arXiv subjects

Ran Yi

Publications and source records attributed to Ran Yi.

101 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

LAKe-Net: Topology-Aware Point Cloud Completion by Localizing Aligned Keypoints

Point cloud completion aims at completing geometric and topological shapes from a partial observation. However, some topology of the original shape is missing, existing methods directly predict the location of complete points, without predicting structured and topological information of the complete shape, which leads to inferior performance. To better tackle the missing topology part, we propose LAKe-Net, a novel topology-aware point cloud completion model by localizing aligned keypoints, with a novel Keypoints-Skeleton-Shape prediction manner. Specifically, our method completes missing topology using three steps: 1) Aligned Keypoint Localization. An asymmetric keypoint locator, including an unsupervised multi-scale keypoint detector and a complete keypoint generator, is proposed for localizing aligned keypoints from complete and partial point clouds. We theoretically prove that the detector can capture aligned keypoints for objects within a sub-category. 2) Surface-skeleton Generation. A new type of skeleton, named Surface-skeleton, is generated from keypoints based on geometric priors to fully represent the topological information captured from keypoints and better recover the local details. 3) Shape Refinement. We design a refinement subnet where multi-scale surface-skeletons are fed into each recursive skeleton-assisted refinement module to assist the completion process. Experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on point cloud completion.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Quality Metric Guided Portrait Line Drawing Generation from Unpaired Training Data

Face portrait line drawing is a unique style of art which is highly abstract and expressive. However, due to its high semantic constraints, many existing methods learn to generate portrait drawings using paired training data, which is costly and time-consuming to obtain. In this paper, we propose a novel method to automatically transform face photos to portrait drawings using unpaired training data with two new features; i.e., our method can (1) learn to generate high quality portrait drawings in multiple styles using a single network and (2) generate portrait drawings in a "new style" unseen in the training data. To achieve these benefits, we (1) propose a novel quality metric for portrait drawings which is learned from human perception, and (2) introduce a quality loss to guide the network toward generating better looking portrait drawings. We observe that existing unpaired translation methods such as CycleGAN tend to embed invisible reconstruction information indiscriminately in the whole drawings due to significant information imbalance between the photo and portrait drawing domains, which leads to important facial features missing. To address this problem, we propose a novel asymmetric cycle mapping that enforces the reconstruction information to be visible and only embedded in the selected facial regions. Along with localized discriminators for important facial regions, our method well preserves all important facial features in the generated drawings. Generator dissection further explains that our model learns to incorporate face semantic information during drawing generation. Extensive experiments including a user study show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Audio-Driven Talking Face Video Generation with Dynamic Convolution Kernels

In this paper, we present a dynamic convolution kernel (DCK) strategy for convolutional neural networks. Using a fully convolutional network with the proposed DCKs, high-quality talking-face video can be generated from multi-modal sources (i.e., unmatched audio and video) in real time, and our trained model is robust to different identities, head postures, and input audios. Our proposed DCKs are specially designed for audio-driven talking face video generation, leading to a simple yet effective end-to-end system. We also provide a theoretical analysis to interpret why DCKs work. Experimental results show that our method can generate high-quality talking-face video with background at 60 fps. Comparison and evaluation between our method and the state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

CFNet: Learning Correlation Functions for One-Stage Panoptic Segmentation

Recently, there is growing attention on one-stage panoptic segmentation methods which aim to segment instances and stuff jointly within a fully convolutional pipeline efficiently. However, most of the existing works directly feed the backbone features to various segmentation heads ignoring the demands for semantic and instance segmentation are different: The former needs semantic-level discriminative features, while the latter requires features to be distinguishable across instances. To alleviate this, we propose to first predict semantic-level and instance-level correlations among different locations that are utilized to enhance the backbone features, and then feed the improved discriminative features into the corresponding segmentation heads, respectively. Specifically, we organize the correlations between a given location and all locations as a continuous sequence and predict it as a whole. Considering that such a sequence can be extremely complicated, we adopt Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), a tool that can approximate an arbitrary sequence parameterized by amplitudes and phrases. For different tasks, we generate these parameters from the backbone features in a fully convolutional way which is optimized implicitly by corresponding tasks. As a result, these accurate and consistent correlations contribute to producing plausible discriminative features which meet the requirements of the complicated panoptic segmentation task. To verify the effectiveness of our methods, we conduct experiments on several challenging panoptic segmentation datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on MS COCO with $45.1$\% PQ and ADE20k with $32.6$\% PQ.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Exploiting Fine-grained Face Forgery Clues via Progressive Enhancement Learning

With the rapid development of facial forgery techniques, forgery detection has attracted more and more attention due to security concerns. Existing approaches attempt to use frequency information to mine subtle artifacts under high-quality forged faces. However, the exploitation of frequency information is coarse-grained, and more importantly, their vanilla learning process struggles to extract fine-grained forgery traces. To address this issue, we propose a progressive enhancement learning framework to exploit both the RGB and fine-grained frequency clues. Specifically, we perform a fine-grained decomposition of RGB images to completely decouple the real and fake traces in the frequency space. Subsequently, we propose a progressive enhancement learning framework based on a two-branch network, combined with self-enhancement and mutual-enhancement modules. The self-enhancement module captures the traces in different input spaces based on spatial noise enhancement and channel attention. The Mutual-enhancement module concurrently enhances RGB and frequency features by communicating in the shared spatial dimension. The progressive enhancement process facilitates the learning of discriminative features with fine-grained face forgery clues. Extensive experiments on several datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art face forgery detection methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

3D-CariGAN: An End-to-End Solution to 3D Caricature Generation from Face Photos

Caricature is a type of artistic style of human faces that attracts considerable attention in the entertainment industry. So far a few 3D caricature generation methods exist and all of them require some caricature information (e.g., a caricature sketch or 2D caricature) as input. This kind of input, however, is difficult to provide by non-professional users. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep neural network model that generates high-quality 3D caricatures directly from a normal 2D face photo. The most challenging issue for our system is that the source domain of face photos (characterized by normal 2D faces) is significantly different from the target domain of 3D caricatures (characterized by 3D exaggerated face shapes and textures). To address this challenge, we: (1) build a large dataset of 5,343 3D caricature meshes and use it to establish a PCA model in the 3D caricature shape space; (2) reconstruct a normal full 3D head from the input face photo and use its PCA representation in the 3D caricature shape space to establish correspondences between the input photo and 3D caricature shape; and (3) propose a novel character loss and a novel caricature loss based on previous psychological studies on caricatures. Experiments including a novel two-level user study show that our system can generate high-quality 3D caricatures directly from normal face photos.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Infrastructure Assisted Constrained Connected Automated Vehicle Trajectory Optimization on Curved Roads: A Spatial Formulation on a Curvilinear Coordinate

Vehicle trajectory optimization is essential to ensure vehicles travel efficiently and safely. This paper presents an infrastructure assisted constrained connected automated vehicles (CAVs) trajectory optimization method on curved roads. This paper systematically formulates the problem based on a curvilinear coordinate which is flexible to model complex road geometries. Further, to deal with the spatial varying road obstacles, traffic regulations, and geometric characteristics, two-dimensional vehicle kinematics is given in a spatial formulation with exact road information provided by the infrastructure. Consequently, we applied a multi-objective model predictive control (MPC) approach to optimize the trajectories in a rolling horizon while satisfying the collision avoidances and vehicle kinematics constraints. To verify the efficiency of our method, a numerical simulation is conducted. As the results suggest, the proposed method can provide smooth vehicular trajectories, avoid road obstacles, and simultaneously follow traffic regulations, which is robust to road geometries and disturbances.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2020

NPRportrait 1.0: A Three-Level Benchmark for Non-Photorealistic Rendering of Portraits

Despite the recent upsurge of activity in image-based non-photorealistic rendering (NPR), and in particular portrait image stylisation, due to the advent of neural style transfer, the state of performance evaluation in this field is limited, especially compared to the norms in the computer vision and machine learning communities. Unfortunately, the task of evaluating image stylisation is thus far not well defined, since it involves subjective, perceptual and aesthetic aspects. To make progress towards a solution, this paper proposes a new structured, three level, benchmark dataset for the evaluation of stylised portrait images. Rigorous criteria were used for its construction, and its consistency was validated by user studies. Moreover, a new methodology has been developed for evaluating portrait stylisation algorithms, which makes use of the different benchmark levels as well as annotations provided by user studies regarding the characteristics of the faces. We perform evaluation for a wide variety of image stylisation methods (both portrait-specific and general purpose, and also both traditional NPR approaches and neural style transfer) using the new benchmark dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Audio-driven Talking Face Video Generation with Learning-based Personalized Head Pose

Real-world talking faces often accompany with natural head movement. However, most existing talking face video generation methods only consider facial animation with fixed head pose. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a deep neural network model that takes an audio signal A of a source person and a very short video V of a target person as input, and outputs a synthesized high-quality talking face video with personalized head pose (making use of the visual information in V), expression and lip synchronization (by considering both A and V). The most challenging issue in our work is that natural poses often cause in-plane and out-of-plane head rotations, which makes synthesized talking face video far from realistic. To address this challenge, we reconstruct 3D face animation and re-render it into synthesized frames. To fine tune these frames into realistic ones with smooth background transition, we propose a novel memory-augmented GAN module. By first training a general mapping based on a publicly available dataset and fine-tuning the mapping using the input short video of target person, we develop an effective strategy that only requires a small number of frames (about 300 frames) to learn personalized talking behavior including head pose. Extensive experiments and two user studies show that our method can generate high-quality (i.e., personalized head movements, expressions and good lip synchronization) talking face videos, which are naturally looking with more distinguishing head movement effects than the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

A Configuration-Space Decomposition Scheme for Learning-based Collision Checking

Motion planning for robots of high degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) is an important problem in robotics with sampling-based methods in configuration space C as one popular solution. Recently, machine learning methods have been introduced into sampling-based motion planning methods, which train a classifier to distinguish collision free subspace from in-collision subspace in C. In this paper, we propose a novel configuration space decomposition method and show two nice properties resulted from this decomposition. Using these two properties, we build a composite classifier that works compatibly with previous machine learning methods by using them as the elementary classifiers. Experimental results are presented, showing that our composite classifier outperforms state-of-the-art single classifier methods by a large margin. A real application of motion planning in a multi-robot system in plant phenotyping using three UR5 robotic arms is also presented.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2019

Geodesic Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations: Theories, Algorithms and Applications

Nowadays, big data of digital media (including images, videos and 3D graphical models) are frequently modeled as low-dimensional manifold meshes embedded in a high-dimensional feature space. In this paper, we summarized our recent work on geodesic centroidal Voronoi tessellations(GCVTs), which are intrinsic geometric structures on manifold meshes. We show that GCVT can find a widely range of interesting applications in computer vision and graphics, due to the efficiency of search, location and indexing inherent in these intrinsic geometric structures. Then we present the challenging issues of how to build the combinatorial structures of GCVTs and establish their time and space complexities, including both theoretical and algorithmic results.

cs.GR↗