arXiv subjects

Ying-Cong Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Ying-Cong Chen.

102 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Real-time 6K Image Rescaling with Rate-distortion Optimization

Contemporary image rescaling aims at embedding a high-resolution (HR) image into a low-resolution (LR) thumbnail image that contains embedded information for HR image reconstruction. Unlike traditional image super-resolution, this enables high-fidelity HR image restoration faithful to the original one, given the embedded information in the LR thumbnail. However, state-of-the-art image rescaling methods do not optimize the LR image file size for efficient sharing and fall short of real-time performance for ultra-high-resolution (e.g., 6K) image reconstruction. To address these two challenges, we propose a novel framework (HyperThumbnail) for real-time 6K rate-distortion-aware image rescaling. Our framework first embeds an HR image into a JPEG LR thumbnail by an encoder with our proposed quantization prediction module, which minimizes the file size of the embedding LR JPEG thumbnail while maximizing HR reconstruction quality. Then, an efficient frequency-aware decoder reconstructs a high-fidelity HR image from the LR one in real time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous image rescaling baselines in rate-distortion performance and can perform 6K image reconstruction in real time.

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arXiv2023

Lift3D: Synthesize 3D Training Data by Lifting 2D GAN to 3D Generative Radiance Field

This work explores the use of 3D generative models to synthesize training data for 3D vision tasks. The key requirements of the generative models are that the generated data should be photorealistic to match the real-world scenarios, and the corresponding 3D attributes should be aligned with given sampling labels. However, we find that the recent NeRF-based 3D GANs hardly meet the above requirements due to their designed generation pipeline and the lack of explicit 3D supervision. In this work, we propose Lift3D, an inverted 2D-to-3D generation framework to achieve the data generation objectives. Lift3D has several merits compared to prior methods: (1) Unlike previous 3D GANs that the output resolution is fixed after training, Lift3D can generalize to any camera intrinsic with higher resolution and photorealistic output. (2) By lifting well-disentangled 2D GAN to 3D object NeRF, Lift3D provides explicit 3D information of generated objects, thus offering accurate 3D annotations for downstream tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of our framework by augmenting autonomous driving datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our data generation framework can effectively improve the performance of 3D object detectors. Project page: https://len-li.github.io/lift3d-web.

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arXiv2022

Contactless Oxygen Monitoring with Gated Transformer

With the increasing popularity of telehealth, it becomes critical to ensure that basic physiological signals can be monitored accurately at home, with minimal patient overhead. In this paper, we propose a contactless approach for monitoring patients' blood oxygen at home, simply by analyzing the radio signals in the room, without any wearable devices. We extract the patients' respiration from the radio signals that bounce off their bodies and devise a novel neural network that infers a patient's oxygen estimates from their breathing signal. Our model, called \emph{Gated BERT-UNet}, is designed to adapt to the patient's medical indices (e.g., gender, sleep stages). It has multiple predictive heads and selects the most suitable head via a gate controlled by the person's physiological indices. Extensive empirical results show that our model achieves high accuracy on both medical and radio datasets.

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arXiv2022

Representation Compensation Networks for Continual Semantic Segmentation

In this work, we study the continual semantic segmentation problem, where the deep neural networks are required to incorporate new classes continually without catastrophic forgetting. We propose to use a structural re-parameterization mechanism, named representation compensation (RC) module, to decouple the representation learning of both old and new knowledge. The RC module consists of two dynamically evolved branches with one frozen and one trainable. Besides, we design a pooled cube knowledge distillation strategy on both spatial and channel dimensions to further enhance the plasticity and stability of the model. We conduct experiments on two challenging continual semantic segmentation scenarios, continual class segmentation and continual domain segmentation. Without any extra computational overhead and parameters during inference, our method outperforms state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhangchbin/RCIL}.

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arXiv2021

Image Synthesis via Semantic Composition

In this paper, we present a novel approach to synthesize realistic images based on their semantic layouts. It hypothesizes that for objects with similar appearance, they share similar representation. Our method establishes dependencies between regions according to their appearance correlation, yielding both spatially variant and associated representations. Conditioning on these features, we propose a dynamic weighted network constructed by spatially conditional computation (with both convolution and normalization). More than preserving semantic distinctions, the given dynamic network strengthens semantic relevance, benefiting global structure and detail synthesis. We demonstrate that our method gives the compelling generation performance qualitatively and quantitatively with extensive experiments on benchmarks.

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arXiv2021

Delving into Deep Imbalanced Regression

Real-world data often exhibit imbalanced distributions, where certain target values have significantly fewer observations. Existing techniques for dealing with imbalanced data focus on targets with categorical indices, i.e., different classes. However, many tasks involve continuous targets, where hard boundaries between classes do not exist. We define Deep Imbalanced Regression (DIR) as learning from such imbalanced data with continuous targets, dealing with potential missing data for certain target values, and generalizing to the entire target range. Motivated by the intrinsic difference between categorical and continuous label space, we propose distribution smoothing for both labels and features, which explicitly acknowledges the effects of nearby targets, and calibrates both label and learned feature distributions. We curate and benchmark large-scale DIR datasets from common real-world tasks in computer vision, natural language processing, and healthcare domains. Extensive experiments verify the superior performance of our strategies. Our work fills the gap in benchmarks and techniques for practical imbalanced regression problems. Code and data are available at https://github.com/YyzHarry/imbalanced-regression.

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arXiv2020

Attentive Normalization for Conditional Image Generation

Traditional convolution-based generative adversarial networks synthesize images based on hierarchical local operations, where long-range dependency relation is implicitly modeled with a Markov chain. It is still not sufficient for categories with complicated structures. In this paper, we characterize long-range dependence with attentive normalization (AN), which is an extension to traditional instance normalization. Specifically, the input feature map is softly divided into several regions based on its internal semantic similarity, which are respectively normalized. It enhances consistency between distant regions with semantic correspondence. Compared with self-attention GAN, our attentive normalization does not need to measure the correlation of all locations, and thus can be directly applied to large-size feature maps without much computational burden. Extensive experiments on class-conditional image generation and semantic inpainting verify the efficacy of our proposed module.

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arXiv2020

VCNet: A Robust Approach to Blind Image Inpainting

Blind inpainting is a task to automatically complete visual contents without specifying masks for missing areas in an image. Previous works assume missing region patterns are known, limiting its application scope. In this paper, we relax the assumption by defining a new blind inpainting setting, making training a blind inpainting neural system robust against various unknown missing region patterns. Specifically, we propose a two-stage visual consistency network (VCN), meant to estimate where to fill (via masks) and generate what to fill. In this procedure, the unavoidable potential mask prediction errors lead to severe artifacts in the subsequent repairing. To address it, our VCN predicts semantically inconsistent regions first, making mask prediction more tractable. Then it repairs these estimated missing regions using a new spatial normalization, enabling VCN to be robust to the mask prediction errors. In this way, semantically convincing and visually compelling content is thus generated. Extensive experiments are conducted, showing our method is effective and robust in blind image inpainting. And our VCN allows for a wide spectrum of applications.

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arXiv2018

Facelet-Bank for Fast Portrait Manipulation

Digital face manipulation has become a popular and fascinating way to touch images with the prevalence of smartphones and social networks. With a wide variety of user preferences, facial expressions, and accessories, a general and flexible model is necessary to accommodate different types of facial editing. In this paper, we propose a model to achieve this goal based on an end-to-end convolutional neural network that supports fast inference, edit-effect control, and quick partial-model update. In addition, this model learns from unpaired image sets with different attributes. Experimental results show that our framework can handle a wide range of expressions, accessories, and makeup effects. It produces high-resolution and high-quality results in fast speed.

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arXiv2017

Convolutional Neural Pyramid for Image Processing

We propose a principled convolutional neural pyramid (CNP) framework for general low-level vision and image processing tasks. It is based on the essential finding that many applications require large receptive fields for structure understanding. But corresponding neural networks for regression either stack many layers or apply large kernels to achieve it, which is computationally very costly. Our pyramid structure can greatly enlarge the field while not sacrificing computation efficiency. Extra benefit includes adaptive network depth and progressive upsampling for quasi-realtime testing on VGA-size input. Our method profits a broad set of applications, such as depth/RGB image restoration, completion, noise/artifact removal, edge refinement, image filtering, image enhancement and colorization.

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arXiv2017

Person Re-Identification by Camera Correlation Aware Feature Augmentation

The challenge of person re-identification (re-id) is to match individual images of the same person captured by different non-overlapping camera views against significant and unknown cross-view feature distortion. While a large number of distance metric/subspace learning models have been developed for re-id, the cross-view transformations they learned are view-generic and thus potentially less effective in quantifying the feature distortion inherent to each camera view. Learning view-specific feature transformations for re-id (i.e., view-specific re-id), an under-studied approach, becomes an alternative resort for this problem. In this work, we formulate a novel view-specific person re-identification framework from the feature augmentation point of view, called Camera coRrelation Aware Feature augmenTation (CRAFT). Specifically, CRAFT performs cross-view adaptation by automatically measuring camera correlation from cross-view visual data distribution and adaptively conducting feature augmentation to transform the original features into a new adaptive space. Through our augmentation framework, view-generic learning algorithms can be readily generalized to learn and optimize view-specific sub-models whilst simultaneously modelling view-generic discrimination information. Therefore, our framework not only inherits the strength of view-generic model learning but also provides an effective way to take into account view specific characteristics. Our CRAFT framework can be extended to jointly learn view-specific feature transformations for person re-id across a large network with more than two cameras, a largely under-investigated but realistic re-id setting. Additionally, we present a domain-generic deep person appearance representation which is designed particularly to be towards view invariant for facilitating cross-view adaptation by CRAFT.

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arXiv2016

An Enhanced Deep Feature Representation for Person Re-identification

Feature representation and metric learning are two critical components in person re-identification models. In this paper, we focus on the feature representation and claim that hand-crafted histogram features can be complementary to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features. We propose a novel feature extraction model called Feature Fusion Net (FFN) for pedestrian image representation. In FFN, back propagation makes CNN features constrained by the handcrafted features. Utilizing color histogram features (RGB, HSV, YCbCr, Lab and YIQ) and texture features (multi-scale and multi-orientation Gabor features), we get a new deep feature representation that is more discriminative and compact. Experiments on three challenging datasets (VIPeR, CUHK01, PRID450s) validates the effectiveness of our proposal.

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