Jimmy Ren

Liang Chen, Jiawei Zhang, Zhenhua Li et al.

Images taken under the low-light condition often contain blur and saturated pixels at the same time. Deblurring images with saturated pixels is quite challenging. Because of the limited dynamic range, the saturated pixels are usually clipped in the imaging process and thus cannot be modeled by the linear blur model. Previous methods use manually designed smooth functions to approximate the clipping procedure. Their deblurring processes often require empirically defined parameters, which may not be the optimal choices for different images. In this paper, we develop a data-driven approach to model the saturated pixels by a learned latent map. Based on the new model, the non-blind deblurring task can be formulated into a maximum a posterior (MAP) problem, which can be effectively solved by iteratively computing the latent map and the latent image. Specifically, the latent map is computed by learning from a map estimation network (MEN), and the latent image estimation process is implemented by a Richardson-Lucy (RL)-based updating scheme. To estimate high-quality deblurred images without amplified artifacts, we develop a prior estimation network (PEN) to obtain prior information, which is further integrated into the RL scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms both quantitatively and qualitatively on synthetic and real-world images.

Jiawei Zhang, Jinshan Pan, Daoye Wang et al.

Deblurring can not only provide visually more pleasant pictures and make photography more convenient, but also can improve the performance of objection detection as well as tracking. However, removing dynamic scene blur from images is a non-trivial task as it is difficult to model the non-uniform blur mathematically. Several methods first use single or multiple images to estimate optical flow (which is treated as an approximation of blur kernels) and then adopt non-blind deblurring algorithms to reconstruct the sharp images. However, these methods cannot be trained in an end-to-end manner and are usually computationally expensive. In this paper, we explore optical flow to remove dynamic scene blur by using the multi-scale spatially variant recurrent neural network (RNN). We utilize FlowNets to estimate optical flow from two consecutive images in different scales. The estimated optical flow provides the RNN weights in different scales so that the weights can better help RNNs to remove blur in the feature spaces. Finally, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) to restore the sharp images from the deblurred features. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy, speed, and model size.

Zheng-Peng Duan, Jiawei Zhang, Siyu Liu et al.

Seamlessly moving objects within a scene is a common requirement for image editing, but it is still a challenge for existing editing methods. Especially for real-world images, the occlusion situation further increases the difficulty. The main difficulty is that the occluded portion needs to be completed before movement can proceed. To leverage the real-world knowledge embedded in the pre-trained diffusion models, we propose a Diffusion-based framework specifically designed for Occluded Object Movement, named DiffOOM. The proposed DiffOOM consists of two parallel branches that perform object de-occlusion and movement simultaneously. The de-occlusion branch utilizes a background color-fill strategy and a continuously updated object mask to focus the diffusion process on completing the obscured portion of the target object. Concurrently, the movement branch employs latent optimization to place the completed object in the target location and adopts local text-conditioned guidance to integrate the object into new surroundings appropriately. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our method, which is further validated by a comprehensive user study.

Jiahua Xiao, Jiawei Zhang, Dongqing Zou et al.

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) has achieved a remarkable leap by leveraging large-scale text-to-image models, enabling realistic image restoration from given recognition textual prompts. However, these methods sometimes fail to recognize some salient objects, resulting in inaccurate semantic restoration in these regions. Additionally, the same region may have a strong response to more than one prompt and it will lead to semantic ambiguity for image super-resolution. To alleviate the above two issues, in this paper, we propose to consider semantic segmentation as an additional control condition into diffusion-based image super-resolution. Compared to textual prompt conditions, semantic segmentation enables a more comprehensive perception of salient objects within an image by assigning class labels to each pixel. It also mitigates the risks of semantic ambiguities by explicitly allocating objects to their respective spatial regions. In practice, inspired by the fact that image super-resolution and segmentation can benefit each other, we propose SegSR which introduces a dual-diffusion framework to facilitate interaction between the image super-resolution and segmentation diffusion models. Specifically, we develop a Dual-Modality Bridge module to enable updated information flow between these two diffusion models, achieving mutual benefit during the reverse diffusion process. Extensive experiments show that SegSR can generate realistic images while preserving semantic structures more effectively.

Lingshun Kong, Jiawei Zhang, Dongqing Zou et al.

Diffusion models have achieved significant progress in image generation. The pre-trained Stable Diffusion (SD) models are helpful for image deblurring by providing clear image priors. However, directly using a blurry image or pre-deblurred one as a conditional control for SD will either hinder accurate structure extraction or make the results overly dependent on the deblurring network. In this work, we propose a Latent Kernel Prediction Network (LKPN) to achieve robust real-world image deblurring. Specifically, we co-train the LKPN in latent space with conditional diffusion. The LKPN learns a spatially variant kernel to guide the restoration of sharp images in the latent space. By applying element-wise adaptive convolution (EAC), the learned kernel is utilized to adaptively process the input feature, effectively preserving the structural information of the input. This process thereby more effectively guides the generative process of Stable Diffusion (SD), enhancing both the deblurring efficacy and the quality of detail reconstruction. Moreover, the results at each diffusion step are utilized to iteratively estimate the kernels in LKPN to better restore the sharp latent by EAC. This iterative refinement enhances the accuracy and robustness of the deblurring process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art image deblurring methods on both benchmark and real-world images.

Lu Xu, Yuwei Zhang, Ying Liu et al.

Low-dose CT has been a key diagnostic imaging modality to reduce the potential risk of radiation overdose to patient health. Despite recent advances, CNN-based approaches typically apply filters in a spatially invariant way and adopt similar pixel-level losses, which treat all regions of the CT image equally and can be inefficient when fine-grained structures coexist with non-uniformly distributed noises. To address this issue, we propose a Structure-preserving Kernel Prediction Network (StructKPN) that combines the kernel prediction network with a structure-aware loss function that utilizes the pixel gradient statistics and guides the model towards spatially-variant filters that enhance noise removal, prevent over-smoothing and preserve detailed structures for different regions in CT imaging. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our approach achieved superior performance on both synthetic and non-synthetic datasets, and better preserves structures that are highly desired in clinical screening and low-dose protocol optimization.

Lu Xu, Jiawei Zhang, Xuanye Cheng et al.

Deep neural networks have been widely used in image denoising during the past few years. Even though they achieve great success on this problem, they are computationally inefficient which makes them inappropriate to be implemented in mobile devices. In this paper, we propose an efficient deep neural network for image denoising based on pixel-wise classification. Despite using a computationally efficient network cannot effectively remove the noises from any content, it is still capable to denoise from a specific type of pattern or texture. The proposed method follows such a divide and conquer scheme. We first use an efficient U-net to pixel-wisely classify pixels in the noisy image based on the local gradient statistics. Then we replace part of the convolution layers in existing denoising networks by the proposed Class Specific Convolution layers (CSConv) which use different weights for different classes of pixels. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the computational costs without sacrificing the performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.

Jinjin Gu, Haoming Cai, Haoyu Chen et al.

Image quality assessment (IQA) is the key factor for the fast development of image restoration (IR) algorithms. The most recent perceptual IR algorithms based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) have brought in significant improvement on visual performance, but also pose great challenges for quantitative evaluation. Notably, we observe an increasing inconsistency between perceptual quality and the evaluation results. We present two questions: Can existing IQA methods objectively evaluate recent IR algorithms? With the focus on beating current benchmarks, are we getting better IR algorithms? To answer the questions and promote the development of IQA methods, we contribute a large-scale IQA dataset, called Perceptual Image Processing ALgorithms (PIPAL) dataset. Especially, this dataset includes the results of GAN-based IR algorithms, which are missing in previous datasets. We collect more than 1.13 million human judgments to assign subjective scores for PIPAL images using the more reliable Elo system. Based on PIPAL, we present new benchmarks for both IQA and SR methods. Our results indicate that existing IQA methods cannot fairly evaluate GAN-based IR algorithms. While using appropriate evaluation methods is important, IQA methods should also be updated along with the development of IR algorithms. At last, we shed light on how to improve the IQA performance on GAN-based distortion. Inspired by the find that the existing IQA methods have an unsatisfactory performance on the GAN-based distortion partially because of their low tolerance to spatial misalignment, we propose to improve the performance of an IQA network on GAN-based distortion by explicitly considering this misalignment. We propose the Space Warping Difference Network, which includes the novel l_2 pooling layers and Space Warping Difference layers. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Jinjin Gu, Haoming Cai, Haoyu Chen et al.

Image quality assessment (IQA) is the key factor for the fast development of image restoration (IR) algorithms. The most recent IR methods based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved significant improvement in visual performance, but also presented great challenges for quantitative evaluation. Notably, we observe an increasing inconsistency between perceptual quality and the evaluation results. Then we raise two questions: (1) Can existing IQA methods objectively evaluate recent IR algorithms? (2) When focus on beating current benchmarks, are we getting better IR algorithms? To answer these questions and promote the development of IQA methods, we contribute a large-scale IQA dataset, called Perceptual Image Processing Algorithms (PIPAL) dataset. Especially, this dataset includes the results of GAN-based methods, which are missing in previous datasets. We collect more than 1.13 million human judgments to assign subjective scores for PIPAL images using the more reliable "Elo system". Based on PIPAL, we present new benchmarks for both IQA and super-resolution methods. Our results indicate that existing IQA methods cannot fairly evaluate GAN-based IR algorithms. While using appropriate evaluation methods is important, IQA methods should also be updated along with the development of IR algorithms. At last, we improve the performance of IQA networks on GAN-based distortions by introducing anti-aliasing pooling. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Zhouxia Wang, Jiawei Zhang, Mude Lin et al.

Automatically selecting exposure bracketing (images exposed differently) is important to obtain a high dynamic range image by using multi-exposure fusion. Unlike previous methods that have many restrictions such as requiring camera response function, sensor noise model, and a stream of preview images with different exposures (not accessible in some scenarios e.g. some mobile applications), we propose a novel deep neural network to automatically select exposure bracketing, named EBSNet, which is sufficiently flexible without having the above restrictions. EBSNet is formulated as a reinforced agent that is trained by maximizing rewards provided by a multi-exposure fusion network (MEFNet). By utilizing the illumination and semantic information extracted from just a single auto-exposure preview image, EBSNet can select an optimal exposure bracketing for multi-exposure fusion. EBSNet and MEFNet can be jointly trained to produce favorable results against recent state-of-the-art approaches. To facilitate future research, we provide a new benchmark dataset for multi-exposure selection and fusion.

Zhe Jiang, Yu Zhang, Dongqing Zou et al.

Recovering sharp video sequence from a motion-blurred image is highly ill-posed due to the significant loss of motion information in the blurring process. For event-based cameras, however, fast motion can be captured as events at high time rate, raising new opportunities to exploring effective solutions. In this paper, we start from a sequential formulation of event-based motion deblurring, then show how its optimization can be unfolded with a novel end-to-end deep architecture. The proposed architecture is a convolutional recurrent neural network that integrates visual and temporal knowledge of both global and local scales in principled manner. To further improve the reconstruction, we propose a differentiable directional event filtering module to effectively extract rich boundary prior from the stream of events. We conduct extensive experiments on the synthetic GoPro dataset and a large newly introduced dataset captured by a DAVIS240C camera. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality, and generalizes better to handling real-world motion blur.

Zhanghan Ke, Daoye Wang, Qiong Yan et al.

Recently, consistency-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised learning (SSL). These methods always involve two roles, an explicit or implicit teacher model and a student model, and penalize predictions under different perturbations by a consistency constraint. However, the weights of these two roles are tightly coupled since the teacher is essentially an exponential moving average (EMA) of the student. In this work, we show that the coupled EMA teacher causes a performance bottleneck. To address this problem, we introduce Dual Student, which replaces the teacher with another student. We also define a novel concept, stable sample, following which a stabilization constraint is designed for our structure to be trainable. Further, we discuss two variants of our method, which produce even higher performance. Extensive experiments show that our method improves the classification performance significantly on several main SSL benchmarks. Specifically, it reduces the error rate of the 13-layer CNN from 16.84% to 12.39% on CIFAR-10 with 1k labels and from 34.10% to 31.56% on CIFAR-100 with 10k labels. In addition, our method also achieves a clear improvement in domain adaptation.

Jinshan Pan, Yang Liu, Deqing Sun et al.

We present a simple and effective image super-resolution algorithm that imposes an image formation constraint on the deep neural networks via pixel substitution. The proposed algorithm first uses a deep neural network to estimate intermediate high-resolution images, blurs the intermediate images using known blur kernels, and then substitutes values of the pixels at the un-decimated positions with those of the corresponding pixels from the low-resolution images. The output of the pixel substitution process strictly satisfies the image formation model and is further refined by the same deep neural network in a cascaded manner. The proposed framework is trained in an end-to-end fashion and can work with existing feed-forward deep neural networks for super-resolution and converges fast in practice. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods.

Shangchen Zhou, Jiawei Zhang, Jinshan Pan et al.

Video deblurring is a challenging task due to the spatially variant blur caused by camera shake, object motions, and depth variations, etc. Existing methods usually estimate optical flow in the blurry video to align consecutive frames or approximate blur kernels. However, they tend to generate artifacts or cannot effectively remove blur when the estimated optical flow is not accurate. To overcome the limitation of separate optical flow estimation, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Filter Adaptive Network (STFAN) for the alignment and deblurring in a unified framework. The proposed STFAN takes both blurry and restored images of the previous frame as well as blurry image of the current frame as input, and dynamically generates the spatially adaptive filters for the alignment and deblurring. We then propose the new Filter Adaptive Convolutional (FAC) layer to align the deblurred features of the previous frame with the current frame and remove the spatially variant blur from the features of the current frame. Finally, we develop a reconstruction network which takes the fusion of two transformed features to restore the clear frames. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation results on the benchmark datasets and real-world videos demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, speed as well as model size.

Shangchen Zhou, Jiawei Zhang, Wangmeng Zuo et al.

Nowadays stereo cameras are more commonly adopted in emerging devices such as dual-lens smartphones and unmanned aerial vehicles. However, they also suffer from blurry images in dynamic scenes which leads to visual discomfort and hampers further image processing. Previous works have succeeded in monocular deblurring, yet there are few studies on deblurring for stereoscopic images. By exploiting the two-view nature of stereo images, we propose a novel stereo image deblurring network with Depth Awareness and View Aggregation, named DAVANet. In our proposed network, 3D scene cues from the depth and varying information from two views are incorporated, which help to remove complex spatially-varying blur in dynamic scenes. Specifically, with our proposed fusion network, we integrate the bidirectional disparities estimation and deblurring into a unified framework. Moreover, we present a large-scale multi-scene dataset for stereo deblurring, containing 20,637 blurry-sharp stereo image pairs from 135 diverse sequences and their corresponding bidirectional disparities. The experimental results on our dataset demonstrate that DAVANet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, speed, and model size.

Yan Chen, Jimmy Ren, Xuanye Cheng et al.

Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras require active illumination to obtain depth information thus the power of illumination directly affects the performance of ToF cameras. Traditional ToF imaging algorithms is very sensitive to illumination and the depth accuracy degenerates rapidly with the power of it. Therefore, the design of a power efficient ToF camera always creates a painful dilemma for the illumination and the performance trade-off. In this paper, we show that despite the weak signals in many areas under extreme short exposure setting, these signals as a whole can be well utilized through a learning process which directly translates the weak and noisy ToF camera raw to depth map. This creates an opportunity to tackle the aforementioned dilemma and make a very power efficient ToF camera possible. To enable the learning, we collect a comprehensive dataset under a variety of scenes and photographic conditions by a specialized ToF camera. Experiments show that our method is able to robustly process ToF camera raw with the exposure time of one order of magnitude shorter than that used in conventional ToF cameras. In addition to evaluating our approach both quantitatively and qualitatively, we also discuss its implication to designing the next generation power efficient ToF cameras. We will make our dataset and code publicly available.

Ruichao Xiao, Wenxiu Sun, Jiahao Pang et al.

With the developments of dual-lens camera modules,depth information representing the third dimension of thecaptured scenes becomes available for smartphones. It isestimated by stereo matching algorithms, taking as input thetwo views captured by dual-lens cameras at slightly differ-ent viewpoints. Depth-of-field rendering (also be referred toas synthetic defocus or bokeh) is one of the trending depth-based applications. However, to achieve fast depth estima-tion on smartphones, the stereo pairs need to be rectified inthe first place. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective so-lution to perform stereo rectification for dual-lens camerascalled direct self-rectification, short for DSR1. It removesthe need of individual offline calibration for every pair ofdual-lens cameras. In addition, the proposed solution isrobust to the slight movements, e.g., due to collisions, ofthe dual-lens cameras after fabrication. Different with ex-isting self-rectification approaches, our approach computesthe homography in a novel way with zero geometric distor-tions introduced to the master image. It is achieved by di-rectly minimizing the vertical displacements of correspond-ing points between the original master image and the trans-formed slave image. Our method is evaluated on both real-istic and synthetic stereo image pairs, and produces supe-rior results compared to the calibrated rectification or otherself-rectification approaches

Xiaoyang Guo, Hongsheng Li, Shuai Yi et al.

Monocular depth estimation aims at estimating a pixelwise depth map for a single image, which has wide applications in scene understanding and autonomous driving. Existing supervised and unsupervised methods face great challenges. Supervised methods require large amounts of depth measurement data, which are generally difficult to obtain, while unsupervised methods are usually limited in estimation accuracy. Synthetic data generated by graphics engines provide a possible solution for collecting large amounts of depth data. However, the large domain gaps between synthetic and realistic data make directly training with them challenging. In this paper, we propose to use the stereo matching network as a proxy to learn depth from synthetic data and use predicted stereo disparity maps for supervising the monocular depth estimation network. Cross-domain synthetic data could be fully utilized in this novel framework. Different strategies are proposed to ensure learned depth perception capability well transferred across different domains. Our extensive experiments show state-of-the-art results of monocular depth estimation on KITTI dataset.

Jinshan Pan, Jiangxin Dong, Yang Liu et al.

We present an algorithm to directly solve numerous image restoration problems (e.g., image deblurring, image dehazing, image deraining, etc.). These problems are highly ill-posed, and the common assumptions for existing methods are usually based on heuristic image priors. In this paper, we find that these problems can be solved by generative models with adversarial learning. However, the basic formulation of generative adversarial networks (GANs) does not generate realistic images, and some structures of the estimated images are usually not preserved well. Motivated by an interesting observation that the estimated results should be consistent with the observed inputs under the physics models, we propose a physics model constrained learning algorithm so that it can guide the estimation of the specific task in the conventional GAN framework. The proposed algorithm is trained in an end-to-end fashion and can be applied to a variety of image restoration and related low-level vision problems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Zhouxia Wang, Tianshui Chen, Jimmy Ren et al.

Social relationships (e.g., friends, couple etc.) form the basis of the social network in our daily life. Automatically interpreting such relationships bears a great potential for the intelligent systems to understand human behavior in depth and to better interact with people at a social level. Human beings interpret the social relationships within a group not only based on the people alone, and the interplay between such social relationships and the contextual information around the people also plays a significant role. However, these additional cues are largely overlooked by the previous studies. We found that the interplay between these two factors can be effectively modeled by a novel structured knowledge graph with proper message propagation and attention. And this structured knowledge can be efficiently integrated into the deep neural network architecture to promote social relationship understanding by an end-to-end trainable Graph Reasoning Model (GRM), in which a propagation mechanism is learned to propagate node message through the graph to explore the interaction between persons of interest and the contextual objects. Meanwhile, a graph attentional mechanism is introduced to explicitly reason about the discriminative objects to promote recognition. Extensive experiments on the public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over the existing leading competitors.

Jinshan Pan, Sifei Liu, Deqing Sun et al.

In this paper, we propose a general dual convolutional neural network (DualCNN) for low-level vision problems, e.g., super-resolution, edge-preserving filtering, deraining and dehazing. These problems usually involve the estimation of two components of the target signals: structures and details. Motivated by this, our proposed DualCNN consists of two parallel branches, which respectively recovers the structures and details in an end-to-end manner. The recovered structures and details can generate the target signals according to the formation model for each particular application. The DualCNN is a flexible framework for low-level vision tasks and can be easily incorporated into existing CNNs. Experimental results show that the DualCNN can be effectively applied to numerous low-level vision tasks with favorable performance against the state-of-the-art methods.

Yicun Liu, Jimmy Ren, Jianbo Liu et al.

Artistic style transfer can be thought as a process to generate different versions of abstraction of the original image. However, most of the artistic style transfer operators are not optimized for human faces thus mainly suffers from two undesirable features when applying them to selfies. First, the edges of human faces may unpleasantly deviate from the ones in the original image. Second, the skin color is far from faithful to the original one which is usually problematic in producing quality selfies. In this paper, we take a different approach and formulate this abstraction process as a gradient domain learning problem. We aim to learn a type of abstraction which not only achieves the specified artistic style but also circumvents the two aforementioned drawbacks thus highly applicable to selfie photography. We also show that our method can be directly generalized to videos with high inter-frame consistency. Our method is also robust to non-selfie images, and the generalization to various kinds of real-life scenes is discussed. We will make our code publicly available.

Wei Yang, Wanli Ouyang, Xiaolong Wang et al.

Recently, remarkable advances have been achieved in 3D human pose estimation from monocular images because of the powerful Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs). Despite their success on large-scale datasets collected in the constrained lab environment, it is difficult to obtain the 3D pose annotations for in-the-wild images. Therefore, 3D human pose estimation in the wild is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose an adversarial learning framework, which distills the 3D human pose structures learned from the fully annotated dataset to in-the-wild images with only 2D pose annotations. Instead of defining hard-coded rules to constrain the pose estimation results, we design a novel multi-source discriminator to distinguish the predicted 3D poses from the ground-truth, which helps to enforce the pose estimator to generate anthropometrically valid poses even with images in the wild. We also observe that a carefully designed information source for the discriminator is essential to boost the performance. Thus, we design a geometric descriptor, which computes the pairwise relative locations and distances between body joints, as a new information source for the discriminator. The efficacy of our adversarial learning framework with the new geometric descriptor has been demonstrated through extensive experiments on widely used public benchmarks. Our approach significantly improves the performance compared with previous state-of-the-art approaches.

Jiahao Pang, Wenxiu Sun, Chengxi Yang et al.

Despite the recent success of stereo matching with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), it remains arduous to generalize a pre-trained deep stereo model to a novel domain. A major difficulty is to collect accurate ground-truth disparities for stereo pairs in the target domain. In this work, we propose a self-adaptation approach for CNN training, utilizing both synthetic training data (with ground-truth disparities) and stereo pairs in the new domain (without ground-truths). Our method is driven by two empirical observations. By feeding real stereo pairs of different domains to stereo models pre-trained with synthetic data, we see that: i) a pre-trained model does not generalize well to the new domain, producing artifacts at boundaries and ill-posed regions; however, ii) feeding an up-sampled stereo pair leads to a disparity map with extra details. To avoid i) while exploiting ii), we formulate an iterative optimization problem with graph Laplacian regularization. At each iteration, the CNN adapts itself better to the new domain: we let the CNN learn its own higher-resolution output; at the meanwhile, a graph Laplacian regularization is imposed to discriminatively keep the desired edges while smoothing out the artifacts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in two domains: daily scenes collected by smartphone cameras, and street views captured in a driving car.

Yue Luo, Jimmy Ren, Mude Lin et al.

Previous monocular depth estimation methods take a single view and directly regress the expected results. Though recent advances are made by applying geometrically inspired loss functions during training, the inference procedure does not explicitly impose any geometrical constraint. Therefore these models purely rely on the quality of data and the effectiveness of learning to generalize. This either leads to suboptimal results or the demand of huge amount of expensive ground truth labelled data to generate reasonable results. In this paper, we show for the first time that the monocular depth estimation problem can be reformulated as two sub-problems, a view synthesis procedure followed by stereo matching, with two intriguing properties, namely i) geometrical constraints can be explicitly imposed during inference; ii) demand on labelled depth data can be greatly alleviated. We show that the whole pipeline can still be trained in an end-to-end fashion and this new formulation plays a critical role in advancing the performance. The resulting model outperforms all the previous monocular depth estimation methods as well as the stereo block matching method in the challenging KITTI dataset by only using a small number of real training data. The model also generalizes well to other monocular depth estimation benchmarks. We also discuss the implications and the advantages of solving monocular depth estimation using stereo methods.

Yue Luo, Jimmy Ren, Zhouxia Wang et al.

We observed that recent state-of-the-art results on single image human pose estimation were achieved by multi-stage Convolution Neural Networks (CNN). Notwithstanding the superior performance on static images, the application of these models on videos is not only computationally intensive, it also suffers from performance degeneration and flicking. Such suboptimal results are mainly attributed to the inability of imposing sequential geometric consistency, handling severe image quality degradation (e.g. motion blur and occlusion) as well as the inability of capturing the temporal correlation among video frames. In this paper, we proposed a novel recurrent network to tackle these problems. We showed that if we were to impose the weight sharing scheme to the multi-stage CNN, it could be re-written as a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). This property decouples the relationship among multiple network stages and results in significantly faster speed in invoking the network for videos. It also enables the adoption of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units between video frames. We found such memory augmented RNN is very effective in imposing geometric consistency among frames. It also well handles input quality degradation in videos while successfully stabilizes the sequential outputs. The experiments showed that our approach significantly outperformed current state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale video pose estimation benchmarks. We also explored the memory cells inside the LSTM and provided insights on why such mechanism would benefit the prediction for video-based pose estimations.

Hui Yang, Jinshan Pan, Qiong Yan et al.

In this paper, we introduce a bilinear composition loss function to address the problem of image dehazing. Previous methods in image dehazing use a two-stage approach which first estimate the transmission map followed by clear image estimation. The drawback of a two-stage method is that it tends to boost local image artifacts such as noise, aliasing and blocking. This is especially the case for heavy haze images captured with a low quality device. Our method is based on convolutional neural networks. Unique in our method is the bilinear composition loss function which directly model the correlations between transmission map, clear image, and atmospheric light. This allows errors to be back-propagated to each sub-network concurrently, while maintaining the composition constraint to avoid overfitting of each sub-network. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method using both synthetic and real world examples. Extensive experiments show that our method outperfoms state-of-the-art methods especially for haze images with severe noise level and compressions.

Jimmy Ren, Zhiyang Yu, Jianbo Liu et al.

Recent advances in visual tracking showed that deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) trained for image classification can be strong feature extractors for discriminative trackers. However, due to the drastic difference between image classification and tracking, extra treatments such as model ensemble and feature engineering must be carried out to bridge the two domains. Such procedures are either time consuming or hard to generalize well across datasets. In this paper we discovered that the internal structure of Region Proposal Network (RPN)'s top layer feature can be utilized for robust visual tracking. We showed that such property has to be unleashed by a novel loss function which simultaneously considers classification accuracy and bounding box quality. Without ensemble and any extra treatment on feature maps, our proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results on several large scale benchmarks including OTB50, OTB100 and VOT2016. We will make our code publicly available.

Jimmy Ren, Xiaohao Chen, Jianbo Liu et al.

Most of the recent successful methods in accurate object detection and localization used some variants of R-CNN style two stage Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) where plausible regions were proposed in the first stage then followed by a second stage for decision refinement. Despite the simplicity of training and the efficiency in deployment, the single stage detection methods have not been as competitive when evaluated in benchmarks consider mAP for high IoU thresholds. In this paper, we proposed a novel single stage end-to-end trainable object detection network to overcome this limitation. We achieved this by introducing Recurrent Rolling Convolution (RRC) architecture over multi-scale feature maps to construct object classifiers and bounding box regressors which are "deep in context". We evaluated our method in the challenging KITTI dataset which measures methods under IoU threshold of 0.7. We showed that with RRC, a single reduced VGG-16 based model already significantly outperformed all the previously published results. At the time this paper was written our models ranked the first in KITTI car detection (the hard level), the first in cyclist detection and the second in pedestrian detection. These results were not reached by the previous single stage methods. The code is publicly available.

Jimmy Ren, Yongtao Hu, Yu-Wing Tai et al.

Speaker identification refers to the task of localizing the face of a person who has the same identity as the ongoing voice in a video. This task not only requires collective perception over both visual and auditory signals, the robustness to handle severe quality degradations and unconstrained content variations are also indispensable. In this paper, we describe a novel multimodal Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture which seamlessly unifies both visual and auditory modalities from the beginning of each sequence input. The key idea is to extend the conventional LSTM by not only sharing weights across time steps, but also sharing weights across modalities. We show that modeling the temporal dependency across face and voice can significantly improve the robustness to content quality degradations and variations. We also found that our multimodal LSTM is robustness to distractors, namely the non-speaking identities. We applied our multimodal LSTM to The Big Bang Theory dataset and showed that our system outperforms the state-of-the-art systems in speaker identification with lower false alarm rate and higher recognition accuracy.

Yongtao Hu, Jimmy Ren, Jingwen Dai et al.

Automatic speaker naming is the problem of localizing as well as identifying each speaking character in a TV/movie/live show video. This is a challenging problem mainly attributes to its multimodal nature, namely face cue alone is insufficient to achieve good performance. Previous multimodal approaches to this problem usually process the data of different modalities individually and merge them using handcrafted heuristics. Such approaches work well for simple scenes, but fail to achieve high performance for speakers with large appearance variations. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural networks (CNN) based learning framework to automatically learn the fusion function of both face and audio cues. We show that without using face tracking, facial landmark localization or subtitle/transcript, our system with robust multimodal feature extraction is able to achieve state-of-the-art speaker naming performance evaluated on two diverse TV series. The dataset and implementation of our algorithm are publicly available online.