A Machine Learning Approach for Predicting Human Preference for Graph Layouts

Understanding what graph layout human prefer and why they prefer is significant and challenging due to the highly complex visual perception and cognition system in human brain. In this paper, we present the first machine learning approach for predicting human preference for graph layouts. In general, the data sets with human preference labels are limited and insufficient for training deep networks. To address this, we train our deep learning model by employing the transfer learning method, e.g., exploiting the quality metrics, such as shape-based metrics, edge crossing and stress, which are shown to be correlated to human preference on graph layouts. Experimental results using the ground truth human preference data sets show that our model can successfully predict human preference for graph layouts. To our best knowledge, this is the first approach for predicting qualitative evaluation of graph layouts using human preference experiment data.

ASDN: A Deep Convolutional Network for Arbitrary Scale Image Super-Resolution

Deep convolutional neural networks have significantly improved the peak signal-to-noise ratio of SuperResolution (SR). However, image viewer applications commonly allow users to zoom the images to arbitrary magnification scales, thus far imposing a large number of required training scales at a tremendous computational cost. To obtain a more computationally efficient model for arbitrary scale SR, this paper employs a Laplacian pyramid method to reconstruct any-scale high-resolution (HR) images using the high-frequency image details in a Laplacian Frequency Representation. For SR of small-scales (between 1 and 2), images are constructed by interpolation from a sparse set of precalculated Laplacian pyramid levels. SR of larger scales is computed by recursion from small scales, which significantly reduces the computational cost. For a full comparison, fixed- and any-scale experiments are conducted using various benchmarks. At fixed scales, ASDN outperforms predefined upsampling methods (e.g., SRCNN, VDSR, DRRN) by about 1 dB in PSNR. At any-scale, ASDN generally exceeds Meta-SR on many scales.

Deep Bi-Dense Networks for Image Super-Resolution

This paper proposes Deep Bi-Dense Networks (DBDN) for single image super-resolution. Our approach extends previous intra-block dense connection approaches by including novel inter-block dense connections. In this way, feature information propagates from a single dense block to all subsequent blocks, instead of to a single successor. To build a DBDN, we firstly construct intra-dense blocks, which extract and compress abundant local features via densely connected convolutional layers and compression layers for further feature learning. Then, we use an inter-block dense net to connect intra-dense blocks, which allow each intra-dense block propagates its own local features to all successors. Additionally, our bi-dense construction connects each block to the output, alleviating the vanishing gradient problems in training. The evaluation of our proposed method on five benchmark datasets shows that our DBDN outperforms the state of the art in SISR with a moderate number of network parameters.