Xi Jia

Xi Jia, Alexander Thorley, Alberto Gomez et al.

U-Net style networks are commonly utilized in unsupervised image registration to predict dense displacement fields, which for high-resolution volumetric image data is a resource-intensive and time-consuming task. To tackle this challenge, we first propose Fourier-Net, which replaces the costly U-Net style expansive path with a parameter-free model-driven decoder. Instead of directly predicting a full-resolution displacement field, our Fourier-Net learns a low-dimensional representation of the displacement field in the band-limited Fourier domain which our model-driven decoder converts to a full-resolution displacement field in the spatial domain. Expanding upon Fourier-Net, we then introduce Fourier-Net+, which additionally takes the band-limited spatial representation of the images as input and further reduces the number of convolutional layers in the U-Net style network's contracting path. Finally, to enhance the registration performance, we propose a cascaded version of Fourier-Net+. We evaluate our proposed methods on three datasets, on which our proposed Fourier-Net and its variants achieve comparable results with current state-of-the art methods, while exhibiting faster inference speeds, lower memory footprint, and fewer multiply-add operations. With such small computational cost, our Fourier-Net+ enables the efficient training of large-scale 3D registration on low-VRAM GPUs. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/xi-jia/Fourier-Net}.

Qiufu Li, Xi Jia, Jiancan Zhou et al.

Sample-to-class-based face recognition models can not fully explore the cross-sample relationship among large amounts of facial images, while sample-to-sample-based models require sophisticated pairing processes for training. Furthermore, neither method satisfies the requirements of real-world face verification applications, which expect a unified threshold separating positive from negative facial pairs. In this paper, we propose a unified threshold integrated sample-to-sample based loss (USS loss), which features an explicit unified threshold for distinguishing positive from negative pairs. Inspired by our USS loss, we also derive the sample-to-sample based softmax and BCE losses, and discuss their relationship. Extensive evaluation on multiple benchmark datasets, including MFR, IJB-C, LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB, and MegaFace, demonstrates that the proposed USS loss is highly efficient and can work seamlessly with sample-to-class-based losses. The embedded loss (USS and sample-to-class Softmax loss) overcomes the pitfalls of previous approaches and the trained facial model UniTSFace exhibits exceptional performance, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, such as CosFace, ArcFace, VPL, AnchorFace, and UNPG. Our code is available.

Weijia Fan, Jiajun Wen, Xi Jia et al.

Prototype learning is widely used in face recognition, which takes the row vectors of coefficient matrix in the last linear layer of the feature extraction model as the prototypes for each class. When the prototypes are updated using the facial sample feature gradients in the model training, they are prone to being pulled away from the class center by the hard samples, resulting in decreased overall model performance. In this paper, we explicitly define prototypes as the expectations of sample features in each class and design the empirical prototypes using the existing samples in the dataset. We then devise a strategy to adaptively update these empirical prototypes during the model training based on the similarity between the sample features and the empirical prototypes. Furthermore, we propose an empirical prototype learning (EPL) method, which utilizes an adaptive margin parameter with respect to sample features. EPL assigns larger margins to the normal samples and smaller margins to the hard samples, allowing the learned empirical prototypes to better reflect the class center dominated by the normal samples and finally pull the hard samples towards the empirical prototypes through the learning. The extensive experiments on MFR, IJB-C, LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB, and MegaFace demonstrate the effectiveness of EPL. Our code is available at $\href{https://github.com/WakingHours-GitHub/EPL}{https://github.com/WakingHours-GitHub/EPL}$.

Weizeng Lu, Xi Jia, Weicheng Xie et al.

We propose a geometry constrained network, termed GC-Net, for weakly supervised object localization (WSOL). GC-Net consists of three modules: a detector, a generator and a classifier. The detector predicts the object location defined by a set of coefficients describing a geometric shape (i.e. ellipse or rectangle), which is geometrically constrained by the mask produced by the generator. The classifier takes the resulting masked images as input and performs two complementary classification tasks for the object and background. To make the mask more compact and more complete, we propose a novel multi-task loss function that takes into account area of the geometric shape, the categorical cross-entropy and the negative entropy. In contrast to previous approaches, GC-Net is trained end-to-end and predict object location without any post-processing (e.g. thresholding) that may require additional tuning. Extensive experiments on the CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC2012 datasets show that GC-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our source code is available at https://github.com/lwzeng/GC-Net.

Alexander Thorley, Xi Jia, Hyung Jin Chang et al.

Deterministic approaches using iterative optimisation have been historically successful in diffeomorphic image registration (DiffIR). Although these approaches are highly accurate, they typically carry a significant computational burden. Recent developments in stochastic approaches based on deep learning have achieved sub-second runtimes for DiffIR with competitive registration accuracy, offering a fast alternative to conventional iterative methods. In this paper, we attempt to reduce this difference in speed whilst retaining the performance advantage of iterative approaches in DiffIR. We first propose a simple iterative scheme that functionally composes intermediate non-stationary velocity fields to handle large deformations in images whilst guaranteeing diffeomorphisms in the resultant deformation. We then propose a convex optimisation model that uses a regularisation term of arbitrary order to impose smoothness on these velocity fields and solve this model with a fast algorithm that combines Nesterov gradient descent and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Finally, we leverage the computational power of GPU to implement this accelerated ADMM solver on a 3D cardiac MRI dataset, further reducing runtime to less than 2 seconds. In addition to producing strictly diffeomorphic deformations, our methods outperform both state-of-the-art deep learning-based and iterative DiffIR approaches in terms of dice and Hausdorff scores, with speed approaching the inference time of deep learning-based methods.

Wei Chen, Xi Jia, Hyung Jin Chang et al.

In this paper, we focus on category-level 6D pose and size estimation from monocular RGB-D image. Previous methods suffer from inefficient category-level pose feature extraction which leads to low accuracy and inference speed. To tackle this problem, we propose a fast shape-based network (FS-Net) with efficient category-level feature extraction for 6D pose estimation. First, we design an orientation aware autoencoder with 3D graph convolution for latent feature extraction. The learned latent feature is insensitive to point shift and object size thanks to the shift and scale-invariance properties of the 3D graph convolution. Then, to efficiently decode category-level rotation information from the latent feature, we propose a novel decoupled rotation mechanism that employs two decoders to complementarily access the rotation information. Meanwhile, we estimate translation and size by two residuals, which are the difference between the mean of object points and ground truth translation, and the difference between the mean size of the category and ground truth size, respectively. Finally, to increase the generalization ability of FS-Net, we propose an online box-cage based 3D deformation mechanism to augment the training data. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both category- and instance-level 6D object pose estimation. Especially in category-level pose estimation, without extra synthetic data, our method outperforms existing methods by 6.3% on the NOCS-REAL dataset.

Wei Chen, Xi Jia, Hyung Jin Chang et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel real-time 6D object pose estimation framework, named G2L-Net. Our network operates on point clouds from RGB-D detection in a divide-and-conquer fashion. Specifically, our network consists of three steps. First, we extract the coarse object point cloud from the RGB-D image by 2D detection. Second, we feed the coarse object point cloud to a translation localization network to perform 3D segmentation and object translation prediction. Third, via the predicted segmentation and translation, we transfer the fine object point cloud into a local canonical coordinate, in which we train a rotation localization network to estimate initial object rotation. In the third step, we define point-wise embedding vector features to capture viewpoint-aware information. To calculate more accurate rotation, we adopt a rotation residual estimator to estimate the residual between initial rotation and ground truth, which can boost initial pose estimation performance. Our proposed G2L-Net is real-time despite the fact multiple steps are stacked via the proposed coarse-to-fine framework. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that G2L-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both accuracy and speed.

WenTing Chen, Xinpeng Xie, Xi Jia et al.

Despite the significant success in image-to-image translation and latent representation based facial attribute editing and expression synthesis, the existing approaches still have limitations in the sharpness of details, distinct image translation and identity preservation. To address these issues, we propose a Texture Deformation Based GAN, namely TDB-GAN, to disentangle texture from original image and transfers domains based on the extracted texture. The approach utilizes the texture to transfer facial attributes and expressions without the consideration of the object pose. This leads to shaper details and more distinct visual effect of the synthesized faces. In addition, it brings the faster convergence during training. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through extensive ablation studies. We also evaluate our approach qualitatively and quantitatively on facial attribute and facial expression synthesis. The results on both the CelebA and RaFD datasets suggest that Texture Deformation Based GAN achieves better performance.