arXiv subjects

Zhibo Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Zhibo Chen.

231 records · Page 13Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Learned Scalable Image Compression with Bidirectional Context Disentanglement Network

In this paper, we propose a learned scalable/progressive image compression scheme based on deep neural networks (DNN), named Bidirectional Context Disentanglement Network (BCD-Net). For learning hierarchical representations, we first adopt bit-plane decomposition to decompose the information coarsely before the deep-learning-based transformation. However, the information carried by different bit-planes is not only unequal in entropy but also of different importance for reconstruction. We thus take the hidden features corresponding to different bit-planes as the context and design a network topology with bidirectional flows to disentangle the contextual information for more effective compressed representations. Our proposed scheme enables us to obtain the compressed codes with scalable rates via a one-pass encoding-decoding. Experiment results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art DNN-based scalable image compression methods in both PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics. In addition, our proposed model achieves higher performance in MS-SSIM metric than conventional scalable image codecs. Effectiveness of our technical components is also verified through sufficient ablation experiments.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2019

Densely Semantically Aligned Person Re-Identification

We propose a densely semantically aligned person re-identification framework. It fundamentally addresses the body misalignment problem caused by pose/viewpoint variations, imperfect person detection, occlusion, etc. By leveraging the estimation of the dense semantics of a person image, we construct a set of densely semantically aligned part images (DSAP-images), where the same spatial positions have the same semantics across different images. We design a two-stream network that consists of a main full image stream (MF-Stream) and a densely semantically-aligned guiding stream (DSAG-Stream). The DSAG-Stream, with the DSAP-images as input, acts as a regulator to guide the MF-Stream to learn densely semantically aligned features from the original image. In the inference, the DSAG-Stream is discarded and only the MF-Stream is needed, which makes the inference system computationally efficient and robust. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to make use of fine grained semantics to address the misalignment problems for re-ID. Our method achieves rank-1 accuracy of 78.9% (new protocol) on the CUHK03 dataset, 90.4% on the CUHK01 dataset, and 95.7% on the Market1501 dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Learning based Facial Image Compression with Semantic Fidelity Metric

Surveillance and security scenarios usually require high efficient facial image compression scheme for face recognition and identification. While either traditional general image codecs or special facial image compression schemes only heuristically refine codec separately according to face verification accuracy metric. We propose a Learning based Facial Image Compression (LFIC) framework with a novel Regionally Adaptive Pooling (RAP) module whose parameters can be automatically optimized according to gradient feedback from an integrated hybrid semantic fidelity metric, including a successfully exploration to apply Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) as metric directly in image compression scheme. The experimental results verify the framework's efficiency by demonstrating performance improvement of 71.41%, 48.28% and 52.67% bitrate saving separately over JPEG2000, WebP and neural network-based codecs under the same face verification accuracy distortion metric. We also evaluate LFIC's superior performance gain compared with latest specific facial image codecs. Visual experiments also show some interesting insight on how LFIC can automatically capture the information in critical areas based on semantic distortion metrics for optimized compression, which is quite different from the heuristic way of optimization in traditional image compression algorithms.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2019

Asynchronous Episodic Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient: Towards Continuous Control in Computationally Complex Environments

Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) has been proved to be a successful reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for continuous control tasks. However, DDPG still suffers from data insufficiency and training inefficiency, especially in computationally complex environments. In this paper, we propose Asynchronous Episodic DDPG (AE-DDPG), as an expansion of DDPG, which can achieve more effective learning with less training time required. First, we design a modified scheme for data collection in an asynchronous fashion. Generally, for asynchronous RL algorithms, sample efficiency or/and training stability diminish as the degree of parallelism increases. We consider this problem from the perspectives of both data generation and data utilization. In detail, we re-design experience replay by introducing the idea of episodic control so that the agent can latch on good trajectories rapidly. In addition, we also inject a new type of noise in action space to enrich the exploration behaviors. Experiments demonstrate that our AE-DDPG achieves higher rewards and requires less time consuming than most popular RL algorithms in Learning to Run task which has a computationally complex environment. Not limited to the control tasks in computationally complex environments, AE-DDPG also achieves higher rewards and 2- to 4-fold improvement in sample efficiency on average compared to other variants of DDPG in MuJoCo environments. Furthermore, we verify the effectiveness of each proposed technique component through abundant ablation study.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

View Invariant 3D Human Pose Estimation

The recent success of deep networks has significantly advanced 3D human pose estimation from 2D images. The diversity of capturing viewpoints and the flexibility of the human poses, however, remain some significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a view invariant 3D human pose estimation module to alleviate the effects of viewpoint diversity. The framework consists of a base network, which provides an initial estimation of a 3D pose, a view-invariant hierarchical correction network (VI-HC) on top of that to learn the 3D pose refinement under consistent views, and a view-invariant discriminative network (VID) to enforce high-level constraints over body configurations. In VI-HC, the initial 3D pose inputs are automatically transformed to consistent views for further refinements at the global body and local body parts level, respectively. For the VID, under consistent viewpoints, we use adversarial learning to differentiate between estimated poses and real poses to avoid implausible 3D poses. Experimental results demonstrate that the consistent viewpoints can dramatically enhance the performance. Our module shows robustness for different 3D pose base networks and achieves a significant improvement (about 9%) over a powerful baseline on the public 3D pose estimation benchmark Human3.6M.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Learning for Video Compression

One key challenge to learning-based video compression is that motion predictive coding, a very effective tool for video compression, can hardly be trained into a neural network. In this paper we propose the concept of PixelMotionCNN (PMCNN) which includes motion extension and hybrid prediction networks. PMCNN can model spatiotemporal coherence to effectively perform predictive coding inside the learning network. On the basis of PMCNN, we further explore a learning-based framework for video compression with additional components of iterative analysis/synthesis, binarization, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Although entropy coding and complex configurations are not employed in this paper, we still demonstrate superior performance compared with MPEG-2 and achieve comparable results with H.264 codec. The proposed learning-based scheme provides a possible new direction to further improve compression efficiency and functionalities of future video coding.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2018

Sequential Gating Ensemble Network for Noise Robust Multi-Scale Face Restoration

Face restoration from low resolution and noise is important for applications of face analysis recognition. However, most existing face restoration models omit the multiple scale issues in face restoration problem, which is still not well-solved in research area. In this paper, we propose a Sequential Gating Ensemble Network (SGEN) for multi-scale noise robust face restoration issue. To endow the network with multi-scale representation ability, we first employ the principle of ensemble learning for SGEN network architecture designing. The SGEN aggregates multi-level base-encoders and base-decoders into the network, which enables the network to contain multiple scales of receptive field. Instead of combining these base-en/decoders directly with non-sequential operations, the SGEN takes base-en/decoders from different levels as sequential data. Specifically, it is visualized that SGEN learns to sequentially extract high level information from base-encoders in bottom-up manner and restore low level information from base-decoders in top-down manner. Besides, we propose to realize bottom-up and top-down information combination and selection with Sequential Gating Unit (SGU). The SGU sequentially takes information from two different levels as inputs and decides the output based on one active input. Experiment results on benchmark dataset demonstrate that our SGEN is more effective at multi-scale human face restoration with more image details and less noise than state-of-the-art image restoration models. Further utilizing adversarial training scheme, SGEN also produces more visually preferred results than other models under subjective evaluation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Hybrid Distortion Aggregated Visual Comfort Assessment for Stereoscopic Image Retargeting

Visual comfort is a quite important factor in 3D media service. Few research efforts have been carried out in this area especially in case of 3D content retargeting which may introduce more complicated visual distortions. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Distortion Aggregated Visual Comfort Assessment (HDA-VCA) scheme for stereoscopic retargeted images (SRI), considering aggregation of hybrid distortions including structure distortion, information loss, binocular incongruity and semantic distortion. Specifically, a Local-SSIM feature is proposed to reflect the local structural distortion of SRI, and information loss is represented by Dual Natural Scene Statistics (D-NSS) feature extracted from the binocular summation and difference channels. Regarding binocular incongruity, visual comfort zone, window violation, binocular rivalry, and accommodation-vergence conflict of human visual system (HVS) are evaluated. Finally, the semantic distortion is represented by the correlation distance of paired feature maps extracted from original stereoscopic image and its retargeted image by using trained deep neural network. We validate the effectiveness of HDA-VCA on published Stereoscopic Image Retargeting Database (SIRD) and two stereoscopic image databases IEEE-SA and NBU 3D-VCA. The results demonstrate HDA-VCA's superior performance in handling hybrid distortions compared to state-of-the-art VCA schemes.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2018

Unsupervised Single Image Deraining with Self-supervised Constraints

Most existing single image deraining methods require learning supervised models from a large set of paired synthetic training data, which limits their generality, scalability and practicality in real-world multimedia applications. Besides, due to lack of labeled-supervised constraints, directly applying existing unsupervised frameworks to the image deraining task will suffer from low-quality recovery. Therefore, we propose an Unsupervised Deraining Generative Adversarial Network (UD-GAN) to tackle above problems by introducing self-supervised constraints from the intrinsic statistics of unpaired rainy and clean images. Specifically, we firstly design two collaboratively optimized modules, namely Rain Guidance Module (RGM) and Background Guidance Module (BGM), to take full advantage of rainy image characteristics: The RGM is designed to discriminate real rainy images from fake rainy images which are created based on outputs of the generator with BGM. Simultaneously, the BGM exploits a hierarchical Gaussian-Blur gradient error to ensure background consistency between rainy input and de-rained output. Secondly, a novel luminance-adjusting adversarial loss is integrated into the clean image discriminator considering the built-in luminance difference between real clean images and derained images. Comprehensive experiment results on various benchmarking datasets and different training settings show that UD-GAN outperforms existing image deraining methods in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Distribution Discrepancy Maximization for Image Privacy Preserving

With the rapid increase in online photo sharing activities, image obfuscation algorithms become particularly important for protecting the sensitive information in the shared photos. However, existing image obfuscation methods based on hand-crafted principles are challenged by the dramatic development of deep learning techniques. To address this problem, we propose to maximize the distribution discrepancy between the original image domain and the encrypted image domain. Accordingly, we introduce a collaborative training scheme: a discriminator $D$ is trained to discriminate the reconstructed image from the encrypted image, and an encryption model $G_e$ is required to generate these two kinds of images to maximize the recognition rate of $D$, leading to the same training objective for both $D$ and $G_e$. We theoretically prove that such a training scheme maximizes two distributions' discrepancy. Compared with commonly-used image obfuscation methods, our model can produce satisfactory defense against the attack of deep recognition models indicated by significant accuracy decreases on FaceScrub, Casia-WebFace and LFW datasets.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Locating earthquakes with a network of seismic stations via a deep learning method

The accurate and automated determination of earthquake locations is still a challenging endeavor. However, such information is critical for monitoring seismic activity and assessing potential hazards in real time. Recently, a convolutional neural network was applied to detect earthquakes from single-station waveforms and approximately map events across several large surface areas. In this study, we locate 194 earthquakes induced during oil and gas operations in Oklahoma, USA, within an error range of approximately 4.9 km on average to the epicenter and 1.0 km to the depth in catalogs with data from 30 network stations by applying the fully convolutional network. The network is trained by 1,013 historic events, and the output is a 3D volume of the event location probability in the Earth. The trained system requires approximately one hundredth of a second to locate an event without the need for any velocity model or human interference.

physics.geo-ph↗

arXiv2018

Visual Comfort Assessment for Stereoscopic Image Retargeting

In recent years, visual comfort assessment (VCA) for 3D/stereoscopic content has aroused extensive attention. However, much less work has been done on the perceptual evaluation of stereoscopic image retargeting. In this paper, we first build a Stereoscopic Image Retargeting Database (SIRD), which contains source images and retargeted images produced by four typical stereoscopic retargeting methods. Then, the subjective experiment is conducted to assess four aspects of visual distortion, i.e. visual comfort, image quality, depth quality and the overall quality. Furthermore, we propose a Visual Comfort Assessment metric for Stereoscopic Image Retargeting (VCA-SIR). Based on the characteristics of stereoscopic retargeted images, the proposed model introduces novel features like disparity range, boundary disparity as well as disparity intensity distribution into the assessment model. Experimental results demonstrate that VCA-SIR can achieve high consistency with subjective perception.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2018

Multi-Scale Face Restoration with Sequential Gating Ensemble Network

Restoring face images from distortions is important in face recognition applications and is challenged by multiple scale issues, which is still not well-solved in research area. In this paper, we present a Sequential Gating Ensemble Network (SGEN) for multi-scale face restoration issue. We first employ the principle of ensemble learning into SGEN architecture design to reinforce predictive performance of the network. The SGEN aggregates multi-level base-encoders and base-decoders into the network, which enables the network to contain multiple scales of receptive field. Instead of combining these base-en/decoders directly with non-sequential operations, the SGEN takes base-en/decoders from different levels as sequential data. Specifically, the SGEN learns to sequentially extract high level information from base-encoders in bottom-up manner and restore low level information from base-decoders in top-down manner. Besides, we propose to realize bottom-up and top-down information combination and selection with Sequential Gating Unit (SGU). The SGU sequentially takes two inputs from different levels and decides the output based on one active input. Experiment results demonstrate that our SGEN is more effective at multi-scale human face restoration with more image details and less noise than state-of-the-art image restoration models. By using adversarial training, SGEN also produces more visually preferred results than other models through subjective evaluation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Conditional Image-to-Image Translation

Image-to-image translation tasks have been widely investigated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and dual learning. However, existing models lack the ability to control the translated results in the target domain and their results usually lack of diversity in the sense that a fixed image usually leads to (almost) deterministic translation result. In this paper, we study a new problem, conditional image-to-image translation, which is to translate an image from the source domain to the target domain conditioned on a given image in the target domain. It requires that the generated image should inherit some domain-specific features of the conditional image from the target domain. Therefore, changing the conditional image in the target domain will lead to diverse translation results for a fixed input image from the source domain, and therefore the conditional input image helps to control the translation results. We tackle this problem with unpaired data based on GANs and dual learning. We twist two conditional translation models (one translation from A domain to B domain, and the other one from B domain to A domain) together for inputs combination and reconstruction while preserving domain independent features. We carry out experiments on men's faces from-to women's faces translation and edges to shoes&bags translations. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Learning to Run challenge solutions: Adapting reinforcement learning methods for neuromusculoskeletal environments

In the NIPS 2017 Learning to Run challenge, participants were tasked with building a controller for a musculoskeletal model to make it run as fast as possible through an obstacle course. Top participants were invited to describe their algorithms. In this work, we present eight solutions that used deep reinforcement learning approaches, based on algorithms such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, Proximal Policy Optimization, and Trust Region Policy Optimization. Many solutions use similar relaxations and heuristics, such as reward shaping, frame skipping, discretization of the action space, symmetry, and policy blending. However, each of the eight teams implemented different modifications of the known algorithms.

cs.LG↗