Seeking Subjectivity in Visual Emotion Distribution Learning

Visual Emotion Analysis (VEA), which aims to predict people's emotions towards different visual stimuli, has become an attractive research topic recently. Rather than a single label classification task, it is more rational to regard VEA as a Label Distribution Learning (LDL) problem by voting from different individuals. Existing methods often predict visual emotion distribution in a unified network, neglecting the inherent subjectivity in its crowd voting process. In psychology, the \textit{Object-Appraisal-Emotion} model has demonstrated that each individual's emotion is affected by his/her subjective appraisal, which is further formed by the affective memory. Inspired by this, we propose a novel \textit{Subjectivity Appraise-and-Match Network (SAMNet)} to investigate the subjectivity in visual emotion distribution. To depict the diversity in crowd voting process, we first propose the \textit{Subjectivity Appraising} with multiple branches, where each branch simulates the emotion evocation process of a specific individual. Specifically, we construct the affective memory with an attention-based mechanism to preserve each individual's unique emotional experience. A subjectivity loss is further proposed to guarantee the divergence between different individuals. Moreover, we propose the \textit{Subjectivity Matching} with a matching loss, aiming at assigning unordered emotion labels to ordered individual predictions in a one-to-one correspondence with the Hungarian algorithm. Extensive experiments and comparisons are conducted on public visual emotion distribution datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed SAMNet consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Ablation study verifies the effectiveness of our method and visualization proves its interpretability.

TransFA: Transformer-based Representation for Face Attribute Evaluation

Face attribute evaluation plays an important role in video surveillance and face analysis. Although methods based on convolution neural networks have made great progress, they inevitably only deal with one local neighborhood with convolutions at a time. Besides, existing methods mostly regard face attribute evaluation as the individual multi-label classification task, ignoring the inherent relationship between semantic attributes and face identity information. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{trans}former-based representation for \textbf{f}ace \textbf{a}ttribute evaluation method (\textbf{TransFA}), which could effectively enhance the attribute discriminative representation learning in the context of attention mechanism. The multiple branches transformer is employed to explore the inter-correlation between different attributes in similar semantic regions for attribute feature learning. Specially, the hierarchical identity-constraint attribute loss is designed to train the end-to-end architecture, which could further integrate face identity discriminative information to boost performance. Experimental results on multiple face attribute benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed TransFA achieves superior performances compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Spatial-Temporal Frequency Forgery Clue for Video Forgery Detection in VIS and NIR Scenario

In recent years, with the rapid development of face editing and generation, more and more fake videos are circulating on social media, which has caused extreme public concerns. Existing face forgery detection methods based on frequency domain find that the GAN forged images have obvious grid-like visual artifacts in the frequency spectrum compared to the real images. But for synthesized videos, these methods only confine to single frame and pay little attention to the most discriminative part and temporal frequency clue among different frames. To take full advantage of the rich information in video sequences, this paper performs video forgery detection on both spatial and temporal frequency domains and proposes a Discrete Cosine Transform-based Forgery Clue Augmentation Network (FCAN-DCT) to achieve a more comprehensive spatial-temporal feature representation. FCAN-DCT consists of a backbone network and two branches: Compact Feature Extraction (CFE) module and Frequency Temporal Attention (FTA) module. We conduct thorough experimental assessments on two visible light (VIS) based datasets WildDeepfake and Celeb-DF (v2), and our self-built video forgery dataset DeepfakeNIR, which is the first video forgery dataset on near-infrared modality. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on detecting forgery videos in both VIS and NIR scenarios.

Instance-Dependent Label-Noise Learning with Manifold-Regularized Transition Matrix Estimation

In label-noise learning, estimating the transition matrix has attracted more and more attention as the matrix plays an important role in building statistically consistent classifiers. However, it is very challenging to estimate the transition matrix T(x), where x denotes the instance, because it is unidentifiable under the instance-dependent noise(IDN). To address this problem, we have noticed that, there are psychological and physiological evidences showing that we humans are more likely to annotate instances of similar appearances to the same classes, and thus poor-quality or ambiguous instances of similar appearances are easier to be mislabeled to the correlated or same noisy classes. Therefore, we propose assumption on the geometry of T(x) that "the closer two instances are, the more similar their corresponding transition matrices should be". More specifically, we formulate above assumption into the manifold embedding, to effectively reduce the degree of freedom of T(x) and make it stably estimable in practice. The proposed manifold-regularized technique works by directly reducing the estimation error without hurting the approximation error about the estimation problem of T(x). Experimental evaluations on four synthetic and two real-world datasets demonstrate that our method is superior to state-of-the-art approaches for label-noise learning under the challenging IDN.

Do Deep Neural Networks Always Perform Better When Eating More Data?

Data has now become a shortcoming of deep learning. Researchers in their own fields share the thinking that "deep neural networks might not always perform better when they eat more data," which still lacks experimental validation and a convincing guiding theory. Here to fill this lack, we design experiments from Identically Independent Distribution(IID) and Out of Distribution(OOD), which give powerful answers. For the purpose of guidance, based on the discussion of results, two theories are proposed: under IID condition, the amount of information determines the effectivity of each sample, the contribution of samples and difference between classes determine the amount of sample information and the amount of class information; under OOD condition, the cross-domain degree of samples determine the contributions, and the bias-fitting caused by irrelevant elements is a significant factor of cross-domain. The above theories provide guidance from the perspective of data, which can promote a wide range of practical applications of artificial intelligence.

Two-Stream Graph Convolutional Network for Intra-oral Scanner Image Segmentation

Precise segmentation of teeth from intra-oral scanner images is an essential task in computer-aided orthodontic surgical planning. The state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods often simply concatenate the raw geometric attributes (i.e., coordinates and normal vectors) of mesh cells to train a single-stream network for automatic intra-oral scanner image segmentation. However, since different raw attributes reveal completely different geometric information, the naive concatenation of different raw attributes at the (low-level) input stage may bring unnecessary confusion in describing and differentiating between mesh cells, thus hampering the learning of high-level geometric representations for the segmentation task. To address this issue, we design a two-stream graph convolutional network (i.e., TSGCN), which can effectively handle inter-view confusion between different raw attributes to more effectively fuse their complementary information and learn discriminative multi-view geometric representations. Specifically, our TSGCN adopts two input-specific graph-learning streams to extract complementary high-level geometric representations from coordinates and normal vectors, respectively. Then, these single-view representations are further fused by a self-attention module to adaptively balance the contributions of different views in learning more discriminative multi-view representations for accurate and fully automatic tooth segmentation. We have evaluated our TSGCN on a real-patient dataset of dental (mesh) models acquired by 3D intraoral scanners. Experimental results show that our TSGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 3D tooth (surface) segmentation. Github: https://github.com/ZhangLingMing1/TSGCNet.

Robust Single Image Dehazing Based on Consistent and Contrast-Assisted Reconstruction

Single image dehazing as a fundamental low-level vision task, is essential for the development of robust intelligent surveillance system. In this paper, we make an early effort to consider dehazing robustness under variational haze density, which is a realistic while under-studied problem in the research filed of singe image dehazing. To properly address this problem, we propose a novel density-variational learning framework to improve the robustness of the image dehzing model assisted by a variety of negative hazy images, to better deal with various complex hazy scenarios. Specifically, the dehazing network is optimized under the consistency-regularized framework with the proposed Contrast-Assisted Reconstruction Loss (CARL). The CARL can fully exploit the negative information to facilitate the traditional positive-orient dehazing objective function, by squeezing the dehazed image to its clean target from different directions. Meanwhile, the consistency regularization keeps consistent outputs given multi-level hazy images, thus improving the model robustness. Extensive experimental results on two synthetic and three real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art approaches.

Towards Semi-Supervised Deep Facial Expression Recognition with An Adaptive Confidence Margin

Only parts of unlabeled data are selected to train models for most semi-supervised learning methods, whose confidence scores are usually higher than the pre-defined threshold (i.e., the confidence margin). We argue that the recognition performance should be further improved by making full use of all unlabeled data. In this paper, we learn an Adaptive Confidence Margin (Ada-CM) to fully leverage all unlabeled data for semi-supervised deep facial expression recognition. All unlabeled samples are partitioned into two subsets by comparing their confidence scores with the adaptively learned confidence margin at each training epoch: (1) subset I including samples whose confidence scores are no lower than the margin; (2) subset II including samples whose confidence scores are lower than the margin. For samples in subset I, we constrain their predictions to match pseudo labels. Meanwhile, samples in subset II participate in the feature-level contrastive objective to learn effective facial expression features. We extensively evaluate Ada-CM on four challenging datasets, showing that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially surpassing fully-supervised baselines in a semi-supervised manner. Ablation study further proves the effectiveness of our method. The source code is available at https://github.com/hangyu94/Ada-CM.

SSCU-Net: Spatial-Spectral Collaborative Unmixing Network for Hyperspectral Images

Linear spectral unmixing is an essential technique in hyperspectral image processing and interpretation. In recent years, deep learning-based approaches have shown great promise in hyperspectral unmixing, in particular, unsupervised unmixing methods based on autoencoder networks are a recent trend. The autoencoder model, which automatically learns low-dimensional representations (abundances) and reconstructs data with their corresponding bases (endmembers), has achieved superior performance in hyperspectral unmixing. In this article, we explore the effective utilization of spatial and spectral information in autoencoder-based unmixing networks. Important findings on the use of spatial and spectral information in the autoencoder framework are discussed. Inspired by these findings, we propose a spatial-spectral collaborative unmixing network, called SSCU-Net, which learns a spatial autoencoder network and a spectral autoencoder network in an end-to-end manner to more effectively improve the unmixing performance. SSCU-Net is a two-stream deep network and shares an alternating architecture, where the two autoencoder networks are efficiently trained in a collaborative way for estimation of endmembers and abundances. Meanwhile, we propose a new spatial autoencoder network by introducing a superpixel segmentation method based on abundance information, which greatly facilitates the employment of spatial information and improves the accuracy of unmixing network. Moreover, extensive ablation studies are carried out to investigate the performance gain of SSCU-Net. Experimental results on both synthetic and real hyperspectral data sets illustrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed SSCU-Net compared with several state-of-the-art hyperspectral unmixing methods.

Semi-parametric Makeup Transfer via Semantic-aware Correspondence

The large discrepancy between the source non-makeup image and the reference makeup image is one of the key challenges in makeup transfer. Conventional approaches for makeup transfer either learn disentangled representation or perform pixel-wise correspondence in a parametric way between two images. We argue that non-parametric techniques have a high potential for addressing the pose, expression, and occlusion discrepancies. To this end, this paper proposes a \textbf{S}emi-\textbf{p}arametric \textbf{M}akeup \textbf{T}ransfer (SpMT) method, which combines the reciprocal strengths of non-parametric and parametric mechanisms. The non-parametric component is a novel \textbf{S}emantic-\textbf{a}ware \textbf{C}orrespondence (SaC) module that explicitly reconstructs content representation with makeup representation under the strong constraint of component semantics. The reconstructed representation is desired to preserve the spatial and identity information of the source image while "wearing" the makeup of the reference image. The output image is synthesized via a parametric decoder that draws on the reconstructed representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of visual quality, robustness, and flexibility. Code and pre-trained model are available at \url{https://github.com/AnonymScholar/SpMT.