Photo2Relief: Let Human in the Photograph Stand Out

In this paper, we propose a technique for making humans in photographs protrude like reliefs. Unlike previous methods which mostly focus on the face and head, our method aims to generate art works that describe the whole body activity of the character. One challenge is that there is no ground-truth for supervised deep learning. We introduce a sigmoid variant function to manipulate gradients tactfully and train our neural networks by equipping with a loss function defined in gradient domain. The second challenge is that actual photographs often across different light conditions. We used image-based rendering technique to address this challenge and acquire rendering images and depth data under different lighting conditions. To make a clear division of labor in network modules, a two-scale architecture is proposed to create high-quality relief from a single photograph. Extensive experimental results on a variety of scenes show that our method is a highly effective solution for generating digital 2.5D artwork from photographs.

A Review of Intelligent Music Generation Systems

Intelligent music generation, one of the most popular subfields of computer creativity, can lower the creative threshold for non-specialists and increase the efficiency of music creation. In the last five years, the quality of algorithm-based automatic music generation has increased significantly, motivated by the use of modern generative algorithms to learn the patterns implicit within a piece of music based on rule constraints or a musical corpus, thus generating music samples in various styles. Some of the available literature reviews lack a systematic benchmark of generative models and are traditional and conservative in their perspective, resulting in a vision of the future development of the field that is not deeply integrated with the current rapid scientific progress. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of recent intelligent music generation techniques,provide a critical discussion, explicitly identify their respective characteristics, and present them in a general table. We first introduce how music as a stream of information is encoded and the relevant datasets, then compare different types of generation algorithms, summarize their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss existing methods for evaluation. Finally, the development of artificial intelligence in composition is studied, especially by comparing the different characteristics of music generation techniques in the East and West and analyzing the development prospects in this field.

3D Pose Based Feedback for Physical Exercises

Unsupervised self-rehabilitation exercises and physical training can cause serious injuries if performed incorrectly. We introduce a learning-based framework that identifies the mistakes made by a user and proposes corrective measures for easier and safer individual training. Our framework does not rely on hard-coded, heuristic rules. Instead, it learns them from data, which facilitates its adaptation to specific user needs. To this end, we use a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architecture acting on the user's pose sequence to model the relationship between the body joints trajectories. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a dataset with 3 different physical exercises. Our approach yields 90.9% mistake identification accuracy and successfully corrects 94.2% of the mistakes.

GISNet: Graph-Based Information Sharing Network For Vehicle Trajectory Prediction

The trajectory prediction is a critical and challenging problem in the design of an autonomous driving system. Many AI-oriented companies, such as Google Waymo, Uber and DiDi, are investigating more accurate vehicle trajectory prediction algorithms. However, the prediction performance is governed by lots of entangled factors, such as the stochastic behaviors of surrounding vehicles, historical information of self-trajectory, and relative positions of neighbors, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based information sharing network (GISNet) that allows the information sharing between the target vehicle and its surrounding vehicles. Meanwhile, the model encodes the historical trajectory information of all the vehicles in the scene. Experiments are carried out on the public NGSIM US-101 and I-80 Dataset and the prediction performance is measured by the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that our model significantly improves the trajectory prediction accuracy, by up to 50.00%, compared to existing models.

Mission-Aware Spatio-Temporal Deep Learning Model for UAS Instantaneous Density Prediction

The number of daily sUAS operations in uncontrolled low altitude airspace is expected to reach into the millions in a few years. Therefore, UAS density prediction has become an emerging and challenging problem. In this paper, a deep learning-based UAS instantaneous density prediction model is presented. The model takes two types of data as input: 1) the historical density generated from the historical data, and 2) the future sUAS mission information. The architecture of our model contains four components: Historical Density Formulation module, UAS Mission Translation module, Mission Feature Extraction module, and Density Map Projection module. The training and testing data are generated by a python based simulator which is inspired by the multi-agent air traffic resource usage simulator (MATRUS) framework. The quality of prediction is measured by the correlation score and the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristics (AUROC) between the predicted value and simulated value. The experimental results demonstrate outstanding performance of the deep learning-based UAS density predictor. Compared to the baseline models, for simplified traffic scenario where no-fly zones and safe distance among sUASs are not considered, our model improves the prediction accuracy by more than 15.2% and its correlation score reaches 0.947. In a more realistic scenario, where the no-fly zone avoidance and the safe distance among sUASs are maintained using A* routing algorithm, our model can still achieve 0.823 correlation score. Meanwhile, the AUROC can reach 0.951 for the hot spot prediction.

Exploiting Neuron and Synapse Filter Dynamics in Spatial Temporal Learning of Deep Spiking Neural Network

The recent discovered spatial-temporal information processing capability of bio-inspired Spiking neural networks (SNN) has enabled some interesting models and applications. However designing large-scale and high-performance model is yet a challenge due to the lack of robust training algorithms. A bio-plausible SNN model with spatial-temporal property is a complex dynamic system. Each synapse and neuron behave as filters capable of preserving temporal information. As such neuron dynamics and filter effects are ignored in existing training algorithms, the SNN downgrades into a memoryless system and loses the ability of temporal signal processing. Furthermore, spike timing plays an important role in information representation, but conventional rate-based spike coding models only consider spike trains statistically, and discard information carried by its temporal structures. To address the above issues, and exploit the temporal dynamics of SNNs, we formulate SNN as a network of infinite impulse response (IIR) filters with neuron nonlinearity. We proposed a training algorithm that is capable to learn spatial-temporal patterns by searching for the optimal synapse filter kernels and weights. The proposed model and training algorithm are applied to construct associative memories and classifiers for synthetic and public datasets including MNIST, NMNIST, DVS 128 etc.; and their accuracy outperforms state-of-art approaches.

Learning Topics using Semantic Locality

The topic modeling discovers the latent topic probability of the given text documents. To generate the more meaningful topic that better represents the given document, we proposed a new feature extraction technique which can be used in the data preprocessing stage. The method consists of three steps. First, it generates the word/word-pair from every single document. Second, it applies a two-way TF-IDF algorithm to word/word-pair for semantic filtering. Third, it uses the K-means algorithm to merge the word pairs that have the similar semantic meaning. Experiments are carried out on the Open Movie Database (OMDb), Reuters Dataset and 20NewsGroup Dataset. The mean Average Precision score is used as the evaluation metric. Comparing our results with other state-of-the-art topic models, such as Latent Dirichlet allocation and traditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines. Our proposed data preprocessing can improve the generated topic accuracy by up to 12.99\%.

High Order Structure Descriptors for Scene Images

Structure information is ubiquitous in natural scene images and it plays an important role in scene representation. In this paper, third order structure statistics (TOSS) and fourth order structure statistics (FOSS) are exploited to encode higher order structure information. Afterwards, based on the radial and normal slice of TOSS and FOSS, we propose the high order structure feature: third order structure feature (TOSF) and fourth order structure feature (FOSF). It is well known that scene images are well characterized by particular arrangements of their local structures, we divide the scene image into the non-overlapping sub-regions and compute the proposed higher order structural features among them. Then a scene classification is performed by using SVM classifier with these higher order structure features. The experimental results show that higher order structure statistics can deliver image structure information well and its spatial envelope has strong discriminative ability.