Chaohui Wang

Huan Fu, Mingming Gong, Chaohui Wang et al.

Monocular depth estimation, which plays a crucial role in understanding 3D scene geometry, is an ill-posed problem. Recent methods have gained significant improvement by exploring image-level information and hierarchical features from deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). These methods model depth estimation as a regression problem and train the regression networks by minimizing mean squared error, which suffers from slow convergence and unsatisfactory local solutions. Besides, existing depth estimation networks employ repeated spatial pooling operations, resulting in undesirable low-resolution feature maps. To obtain high-resolution depth maps, skip-connections or multi-layer deconvolution networks are required, which complicates network training and consumes much more computations. To eliminate or at least largely reduce these problems, we introduce a spacing-increasing discretization (SID) strategy to discretize depth and recast depth network learning as an ordinal regression problem. By training the network using an ordinary regression loss, our method achieves much higher accuracy and \dd{faster convergence in synch}. Furthermore, we adopt a multi-scale network structure which avoids unnecessary spatial pooling and captures multi-scale information in parallel. The method described in this paper achieves state-of-the-art results on four challenging benchmarks, i.e., KITTI [17], ScanNet [9], Make3D [50], and NYU Depth v2 [42], and win the 1st prize in Robust Vision Challenge 2018. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/hufu6371/DORN.

Huan Fu, Mingming Gong, Chaohui Wang et al.

Unsupervised domain mapping aims to learn a function to translate domain X to Y by a function GXY in the absence of paired examples. Finding the optimal GXY without paired data is an ill-posed problem, so appropriate constraints are required to obtain reasonable solutions. One of the most prominent constraints is cycle consistency, which enforces the translated image by GXY to be translated back to the input image by an inverse mapping GYX. While cycle consistency requires the simultaneous training of GXY and GY X, recent studies have shown that one-sided domain mapping can be achieved by preserving pairwise distances between images. Although cycle consistency and distance preservation successfully constrain the solution space, they overlook the special properties that simple geometric transformations do not change the semantic structure of images. Based on this special property, we develop a geometry-consistent generative adversarial network (GcGAN), which enables one-sided unsupervised domain mapping. GcGAN takes the original image and its counterpart image transformed by a predefined geometric transformation as inputs and generates two images in the new domain coupled with the corresponding geometry-consistency constraint. The geometry-consistency constraint reduces the space of possible solutions while keep the correct solutions in the search space. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons with the baseline (GAN alone) and the state-of-the-art methods including CycleGAN and DistanceGAN demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Huan Fu, Mingming Gong, Chaohui Wang et al.

Scene parsing is an indispensable component in understanding the semantics within a scene. Traditional methods rely on handcrafted local features and probabilistic graphical models to incorporate local and global cues. Recently, methods based on fully convolutional neural networks have achieved new records on scene parsing. An important strategy common to these methods is the aggregation of hierarchical features yielded by a deep convolutional neural network. However, typical algorithms usually aggregate hierarchical convolutional features via concatenation or linear combination, which cannot sufficiently exploit the diversities of contextual information in multi-scale features and the spatial inhomogeneity of a scene. In this paper, we propose a mixture-of-experts scene parsing network (MoE-SPNet) that incorporates a convolutional mixture-of-experts layer to assess the importance of features from different levels and at different spatial locations. In addition, we propose a variant of mixture-of-experts called the adaptive hierarchical feature aggregation (AHFA) mechanism which can be incorporated into existing scene parsing networks that use skip-connections to fuse features layer-wisely. In the proposed networks, different levels of features at each spatial location are adaptively re-weighted according to the local structure and surrounding contextual information before aggregation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods on two scene parsing datasets including PASCAL VOC 2012 and SceneParse150 based on two kinds of baseline models FCN-8s and DeepLab-ASPP.