In this work, we propose a novel framework named Region-Aware Network (RANet), which learns the ability of anti-confusing in case of heavy occlusion, nearby person and symmetric appearance, for human pose estimation. Specifically, the proposed method addresses three key aspects, i.e., data augmentation, feature learning and prediction fusion, respectively. First, we propose Parsing-based Data Augmentation (PDA) to generate abundant data that synthesizes confusing textures. Second, we not only propose a Feature Pyramid Stem (FPS) to learn stronger low-level features in lower stage; but also incorporate an Effective Region Extraction (ERE) module to excavate better target-specific features. Third, we introduce Cascade Voting Fusion (CVF) to explicitly exclude the inferior predictions and fuse the rest effective predictions for the final pose estimation. Extensive experimental results on two popular benchmarks, i.e. MPII and LSP, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against the state-of-the-art competitors. Especially on easily-confusable joints, our method makes significant improvement.
In this work, we propose a novel meta-learning approach for few-shot classification, which learns transferable prior knowledge across tasks and directly produces network parameters for similar unseen tasks with training samples. Our approach, called LGM-Net, includes two key modules, namely, TargetNet and MetaNet. The TargetNet module is a neural network for solving a specific task and the MetaNet module aims at learning to generate functional weights for TargetNet by observing training samples. We also present an intertask normalization strategy for the training process to leverage common information shared across different tasks. The experimental results on Omniglot and miniImageNet datasets demonstrate that LGM-Net can effectively adapt to similar unseen tasks and achieve competitive performance, and the results on synthetic datasets show that transferable prior knowledge is learned by the MetaNet module via mapping training data to functional weights. LGM-Net enables fast learning and adaptation since no further tuning steps are required compared to other meta-learning approaches.
Structured pruning of filters or neurons has received increased focus for compressing convolutional neural networks. Most existing methods rely on multi-stage optimizations in a layer-wise manner for iteratively pruning and retraining which may not be optimal and may be computation intensive. Besides, these methods are designed for pruning a specific structure, such as filter or block structures without jointly pruning heterogeneous structures. In this paper, we propose an effective structured pruning approach that jointly prunes filters as well as other structures in an end-to-end manner. To accomplish this, we first introduce a soft mask to scale the output of these structures by defining a new objective function with sparsity regularization to align the output of baseline and network with this mask. We then effectively solve the optimization problem by generative adversarial learning (GAL), which learns a sparse soft mask in a label-free and an end-to-end manner. By forcing more scaling factors in the soft mask to zero, the fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (FISTA) can be leveraged to fast and reliably remove the corresponding structures. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GAL on different datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet ILSVRC 2012. For example, on ImageNet ILSVRC 2012, the pruned ResNet-50 achieves 10.88\% Top-5 error and results in a factor of 3.7x speedup. This significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
In this paper, we propose a light reflection based face anti-spoofing method named Aurora Guard (AG), which is fast, simple yet effective that has already been deployed in real-world systems serving for millions of users. Specifically, our method first extracts the normal cues via light reflection analysis, and then uses an end-to-end trainable multi-task Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to not only recover subjects' depth maps to assist liveness classification, but also provide the light CAPTCHA checking mechanism in the regression branch to further improve the system reliability. Moreover, we further collect a large-scale dataset containing $12,000$ live and spoofing samples, which covers abundant imaging qualities and Presentation Attack Instruments (PAI). Extensive experiments on both public and our datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over the state of the arts.
Compressing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has received ever-increasing research focus. However, most existing CNN compression methods do not interpret their inherent structures to distinguish the implicit redundancy. In this paper, we investigate the problem of CNN compression from a novel interpretable perspective. The relationship between the input feature maps and 2D kernels is revealed in a theoretical framework, based on which a kernel sparsity and entropy (KSE) indicator is proposed to quantitate the feature map importance in a feature-agnostic manner to guide model compression. Kernel clustering is further conducted based on the KSE indicator to accomplish high-precision CNN compression. KSE is capable of simultaneously compressing each layer in an efficient way, which is significantly faster compared to previous data-driven feature map pruning methods. We comprehensively evaluate the compression and speedup of the proposed method on CIFAR-10, SVHN and ImageNet 2012. Our method demonstrates superior performance gains over previous ones. In particular, it achieves 4.7 \times FLOPs reduction and 2.9 \times compression on ResNet-50 with only a Top-5 accuracy drop of 0.35% on ImageNet 2012, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
In recent years, heatmap regression based models have shown their effectiveness in face alignment and pose estimation. However, Conventional Heatmap Regression (CHR) is not accurate nor stable when dealing with high-resolution facial videos, since it finds the maximum activated location in heatmaps which are generated from rounding coordinates, and thus leads to quantization errors when scaling back to the original high-resolution space. In this paper, we propose a Fractional Heatmap Regression (FHR) for high-resolution video-based face alignment. The proposed FHR can accurately estimate the fractional part according to the 2D Gaussian function by sampling three points in heatmaps. To further stabilize the landmarks among continuous video frames while maintaining the precise at the same time, we propose a novel stabilization loss that contains two terms to address time delay and non-smooth issues, respectively. Experiments on 300W, 300-VW and Talking Face datasets clearly demonstrate that the proposed method is more accurate and stable than the state-of-the-art models.
Most existing Re-IDentification (Re-ID) methods are highly dependent on precise bounding boxes that enable images to be aligned with each other. However, due to the inevitable challenging scenarios, current detection models often output inaccurate bounding boxes yet, which inevitably worsen the performance of these Re-ID algorithms. In this paper, to relax the requirement, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine pyramid model that not only incorporates local and global information, but also integrates the gradual cues between them. The pyramid model is able to match the cues at different scales and then search for the correct image of the same identity even when the image pair are not aligned. In addition, in order to learn discriminative identity representation, we explore a dynamic training scheme to seamlessly unify two losses and extract appropriate shared information between them. Experimental results clearly demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art results on three datasets and it is worth noting that our approach exceeds the current best method by 9.5% on the most challenging dataset CUHK03.
Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has achieved great success in face detection. However, it remains a challenging problem for the current face detection methods owing to high degree of variability in scale, pose, occlusion, expression, appearance and illumination. In this paper, we propose a novel face detection network named Dual Shot face Detector(DSFD), which inherits the architecture of SSD and introduces a Feature Enhance Module (FEM) for transferring the original feature maps to extend the single shot detector to dual shot detector. Specially, Progressive Anchor Loss (PAL) computed by using two set of anchors is adopted to effectively facilitate the features. Additionally, we propose an Improved Anchor Matching (IAM) method by integrating novel data augmentation techniques and anchor design strategy in our DSFD to provide better initialization for the regressor. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks: WIDER FACE (easy: $0.966$, medium: $0.957$, hard: $0.904$) and FDDB ( discontinuous: $0.991$, continuous: $0.862$) demonstrate the superiority of DSFD over the state-of-the-art face detectors (e.g., PyramidBox and SRN). Code will be made available upon publication.
While attributes have been widely used for person re-identification (Re-ID) which aims at matching the same person images across disjoint camera views, they are used either as extra features or for performing multi-task learning to assist the image-image matching task. However, how to find a set of person images according to a given attribute description, which is very practical in many surveillance applications, remains a rarely investigated cross-modality matching problem in person Re-ID. In this work, we present this challenge and formulate this task as a joint space learning problem. By imposing an attribute-guided attention mechanism for images and a semantic consistent adversary strategy for attributes, each modality, i.e., images and attributes, successfully learns semantically correlated concepts under the guidance of the other. We conducted extensive experiments on three attribute datasets and demonstrated that the proposed joint space learning method is so far the most effective method for the attribute-image cross-modality person Re-ID problem.