Bo Ren

Xin Jin, Pengyi Jiao, Zheng-Peng Duan et al.

Volumetric rendering based methods, like NeRF, excel in HDR view synthesis from RAWimages, especially for nighttime scenes. While, they suffer from long training times and cannot perform real-time rendering due to dense sampling requirements. The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering and faster training. However, implementing RAW image-based view synthesis directly using 3DGS is challenging due to its inherent drawbacks: 1) in nighttime scenes, extremely low SNR leads to poor structure-from-motion (SfM) estimation in distant views; 2) the limited representation capacity of spherical harmonics (SH) function is unsuitable for RAW linear color space; and 3) inaccurate scene structure hampers downstream tasks such as refocusing. To address these issues, we propose LE3D (Lighting Every darkness with 3DGS). Our method proposes Cone Scatter Initialization to enrich the estimation of SfM, and replaces SH with a Color MLP to represent the RAW linear color space. Additionally, we introduce depth distortion and near-far regularizations to improve the accuracy of scene structure for downstream tasks. These designs enable LE3D to perform real-time novel view synthesis, HDR rendering, refocusing, and tone-mapping changes. Compared to previous volumetric rendering based methods, LE3D reduces training time to 1% and improves rendering speed by up to 4,000 times for 2K resolution images in terms of FPS. Code and viewer can be found in https://github.com/Srameo/LE3D .

Xiujun Shu, Yusheng Tao, Ruizhi Qiao et al.

Person search in media has seen increasing potential in Internet applications, such as video clipping and character collection. This task is common but overlooked by previous person search works which focus on surveillance scenes. The media scenarios have some different challenges from surveillance scenes. For example, a person may change his clothes frequently. To alleviate this issue, this paper proposes a Unified Detector and Graph Network (UDGNet) for person search in media. UDGNet is the first person search framework to detect and re-identify the human body and head simultaneously. Specifically, it first builds two branches based on a unified network to detect the human body and head, then the detected body and head are used for re-identification. This dual-task approach can significantly enhance discriminative learning. To tackle the cloth-changing issue, UDGNet builds two graphs to explore reliable links among cloth-changing samples and utilizes a graph network to learn better embeddings. This design effectively enhances the robustness of person search to cloth-changing challenges. Besides, we demonstrate that UDGNet can be implemented with both anchor-based and anchor-free person search frameworks and further achieve performance improvement. This paper also contributes a large-scale dataset for Person Search in Media (PSM), which provides both body and head annotations. It is by far the largest dataset for person search in media. Experiments show that UDGNet improves the anchor-free model AlignPS by 12.1% in mAP. Meanwhile, it shows good generalization across surveillance and longterm scenarios. The dataset and code will be available at: https://github.com/shuxjweb/PSM.git.

Jianfeng Kuang, Wei Hua, Dingkang Liang et al.

Visual information extraction (VIE), which aims to simultaneously perform OCR and information extraction in a unified framework, has drawn increasing attention due to its essential role in various applications like understanding receipts, goods, and traffic signs. However, as existing benchmark datasets for VIE mainly consist of document images without the adequate diversity of layout structures, background disturbs, and entity categories, they cannot fully reveal the challenges of real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a large-scale dataset consisting of camera images for VIE, which contains not only the larger variance of layout, backgrounds, and fonts but also much more types of entities. Besides, we propose a novel framework for end-to-end VIE that combines the stages of OCR and information extraction in an end-to-end learning fashion. Different from the previous end-to-end approaches that directly adopt OCR features as the input of an information extraction module, we propose to use contrastive learning to narrow the semantic gap caused by the difference between the tasks of OCR and information extraction. We evaluate the existing end-to-end methods for VIE on the proposed dataset and observe that the performance of these methods has a distinguishable drop from SROIE (a widely used English dataset) to our proposed dataset due to the larger variance of layout and entities. These results demonstrate our dataset is more practical for promoting advanced VIE algorithms. In addition, experiments demonstrate that the proposed VIE method consistently achieves the obvious performance gains on the proposed and SROIE datasets.

Hao Liu, Xin Li, Bing Liu et al.

Recently, table structure recognition has achieved impressive progress with the help of deep graph models. Most of them exploit single visual cues of tabular elements or simply combine visual cues with other modalities via early fusion to reason their graph relationships. However, neither early fusion nor individually reasoning in terms of multiple modalities can be appropriate for all varieties of table structures with great diversity. Instead, different modalities are expected to collaborate with each other in different patterns for different table cases. In the community, the importance of intra-inter modality interactions for table structure reasoning is still unexplored. In this paper, we define it as heterogeneous table structure recognition (Hetero-TSR) problem. With the aim of filling this gap, we present a novel Neural Collaborative Graph Machines (NCGM) equipped with stacked collaborative blocks, which alternatively extracts intra-modality context and models inter-modality interactions in a hierarchical way. It can represent the intra-inter modality relationships of tabular elements more robustly, which significantly improves the recognition performance. We also show that the proposed NCGM can modulate collaborative pattern of different modalities conditioned on the context of intra-modality cues, which is vital for diversified table cases. Experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate our proposed NCGM achieves state-of-the-art performance and beats other contemporary methods by a large margin especially under challenging scenarios.

Hao Liu, Antai Guo, Deqiang Jiang et al.

Recently, a series of decomposition-based scene text detection methods has achieved impressive progress by decomposing challenging text regions into pieces and linking them in a bottom-up manner. However, most of them merely focus on linking independent text pieces while the context information is underestimated. In the puzzle game, the solver often put pieces together in a logical way according to the contextual information of each piece, in order to arrive at the correct solution. Inspired by it, we propose a novel decomposition-based method, termed Puzzle Networks (PuzzleNet), to address the challenging scene text detection task in this work. PuzzleNet consists of the Segment Proposal Network (SPN) that predicts the candidate text segments fitting arbitrary shape of text region, and the two-branch Multiple-Similarity Graph Convolutional Network (MSGCN) that models both appearance and geometry correlations between each segment to its contextual ones. By building segments as context graphs, MSGCN effectively employs segment context to predict combinations of segments. Final detections of polygon shape are produced by merging segments according to the predicted combinations. Evaluations on three benchmark datasets, ICDAR15, MSRA-TD500 and SCUT-CTW1500, have demonstrated that our method can achieve better or comparable performance than current state-of-the-arts, which is beneficial from the exploitation of segment context graph.

Hao Liu, Jingjing Wu, Jianguo Jiang et al.

Attribute recognition has become crucial because of its wide applications in many computer vision tasks, such as person re-identification. Like many object recognition problems, variations in viewpoints, illumination, and recognition at far distance, all make this task challenging. In this work, we propose a joint CTC-Attention model (JCM), which maps attribute labels into sequences to learn the semantic relationship among attributes. Besides, this network uses neural network to encode images into sequences, and employs connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss to train the network with the aim of improving the encoding performance of the network. At the same time, it adopts the attention model to decode the sequences, which can realize aligning the sequences and better learning the semantic information from attributes. Extensive experiments on three public datasets, i.e., Market-1501 attribute dataset, Duke attribute dataset and PETA dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Deng-Ping Fan, ShengChuan Zhang, Yu-Huan Wu et al.

Existing face sketch synthesis (FSS) similarity measures are sensitive to slight image degradation (e.g., noise, blur). However, human perception of the similarity of two sketches will consider both structure and texture as essential factors and is not sensitive to slight ("pixel-level") mismatches. Consequently, the use of existing similarity measures can lead to better algorithms receiving a lower score than worse algorithms. This unreliable evaluation has significantly hindered the development of the FSS field. To solve this problem, we propose a novel and robust style similarity measure called Scoot-measure (Structure CO-Occurrence Texture Measure), which simultaneously evaluates "block-level" spatial structure and co-occurrence texture statistics. In addition, we further propose 4 new meta-measures and create 2 new datasets to perform a comprehensive evaluation of several widely-used FSS measures on two large databases. Experimental results demonstrate that our measure not only provides a reliable evaluation but also achieves significantly improved performance. Specifically, the study indicated a higher degree (78.8%) of correlation between our measure and human judgment than the best prior measure (58.6%). Our code will be made available.