Xin Ning

Changshuo Wang, Meiqing Wu, Siew-Kei Lam et al.

Despite the significant advancements in pre-training methods for point cloud understanding, directly capturing intricate shape information from irregular point clouds without reliance on external data remains a formidable challenge. To address this problem, we propose GPSFormer, an innovative Global Perception and Local Structure Fitting-based Transformer, which learns detailed shape information from point clouds with remarkable precision. The core of GPSFormer is the Global Perception Module (GPM) and the Local Structure Fitting Convolution (LSFConv). Specifically, GPM utilizes Adaptive Deformable Graph Convolution (ADGConv) to identify short-range dependencies among similar features in the feature space and employs Multi-Head Attention (MHA) to learn long-range dependencies across all positions within the feature space, ultimately enabling flexible learning of contextual representations. Inspired by Taylor series, we design LSFConv, which learns both low-order fundamental and high-order refinement information from explicitly encoded local geometric structures. Integrating the GPM and LSFConv as fundamental components, we construct GPSFormer, a cutting-edge Transformer that effectively captures global and local structures of point clouds. Extensive experiments validate GPSFormer's effectiveness in three point cloud tasks: shape classification, part segmentation, and few-shot learning. The code of GPSFormer is available at \url{https://github.com/changshuowang/GPSFormer}.

Huang Zhang, Changshuo Wang, Shengwei Tian et al.

In recent years, point cloud representation has become one of the research hotspots in the field of computer vision, and has been widely used in many fields, such as autonomous driving, virtual reality, robotics, etc. Although deep learning techniques have achieved great success in processing regular structured 2D grid image data, there are still great challenges in processing irregular, unstructured point cloud data. Point cloud classification is the basis of point cloud analysis, and many deep learning-based methods have been widely used in this task. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide researchers in this field with the latest research progress and future trends. First, we introduce point cloud acquisition, characteristics, and challenges. Second, we review 3D data representations, storage formats, and commonly used datasets for point cloud classification. We then summarize deep learning-based methods for point cloud classification and complement recent research work. Next, we compare and analyze the performance of the main methods. Finally, we discuss some challenges and future directions for point cloud classification.

Enhao Ning, Changshuo Wang, Huang Zhangc et al.

Person re-identification (Re-ID) technology plays an increasingly crucial role in intelligent surveillance systems. Widespread occlusion significantly impacts the performance of person Re-ID. Occluded person Re-ID refers to a pedestrian matching method that deals with challenges such as pedestrian information loss, noise interference, and perspective misalignment. It has garnered extensive attention from researchers. Over the past few years, several occlusion-solving person Re-ID methods have been proposed, tackling various sub-problems arising from occlusion. However, there is a lack of comprehensive studies that compare, summarize, and evaluate the potential of occluded person Re-ID methods in detail. In this review, we start by providing a detailed overview of the datasets and evaluation scheme used for occluded person Re-ID. Next, we scientifically classify and analyze existing deep learning-based occluded person Re-ID methods from various perspectives, summarizing them concisely. Furthermore, we conduct a systematic comparison among these methods, identify the state-of-the-art approaches, and present an outlook on the future development of occluded person Re-ID.

Tianqi Li, Guansong Pang, Xiao Bai et al.

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) focuses on classifying samples of unseen classes with only their side semantic information presented during training. It cannot handle real-life, open-world scenarios where there are test samples of unknown classes for which neither samples (e.g., images) nor their side semantic information is known during training. Open-Set Recognition (OSR) is dedicated to addressing the unknown class issue, but existing OSR methods are not designed to model the semantic information of the unseen classes. To tackle this combined ZSL and OSR problem, we consider the case of "Zero-Shot Open-Set Recognition" (ZS-OSR), where a model is trained under the ZSL setting but it is required to accurately classify samples from the unseen classes while being able to reject samples from the unknown classes during inference. We perform large experiments on combining existing state-of-the-art ZSL and OSR models for the ZS-OSR task on four widely used datasets adapted from the ZSL task, and reveal that ZS-OSR is a non-trivial task as the simply combined solutions perform badly in distinguishing the unseen-class and unknown-class samples. We further introduce a novel approach specifically designed for ZS-OSR, in which our model learns to generate adversarial semantic embeddings of the unknown classes to train an unknowns-informed ZS-OSR classifier. Extensive empirical results show that our method 1) substantially outperforms the combined solutions in detecting the unknown classes while retaining the classification accuracy on the unseen classes and 2) achieves similar superiority under generalized ZS-OSR settings.

Pengcheng Zhang, Xiaohan Yu, Xiao Bai et al.

The development of person search techniques has been greatly promoted in recent years for its superior practicality and challenging goals. Despite their significant progress, existing person search models still lack the ability to continually learn from increaseing real-world data and adaptively process input from different domains. To this end, this work introduces the continual person search task that sequentially learns on multiple domains and then performs person search on all seen domains. This requires balancing the stability and plasticity of the model to continually learn new knowledge without catastrophic forgetting. For this, we propose a Prompt-based Continual Person Search (PoPS) model in this paper. First, we design a compositional person search transformer to construct an effective pre-trained transformer without exhaustive pre-training from scratch on large-scale person search data. This serves as the fundamental for prompt-based continual learning. On top of that, we design a domain incremental prompt pool with a diverse attribute matching module. For each domain, we independently learn a set of prompts to encode the domain-oriented knowledge. Meanwhile, we jointly learn a group of diverse attribute projections and prototype embeddings to capture discriminative domain attributes. By matching an input image with the learned attributes across domains, the learned prompts can be properly selected for model inference. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the proposed method for continual person search. The source code is available at https://github.com/PatrickZad/PoPS.

Jiahe Li, Jiawei Zhang, Xiao Bai et al.

Radiance fields have demonstrated impressive performance in synthesizing novel views from sparse input views, yet prevailing methods suffer from high training costs and slow inference speed. This paper introduces DNGaussian, a depth-regularized framework based on 3D Gaussian radiance fields, offering real-time and high-quality few-shot novel view synthesis at low costs. Our motivation stems from the highly efficient representation and surprising quality of the recent 3D Gaussian Splatting, despite it will encounter a geometry degradation when input views decrease. In the Gaussian radiance fields, we find this degradation in scene geometry primarily lined to the positioning of Gaussian primitives and can be mitigated by depth constraint. Consequently, we propose a Hard and Soft Depth Regularization to restore accurate scene geometry under coarse monocular depth supervision while maintaining a fine-grained color appearance. To further refine detailed geometry reshaping, we introduce Global-Local Depth Normalization, enhancing the focus on small local depth changes. Extensive experiments on LLFF, DTU, and Blender datasets demonstrate that DNGaussian outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving comparable or better results with significantly reduced memory cost, a $25 \times$ reduction in training time, and over $3000 \times$ faster rendering speed.

Songsong Tian, Lusi Li, Weijun Li et al.

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) aims to enable deep neural networks to learn new tasks incrementally from a small number of labeled samples without forgetting previously learned tasks, closely mimicking human learning patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Prompt Learning for FSCIL (PL-FSCIL), which harnesses the power of prompts in conjunction with a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) model to address the challenges of FSCIL effectively. Our work pioneers the use of visual prompts in FSCIL, which is characterized by its notable simplicity. PL-FSCIL consists of two distinct prompts: the Domain Prompt and the FSCIL Prompt. Both are vectors that augment the model by embedding themselves into the attention layer of the ViT model. Specifically, the Domain Prompt assists the ViT model in adapting to new data domains. The task-specific FSCIL Prompt, coupled with a prototype classifier, amplifies the model's ability to effectively handle FSCIL tasks. We validate the efficacy of PL-FSCIL on widely used benchmark datasets such as CIFAR-100 and CUB-200. The results showcase competitive performance, underscoring its promising potential for real-world applications where high-quality data is often scarce. The source code is available at: https://github.com/TianSongS/PL-FSCIL.

Jiahe Li, Jiawei Zhang, Xiao Bai et al.

Radiance fields have demonstrated impressive performance in synthesizing lifelike 3D talking heads. However, due to the difficulty in fitting steep appearance changes, the prevailing paradigm that presents facial motions by directly modifying point appearance may lead to distortions in dynamic regions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce TalkingGaussian, a deformation-based radiance fields framework for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. Leveraging the point-based Gaussian Splatting, facial motions can be represented in our method by applying smooth and continuous deformations to persistent Gaussian primitives, without requiring to learn the difficult appearance change like previous methods. Due to this simplification, precise facial motions can be synthesized while keeping a highly intact facial feature. Under such a deformation paradigm, we further identify a face-mouth motion inconsistency that would affect the learning of detailed speaking motions. To address this conflict, we decompose the model into two branches separately for the face and inside mouth areas, therefore simplifying the learning tasks to help reconstruct more accurate motion and structure of the mouth region. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method renders high-quality lip-synchronized talking head videos, with better facial fidelity and higher efficiency compared with previous methods.

Jie Li, Shengwei Tian, Long Yu et al.

Chamfer Distance (CD) comprises two components that can evaluate the global distribution and local performance of generated point clouds, making it widely utilized as a similarity measure between generated and target point clouds in point cloud completion tasks. Additionally, CD's computational efficiency has led to its frequent application as an objective function for guiding point cloud generation. However, using CD directly as an objective function with fixed equal weights for its two components can often result in seemingly high overall performance (i.e., low CD score), while failing to achieve a good global distribution. This is typically reflected in high Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and Decomposed Chamfer Distance (DCD) scores, alongside poor human assessments. To address this issue, we propose a Flexible-Weighted Chamfer Distance (FCD) to guide point cloud generation. FCD assigns a higher weight to the global distribution component of CD and incorporates a flexible weighting strategy to adjust the balance between the two components, aiming to improve global distribution while maintaining robust overall performance. Experimental results on two state-of-the-art networks demonstrate that our method achieves superior results across multiple evaluation metrics, including CD, EMD, DCD, and F-Score, as well as in human evaluations.

Liping Zhang, Weijun Li, Linjun Sun et al.

How to represent a face pattern? While it is presented in a continuous way in our visual system, computers often store and process the face image in a discrete manner with 2D arrays of pixels. In this study, we attempt to learn a continuous representation for face images with explicit functions. First, we propose an explicit model (EmFace) for human face representation in the form of a finite sum of mathematical terms, where each term is an analytic function element. Further, to estimate the unknown parameters of EmFace, a novel neural network, EmNet, is designed with an encoder-decoder structure and trained using the backpropagation algorithm, where the encoder is defined by a deep convolutional neural network and the decoder is an explicit mathematical expression of EmFace. Experimental results show that EmFace has a higher representation performance on faces with various expressions, postures, and other factors, compared to that of other methods. Furthermore, EmFace achieves reasonable performance on several face image processing tasks, including face image restoration, denoising, and transformation.

Liping Zhang, Weijun Li, Lina Yu et al.

Establishing mathematical models is a ubiquitous and effective method to understand the objective world. Due to complex physiological structures and dynamic behaviors, mathematical representation of the human face is an especially challenging task. A mathematical model for face image representation called GmFace is proposed in the form of a multi-Gaussian function in this paper. The model utilizes the advantages of two-dimensional Gaussian function which provides a symmetric bell surface with a shape that can be controlled by parameters. The GmNet is then designed using Gaussian functions as neurons, with parameters that correspond to each of the parameters of GmFace in order to transform the problem of GmFace parameter solving into a network optimization problem of GmNet. The face modeling process can be described by the following steps: (1) GmNet initialization; (2) feeding GmNet with face image(s); (3) training GmNet until convergence; (4) drawing out the parameters of GmNet (as the same as GmFace); (5) recording the face model GmFace. Furthermore, using GmFace, several face image transformation operations can be realized mathematically through simple parameter computation.

Liping Zhang, Weijun Li, Xin Ning

Local feature descriptors exhibit great superiority in finger vein recognition due to their stability and robustness against local changes in images. However, most of these are methods use general-purpose descriptors that do not consider finger vein-specific features. In this work, we propose a finger vein-specific local feature descriptors based physiological characteristic of finger vein patterns, i.e., histogram of oriented physiological Gabor responses (HOPGR), for finger vein recognition. First, prior of directional characteristic of finger vein patterns is obtained in an unsupervised manner. Then the physiological Gabor filter banks are set up based on the prior information to extract the physiological responses and orientation. Finally, to make feature has robustness against local changes in images, histogram is generated as output by dividing the image into non-overlapping cells and overlapping blocks. Extensive experimental results on several databases clearly demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms most current state-of-the-art finger vein recognition methods.

Xin Ning, Shaohui Xu, Xiaoli Dong et al.

The generative adversarial network (GAN) exhibits great superiority in the face attribute synthesis task. However, existing methods have very limited effects on the expansion of new attributes. To overcome the limitations of a single network in new attribute synthesis, a continuous learning method for face attribute synthesis is proposed in this work. First, the feature vector of the input image is extracted and attribute direction regression is performed in the feature space to obtain the axes of different attributes. The feature vector is then linearly guided along the axis so that images with target attributes can be synthesized by the decoder. Finally, to make the network capable of continuous learning, the orthogonal direction modification module is used to extend the newly-added attributes. Experimental results show that the proposed method can endow a single network with the ability to learn attributes continuously, and, as compared to those produced by the current state-of-the-art methods, the synthetic attributes have higher accuracy.