Occlusion Sensitivity Analysis with Augmentation Subspace Perturbation in Deep Feature Space

Deep Learning of neural networks has gained prominence in multiple life-critical applications like medical diagnoses and autonomous vehicle accident investigations. However, concerns about model transparency and biases persist. Explainable methods are viewed as the solution to address these challenges. In this study, we introduce the Occlusion Sensitivity Analysis with Deep Feature Augmentation Subspace (OSA-DAS), a novel perturbation-based interpretability approach for computer vision. While traditional perturbation methods make only use of occlusions to explain the model predictions, OSA-DAS extends standard occlusion sensitivity analysis by enabling the integration with diverse image augmentations. Distinctly, our method utilizes the output vector of a DNN to build low-dimensional subspaces within the deep feature vector space, offering a more precise explanation of the model prediction. The structural similarity between these subspaces encompasses the influence of diverse augmentations and occlusions. We test extensively on the ImageNet-1k, and our class- and model-agnostic approach outperforms commonly used interpreters, setting it apart in the realm of explainable AI.

Diffusion-based Holistic Texture Rectification and Synthesis

We present a novel framework for rectifying occlusions and distortions in degraded texture samples from natural images. Traditional texture synthesis approaches focus on generating textures from pristine samples, which necessitate meticulous preparation by humans and are often unattainable in most natural images. These challenges stem from the frequent occlusions and distortions of texture samples in natural images due to obstructions and variations in object surface geometry. To address these issues, we propose a framework that synthesizes holistic textures from degraded samples in natural images, extending the applicability of exemplar-based texture synthesis techniques. Our framework utilizes a conditional Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with a novel occlusion-aware latent transformer. This latent transformer not only effectively encodes texture features from partially-observed samples necessary for the generation process of the LDM, but also explicitly captures long-range dependencies in samples with large occlusions. To train our model, we introduce a method for generating synthetic data by applying geometric transformations and free-form mask generation to clean textures. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods both quantitatively and quantitatively. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to validate the different components of our proposed framework. Results are corroborated by a perceptual user study which highlights the efficiency of our proposed approach.

Controllable Multi-domain Semantic Artwork Synthesis

We present a novel framework for multi-domain synthesis of artwork from semantic layouts. One of the main limitations of this challenging task is the lack of publicly available segmentation datasets for art synthesis. To address this problem, we propose a dataset, which we call ArtSem, that contains 40,000 images of artwork from 4 different domains with their corresponding semantic label maps. We generate the dataset by first extracting semantic maps from landscape photography and then propose a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based approach to generate high-quality artwork from the semantic maps without necessitating paired training data. Furthermore, we propose an artwork synthesis model that uses domain-dependent variational encoders for high-quality multi-domain synthesis. The model is improved and complemented with a simple but effective normalization method, based on normalizing both the semantic and style jointly, which we call Spatially STyle-Adaptive Normalization (SSTAN). In contrast to previous methods that only take semantic layout as input, our model is able to learn a joint representation of both style and semantic information, which leads to better generation quality for synthesizing artistic images. Results indicate that our model learns to separate the domains in the latent space, and thus, by identifying the hyperplanes that separate the different domains, we can also perform fine-grained control of the synthesized artwork. By combining our proposed dataset and approach, we are able to generate user-controllable artwork that is of higher quality than existing

Time-series Anomaly Detection based on Difference Subspace between Signal Subspaces

This paper proposes a new method for anomaly detection in time-series data by incorporating the concept of difference subspace into the singular spectrum analysis (SSA). The key idea is to monitor slight temporal variations of the difference subspace between two signal subspaces corresponding to the past and present time-series data, as anomaly score. It is a natural generalization of the conventional SSA-based method which measures the minimum angle between the two signal subspaces as the degree of changes. By replacing the minimum angle with the difference subspace, our method boosts the performance while using the SSA-based framework as it can capture the whole structural difference between the two subspaces in its magnitude and direction. We demonstrate our method's effectiveness through performance evaluations on public time-series datasets.

Visually explaining 3D-CNN predictions for video classification with an adaptive occlusion sensitivity analysis

This paper proposes a method for visually explaining the decision-making process of 3D convolutional neural networks (CNN) with a temporal extension of occlusion sensitivity analysis. The key idea here is to occlude a specific volume of data by a 3D mask in an input 3D temporal-spatial data space and then measure the change degree in the output score. The occluded volume data that produces a larger change degree is regarded as a more critical element for classification. However, while the occlusion sensitivity analysis is commonly used to analyze single image classification, it is not so straightforward to apply this idea to video classification as a simple fixed cuboid cannot deal with the motions. To this end, we adapt the shape of a 3D occlusion mask to complicated motions of target objects. Our flexible mask adaptation is performed by considering the temporal continuity and spatial co-occurrence of the optical flows extracted from the input video data. We further propose to approximate our method by using the first-order partial derivative of the score with respect to an input image to reduce its computational cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through various and extensive comparisons with the conventional methods in terms of the deletion/insertion metric and the pointing metric on the UCF-101. The code is available at: https://github.com/uchiyama33/AOSA.

Grassmannian learning mutual subspace method for image set recognition

This paper addresses the problem of object recognition given a set of images as input (e.g., multiple camera sources and video frames). Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based frameworks do not exploit these sets effectively, processing a pattern as observed, not capturing the underlying feature distribution as it does not consider the variance of images in the set. To address this issue, we propose the Grassmannian learning mutual subspace method (G-LMSM), a NN layer embedded on top of CNNs as a classifier, that can process image sets more effectively and can be trained in an end-to-end manner. The image set is represented by a low-dimensional input subspace; and this input subspace is matched with reference subspaces by a similarity of their canonical angles, an interpretable and easy to compute metric. The key idea of G-LMSM is that the reference subspaces are learned as points on the Grassmann manifold, optimized with Riemannian stochastic gradient descent. This learning is stable, efficient and theoretically well-grounded. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on hand shape recognition, face identification, and facial emotion recognition.

Discriminative Singular Spectrum Classifier with Applications on Bioacoustic Signal Recognition

Automatic analysis of bioacoustic signals is a fundamental tool to evaluate the vitality of our planet. Frogs and bees, for instance, may act like biological sensors providing information about environmental changes. This task is fundamental for ecological monitoring still includes many challenges such as nonuniform signal length processing, degraded target signal due to environmental noise, and the scarcity of the labeled samples for training machine learning. To tackle these challenges, we present a bioacoustic signal classifier equipped with a discriminative mechanism to extract useful features for analysis and classification efficiently. The proposed classifier does not require a large amount of training data and handles nonuniform signal length natively. Unlike current bioacoustic recognition methods, which are task-oriented, the proposed model relies on transforming the input signals into vector subspaces generated by applying Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA). Then, a subspace is designed to expose discriminative features. The proposed model shares end-to-end capabilities, which is desirable in modern machine learning systems. This formulation provides a segmentation-free and noise-tolerant approach to represent and classify bioacoustic signals and a highly compact signal descriptor inherited from SSA. The validity of the proposed method is verified using three challenging bioacoustic datasets containing anuran, bee, and mosquito species. Experimental results on three bioacoustic datasets have shown the competitive performance of the proposed method compared to commonly employed methods for bioacoustics signal classification in terms of accuracy.

Discriminant analysis based on projection onto generalized difference subspace

This paper discusses a new type of discriminant analysis based on the orthogonal projection of data onto a generalized difference subspace (GDS). In our previous work, we have demonstrated that GDS projection works as the quasi-orthogonalization of class subspaces, which is an effective feature extraction for subspace based classifiers. Interestingly, GDS projection also works as a discriminant feature extraction through a similar mechanism to the Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA). A direct proof of the connection between GDS projection and FDA is difficult due to the significant difference in their formulations. To avoid the difficulty, we first introduce geometrical Fisher discriminant analysis (gFDA) based on a simplified Fisher criterion. Our simplified Fisher criterion is derived from a heuristic yet practically plausible principle: the direction of the sample mean vector of a class is in most cases almost equal to that of the first principal component vector of the class, under the condition that the principal component vectors are calculated by applying the principal component analysis (PCA) without data centering. gFDA can work stably even under few samples, bypassing the small sample size (SSS) problem of FDA. Next, we prove that gFDA is equivalent to GDS projection with a small correction term. This equivalence ensures GDS projection to inherit the discriminant ability from FDA via gFDA. Furthermore, to enhance the performances of gFDA and GDS projection, we normalize the projected vectors on the discriminant spaces. Extensive experiments using the extended Yale B+ database and the CMU face database show that gFDA and GDS projection have equivalent or better performance than the original FDA and its extensions.

Resolving Marker Pose Ambiguity by Robust Rotation Averaging with Clique Constraints

Planar markers are useful in robotics and computer vision for mapping and localisation. Given a detected marker in an image, a frequent task is to estimate the 6DOF pose of the marker relative to the camera, which is an instance of planar pose estimation (PPE). Although there are mature techniques, PPE suffers from a fundamental ambiguity problem, in that there can be more than one plausible pose solutions for a PPE instance. Especially when localisation of the marker corners is noisy, it is often difficult to disambiguate the pose solutions based on reprojection error alone. Previous methods choose between the possible solutions using a heuristic criteria, or simply ignore ambiguous markers. We propose to resolve the ambiguities by examining the consistencies of a set of markers across multiple views. Our specific contributions include a novel rotation averaging formulation that incorporates long-range dependencies between possible marker orientation solutions that arise from PPE ambiguities. We analyse the combinatorial complexity of the problem, and develop a novel lifted algorithm to effectively resolve marker pose ambiguities, without discarding any marker observations. Results on real and synthetic data show that our method is able to handle highly ambiguous inputs, and provides more accurate and/or complete marker-based mapping and localisation.