arXiv subjects

Jianbo Shi

Publications and source records attributed to Jianbo Shi.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Inpainting at Modern Camera Resolution by Guided PatchMatch with Auto-Curation

Recently, deep models have established SOTA performance for low-resolution image inpainting, but they lack fidelity at resolutions associated with modern cameras such as 4K or more, and for large holes. We contribute an inpainting benchmark dataset of photos at 4K and above representative of modern sensors. We demonstrate a novel framework that combines deep learning and traditional methods. We use an existing deep inpainting model LaMa to fill the hole plausibly, establish three guide images consisting of structure, segmentation, depth, and apply a multiply-guided PatchMatch to produce eight candidate upsampled inpainted images. Next, we feed all candidate inpaintings through a novel curation module that chooses a good inpainting by column summation on an 8x8 antisymmetric pairwise preference matrix. Our framework's results are overwhelmingly preferred by users over 8 strong baselines, with improvements of quantitative metrics up to 7.4 over the best baseline LaMa, and our technique when paired with 4 different SOTA inpainting backbones improves each such that ours is overwhelmingly preferred by users over a strong super-res baseline.

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arXiv2022

Perceptual Artifacts Localization for Inpainting

Image inpainting is an essential task for multiple practical applications like object removal and image editing. Deep GAN-based models greatly improve the inpainting performance in structures and textures within the hole, but might also generate unexpected artifacts like broken structures or color blobs. Users perceive these artifacts to judge the effectiveness of inpainting models, and retouch these imperfect areas to inpaint again in a typical retouching workflow. Inspired by this workflow, we propose a new learning task of automatic segmentation of inpainting perceptual artifacts, and apply the model for inpainting model evaluation and iterative refinement. Specifically, we first construct a new inpainting artifacts dataset by manually annotating perceptual artifacts in the results of state-of-the-art inpainting models. Then we train advanced segmentation networks on this dataset to reliably localize inpainting artifacts within inpainted images. Second, we propose a new interpretable evaluation metric called Perceptual Artifact Ratio (PAR), which is the ratio of objectionable inpainted regions to the entire inpainted area. PAR demonstrates a strong correlation with real user preference. Finally, we further apply the generated masks for iterative image inpainting by combining our approach with multiple recent inpainting methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the consistent decrease of artifact regions and inpainting quality improvement across the different methods.

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arXiv2022

DSPoint: Dual-scale Point Cloud Recognition with High-frequency Fusion

Point cloud processing is a challenging task due to its sparsity and irregularity. Prior works introduce delicate designs on either local feature aggregator or global geometric architecture, but few combine both advantages. We propose Dual-Scale Point Cloud Recognition with High-frequency Fusion (DSPoint) to extract local-global features by concurrently operating on voxels and points. We reverse the conventional design of applying convolution on voxels and attention to points. Specifically, we disentangle point features through channel dimension for dual-scale processing: one by point-wise convolution for fine-grained geometry parsing, the other by voxel-wise global attention for long-range structural exploration. We design a co-attention fusion module for feature alignment to blend local-global modalities, which conducts inter-scale cross-modality interaction by communicating high-frequency coordinates information. Experiments and ablations on widely-adopted ModelNet40, ShapeNet, and S3DIS demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our DSPoint.

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arXiv2022

Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video

We introduce Ego4D, a massive-scale egocentric video dataset and benchmark suite. It offers 3,670 hours of daily-life activity video spanning hundreds of scenarios (household, outdoor, workplace, leisure, etc.) captured by 931 unique camera wearers from 74 worldwide locations and 9 different countries. The approach to collection is designed to uphold rigorous privacy and ethics standards with consenting participants and robust de-identification procedures where relevant. Ego4D dramatically expands the volume of diverse egocentric video footage publicly available to the research community. Portions of the video are accompanied by audio, 3D meshes of the environment, eye gaze, stereo, and/or synchronized videos from multiple egocentric cameras at the same event. Furthermore, we present a host of new benchmark challenges centered around understanding the first-person visual experience in the past (querying an episodic memory), present (analyzing hand-object manipulation, audio-visual conversation, and social interactions), and future (forecasting activities). By publicly sharing this massive annotated dataset and benchmark suite, we aim to push the frontier of first-person perception. Project page: https://ego4d-data.org/

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arXiv2021

SoGCN: Second-Order Graph Convolutional Networks

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) with multi-hop aggregation is more expressive than one-hop GCN but suffers from higher model complexity. Finding the shortest aggregation range that achieves comparable expressiveness and minimizes this side effect remains an open question. We answer this question by showing that multi-layer second-order graph convolution (SoGC) is sufficient to attain the ability of expressing polynomial spectral filters with arbitrary coefficients. Compared to models with one-hop aggregation, multi-hop propagation, and jump connections, SoGC possesses filter representational completeness while being lightweight, efficient, and easy to implement. Thereby, we suggest that SoGC is a simple design capable of forming the basic building block of GCNs, playing the same role as $3 \times 3$ kernels in CNNs. We build our Second-Order Graph Convolutional Networks (SoGCN) with SoGC and design a synthetic dataset to verify its filter fitting capability to validate these points. For real-world tasks, we present the state-of-the-art performance of SoGCN on the benchmark of node classification, graph classification, and graph regression datasets.

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arXiv2021

Normalized Diversification

Generating diverse yet specific data is the goal of the generative adversarial network (GAN), but it suffers from the problem of mode collapse. We introduce the concept of normalized diversity which force the model to preserve the normalized pairwise distance between the sparse samples from a latent parametric distribution and their corresponding high-dimensional outputs. The normalized diversification aims to unfold the manifold of unknown topology and non-uniform distribution, which leads to safe interpolation between valid latent variables. By alternating the maximization over the pairwise distance and updating the total distance (normalizer), we encourage the model to actively explore in the high-dimensional output space. We demonstrate that by combining the normalized diversity loss and the adversarial loss, we generate diverse data without suffering from mode collapsing. Experimental results show that our method achieves consistent improvement on unsupervised image generation, conditional image generation and hand pose estimation over strong baselines.

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arXiv2021

Efficient Visual Recognition with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey on Recent Advances and New Directions

Visual recognition is currently one of the most important and active research areas in computer vision, pattern recognition, and even the general field of artificial intelligence. It has great fundamental importance and strong industrial needs. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have largely boosted their performances on many concrete tasks, with the help of large amounts of training data and new powerful computation resources. Though recognition accuracy is usually the first concern for new progresses, efficiency is actually rather important and sometimes critical for both academic research and industrial applications. Moreover, insightful views on the opportunities and challenges of efficiency are also highly required for the entire community. While general surveys on the efficiency issue of DNNs have been done from various perspectives, as far as we are aware, scarcely any of them focused on visual recognition systematically, and thus it is unclear which progresses are applicable to it and what else should be concerned. In this paper, we present the review of the recent advances with our suggestions on the new possible directions towards improving the efficiency of DNN-related visual recognition approaches. We investigate not only from the model but also the data point of view (which is not the case in existing surveys), and focus on three most studied data types (images, videos and points). This paper attempts to provide a systematic summary via a comprehensive survey which can serve as a valuable reference and inspire both researchers and practitioners who work on visual recognition problems.

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arXiv2021

Convolutional Ordinal Regression Forest for Image Ordinal Estimation

Image ordinal estimation is to predict the ordinal label of a given image, which can be categorized as an ordinal regression problem. Recent methods formulate an ordinal regression problem as a series of binary classification problems. Such methods cannot ensure that the global ordinal relationship is preserved since the relationships among different binary classifiers are neglected. We propose a novel ordinal regression approach, termed Convolutional Ordinal Regression Forest or CORF, for image ordinal estimation, which can integrate ordinal regression and differentiable decision trees with a convolutional neural network for obtaining precise and stable global ordinal relationships. The advantages of the proposed CORF are twofold. First, instead of learning a series of binary classifiers \emph{independently}, the proposed method aims at learning an ordinal distribution for ordinal regression by optimizing those binary classifiers \emph{simultaneously}. Second, the differentiable decision trees in the proposed CORF can be trained together with the ordinal distribution in an end-to-end manner. The effectiveness of the proposed CORF is verified on two image ordinal estimation tasks, i.e. facial age estimation and image aesthetic assessment, showing significant improvements and better stability over the state-of-the-art ordinal regression methods.

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arXiv2020

FoveaBox: Beyond Anchor-based Object Detector

We present FoveaBox, an accurate, flexible, and completely anchor-free framework for object detection. While almost all state-of-the-art object detectors utilize predefined anchors to enumerate possible locations, scales and aspect ratios for the search of the objects, their performance and generalization ability are also limited to the design of anchors. Instead, FoveaBox directly learns the object existing possibility and the bounding box coordinates without anchor reference. This is achieved by: (a) predicting category-sensitive semantic maps for the object existing possibility, and (b) producing category-agnostic bounding box for each position that potentially contains an object. The scales of target boxes are naturally associated with feature pyramid representations. In FoveaBox, an instance is assigned to adjacent feature levels to make the model more accurate.We demonstrate its effectiveness on standard benchmarks and report extensive experimental analysis. Without bells and whistles, FoveaBox achieves state-of-the-art single model performance on the standard COCO and Pascal VOC object detection benchmark. More importantly, FoveaBox avoids all computation and hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often sensitive to the final detection performance. We believe the simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research for object detection. The code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/taokong/FoveaBox .

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arXiv2020

Nested Scale Editing for Conditional Image Synthesis

We propose an image synthesis approach that provides stratified navigation in the latent code space. With a tiny amount of partial or very low-resolution image, our approach can consistently out-perform state-of-the-art counterparts in terms of generating the closest sampled image to the ground truth. We achieve this through scale-independent editing while expanding scale-specific diversity. Scale-independence is achieved with a nested scale disentanglement loss. Scale-specific diversity is created by incorporating a progressive diversification constraint. We introduce semantic persistency across the scales by sharing common latent codes. Together they provide better control of the image synthesis process. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approach through various tasks, including image outpainting, image superresolution, and cross-domain image translation.

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arXiv2020

Potential Field: Interpretable and Unified Representation for Trajectory Prediction

Predicting an agent's future trajectory is a challenging task given the complicated stimuli (environmental/inertial/social) of motion. Prior works learn individual stimulus from different modules and fuse the representations in an end-to-end manner, which makes it hard to understand what are actually captured and how they are fused. In this work, we borrow the notion of potential field from physics as an interpretable and unified representation to model all stimuli. This allows us to not only supervise the intermediate learning process, but also have a coherent method to fuse the information of different sources. From the generated potential fields, we further estimate future motion direction and speed, which are modeled as Gaussian distributions to account for the multi-modal nature of the problem. The final prediction results are generated by recurrently moving past location based on the estimated motion direction and speed. We show state-of-the-art results on the ETH, UCY, and Stanford Drone datasets.

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arXiv2019

Learning Temporal Pose Estimation from Sparsely-Labeled Videos

Modern approaches for multi-person pose estimation in video require large amounts of dense annotations. However, labeling every frame in a video is costly and labor intensive. To reduce the need for dense annotations, we propose a PoseWarper network that leverages training videos with sparse annotations (every k frames) to learn to perform dense temporal pose propagation and estimation. Given a pair of video frames---a labeled Frame A and an unlabeled Frame B---we train our model to predict human pose in Frame A using the features from Frame B by means of deformable convolutions to implicitly learn the pose warping between A and B. We demonstrate that we can leverage our trained PoseWarper for several applications. First, at inference time we can reverse the application direction of our network in order to propagate pose information from manually annotated frames to unlabeled frames. This makes it possible to generate pose annotations for the entire video given only a few manually-labeled frames. Compared to modern label propagation methods based on optical flow, our warping mechanism is much more compact (6M vs 39M parameters), and also more accurate (88.7% mAP vs 83.8% mAP). We also show that we can improve the accuracy of a pose estimator by training it on an augmented dataset obtained by adding our propagated poses to the original manual labels. Lastly, we can use our PoseWarper to aggregate temporal pose information from neighboring frames during inference. This allows our system to achieve state-of-the-art pose detection results on the PoseTrack2017 and PoseTrack2018 datasets. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/PoseWarper.

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arXiv2019

SegSort: Segmentation by Discriminative Sorting of Segments

Almost all existing deep learning approaches for semantic segmentation tackle this task as a pixel-wise classification problem. Yet humans understand a scene not in terms of pixels, but by decomposing it into perceptual groups and structures that are the basic building blocks of recognition. This motivates us to propose an end-to-end pixel-wise metric learning approach that mimics this process. In our approach, the optimal visual representation determines the right segmentation within individual images and associates segments with the same semantic classes across images. The core visual learning problem is therefore to maximize the similarity within segments and minimize the similarity between segments. Given a model trained this way, inference is performed consistently by extracting pixel-wise embeddings and clustering, with the semantic label determined by the majority vote of its nearest neighbors from an annotated set. As a result, we present the SegSort, as a first attempt using deep learning for unsupervised semantic segmentation, achieving $76\%$ performance of its supervised counterpart. When supervision is available, SegSort shows consistent improvements over conventional approaches based on pixel-wise softmax training. Additionally, our approach produces more precise boundaries and consistent region predictions. The proposed SegSort further produces an interpretable result, as each choice of label can be easily understood from the retrieved nearest segments.

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arXiv2019

Multimodal Image Outpainting With Regularized Normalized Diversification

In this paper, we study the problem of generating a set ofrealistic and diverse backgrounds when given only a smallforeground region. We refer to this task as image outpaint-ing. The technical challenge of this task is to synthesize notonly plausible but also diverse image outputs. Traditionalgenerative adversarial networks suffer from mode collapse.While recent approaches propose to maximize orpreserve the pairwise distance between generated sampleswith respect to their latent distance, they do not explicitlyprevent the diverse samples of different conditional inputsfrom collapsing. Therefore, we propose a new regulariza-tion method to encourage diverse sampling in conditionalsynthesis. In addition, we propose a feature pyramid dis-criminator to improve the image quality. Our experimen-tal results show that our model can produce more diverseimages without sacrificing visual quality compared to state-of-the-arts approaches in both the CelebA face dataset and the Cityscape scene dataset.

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arXiv2019

Deep Image Blending

Image composition is an important operation to create visual content. Among image composition tasks, image blending aims to seamlessly blend an object from a source image onto a target image with lightly mask adjustment. A popular approach is Poisson image blending, which enforces the gradient domain smoothness in the composite image. However, this approach only considers the boundary pixels of target image, and thus can not adapt to texture of target image. In addition, the colors of the target image often seep through the original source object too much causing a significant loss of content of the source object. We propose a Poisson blending loss that achieves the same purpose of Poisson image blending. In addition, we jointly optimize the proposed Poisson blending loss as well as the style and content loss computed from a deep network, and reconstruct the blending region by iteratively updating the pixels using the L-BFGS solver. In the blending image, we not only smooth out gradient domain of the blending boundary but also add consistent texture into the blending region. User studies show that our method outperforms strong baselines as well as state-of-the-art approaches when placing objects onto both paintings and real-world images.

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arXiv2019

Adversarial Structure Matching for Structured Prediction Tasks

Pixel-wise losses, e.g., cross-entropy or L2, have been widely used in structured prediction tasks as a spatial extension of generic image classification or regression. However, its i.i.d. assumption neglects the structural regularity present in natural images. Various attempts have been made to incorporate structural reasoning mostly through structure priors in a cooperative way where co-occurring patterns are encouraged. We, on the other hand, approach this problem from an opposing angle and propose a new framework, Adversarial Structure Matching (ASM), for training such structured prediction networks via an adversarial process, in which we train a structure analyzer that provides the supervisory signals, the ASM loss. The structure analyzer is trained to maximize the ASM loss, or to emphasize recurring multi-scale hard negative structural mistakes among co-occurring patterns. On the contrary, the structured prediction network is trained to reduce those mistakes and is thus enabled to distinguish fine-grained structures. As a result, training structured prediction networks using ASM reduces contextual confusion among objects and improves boundary localization. We demonstrate that our ASM outperforms pixel-wise IID loss or structural prior GAN loss on three different structured prediction tasks: semantic segmentation, monocular depth estimation, and surface normal prediction.

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arXiv2019

Image-based marker tracking and registration for intraoperative 3D image-guided interventions using augmented reality

Augmented reality has the potential to improve operating room workflow by allowing physicians to "see" inside a patient through the projection of imaging directly onto the surgical field. For this to be useful the acquired imaging must be quickly and accurately registered with patient and the registration must be maintained. Here we describe a method for projecting a CT scan with Microsoft Hololens and then aligning that projection to a set of fiduciary markers. Radio-opaque stickers with unique QR-codes are placed on an object prior to acquiring a CT scan. The location of the markers in the CT scan are extracted and the CT scan is converted into a 3D surface object. The 3D object is then projected using the Hololens onto a table on which the same markers are placed. We designed an algorithm that aligns the markers on the 3D object with the markers on the table. To extract the markers and convert the CT into a 3D object took less than 5 seconds. To align three markers, it took $0.9 \pm 0.2$ seconds to achieve an accuracy of $5 \pm 2$ mm. These findings show that it is feasible to use a combined radio-opaque optical marker, placed on a patient prior to a CT scan, to subsequently align the acquired CT scan with the patient.

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arXiv2019

Enhanced generative adversarial network for 3D brain MRI super-resolution

Single image super-resolution (SISR) reconstruction for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has generated significant interest because of its potential to not only speed up imaging but to improve quantitative processing and analysis of available image data. Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have proven to perform well in recovering image texture detail, and many variants have therefore been proposed for SISR. In this work, we develop an enhancement to tackle GAN-based 3D SISR by introducing a new residual-in-residual dense block (RRDG) generator that is both memory efficient and achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), SSIM (Structural Similarity) and NRMSE (Normalized Root Mean Squared Error) metrics. We also introduce a patch GAN discriminator with improved convergence behavior to better model brain image texture. We proposed a novel the anatomical fidelity evaluation of the results using a pre-trained brain parcellation network. Finally, these developments are combined through a simple and efficient method to balance etween image and texture quality in the final output.

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