arXiv subjects

Qingming Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Qingming Huang.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Spatiotemporal CNN for Video Object Segmentation

In this paper, we present a unified, end-to-end trainable spatiotemporal CNN model for VOS, which consists of two branches, i.e., the temporal coherence branch and the spatial segmentation branch. Specifically, the temporal coherence branch pretrained in an adversarial fashion from unlabeled video data, is designed to capture the dynamic appearance and motion cues of video sequences to guide object segmentation. The spatial segmentation branch focuses on segmenting objects accurately based on the learned appearance and motion cues. To obtain accurate segmentation results, we design a coarse-to-fine process to sequentially apply a designed attention module on multi-scale feature maps, and concatenate them to produce the final prediction. In this way, the spatial segmentation branch is enforced to gradually concentrate on object regions. These two branches are jointly fine-tuned on video segmentation sequences in an end-to-end manner. Several experiments are carried out on three challenging datasets (i.e., DAVIS-2016, DAVIS-2017 and Youtube-Object) to show that our method achieves favorable performance against the state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/longyin880815/STCNN.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

See Better Before Looking Closer: Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Network for Fine-Grained Visual Classification

Data augmentation is usually adopted to increase the amount of training data, prevent overfitting and improve the performance of deep models. However, in practice, random data augmentation, such as random image cropping, is low-efficiency and might introduce many uncontrolled background noises. In this paper, we propose Weakly Supervised Data Augmentation Network (WS-DAN) to explore the potential of data augmentation. Specifically, for each training image, we first generate attention maps to represent the object's discriminative parts by weakly supervised learning. Next, we augment the image guided by these attention maps, including attention cropping and attention dropping. The proposed WS-DAN improves the classification accuracy in two folds. In the first stage, images can be seen better since more discriminative parts' features will be extracted. In the second stage, attention regions provide accurate location of object, which ensures our model to look at the object closer and further improve the performance. Comprehensive experiments in common fine-grained visual classification datasets show that our WS-DAN surpasses the state-of-the-art methods, which demonstrates its effectiveness.

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arXiv2019

Deep Robust Subjective Visual Property Prediction in Crowdsourcing

The problem of estimating subjective visual properties (SVP) of images (e.g., Shoes A is more comfortable than B) is gaining rising attention. Due to its highly subjective nature, different annotators often exhibit different interpretations of scales when adopting absolute value tests. Therefore, recent investigations turn to collect pairwise comparisons via crowdsourcing platforms. However, crowdsourcing data usually contains outliers. For this purpose, it is desired to develop a robust model for learning SVP from crowdsourced noisy annotations. In this paper, we construct a deep SVP prediction model which not only leads to better detection of annotation outliers but also enables learning with extremely sparse annotations. Specifically, we construct a comparison multi-graph based on the collected annotations, where different labeling results correspond to edges with different directions between two vertexes. Then, we propose a generalized deep probabilistic framework which consists of an SVP prediction module and an outlier modeling module that work collaboratively and are optimized jointly. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that our new approach guarantees promising results.

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arXiv2019

Weakly Supervised Bilinear Attention Network for Fine-Grained Visual Classification

For fine-grained visual classification, objects usually share similar geometric structure but present variant local appearance and different pose. Therefore, localizing and extracting discriminative local features play a crucial role in accurate category prediction. Existing works either pay attention to limited object parts or train isolated networks for locating and classification. In this paper, we propose Weakly Supervised Bilinear Attention Network (WS-BAN) to solve these issues. It jointly generates a set of attention maps (region-of-interest maps) to indicate the locations of object's parts and extracts sequential part features by Bilinear Attention Pooling (BAP). Besides, we propose attention regularization and attention dropout to weakly supervise the generating process of attention maps. WS-BAN can be trained end-to-end and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on multiple fine-grained classification datasets, including CUB-200-2011, Stanford Car and FGVC-Aircraft, which demonstrated its effectiveness.

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arXiv2018

HSCS: Hierarchical Sparsity Based Co-saliency Detection for RGBD Images

Co-saliency detection aims to discover common and salient objects in an image group containing more than two relevant images. Moreover, depth information has been demonstrated to be effective for many computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel co-saliency detection method for RGBD images based on hierarchical sparsity reconstruction and energy function refinement. With the assistance of the intra saliency map, the inter-image correspondence is formulated as a hierarchical sparsity reconstruction framework. The global sparsity reconstruction model with a ranking scheme focuses on capturing the global characteristics among the whole image group through a common foreground dictionary. The pairwise sparsity reconstruction model aims to explore the corresponding relationship between pairwise images through a set of pairwise dictionaries. In order to improve the intra-image smoothness and inter-image consistency, an energy function refinement model is proposed, which includes the unary data term, spatial smooth term, and holistic consistency term. Experiments on two RGBD co-saliency detection benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms both qualitatively and quantitatively.

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arXiv2018

Review of Visual Saliency Detection with Comprehensive Information

Visual saliency detection model simulates the human visual system to perceive the scene, and has been widely used in many vision tasks. With the acquisition technology development, more comprehensive information, such as depth cue, inter-image correspondence, or temporal relationship, is available to extend image saliency detection to RGBD saliency detection, co-saliency detection, or video saliency detection. RGBD saliency detection model focuses on extracting the salient regions from RGBD images by combining the depth information. Co-saliency detection model introduces the inter-image correspondence constraint to discover the common salient object in an image group. The goal of video saliency detection model is to locate the motion-related salient object in video sequences, which considers the motion cue and spatiotemporal constraint jointly. In this paper, we review different types of saliency detection algorithms, summarize the important issues of the existing methods, and discuss the existent problems and future works. Moreover, the evaluation datasets and quantitative measurements are briefly introduced, and the experimental analysis and discission are conducted to provide a holistic overview of different saliency detection methods.

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arXiv2018

Person Re-Identification by Semantic Region Representation and Topology Constraint

Person re-identification is a popular research topic which aims at matching the specific person in a multi-camera network automatically. Feature representation and metric learning are two important issues for person re-identification. In this paper, we propose a novel person re-identification method, which consists of a reliable representation called Semantic Region Representation (SRR), and an effective metric learning with Mapping Space Topology Constraint (MSTC). The SRR integrates semantic representations to achieve effective similarity comparison between the corresponding regions via parsing the body into multiple parts, which focuses on the foreground context against the background interference. To learn a discriminant metric, the MSTC is proposed to take into account the topological relationship among all samples in the feature space. It considers two-fold constraints: the distribution of positive pairs should be more compact than the average distribution of negative pairs with regard to the same probe, while the average distance between different classes should be larger than that between same classes. These two aspects cooperate to maintain the compactness of the intra-class as well as the sparsity of the inter-class. Extensive experiments conducted on five challenging person re-identification datasets, VIPeR, SYSU-sReID, QUML GRID, CUHK03, and Market-1501, show that the proposed method achieves competitive performance with the state-of-the-art approaches.

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arXiv2018

From Common to Special: When Multi-Attribute Learning Meets Personalized Opinions

Visual attributes, which refer to human-labeled semantic annotations, have gained increasing popularity in a wide range of real world applications. Generally, the existing attribute learning methods fall into two categories: one focuses on learning user-specific labels separately for different attributes, while the other one focuses on learning crowd-sourced global labels jointly for multiple attributes. However, both categories ignore the joint effect of the two mentioned factors: the personal diversity with respect to the global consensus; and the intrinsic correlation among multiple attributes. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel model to learn user-specific predictors across multiple attributes. In our proposed model, the diversity of personalized opinions and the intrinsic relationship among multiple attributes are unified in a common-to-special manner. To this end, we adopt a three-component decomposition. Specifically, our model integrates a common cognition factor, an attribute-specific bias factor and a user-specific bias factor. Meanwhile Lasso and group Lasso penalties are adopted to leverage efficient feature selection. Furthermore, theoretical analysis is conducted to show that our proposed method could reach reasonable performance. Eventually, the empirical study carried out in this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

A Margin-based MLE for Crowdsourced Partial Ranking

A preference order or ranking aggregated from pairwise comparison data is commonly understood as a strict total order. However, in real-world scenarios, some items are intrinsically ambiguous in comparisons, which may very well be an inherent uncertainty of the data. In this case, the conventional total order ranking can not capture such uncertainty with mere global ranking or utility scores. In this paper, we are specifically interested in the recent surge in crowdsourcing applications to predict partial but more accurate (i.e., making less incorrect statements) orders rather than complete ones. To do so, we propose a novel framework to learn some probabilistic models of partial orders as a \emph{margin-based Maximum Likelihood Estimate} (MLE) method. We prove that the induced MLE is a joint convex optimization problem with respect to all the parameters, including the global ranking scores and margin parameter. Moreover, three kinds of generalized linear models are studied, including the basic uniform model, Bradley-Terry model, and Thurstone-Mosteller model, equipped with some theoretical analysis on FDR and Power control for the proposed methods. The validity of these models are supported by experiments with both simulated and real-world datasets, which shows that the proposed models exhibit improvements compared with traditional state-of-the-art algorithms.

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arXiv2018

RAM: A Region-Aware Deep Model for Vehicle Re-Identification

Previous works on vehicle Re-ID mainly focus on extracting global features and learning distance metrics. Because some vehicles commonly share same model and maker, it is hard to distinguish them based on their global appearances. Compared with the global appearance, local regions such as decorations and inspection stickers attached to the windshield, may be more distinctive for vehicle Re-ID. To embed the detailed visual cues in those local regions, we propose a Region-Aware deep Model (RAM). Specifically, in addition to extracting global features, RAM also extracts features from a series of local regions. As each local region conveys more distinctive visual cues, RAM encourages the deep model to learn discriminative features. We also introduce a novel learning algorithm to jointly use vehicle IDs, types/models, and colors to train the RAM. This strategy fuses more cues for training and results in more discriminative global and regional features. We evaluate our methods on two large-scale vehicle Re-ID datasets, i.e., VeRi and VehicleID. Experimental results show our methods achieve promising performance in comparison with recent works.

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arXiv2018

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Benchmark: Object Detection and Tracking

With the advantage of high mobility, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used to fuel numerous important applications in computer vision, delivering more efficiency and convenience than surveillance cameras with fixed camera angle, scale and view. However, very limited UAV datasets are proposed, and they focus only on a specific task such as visual tracking or object detection in relatively constrained scenarios. Consequently, it is of great importance to develop an unconstrained UAV benchmark to boost related researches. In this paper, we construct a new UAV benchmark focusing on complex scenarios with new level challenges. Selected from 10 hours raw videos, about 80,000 representative frames are fully annotated with bounding boxes as well as up to 14 kinds of attributes (e.g., weather condition, flying altitude, camera view, vehicle category, and occlusion) for three fundamental computer vision tasks: object detection, single object tracking, and multiple object tracking. Then, a detailed quantitative study is performed using most recent state-of-the-art algorithms for each task. Experimental results show that the current state-of-the-art methods perform relative worse on our dataset, due to the new challenges appeared in UAV based real scenes, e.g., high density, small object, and camera motion. To our knowledge, our work is the first time to explore such issues in unconstrained scenes comprehensively.

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arXiv2018

Facial Landmarks Detection by Self-Iterative Regression based Landmarks-Attention Network

Cascaded Regression (CR) based methods have been proposed to solve facial landmarks detection problem, which learn a series of descent directions by multiple cascaded regressors separately trained in coarse and fine stages. They outperform the traditional gradient descent based methods in both accuracy and running speed. However, cascaded regression is not robust enough because each regressor's training data comes from the output of previous regressor. Moreover, training multiple regressors requires lots of computing resources, especially for deep learning based methods. In this paper, we develop a Self-Iterative Regression (SIR) framework to improve the model efficiency. Only one self-iterative regressor is trained to learn the descent directions for samples from coarse stages to fine stages, and parameters are iteratively updated by the same regressor. Specifically, we proposed Landmarks-Attention Network (LAN) as our regressor, which concurrently learns features around each landmark and obtains the holistic location increment. By doing so, not only the rest of regressors are removed to simplify the training process, but the number of model parameters is significantly decreased. The experiments demonstrate that with only 3.72M model parameters, our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

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arXiv2018

From Social to Individuals: a Parsimonious Path of Multi-level Models for Crowdsourced Preference Aggregation

In crowdsourced preference aggregation, it is often assumed that all the annotators are subject to a common preference or social utility function which generates their comparison behaviors in experiments. However, in reality annotators are subject to variations due to multi-criteria, abnormal, or a mixture of such behaviors. In this paper, we propose a parsimonious mixed-effects model, which takes into account both the fixed effect that the majority of annotators follows a common linear utility model, and the random effect that some annotators might deviate from the common significantly and exhibit strongly personalized preferences. The key algorithm in this paper establishes a dynamic path from the social utility to individual variations, with different levels of sparsity on personalization. The algorithm is based on the Linearized Bregman Iterations, which leads to easy parallel implementations to meet the need of large-scale data analysis. In this unified framework, three kinds of random utility models are presented, including the basic linear model with L2 loss, Bradley-Terry model, and Thurstone-Mosteller model. The validity of these multi-level models are supported by experiments with both simulated and real-world datasets, which shows that the parsimonious multi-level models exhibit improvements in both interpretability and predictive precision compared with traditional HodgeRank.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2018

Less Is More: Picking Informative Frames for Video Captioning

In video captioning task, the best practice has been achieved by attention-based models which associate salient visual components with sentences in the video. However, existing study follows a common procedure which includes a frame-level appearance modeling and motion modeling on equal interval frame sampling, which may bring about redundant visual information, sensitivity to content noise and unnecessary computation cost. We propose a plug-and-play PickNet to perform informative frame picking in video captioning. Based on a standard Encoder-Decoder framework, we develop a reinforcement-learning-based procedure to train the network sequentially, where the reward of each frame picking action is designed by maximizing visual diversity and minimizing textual discrepancy. If the candidate is rewarded, it will be selected and the corresponding latent representation of Encoder-Decoder will be updated for future trials. This procedure goes on until the end of the video sequence. Consequently, a compact frame subset can be selected to represent the visual information and perform video captioning without performance degradation. Experiment results shows that our model can use 6-8 frames to achieve competitive performance across popular benchmarks.

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arXiv2017

HodgeRank with Information Maximization for Crowdsourced Pairwise Ranking Aggregation

Recently, crowdsourcing has emerged as an effective paradigm for human-powered large scale problem solving in various domains. However, task requester usually has a limited amount of budget, thus it is desirable to have a policy to wisely allocate the budget to achieve better quality. In this paper, we study the principle of information maximization for active sampling strategies in the framework of HodgeRank, an approach based on Hodge Decomposition of pairwise ranking data with multiple workers. The principle exhibits two scenarios of active sampling: Fisher information maximization that leads to unsupervised sampling based on a sequential maximization of graph algebraic connectivity without considering labels; and Bayesian information maximization that selects samples with the largest information gain from prior to posterior, which gives a supervised sampling involving the labels collected. Experiments show that the proposed methods boost the sampling efficiency as compared to traditional sampling schemes and are thus valuable to practical crowdsourcing experiments.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2017

An Iterative Co-Saliency Framework for RGBD Images

As a newly emerging and significant topic in computer vision community, co-saliency detection aims at discovering the common salient objects in multiple related images. The existing methods often generate the co-saliency map through a direct forward pipeline which is based on the designed cues or initialization, but lack the refinement-cycle scheme. Moreover, they mainly focus on RGB image and ignore the depth information for RGBD images. In this paper, we propose an iterative RGBD co-saliency framework, which utilizes the existing single saliency maps as the initialization, and generates the final RGBD cosaliency map by using a refinement-cycle model. Three schemes are employed in the proposed RGBD co-saliency framework, which include the addition scheme, deletion scheme, and iteration scheme. The addition scheme is used to highlight the salient regions based on intra-image depth propagation and saliency propagation, while the deletion scheme filters the saliency regions and removes the non-common salient regions based on interimage constraint. The iteration scheme is proposed to obtain more homogeneous and consistent co-saliency map. Furthermore, a novel descriptor, named depth shape prior, is proposed in the addition scheme to introduce the depth information to enhance identification of co-salient objects. The proposed method can effectively exploit any existing 2D saliency model to work well in RGBD co-saliency scenarios. The experiments on two RGBD cosaliency datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Saliency Detection for Stereoscopic Images Based on Depth Confidence Analysis and Multiple Cues Fusion

Stereoscopic perception is an important part of human visual system that allows the brain to perceive depth. However, depth information has not been well explored in existing saliency detection models. In this letter, a novel saliency detection method for stereoscopic images is proposed. Firstly, we propose a measure to evaluate the reliability of depth map, and use it to reduce the influence of poor depth map on saliency detection. Then, the input image is represented as a graph, and the depth information is introduced into graph construction. After that, a new definition of compactness using color and depth cues is put forward to compute the compactness saliency map. In order to compensate the detection errors of compactness saliency when the salient regions have similar appearances with background, foreground saliency map is calculated based on depth-refined foreground seeds selection mechanism and multiple cues contrast. Finally, these two saliency maps are integrated into a final saliency map through weighted-sum method according to their importance. Experiments on two publicly available stereo datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than other 10 state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Co-saliency Detection for RGBD Images Based on Multi-constraint Feature Matching and Cross Label Propagation

Co-saliency detection aims at extracting the common salient regions from an image group containing two or more relevant images. It is a newly emerging topic in computer vision community. Different from the most existing co-saliency methods focusing on RGB images, this paper proposes a novel co-saliency detection model for RGBD images, which utilizes the depth information to enhance identification of co-saliency. First, the intra saliency map for each image is generated by the single image saliency model, while the inter saliency map is calculated based on the multi-constraint feature matching, which represents the constraint relationship among multiple images. Then, the optimization scheme, namely Cross Label Propagation (CLP), is used to refine the intra and inter saliency maps in a cross way. Finally, all the original and optimized saliency maps are integrated to generate the final co-saliency result. The proposed method introduces the depth information and multi-constraint feature matching to improve the performance of co-saliency detection. Moreover, the proposed method can effectively exploit any existing single image saliency model to work well in co-saliency scenarios. Experiments on two RGBD co-saliency datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

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