SHX: Search History Driven Crossover for Real-Coded Genetic Algorithm

In evolutionary algorithms, genetic operators iteratively generate new offspring which constitute a potentially valuable set of search history. To boost the performance of crossover in real-coded genetic algorithm (RCGA), in this paper we propose to exploit the search history cached so far in an online style during the iteration. Specifically, survivor individuals over past few generations are collected and stored in the archive to form the search history. We introduce a simple yet effective crossover model driven by the search history (abbreviated as SHX). In particular, the search history is clustered and each cluster is assigned a score for SHX. In essence, the proposed SHX is a data-driven method which exploits the search history to perform offspring selection after the offspring generation. Since no additional fitness evaluations are needed, SHX is favorable for the tasks with limited budget or expensive fitness evaluations. We experimentally verify the effectiveness of SHX over 4 benchmark functions. Quantitative results show that our SHX can significantly enhance the performance of RCGA, in terms of accuracy.

HDF: Hybrid Deep Features for Scene Image Representation

Nowadays it is prevalent to take features extracted from pre-trained deep learning models as image representations which have achieved promising classification performance. Existing methods usually consider either object-based features or scene-based features only. However, both types of features are important for complex images like scene images, as they can complement each other. In this paper, we propose a novel type of features -- hybrid deep features, for scene images. Specifically, we exploit both object-based and scene-based features at two levels: part image level (i.e., parts of an image) and whole image level (i.e., a whole image), which produces a total number of four types of deep features. Regarding the part image level, we also propose two new slicing techniques to extract part based features. Finally, we aggregate these four types of deep features via the concatenation operator. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our hybrid deep features on three commonly used scene datasets (MIT-67, Scene-15, and Event-8), in terms of the scene image classification task. Extensive comparisons show that our introduced features can produce state-of-the-art classification accuracies which are more consistent and stable than the results of existing features across all datasets.

G2MF-WA: Geometric Multi-Model Fitting with Weakly Annotated Data

In this paper we attempt to address the problem of geometric multi-model fitting with resorting to a few weakly annotated (WA) data points, which has been sparsely studied so far. In weak annotating, most of the manual annotations are supposed to be correct yet inevitably mixed with incorrect ones. The WA data can be naturally obtained in an interactive way for specific tasks, for example, in the case of homography estimation, one can easily annotate points on the same plane/object with a single label by observing the image. Motivated by this, we propose a novel method to make full use of the WA data to boost the multi-model fitting performance. Specifically, a graph for model proposal sampling is first constructed using the WA data, given the prior that the WA data annotated with the same weak label has a high probability of being assigned to the same model. By incorporating this prior knowledge into the calculation of edge probabilities, vertices (i.e., data points) lie on/near the latent model are likely to connect together and further form a subset/cluster for effective proposals generation. With the proposals generated, the $\alpha$-expansion is adopted for labeling, and our method in return updates the proposals. This works in an iterative way. Extensive experiments validate our method and show that the proposed method produces noticeably better results than state-of-the-art techniques in most cases.

Unsupervised Deep Features for Privacy Image Classification

Sharing images online poses security threats to a wide range of users due to the unawareness of privacy information. Deep features have been demonstrated to be a powerful representation for images. However, deep features usually suffer from the issues of a large size and requiring a huge amount of data for fine-tuning. In contrast to normal images (e.g., scene images), privacy images are often limited because of sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that can work on limited data and generate deep features of smaller size. For training images, we first extract the initial deep features from the pre-trained model and then employ the K-means clustering algorithm to learn the centroids of these initial deep features. We use the learned centroids from training features to extract the final features for each testing image and encode our final features with the triangle encoding. To improve the discriminability of the features, we further perform the fusion of two proposed unsupervised deep features obtained from different layers. Experimental results show that the proposed features outperform state-of-the-art deep features, in terms of both classification accuracy and testing time.

Tag-based Semantic Features for Scene Image Classification

The existing image feature extraction methods are primarily based on the content and structure information of images, and rarely consider the contextual semantic information. Regarding some types of images such as scenes and objects, the annotations and descriptions of them available on the web may provide reliable contextual semantic information for feature extraction. In this paper, we introduce novel semantic features of an image based on the annotations and descriptions of its similar images available on the web. Specifically, we propose a new method which consists of two consecutive steps to extract our semantic features. For each image in the training set, we initially search the top $k$ most similar images from the internet and extract their annotations/descriptions (e.g., tags or keywords). The annotation information is employed to design a filter bank for each image category and generate filter words (codebook). Finally, each image is represented by the histogram of the occurrences of filter words in all categories. We evaluate the performance of the proposed features in scene image classification on three commonly-used scene image datasets (i.e., MIT-67, Scene15 and Event8). Our method typically produces a lower feature dimension than existing feature extraction methods. Experimental results show that the proposed features generate better classification accuracies than vision based and tag based features, and comparable results to deep learning based features.

Explicit Facial Expression Transfer via Fine-Grained Semantic Representations

Facial expression transfer between two unpaired images is a challenging problem, as fine-grained expressions are typically tangled with other facial attributes such as identity and pose. Most existing methods treat expression transfer as an application of expression manipulation, and use predicted facial expressions, landmarks or action units (AUs) of a source image to guide the expression edit of a target image. However, the prediction of expressions, landmarks and especially AUs may be inaccurate, which limits the accuracy of transferring fine-grained expressions. Instead of using an intermediate estimated guidance, we propose to explicitly transfer expressions by directly mapping two unpaired images to two synthesized images with swapped expressions. Since each AU semantically describes local expression details, we can synthesize new images with preserved identities and swapped expressions by combining AU-free features with swapped AU-related features. To disentangle the images into AU-related features and AU-free features, we propose a novel adversarial training method which can solve the adversarial learning of multi-class classification problems. Moreover, to obtain reliable expression transfer results of the unpaired input, we introduce a swap consistency loss to make the synthesized images and self-reconstructed images indistinguishable. Extensive experiments on RaFD, MMI and CFD datasets show that our approach can generate photo-realistic expression transfer results between unpaired images with different expression appearances including genders, ages, races and poses.

Indoor image representation by high-level semantic features

Indoor image features extraction is a fundamental problem in multiple fields such as image processing, pattern recognition, robotics and so on. Nevertheless, most of the existing feature extraction methods, which extract features based on pixels, color, shape/object parts or objects on images, suffer from limited capabilities in describing semantic information (e.g., object association). These techniques, therefore, involve undesired classification performance. To tackle this issue, we propose the notion of high-level semantic features and design four steps to extract them. Specifically, we first construct the objects pattern dictionary through extracting raw objects in the images, and then retrieve and extract semantic objects from the objects pattern dictionary. We finally extract our high-level semantic features based on the calculated probability and delta parameter. Experiments on three publicly available datasets (MIT-67, Scene15 and NYU V1) show that our feature extraction approach outperforms state-of-the-art feature extraction methods for indoor image classification, given a lower dimension of our features than those methods.

Kernel-Free Image Deblurring with a Pair of Blurred/Noisy Images

Complex blur like the mixup of space-variant and space-invariant blur, which is hard to be modeled mathematically, widely exists in real images. In the real world, a common type of blur occurs when capturing images in low-light environments. In this paper, we propose a novel image deblurring method that does not need to estimate blur kernels. We utilize a pair of images which can be easily acquired in low-light situations: (1) a blurred image taken with low shutter speed and low ISO noise, and (2) a noisy image captured with high shutter speed and high ISO noise. Specifically, the blurred image is first sliced into patches, and we extend the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to model the underlying intensity distribution of each patch using the corresponding patches in the noisy image. We compute patch correspondences by analyzing the optical flow between the two images. The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is utilized to estimate the involved parameters in the GMM. To preserve sharp features, we add an additional bilateral term to the objective function in the M-step. We eventually add a detail layer to the deblurred image for refinement. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, in terms of robustness, visual quality and quantitative metrics. We will make our dataset and source code publicly available.