arXiv subjects

Xiang Bai

Publications and source records attributed to Xiang Bai.

At least 271 records · Page 15Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Anisotropic-Scale Junction Detection and Matching for Indoor Images

Junctions play an important role in the characterization of local geometric structures in images, the detection of which is a longstanding and challenging task. Existing junction detectors usually focus on identifying the junction locations and the orientations of the junction branches while ignoring their scales; however, these scales also contain rich geometric information. This paper presents a novel approach to junction detection and characterization that exploits the locally anisotropic geometries of a junction and estimates the scales of these geometries using an \emph{a contrario} model. The output junctions have anisotropic scales --- i.e., each branch of a junction is associated with an independent scale parameter --- and are thus termed anisotropic-scale junctions (ASJs). We then apply the newly detected ASJs for the matching of indoor images, in which there may be dramatic changes in viewpoint and the detected local visual features, e.g., key-points, are usually insufficiently distinctive. We propose to use the anisotropic geometries of our junctions to improve the matching precision for indoor images. Matching results obtained on sets of indoor images demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in indoor image matching.

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arXiv2017

Multidimensional Scaling on Multiple Input Distance Matrices

Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) is a classic technique that seeks vectorial representations for data points, given the pairwise distances between them. However, in recent years, data are usually collected from diverse sources or have multiple heterogeneous representations. How to do multidimensional scaling on multiple input distance matrices is still unsolved to our best knowledge. In this paper, we first define this new task formally. Then, we propose a new algorithm called Multi-View Multidimensional Scaling (MVMDS) by considering each input distance matrix as one view. Our algorithm is able to learn the weights of views (i.e., distance matrices) automatically by exploring the consensus information and complementary nature of views. Experimental results on synthetic as well as real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MVMDS. We hope that our work encourages a wider consideration in many domains where MDS is needed.

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arXiv2017

Divide and Fuse: A Re-ranking Approach for Person Re-identification

As re-ranking is a necessary procedure to boost person re-identification (re-ID) performance on large-scale datasets, the diversity of feature becomes crucial to person reID for its importance both on designing pedestrian descriptions and re-ranking based on feature fusion. However, in many circumstances, only one type of pedestrian feature is available. In this paper, we propose a "Divide and use" re-ranking framework for person re-ID. It exploits the diversity from different parts of a high-dimensional feature vector for fusion-based re-ranking, while no other features are accessible. Specifically, given an image, the extracted feature is divided into sub-features. Then the contextual information of each sub-feature is iteratively encoded into a new feature. Finally, the new features from the same image are fused into one vector for re-ranking. Experimental results on two person re-ID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Especially, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Market-1501 dataset.

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arXiv2017

DeepSkeleton: Learning Multi-task Scale-associated Deep Side Outputs for Object Skeleton Extraction in Natural Images

Object skeletons are useful for object representation and object detection. They are complementary to the object contour, and provide extra information, such as how object scale (thickness) varies among object parts. But object skeleton extraction from natural images is very challenging, because it requires the extractor to be able to capture both local and non-local image context in order to determine the scale of each skeleton pixel. In this paper, we present a novel fully convolutional network with multiple scale-associated side outputs to address this problem. By observing the relationship between the receptive field sizes of the different layers in the network and the skeleton scales they can capture, we introduce two scale-associated side outputs to each stage of the network. The network is trained by multi-task learning, where one task is skeleton localization to classify whether a pixel is a skeleton pixel or not, and the other is skeleton scale prediction to regress the scale of each skeleton pixel. Supervision is imposed at different stages by guiding the scale-associated side outputs toward the groundtruth skeletons at the appropriate scales. The responses of the multiple scale-associated side outputs are then fused in a scale-specific way to detect skeleton pixels using multiple scales effectively. Our method achieves promising results on two skeleton extraction datasets, and significantly outperforms other competitors. Additionally, the usefulness of the obtained skeletons and scales (thickness) are verified on two object detection applications: Foreground object segmentation and object proposal detection.

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arXiv2017

Auto-Encoder Guided GAN for Chinese Calligraphy Synthesis

In this paper, we investigate the Chinese calligraphy synthesis problem: synthesizing Chinese calligraphy images with specified style from standard font(eg. Hei font) images (Fig. 1(a)). Recent works mostly follow the stroke extraction and assemble pipeline which is complex in the process and limited by the effect of stroke extraction. We treat the calligraphy synthesis problem as an image-to-image translation problem and propose a deep neural network based model which can generate calligraphy images from standard font images directly. Besides, we also construct a large scale benchmark that contains various styles for Chinese calligraphy synthesis. We evaluate our method as well as some baseline methods on the proposed dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

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arXiv2017

Integrating Scene Text and Visual Appearance for Fine-Grained Image Classification

Text in natural images contains rich semantics that are often highly relevant to objects or scene. In this paper, we focus on the problem of fully exploiting scene text for visual understanding. The main idea is combining word representations and deep visual features into a globally trainable deep convolutional neural network. First, the recognized words are obtained by a scene text reading system. Then, we combine the word embedding of the recognized words and the deep visual features into a single representation, which is optimized by a convolutional neural network for fine-grained image classification. In our framework, the attention mechanism is adopted to reveal the relevance between each recognized word and the given image, which further enhances the recognition performance. We have performed experiments on two datasets: Con-Text dataset and Drink Bottle dataset, that are proposed for fine-grained classification of business places and drink bottles, respectively. The experimental results consistently demonstrate that the proposed method combining textual and visual cues significantly outperforms classification with only visual representations. Moreover, we have shown that the learned representation improves the retrieval performance on the drink bottle images by a large margin, making it potentially useful in product search.

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arXiv2017

Deep Patch Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Classification and Discovery

Patch-level image representation is very important for object classification and detection, since it is robust to spatial transformation, scale variation, and cluttered background. Many existing methods usually require fine-grained supervisions (e.g., bounding-box annotations) to learn patch features, which requires a great effort to label images may limit their potential applications. In this paper, we propose to learn patch features via weak supervisions, i.e., only image-level supervisions. To achieve this goal, we treat images as bags and patches as instances to integrate the weakly supervised multiple instance learning constraints into deep neural networks. Also, our method integrates the traditional multiple stages of weakly supervised object classification and discovery into a unified deep convolutional neural network and optimizes the network in an end-to-end way. The network processes the two tasks object classification and discovery jointly, and shares hierarchical deep features. Through this jointly learning strategy, weakly supervised object classification and discovery are beneficial to each other. We test the proposed method on the challenging PASCAL VOC datasets. The results show that our method can obtain state-of-the-art performance on object classification, and very competitive results on object discovery, with faster testing speed than competitors.

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arXiv2017

Detecting Oriented Text in Natural Images by Linking Segments

Most state-of-the-art text detection methods are specific to horizontal Latin text and are not fast enough for real-time applications. We introduce Segment Linking (SegLink), an oriented text detection method. The main idea is to decompose text into two locally detectable elements, namely segments and links. A segment is an oriented box covering a part of a word or text line; A link connects two adjacent segments, indicating that they belong to the same word or text line. Both elements are detected densely at multiple scales by an end-to-end trained, fully-convolutional neural network. Final detections are produced by combining segments connected by links. Compared with previous methods, SegLink improves along the dimensions of accuracy, speed, and ease of training. It achieves an f-measure of 75.0% on the standard ICDAR 2015 Incidental (Challenge 4) benchmark, outperforming the previous best by a large margin. It runs at over 20 FPS on 512x512 images. Moreover, without modification, SegLink is able to detect long lines of non-Latin text, such as Chinese.

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arXiv2017

Multiple Instance Detection Network with Online Instance Classifier Refinement

Of late, weakly supervised object detection is with great importance in object recognition. Based on deep learning, weakly supervised detectors have achieved many promising results. However, compared with fully supervised detection, it is more challenging to train deep network based detectors in a weakly supervised manner. Here we formulate weakly supervised detection as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem, where instance classifiers (object detectors) are put into the network as hidden nodes. We propose a novel online instance classifier refinement algorithm to integrate MIL and the instance classifier refinement procedure into a single deep network, and train the network end-to-end with only image-level supervision, i.e., without object location information. More precisely, instance labels inferred from weak supervision are propagated to their spatially overlapped instances to refine instance classifier online. The iterative instance classifier refinement procedure is implemented using multiple streams in deep network, where each stream supervises its latter stream. Weakly supervised object detection experiments are carried out on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 benchmarks. We obtain 47% mAP on VOC 2007 that significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art.

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arXiv2017

GIFT: A Real-time and Scalable 3D Shape Search Engine

Projective analysis is an important solution for 3D shape retrieval, since human visual perceptions of 3D shapes rely on various 2D observations from different view points. Although multiple informative and discriminative views are utilized, most projection-based retrieval systems suffer from heavy computational cost, thus cannot satisfy the basic requirement of scalability for search engines. In this paper, we present a real-time 3D shape search engine based on the projective images of 3D shapes. The real-time property of our search engine results from the following aspects: (1) efficient projection and view feature extraction using GPU acceleration; (2) the first inverted file, referred as F-IF, is utilized to speed up the procedure of multi-view matching; (3) the second inverted file (S-IF), which captures a local distribution of 3D shapes in the feature manifold, is adopted for efficient context-based re-ranking. As a result, for each query the retrieval task can be finished within one second despite the necessary cost of IO overhead. We name the proposed 3D shape search engine, which combines GPU acceleration and Inverted File Twice, as GIFT. Besides its high efficiency, GIFT also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly in retrieval accuracy on various shape benchmarks and competitions.

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arXiv2017

Scalable Person Re-identification on Supervised Smoothed Manifold

Most existing person re-identification algorithms either extract robust visual features or learn discriminative metrics for person images. However, the underlying manifold which those images reside on is rarely investigated. That raises a problem that the learned metric is not smooth with respect to the local geometry structure of the data manifold. In this paper, we study person re-identification with manifold-based affinity learning, which did not receive enough attention from this area. An unconventional manifold-preserving algorithm is proposed, which can 1) make the best use of supervision from training data, whose label information is given as pairwise constraints; 2) scale up to large repositories with low on-line time complexity; and 3) be plunged into most existing algorithms, serving as a generic postprocessing procedure to further boost the identification accuracies. Extensive experimental results on five popular person re-identification benchmarks consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Especially, on the largest CUHK03 and Market-1501, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives by a large margin with high efficiency, which is more appropriate for practical applications.

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arXiv2017

Texture Characterization by Using Shape Co-occurrence Patterns

Texture characterization is a key problem in image understanding and pattern recognition. In this paper, we present a flexible shape-based texture representation using shape co-occurrence patterns. More precisely, texture images are first represented by tree of shapes, each of which is associated with several geometrical and radiometric attributes. Then four typical kinds of shape co-occurrence patterns based on the hierarchical relationship of the shapes in the tree are learned as codewords. Three different coding methods are investigated to learn the codewords, with which, any given texture image can be encoded into a descriptive vector. In contrast with existing works, the proposed method not only inherits the strong ability to depict geometrical aspects of textures and the high robustness to variations of imaging conditions from the shape-based method, but also provides a flexible way to consider shape relationships and to compute high-order statistics on the tree. To our knowledge, this is the first time to use co-occurrence patterns of explicit shapes as a tool for texture analysis. Experiments on various texture datasets and scene datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.

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arXiv2016

TextBoxes: A Fast Text Detector with a Single Deep Neural Network

This paper presents an end-to-end trainable fast scene text detector, named TextBoxes, which detects scene text with both high accuracy and efficiency in a single network forward pass, involving no post-process except for a standard non-maximum suppression. TextBoxes outperforms competing methods in terms of text localization accuracy and is much faster, taking only 0.09s per image in a fast implementation. Furthermore, combined with a text recognizer, TextBoxes significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on word spotting and end-to-end text recognition tasks.

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arXiv2016

Revisiting Multiple Instance Neural Networks

Recently neural networks and multiple instance learning are both attractive topics in Artificial Intelligence related research fields. Deep neural networks have achieved great success in supervised learning problems, and multiple instance learning as a typical weakly-supervised learning method is effective for many applications in computer vision, biometrics, nature language processing, etc. In this paper, we revisit the problem of solving multiple instance learning problems using neural networks. Neural networks are appealing for solving multiple instance learning problem. The multiple instance neural networks perform multiple instance learning in an end-to-end way, which take a bag with various number of instances as input and directly output bag label. All of the parameters in a multiple instance network are able to be optimized via back-propagation. We propose a new multiple instance neural network to learn bag representations, which is different from the existing multiple instance neural networks that focus on estimating instance label. In addition, recent tricks developed in deep learning have been studied in multiple instance networks, we find deep supervision is effective for boosting bag classification accuracy. In the experiments, the proposed multiple instance networks achieve state-of-the-art or competitive performance on several MIL benchmarks. Moreover, it is extremely fast for both testing and training, e.g., it takes only 0.0003 second to predict a bag and a few seconds to train on a MIL datasets on a moderate CPU.

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arXiv2016

AID: A Benchmark Dataset for Performance Evaluation of Aerial Scene Classification

Aerial scene classification, which aims to automatically label an aerial image with a specific semantic category, is a fundamental problem for understanding high-resolution remote sensing imagery. In recent years, it has become an active task in remote sensing area and numerous algorithms have been proposed for this task, including many machine learning and data-driven approaches. However, the existing datasets for aerial scene classification like UC-Merced dataset and WHU-RS19 are with relatively small sizes, and the results on them are already saturated. This largely limits the development of scene classification algorithms. This paper describes the Aerial Image Dataset (AID): a large-scale dataset for aerial scene classification. The goal of AID is to advance the state-of-the-arts in scene classification of remote sensing images. For creating AID, we collect and annotate more than ten thousands aerial scene images. In addition, a comprehensive review of the existing aerial scene classification techniques as well as recent widely-used deep learning methods is given. Finally, we provide a performance analysis of typical aerial scene classification and deep learning approaches on AID, which can be served as the baseline results on this benchmark.

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arXiv2016

Deep FisherNet for Object Classification

Despite the great success of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for the image classification task on datasets like Cifar and ImageNet, CNN's representation power is still somewhat limited in dealing with object images that have large variation in size and clutter, where Fisher Vector (FV) has shown to be an effective encoding strategy. FV encodes an image by aggregating local descriptors with a universal generative Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). FV however has limited learning capability and its parameters are mostly fixed after constructing the codebook. To combine together the best of the two worlds, we propose in this paper a neural network structure with FV layer being part of an end-to-end trainable system that is differentiable; we name our network FisherNet that is learnable using backpropagation. Our proposed FisherNet combines convolutional neural network training and Fisher Vector encoding in a single end-to-end structure. We observe a clear advantage of FisherNet over plain CNN and standard FV in terms of both classification accuracy and computational efficiency on the challenging PASCAL VOC object classification task.

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arXiv2016

Scene Text Detection via Holistic, Multi-Channel Prediction

Recently, scene text detection has become an active research topic in computer vision and document analysis, because of its great importance and significant challenge. However, vast majority of the existing methods detect text within local regions, typically through extracting character, word or line level candidates followed by candidate aggregation and false positive elimination, which potentially exclude the effect of wide-scope and long-range contextual cues in the scene. To take full advantage of the rich information available in the whole natural image, we propose to localize text in a holistic manner, by casting scene text detection as a semantic segmentation problem. The proposed algorithm directly runs on full images and produces global, pixel-wise prediction maps, in which detections are subsequently formed. To better make use of the properties of text, three types of information regarding text region, individual characters and their relationship are estimated, with a single Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) model. With such predictions of text properties, the proposed algorithm can simultaneously handle horizontal, multi-oriented and curved text in real-world natural images. The experiments on standard benchmarks, including ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2015 and MSRA-TD500, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm substantially outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we report the first baseline result on the recently-released, large-scale dataset COCO-Text.

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arXiv2016

Robust Scene Text Recognition with Automatic Rectification

Recognizing text in natural images is a challenging task with many unsolved problems. Different from those in documents, words in natural images often possess irregular shapes, which are caused by perspective distortion, curved character placement, etc. We propose RARE (Robust text recognizer with Automatic REctification), a recognition model that is robust to irregular text. RARE is a specially-designed deep neural network, which consists of a Spatial Transformer Network (STN) and a Sequence Recognition Network (SRN). In testing, an image is firstly rectified via a predicted Thin-Plate-Spline (TPS) transformation, into a more "readable" image for the following SRN, which recognizes text through a sequence recognition approach. We show that the model is able to recognize several types of irregular text, including perspective text and curved text. RARE is end-to-end trainable, requiring only images and associated text labels, making it convenient to train and deploy the model in practical systems. State-of-the-art or highly-competitive performance achieved on several benchmarks well demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model.

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