Wen-Huang Cheng

Junchen Zhu, Huan Yang, Wenjing Wang et al. · microsoft-research

Videos for mobile devices become the most popular access to share and acquire information recently. For the convenience of users' creation, in this paper, we present a system, namely MobileVidFactory, to automatically generate vertical mobile videos where users only need to give simple texts mainly. Our system consists of two parts: basic and customized generation. In the basic generation, we take advantage of the pretrained image diffusion model, and adapt it to a high-quality open-domain vertical video generator for mobile devices. As for the audio, by retrieving from our big database, our system matches a suitable background sound for the video. Additionally to produce customized content, our system allows users to add specified screen texts to the video for enriching visual expression, and specify texts for automatic reading with optional voices as they like.

Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Cheng-Ming Chiang et al.

Video super-resolution is one of the most popular tasks on mobile devices, being widely used for an automatic improvement of low-bitrate and low-resolution video streams. While numerous solutions have been proposed for this problem, they are usually quite computationally demanding, demonstrating low FPS rates and power efficiency on mobile devices. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose the participants to design an end-to-end real-time video super-resolution solution for mobile NPUs optimized for low energy consumption. The participants were provided with the REDS training dataset containing video sequences for a 4X video upscaling task. The runtime and power efficiency of all models was evaluated on the powerful MediaTek Dimensity 9000 platform with a dedicated AI processing unit capable of accelerating floating-point and quantized neural networks. All proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU, demonstrating an up to 500 FPS rate and 0.2 [Watt / 30 FPS] power consumption. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Sandy Ardianto, Hsueh-Ming Hang, Wen-Huang Cheng

We design a fast car detection and tracking algorithm for traffic monitoring fisheye video mounted on crossroads. We use ICIP 2020 VIP Cup dataset and adopt YOLOv5 as the object detection base model. The nighttime video of this dataset is very challenging, and the detection accuracy (AP50) of the base model is about 54%. We design a reliable car detection and tracking algorithm based on the concept of bounding box propagation among frames, which provides 17.9 percentage points (pp) and 6.2 pp. accuracy improvement over the base model for the nighttime and daytime videos, respectively. To speed up, the grayscale frame difference is used for the intermediate frames in a segment, which can double the processing speed.

Yu-Jen Ma, Hong-Han Shuai, Wen-Huang Cheng

In this paper, we propose a novel SpatioTemporal convolutional Dense Network (STDNet) to address the video-based crowd counting problem, which contains the decomposition of 3D convolution and the 3D spatiotemporal dilated dense convolution to alleviate the rapid growth of the model size caused by the Conv3D layer. Moreover, since the dilated convolution extracts the multiscale features, we combine the dilated convolution with the channel attention block to enhance the feature representations. Due to the error that occurs from the difficulty of labeling crowds, especially for videos, imprecise or standard-inconsistent labels may lead to poor convergence for the model. To address this issue, we further propose a new patch-wise regression loss (PRL) to improve the original pixel-wise loss. Experimental results on three video-based benchmarks, i.e., the UCSD, Mall and WorldExpo'10 datasets, show that STDNet outperforms both image- and video-based state-of-the-art methods. The source codes are released at \url{https://github.com/STDNet/STDNet}.

Hong-Xia Xie, I-Hsuan Li, Ling Lo et al.

In this work, we describe our method for tackling the valence-arousal estimation challenge from ABAW2 ICCV-2021 Competition. The competition organizers provide an in-the-wild Aff-Wild2 dataset for participants to analyze affective behavior in real-life settings. We use a two stream model to learn emotion features from appearance and action respectively. To solve data imbalanced problem, we apply label distribution smoothing (LDS) to re-weight labels. Our proposed method achieves Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of 0.591 and 0.617 for valence and arousal on the validation set of Aff-wild2 dataset.

Wen-Huang Cheng, Sijie Song, Chieh-Yun Chen et al.

Fashion is the way we present ourselves to the world and has become one of the world's largest industries. Fashion, mainly conveyed by vision, has thus attracted much attention from computer vision researchers in recent years. Given the rapid development, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of more than 200 major fashion-related works covering four main aspects for enabling intelligent fashion: (1) Fashion detection includes landmark detection, fashion parsing, and item retrieval, (2) Fashion analysis contains attribute recognition, style learning, and popularity prediction, (3) Fashion synthesis involves style transfer, pose transformation, and physical simulation, and (4) Fashion recommendation comprises fashion compatibility, outfit matching, and hairstyle suggestion. For each task, the benchmark datasets and the evaluation protocols are summarized. Furthermore, we highlight promising directions for future research.

Xutong Ren, Mading Li, Wen-Huang Cheng et al.

Many low-light enhancement methods ignore intensive noise in original images. As a result, they often simultaneously enhance the noise as well. Furthermore, extra denoising procedures adopted by most methods ruin the details. In this paper, we introduce a joint low-light enhancement and denoising strategy, aimed at obtaining well-enhanced low-light images while getting rid of the inherent noise issue simultaneously. The proposed method performs Retinex model based decomposition in a successive sequence, which sequentially estimates a piece-wise smoothed illumination and a noise-suppressed reflectance. After getting the illumination and reflectance map, we adjust the illumination layer and generate our enhancement result. In this noise-suppressed sequential decomposition process we enforce the spatial smoothness on each component and skillfully make use of weight matrices to suppress the noise and improve the contrast. Results of extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of our method. It performs well for a wide variety of images, and achieves better or comparable quality compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Bo Wu, Wen-Huang Cheng, Yongdong Zhang et al.

The evolution of social media popularity exhibits rich temporality, i.e., popularities change over time at various levels of temporal granularity. This is influenced by temporal variations of public attentions or user activities. For example, popularity patterns of street snap on Flickr are observed to depict distinctive fashion styles at specific time scales, such as season-based periodic fluctuations for Trench Coat or one-off peak in days for Evening Dress. However, this fact is often overlooked by existing research of popularity modeling. We present the first study to incorporate multiple time-scale dynamics into predicting online popularity. We propose a novel computational framework in the paper, named Multi-scale Temporalization, for estimating popularity based on multi-scale decomposition and structural reconstruction in a tensor space of user, post, and time by joint low-rank constraints. By considering the noise caused by context inconsistency, we design a data rearrangement step based on context aggregation as preprocessing to enhance contextual relevance of neighboring data in the tensor space. As a result, our approach can leverage multiple levels of temporal characteristics and reduce the noise of data decomposition to improve modeling effectiveness. We evaluate our approach on two large-scale Flickr image datasets with over 1.8 million photos in total, for the task of popularity prediction. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art popularity prediction techniques, with a relative improvement of 10.9%-47.5% in terms of prediction accuracy.

Bo Wu, Wen-Huang Cheng, Yongdong Zhang et al.

Prediction of popularity has profound impact for social media, since it offers opportunities to reveal individual preference and public attention from evolutionary social systems. Previous research, although achieves promising results, neglects one distinctive characteristic of social data, i.e., sequentiality. For example, the popularity of online content is generated over time with sequential post streams of social media. To investigate the sequential prediction of popularity, we propose a novel prediction framework called Deep Temporal Context Networks (DTCN) by incorporating both temporal context and temporal attention into account. Our DTCN contains three main components, from embedding, learning to predicting. With a joint embedding network, we obtain a unified deep representation of multi-modal user-post data in a common embedding space. Then, based on the embedded data sequence over time, temporal context learning attempts to recurrently learn two adaptive temporal contexts for sequential popularity. Finally, a novel temporal attention is designed to predict new popularity (the popularity of a new user-post pair) with temporal coherence across multiple time-scales. Experiments on our released image dataset with about 600K Flickr photos demonstrate that DTCN outperforms state-of-the-art deep prediction algorithms, with an average of 21.51% relative performance improvement in the popularity prediction (Spearman Ranking Correlation).