Zhaoxiang Liu

CV
h-index17
29papers
1,440citations
Novelty45%
AI Score56

29 Papers

1.4CVSep 20, 2022Code
Data-Centric AI Paradigm Based on Application-Driven Fine-Grained Dataset Design

Huan Hu, Yajie Cui, Zhaoxiang Liu et al.

Deep learning has a wide range of applications in industrial scenario, but reducing false alarm (FA) remains a major difficulty. Optimizing network architecture or network parameters is used to tackle this challenge in academic circles, while ignoring the essential characteristics of data in application scenarios, which often results in increased FA in new scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for fine-grained design of datasets, driven by industrial applications. We flexibly select positive and negative sample sets according to the essential features of the data and application requirements, and add the remaining samples to the training set as uncertainty classes. We collect more than 10,000 mask-wearing recognition samples covering various application scenarios as our experimental data. Compared with the traditional data design methods, our method achieves better results and effectively reduces FA. We make all contributions available to the research community for broader use. The contributions will be available at https://github.com/huh30/OpenDatasets.

1.4CVSep 30, 2022Code
Application-Driven AI Paradigm for Human Action Recognition

Zezhou Chen, Yajie Cui, Kaikai Zhao et al.

Human action recognition in computer vision has been widely studied in recent years. However, most algorithms consider only certain action specially with even high computational cost. That is not suitable for practical applications with multiple actions to be identified with low computational cost. To meet various application scenarios, this paper presents a unified human action recognition framework composed of two modules, i.e., multi-form human detection and corresponding action classification. Among them, an open-source dataset is constructed to train a multi-form human detection model that distinguishes a human being's whole body, upper body or part body, and the followed action classification model is adopted to recognize such action as falling, sleeping or on-duty, etc. Some experimental results show that the unified framework is effective for various application scenarios. It is expected to be a new application-driven AI paradigm for human action recognition.

14.1CVApr 24, 2022
A Survey on Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Algorithms for Industrial Images

Yajie Cui, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian

In line with the development of Industry 4.0, surface defect detection/anomaly detection becomes a topical subject in the industry field. Improving efficiency as well as saving labor costs has steadily become a matter of great concern in practice, where deep learning-based algorithms perform better than traditional vision inspection methods in recent years. While existing deep learning-based algorithms are biased towards supervised learning, which not only necessitates a huge amount of labeled data and human labor, but also brings about inefficiency and limitations. In contrast, recent research shows that unsupervised learning has great potential in tackling the above disadvantages for visual industrial anomaly detection. In this survey, we summarize current challenges and provide a thorough overview of recently proposed unsupervised algorithms for visual industrial anomaly detection covering five categories, whose innovation points and frameworks are described in detail. Meanwhile, publicly available datasets for industrial anomaly detection are introduced. By comparing different classes of methods, the advantages and disadvantages of anomaly detection algorithms are summarized. Based on the current research framework, we point out the core issue that remains to be resolved and provide further improvement directions. Meanwhile, based on the latest technological trends, we offer insights into future research directions. It is expected to assist both the research community and industry in developing a broader and cross-domain perspective.

6.8CVJun 25, 2023
Semi-supervised Object Detection: A Survey on Recent Research and Progress

Yanyang Wang, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian

In recent years, deep learning technology has been maturely applied in the field of object detection, and most algorithms tend to be supervised learning. However, a large amount of labeled data requires high costs of human resources, which brings about low efficiency and limitations. Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) has been paid more and more attentions due to its high research value and practicability. It is designed to learn information by using small amounts of labeled data and large amounts of unlabeled data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on the SSOD approaches from five aspects. We first briefly introduce several ways of data augmentation. Then, we dive the mainstream semi-supervised strategies into pseudo labels, consistent regularization, graph based and transfer learning based methods, and introduce some methods in challenging settings. We further present widely-used loss functions, and then we outline the common benchmark datasets and compare the accuracy among different representative approaches. Finally, we conclude this paper and present some promising research directions for the future. Our survey aims to provide researchers and practitioners new to the field as well as more advanced readers with a solid understanding of the main approaches developed over the past few years.

1.5CVAug 1, 2023
Patch-wise Auto-Encoder for Visual Anomaly Detection

Yajie Cui, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian

Anomaly detection without priors of the anomalies is challenging. In the field of unsupervised anomaly detection, traditional auto-encoder (AE) tends to fail based on the assumption that by training only on normal images, the model will not be able to reconstruct abnormal images correctly. On the contrary, we propose a novel patch-wise auto-encoder (Patch AE) framework, which aims at enhancing the reconstruction ability of AE to anomalies instead of weakening it. Each patch of image is reconstructed by corresponding spatially distributed feature vector of the learned feature representation, i.e., patch-wise reconstruction, which ensures anomaly-sensitivity of AE. Our method is simple and efficient. It advances the state-of-the-art performances on Mvtec AD benchmark, which proves the effectiveness of our model. It shows great potential in practical industrial application scenarios.

4.4CLApr 25
Mixture of Heterogeneous Grouped Experts for Language Modeling

Zhicheng Ma, Xiang Liu, Zhaoxiang Liu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) are pivotal in industrial applications for their ability to scale performance efficiently. However, standard MoEs enforce uniform expert sizes,creating a rigidity that fails to align computational costs with varying token-level complexity. While heterogeneous expert architectures attempt to address this by diversifying expert sizes, they often suffer from significant system-level challenges, specifically unbalanced GPU utilization and inefficient parameter utilization, which hinder practical deployment. To bridge the gap between theoretical heterogeneity and robust industrial application, we propose Mixture of Heterogeneous Grouped Experts (MoHGE) which introduces a two-level routing mechanism to enable flexible, resource-aware expert combinations. To optimize inference efficiency, we propose a Group-Wise Auxiliary Loss, which dynamically steers tokens to the most parameter-efficient expert groups based on task difficulty. To address the critical deployment challenge of GPU load balancing, we introduce an All-size Group-decoupling Allocation strategy coupled with an Intra-Group Experts Auxiliary Loss. These mechanisms collectively ensure uniform computation distribution across GPUs. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MoHGE matches the performance of MoE architectures while reducing the total parameters by approximately 20% and maintaining balanced GPU utilization. Our work establishes a scalable paradigm for resource-efficient MoE design, offering a practical solution for optimizing inference costs in real-world scenarios.

1.4CVOct 13, 2022
Application-Driven AI Paradigm for Hand-Held Action Detection

Kohou Wang, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian

In practical applications especially with safety requirement, some hand-held actions need to be monitored closely, including smoking cigarettes, dialing, eating, etc. Taking smoking cigarettes as example, existing smoke detection algorithms usually detect the cigarette or cigarette with hand as the target object only, which leads to low accuracy. In this paper, we propose an application-driven AI paradigm for hand-held action detection based on hierarchical object detection. It is a coarse-to-fine hierarchical detection framework composed of two modules. The first one is a coarse detection module with the human pose consisting of the whole hand, cigarette and head as target object. The followed second one is a fine detection module with the fingers holding cigarette, mouth area and the whole cigarette as target. Some experiments are done with the dataset collected from real-world scenarios, and the results show that the proposed framework achieve higher detection rate with good adaptation and robustness in complex environments.

1.4CVJul 11, 2022
A Waste Copper Granules Rating System Based on Machine Vision

Kaikai Zhao, Yajie Cui, Zhaoxiang Liu et al.

In the field of waste copper granules recycling, engineers should be able to identify all different sorts of impurities in waste copper granules and estimate their mass proportion relying on experience before rating. This manual rating method is costly, lacking in objectivity and comprehensiveness. To tackle this problem, we propose a waste copper granules rating system based on machine vision and deep learning. We firstly formulate the rating task into a 2D image recognition and purity regression task. Then we design a two-stage convolutional rating network to compute the mass purity and rating level of waste copper granules. Our rating network includes a segmentation network and a purity regression network, which respectively calculate the semantic segmentation heatmaps and purity results of the waste copper granules. After training the rating network on the augmented datasets, experiments on real waste copper granules demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed network. Specifically, our system is superior to the manual method in terms of accuracy, effectiveness, robustness, and objectivity.

6.2CVNov 10, 2025Code
HiMo-CLIP: Modeling Semantic Hierarchy and Monotonicity in Vision-Language Alignment

Ruijia Wu, Ping Chen, Fei Shen et al.

Contrastive vision-language models like CLIP have achieved impressive results in image-text retrieval by aligning image and text representations in a shared embedding space. However, these models often treat text as flat sequences, limiting their ability to handle complex, compositional, and long-form descriptions. In particular, they fail to capture two essential properties of language: semantic hierarchy, which reflects the multi-level compositional structure of text, and semantic monotonicity, where richer descriptions should result in stronger alignment with visual content.To address these limitations, we propose HiMo-CLIP, a representation-level framework that enhances CLIP-style models without modifying the encoder architecture. HiMo-CLIP introduces two key components: a hierarchical decomposition (HiDe) module that extracts latent semantic components from long-form text via in-batch PCA, enabling flexible, batch-aware alignment across different semantic granularities, and a monotonicity-aware contrastive loss (MoLo) that jointly aligns global and component-level representations, encouraging the model to internalize semantic ordering and alignment strength as a function of textual completeness.These components work in concert to produce structured, cognitively-aligned cross-modal representations. Experiments on multiple image-text retrieval benchmarks show that HiMo-CLIP consistently outperforms strong baselines, particularly under long or compositional descriptions. The code is available at https://github.com/UnicomAI/HiMo-CLIP.

11.8CVOct 30, 2025Code
LeMiCa: Lexicographic Minimax Path Caching for Efficient Diffusion-Based Video Generation

Huanlin Gao, Ping Chen, Fuyuan Shi et al.

We present LeMiCa, a training-free and efficient acceleration framework for diffusion-based video generation. While existing caching strategies primarily focus on reducing local heuristic errors, they often overlook the accumulation of global errors, leading to noticeable content degradation between accelerated and original videos. To address this issue, we formulate cache scheduling as a directed graph with error-weighted edges and introduce a Lexicographic Minimax Path Optimization strategy that explicitly bounds the worst-case path error. This approach substantially improves the consistency of global content and style across generated frames. Extensive experiments on multiple text-to-video benchmarks demonstrate that LeMiCa delivers dual improvements in both inference speed and generation quality. Notably, our method achieves a 2.9x speedup on the Latte model and reaches an LPIPS score of 0.05 on Open-Sora, outperforming prior caching techniques. Importantly, these gains come with minimal perceptual quality degradation, making LeMiCa a robust and generalizable paradigm for accelerating diffusion-based video generation. We believe this approach can serve as a strong foundation for future research on efficient and reliable video synthesis. Our code is available at :https://github.com/UnicomAI/LeMiCa

19.7CVMar 10, 2025Code
A Multimodal Benchmark Dataset and Model for Crop Disease Diagnosis

Xiang Liu, Zhaoxiang Liu, Huan Hu et al.

While conversational generative AI has shown considerable potential in enhancing decision-making for agricultural professionals, its exploration has predominantly been anchored in text-based interactions. The evolution of multimodal conversational AI, leveraging vast amounts of image-text data from diverse sources, marks a significant stride forward. However, the application of such advanced vision-language models in the agricultural domain, particularly for crop disease diagnosis, remains underexplored. In this work, we present the crop disease domain multimodal (CDDM) dataset, a pioneering resource designed to advance the field of agricultural research through the application of multimodal learning techniques. The dataset comprises 137,000 images of various crop diseases, accompanied by 1 million question-answer pairs that span a broad spectrum of agricultural knowledge, from disease identification to management practices. By integrating visual and textual data, CDDM facilitates the development of sophisticated question-answering systems capable of providing precise, useful advice to farmers and agricultural professionals. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset by finetuning state-of-the-art multimodal models, showcasing significant improvements in crop disease diagnosis. Specifically, we employed a novel finetuning strategy that utilizes low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to finetune the visual encoder, adapter and language model simultaneously. Our contributions include not only the dataset but also a finetuning strategy and a benchmark to stimulate further research in agricultural technology, aiming to bridge the gap between advanced AI techniques and practical agricultural applications. The dataset is available at https: //github.com/UnicomAI/UnicomBenchmark/tree/main/CDDMBench.

11.8CVMar 5, 2025Code
Optimizing for the Shortest Path in Denoising Diffusion Model

Ping Chen, Xingpeng Zhang, Zhaoxiang Liu et al.

In this research, we propose a novel denoising diffusion model based on shortest-path modeling that optimizes residual propagation to enhance both denoising efficiency and quality. Drawing on Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) and insights from graph theory, our model, termed the Shortest Path Diffusion Model (ShortDF), treats the denoising process as a shortest-path problem aimed at minimizing reconstruction error. By optimizing the initial residuals, we improve the efficiency of the reverse diffusion process and the quality of the generated samples. Extensive experiments on multiple standard benchmarks demonstrate that ShortDF significantly reduces diffusion time (or steps) while enhancing the visual fidelity of generated samples compared to prior arts. This work, we suppose, paves the way for interactive diffusion-based applications and establishes a foundation for rapid data generation. Code is available at https://github.com/UnicomAI/ShortDF.

6.2CVSep 10, 2025Code
MITS: A Large-Scale Multimodal Benchmark Dataset for Intelligent Traffic Surveillance

Kaikai Zhao, Zhaoxiang Liu, Peng Wang et al.

General-domain large multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved significant advances in various image-text tasks. However, their performance in the Intelligent Traffic Surveillance (ITS) domain remains limited due to the absence of dedicated multimodal datasets. To address this gap, we introduce MITS (Multimodal Intelligent Traffic Surveillance), the first large-scale multimodal benchmark dataset specifically designed for ITS. MITS includes 170,400 independently collected real-world ITS images sourced from traffic surveillance cameras, annotated with eight main categories and 24 subcategories of ITS-specific objects and events under diverse environmental conditions. Additionally, through a systematic data generation pipeline, we generate high-quality image captions and 5 million instruction-following visual question-answer pairs, addressing five critical ITS tasks: object and event recognition, object counting, object localization, background analysis, and event reasoning. To demonstrate MITS's effectiveness, we fine-tune mainstream LMMs on this dataset, enabling the development of ITS-specific applications. Experimental results show that MITS significantly improves LMM performance in ITS applications, increasing LLaVA-1.5's performance from 0.494 to 0.905 (+83.2%), LLaVA-1.6's from 0.678 to 0.921 (+35.8%), Qwen2-VL's from 0.584 to 0.926 (+58.6%), and Qwen2.5-VL's from 0.732 to 0.930 (+27.0%). We release the dataset, code, and models as open-source, providing high-value resources to advance both ITS and LMM research.

27.8SEJun 18
Token-Operations-Oriented Inference Optimization Techniques for Large Models

Shiguo Lian, Kai Wang, Zhaoxiang Liu et al.

Large model inference optimization serves as a key foundation for supporting the scalable, low-cost, and highly stable operation of large model services. Centered on token-oriented inference optimization technology, this paper proposes for the first time a four-layer technical architecture consisting of Multi-model Fusion, Model Optimization, Compute-Model Fusion, and Compute-Network-Model Fusion. It systematically reviews the key technologies and current industry status across these four levels and analyzes the application value of related technologies in real-world business scenarios. This paper provides a practical technical path for reducing token production costs, improving token service efficiency, ensuring the stability of token supply, and driving the transition of large model services from being merely callable to being operable.

3.3AIFeb 16, 2025
Quantifying the Capability Boundary of DeepSeek Models: An Application-Driven Performance Analysis

Kaikai Zhao, Zhaoxiang Liu, Xuejiao Lei et al.

DeepSeek-R1, known for its low training cost and exceptional reasoning capabilities, has achieved state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks. However, detailed evaluations for DeepSeek Series models from the perspective of real-world applications are lacking, making it challenging for users to select the most suitable DeepSeek models for their specific needs. To address this gap, we presents the first comprehensive evaluation of the DeepSeek and its related models (including DeepSeek-V3, DeepSeek-R1, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen series, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama series, their corresponding 4-bit quantized models, and the reasoning model QwQ-32B) using our enhanced A-Eval benchmark, A-Eval-2.0. Our systematic analysis reveals several key insights: (1) Given identical model architectures and training data, larger parameter models demonstrate superior performance, aligning with the scaling law. However, smaller models may achieve enhanced capabilities when employing optimized training strategies and higher-quality data; (2) Reasoning-enhanced model show significant performance gains in logical reasoning tasks but may underperform in text understanding and generation tasks; (3) As the data difficulty increases, distillation or reasoning enhancements yield higher performance gains for the models. Interestingly, reasoning enhancements can even have a negative impact on simpler problems; (4) Quantization impacts different capabilities unevenly, with significant drop on logical reasoning and minimal impact on text generation. Based on these results and findings, we design an model selection handbook enabling users to select the most cost-effective models without efforts.

2.0CVMay 14, 2024
TP3M: Transformer-based Pseudo 3D Image Matching with Reference Image

Liming Han, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian

Image matching is still challenging in such scenes with large viewpoints or illumination changes or with low textures. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based pseudo 3D image matching method. It upgrades the 2D features extracted from the source image to 3D features with the help of a reference image and matches to the 2D features extracted from the destination image by the coarse-to-fine 3D matching. Our key discovery is that by introducing the reference image, the source image's fine points are screened and furtherly their feature descriptors are enriched from 2D to 3D, which improves the match performance with the destination image. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art on the tasks of homography estimation, pose estimation and visual localization especially in challenging scenes.

4.1HCJun 25, 2025
iLearnRobot: An Interactive Learning-Based Multi-Modal Robot with Continuous Improvement

Kohou Wang, ZhaoXiang Liu, Lin Bai et al.

It is crucial that robots' performance can be improved after deployment, as they are inherently likely to encounter novel scenarios never seen before. This paper presents an innovative solution: an interactive learning-based robot system powered by a Multi-modal Large Language Model(MLLM). A key feature of our system is its ability to learn from natural dialogues with non-expert users. We also propose chain of question to clarify the exact intent of the question before providing an answer and dual-modality retrieval modules to leverage these interaction events to avoid repeating same mistakes, ensuring a seamless user experience before model updates, which is in contrast to current mainstream MLLM-based robotic systems. Our system marks a novel approach in robotics by integrating interactive learning, paving the way for superior adaptability and performance in diverse environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness and improvement of our method through experiments, both quantitively and qualitatively.

6.2CVApr 25, 2025
A Large Vision-Language Model based Environment Perception System for Visually Impaired People

Zezhou Chen, Zhaoxiang Liu, Kai Wang et al.

It is a challenging task for visually impaired people to perceive their surrounding environment due to the complexity of the natural scenes. Their personal and social activities are thus highly limited. This paper introduces a Large Vision-Language Model(LVLM) based environment perception system which helps them to better understand the surrounding environment, by capturing the current scene they face with a wearable device, and then letting them retrieve the analysis results through the device. The visually impaired people could acquire a global description of the scene by long pressing the screen to activate the LVLM output, retrieve the categories of the objects in the scene resulting from a segmentation model by tapping or swiping the screen, and get a detailed description of the objects they are interested in by double-tapping the screen. To help visually impaired people more accurately perceive the world, this paper proposes incorporating the segmentation result of the RGB image as external knowledge into the input of LVLM to reduce the LVLM's hallucination. Technical experiments on POPE, MME and LLaVA-QA90 show that the system could provide a more accurate description of the scene compared to Qwen-VL-Chat, exploratory experiments show that the system helps visually impaired people to perceive the surrounding environment effectively.

2.6CVSep 11, 2019
How Old Are You? Face Age Translation with Identity Preservation Using GANs

Zipeng Wang, Zhaoxiang Liu, Jianfeng Huang et al.

We present a novel framework to generate images of different age while preserving identity information, which is known as face aging. Different from most recent popular face aging networks utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs) application, our approach do not simply transfer a young face to an old one. Instead, we employ the edge map as intermediate representations, firstly edge maps of young faces are extracted, a CycleGAN-based network is adopted to transfer them into edge maps of old faces, then another pix2pixHD-based network is adopted to transfer the synthesized edge maps, concatenated with identity information, into old faces. In this way, our method can generate more realistic transfered images, simultaneously ensuring that face identity information be preserved well, and the apparent age of the generated image be accurately appropriate. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is feasible for face age translation.

6.5CVAug 21, 2019
A Realistic Face-to-Face Conversation System based on Deep Neural Networks

Zezhou Chen, Zhaoxiang Liu, Huan Hu et al.

To improve the experiences of face-to-face conversation with avatar, this paper presents a novel conversation system. It is composed of two sequence-to-sequence models respectively for listening and speaking and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based realistic avatar synthesizer. The models exploit the facial action and head pose to learn natural human reactions. Based on the models' output, the synthesizer uses the Pixel2Pixel model to generate realistic facial images. To show the improvement of our system, we use a 3D model based avatar driving scheme as a reference. We train and evaluate our neural networks with the data from ESPN shows. Experimental results show that our conversation system can generate natural facial reactions and realistic facial images.

5.4CVAug 20, 2019
A Neural Virtual Anchor Synthesizer based on Seq2Seq and GAN Models

Zipeng Wang, Zhaoxiang Liu, Zezhou Chen et al.

This paper presents a novel framework to generate realistic face video of an anchor, who is reading certain news. This task is also known as Virtual Anchor. Given some paragraphs of words, we first utilize a pretrained Word2Vec model to embed each word into a vector; then we utilize a Seq2Seq-based model to translate these word embeddings into action units and head poses of the target anchor; these action units and head poses will be concatenated with facial landmarks as well as the former $n$ synthesized frames, and the concatenation serves as input of a Pix2PixHD-based model to synthesize realistic facial images for the virtual anchor. The experimental results demonstrate our framework is feasible for the synthesis of virtual anchor.

7.6CVAug 19, 2019
Video synthesis of human upper body with realistic face

Zhaoxiang Liu, Huan Hu, Zipeng Wang et al.

This paper presents a generative adversarial learning-based human upper body video synthesis approach to generate an upper body video of target person that is consistent with the body motion, face expression, and pose of the person in source video. We use upper body keypoints, facial action units and poses as intermediate representations between source video and target video. Instead of directly transferring the source video to the target video, we firstly map the source person's facial action units and poses into the target person's facial landmarks, then combine the normalized upper body keypoints and generated facial landmarks with spatio-temporal smoothing to generate the corresponding target video's image. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.

6.5CVMay 6, 2019
Feature Aggregation Network for Video Face Recognition

Zhaoxiang Liu, Huan Hu, Jinqiang Bai et al.

This paper aims to learn a compact representation of a video for video face recognition task. We make the following contributions: first, we propose a meta attention-based aggregation scheme which adaptively and fine-grained weighs the feature along each feature dimension among all frames to form a compact and discriminative representation. It makes the best to exploit the valuable or discriminative part of each frame to promote the performance of face recognition, without discarding or despising low quality frames as usual methods do. Second, we build a feature aggregation network comprised of a feature embedding module and a feature aggregation module. The embedding module is a convolutional neural network used to extract a feature vector from a face image, while the aggregation module consists of cascaded two meta attention blocks which adaptively aggregate the feature vectors into a single fixed-length representation. The network can deal with arbitrary number of frames, and is insensitive to frame order. Third, we validate the performance of proposed aggregation scheme. Experiments on publicly available datasets, such as YouTube face dataset and IJB-A dataset, show the effectiveness of our method, and it achieves competitive performances on both the verification and identification protocols.

8.1CVApr 30, 2019
Facial Pose Estimation by Deep Learning from Label Distributions

Zhaoxiang Liu, Zezhou Chen, Jinqiang Bai et al.

Facial pose estimation has gained a lot of attentions in many practical applications, such as human-robot interaction, gaze estimation and driver monitoring. Meanwhile, end-to-end deep learning-based facial pose estimation is becoming more and more popular. However, facial pose estimation suffers from a key challenge: the lack of sufficient training data for many poses, especially for large poses. Inspired by the observation that the faces under close poses look similar, we reformulate the facial pose estimation as a label distribution learning problem, considering each face image as an example associated with a Gaussian label distribution rather than a single label, and construct a convolutional neural network which is trained with a multi-loss function on AFLW dataset and 300W-LP dataset to predict the facial poses directly from color image. Extensive experiments are conducted on several popular benchmarks, including AFLW2000, BIWI, AFLW and AFW, where our approach shows a significant advantage over other state-of-the-art methods.

6.0CVApr 30, 2019
Wearable Travel Aid for Environment Perception and Navigation of Visually Impaired People

Jinqiang Bai, Zhaoxiang Liu, Yimin Lin et al.

This paper presents a wearable assistive device with the shape of a pair of eyeglasses that allows visually impaired people to navigate safely and quickly in unfamiliar environment, as well as perceive the complicated environment to automatically make decisions on the direction to move. The device uses a consumer Red, Green, Blue and Depth (RGB-D) camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to detect obstacles. As the device leverages the ground height continuity among adjacent image frames, it is able to segment the ground from obstacles accurately and rapidly. Based on the detected ground, the optimal walkable direction is computed and the user is then informed via converted beep sound. Moreover, by utilizing deep learning techniques, the device can semantically categorize the detected obstacles to improve the users' perception of surroundings. It combines a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) deployed on a smartphone with a depth-image-based object detection to decide what the object type is and where the object is located, and then notifies the user of such information via speech. We evaluated the device's performance with different experiments in which 20 visually impaired people were asked to wear the device and move in an office, and found that they were able to avoid obstacle collisions and find the way in complicated scenarios.

6.0CVApr 30, 2019
Deep Learning Based Robot for Automatically Picking up Garbage on the Grass

Jinqiang Bai, Shiguo Lian, Zhaoxiang Liu et al.

This paper presents a novel garbage pickup robot which operates on the grass. The robot is able to detect the garbage accurately and autonomously by using a deep neural network for garbage recognition. In addition, with the ground segmentation using a deep neural network, a novel navigation strategy is proposed to guide the robot to move around. With the garbage recognition and automatic navigation functions, the robot can clean garbage on the ground in places like parks or schools efficiently and autonomously. Experimental results show that the garbage recognition accuracy can reach as high as 95%, and even without path planning, the navigation strategy can reach almost the same cleaning efficiency with traditional methods. Thus, the proposed robot can serve as a good assistance to relieve dustman's physical labor on garbage cleaning tasks.

3.4CVApr 30, 2019
Virtual-Blind-Road Following Based Wearable Navigation Device for Blind People

Jinqiang Bai, Shiguo Lian, Zhaoxiang Liu et al.

To help the blind people walk to the destination efficiently and safely in indoor environment, a novel wearable navigation device is presented in this paper. The locating, way-finding, route following and obstacle avoiding modules are the essential components in a navigation system, while it remains a challenging task to consider obstacle avoiding during route following, as the indoor environment is complex, changeable and possibly with dynamic objects. To address this issue, we propose a novel scheme which utilizes a dynamic sub-goal selecting strategy to guide the users to the destination and help them bypass obstacles at the same time. This scheme serves as the key component of a complete navigation system deployed on a pair of wearable optical see-through glasses for the ease of use of blind people's daily walks. The proposed navigation device has been tested on a collection of individuals and proved to be effective on indoor navigation tasks. The sensors embedded are of low cost, small volume and easy integration, making it possible for the glasses to be widely used as a wearable consumer device.

11.1CVDec 19, 2018
Deep Global-Relative Networks for End-to-End 6-DoF Visual Localization and Odometry

Yimin Lin, Zhaoxiang Liu, Jianfeng Huang et al.

Although a wide variety of deep neural networks for robust Visual Odometry (VO) can be found in the literature, they are still unable to solve the drift problem in long-term robot navigation. Thus, this paper aims to propose novel deep end-to-end networks for long-term 6-DoF VO task. It mainly fuses relative and global networks based on Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (RCNNs) to improve the monocular localization accuracy. Indeed, the relative sub-networks are implemented to smooth the VO trajectory, while global subnetworks are designed to avoid drift problem. All the parameters are jointly optimized using Cross Transformation Constraints (CTC), which represents temporal geometric consistency of the consecutive frames, and Mean Square Error (MSE) between the predicted pose and ground truth. The experimental results on both indoor and outdoor datasets show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art learning-based VO methods in terms of pose accuracy.

21.1HCSep 27, 2017
Smart Guiding Glasses for Visually Impaired People in Indoor Environment

Jinqiang Bai, Shiguo Lian, Zhaoxiang Liu et al.

To overcome the travelling difficulty for the visually impaired group, this paper presents a novel ETA (Electronic Travel Aids)-smart guiding device in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses for giving these people guidance efficiently and safely. Different from existing works, a novel multi sensor fusion based obstacle avoiding algorithm is proposed, which utilizes both the depth sensor and ultrasonic sensor to solve the problems of detecting small obstacles, and transparent obstacles, e.g. the French door. For totally blind people, three kinds of auditory cues were developed to inform the direction where they can go ahead. Whereas for weak sighted people, visual enhancement which leverages the AR (Augment Reality) technique and integrates the traversable direction is adopted. The prototype consisting of a pair of display glasses and several low cost sensors is developed, and its efficiency and accuracy were tested by a number of users. The experimental results show that the smart guiding glasses can effectively improve the user's travelling experience in complicated indoor environment. Thus it serves as a consumer device for helping the visually impaired people to travel safely.