arXiv subjects

Jue Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Jue Wang.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Disentangled Image Matting

Most previous image matting methods require a roughly-specificed trimap as input, and estimate fractional alpha values for all pixels that are in the unknown region of the trimap. In this paper, we argue that directly estimating the alpha matte from a coarse trimap is a major limitation of previous methods, as this practice tries to address two difficult and inherently different problems at the same time: identifying true blending pixels inside the trimap region, and estimate accurate alpha values for them. We propose AdaMatting, a new end-to-end matting framework that disentangles this problem into two sub-tasks: trimap adaptation and alpha estimation. Trimap adaptation is a pixel-wise classification problem that infers the global structure of the input image by identifying definite foreground, background, and semi-transparent image regions. Alpha estimation is a regression problem that calculates the opacity value of each blended pixel. Our method separately handles these two sub-tasks within a single deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Extensive experiments show that AdaMatting has additional structure awareness and trimap fault-tolerance. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on Adobe Composition-1k dataset both qualitatively and quantitatively. It is also the current best-performing method on the alphamatting.com online evaluation for all commonly-used metrics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Discriminative Video Representation Learning Using Support Vector Classifiers

Most popular deep models for action recognition in videos generate independent predictions for short clips, which are then pooled heuristically to assign an action label to the full video segment. As not all frames may characterize the underlying action---many are common across multiple actions---pooling schemes that impose equal importance on all frames might be unfavorable. In an attempt to tackle this problem, we propose discriminative pooling, based on the notion that among the deep features generated on all short clips, there is at least one that characterizes the action. To identify these useful features, we resort to a negative bag consisting of features that are known to be irrelevant, for example, they are sampled either from datasets that are unrelated to our actions of interest or are CNN features produced via random noise as input. With the features from the video as a positive bag and the irrelevant features as the negative bag, we cast an objective to learn a (nonlinear) hyperplane that separates the unknown useful features from the rest in a multiple instance learning formulation within a support vector machine setup. We use the parameters of this separating hyperplane as a descriptor for the full video segment. Since these parameters are directly related to the support vectors in a max-margin framework, they can be treated as a weighted average pooling of the features from the bags, with zero weights given to non-support vectors. Our pooling scheme is end-to-end trainable within a deep learning framework. We report results from experiments on eight computer vision benchmark datasets spanning a variety of video-related tasks and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across these tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

GODS: Generalized One-class Discriminative Subspaces for Anomaly Detection

One-class learning is the classic problem of fitting a model to data for which annotations are available only for a single class. In this paper, we propose a novel objective for one-class learning. Our key idea is to use a pair of orthonormal frames -- as subspaces -- to "sandwich" the labeled data via optimizing for two objectives jointly: i) minimize the distance between the origins of the two subspaces, and ii) to maximize the margin between the hyperplanes and the data, either subspace demanding the data to be in its positive and negative orthant respectively. Our proposed objective however leads to a non-convex optimization problem, to which we resort to Riemannian optimization schemes and derive an efficient conjugate gradient scheme on the Stiefel manifold. To study the effectiveness of our scheme, we propose a new dataset~\emph{Dash-Cam-Pose}, consisting of clips with skeleton poses of humans seated in a car, the task being to classify the clips as normal or abnormal; the latter is when any human pose is out-of-position with regard to say an airbag deployment. Our experiments on the proposed Dash-Cam-Pose dataset, as well as several other standard anomaly/novelty detection benchmarks demonstrate the benefits of our scheme, achieving state-of-the-art one-class accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Semi-supervised Skin Detection by Network with Mutual Guidance

In this paper we present a new data-driven method for robust skin detection from a single human portrait image. Unlike previous methods, we incorporate human body as a weak semantic guidance into this task, considering acquiring large-scale of human labeled skin data is commonly expensive and time-consuming. To be specific, we propose a dual-task neural network for joint detection of skin and body via a semi-supervised learning strategy. The dual-task network contains a shared encoder but two decoders for skin and body separately. For each decoder, its output also serves as a guidance for its counterpart, making both decoders mutually guided. Extensive experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our network with mutual guidance, and experimental results show our network outperforms the state-of-the-art in skin detection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Learning Raw Image Denoising with Bayer Pattern Unification and Bayer Preserving Augmentation

In this paper, we present new data pre-processing and augmentation techniques for DNN-based raw image denoising. Compared with traditional RGB image denoising, performing this task on direct camera sensor readings presents new challenges such as how to effectively handle various Bayer patterns from different data sources, and subsequently how to perform valid data augmentation with raw images. To address the first problem, we propose a Bayer pattern unification (BayerUnify) method to unify different Bayer patterns. This allows us to fully utilize a heterogeneous dataset to train a single denoising model instead of training one model for each pattern. Furthermore, while it is essential to augment the dataset to improve model generalization and performance, we discovered that it is error-prone to modify raw images by adapting augmentation methods designed for RGB images. Towards this end, we present a Bayer preserving augmentation (BayerAug) method as an effective approach for raw image augmentation. Combining these data processing technqiues with a modified U-Net, our method achieves a PSNR of 52.11 and a SSIM of 0.9969 in NTIRE 2019 Real Image Denoising Challenge, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jiaming-Liu/BayerUnifyAug.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Not All Parts Are Created Equal: 3D Pose Estimation by Modelling Bi-directional Dependencies of Body Parts

Not all the human body parts have the same~degree of freedom~(DOF) due to the physiological structure. For example, the limbs may move more flexibly and freely than the torso does. Most of the existing 3D pose estimation methods, despite the very promising results achieved, treat the body joints equally and consequently often lead to larger reconstruction errors on the limbs. In this paper, we propose a progressive approach that explicitly accounts for the distinct DOFs among the body parts. We model parts with higher DOFs like the elbows, as dependent components of the corresponding parts with lower DOFs like the torso, of which the 3D locations can be more reliably estimated. Meanwhile, the high-DOF parts may, in turn, impose a constraint on where the low-DOF ones lie. As a result, parts with different DOFs supervise one another, yielding physically constrained and plausible pose-estimation results. To further facilitate the prediction of the high-DOF parts, we introduce a pose-attribute estimation, where the relative location of a limb joint with respect to the torso, which has the least DOF of a human body, is explicitly estimated and further fed to the joint-estimation module. The proposed approach achieves very promising results, outperforming the state of the art on several benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialog

We introduce the task of scene-aware dialog. Our goal is to generate a complete and natural response to a question about a scene, given video and audio of the scene and the history of previous turns in the dialog. To answer successfully, agents must ground concepts from the question in the video while leveraging contextual cues from the dialog history. To benchmark this task, we introduce the Audio Visual Scene-Aware Dialog (AVSD) Dataset. For each of more than 11,000 videos of human actions from the Charades dataset, our dataset contains a dialog about the video, plus a final summary of the video by one of the dialog participants. We train several baseline systems for this task and evaluate the performance of the trained models using both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Our results indicate that models must utilize all the available inputs (video, audio, question, and dialog history) to perform best on this dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Frame-Recurrent Video Inpainting by Robust Optical Flow Inference

In this paper, we present a new inpainting framework for recovering missing regions of video frames. Compared with image inpainting, performing this task on video presents new challenges such as how to preserving temporal consistency and spatial details, as well as how to handle arbitrary input video size and length fast and efficiently. Towards this end, we propose a novel deep learning architecture which incorporates ConvLSTM and optical flow for modeling the spatial-temporal consistency in videos. It also saves much computational resource such that our method can handle videos with larger frame size and arbitrary length streamingly in real-time. Furthermore, to generate an accurate optical flow from corrupted frames, we propose a robust flow generation module, where two sources of flows are fed and a flow blending network is trained to fuse them. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our method in various scenarios and different datasets, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The experimental results demonstrate the superior of our method compared with the state-of-the-art inpainting approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

GIF2Video: Color Dequantization and Temporal Interpolation of GIF images

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a highly portable graphics format that is ubiquitous on the Internet. Despite their small sizes, GIF images often contain undesirable visual artifacts such as flat color regions, false contours, color shift, and dotted patterns. In this paper, we propose GIF2Video, the first learning-based method for enhancing the visual quality of GIFs in the wild. We focus on the challenging task of GIF restoration by recovering information lost in the three steps of GIF creation: frame sampling, color quantization, and color dithering. We first propose a novel CNN architecture for color dequantization. It is built upon a compositional architecture for multi-step color correction, with a comprehensive loss function designed to handle large quantization errors. We then adapt the SuperSlomo network for temporal interpolation of GIF frames. We introduce two large datasets, namely GIF-Faces and GIF-Moments, for both training and evaluation. Experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the visual quality of GIFs, and outperforms direct baseline and state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning for Dual Question-Answer Extraction

This paper addresses the problem of key phrase extraction from sentences. Existing state-of-the-art supervised methods require large amounts of annotated data to achieve good performance and generalization. Collecting labeled data is, however, often expensive. In this paper, we redefine the problem as question-answer extraction, and present SAMIE: Self-Asking Model for Information Ixtraction, a semi-supervised model which dually learns to ask and to answer questions by itself. Briefly, given a sentence $s$ and an answer $a$, the model needs to choose the most appropriate question $\hat q$; meanwhile, for the given sentence $s$ and same question $\hat q$ selected in the previous step, the model will predict an answer $\hat a$. The model can support few-shot learning with very limited supervision. It can also be used to perform clustering analysis when no supervision is provided. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms typical supervised methods especially when given little labeled data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Exploiting the Shipping Lane Information for Energy-Efficient Maritime Communications

Energy efficiency is a crucial issue for maritime communications, due to the limitation of geographically available base station sites. Different from previous studies, we promote the energy efficiency by exploiting the specific characteristics of maritime channels and user mobility. Particularly, we utilize the shipping lane information to obtain the long-term position information of marine users, from which the large-scale channel state information is estimated. Based on that, the resource allocation is jointly optimized for all users and all time slots during the voyage, leading to a mixed 0-1 non-convex programming problem. We transform this problem into a convex one by means of variable substitution and time-sharing relaxation, and propose an iterative algorithm to solve it based on the Lagrangian dual decomposition method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the power consumption compared with existing approaches, due to the global optimization over a much larger time span by utilizing the shipping lane information.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Joint Active User Detection and Channel Estimation in Massive Access Systems Exploiting Reed-Muller Sequences

The requirements to support massive connectivity and low latency in massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC) bring a huge challenge in the design of its random access (RA) procedure, which usually calls for efficient joint active user detection and channel estimation. In this paper, we exploit the vast sequence space and the beneficial nested structure of the length-$2^m$ second-order Reed-Muller (RM) sequences for designing an efficient RA scheme, which is capable of reliably detecting multiple active users from the set of unknown potential users with a size as large as $2^{m(m-1)/2}$, whilst simultaneously estimating their channel state information as well. Explicitly, at the transmitter each user is mapped to a specially designed RM sequence, which facilitates reliable joint sequence detection and channel estimation based on a single transmission event. To elaborate, as a first step, at the receiver we exploit the elegant nested structure of the RM sequences using a layer-by-layer RM detection algorithm for the single-user (single-sequence) scenario. Then an iterative RM detection and channel estimation algorithm is conceived for the multi-user (multi-sequence) scenario. As a benefit of the information exchange between the RM sequence detector and channel estimator, a compelling performance vs. complexity trade-off is struck, as evidenced both by our analytical and numerical results.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Direct Determination of Band Gap Renormalization in Photo-Excited Monolayer MoS2

A key feature of monolayer semiconductors, such as transition-metal dichalcogenides, is the poorly screened Coulomb potential, which leads to large exciton binding energy (Eb) and strong renormalization of the quasiparticle bandgap (Eg) by carriers. The latter has been difficult to determine due to cancellation in changes of Eb and Eg, resulting in little change in optical transition energy at different carrier densities. Here we quantify bandgap renormalization in macroscopic single crystal MoS2 monolayers on SiO2 using time and angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (TR-ARPES). At excitation density above the Mott threshold, Eg decreases by as much as 360 meV. We compare the carrier density dependent Eg with previous theoretical calculations and show the necessity of knowing both doping and excitation densities in quantifying the bandgap.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2019

GeoNet: Deep Geodesic Networks for Point Cloud Analysis

Surface-based geodesic topology provides strong cues for object semantic analysis and geometric modeling. However, such connectivity information is lost in point clouds. Thus we introduce GeoNet, the first deep learning architecture trained to model the intrinsic structure of surfaces represented as point clouds. To demonstrate the applicability of learned geodesic-aware representations, we propose fusion schemes which use GeoNet in conjunction with other baseline or backbone networks, such as PU-Net and PointNet++, for down-stream point cloud analysis. Our method improves the state-of-the-art on multiple representative tasks that can benefit from understandings of the underlying surface topology, including point upsampling, normal estimation, mesh reconstruction and non-rigid shape classification.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Video Inpainting by Jointly Learning Temporal Structure and Spatial Details

We present a new data-driven video inpainting method for recovering missing regions of video frames. A novel deep learning architecture is proposed which contains two sub-networks: a temporal structure inference network and a spatial detail recovering network. The temporal structure inference network is built upon a 3D fully convolutional architecture: it only learns to complete a low-resolution video volume given the expensive computational cost of 3D convolution. The low resolution result provides temporal guidance to the spatial detail recovering network, which performs image-based inpainting with a 2D fully convolutional network to produce recovered video frames in their original resolution. Such two-step network design ensures both the spatial quality of each frame and the temporal coherence across frames. Our method jointly trains both sub-networks in an end-to-end manner. We provide qualitative and quantitative evaluation on three datasets, demonstrating that our method outperforms previous learning-based video inpainting methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Inverse obstacle scattering for Maxwell's equations in an unbounded structure

This paper is concerned with analysis of electromagnetic wave scattering by an obstacle which is embedded in a two-layered lossy medium separated by an unbounded rough surface. Given a dipole point source, the direct problem is to determine the electromagnetic wave field for the given obstacle and unbounded rough surface; the inverse problem is to reconstruct simultaneously the obstacle and unbounded rough surface from the electromagnetic field measured on a plane surface above the obstacle. For the direct problem, a new boundary integral equation is proposed and its well-posedness is established. The analysis is based on the exponential decay of the dyadic Green function for Maxwell's equations in a lossy medium. For the inverse problem, the global uniqueness is proved and a local stability is discussed. A crucial step in the proof of the stability is to obtain the existence and characterization of the domain derivative of the electric field with respect to the shape of the obstacle and unbounded rough surface.

math.AP↗

arXiv2018

End-to-End Audio Visual Scene-Aware Dialog using Multimodal Attention-Based Video Features

Dialog systems need to understand dynamic visual scenes in order to have conversations with users about the objects and events around them. Scene-aware dialog systems for real-world applications could be developed by integrating state-of-the-art technologies from multiple research areas, including: end-to-end dialog technologies, which generate system responses using models trained from dialog data; visual question answering (VQA) technologies, which answer questions about images using learned image features; and video description technologies, in which descriptions/captions are generated from videos using multimodal information. We introduce a new dataset of dialogs about videos of human behaviors. Each dialog is a typed conversation that consists of a sequence of 10 question-and-answer(QA) pairs between two Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers. In total, we collected dialogs on roughly 9,000 videos. Using this new dataset for Audio Visual Scene-aware dialog (AVSD), we trained an end-to-end conversation model that generates responses in a dialog about a video. Our experiments demonstrate that using multimodal features that were developed for multimodal attention-based video description enhances the quality of generated dialog about dynamic scenes (videos). Our dataset, model code and pretrained models will be publicly available for a new Video Scene-Aware Dialog challenge.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Audio Visual Scene-Aware Dialog (AVSD) Challenge at DSTC7

Scene-aware dialog systems will be able to have conversations with users about the objects and events around them. Progress on such systems can be made by integrating state-of-the-art technologies from multiple research areas including end-to-end dialog systems visual dialog, and video description. We introduce the Audio Visual Scene Aware Dialog (AVSD) challenge and dataset. In this challenge, which is one track of the 7th Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC7) workshop1, the task is to build a system that generates responses in a dialog about an input video

cs.CL↗