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Xinfeng Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xinfeng Zhang.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

MSNeRV: Neural Video Representation with Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

Implicit Neural representations (INRs) have emerged as a promising approach for video compression, and have achieved comparable performance to the state-of-the-art codecs such as H.266/VVC. However, existing INR-based methods struggle to effectively represent detail-intensive and fast-changing video content. This limitation mainly stems from the underutilization of internal network features and the absence of video-specific considerations in network design. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-scale feature fusion framework, MSNeRV, for neural video representation. In the encoding stage, we enhance temporal consistency by employing temporal windows, and divide the video into multiple Groups of Pictures (GoPs), where a GoP-level grid is used for background representation. Additionally, we design a multi-scale spatial decoder with a scale-adaptive loss function to integrate multi-resolution and multi-frequency information. To further improve feature extraction, we introduce a multi-scale feature block that fully leverages hidden features. We evaluate MSNeRV on HEVC ClassB and UVG datasets for video representation and compression. Experimental results demonstrate that our model exhibits superior representation capability among INR-based approaches and surpasses VTM-23.7 (Random Access) in dynamic scenarios in terms of compression efficiency.

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CANeRV: Content Adaptive Neural Representation for Video Compression

Recent advances in video compression introduce implicit neural representation (INR) based methods, which effectively capture global dependencies and characteristics of entire video sequences. Unlike traditional and deep learning based approaches, INR-based methods optimize network parameters from a global perspective, resulting in superior compression potential. However, most current INR methods utilize a fixed and uniform network architecture across all frames, limiting their adaptability to dynamic variations within and between video sequences. This often leads to suboptimal compression outcomes as these methods struggle to capture the distinct nuances and transitions in video content. To overcome these challenges, we propose Content Adaptive Neural Representation for Video Compression (CANeRV), an innovative INR-based video compression network that adaptively conducts structure optimisation based on the specific content of each video sequence. To better capture dynamic information across video sequences, we propose a dynamic sequence-level adjustment (DSA). Furthermore, to enhance the capture of dynamics between frames within a sequence, we implement a dynamic frame-level adjustment (DFA). {Finally, to effectively capture spatial structural information within video frames, thereby enhancing the detail restoration capabilities of CANeRV, we devise a structure level hierarchical structural adaptation (HSA).} Experimental results demonstrate that CANeRV can outperform both H.266/VVC and state-of-the-art INR-based video compression techniques across diverse video datasets.

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Are KANs Effective for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting?

Multivariate time series forecasting is a crucial task that predicts the future states based on historical inputs. Related techniques have been developing in parallel with the machine learning community, from early statistical learning methods to current deep learning methods. Despite their significant advancements, existing methods continue to struggle with the challenge of inadequate interpretability. The rise of the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) provides a new perspective to solve this challenge, but current work has not yet concluded whether KAN is effective in time series forecasting tasks. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the effectiveness of KANs in time-series forecasting from the perspectives of performance, integrability, efficiency, and interpretability. To this end, we propose the Multi-layer Mixture-of-KAN network (MMK), which achieves excellent performance while retaining KAN's ability to be transformed into a combination of symbolic functions. The core module of MMK is the mixture-of-KAN layer, which uses a mixture-of-experts structure to assign variables to best-matched KAN experts. Then, we explore some useful experimental strategies to deal with the issues in the training stage. Finally, we compare MMK and various baselines on seven datasets. Extensive experimental and visualization results demonstrate that KANs are effective in multivariate time series forecasting. Code is available at: https://github.com/2448845600/EasyTSF.

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Predicting Satisfied User and Machine Ratio for Compressed Images: A Unified Approach

Nowadays, high-quality images are pursued by both humans for better viewing experience and by machines for more accurate visual analysis. However, images are usually compressed before being consumed, decreasing their quality. It is meaningful to predict the perceptual quality of compressed images for both humans and machines, which guides the optimization for compression. In this paper, we propose a unified approach to address this. Specifically, we create a deep learning-based model to predict Satisfied User Ratio (SUR) and Satisfied Machine Ratio (SMR) of compressed images simultaneously. We first pre-train a feature extractor network on a large-scale SMR-annotated dataset with human perception-related quality labels generated by diverse image quality models, which simulates the acquisition of SUR labels. Then, we propose an MLP-Mixer-based network to predict SUR and SMR by leveraging and fusing the extracted multi-layer features. We introduce a Difference Feature Residual Learning (DFRL) module to learn more discriminative difference features. We further use a Multi-Head Attention Aggregation and Pooling (MHAAP) layer to aggregate difference features and reduce their redundancy. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art SUR and SMR prediction methods. Moreover, our joint learning scheme of human and machine perceptual quality prediction tasks is effective at improving the performance of both.

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Releasing the Parameter Latency of Neural Representation for High-Efficiency Video Compression

For decades, video compression technology has been a prominent research area. Traditional hybrid video compression framework and end-to-end frameworks continue to explore various intra- and inter-frame reference and prediction strategies based on discrete transforms and deep learning techniques. However, the emerging implicit neural representation (INR) technique models entire videos as basic units, automatically capturing intra-frame and inter-frame correlations and obtaining promising performance. INR uses a compact neural network to store video information in network parameters, effectively eliminating spatial and temporal redundancy in the original video. However, in this paper, our exploration and verification reveal that current INR video compression methods do not fully exploit their potential to preserve information. We investigate the potential of enhancing network parameter storage through parameter reuse. By deepening the network, we designed a feasible INR parameter reuse scheme to further improve compression performance. Extensive experimental results show that our method significantly enhances the rate-distortion performance of INR video compression.

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Perceptual Video Coding for Machines via Satisfied Machine Ratio Modeling

Video Coding for Machines (VCM) aims to compress visual signals for machine analysis. However, existing methods only consider a few machines, neglecting the majority. Moreover, the machine's perceptual characteristics are not leveraged effectively, resulting in suboptimal compression efficiency. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces Satisfied Machine Ratio (SMR), a metric that statistically evaluates the perceptual quality of compressed images and videos for machines by aggregating satisfaction scores from them. Each score is derived from machine perceptual differences between original and compressed images. Targeting image classification and object detection tasks, we build two representative machine libraries for SMR annotation and create a large-scale SMR dataset to facilitate SMR studies. We then propose an SMR prediction model based on the correlation between deep feature differences and SMR. Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary task to increase the prediction accuracy by predicting the SMR difference between two images in different quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMR models significantly improve compression performance for machines and exhibit robust generalizability on unseen machines, codecs, datasets, and frame types. SMR enables perceptual coding for machines and propels VCM from specificity to generality. Code is available at https://github.com/ywwynm/SMR.

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Structure-CLIP: Towards Scene Graph Knowledge to Enhance Multi-modal Structured Representations

Large-scale vision-language pre-training has achieved significant performance in multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. However, existing methods often perform poorly on image-text matching tasks that require structured representations, i.e., representations of objects, attributes, and relations. As illustrated in Fig.~reffig:case (a), the models cannot make a distinction between ``An astronaut rides a horse" and ``A horse rides an astronaut". This is because they fail to fully leverage structured knowledge when learning representations in multi-modal scenarios. In this paper, we present an end-to-end framework Structure-CLIP, which integrates Scene Graph Knowledge (SGK) to enhance multi-modal structured representations. Firstly, we use scene graphs to guide the construction of semantic negative examples, which results in an increased emphasis on learning structured representations. Moreover, a Knowledge-Enhance Encoder (KEE) is proposed to leverage SGK as input to further enhance structured representations. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we pre-train our model with the aforementioned approaches and conduct experiments on downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that Structure-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on VG-Attribution and VG-Relation datasets, with 12.5% and 4.1% ahead of the multi-modal SOTA model respectively. Meanwhile, the results on MSCOCO indicate that Structure-CLIP significantly enhances the structured representations while maintaining the ability of general representations. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjukg/Structure-CLIP.

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Scene Matters: Model-based Deep Video Compression

Video compression has always been a popular research area, where many traditional and deep video compression methods have been proposed. These methods typically rely on signal prediction theory to enhance compression performance by designing high efficient intra and inter prediction strategies and compressing video frames one by one. In this paper, we propose a novel model-based video compression (MVC) framework that regards scenes as the fundamental units for video sequences. Our proposed MVC directly models the intensity variation of the entire video sequence in one scene, seeking non-redundant representations instead of reducing redundancy through spatio-temporal predictions. To achieve this, we employ implicit neural representation as our basic modeling architecture. To improve the efficiency of video modeling, we first propose context-related spatial positional embedding and frequency domain supervision in spatial context enhancement. For temporal correlation capturing, we design the scene flow constrain mechanism and temporal contrastive loss. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves up to a 20\% bitrate reduction compared to the latest video coding standard H.266 and is more efficient in decoding than existing video coding strategies.

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Diffusion-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation with Multi-Hypothesis Aggregation

In this paper, a novel Diffusion-based 3D Pose estimation (D3DP) method with Joint-wise reProjection-based Multi-hypothesis Aggregation (JPMA) is proposed for probabilistic 3D human pose estimation. On the one hand, D3DP generates multiple possible 3D pose hypotheses for a single 2D observation. It gradually diffuses the ground truth 3D poses to a random distribution, and learns a denoiser conditioned on 2D keypoints to recover the uncontaminated 3D poses. The proposed D3DP is compatible with existing 3D pose estimators and supports users to balance efficiency and accuracy during inference through two customizable parameters. On the other hand, JPMA is proposed to assemble multiple hypotheses generated by D3DP into a single 3D pose for practical use. It reprojects 3D pose hypotheses to the 2D camera plane, selects the best hypothesis joint-by-joint based on the reprojection errors, and combines the selected joints into the final pose. The proposed JPMA conducts aggregation at the joint level and makes use of the 2D prior information, both of which have been overlooked by previous approaches. Extensive experiments on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art deterministic and probabilistic approaches by 1.5% and 8.9%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/paTRICK-swk/D3DP.

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Sequential Hierarchical Learning with Distribution Transformation for Image Super-Resolution

Multi-scale design has been considered in recent image super-resolution (SR) works to explore the hierarchical feature information. Existing multi-scale networks aim to build elaborate blocks or progressive architecture for restoration. In general, larger scale features concentrate more on structural and high-level information, while smaller scale features contain plentiful details and textured information. In this point of view, information from larger scale features can be derived from smaller ones. Based on the observation, in this paper, we build a sequential hierarchical learning super-resolution network (SHSR) for effective image SR. Specially, we consider the inter-scale correlations of features, and devise a sequential multi-scale block (SMB) to progressively explore the hierarchical information. SMB is designed in a recursive way based on the linearity of convolution with restricted parameters. Besides the sequential hierarchical learning, we also investigate the correlations among the feature maps and devise a distribution transformation block (DTB). Different from attention-based methods, DTB regards the transformation in a normalization manner, and jointly considers the spatial and channel-wise correlations with scaling and bias factors. Experiment results show SHSR achieves superior quantitative performance and visual quality to state-of-the-art methods with near 34\% parameters and 50\% MACs off when scaling factor is $\times4$. To boost the performance without further training, the extension model SHSR$^+$ with self-ensemble achieves competitive performance than larger networks with near 92\% parameters and 42\% MACs off with scaling factor $\times4$.

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Cross Modal Compression: Towards Human-comprehensible Semantic Compression

Traditional image/video compression aims to reduce the transmission/storage cost with signal fidelity as high as possible. However, with the increasing demand for machine analysis and semantic monitoring in recent years, semantic fidelity rather than signal fidelity is becoming another emerging concern in image/video compression. With the recent advances in cross modal translation and generation, in this paper, we propose the cross modal compression~(CMC), a semantic compression framework for visual data, to transform the high redundant visual data~(such as image, video, etc.) into a compact, human-comprehensible domain~(such as text, sketch, semantic map, attributions, etc.), while preserving the semantic. Specifically, we first formulate the CMC problem as a rate-distortion optimization problem. Secondly, we investigate the relationship with the traditional image/video compression and the recent feature compression frameworks, showing the difference between our CMC and these prior frameworks. Then we propose a novel paradigm for CMC to demonstrate its effectiveness. The qualitative and quantitative results show that our proposed CMC can achieve encouraging reconstructed results with an ultrahigh compression ratio, showing better compression performance than the widely used JPEG baseline.

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P-STMO: Pre-Trained Spatial Temporal Many-to-One Model for 3D Human Pose Estimation

This paper introduces a novel Pre-trained Spatial Temporal Many-to-One (P-STMO) model for 2D-to-3D human pose estimation task. To reduce the difficulty of capturing spatial and temporal information, we divide this task into two stages: pre-training (Stage I) and fine-tuning (Stage II). In Stage I, a self-supervised pre-training sub-task, termed masked pose modeling, is proposed. The human joints in the input sequence are randomly masked in both spatial and temporal domains. A general form of denoising auto-encoder is exploited to recover the original 2D poses and the encoder is capable of capturing spatial and temporal dependencies in this way. In Stage II, the pre-trained encoder is loaded to STMO model and fine-tuned. The encoder is followed by a many-to-one frame aggregator to predict the 3D pose in the current frame. Especially, an MLP block is utilized as the spatial feature extractor in STMO, which yields better performance than other methods. In addition, a temporal downsampling strategy is proposed to diminish data redundancy. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with fewer parameters and less computational overhead. For example, our P-STMO model achieves 42.1mm MPJPE on Human3.6M dataset when using 2D poses from CPN as inputs. Meanwhile, it brings a 1.5-7.1 times speedup to state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/paTRICK-swk/P-STMO.

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STIP: A SpatioTemporal Information-Preserving and Perception-Augmented Model for High-Resolution Video Prediction

Although significant achievements have been achieved by recurrent neural network (RNN) based video prediction methods, their performance in datasets with high resolutions is still far from satisfactory because of the information loss problem and the perception-insensitive mean square error (MSE) based loss functions. In this paper, we propose a Spatiotemporal Information-Preserving and Perception-Augmented Model (STIP) to solve the above two problems. To solve the information loss problem, the proposed model aims to preserve the spatiotemporal information for videos during the feature extraction and the state transitions, respectively. Firstly, a Multi-Grained Spatiotemporal Auto-Encoder (MGST-AE) is designed based on the X-Net structure. The proposed MGST-AE can help the decoders recall multi-grained information from the encoders in both the temporal and spatial domains. In this way, more spatiotemporal information can be preserved during the feature extraction for high-resolution videos. Secondly, a Spatiotemporal Gated Recurrent Unit (STGRU) is designed based on the standard Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) structure, which can efficiently preserve spatiotemporal information during the state transitions. The proposed STGRU can achieve more satisfactory performance with a much lower computation load compared with the popular Long Short-Term (LSTM) based predictive memories. Furthermore, to improve the traditional MSE loss functions, a Learned Perceptual Loss (LP-loss) is further designed based on the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which can help obtain a satisfactory trade-off between the objective quality and the perceptual quality. Experimental results show that the proposed STIP can predict videos with more satisfactory visual quality compared with a variety of state-of-the-art methods. Source code has been available at \url{https://github.com/ZhengChang467/STIPHR}.

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STAU: A SpatioTemporal-Aware Unit for Video Prediction and Beyond

Video prediction aims to predict future frames by modeling the complex spatiotemporal dynamics in videos. However, most of the existing methods only model the temporal information and the spatial information for videos in an independent manner but haven't fully explored the correlations between both terms. In this paper, we propose a SpatioTemporal-Aware Unit (STAU) for video prediction and beyond by exploring the significant spatiotemporal correlations in videos. On the one hand, the motion-aware attention weights are learned from the spatial states to help aggregate the temporal states in the temporal domain. On the other hand, the appearance-aware attention weights are learned from the temporal states to help aggregate the spatial states in the spatial domain. In this way, the temporal information and the spatial information can be greatly aware of each other in both domains, during which, the spatiotemporal receptive field can also be greatly broadened for more reliable spatiotemporal modeling. Experiments are not only conducted on traditional video prediction tasks but also other tasks beyond video prediction, including the early action recognition and object detection tasks. Experimental results show that our STAU can outperform other methods on all tasks in terms of performance and computation efficiency.

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STRPM: A Spatiotemporal Residual Predictive Model for High-Resolution Video Prediction

Although many video prediction methods have obtained good performance in low-resolution (64$\sim$128) videos, predictive models for high-resolution (512$\sim$4K) videos have not been fully explored yet, which are more meaningful due to the increasing demand for high-quality videos. Compared with low-resolution videos, high-resolution videos contain richer appearance (spatial) information and more complex motion (temporal) information. In this paper, we propose a Spatiotemporal Residual Predictive Model (STRPM) for high-resolution video prediction. On the one hand, we propose a Spatiotemporal Encoding-Decoding Scheme to preserve more spatiotemporal information for high-resolution videos. In this way, the appearance details for each frame can be greatly preserved. On the other hand, we design a Residual Predictive Memory (RPM) which focuses on modeling the spatiotemporal residual features (STRF) between previous and future frames instead of the whole frame, which can greatly help capture the complex motion information in high-resolution videos. In addition, the proposed RPM can supervise the spatial encoder and temporal encoder to extract different features in the spatial domain and the temporal domain, respectively. Moreover, the proposed model is trained using generative adversarial networks (GANs) with a learned perceptual loss (LP-loss) to improve the perceptual quality of the predictions. Experimental results show that STRPM can generate more satisfactory results compared with various existing methods.

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Improving Robustness and Accuracy via Relative Information Encoding in 3D Human Pose Estimation

Most of the existing 3D human pose estimation approaches mainly focus on predicting 3D positional relationships between the root joint and other human joints (local motion) instead of the overall trajectory of the human body (global motion). Despite the great progress achieved by these approaches, they are not robust to global motion, and lack the ability to accurately predict local motion with a small movement range. To alleviate these two problems, we propose a relative information encoding method that yields positional and temporal enhanced representations. Firstly, we encode positional information by utilizing relative coordinates of 2D poses to enhance the consistency between the input and output distribution. The same posture with different absolute 2D positions can be mapped to a common representation. It is beneficial to resist the interference of global motion on the prediction results. Second, we encode temporal information by establishing the connection between the current pose and other poses of the same person within a period of time. More attention will be paid to the movement changes before and after the current pose, resulting in better prediction performance on local motion with a small movement range. The ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed relative information encoding method. Besides, we introduce a multi-stage optimization method to the whole framework to further exploit the positional and temporal enhanced representations. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/paTRICK-swk/Pose3D-RIE.

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Towards Fine-grained Human Pose Transfer with Detail Replenishing Network

Human pose transfer (HPT) is an emerging research topic with huge potential in fashion design, media production, online advertising and virtual reality. For these applications, the visual realism of fine-grained appearance details is crucial for production quality and user engagement. However, existing HPT methods often suffer from three fundamental issues: detail deficiency, content ambiguity and style inconsistency, which severely degrade the visual quality and realism of generated images. Aiming towards real-world applications, we develop a more challenging yet practical HPT setting, termed as Fine-grained Human Pose Transfer (FHPT), with a higher focus on semantic fidelity and detail replenishment. Concretely, we analyze the potential design flaws of existing methods via an illustrative example, and establish the core FHPT methodology by combing the idea of content synthesis and feature transfer together in a mutually-guided fashion. Thereafter, we substantiate the proposed methodology with a Detail Replenishing Network (DRN) and a corresponding coarse-to-fine model training scheme. Moreover, we build up a complete suite of fine-grained evaluation protocols to address the challenges of FHPT in a comprehensive manner, including semantic analysis, structural detection and perceptual quality assessment. Extensive experiments on the DeepFashion benchmark dataset have verified the power of proposed benchmark against start-of-the-art works, with 12\%-14\% gain on top-10 retrieval recall, 5\% higher joint localization accuracy, and near 40\% gain on face identity preservation. Moreover, the evaluation results offer further insights to the subject matter, which could inspire many promising future works along this direction.

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Towards Analysis-friendly Face Representation with Scalable Feature and Texture Compression

It plays a fundamental role to compactly represent the visual information towards the optimization of the ultimate utility in myriad visual data centered applications. With numerous approaches proposed to efficiently compress the texture and visual features serving human visual perception and machine intelligence respectively, much less work has been dedicated to studying the interactions between them. Here we investigate the integration of feature and texture compression, and show that a universal and collaborative visual information representation can be achieved in a hierarchical way. In particular, we study the feature and texture compression in a scalable coding framework, where the base layer serves as the deep learning feature and enhancement layer targets to perfectly reconstruct the texture. Based on the strong generative capability of deep neural networks, the gap between the base feature layer and enhancement layer is further filled with the feature level texture reconstruction, aiming to further construct texture representation from feature. As such, the residuals between the original and reconstructed texture could be further conveyed in the enhancement layer. To improve the efficiency of the proposed framework, the base layer neural network is trained in a multi-task manner such that the learned features enjoy both high quality reconstruction and high accuracy analysis. We further demonstrate the framework and optimization strategies in face image compression, and promising coding performance has been achieved in terms of both rate-fidelity and rate-accuracy.

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