arXiv subjects

Man Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Man Zhou.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Unlocking Masked Autoencoders as Loss Function for Image and Video Restoration

Image and video restoration has achieved a remarkable leap with the advent of deep learning. The success of deep learning paradigm lies in three key components: data, model, and loss. Currently, many efforts have been devoted to the first two while seldom study focuses on loss function. With the question ``are the de facto optimization functions e.g., $L_1$, $L_2$, and perceptual losses optimal?'', we explore the potential of loss and raise our belief ``learned loss function empowers the learning capability of neural networks for image and video restoration''. Concretely, we stand on the shoulders of the masked Autoencoders (MAE) and formulate it as a `learned loss function', owing to the fact the pre-trained MAE innately inherits the prior of image reasoning. We investigate the efficacy of our belief from three perspectives: 1) from task-customized MAE to native MAE, 2) from image task to video task, and 3) from transformer structure to convolution neural network structure. Extensive experiments across multiple image and video tasks, including image denoising, image super-resolution, image enhancement, guided image super-resolution, video denoising, and video enhancement, demonstrate the consistent performance improvements introduced by the learned loss function. Besides, the learned loss function is preferable as it can be directly plugged into existing networks during training without involving computations in the inference stage. Code will be publicly available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Random Weights Networks Work as Loss Prior Constraint for Image Restoration

In this paper, orthogonal to the existing data and model studies, we instead resort our efforts to investigate the potential of loss function in a new perspective and present our belief ``Random Weights Networks can Be Acted as Loss Prior Constraint for Image Restoration''. Inspired by Functional theory, we provide several alternative solutions to implement our belief in the strict mathematical manifolds including Taylor's Unfolding Network, Invertible Neural Network, Central Difference Convolution and Zero-order Filtering as ``random weights network prototype'' with respect of the following four levels: 1) the different random weights strategies; 2) the different network architectures, \emph{eg,} pure convolution layer or transformer; 3) the different network architecture depths; 4) the different numbers of random weights network combination. Furthermore, to enlarge the capability of the randomly initialized manifolds, we devise the manner of random weights in the following two variants: 1) the weights are randomly initialized only once during the whole training procedure; 2) the weights are randomly initialized at each training iteration epoch. Our propose belief can be directly inserted into existing networks without any training and testing computational cost. Extensive experiments across multiple image restoration tasks, including image de-noising, low-light image enhancement, guided image super-resolution demonstrate the consistent performance gains obtained by introducing our belief. To emphasize, our main focus is to spark the realms of loss function and save their current neglected status. Code will be publicly available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Probability-based Global Cross-modal Upsampling for Pansharpening

Pansharpening is an essential preprocessing step for remote sensing image processing. Although deep learning (DL) approaches performed well on this task, current upsampling methods used in these approaches only utilize the local information of each pixel in the low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) image while neglecting to exploit its global information as well as the cross-modal information of the guiding panchromatic (PAN) image, which limits their performance improvement. To address this issue, this paper develops a novel probability-based global cross-modal upsampling (PGCU) method for pan-sharpening. Precisely, we first formulate the PGCU method from a probabilistic perspective and then design an efficient network module to implement it by fully utilizing the information mentioned above while simultaneously considering the channel specificity. The PGCU module consists of three blocks, i.e., information extraction (IE), distribution and expectation estimation (DEE), and fine adjustment (FA). Extensive experiments verify the superiority of the PGCU method compared with other popular upsampling methods. Additionally, experiments also show that the PGCU module can help improve the performance of existing SOTA deep learning pansharpening methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/Zeyu-Zhu/PGCU.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Embedding Fourier for Ultra-High-Definition Low-Light Image Enhancement

Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) photo has gradually become the standard configuration in advanced imaging devices. The new standard unveils many issues in existing approaches for low-light image enhancement (LLIE), especially in dealing with the intricate issue of joint luminance enhancement and noise removal while remaining efficient. Unlike existing methods that address the problem in the spatial domain, we propose a new solution, UHDFour, that embeds Fourier transform into a cascaded network. Our approach is motivated by a few unique characteristics in the Fourier domain: 1) most luminance information concentrates on amplitudes while noise is closely related to phases, and 2) a high-resolution image and its low-resolution version share similar amplitude patterns.Through embedding Fourier into our network, the amplitude and phase of a low-light image are separately processed to avoid amplifying noise when enhancing luminance. Besides, UHDFour is scalable to UHD images by implementing amplitude and phase enhancement under the low-resolution regime and then adjusting the high-resolution scale with few computations. We also contribute the first real UHD LLIE dataset, \textbf{UHD-LL}, that contains 2,150 low-noise/normal-clear 4K image pairs with diverse darkness and noise levels captured in different scenarios. With this dataset, we systematically analyze the performance of existing LLIE methods for processing UHD images and demonstrate the advantage of our solution. We believe our new framework, coupled with the dataset, would push the frontier of LLIE towards UHD. The code and dataset are available at https://li-chongyi.github.io/UHDFour.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Panchromatic and Multispectral Image Fusion via Alternating Reverse Filtering Network

Panchromatic (PAN) and multi-spectral (MS) image fusion, named Pan-sharpening, refers to super-resolve the low-resolution (LR) multi-spectral (MS) images in the spatial domain to generate the expected high-resolution (HR) MS images, conditioning on the corresponding high-resolution PAN images. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective \textit{alternating reverse filtering network} for pan-sharpening. Inspired by the classical reverse filtering that reverses images to the status before filtering, we formulate pan-sharpening as an alternately iterative reverse filtering process, which fuses LR MS and HR MS in an interpretable manner. Different from existing model-driven methods that require well-designed priors and degradation assumptions, the reverse filtering process avoids the dependency on pre-defined exact priors. To guarantee the stability and convergence of the iterative process via contraction mapping on a metric space, we develop the learnable multi-scale Gaussian kernel module, instead of using specific filters. We demonstrate the theoretical feasibility of such formulations. Extensive experiments on diverse scenes to thoroughly verify the performance of our method, significantly outperforming the state of the arts.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Shielding Federated Learning: Mitigating Byzantine Attacks with Less Constraints

Federated learning is a newly emerging distributed learning framework that facilitates the collaborative training of a shared global model among distributed participants with their privacy preserved. However, federated learning systems are vulnerable to Byzantine attacks from malicious participants, who can upload carefully crafted local model updates to degrade the quality of the global model and even leave a backdoor. While this problem has received significant attention recently, current defensive schemes heavily rely on various assumptions, such as a fixed Byzantine model, availability of participants' local data, minority attackers, IID data distribution, etc. To relax those constraints, this paper presents Robust-FL, the first prediction-based Byzantine-robust federated learning scheme where none of the assumptions is leveraged. The core idea of the Robust-FL is exploiting historical global model to construct an estimator based on which the local models will be filtered through similarity detection. We then cluster local models to adaptively adjust the acceptable differences between the local models and the estimator such that Byzantine users can be identified. Extensive experiments over different datasets show that our approach achieves the following advantages simultaneously: (i) independence of participants' local data, (ii) tolerance of majority attackers, (iii) generalization to variable Byzantine model.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

Deep Fourier Up-Sampling

Existing convolutional neural networks widely adopt spatial down-/up-sampling for multi-scale modeling. However, spatial up-sampling operators (\emph{e.g.}, interpolation, transposed convolution, and un-pooling) heavily depend on local pixel attention, incapably exploring the global dependency. In contrast, the Fourier domain obeys the nature of global modeling according to the spectral convolution theorem. Unlike the spatial domain that performs up-sampling with the property of local similarity, up-sampling in the Fourier domain is more challenging as it does not follow such a local property. In this study, we propose a theoretically sound Deep Fourier Up-Sampling (FourierUp) to solve these issues. We revisit the relationships between spatial and Fourier domains and reveal the transform rules on the features of different resolutions in the Fourier domain, which provide key insights for FourierUp's designs. FourierUp as a generic operator consists of three key components: 2D discrete Fourier transform, Fourier dimension increase rules, and 2D inverse Fourier transform, which can be directly integrated with existing networks. Extensive experiments across multiple computer vision tasks, including object detection, image segmentation, image de-raining, image dehazing, and guided image super-resolution, demonstrate the consistent performance gains obtained by introducing our FourierUp.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Model-Guided Multi-Contrast Deep Unfolding Network for MRI Super-resolution Reconstruction

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with high resolution (HR) provides more detailed information for accurate diagnosis and quantitative image analysis. Despite the significant advances, most existing super-resolution (SR) reconstruction network for medical images has two flaws: 1) All of them are designed in a black-box principle, thus lacking sufficient interpretability and further limiting their practical applications. Interpretable neural network models are of significant interest since they enhance the trustworthiness required in clinical practice when dealing with medical images. 2) most existing SR reconstruction approaches only use a single contrast or use a simple multi-contrast fusion mechanism, neglecting the complex relationships between different contrasts that are critical for SR improvement. To deal with these issues, in this paper, a novel Model-Guided interpretable Deep Unfolding Network (MGDUN) for medical image SR reconstruction is proposed. The Model-Guided image SR reconstruction approach solves manually designed objective functions to reconstruct HR MRI. We show how to unfold an iterative MGDUN algorithm into a novel model-guided deep unfolding network by taking the MRI observation matrix and explicit multi-contrast relationship matrix into account during the end-to-end optimization. Extensive experiments on the multi-contrast IXI dataset and BraTs 2019 dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2022

Enhancement by Your Aesthetic: An Intelligible Unsupervised Personalized Enhancer for Low-Light Images

Low-light image enhancement is an inherently subjective process whose targets vary with the user's aesthetic. Motivated by this, several personalized enhancement methods have been investigated. However, the enhancement process based on user preferences in these techniques is invisible, i.e., a "black box". In this work, we propose an intelligible unsupervised personalized enhancer (iUPEnhancer) for low-light images, which establishes the correlations between the low-light and the unpaired reference images with regard to three user-friendly attributions (brightness, chromaticity, and noise). The proposed iUP-Enhancer is trained with the guidance of these correlations and the corresponding unsupervised loss functions. Rather than a "black box" process, our iUP-Enhancer presents an intelligible enhancement process with the above attributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm produces competitive qualitative and quantitative results while maintaining excellent flexibility and scalability. This can be validated by personalization with single/multiple references, cross-attribution references, or merely adjusting parameters.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Real-world Image Dehazing

Deep learning-based source dehazing methods trained on synthetic datasets have achieved remarkable performance but suffer from dramatic performance degradation on real hazy images due to domain shift. Although certain Domain Adaptation (DA) dehazing methods have been presented, they inevitably require access to the source dataset to reduce the gap between the source synthetic and target real domains. To address these issues, we present a novel Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFUDA) image dehazing paradigm, in which only a well-trained source model and an unlabeled target real hazy dataset are available. Specifically, we devise the Domain Representation Normalization (DRN) module to make the representation of real hazy domain features match that of the synthetic domain to bridge the gaps. With our plug-and-play DRN module, unlabeled real hazy images can adapt existing well-trained source networks. Besides, the unsupervised losses are applied to guide the learning of the DRN module, which consists of frequency losses and physical prior losses. Frequency losses provide structure and style constraints, while the prior loss explores the inherent statistic property of haze-free images. Equipped with our DRN module and unsupervised loss, existing source dehazing models are able to dehaze unlabeled real hazy images. Extensive experiments on multiple baselines demonstrate the validity and superiority of our method visually and quantitatively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Memory-augmented Deep Unfolding Network for Guided Image Super-resolution

Guided image super-resolution (GISR) aims to obtain a high-resolution (HR) target image by enhancing the spatial resolution of a low-resolution (LR) target image under the guidance of a HR image. However, previous model-based methods mainly takes the entire image as a whole, and assume the prior distribution between the HR target image and the HR guidance image, simply ignoring many non-local common characteristics between them. To alleviate this issue, we firstly propose a maximal a posterior (MAP) estimation model for GISR with two types of prior on the HR target image, i.e., local implicit prior and global implicit prior. The local implicit prior aims to model the complex relationship between the HR target image and the HR guidance image from a local perspective, and the global implicit prior considers the non-local auto-regression property between the two images from a global perspective. Secondly, we design a novel alternating optimization algorithm to solve this model for GISR. The algorithm is in a concise framework that facilitates to be replicated into commonly used deep network structures. Thirdly, to reduce the information loss across iterative stages, the persistent memory mechanism is introduced to augment the information representation by exploiting the Long short-term memory unit (LSTM) in the image and feature spaces. In this way, a deep network with certain interpretation and high representation ability is built. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority of our method on a variety of GISR tasks, including Pan-sharpening, depth image super-resolution, and MR image super-resolution.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

Active Link Obfuscation to Thwart Link-flooding Attacks for Internet of Things

The DDoS attack is a serious threat to Internet of Things (IoT). As a new class of DDoS attack, Link-flooding attack (LFA) disrupts connectivity between legitimate IoT devices and target servers by flooding only a small number of links. In this paper, we propose an active LFA mitigation mechanism, called Linkbait, that is a proactive and preventive defense to throttle LFA for IoT. We propose a link obfuscation algorithm in Linkbait that selectively reroutes probing flows to hide target links from adversaries and mislead them to identify bait links as target links. To block attack traffic and further reduce the impact in IoT, we propose a compromised IoT devices detection algorithm that extracts unique traffic patterns of LFA for IoT and leverages support vector machine (SVM) to identify attack traffic. We evaluate the performance of Linkbait by using both real-world experiments and large-scale simulations. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of Linkbait.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Unfolding Taylor's Approximations for Image Restoration

Deep learning provides a new avenue for image restoration, which demands a delicate balance between fine-grained details and high-level contextualized information during recovering the latent clear image. In practice, however, existing methods empirically construct encapsulated end-to-end mapping networks without deepening into the rationality, and neglect the intrinsic prior knowledge of restoration task. To solve the above problems, inspired by Taylor's Approximations, we unfold Taylor's Formula to construct a novel framework for image restoration. We find the main part and the derivative part of Taylor's Approximations take the same effect as the two competing goals of high-level contextualized information and spatial details of image restoration respectively. Specifically, our framework consists of two steps, correspondingly responsible for the mapping and derivative functions. The former first learns the high-level contextualized information and the later combines it with the degraded input to progressively recover local high-order spatial details. Our proposed framework is orthogonal to existing methods and thus can be easily integrated with them for further improvement, and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed framework.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Securing Face Liveness Detection Using Unforgeable Lip Motion Patterns

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.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Van der Waals stacked multilayer in-plane graphene/hexagonal boron nitride heterostructure: its interfacial thermal transport properties

Combining both vertical and in-plane two-dimensional (2D) heterostructures opens up the possibility to create an unprecedented architecture using 2D atomic layer building blocks. The thermal transport properties of such mixed heterostructures, critical to various applications in nanoelectronics, however, have not been thoroughly explored. Herein, we construct two configurations of multilayer in-plane graphene/hexagonal boron nitride (Gr/h-BN) heterostructures (i.e. mixed heterostructures) via weak van der Waals (vdW) interactions and systematically investigate the dependence of their interfacial thermal conductance (ITC) on the number of layers using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations. The computational results show that the ITC of two configurations of multilayer in-plane Gr/h-BN heterostructures (MIGHHs) decrease with increasing layer number n and both saturate at n = 3. And surprisingly, we find that the MIGHH is more advantageous to interfacial thermal transport than the monolayer in-plane Gr/h-BN heterostructure, which is in strong contrast to the commonly held notion that the multilayer structures of Gr and h-BN suppress the phonon transmission. The underlying physical mechanisms for these puzzling phenomena are probed through the analyses of heat flux, temperature jump, stress concentration factor, overlap of phonon vibrational spectra and phonon participation ratio. In particular, by changing the stacking angle of MIGHH, a higher ITC can be obtained due to the thermal rectification behavior. Furthermore, we find that the ITC in MIGHH can be well-regulated by controlling the coupling strength between layers. Our findings here are of significance for understanding the interfacial thermal transport behaviors of multilayer in-plane Gr/h-BN heterostructure, and are expected to attract extensive interest in exploring its new physics and applications.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2018

PatternListener: Cracking Android Pattern Lock Using Acoustic Signals

Pattern lock has been widely used for authentication to protect user privacy on mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets). Given its pervasive usage, the compromise of pattern lock could lead to serious consequences. Several attacks have been constructed to crack the lock. However, these approaches require the attackers to either be physically close to the target device or be able to manipulate the network facilities (e.g., WiFi hotspots) used by the victims. Therefore, the effectiveness of the attacks is significantly impacted by the environment of mobile devices. Also, these attacks are not scalable since they cannot easily infer unlock patterns of a large number of devices. Motivated by an observation that fingertip motions on the screen of a mobile device can be captured by analyzing surrounding acoustic signals on it, we propose PatternListener, a novel acoustic attack that cracks pattern lock by analyzing imperceptible acoustic signals reflected by the fingertip. It leverages speakers and microphones of the victim's device to play imperceptible audio and record the acoustic signals reflected by the fingertip. In particular, it infers each unlock pattern by analyzing individual lines that compose the pattern and are the trajectories of the fingertip. We propose several algorithms to construct signal segments according to the captured signals for each line and infer possible candidates of each individual line according to the signal segments. Finally, we map all line candidates into grid patterns and thereby obtain the candidates of the entire unlock pattern. We implement a PatternListener prototype by using off-the-shelf smartphones and thoroughly evaluate it using 130 unique patterns. The real experimental results demonstrate that PatternListener can successfully exploit over 90% patterns within five attempts.

eess.SP↗