arXiv subjects

Ming-Hsuan Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Ming-Hsuan Yang.

At least 415 records · Page 23Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Quadratic video interpolation

Video interpolation is an important problem in computer vision, which helps overcome the temporal limitation of camera sensors. Existing video interpolation methods usually assume uniform motion between consecutive frames and use linear models for interpolation, which cannot well approximate the complex motion in the real world. To address these issues, we propose a quadratic video interpolation method which exploits the acceleration information in videos. This method allows prediction with curvilinear trajectory and variable velocity, and generates more accurate interpolation results. For high-quality frame synthesis, we develop a flow reversal layer to estimate flow fields starting from the unknown target frame to the source frame. In addition, we present techniques for flow refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs favorably against the existing linear models on a wide variety of video datasets.

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arXiv2019

Progressive Domain Adaptation for Object Detection

Recent deep learning methods for object detection rely on a large amount of bounding box annotations. Collecting these annotations is laborious and costly, yet supervised models do not generalize well when testing on images from a different distribution. Domain adaptation provides a solution by adapting existing labels to the target testing data. However, a large gap between domains could make adaptation a challenging task, which leads to unstable training processes and sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose to bridge the domain gap with an intermediate domain and progressively solve easier adaptation subtasks. This intermediate domain is constructed by translating the source images to mimic the ones in the target domain. To tackle the domain-shift problem, we adopt adversarial learning to align distributions at the feature level. In addition, a weighted task loss is applied to deal with unbalanced image quality in the intermediate domain. Experimental results show that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art method in terms of the performance on the target domain.

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arXiv2019

Referring Expression Object Segmentation with Caption-Aware Consistency

Referring expressions are natural language descriptions that identify a particular object within a scene and are widely used in our daily conversations. In this work, we focus on segmenting the object in an image specified by a referring expression. To this end, we propose an end-to-end trainable comprehension network that consists of the language and visual encoders to extract feature representations from both domains. We introduce the spatial-aware dynamic filters to transfer knowledge from text to image, and effectively capture the spatial information of the specified object. To better communicate between the language and visual modules, we employ a caption generation network that takes features shared across both domains as input, and improves both representations via a consistency that enforces the generated sentence to be similar to the given referring expression. We evaluate the proposed framework on two referring expression datasets and show that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art algorithms.

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arXiv2019

Joint-task Self-supervised Learning for Temporal Correspondence

This paper proposes to learn reliable dense correspondence from videos in a self-supervised manner. Our learning process integrates two highly related tasks: tracking large image regions \emph{and} establishing fine-grained pixel-level associations between consecutive video frames. We exploit the synergy between both tasks through a shared inter-frame affinity matrix, which simultaneously models transitions between video frames at both the region- and pixel-levels. While region-level localization helps reduce ambiguities in fine-grained matching by narrowing down search regions; fine-grained matching provides bottom-up features to facilitate region-level localization. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on a variety of visual correspondence tasks, including video-object and part-segmentation propagation, keypoint tracking, and object tracking. Our self-supervised method even surpasses the fully-supervised affinity feature representation obtained from a ResNet-18 pre-trained on the ImageNet.

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arXiv2019

MEMC-Net: Motion Estimation and Motion Compensation Driven Neural Network for Video Interpolation and Enhancement

Motion estimation (ME) and motion compensation (MC) have been widely used for classical video frame interpolation systems over the past decades. Recently, a number of data-driven frame interpolation methods based on convolutional neural networks have been proposed. However, existing learning based methods typically estimate either flow or compensation kernels, thereby limiting performance on both computational efficiency and interpolation accuracy. In this work, we propose a motion estimation and compensation driven neural network for video frame interpolation. A novel adaptive warping layer is developed to integrate both optical flow and interpolation kernels to synthesize target frame pixels. This layer is fully differentiable such that both the flow and kernel estimation networks can be optimized jointly. The proposed model benefits from the advantages of motion estimation and compensation methods without using hand-crafted features. Compared to existing methods, our approach is computationally efficient and able to generate more visually appealing results. Furthermore, the proposed MEMC-Net can be seamlessly adapted to several video enhancement tasks, e.g., super-resolution, denoising, and deblocking. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art video frame interpolation and enhancement algorithms on a wide range of datasets.

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arXiv2019

Few-Shot Viewpoint Estimation

Viewpoint estimation for known categories of objects has been improved significantly thanks to deep networks and large datasets, but generalization to unknown categories is still very challenging. With an aim towards improving performance on unknown categories, we introduce the problem of category-level few-shot viewpoint estimation. We design a novel framework to successfully train viewpoint networks for new categories with few examples (10 or less). We formulate the problem as one of learning to estimate category-specific 3D canonical shapes, their associated depth estimates, and semantic 2D keypoints. We apply meta-learning to learn weights for our network that are amenable to category-specific few-shot fine-tuning. Furthermore, we design a flexible meta-Siamese network that maximizes information sharing during meta-learning. Through extensive experimentation on the ObjectNet3D and Pascal3D+ benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our framework, which we call MetaView, significantly outperforms fine-tuning the state-of-the-art models with few examples, and that the specific architectural innovations of our method are crucial to achieving good performance.

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arXiv2019

Video Stitching for Linear Camera Arrays

Despite the long history of image and video stitching research, existing academic and commercial solutions still produce strong artifacts. In this work, we propose a wide-baseline video stitching algorithm for linear camera arrays that is temporally stable and tolerant to strong parallax. Our key insight is that stitching can be cast as a problem of learning a smooth spatial interpolation between the input videos. To solve this problem, inspired by pushbroom cameras, we introduce a fast pushbroom interpolation layer and propose a novel pushbroom stitching network, which learns a dense flow field to smoothly align the multiple input videos for spatial interpolation. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a significant margin, as we show with a user study, and has immediate applications in many areas such as virtual reality, immersive telepresence, autonomous driving, and video surveillance.

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arXiv2019

Simultaneous Fidelity and Regularization Learning for Image Restoration

Most existing non-blind restoration methods are based on the assumption that a precise degradation model is known. As the degradation process can only be partially known or inaccurately modeled, images may not be well restored. Rain streak removal and image deconvolution with inaccurate blur kernels are two representative examples of such tasks. For rain streak removal, although an input image can be decomposed into a scene layer and a rain streak layer, there exists no explicit formulation for modeling rain streaks and the composition with scene layer. For blind deconvolution, as estimation error of blur kernel is usually introduced, the subsequent non-blind deconvolution process does not restore the latent image well. In this paper, we propose a principled algorithm within the maximum a posterior framework to tackle image restoration with a partially known or inaccurate degradation model. Specifically, the residual caused by a partially known or inaccurate degradation model is spatially dependent and complexly distributed. With a training set of degraded and ground-truth image pairs, we parameterize and learn the fidelity term for a degradation model in a task-driven manner. Furthermore, the regularization term can also be learned along with the fidelity term, thereby forming a simultaneous fidelity and regularization learning model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for image deconvolution with inaccurate blur kernels, deconvolution with multiple degradations and rain streak removal.

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arXiv2019

Self-supervised Audio Spatialization with Correspondence Classifier

Spatial audio is an essential medium to audiences for 3D visual and auditory experience. However, the recording devices and techniques are expensive or inaccessible to the general public. In this work, we propose a self-supervised audio spatialization network that can generate spatial audio given the corresponding video and monaural audio. To enhance spatialization performance, we use an auxiliary classifier to classify ground-truth videos and those with audio where the left and right channels are swapped. We collect a large-scale video dataset with spatial audio to validate the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on the audio spatialization task.

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arXiv2019

Weakly-supervised Caricature Face Parsing through Domain Adaptation

A caricature is an artistic form of a person's picture in which certain striking characteristics are abstracted or exaggerated in order to create a humor or sarcasm effect. For numerous caricature related applications such as attribute recognition and caricature editing, face parsing is an essential pre-processing step that provides a complete facial structure understanding. However, current state-of-the-art face parsing methods require large amounts of labeled data on the pixel-level and such process for caricature is tedious and labor-intensive. For real photos, there are numerous labeled datasets for face parsing. Thus, we formulate caricature face parsing as a domain adaptation problem, where real photos play the role of the source domain, adapting to the target caricatures. Specifically, we first leverage a spatial transformer based network to enable shape domain shifts. A feed-forward style transfer network is then utilized to capture texture-level domain gaps. With these two steps, we synthesize face caricatures from real photos, and thus we can use parsing ground truths of the original photos to learn the parsing model. Experimental results on the synthetic and real caricatures demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed domain adaptation algorithm. Code is available at: https://github.com/ZJULearning/CariFaceParsing .

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arXiv2019

Mode Seeking Generative Adversarial Networks for Diverse Image Synthesis

Most conditional generation tasks expect diverse outputs given a single conditional context. However, conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) often focus on the prior conditional information and ignore the input noise vectors, which contribute to the output variations. Recent attempts to resolve the mode collapse issue for cGANs are usually task-specific and computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization term to address the mode collapse issue for cGANs. The proposed method explicitly maximizes the ratio of the distance between generated images with respect to the corresponding latent codes, thus encouraging the generators to explore more minor modes during training. This mode seeking regularization term is readily applicable to various conditional generation tasks without imposing training overhead or modifying the original network structures. We validate the proposed algorithm on three conditional image synthesis tasks including categorical generation, image-to-image translation, and text-to-image synthesis with different baseline models. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed regularization method for improving diversity without loss of quality.

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arXiv2019

SCOPS: Self-Supervised Co-Part Segmentation

Parts provide a good intermediate representation of objects that is robust with respect to the camera, pose and appearance variations. Existing works on part segmentation is dominated by supervised approaches that rely on large amounts of manual annotations and can not generalize to unseen object categories. We propose a self-supervised deep learning approach for part segmentation, where we devise several loss functions that aids in predicting part segments that are geometrically concentrated, robust to object variations and are also semantically consistent across different object instances. Extensive experiments on different types of image collections demonstrate that our approach can produce part segments that adhere to object boundaries and also more semantically consistent across object instances compared to existing self-supervised techniques.

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arXiv2019

Target-Aware Deep Tracking

Existing deep trackers mainly use convolutional neural networks pre-trained for generic object recognition task for representations. Despite demonstrated successes for numerous vision tasks, the contributions of using pre-trained deep features for visual tracking are not as significant as that for object recognition. The key issue is that in visual tracking the targets of interest can be arbitrary object class with arbitrary forms. As such, pre-trained deep features are less effective in modeling these targets of arbitrary forms for distinguishing them from the background. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to learn target-aware features, which can better recognize the targets undergoing significant appearance variations than pre-trained deep features. To this end, we develop a regression loss and a ranking loss to guide the generation of target-active and scale-sensitive features. We identify the importance of each convolutional filter according to the back-propagated gradients and select the target-aware features based on activations for representing the targets. The target-aware features are integrated with a Siamese matching network for visual tracking. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and speed.

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arXiv2019

Depth-Aware Video Frame Interpolation

Video frame interpolation aims to synthesize nonexistent frames in-between the original frames. While significant advances have been made from the recent deep convolutional neural networks, the quality of interpolation is often reduced due to large object motion or occlusion. In this work, we propose a video frame interpolation method which explicitly detects the occlusion by exploring the depth information. Specifically, we develop a depth-aware flow projection layer to synthesize intermediate flows that preferably sample closer objects than farther ones. In addition, we learn hierarchical features to gather contextual information from neighboring pixels. The proposed model then warps the input frames, depth maps, and contextual features based on the optical flow and local interpolation kernels for synthesizing the output frame. Our model is compact, efficient, and fully differentiable. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against state-of-the-art frame interpolation methods on a wide variety of datasets.

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arXiv2019

Im2Pencil: Controllable Pencil Illustration from Photographs

We propose a high-quality photo-to-pencil translation method with fine-grained control over the drawing style. This is a challenging task due to multiple stroke types (e.g., outline and shading), structural complexity of pencil shading (e.g., hatching), and the lack of aligned training data pairs. To address these challenges, we develop a two-branch model that learns separate filters for generating sketchy outlines and tonal shading from a collection of pencil drawings. We create training data pairs by extracting clean outlines and tonal illustrations from original pencil drawings using image filtering techniques, and we manually label the drawing styles. In addition, our model creates different pencil styles (e.g., line sketchiness and shading style) in a user-controllable manner. Experimental results on different types of pencil drawings show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against existing methods in terms of quality, diversity and user evaluations.

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arXiv2019

Putting Humans in a Scene: Learning Affordance in 3D Indoor Environments

Affordance modeling plays an important role in visual understanding. In this paper, we aim to predict affordances of 3D indoor scenes, specifically what human poses are afforded by a given indoor environment, such as sitting on a chair or standing on the floor. In order to predict valid affordances and learn possible 3D human poses in indoor scenes, we need to understand the semantic and geometric structure of a scene as well as its potential interactions with a human. To learn such a model, a large-scale dataset of 3D indoor affordances is required. In this work, we build a fully automatic 3D pose synthesizer that fuses semantic knowledge from a large number of 2D poses extracted from TV shows as well as 3D geometric knowledge from voxel representations of indoor scenes. With the data created by the synthesizer, we introduce a 3D pose generative model to predict semantically plausible and physically feasible human poses within a given scene (provided as a single RGB, RGB-D, or depth image). We demonstrate that our human affordance prediction method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2019

Inserting Videos into Videos

In this paper, we introduce a new problem of manipulating a given video by inserting other videos into it. Our main task is, given an object video and a scene video, to insert the object video at a user-specified location in the scene video so that the resulting video looks realistic. We aim to handle different object motions and complex backgrounds without expensive segmentation annotations. As it is difficult to collect training pairs for this problem, we synthesize fake training pairs that can provide helpful supervisory signals when training a neural network with unpaired real data. The proposed network architecture can take both real and fake pairs as input and perform both supervised and unsupervised training in an adversarial learning scheme. To synthesize a realistic video, the network renders each frame based on the current input and previous frames. Within this framework, we observe that injecting noise into previous frames while generating the current frame stabilizes training. We conduct experiments on real-world videos in object tracking and person re-identification benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to synthesize long sequences of realistic videos with a given object video inserted.

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arXiv2019

Online Multi-Object Tracking with Dual Matching Attention Networks

In this paper, we propose an online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) approach which integrates the merits of single object tracking and data association methods in a unified framework to handle noisy detections and frequent interactions between targets. Specifically, for applying single object tracking in MOT, we introduce a cost-sensitive tracking loss based on the state-of-the-art visual tracker, which encourages the model to focus on hard negative distractors during online learning. For data association, we propose Dual Matching Attention Networks (DMAN) with both spatial and temporal attention mechanisms. The spatial attention module generates dual attention maps which enable the network to focus on the matching patterns of the input image pair, while the temporal attention module adaptively allocates different levels of attention to different samples in the tracklet to suppress noisy observations. Experimental results on the MOT benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against both online and offline trackers in terms of identity-preserving metrics.

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