Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation

Character Animation aims to generating character videos from still images through driving signals. Currently, diffusion models have become the mainstream in visual generation research, owing to their robust generative capabilities. However, challenges persist in the realm of image-to-video, especially in character animation, where temporally maintaining consistency with detailed information from character remains a formidable problem. In this paper, we leverage the power of diffusion models and propose a novel framework tailored for character animation. To preserve consistency of intricate appearance features from reference image, we design ReferenceNet to merge detail features via spatial attention. To ensure controllability and continuity, we introduce an efficient pose guider to direct character's movements and employ an effective temporal modeling approach to ensure smooth inter-frame transitions between video frames. By expanding the training data, our approach can animate arbitrary characters, yielding superior results in character animation compared to other image-to-video methods. Furthermore, we evaluate our method on benchmarks for fashion video and human dance synthesis, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Recurrent Dynamic Embedding for Video Object Segmentation

Space-time memory (STM) based video object segmentation (VOS) networks usually keep increasing memory bank every several frames, which shows excellent performance. However, 1) the hardware cannot withstand the ever-increasing memory requirements as the video length increases. 2) Storing lots of information inevitably introduces lots of noise, which is not conducive to reading the most important information from the memory bank. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Dynamic Embedding (RDE) to build a memory bank of constant size. Specifically, we explicitly generate and update RDE by the proposed Spatio-temporal Aggregation Module (SAM), which exploits the cue of historical information. To avoid error accumulation owing to the recurrent usage of SAM, we propose an unbiased guidance loss during the training stage, which makes SAM more robust in long videos. Moreover, the predicted masks in the memory bank are inaccurate due to the inaccurate network inference, which affects the segmentation of the query frame. To address this problem, we design a novel self-correction strategy so that the network can repair the embeddings of masks with different qualities in the memory bank. Extensive experiments show our method achieves the best tradeoff between performance and speed. Code is available at https://github.com/Limingxing00/RDE-VOS-CVPR2022.

Learning Position and Target Consistency for Memory-based Video Object Segmentation

This paper studies the problem of semi-supervised video object segmentation(VOS). Multiple works have shown that memory-based approaches can be effective for video object segmentation. They are mostly based on pixel-level matching, both spatially and temporally. The main shortcoming of memory-based approaches is that they do not take into account the sequential order among frames and do not exploit object-level knowledge from the target. To address this limitation, we propose to Learn position and target Consistency framework for Memory-based video object segmentation, termed as LCM. It applies the memory mechanism to retrieve pixels globally, and meanwhile learns position consistency for more reliable segmentation. The learned location response promotes a better discrimination between target and distractors. Besides, LCM introduces an object-level relationship from the target to maintain target consistency, making LCM more robust to error drifting. Experiments show that our LCM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both DAVIS and Youtube-VOS benchmark. And we rank the 1st in the DAVIS 2020 challenge semi-supervised VOS task.

Machine Learning-based Signal Detection for PMH Signals in Load-modulated MIMO System

Phase Modulation on the Hypersphere (PMH) is a power efficient modulation scheme for the \textit{load-modulated} multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitters with central power amplifiers (CPA). However, it is difficult to obtain the precise channel state information (CSI), and the traditional optimal maximum likelihood (ML) detection scheme incurs high complexity which increases exponentially with the number of antennas and the number of bits carried per antenna in the PMH modulation. To detect the PMH signals without knowing the prior CSI, we first propose a signal detection scheme, termed as the hypersphere clustering scheme based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm with maximum likelihood detection (HEM-ML). By leveraging machine learning, the proposed detection scheme can accurately obtain information of the channel from a few of the received symbols with little resource cost and achieve comparable detection results as that of the optimal ML detector. To further reduce the computational complexity in the ML detection in HEM-ML, we also propose the second signal detection scheme, termed as the hypersphere clustering scheme based on the EM algorithm with KD-tree detection (HEM-KD). The CSI obtained from the EM algorithm is used to build a spatial KD-tree receiver codebook and the signal detection problem can be transformed into a nearest neighbor search (NNS) problem. The detection complexity of HEM-KD is significantly reduced without any detection performance loss as compared to HEM-ML. Extensive simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed detection schemes.

Double Anchor R-CNN for Human Detection in a Crowd

Detecting human in a crowd is a challenging problem due to the uncertainties of occlusion patterns. In this paper, we propose to handle the crowd occlusion problem in human detection by leveraging the head part. Double Anchor RPN is developed to capture body and head parts in pairs. A proposal crossover strategy is introduced to generate high-quality proposals for both parts as a training augmentation. Features of coupled proposals are then aggregated efficiently to exploit the inherent relationship. Finally, a Joint NMS module is developed for robust post-processing. The proposed framework, called Double Anchor R-CNN, is able to detect the body and head for each person simultaneously in crowded scenarios. State-of-the-art results are reported on challenging human detection datasets. Our model yields log-average miss rates (MR) of 51.79pp on CrowdHuman, 55.01pp on COCOPersons~(crowded sub-dataset) and 40.02pp on CrowdPose~(crowded sub-dataset), which outperforms previous baseline detectors by 3.57pp, 3.82pp, and 4.24pp, respectively. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in crowded human detection.