Mei Xie

Yanxiang Gong, Zhiwei Xie, Guozhen Duan et al.

Mode collapse is a significant unsolved issue of generative adversarial networks. In this work, we examine the causes of mode collapse from a novel perspective. Due to the nonuniform sampling in the training process, some sub-distributions may be missed when sampling data. As a result, even when the generated distribution differs from the real one, the GAN objective can still achieve the minimum. To address the issue, we propose a global distribution fitting (GDF) method with a penalty term to confine the generated data distribution. When the generated distribution differs from the real one, GDF will make the objective harder to reach the minimal value, while the original global minimum is not changed. To deal with the circumstance when the overall real data is unreachable, we also propose a local distribution fitting (LDF) method. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and competitive performance of GDF and LDF.

Linjie Deng, Yanxiang Gong, Xinchen Lu et al.

To achieve high coverage of target boxes, a normal strategy of conventional one-stage anchor-based detectors is to utilize multiple priors at each spatial position, especially in scene text detection tasks. In this work, we present a simple and intuitive method for multi-oriented text detection where each location of feature maps only associates with one reference box. The idea is inspired from the twostage R-CNN framework that can estimate the location of objects with any shape by using learned proposals. The aim of our method is to integrate this mechanism into a onestage detector and employ the learned anchor which is obtained through a regression operation to replace the original one into the final predictions. Based on RetinaNet, our method achieves competitive performances on several public benchmarks with a totally real-time efficiency (26:5fps at 800p), which surpasses all of anchor-based scene text detectors. In addition, with less attention on anchor design, we believe our method is easy to be applied on other analogous detection tasks. The code will publicly available at https://github.com/xhzdeng/stela.

Linjie Deng, Yanxiang Gong, Xinchen Lu et al.

Recently, scene text recognition methods based on deep learning have sprung up in computer vision area. The existing methods achieved great performances, but the recognition of irregular text is still challenging due to the various shapes and distorted patterns. Consider that at the time of reading words in the real world, normally we will not rectify it in our mind but adjust our focus and visual fields. Similarly, through utilizing deformable convolutional layers whose geometric structures are adjustable, we present an enhanced recognition network without the steps of rectification to deal with irregular text in this work. A number of experiments have been applied, where the results on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed components and shows that our method has reached satisfactory performances. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Alpaca07/dtr soon.

Linjie Deng, Yanxiang Gong, Yi Lin et al.

Previous approaches for scene text detection usually rely on manually defined sliding windows. This work presents an intuitive two-stage region-based method to detect multi-oriented text without any prior knowledge regarding the textual shape. In the first stage, we estimate the possible locations of text instances by detecting and linking corners instead of shifting a set of default anchors. The quadrilateral proposals are geometry adaptive, which allows our method to cope with various text aspect ratios and orientations. In the second stage, we design a new pooling layer named Dual-RoI Pooling which embeds data augmentation inside the region-wise subnetwork for more robust classification and regression over these proposals. Experimental results on public benchmarks confirm that the proposed method is capable of achieving comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/xhzdeng/crpn

Yujiang Chen, Mei Xie

Recently, lung nodule detection methods based on deep learning have shown excellent performance in the medical image processing field. Considering that only a few public lung datasets are available and lung nodules are more difficult to detect in CT images than in natural images, the existing methods face many bottlenecks when detecting lung nodules, especially hard ones in CT images. In order to solve these problems, we plan to enhance the focus of our network. In this work, we present an improved detection network that pays more attention to hard samples and datasets to deal with lung nodules by introducing deformable convolution and self-paced learning. Experiments on the LUNA16 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed components and show that our method has reached competitive performance.

Wenjie Ai, Xiaoguang Tu, Shilei Cheng et al.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have achieved impressive performance in Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). To further improve the performance, existing CNN-based methods generally focus on designing deeper architecture of the network. However, we argue blindly increasing network's depth is not the most sensible way. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Residual Neuron Attention Networks (RNAN) for more efficient and effective SISR. Structurally, our RNAN is a sequential integration of the well-designed Global Context-enhanced Residual Groups (GCRGs), which extracts super-resolved features from coarse to fine. Our GCRG is designed with two novelties. Firstly, the Residual Neuron Attention (RNA) mechanism is proposed in each block of GCRG to reveal the relevance of neurons for better feature representation. Furthermore, the Global Context (GC) block is embedded into RNAN at the end of each GCRG for effectively modeling the global contextual information. Experiments results demonstrate that our RNAN achieves the comparable results with state-of-the-art methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality, however, with simplified network architecture.

Yao Luo, Xiaoguang Tu, Mei Xie

3D face reconstruction from a single 2D image is a very important topic in computer vision. However, the current reconstruction methods are usually non-sensitive to face identities and over-sensitive to facial poses, which may result in similar 3D geometries for faces of different identities, or obtain different shapes for the same identity with different poses. When such methods are applied practically, their 3D estimates are either changeable for different photos of the same subject or over-regularized and generic to distinguish face identities. In this paper, we propose a robust solution to solve this problem by carefully designing a novel Siamese Convolutional Neural Network (SCNN). Specifically, regarding the 3D Morphable face Model (3DMM) parameters of the same individual as the same class, we employ the contrastive loss to enlarge the inter-class distance and meanwhile reduce the intra-class distance for the output 3DMM parameters. We also propose an identity loss to preserve the identity information for the same individual in the feature space. Training with these two losses, our SCNN could learn representations that are more discriminative for face identity and generalizable for pose variants. Experiments on the challenging database 300W-LP and AFLW2000-3D have shown the effectiveness of our method by comparing with state-of-the-arts.

Yanxiang Gong, Linjie Deng, Zheng Ma et al.

Recently, methods based on deep learning have dominated the field of text recognition. With a large number of training data, most of them can achieve the state-of-the-art performances. However, it is hard to harvest and label sufficient text sequence images from the real scenes. To mitigate this issue, several methods to synthesize text sequence images were proposed, yet they usually need complicated preceding or follow-up steps. In this work, we present a method which is able to generate infinite training data without any auxiliary pre/post-process. We tackle the generation task as an image-to-image translation one and utilize conditional adversarial networks to produce realistic text sequence images in the light of the semantic ones. Some evaluation metrics are involved to assess our method and the results demonstrate that the caliber of the data is satisfactory. The code and dataset will be publicly available soon.