arXiv subjects

Wangmeng Zuo

Publications and source records attributed to Wangmeng Zuo.

At least 253 records · Page 14Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Semantic-shape Adaptive Feature Modulation for Semantic Image Synthesis

Recent years have witnessed substantial progress in semantic image synthesis, it is still challenging in synthesizing photo-realistic images with rich details. Most previous methods focus on exploiting the given semantic map, which just captures an object-level layout for an image. Obviously, a fine-grained part-level semantic layout will benefit object details generation, and it can be roughly inferred from an object's shape. In order to exploit the part-level layouts, we propose a Shape-aware Position Descriptor (SPD) to describe each pixel's positional feature, where object shape is explicitly encoded into the SPD feature. Furthermore, a Semantic-shape Adaptive Feature Modulation (SAFM) block is proposed to combine the given semantic map and our positional features to produce adaptively modulated features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SPD and SAFM significantly improve the generation of objects with rich details. Moreover, our method performs favorably against the SOTA methods in terms of quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The source code and model are available at https://github.com/cszy98/SAFM.

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arXiv2022

On Steering Multi-Annotations per Sample for Multi-Task Learning

The study of multi-task learning has drawn great attention from the community. Despite the remarkable progress, the challenge of optimally learning different tasks simultaneously remains to be explored. Previous works attempt to modify the gradients from different tasks. Yet these methods give a subjective assumption of the relationship between tasks, and the modified gradient may be less accurate. In this paper, we introduce Stochastic Task Allocation~(STA), a mechanism that addresses this issue by a task allocation approach, in which each sample is randomly allocated a subset of tasks. For further progress, we propose Interleaved Stochastic Task Allocation~(ISTA) to iteratively allocate all tasks to each example during several consecutive iterations. We evaluate STA and ISTA on various datasets and applications: NYUv2, Cityscapes, and COCO for scene understanding and instance segmentation. Our experiments show both STA and ISTA outperform current state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Learning Class-Agnostic Pseudo Mask Generation for Box-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Recently, several weakly supervised learning methods have been devoted to utilize bounding box supervision for training deep semantic segmentation models. Most existing methods usually leverage the generic proposal generators (e.g., dense CRF and MCG) to produce enhanced segmentation masks for further training segmentation models. These proposal generators, however, are generic and not specifically designed for box-supervised semantic segmentation, thereby leaving some leeway for improving segmentation performance. In this paper, we aim at seeking for a more accurate learning-based class-agnostic pseudo mask generator tailored to box-supervised semantic segmentation. To this end, we resort to a pixel-level annotated auxiliary dataset where the class labels are non-overlapped with those of the box-annotated dataset. For learning pseudo mask generator from the auxiliary dataset, we present a bi-level optimization formulation. In particular, the lower subproblem is used to learn box-supervised semantic segmentation, while the upper subproblem is used to learn an optimal class-agnostic pseudo mask generator. The learned pseudo segmentation mask generator can then be deployed to the box-annotated dataset for improving weakly supervised semantic segmentation. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset show that the learned pseudo mask generator is effective in boosting segmentation performance, and our method can further close the performance gap between box-supervised and fully-supervised models. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Vious/LPG_BBox_Segmentation .

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arXiv2022

NÜWA-LIP: Language Guided Image Inpainting with Defect-free VQGAN

Language guided image inpainting aims to fill in the defective regions of an image under the guidance of text while keeping non-defective regions unchanged. However, the encoding process of existing models suffers from either receptive spreading of defective regions or information loss of non-defective regions, giving rise to visually unappealing inpainting results. To address the above issues, this paper proposes NÜWA-LIP by incorporating defect-free VQGAN (DF-VQGAN) with multi-perspective sequence to sequence (MP-S2S). In particular, DF-VQGAN introduces relative estimation to control receptive spreading and adopts symmetrical connections to protect information. MP-S2S further enhances visual information from complementary perspectives, including both low-level pixels and high-level tokens. Experiments show that DF-VQGAN performs more robustness than VQGAN. To evaluate the inpainting performance of our model, we built up 3 open-domain benchmarks, where NÜWA-LIP is also superior to recent strong baselines.

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arXiv2021

Invertible Network for Unpaired Low-light Image Enhancement

Existing unpaired low-light image enhancement approaches prefer to employ the two-way GAN framework, in which two CNN generators are deployed for enhancement and degradation separately. However, such data-driven models ignore the inherent characteristics of transformation between the low and normal light images, leading to unstable training and artifacts. Here, we propose to leverage the invertible network to enhance low-light image in forward process and degrade the normal-light one inversely with unpaired learning. The generated and real images are then fed into discriminators for adversarial learning. In addition to the adversarial loss, we design various loss functions to ensure the stability of training and preserve more image details. Particularly, a reversibility loss is introduced to alleviate the over-exposure problem. Moreover, we present a progressive self-guided enhancement process for low-light images and achieve favorable performance against the SOTAs.

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arXiv2021

Infrared Small-Dim Target Detection with Transformer under Complex Backgrounds

The infrared small-dim target detection is one of the key techniques in the infrared search and tracking system. Since the local regions similar to infrared small-dim targets spread over the whole background, exploring the interaction information amongst image features in large-range dependencies to mine the difference between the target and background is crucial for robust detection. However, existing deep learning-based methods are limited by the locality of convolutional neural networks, which impairs the ability to capture large-range dependencies. Additionally, the small-dim appearance of the infrared target makes the detection model highly possible to miss detection. To this end, we propose a robust and general infrared small-dim target detection method with the transformer. We adopt the self-attention mechanism of the transformer to learn the interaction information of image features in a larger range. Moreover, we design a feature enhancement module to learn discriminative features of small-dim targets to avoid miss detection. After that, to avoid the loss of the target information, we adopt a decoder with the U-Net-like skip connection operation to contain more information of small-dim targets. Finally, we get the detection result by a segmentation head. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show the obvious superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art methods and the proposed method has stronger cross-scene generalization and anti-noise performance.

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arXiv2021

Local Patch Network with Global Attention for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection plays an important role in the infrared search and tracking applications. In recent years, deep learning techniques were introduced to this task and achieved noteworthy effects. Following general object segmentation methods, existing deep learning methods usually processed the image from the global view. However, the imaging locality of small targets and extreme class-imbalance between the target and background pixels were not well-considered by these deep learning methods, which causes the low-efficiency on training and high-dependence on numerous data. A local patch network (LPNet) with global attention is proposed in this paper to detect small targets by jointly considering the global and local properties of infrared small target images. From the global view, a supervised attention module trained by the small target spread map is proposed to suppress most background pixels irrelevant with small target features. From the local view, local patches are split from global features and share the same convolution weights with each other in a patch net. By leveraging both the global and local properties, the data-driven framework proposed in this paper has fused multi-scale features for small target detection. Extensive synthetic and real data experiments show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with existing both conventional and deep learning methods.

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arXiv2021

Variational Attention: Propagating Domain-Specific Knowledge for Multi-Domain Learning in Crowd Counting

In crowd counting, due to the problem of laborious labelling, it is perceived intractability of collecting a new large-scale dataset which has plentiful images with large diversity in density, scene, etc. Thus, for learning a general model, training with data from multiple different datasets might be a remedy and be of great value. In this paper, we resort to the multi-domain joint learning and propose a simple but effective Domain-specific Knowledge Propagating Network (DKPNet)1 for unbiasedly learning the knowledge from multiple diverse data domains at the same time. It is mainly achieved by proposing the novel Variational Attention(VA) technique for explicitly modeling the attention distributions for different domains. And as an extension to VA, Intrinsic Variational Attention(InVA) is proposed to handle the problems of over-lapped domains and sub-domains. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the superiority of our DKPNet over several popular datasets, including ShanghaiTech A/B, UCF-QNRF and NWPU.

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arXiv2021

Learning RAW-to-sRGB Mappings with Inaccurately Aligned Supervision

Learning RAW-to-sRGB mapping has drawn increasing attention in recent years, wherein an input raw image is trained to imitate the target sRGB image captured by another camera. However, the severe color inconsistency makes it very challenging to generate well-aligned training pairs of input raw and target sRGB images. While learning with inaccurately aligned supervision is prone to causing pixel shift and producing blurry results. In this paper, we circumvent such issue by presenting a joint learning model for image alignment and RAW-to-sRGB mapping. To diminish the effect of color inconsistency in image alignment, we introduce to use a global color mapping (GCM) module to generate an initial sRGB image given the input raw image, which can keep the spatial location of the pixels unchanged, and the target sRGB image is utilized to guide GCM for converting the color towards it. Then a pre-trained optical flow estimation network (e.g., PWC-Net) is deployed to warp the target sRGB image to align with the GCM output. To alleviate the effect of inaccurately aligned supervision, the warped target sRGB image is leveraged to learn RAW-to-sRGB mapping. When training is done, the GCM module and optical flow network can be detached, thereby bringing no extra computation cost for inference. Experiments show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-arts on ZRR and SR-RAW datasets. With our joint learning model, a light-weight backbone can achieve better quantitative and qualitative performance on ZRR dataset. Codes are available at https://github.com/cszhilu1998/RAW-to-sRGB.

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arXiv2021

Orthogonal Jacobian Regularization for Unsupervised Disentanglement in Image Generation

Unsupervised disentanglement learning is a crucial issue for understanding and exploiting deep generative models. Recently, SeFa tries to find latent disentangled directions by performing SVD on the first projection of a pre-trained GAN. However, it is only applied to the first layer and works in a post-processing way. Hessian Penalty minimizes the off-diagonal entries of the output's Hessian matrix to facilitate disentanglement, and can be applied to multi-layers.However, it constrains each entry of output independently, making it not sufficient in disentangling the latent directions (e.g., shape, size, rotation, etc.) of spatially correlated variations. In this paper, we propose a simple Orthogonal Jacobian Regularization (OroJaR) to encourage deep generative model to learn disentangled representations. It simply encourages the variation of output caused by perturbations on different latent dimensions to be orthogonal, and the Jacobian with respect to the input is calculated to represent this variation. We show that our OroJaR also encourages the output's Hessian matrix to be diagonal in an indirect manner. In contrast to the Hessian Penalty, our OroJaR constrains the output in a holistic way, making it very effective in disentangling latent dimensions corresponding to spatially correlated variations. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that our method is effective in disentangled and controllable image generation, and performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/csyxwei/OroJaR

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arXiv2021

Boosting Weakly Supervised Object Detection via Learning Bounding Box Adjusters

Weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) has emerged as an inspiring recent topic to avoid expensive instance-level object annotations. However, the bounding boxes of most existing WSOD methods are mainly determined by precomputed proposals, thereby being limited in precise object localization. In this paper, we defend the problem setting for improving localization performance by leveraging the bounding box regression knowledge from a well-annotated auxiliary dataset. First, we use the well-annotated auxiliary dataset to explore a series of learnable bounding box adjusters (LBBAs) in a multi-stage training manner, which is class-agnostic. Then, only LBBAs and a weakly-annotated dataset with non-overlapped classes are used for training LBBA-boosted WSOD. As such, our LBBAs are practically more convenient and economical to implement while avoiding the leakage of the auxiliary well-annotated dataset. In particular, we formulate learning bounding box adjusters as a bi-level optimization problem and suggest an EM-like multi-stage training algorithm. Then, a multi-stage scheme is further presented for LBBA-boosted WSOD. Additionally, a masking strategy is adopted to improve proposal classification. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our method. Our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art WSOD methods and knowledge transfer model with similar problem setting. Code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/DongSky/lbba_boosted_wsod}.

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arXiv2021

Plug-and-Play Image Restoration with Deep Denoiser Prior

Recent works on plug-and-play image restoration have shown that a denoiser can implicitly serve as the image prior for model-based methods to solve many inverse problems. Such a property induces considerable advantages for plug-and-play image restoration (e.g., integrating the flexibility of model-based method and effectiveness of learning-based methods) when the denoiser is discriminatively learned via deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with large modeling capacity. However, while deeper and larger CNN models are rapidly gaining popularity, existing plug-and-play image restoration hinders its performance due to the lack of suitable denoiser prior. In order to push the limits of plug-and-play image restoration, we set up a benchmark deep denoiser prior by training a highly flexible and effective CNN denoiser. We then plug the deep denoiser prior as a modular part into a half quadratic splitting based iterative algorithm to solve various image restoration problems. We, meanwhile, provide a thorough analysis of parameter setting, intermediate results and empirical convergence to better understand the working mechanism. Experimental results on three representative image restoration tasks, including deblurring, super-resolution and demosaicing, demonstrate that the proposed plug-and-play image restoration with deep denoiser prior not only significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art model-based methods but also achieves competitive or even superior performance against state-of-the-art learning-based methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/cszn/DPIR.

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arXiv2021

Crowd Counting via Perspective-Guided Fractional-Dilation Convolution

Crowd counting is critical for numerous video surveillance scenarios. One of the main issues in this task is how to handle the dramatic scale variations of pedestrians caused by the perspective effect. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel convolution neural network-based crowd counting method, termed Perspective-guided Fractional-Dilation Network (PFDNet). By modeling the continuous scale variations, the proposed PFDNet is able to select the proper fractional dilation kernels for adapting to different spatial locations. It significantly improves the flexibility of the state-of-the-arts that only consider the discrete representative scales. In addition, by avoiding the multi-scale or multi-column architecture that used in other methods, it is computationally more efficient. In practice, the proposed PFDNet is constructed by stacking multiple Perspective-guided Fractional-Dilation Convolutions (PFC) on a VGG16-BN backbone. By introducing a novel generalized dilation convolution operation, the PFC can handle fractional dilation ratios in the spatial domain under the guidance of perspective annotations, achieving continuous scales modeling of pedestrians. To deal with the problem of unavailable perspective information in some cases, we further introduce an effective perspective estimation branch to the proposed PFDNet, which can be trained in either supervised or weakly-supervised setting once the branch has been pre-trained. Extensive experiments show that the proposed PFDNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ShanghaiTech A, ShanghaiTech B, WorldExpo'10, UCF-QNRF, UCF_CC_50 and TRANCOS dataset, achieving MAE 53.8, 6.5, 6.8, 84.3, 205.8, and 3.06 respectively.

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arXiv2021

Enhancing Geometric Factors in Model Learning and Inference for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation

Deep learning-based object detection and instance segmentation have achieved unprecedented progress. In this paper, we propose Complete-IoU (CIoU) loss and Cluster-NMS for enhancing geometric factors in both bounding box regression and Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), leading to notable gains of average precision (AP) and average recall (AR), without the sacrifice of inference efficiency. In particular, we consider three geometric factors, i.e., overlap area, normalized central point distance and aspect ratio, which are crucial for measuring bounding box regression in object detection and instance segmentation. The three geometric factors are then incorporated into CIoU loss for better distinguishing difficult regression cases. The training of deep models using CIoU loss results in consistent AP and AR improvements in comparison to widely adopted $\ell_n$-norm loss and IoU-based loss. Furthermore, we propose Cluster-NMS, where NMS during inference is done by implicitly clustering detected boxes and usually requires less iterations. Cluster-NMS is very efficient due to its pure GPU implementation, and geometric factors can be incorporated to improve both AP and AR. In the experiments, CIoU loss and Cluster-NMS have been applied to state-of-the-art instance segmentation (e.g., YOLACT and BlendMask-RT), and object detection (e.g., YOLO v3, SSD and Faster R-CNN) models. Taking YOLACT on MS COCO as an example, our method achieves performance gains as +1.7 AP and +6.2 AR$_{100}$ for object detection, and +0.9 AP and +3.5 AR$_{100}$ for instance segmentation, with 27.1 FPS on one NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti GPU. All the source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Zzh-tju/CIoU

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arXiv2021

Image Inpainting with Edge-guided Learnable Bidirectional Attention Maps

For image inpainting, the convolutional neural networks (CNN) in previous methods often adopt standard convolutional operator, which treats valid pixels and holes indistinguishably. As a result, they are limited in handling irregular holes and tend to produce color-discrepant and blurry inpainting result. Partial convolution (PConv) copes with this issue by conducting masked convolution and feature re-normalization conditioned only on valid pixels, but the mask-updating is handcrafted and independent with image structural information. In this paper, we present an edge-guided learnable bidirectional attention map (Edge-LBAM) for improving image inpainting of irregular holes with several distinct merits. Instead of using a hard 0-1 mask, a learnable attention map module is introduced for learning feature re-normalization and mask-updating in an end-to-end manner. Learnable reverse attention maps are further proposed in the decoder for emphasizing on filling in unknown pixels instead of reconstructing all pixels. Motivated by that the filling-in order is crucial to inpainting results and largely depends on image structures in exemplar-based methods, we further suggest a multi-scale edge completion network to predict coherent edges. Our Edge-LBAM method contains dual procedures,including structure-aware mask-updating guided by predict edges and attention maps generated by masks for feature re-normalization.Extensive experiments show that our Edge-LBAM is effective in generating coherent image structures and preventing color discrepancy and blurriness, and performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of qualitative metrics and visual quality.

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arXiv2021

Learning Semantic Person Image Generation by Region-Adaptive Normalization

Human pose transfer has received great attention due to its wide applications, yet is still a challenging task that is not well solved. Recent works have achieved great success to transfer the person image from the source to the target pose. However, most of them cannot well capture the semantic appearance, resulting in inconsistent and less realistic textures on the reconstructed results. To address this issue, we propose a new two-stage framework to handle the pose and appearance translation. In the first stage, we predict the target semantic parsing maps to eliminate the difficulties of pose transfer and further benefit the latter translation of per-region appearance style. In the second one, with the predicted target semantic maps, we suggest a new person image generation method by incorporating the region-adaptive normalization, in which it takes the per-region styles to guide the target appearance generation. Extensive experiments show that our proposed SPGNet can generate more semantic, consistent, and photo-realistic results and perform favorably against the state of the art methods in terms of quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The source code and model are available at https://github.com/cszy98/SPGNet.git.

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arXiv2021

Learning Spatio-Appearance Memory Network for High-Performance Visual Tracking

Existing visual object tracking usually learns a bounding-box based template to match the targets across frames, which cannot accurately learn a pixel-wise representation, thereby being limited in handling severe appearance variations. To address these issues, much effort has been made on segmentation-based tracking, which learns a pixel-wise object-aware template and can achieve higher accuracy than bounding-box template based tracking. However, existing segmentation-based trackers are ineffective in learning the spatio-temporal correspondence across frames due to no use of the rich temporal information. To overcome this issue, this paper presents a novel segmentation-based tracking architecture, which is equipped with a spatio-appearance memory network to learn accurate spatio-temporal correspondence. Among it, an appearance memory network explores spatio-temporal non-local similarity to learn the dense correspondence between the segmentation mask and the current frame. Meanwhile, a spatial memory network is modeled as discriminative correlation filter to learn the mapping between feature map and spatial map. The appearance memory network helps to filter out the noisy samples in the spatial memory network while the latter provides the former with more accurate target geometrical center. This mutual promotion greatly boosts the tracking performance. Without bells and whistles, our simple-yet-effective tracking architecture sets new state-of-the-arts on the VOT2016, VOT2018, VOT2019, GOT-10K, TrackingNet, and VOT2020 benchmarks, respectively. Besides, our tracker outperforms the leading segmentation-based trackers SiamMask and D3S on two video object segmentation benchmarks DAVIS16 and DAVIS17 by a large margin. The source codes can be found at https://github.com/phiphiphi31/DMB.

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arXiv2021

Learning Scalable $\ell_\infty$-constrained Near-lossless Image Compression via Joint Lossy Image and Residual Compression

We propose a novel joint lossy image and residual compression framework for learning $\ell_\infty$-constrained near-lossless image compression. Specifically, we obtain a lossy reconstruction of the raw image through lossy image compression and uniformly quantize the corresponding residual to satisfy a given tight $\ell_\infty$ error bound. Suppose that the error bound is zero, i.e., lossless image compression, we formulate the joint optimization problem of compressing both the lossy image and the original residual in terms of variational auto-encoders and solve it with end-to-end training. To achieve scalable compression with the error bound larger than zero, we derive the probability model of the quantized residual by quantizing the learned probability model of the original residual, instead of training multiple networks. We further correct the bias of the derived probability model caused by the context mismatch between training and inference. Finally, the quantized residual is encoded according to the bias-corrected probability model and is concatenated with the bitstream of the compressed lossy image. Experimental results demonstrate that our near-lossless codec achieves the state-of-the-art performance for lossless and near-lossless image compression, and achieves competitive PSNR while much smaller $\ell_\infty$ error compared with lossy image codecs at high bit rates.

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