Jing Yang

Jing Yang, James P. Wilson, Shalabh Gupta

With the growth of sensing, control and robotic technologies, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have become useful assistants to human divers for performing various underwater operations. In the current practice, the divers are required to carry expensive, bulky, and waterproof keyboards or joystick-based controllers for supervision and control of AUVs. Therefore, diver action-based supervision is becoming increasingly popular because it is convenient, easier to use, faster, and cost effective. However, the various environmental, diver and sensing uncertainties present underwater makes it challenging to train a robust and reliable diver action recognition system. In this regard, this paper presents DARE, a diver action recognition system, that is trained based on Cognitive Autonomous Driving Buddy (CADDY) dataset, which is a rich set of data containing images of different diver gestures and poses in several different and realistic underwater environments. DARE is based on fusion of stereo-pairs of camera images using a multi-channel convolutional neural network supported with a systematically trained tree-topological deep neural network classifier to enhance the classification performance. DARE is fast and requires only a few milliseconds to classify one stereo-pair, thus making it suitable for real-time underwater implementation. DARE is comparatively evaluated against several existing classifier architectures and the results show that DARE supersedes the performance of all classifiers for diver action recognition in terms of overall as well as individual class accuracies and F1-scores.

Kun Li, Jing Yang, Nianhong Jiao et al.

3D face reconstruction from a single image is a challenging problem, especially under partial occlusions and extreme poses. This is because the uncertainty of the estimated 2D landmarks will affect the quality of face reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a novel joint 2D and 3D optimization method to adaptively reconstruct 3D face shapes from a single image, which combines the depths of 3D landmarks to solve the uncertain detections of invisible landmarks. The strategy of our method involves two aspects: a coarse-to-fine pose estimation using both 2D and 3D landmarks, and an adaptive 2D and 3D re-weighting based on the refined pose parameter to recover accurate 3D faces. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method can generate high-quality reconstruction from a single color image and is robust for self-occlusion and large poses.

Jing Yang, Brais Martinez, Adrian Bulat et al.

This paper addresses the problem of model compression via knowledge distillation. To this end, we propose a new knowledge distillation method based on transferring feature statistics, specifically the channel-wise mean and variance, from the teacher to the student. Our method goes beyond the standard way of enforcing the mean and variance of the student to be similar to those of the teacher through an $L_2$ loss, which we found it to be of limited effectiveness. Specifically, we propose a new loss based on adaptive instance normalization to effectively transfer the feature statistics. The main idea is to transfer the learned statistics back to the teacher via adaptive instance normalization (conditioned on the student) and let the teacher network "evaluate" via a loss whether the statistics learned by the student are reliably transferred. We show that our distillation method outperforms other state-of-the-art distillation methods over a large set of experimental settings including different (a) network architectures, (b) teacher-student capacities, (c) datasets, and (d) domains.

Qingshan Liu, Jing Yang, Kaihua Zhang et al.

Recently, the compressive tracking (CT) method has attracted much attention due to its high efficiency, but it cannot well deal with the large scale target appearance variations due to its data-independent random projection matrix that results in less discriminative features. To address this issue, in this paper we propose an adaptive CT approach, which selects the most discriminative features to design an effective appearance model. Our method significantly improves CT in three aspects: Firstly, the most discriminative features are selected via an online vector boosting method. Secondly, the object representation is updated in an effective online manner, which preserves the stable features while filtering out the noisy ones. Finally, a simple and effective trajectory rectification approach is adopted that can make the estimated location more accurate. Extensive experiments on the CVPR2013 tracking benchmark demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm compared over state-of-the-art tracking algorithms.