Qi Li

Qi Li, Weining Wang, Chengzhong Xu et al.

Although face swapping has attracted much attention in recent years, it remains a challenging problem. Existing methods leverage a large number of data samples to explore the intrinsic properties of face swapping without considering the semantic information of face images. Moreover, the representation of the identity information tends to be fixed, leading to suboptimal face swapping. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient method named FaceSwapper, for one-shot face swapping based on Generative Adversarial Networks. Our method consists of a disentangled representation module and a semantic-guided fusion module. The disentangled representation module comprises an attribute encoder and an identity encoder, which aims to achieve the disentanglement of the identity and attribute information. The identity encoder is more flexible, and the attribute encoder contains more attribute details than its competitors. Benefiting from the disentangled representation, FaceSwapper can swap face images progressively. In addition, semantic information is introduced into the semantic-guided fusion module to control the swapped region and model the pose and expression more accurately. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets with fewer training samples. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/liqi-casia/FaceSwapper.

Siyi Chen, Tianhan Luo, Shijian Wu et al.

Open-source libraries are widely used in modern software development, introducing significant security vulnerabilities. While static analysis tools can identify potential vulnerabilities at scale, they often generate overwhelming reports with high false positive rates. Automated Exploit Generation (AEG) emerges as a promising solution to confirm vulnerability authenticity by generating an exploit. However, traditional AEG approaches based on fuzzing or symbolic execution face path coverage and constraint-solving problems. Although LLMs show great potential for AEG, how to effectively leverage them to comprehend vulnerabilities and generate corresponding exploits is still an open question. To address these challenges, we propose Vulnsage, a multi-agent framework for AEG. Vulnsage simulates human security researchers' workflows by decomposing the complex AEG process into multiple specialized sub-agents: Code Analyzer Agent, Code Generation Agent, Validation Agent, and a set of Reflection Agents, orchestrated by a central supervisor through iterative cycles. Given a target program, the Code Analyzer Agent performs static analysis to identify potential vulnerabilities and collects relevant information for each one. The Code Generation Agent then utilizes an LLM to generate candidate exploits. The Validation Agent and Reflection Agents form a feedback-driven self-refinement loop that uses execution traces and runtime error analysis to either improve the exploit iteratively or reason about the false positive alert. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that Vulnsage succeeds in generating 34.64\% more exploits than state-of-the-art tools such as \explodejs. Furthermore, Vulnsage has successfully discovered and verified 146 zero-day vulnerabilities in real-world scenarios, demonstrating its practical effectiveness for assisting security assessment in software supply chains.

Yunfan Liu, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun et al.

One-shot face re-enactment is a challenging task due to the identity mismatch between source and driving faces. Specifically, the suboptimally disentangled identity information of driving subjects would inevitably interfere with the re-enactment results and lead to face shape distortion. To solve this problem, this paper proposes to use 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) for explicit facial semantic decomposition and identity disentanglement. Instead of using 3D coefficients alone for re-enactment control, we take the advantage of the generative ability of 3DMM to render textured face proxies. These proxies contain abundant yet compact geometric and semantic information of human faces, which enable us to compute the face motion field between source and driving images by estimating the dense correspondence. In this way, we could approximate re-enactment results by warping source images according to the motion field, and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is adopted to further improve the visual quality of warping results. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method over existing start-of-the-art benchmarks in both identity preservation and re-enactment fulfillment.

Jianxin Sun, Qiyao Deng, Qi Li et al.

Existing text-to-image synthesis methods generally are only applicable to words in the training dataset. However, human faces are so variable to be described with limited words. So this paper proposes the first free-style text-to-face method namely AnyFace enabling much wider open world applications such as metaverse, social media, cosmetics, forensics, etc. AnyFace has a novel two-stream framework for face image synthesis and manipulation given arbitrary descriptions of the human face. Specifically, one stream performs text-to-face generation and the other conducts face image reconstruction. Facial text and image features are extracted using the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) encoders. And a collaborative Cross Modal Distillation (CMD) module is designed to align the linguistic and visual features across these two streams. Furthermore, a Diverse Triplet Loss (DT loss) is developed to model fine-grained features and improve facial diversity. Extensive experiments on Multi-modal CelebA-HQ and CelebAText-HQ demonstrate significant advantages of AnyFace over state-of-the-art methods. AnyFace can achieve high-quality, high-resolution, and high-diversity face synthesis and manipulation results without any constraints on the number and content of input captions.

Yinfan Wang, Jie Gui, Baosheng Yu et al.

A major challenge in finger vein recognition is the lack of large-scale public datasets. Existing datasets contain few identities and limited samples per finger, restricting the advancement of deep learning-based methods. To address this, we introduce FVeinSyn, a synthetic generator capable of producing diverse finger vein patterns with rich intra-class variations. Using FVeinSyn, we created FingerVeinSyn-5M -- the largest available finger vein dataset -- containing 5 million samples from 50,000 unique fingers, each with 100 variations including shift, rotation, scale, roll, varying exposure levels, skin scattering blur, optical blur, and motion blur. FingerVeinSyn-5M is also the first to offer fully annotated finger vein images, supporting deep learning applications in this field. Models pretrained on FingerVeinSyn-5M and fine-tuned with minimal real data achieve an average 53.91\% performance gain across multiple benchmarks. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/EvanWang98/FingerVeinSyn-5M.

Wenxi Liu, Qi Li, Xindai Lin et al.

Ultra-high resolution image segmentation has raised increasing interests in recent years due to its realistic applications. In this paper, we innovate the widely used high-resolution image segmentation pipeline, in which an ultra-high resolution image is partitioned into regular patches for local segmentation and then the local results are merged into a high-resolution semantic mask. In particular, we introduce a novel locality-aware context fusion based segmentation model to process local patches, where the relevance between local patch and its various contexts are jointly and complementarily utilized to handle the semantic regions with large variations. Additionally, we present the alternating local enhancement module that restricts the negative impact of redundant information introduced from the contexts, and thus is endowed with the ability of fixing the locality-aware features to produce refined results. Furthermore, in comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in public benchmarks. Our released codes are available at: https://github.com/liqiokkk/FCtL.

Mingtao Feng, Zhen Li, Qi Li et al.

3D object grounding aims to locate the most relevant target object in a raw point cloud scene based on a free-form language description. Understanding complex and diverse descriptions, and lifting them directly to a point cloud is a new and challenging topic due to the irregular and sparse nature of point clouds. There are three main challenges in 3D object grounding: to find the main focus in the complex and diverse description; to understand the point cloud scene; and to locate the target object. In this paper, we address all three challenges. Firstly, we propose a language scene graph module to capture the rich structure and long-distance phrase correlations. Secondly, we introduce a multi-level 3D proposal relation graph module to extract the object-object and object-scene co-occurrence relationships, and strengthen the visual features of the initial proposals. Lastly, we develop a description guided 3D visual graph module to encode global contexts of phrases and proposals by a nodes matching strategy. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmark datasets (ScanRefer and Nr3D) show that our algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art. Our code is available at https://github.com/PNXD/FFL-3DOG.

Wenyi Wu, Qi Li, Wenliang Zhong et al.

Vision-language models have been widely explored across a wide range of tasks and achieve satisfactory performance. However, it's under-explored how to consolidate entity understanding through a varying number of images and to align it with the pre-trained language models for generative tasks. In this paper, we propose MIVC, a general multiple instance visual component to bridge the gap between various image inputs with off-the-shelf vision-language models by aggregating visual representations in a permutation-invariant fashion through a neural network. We show that MIVC could be plugged into the visual-language models to improve the model performance consistently on visual question answering, classification and captioning tasks on a public available e-commerce dataset with multiple images per product. Furthermore, we show that the component provides insight into the contribution of each image to the downstream tasks.

Wenliang Zhong, Wenyi Wu, Qi Li et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved SOTA performance in various visual language tasks by fusing the visual representations with LLMs leveraging some visual adapters. In this paper, we first establish that adapters using query-based Transformers such as Q-former is a simplified Multi-instance Learning method without considering instance heterogeneity/correlation. We then propose a general component termed Multi-instance Visual Prompt Generator (MIVPG) to incorporate enriched visual representations into LLMs by taking advantage of instance correlation between images or patches for the same sample. Quantatitive evaluation on three public vision-language (VL) datasets from different scenarios shows that the proposed MIVPG improves Q-former in main VL tasks.

Fan Ji, Muyi Sun, Xingqun Qi et al.

Face sketch synthesis has been widely used in multi-media entertainment and law enforcement. Despite the recent developments in deep neural networks, accurate and realistic face sketch synthesis is still a challenging task due to the diversity and complexity of human faces. Current image-to-image translation-based face sketch synthesis frequently encounters over-fitting problems when it comes to small-scale datasets. To tackle this problem, we present an end-to-end Memory Oriented Style Transfer Network (MOST-Net) for face sketch synthesis which can produce high-fidelity sketches with limited data. Specifically, an external self-supervised dynamic memory module is introduced to capture the domain alignment knowledge in the long term. In this way, our proposed model could obtain the domain-transfer ability by establishing the durable relationship between faces and corresponding sketches on the feature level. Furthermore, we design a novel Memory Refinement Loss (MR Loss) for feature alignment in the memory module, which enhances the accuracy of memory slots in an unsupervised manner. Extensive experiments on the CUFS and the CUFSF datasets show that our MOST-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in terms of the Structural Similarity Index(SSIM).

Xingqun Qi, Muyi Sun, Zijian Wang et al.

Biphasic face photo-sketch synthesis has significant practical value in wide-ranging fields such as digital entertainment and law enforcement. Previous approaches directly generate the photo-sketch in a global view, they always suffer from the low quality of sketches and complex photo variations, leading to unnatural and low-fidelity results. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic-Driven Generative Adversarial Network to address the above issues, cooperating with Graph Representation Learning. Considering that human faces have distinct spatial structures, we first inject class-wise semantic layouts into the generator to provide style-based spatial information for synthesized face photos and sketches. Additionally, to enhance the authenticity of details in generated faces, we construct two types of representational graphs via semantic parsing maps upon input faces, dubbed the IntrA-class Semantic Graph (IASG) and the InteR-class Structure Graph (IRSG). Specifically, the IASG effectively models the intra-class semantic correlations of each facial semantic component, thus producing realistic facial details. To preserve the generated faces being more structure-coordinated, the IRSG models inter-class structural relations among every facial component by graph representation learning. To further enhance the perceptual quality of synthesized images, we present a biphasic interactive cycle training strategy by fully taking advantage of the multi-level feature consistency between the photo and sketch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors on the CUFS and CUFSF datasets.

Muyi Sun, Jian Wang, Yunfan Liu et al.

Biphasic facial age translation aims at predicting the appearance of the input face at any age. Facial age translation has received considerable research attention in the last decade due to its practical value in cross-age face recognition and various entertainment applications. However, most existing methods model age changes between holistic images, regardless of the human face structure and the age-changing patterns of individual facial components. Consequently, the lack of semantic supervision will cause infidelity of generated faces in detail. To this end, we propose a unified framework for biphasic facial age translation with noisy-semantic guided generative adversarial networks. Structurally, we project the class-aware noisy semantic layouts to soft latent maps for the following injection operation on the individual facial parts. In particular, we introduce two sub-networks, ProjectionNet and ConstraintNet. ProjectionNet introduces the low-level structural semantic information with noise map and produces soft latent maps. ConstraintNet disentangles the high-level spatial features to constrain the soft latent maps, which endows more age-related context into the soft latent maps. Specifically, attention mechanism is employed in ConstraintNet for feature disentanglement. Meanwhile, in order to mine the strongest mapping ability of the network, we embed two types of learning strategies in the training procedure, supervised self-driven generation and unsupervised condition-driven cycle-consistent generation. As a result, extensive experiments conducted on MORPH and CACD datasets demonstrate the prominent ability of our proposed method which achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Qi Li, Yue Wang, Yilun Wang et al.

Constructing HD semantic maps is a central component of autonomous driving. However, traditional pipelines require a vast amount of human efforts and resources in annotating and maintaining the semantics in the map, which limits its scalability. In this paper, we introduce the problem of HD semantic map learning, which dynamically constructs the local semantics based on onboard sensor observations. Meanwhile, we introduce a semantic map learning method, dubbed HDMapNet. HDMapNet encodes image features from surrounding cameras and/or point clouds from LiDAR, and predicts vectorized map elements in the bird's-eye view. We benchmark HDMapNet on nuScenes dataset and show that in all settings, it performs better than baseline methods. Of note, our camera-LiDAR fusion-based HDMapNet outperforms existing methods by more than 50% in all metrics. In addition, we develop semantic-level and instance-level metrics to evaluate the map learning performance. Finally, we showcase our method is capable of predicting a locally consistent map. By introducing the method and metrics, we invite the community to study this novel map learning problem.

Xingqun Qi, Muyi Sun, Weining Wang et al.

Face sketch synthesis has made significant progress with the development of deep neural networks in these years. The delicate depiction of sketch portraits facilitates a wide range of applications like digital entertainment and law enforcement. However, accurate and realistic face sketch generation is still a challenging task due to the illumination variations and complex backgrounds in the real scenes. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Semantic-Driven Generative Adversarial Network (SDGAN) which embeds global structure-level style injection and local class-level knowledge re-weighting. Specifically, we conduct facial saliency detection on the input face photos to provide overall facial texture structure, which could be used as a global type of prior information. In addition, we exploit face parsing layouts as the semantic-level spatial prior to enforce globally structural style injection in the generator of SDGAN. Furthermore, to enhance the realistic effect of the details, we propose a novel Adaptive Re-weighting Loss (ARLoss) which dedicates to balance the contributions of different semantic classes. Experimentally, our extensive experiments on CUFS and CUFSF datasets show that our proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Man Zhou, Qian Wang, Qi Li et al.

Face authentication usually utilizes deep learning models to verify users with high recognition accuracy. However, face authentication systems are vulnerable to various attacks that cheat the models by manipulating the digital counterparts of human faces. So far, lots of liveness detection schemes have been developed to prevent such attacks. Unfortunately, the attacker can still bypass these schemes by constructing wide-ranging sophisticated attacks. We study the security of existing face authentication services (e.g., Microsoft, Amazon, and Face++) and typical liveness detection approaches. Particularly, we develop a new type of attack, i.e., the low-cost 3D projection attack that projects manipulated face videos on a 3D face model, which can easily evade these face authentication services and liveness detection approaches. To this end, we propose FaceLip, a novel liveness detection scheme for face authentication, which utilizes unforgeable lip motion patterns built upon well-designed acoustic signals to enable a strong security guarantee. The unique lip motion patterns for each user are unforgeable because FaceLip verifies the patterns by capturing and analyzing the acoustic signals that are dynamically generated according to random challenges, which ensures that our signals for liveness detection cannot be manipulated. Specially, we develop robust algorithms for FaceLip to eliminate the impact of noisy signals in the environment and thus can accurately infer the lip motions at larger distances. We prototype FaceLip on off-the-shelf smartphones and conduct extensive experiments under different settings. Our evaluation with 44 participants validates the effectiveness and robustness of FaceLip.

Yuhao Zhu, Qi Li, Jian Wang et al.

Face swapping has both positive applications such as entertainment, human-computer interaction, etc., and negative applications such as DeepFake threats to politics, economics, etc. Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand the scheme of advanced methods for high-quality face swapping and generate enough and representative face swapping images to train DeepFake detection algorithms. This paper proposes the first Megapixel level method for one shot Face Swapping (or MegaFS for short). Firstly, MegaFS organizes face representation hierarchically by the proposed Hierarchical Representation Face Encoder (HieRFE) in an extended latent space to maintain more facial details, rather than compressed representation in previous face swapping methods. Secondly, a carefully designed Face Transfer Module (FTM) is proposed to transfer the identity from a source image to the target by a non-linear trajectory without explicit feature disentanglement. Finally, the swapped faces can be synthesized by StyleGAN2 with the benefits of its training stability and powerful generative capability. Each part of MegaFS can be trained separately so the requirement of our model for GPU memory can be satisfied for megapixel face swapping. In summary, complete face representation, stable training, and limited memory usage are the three novel contributions to the success of our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MegaFS and the first megapixel level face swapping database is released for research on DeepFake detection and face image editing in the public domain. The dataset is at this link.

Yunfan Liu, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with style-based generators (e.g. StyleGAN) successfully enable semantic control over image synthesis, and recent studies have also revealed that interpretable image translations could be obtained by modifying the latent code. However, in terms of the low-level image content, traveling in the latent space would lead to `spatially entangled changes' in corresponding images, which is undesirable in many real-world applications where local editing is required. To solve this problem, we analyze properties of the 'style space' and explore the possibility of controlling the local translation with pre-trained style-based generators. Concretely, we propose 'Style Intervention', a lightweight optimization-based algorithm which could adapt to arbitrary input images and render natural translation effects under flexible objectives. We verify the performance of the proposed framework in facial attribute editing on high-resolution images, where both photo-realism and consistency are required. Extensive qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and quantitative measurements also show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in various aspects.

Jiangmiao Pang, Linlu Qiu, Xia Li et al.

Similarity learning has been recognized as a crucial step for object tracking. However, existing multiple object tracking methods only use sparse ground truth matching as the training objective, while ignoring the majority of the informative regions on the images. In this paper, we present Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning, which densely samples hundreds of region proposals on a pair of images for contrastive learning. We can directly combine this similarity learning with existing detection methods to build Quasi-Dense Tracking (QDTrack) without turning to displacement regression or motion priors. We also find that the resulting distinctive feature space admits a simple nearest neighbor search at the inference time. Despite its simplicity, QDTrack outperforms all existing methods on MOT, BDD100K, Waymo, and TAO tracking benchmarks. It achieves 68.7 MOTA at 20.3 FPS on MOT17 without using external training data. Compared to methods with similar detectors, it boosts almost 10 points of MOTA and significantly decreases the number of ID switches on BDD100K and Waymo datasets. Our code and trained models are available at http://vis.xyz/pub/qdtrack.

Qi Li, Hanlin Mo, Jinghan Zhao et al.

The dynamics of human skeletons have significant information for the task of action recognition. The similarity between trajectories of corresponding joints is an indicating feature of the same action, while this similarity may subject to some distortions that can be modeled as the combination of spatial and temporal affine transformations. In this work, we propose a novel feature called spatio-temporal dual affine differential invariant (STDADI). Furthermore, in order to improve the generalization ability of neural networks, a channel augmentation method is proposed. On the large scale action recognition dataset NTU-RGB+D, and its extended version NTU-RGB+D 120, it achieves remarkable improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods.

Meng Chang, Chenwei Yang, Huajun Feng et al.

Camera motion deblurring is an important low-level vision task for achieving better imaging quality. When a scene has outliers such as saturated pixels, the captured blurred image becomes more difficult to restore. In this paper, we propose a novel method to handle camera motion blur with outliers. We first propose an edge-aware scale-recurrent network (EASRN) to conduct deblurring. EASRN has a separate deblurring module that removes blur at multiple scales and an upsampling module that fuses different input scales. Then a salient edge detection network is proposed to supervise the training process and constraint the edges restoration. By simulating camera motion and adding various light sources, we can generate blurred images with saturation cutoff. Using the proposed data generation method, our network can learn to deal with outliers effectively. We evaluate our method on public test datasets including the GoPro dataset, Kohler's dataset and Lai's dataset. Both objective evaluation indexes and subjective visualization show that our method results in better deblurring quality than other state-of-the-art approaches.

Yunfan Liu, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun et al.

Face aging, which aims at aesthetically rendering a given face to predict its future appearance, has received significant research attention in recent years. Although great progress has been achieved with the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in synthesizing realistic images, most existing GAN-based face aging methods have two main problems: 1) unnatural changes of high-level semantic information (e.g. facial attributes) due to the insufficient utilization of prior knowledge of input faces, and 2) distortions of low-level image content including ghosting artifacts and modifications in age-irrelevant regions. In this paper, we introduce A3GAN, an Attribute-Aware Attentive face aging model to address the above issues. Facial attribute vectors are regarded as the conditional information and embedded into both the generator and discriminator, encouraging synthesized faces to be faithful to attributes of corresponding inputs. To improve the visual fidelity of generation results, we leverage the attention mechanism to restrict modifications to age-related areas and preserve image details. Moreover, the wavelet packet transform is employed to capture textural features at multiple scales in the frequency space. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in synthesizing photorealistic aged face images and achieving state-of-the-art performance on popular face aging datasets.

Qi Li, Long Mai, Michael A. Alcorn et al.

Large, pre-trained generative models have been increasingly popular and useful to both the research and wider communities. Specifically, BigGANs a class-conditional Generative Adversarial Networks trained on ImageNet---achieved excellent, state-of-the-art capability in generating realistic photos. However, fine-tuning or training BigGANs from scratch is practically impossible for most researchers and engineers because (1) GAN training is often unstable and suffering from mode-collapse; and (2) the training requires a significant amount of computation, 256 Google TPUs for 2 days or 8xV100 GPUs for 15 days. Importantly, many pre-trained generative models both in NLP and image domains were found to contain biases that are harmful to society. Thus, we need computationally-feasible methods for modifying and re-purposing these huge, pre-trained models for downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective optimization method for improving and re-purposing BigGANs by fine-tuning only the class-embedding layer. We show the effectiveness of our model-editing approach in three tasks: (1) significantly improving the realism and diversity of samples of complete mode-collapse classes; (2) re-purposing ImageNet BigGANs for generating images for Places365; and (3) de-biasing or improving the sample diversity for selected ImageNet classes.

Qi Li, Yunfan Liu, Zhenan Sun

Age progression and regression refers to aesthetically render-ing a given face image to present effects of face aging and rejuvenation, respectively. Although numerous studies have been conducted in this topic, there are two major problems: 1) multiple models are usually trained to simulate different age mappings, and 2) the photo-realism of generated face images is heavily influenced by the variation of training images in terms of pose, illumination, and background. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a framework based on conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) to achieve age progression and regression simultaneously. Particularly, since face aging and rejuvenation are largely different in terms of image translation patterns, we model these two processes using two separate generators, each dedicated to one age changing process. In addition, we exploit spatial attention mechanisms to limit image modifications to regions closely related to age changes, so that images with high visual fidelity could be synthesized for in-the-wild cases. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the ability of our model in synthesizing lifelike face images at desired ages with personalized features well preserved, and keeping age-irrelevant regions unchanged.

Yunfan Liu, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun

Since it is difficult to collect face images of the same subject over a long range of age span, most existing face aging methods resort to unpaired datasets to learn age mappings. However, the matching ambiguity between young and aged face images inherent to unpaired training data may lead to unnatural changes of facial attributes during the aging process, which could not be solved by only enforcing identity consistency like most existing studies do. In this paper, we propose a attribute-aware face aging model with wavelet-based Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to address the above issues. To be specific, we embed facial attribute vectors into both generator and discriminator of the model to encourage each synthesized elderly face image to be faithful to the attribute of its corresponding input. In addition, a wavelet packet transform (WPT) module is incorporated to improve the visual fidelity of generated images by capturing age-related texture details at multiple scales in the frequency space. Qualitative results demonstrate the ability of our model to synthesize visually plausible face images, and extensive quantitative evaluation results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing datasets.

Peipei Li, Yibo Hu, Qi Li et al.

Age progression/regression is a challenging task due to the complicated and non-linear transformation in human aging process. Many researches have shown that both global and local facial features are essential for face representation, but previous GAN based methods mainly focused on the global feature in age synthesis. To utilize both global and local facial information, we propose a Global and Local Consistent Age Generative Adversarial Network (GLCA-GAN). In our generator, a global network learns the whole facial structure and simulates the aging trend of the whole face, while three crucial facial patches are progressed or regressed by three local networks aiming at imitating subtle changes of crucial facial subregions. To preserve most of the details in age-attribute-irrelevant areas, our generator learns the residual face. Moreover, we employ an identity preserving loss to better preserve the identity information, as well as age preserving loss to enhance the accuracy of age synthesis. A pixel loss is also adopted to preserve detailed facial information of the input face. Our proposed method is evaluated on three face aging datasets, i.e., CACD dataset, Morph dataset and FG-NET dataset. Experimental results show appealing performance of the proposed method by comparing with the state-of-the-art.

Daiguo Deng, Ruomei Wang, Hefeng Wu et al.

Fabric image retrieval is beneficial to many applications including clothing searching, online shopping and cloth modeling. Learning pairwise image similarity is of great importance to an image retrieval task. With the resurgence of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), recent works have achieved significant progresses via deep representation learning with metric embedding, which drives similar examples close to each other in a feature space, and dissimilar ones apart from each other. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding method termed focus ranking that can be easily unified into a CNN for jointly learning image representations and metrics in the context of fine-grained fabric image retrieval. Focus ranking aims to rank similar examples higher than all dissimilar ones by penalizing ranking disorders via the minimization of the overall cost attributed to similar samples being ranked below dissimilar ones. At the training stage, training samples are organized into focus ranking units for efficient optimization. We build a large-scale fabric image retrieval dataset (FIRD) with about 25,000 images of 4,300 fabrics, and test the proposed model on the FIRD dataset. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed model over existing metric embedding models.

Qi Li, Zhenan Sun, Ran He et al.

With the rapid growth of image and video data on the web, hashing has been extensively studied for image or video search in recent years. Benefit from recent advances in deep learning, deep hashing methods have achieved promising results for image retrieval. However, there are some limitations of previous deep hashing methods (e.g., the semantic information is not fully exploited). In this paper, we develop a deep supervised discrete hashing algorithm based on the assumption that the learned binary codes should be ideal for classification. Both the pairwise label information and the classification information are used to learn the hash codes within one stream framework. We constrain the outputs of the last layer to be binary codes directly, which is rarely investigated in deep hashing algorithm. Because of the discrete nature of hash codes, an alternating minimization method is used to optimize the objective function. Experimental results have shown that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

Hongwen Zhang, Qi Li, Zhenan Sun et al.

Facial landmark detection is an important yet challenging task for real-world computer vision applications. This paper proposes an effective and robust approach for facial landmark detection by combining data- and model-driven methods. Firstly, a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) is trained to compute response maps of all facial landmark points. Such a data-driven method could make full use of holistic information in a facial image for global estimation of facial landmarks. After that, the maximum points in the response maps are fitted with a pre-trained Point Distribution Model (PDM) to generate the initial facial shape. This model-driven method is able to correct the inaccurate locations of outliers by considering the shape prior information. Finally, a weighted version of Regularized Landmark Mean-Shift (RLMS) is employed to fine-tune the facial shape iteratively. This Estimation-Correction-Tuning process perfectly combines the advantages of the global robustness of data-driven method (FCN), outlier correction capability of model-driven method (PDM) and non-parametric optimization of RLMS. Results of extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances on challenging datasets including 300W, AFLW, AFW and COFW. The proposed method is able to produce satisfying detection results on face images with exaggerated expressions, large head poses, and partial occlusions.