simultaneously super-resolving and frontalizing tiny non-frontal face images. VividGAN consists of coarse-level and fine-level Face Hallucination Networks (FHnet) and two discriminators, i.e., Coarse-D and Fine-D. The coarse-level FHnet generates a frontal coarse HR face and then the fine-level FHnet makes use of the facial component appearance prior, i.e., fine-grained facial components, to attain a frontal HR face image with authentic details. In the fine-level FHnet, we also design a facial component-aware module that adopts the facial geometry guidance as clues to accurately align and merge the frontal coarse HR face and prior information. Meanwhile, two-level discriminators are designed to capture both the global outline of a face image as well as detailed facial characteristics. The Coarse-D enforces the coarsely hallucinated faces to be upright and complete while the Fine-D focuses on the fine hallucinated ones for sharper details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VividGAN achieves photo-realistic frontal HR faces, reaching superior performance in downstream tasks, i.e., face recognition and expression classification, compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

Shengqin Jiang, Xiaobo Lu, Yinjie Lei et al.

Crowd counting problem aims to count the number of objects within an image or a frame in the videos and is usually solved by estimating the density map generated from the object location annotations. The values in the density map, by nature, take two possible states: zero indicating no object around, a non-zero value indicating the existence of objects and the value denoting the local object density. In contrast to traditional methods which do not differentiate the density prediction of these two states, we propose to use a dedicated network branch to predict the object/non-object mask and then combine its prediction with the input image to produce the density map. Our rationale is that the mask prediction could be better modeled as a binary segmentation problem and the difficulty of estimating the density could be reduced if the mask is known. A key to the proposed scheme is the strategy of incorporating the mask prediction into the density map estimator. To this end, we study five possible solutions, and via analysis and experimental validation we identify the most effective one. Through extensive experiments on five public datasets, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach over the baselines and show that our network could achieve the state-of-the-art performance.

Yaocong Hu, MingQi Lu, Xiaobo Lu

Abnormal driving behaviour is one of the leading cause of terrible traffic accidents endangering human life. Therefore, study on driving behaviour surveillance has become essential to traffic security and public management. In this paper, we conduct this promising research and employ a two stream CNN framework for video-based driving behaviour recognition, in which spatial stream CNN captures appearance information from still frames, whilst temporal stream CNN captures motion information with pre-computed optical flow displacement between a few adjacent video frames. We investigate different spatial-temporal fusion strategies to combine the intra frame static clues and inter frame dynamic clues for final behaviour recognition. So as to validate the effectiveness of the designed spatial-temporal deep learning based model, we create a simulated driving behaviour dataset, containing 1237 videos with 6 different driving behavior for recognition. Experiment result shows that our proposed method obtains noticeable performance improvements compared to the existing methods.