Progressive Pose Attention Transfer for Person Image Generation

This paper proposes a new generative adversarial network for pose transfer, i.e., transferring the pose of a given person to a target pose. The generator of the network comprises a sequence of Pose-Attentional Transfer Blocks that each transfers certain regions it attends to, generating the person image progressively. Compared with those in previous works, our generated person images possess better appearance consistency and shape consistency with the input images, thus significantly more realistic-looking. The efficacy and efficiency of the proposed network are validated both qualitatively and quantitatively on Market-1501 and DeepFashion. Furthermore, the proposed architecture can generate training images for person re-identification, alleviating data insufficiency. Codes and models are available at: https://github.com/tengteng95/Pose-Transfer.git.

Exploiting Emotions for Fake News Detection on Social Media

Microblog has become a popular platform for people to post, share, and seek information due to its convenience and low cost. However, it also facilitates the generation and propagation of fake news, which could cause detrimental societal consequences. Detecting fake news on microblogs is important for societal good. Emotion is a significant indicator while verifying information on social media. Existing fake news detection studies utilize emotion mainly through users stances or simple statistical emotional features; and exploiting the emotion information from both news content and user comments is also limited. In the realistic scenarios, to impress the audience and spread extensively, the publishers typically either post a tweet with intense emotion which could easily resonate with the crowd, or post a controversial statement unemotionally but aim to evoke intense emotion among the users. Therefore, in this paper, we study the novel problem of exploiting emotion information for fake news detection. We propose a new Emotion-based Fake News Detection framework (EFN), which can i) learn content- and comment- emotion representations for publishers and users respectively; and ii) exploit content and social emotions simultaneously for fake news detection. Experimental results on real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Defect detection for patterned fabric images based on GHOG and low-rank decomposition

In order to accurately detect defects in patterned fabric images, a novel detection algorithm based on Gabor-HOG (GHOG) and low-rank decomposition is proposed in this paper. Defect-free pattern fabric images have the specified direction, while defects damage their regularity of direction. Therefore, a direction-aware descriptor is designed, denoted as GHOG, a combination of Gabor and HOG, which is extremely valuable for localizing the defect region. Upon devising a powerful directional descriptor, an efficient low-rank decomposition model is constructed to divide the matrix generated by the directional feature extracted from image blocks into a low-rank matrix (background information) and a sparse matrix (defect information). A nonconvex log det(.) as a smooth surrogate function for the rank instead of the nuclear norm is also exploited to improve the efficiency of the low-rank model. Moreover, the computational efficiency is further improved by utilizing the alternative direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Thereafter, the saliency map generated by the sparse matrix is segmented via the optimal threshold algorithm to locate the defect regions. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively detect patterned fabric defects and outperform the state-of-the-art methods.

Dynamic Parallel and Distributed Graph Cuts

Graph-cuts are widely used in computer vision. In order to speed up the optimization process and improve the scalability for large graphs, Strandmark and Kahl introduced a splitting method to split a graph into multiple subgraphs for parallel computation in both shared and distributed memory models. However, this parallel algorithm (parallel BK-algorithm) does not have a polynomial bound on the number of iterations and is found non-convergent in some cases due to the possible multiple optimal solutions of its sub-problems. To remedy this non-convergence problem, in this work we first introduce a merging method capable of merging any number of those adjacent sub-graphs which could hardly reach an agreement on their overlapped region in the parallel BK algorithm. Based on the pseudo-boolean representations of graph cuts,our merging method is shown able to effectively reuse all the computed flows in these sub-graphs. Through both the splitting and merging, we further propose a dynamic parallel and distributed graph-cuts algorithm with guaranteed convergence to the globally optimal solutions within a predefined number of iterations. In essence, this work provides a general framework to allow more sophisticated splitting and merging strategies to be employed to further boost performance. Our dynamic parallel algorithm is validated with extensive experimental results.