arXiv subjects

Wanqing Li

Publications and source records attributed to Wanqing Li.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Multi-View Stereo with Transformer

This paper proposes a network, referred to as MVSTR, for Multi-View Stereo (MVS). It is built upon Transformer and is capable of extracting dense features with global context and 3D consistency, which are crucial to achieving reliable matching for MVS. Specifically, to tackle the problem of the limited receptive field of existing CNN-based MVS methods, a global-context Transformer module is first proposed to explore intra-view global context. In addition, to further enable dense features to be 3D-consistent, a 3D-geometry Transformer module is built with a well-designed cross-view attention mechanism to facilitate inter-view information interaction. Experimental results show that the proposed MVSTR achieves the best overall performance on the DTU dataset and strong generalization on the Tanks & Temples benchmark dataset.

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arXiv2021

A Central Difference Graph Convolutional Operator for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

This paper proposes a new graph convolutional operator called central difference graph convolution (CDGC) for skeleton based action recognition. It is not only able to aggregate node information like a vanilla graph convolutional operation but also gradient information. Without introducing any additional parameters, CDGC can replace vanilla graph convolution in any existing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). In addition, an accelerated version of the CDGC is developed which greatly improves the speed of training. Experiments on two popular large-scale datasets NTU RGB+D 60 & 120 have demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed CDGC. Code is available at https://github.com/iesymiao/CD-GCN.

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arXiv2021

Novel View Synthesis from a Single Image via Unsupervised learning

View synthesis aims to generate novel views from one or more given source views. Although existing methods have achieved promising performance, they usually require paired views of different poses to learn a pixel transformation. This paper proposes an unsupervised network to learn such a pixel transformation from a single source viewpoint. In particular, the network consists of a token transformation module (TTM) that facilities the transformation of the features extracted from a source viewpoint image into an intrinsic representation with respect to a pre-defined reference pose and a view generation module (VGM) that synthesizes an arbitrary view from the representation. The learned transformation allows us to synthesize a novel view from any single source viewpoint image of unknown pose. Experiments on the widely used view synthesis datasets have demonstrated that the proposed network is able to produce comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods despite the fact that learning is unsupervised and only a single source viewpoint image is required for generating a novel view. The code will be available soon.

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arXiv2021

Context-guided Triple Matching for Multiple Choice Question Answering

The task of multiple choice question answering (MCQA) refers to identifying a suitable answer from multiple candidates, by estimating the matching score among the triple of the passage, question and answer. Despite the general research interest in this regard, existing methods decouple the process into several pair-wise or dual matching steps, that limited the ability of assessing cases with multiple evidence sentences. To alleviate this issue, this paper introduces a novel Context-guided Triple Matching algorithm, which is achieved by integrating a Triple Matching (TM) module and a Contrastive Regularization (CR). The former is designed to enumerate one component from the triple as the background context, and estimate its semantic matching with the other two. Additionally, the contrastive term is further proposed to capture the dissimilarity between the correct answer and distractive ones. We validate the proposed algorithm on several benchmarking MCQA datasets, which exhibits competitive performances against state-of-the-arts.

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arXiv2021

Regression on Deep Visual Features using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to Predict Hydraulic Blockage at Culverts

Cross drainage hydraulic structures (i.e., culverts, bridges) in urban landscapes are prone to getting blocked by transported debris which often results in causing the flash floods. In context of Australia, Wollongong City Council (WCC) blockage conduit policy is the only formal guideline to consider blockage in design process. However, many argue that this policy is based on the post floods visual inspections and hence can not be considered accurate representation of hydraulic blockage. As a result of this on-going debate, visual blockage and hydraulic blockage are considered two distinct terms with no established quantifiable relation among both. This paper attempts to relate both terms by proposing the use of deep visual features for prediction of hydraulic blockage at a given culvert. An end-to-end machine learning pipeline is propounded which takes an image of culvert as input, extract visual features using deep learning models, pre-process the visual features and feed into regression model to predict the corresponding hydraulic blockage. Dataset (i.e., Hydrology-Lab Dataset (HD), Visual Hydrology-Lab Dataset (VHD)) used in this research was collected from in-lab experiments carried out using scaled physical models of culverts where multiple blockage scenarios were replicated at scale. Performance of regression models was assessed using standard evaluation metrics. Furthermore, performance of overall machine learning pipeline was assessed in terms of processing times for relative comparison of models and hardware requirement analysis. From the results ANN used with MobileNet extracted visual features achieved the best regression performance with $R^{2}$ score of 0.7855. Positive value of $R^{2}$ score indicated the presence of correlation between visual features and hydraulic blockage and suggested that both can be interrelated with each other.

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arXiv2021

Automating Visual Blockage Classification of Culverts with Deep Learning

Blockage of culverts by transported debris materials is reported as main contributor in originating urban flash floods. Conventional modelling approaches had no success in addressing the problem largely because of unavailability of peak floods hydraulic data and highly non-linear behaviour of debris at culvert. This article explores a new dimension to investigate the issue by proposing the use of Intelligent Video Analytic (IVA) algorithms for extracting blockage related information. Potential of using existing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) algorithms (i.e., DarkNet53, DenseNet121, InceptionResNetV2, InceptionV3, MobileNet, ResNet50, VGG16, EfficientNetB3, NASNet) is investigated over a custom collected blockage dataset (i.e., Images of Culvert Openings and Blockage (ICOB)) to predict the blockage in a given image. Models were evaluated based on their performance on test dataset (i.e., accuracy, loss, precision, recall, F1-score, Jaccard-Index), Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPs) and response times to process a single test instance. From the results, NASNet was reported most efficient in classifying the blockage with the accuracy of 85\%; however, EfficientNetB3 was recommended for the hardware implementation because of its improved response time with accuracy comparable to NASNet (i.e., 83\%). False Negative (FN) instances, False Positive (FP) instances and CNN layers activation suggested that background noise and oversimplified labelling criteria were two contributing factors in degraded performance of existing CNN algorithms.

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arXiv2021

Prediction of Hydraulic Blockage at Cross Drainage Structures using Regression Analysis

Hydraulic blockage of cross-drainage structures such as culverts is considered one of main contributor in triggering urban flash floods. However, due to lack of during floods data and highly non-linear nature of debris interaction, conventional modelling for hydraulic blockage is not possible. This paper proposes to use machine learning regression analysis for the prediction of hydraulic blockage. Relevant data has been collected by performing a scaled in-lab study and replicating different blockage scenarios. From the regression analysis, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was reported best in hydraulic blockage prediction with $R^2$ of 0.89. With deployment of hydraulic sensors in smart cities, and availability of Big Data, regression analysis may prove helpful in addressing the blockage detection problem which is difficult to counter using conventional experimental and hydrological approaches.

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arXiv2021

A Two-stream Neural Network for Pose-based Hand Gesture Recognition

Pose based hand gesture recognition has been widely studied in the recent years. Compared with full body action recognition, hand gesture involves joints that are more spatially closely distributed with stronger collaboration. This nature requires a different approach from action recognition to capturing the complex spatial features. Many gesture categories, such as "Grab" and "Pinch", have very similar motion or temporal patterns posing a challenge on temporal processing. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a two-stream neural network with one stream being a self-attention based graph convolutional network (SAGCN) extracting the short-term temporal information and hierarchical spatial information, and the other being a residual-connection enhanced bidirectional Independently Recurrent Neural Network (RBi-IndRNN) for extracting long-term temporal information. The self-attention based graph convolutional network has a dynamic self-attention mechanism to adaptively exploit the relationships of all hand joints in addition to the fixed topology and local feature extraction in the GCN. On the other hand, the residual-connection enhanced Bi-IndRNN extends an IndRNN with the capability of bidirectional processing for temporal modelling. The two streams are fused together for recognition. The Dynamic Hand Gesture dataset and First-Person Hand Action dataset are used to validate its effectiveness, and our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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arXiv2021

Trear: Transformer-based RGB-D Egocentric Action Recognition

In this paper, we propose a \textbf{Tr}ansformer-based RGB-D \textbf{e}gocentric \textbf{a}ction \textbf{r}ecognition framework, called Trear. It consists of two modules, inter-frame attention encoder and mutual-attentional fusion block. Instead of using optical flow or recurrent units, we adopt self-attention mechanism to model the temporal structure of the data from different modalities. Input frames are cropped randomly to mitigate the effect of the data redundancy. Features from each modality are interacted through the proposed fusion block and combined through a simple yet effective fusion operation to produce a joint RGB-D representation. Empirical experiments on two large egocentric RGB-D datasets, THU-READ and FPHA, and one small dataset, WCVS, have shown that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art results by a large margin.

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arXiv2020

Deep Independently Recurrent Neural Network (IndRNN)

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are known to be difficult to train due to the gradient vanishing and exploding problems and thus difficult to learn long-term patterns and construct deep networks. To address these problems, this paper proposes a new type of RNNs with the recurrent connection formulated as Hadamard product, referred to as independently recurrent neural network (IndRNN), where neurons in the same layer are independent of each other and connected across layers. Due to the better behaved gradient backpropagation, IndRNN with regulated recurrent weights effectively addresses the gradient vanishing and exploding problems and thus long-term dependencies can be learned. Moreover, an IndRNN can work with non-saturated activation functions such as ReLU (rectified linear unit) and be still trained robustly. Different deeper IndRNN architectures, including the basic stacked IndRNN, residual IndRNN and densely connected IndRNN, have been investigated, all of which can be much deeper than the existing RNNs. Furthermore, IndRNN reduces the computation at each time step and can be over 10 times faster than the commonly used Long short-term memory (LSTM). Experimental results have shown that the proposed IndRNN is able to process very long sequences and construct very deep networks. Better performance has been achieved on various tasks with IndRNNs compared with the traditional RNN, LSTM and the popular Transformer.

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arXiv2020

Transformer Guided Geometry Model for Flow-Based Unsupervised Visual Odometry

Existing unsupervised visual odometry (VO) methods either match pairwise images or integrate the temporal information using recurrent neural networks over a long sequence of images. They are either not accurate, time-consuming in training or error accumulative. In this paper, we propose a method consisting of two camera pose estimators that deal with the information from pairwise images and a short sequence of images respectively. For image sequences, a Transformer-like structure is adopted to build a geometry model over a local temporal window, referred to as Transformer-based Auxiliary Pose Estimator (TAPE). Meanwhile, a Flow-to-Flow Pose Estimator (F2FPE) is proposed to exploit the relationship between pairwise images. The two estimators are constrained through a simple yet effective consistency loss in training. Empirical evaluation has shown that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning-based methods by a large margin and performs comparably to supervised and traditional ones on the KITTI and Malaga dataset.

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arXiv2020

A Framework of Combining Short-Term Spatial/Frequency Feature Extraction and Long-Term IndRNN for Activity Recognition

Smartphone sensors based human activity recognition is attracting increasing interests nowadays with the popularization of smartphones. With the high sampling rates of smartphone sensors, it is a highly long-range temporal recognition problem, especially with the large intra-class distances such as the smartphones carried at different locations such as in the bag or on the body, and the small inter-class distances such as taking train or subway. To address this problem, we propose a new framework of combining short-term spatial/frequency feature extraction and a long-term Independently Recurrent Neural Network (IndRNN) for activity recognition. Considering the periodic characteristics of the sensor data, short-term temporal features are first extracted in the spatial and frequency domains. Then the IndRNN, which is able to capture long-term patterns, is used to further obtain the long-term features for classification. In view of the large differences when the smartphone is carried at different locations, a group based location recognition is first developed to pinpoint the location of the smartphone. The Sussex-Huawei Locomotion (SHL) dataset from the SHL Challenge is used for evaluation. An earlier version of the proposed method has won the second place award in the SHL Challenge 2020 (the first place if not considering multiple models fusion approach). The proposed method is further improved in this paper and achieves 80.72$\%$ accuracy, better than the existing methods using a single model.

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arXiv2020

SAR-NAS: Skeleton-based Action Recognition via Neural Architecture Searching

This paper presents a study of automatic design of neural network architectures for skeleton-based action recognition. Specifically, we encode a skeleton-based action instance into a tensor and carefully define a set of operations to build two types of network cells: normal cells and reduction cells. The recently developed DARTS (Differentiable Architecture Search) is adopted to search for an effective network architecture that is built upon the two types of cells. All operations are 2D based in order to reduce the overall computation and search space. Experiments on the challenging NTU RGB+D and Kinectics datasets have verified that most of the networks developed to date for skeleton-based action recognition are likely not compact and efficient. The proposed method provides an approach to search for such a compact network that is able to achieve comparative or even better performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2020

Unsupervised Domain Expansion from Multiple Sources

Given an existing system learned from previous source domains, it is desirable to adapt the system to new domains without accessing and forgetting all the previous domains in some applications. This problem is known as domain expansion. Unlike traditional domain adaptation in which the target domain is the domain defined by new data, in domain expansion the target domain is formed jointly by the source domains and the new domain (hence, domain expansion) and the label function to be learned must work for the expanded domain. Specifically, this paper presents a method for unsupervised multi-source domain expansion (UMSDE) where only the pre-learned models of the source domains and unlabelled new domain data are available. We propose to use the predicted class probability of the unlabelled data in the new domain produced by different source models to jointly mitigate the biases among domains, exploit the discriminative information in the new domain, and preserve the performance in the source domains. Experimental results on the VLCS, ImageCLEF_DA and PACS datasets have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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arXiv2019

Recent Advances in Transfer Learning for Cross-Dataset Visual Recognition: A Problem-Oriented Perspective

This paper takes a problem-oriented perspective and presents a comprehensive review of transfer learning methods, both shallow and deep, for cross-dataset visual recognition. Specifically, it categorises the cross-dataset recognition into seventeen problems based on a set of carefully chosen data and label attributes. Such a problem-oriented taxonomy has allowed us to examine how different transfer learning approaches tackle each problem and how well each problem has been researched to date. The comprehensive problem-oriented review of the advances in transfer learning with respect to the problem has not only revealed the challenges in transfer learning for visual recognition, but also the problems (e.g. eight of the seventeen problems) that have been scarcely studied. This survey not only presents an up-to-date technical review for researchers, but also a systematic approach and a reference for a machine learning practitioner to categorise a real problem and to look up for a possible solution accordingly.

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arXiv2018

Independently Recurrent Neural Network (IndRNN): Building A Longer and Deeper RNN

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been widely used for processing sequential data. However, RNNs are commonly difficult to train due to the well-known gradient vanishing and exploding problems and hard to learn long-term patterns. Long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) were developed to address these problems, but the use of hyperbolic tangent and the sigmoid action functions results in gradient decay over layers. Consequently, construction of an efficiently trainable deep network is challenging. In addition, all the neurons in an RNN layer are entangled together and their behaviour is hard to interpret. To address these problems, a new type of RNN, referred to as independently recurrent neural network (IndRNN), is proposed in this paper, where neurons in the same layer are independent of each other and they are connected across layers. We have shown that an IndRNN can be easily regulated to prevent the gradient exploding and vanishing problems while allowing the network to learn long-term dependencies. Moreover, an IndRNN can work with non-saturated activation functions such as relu (rectified linear unit) and be still trained robustly. Multiple IndRNNs can be stacked to construct a network that is deeper than the existing RNNs. Experimental results have shown that the proposed IndRNN is able to process very long sequences (over 5000 time steps), can be used to construct very deep networks (21 layers used in the experiment) and still be trained robustly. Better performances have been achieved on various tasks by using IndRNNs compared with the traditional RNN and LSTM. The code is available at https://github.com/Sunnydreamrain/IndRNN_Theano_Lasagne.

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arXiv2018

RGB-D-based Human Motion Recognition with Deep Learning: A Survey

Human motion recognition is one of the most important branches of human-centered research activities. In recent years, motion recognition based on RGB-D data has attracted much attention. Along with the development in artificial intelligence, deep learning techniques have gained remarkable success in computer vision. In particular, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved great success for image-based tasks, and recurrent neural networks (RNN) are renowned for sequence-based problems. Specifically, deep learning methods based on the CNN and RNN architectures have been adopted for motion recognition using RGB-D data. In this paper, a detailed overview of recent advances in RGB-D-based motion recognition is presented. The reviewed methods are broadly categorized into four groups, depending on the modality adopted for recognition: RGB-based, depth-based, skeleton-based and RGB+D-based. As a survey focused on the application of deep learning to RGB-D-based motion recognition, we explicitly discuss the advantages and limitations of existing techniques. Particularly, we highlighted the methods of encoding spatial-temporal-structural information inherent in video sequence, and discuss potential directions for future research.

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arXiv2018

Depth Pooling Based Large-scale 3D Action Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

This paper proposes three simple, compact yet effective representations of depth sequences, referred to respectively as Dynamic Depth Images (DDI), Dynamic Depth Normal Images (DDNI) and Dynamic Depth Motion Normal Images (DDMNI), for both isolated and continuous action recognition. These dynamic images are constructed from a segmented sequence of depth maps using hierarchical bidirectional rank pooling to effectively capture the spatial-temporal information. Specifically, DDI exploits the dynamics of postures over time and DDNI and DDMNI exploit the 3D structural information captured by depth maps. Upon the proposed representations, a ConvNet based method is developed for action recognition. The image-based representations enable us to fine-tune the existing Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) models trained on image data without training a large number of parameters from scratch. The proposed method achieved the state-of-art results on three large datasets, namely, the Large-scale Continuous Gesture Recognition Dataset (means Jaccard index 0.4109), the Large-scale Isolated Gesture Recognition Dataset (59.21%), and the NTU RGB+D Dataset (87.08% cross-subject and 84.22% cross-view) even though only the depth modality was used.

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