Jia Li

Nan Gao, Jia Li, Huaibo Huang et al.

Blind face restoration (BFR) is a highly challenging problem due to the uncertainty of data degradation patterns. Current BFR methods have realized certain restored productions but with inherent neural degradations that limit real-world generalization in complicated scenarios. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework InfoBFR to tackle neural degradations, e.g., prior bias, topological distortion, textural distortion, and artifact residues, which achieves high-generalization face restoration in diverse wild and heterogeneous scenes. Specifically, based on the results from pre-trained BFR models, InfoBFR considers information compression using manifold information bottleneck (MIB) and information compensation with efficient diffusion LoRA to conduct information optimization. InfoBFR effectively synthesizes high-fidelity faces without attribute and identity distortions. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of InfoBFR over state-of-the-art GAN-based and diffusion-based BFR methods, with around 70ms consumption, 16M trainable parameters, and nearly 85% BFR-boosting. It is promising that InfoBFR will be the first plug-and-play restorer universally employed by diverse BFR models to conquer neural degradations.

Guangyao Chen, Peixi Peng, Li Ma et al.

Recently, the generalization behavior of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is gradually transparent through explanation techniques with the frequency components decomposition. However, the importance of the phase spectrum of the image for a robust vision system is still ignored. In this paper, we notice that the CNN tends to converge at the local optimum which is closely related to the high-frequency components of the training images, while the amplitude spectrum is easily disturbed such as noises or common corruptions. In contrast, more empirical studies found that humans rely on more phase components to achieve robust recognition. This observation leads to more explanations of the CNN's generalization behaviors in both robustness to common perturbations and out-of-distribution detection, and motivates a new perspective on data augmentation designed by re-combing the phase spectrum of the current image and the amplitude spectrum of the distracter image. That is, the generated samples force the CNN to pay more attention to the structured information from phase components and keep robust to the variation of the amplitude. Experiments on several image datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performances on multiple generalizations and calibration tasks, including adaptability for common corruptions and surface variations, out-of-distribution detection, and adversarial attack.

Jinming Su, Jia Li, Yu Zhang et al.

Typically, a salient object detection (SOD) model faces opposite requirements in processing object interiors and boundaries. The features of interiors should be invariant to strong appearance change so as to pop-out the salient object as a whole, while the features of boundaries should be selective to slight appearance change to distinguish salient objects and background. To address this selectivity-invariance dilemma, we propose a novel boundary-aware network with successive dilation for image-based SOD. In this network, the feature selectivity at boundaries is enhanced by incorporating a boundary localization stream, while the feature invariance at interiors is guaranteed with a complex interior perception stream. Moreover, a transition compensation stream is adopted to amend the probable failures in transitional regions between interiors and boundaries. In particular, an integrated successive dilation module is proposed to enhance the feature invariance at interiors and transitional regions. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms 16 state-of-the-art methods.

Jia Li, Pengcheng Yuan, Daxin Gu et al.

Primary object segmentation plays an important role in understanding videos generated by unmanned aerial vehicles. In this paper, we propose a large-scale dataset with 500 aerial videos and manually annotated primary objects. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest dataset to date for primary object segmentation in aerial videos. From this dataset, we find most aerial videos contain large-scale scenes, small primary objects as well as consistently varying scales and viewpoints. Inspired by that, we propose a hierarchical deep co-segmentation approach that repeatedly divides a video into two sub-videos formed by the odd and even frames, respectively. In this manner, the primary objects shared by sub-videos can be co-segmented by training two-stream CNNs and finally refined within the neighborhood reversible flows. Experimental results show that our approach remarkably outperforms 17 state-of-the-art methods in segmenting primary objects in various types of aerial videos.

Jia Li, Changqun Xia, Xiaowu Chen

Image-based salient object detection (SOD) has been extensively studied in the past decades. However, video-based SOD is much less explored since there lack large-scale video datasets within which salient objects are unambiguously defined and annotated. Toward this end, this paper proposes a video-based SOD dataset that consists of 200 videos (64 minutes). In constructing the dataset, we manually annotate all objects and regions over 7,650 uniformly sampled keyframes and collect the eye-tracking data of 23 subjects that free-view all videos. From the user data, we find salient objects in video can be defined as objects that consistently pop-out throughout the video, and objects with such attributes can be unambiguously annotated by combining manually annotated object/region masks with eye-tracking data of multiple subjects. To the best of our knowledge, it is currently the largest dataset for video-based salient object detection. Based on this dataset, this paper proposes an unsupervised baseline approach for video-based SOD by using saliency-guided stacked autoencoders. In the proposed approach, multiple spatiotemporal saliency cues are first extracted at pixel, superpixel and object levels. With these saliency cues, stacked autoencoders are unsupervisedly constructed which automatically infer a saliency score for each pixel by progressively encoding the high-dimensional saliency cues gathered from the pixel and its spatiotemporal neighbors. Experimental results show that the proposed unsupervised approach outperforms 30 state-of-the-art models on the proposed dataset, including 19 image-based & classic (unsupervised or non-deep learning), 6 image-based & deep learning, and 5 video-based & unsupervised. Moreover, benchmarking results show that the proposed dataset is very challenging and has the potential to boost the development of video-based SOD.