In this paper, we present MovieFactory, a powerful framework to generate cinematic-picture (3072$\times$1280), film-style (multi-scene), and multi-modality (sounding) movies on the demand of natural languages. As the first fully automated movie generation model to the best of our knowledge, our approach empowers users to create captivating movies with smooth transitions using simple text inputs, surpassing existing methods that produce soundless videos limited to a single scene of modest quality. To facilitate this distinctive functionality, we leverage ChatGPT to expand user-provided text into detailed sequential scripts for movie generation. Then we bring scripts to life visually and acoustically through vision generation and audio retrieval. To generate videos, we extend the capabilities of a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model through a two-stage process. Firstly, we employ spatial finetuning to bridge the gap between the pretrained image model and the new video dataset. Subsequently, we introduce temporal learning to capture object motion. In terms of audio, we leverage sophisticated retrieval models to select and align audio elements that correspond to the plot and visual content of the movie. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MovieFactory produces movies with realistic visuals, diverse scenes, and seamlessly fitting audio, offering users a novel and immersive experience. Generated samples can be found in YouTube or Bilibili (1080P).
The weight-sharing mechanism of convolutional kernels ensures translation-equivariance of convolution neural networks (CNNs). Recently, rotation-equivariance has been investigated. However, research on scale-equivariance or simultaneous scale-rotation-equivariance is insufficient. This study proposes a Lie group-CNN, which can keep scale-rotation-equivariance for image classification tasks. The Lie group-CNN includes a lifting module, a series of group convolution modules, a global pooling layer, and a classification layer. The lifting module transfers the input image from Euclidean space to Lie group space, and the group convolution is parameterized through a fully connected network using Lie-algebra of Lie-group elements as inputs to achieve scale-rotation-equivariance. The Lie group SIM(2) is utilized to establish the Lie group-CNN with scale-rotation-equivariance. Scale-rotation-equivariance of Lie group-CNN is verified and achieves the best recognition accuracy on the blood cell dataset (97.50%) and the HAM10000 dataset (77.90%) superior to Lie algebra convolution network, dilation convolution, spatial transformer network, and scale-equivariant steerable network. In addition, the generalization ability of the Lie group-CNN on SIM(2) on rotation-equivariance is verified on rotated-MNIST and rotated-CIFAR10, and the robustness of the network is verified on SO(2) and SE(2). Therefore, the Lie group-CNN can successfully extract geometric features and performs equivariant recognition on images with rotation and scale transformations.
Dust in the agricultural landscape is a significant challenge and influences, for example, the environmental perception of autonomous agricultural machines. Image enhancement algorithms can be used to reduce dust. However, these require dusty and dust-free images of the same environment for validation. In fact, to date, there is no dataset that we are aware of that addresses this issue. Therefore, we present the agriscapes RB-Dust dataset, which is named after its purpose of reference-based dust removal. It is not possible to take pictures from the cabin during tillage, as this would cause shifts in the images. Because of this, we built a setup from which it is possible to take images from a stationary position close to the passing tractor. The test setup was based on a half-sided gate through which the tractor could drive. The field tests were carried out on a farm in Bavaria, Germany, during tillage. During the field tests, other parameters such as soil moisture and wind speed were controlled, as these significantly affect dust development. We validated our dataset with contrast enhancement and image dehazing algorithms and analyzed the generalizability from recordings from the moving tractor. Finally, we demonstrate the application of dust removal based on a high-level vision task, such as person classification. Our empirical study confirms the validity of RB-Dust for vision-based dust removal in agriculture.
No-service rail surface defect (NRSD) segmentation is an essential way for perceiving the quality of no-service rails. However, due to the complex and diverse outlines and low-contrast textures of no-service rails, existing natural image segmentation methods cannot achieve promising performance in NRSD images, especially in some unique and challenging NRSD scenes. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel segmentation network for NRSDs based on Normalized Attention and Dual-scale Interaction, named NaDiNet. Specifically, NaDiNet follows the enhancement-interaction paradigm. The Normalized Channel-wise Self-Attention Module (NAM) and the Dual-scale Interaction Block (DIB) are two key components of NaDiNet. NAM is a specific extension of the channel-wise self-attention mechanism (CAM) to enhance features extracted from low-contrast NRSD images. The softmax layer in CAM will produce very small correlation coefficients which are not conducive to low-contrast feature enhancement. Instead, in NAM, we directly calculate the normalized correlation coefficient between channels to enlarge the feature differentiation. DIB is specifically designed for the feature interaction of the enhanced features. It has two interaction branches with dual scales, one for fine-grained clues and the other for coarse-grained clues. With both branches working together, DIB can perceive defect regions of different granularities. With these modules working together, our NaDiNet can generate accurate segmentation map. Extensive experiments on the public NRSD-MN dataset with man-made and natural NRSDs demonstrate that our proposed NaDiNet with various backbones (i.e., VGG, ResNet, and DenseNet) consistently outperforms 10 state-of-the-art methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/monxxcn/NaDiNet.
Multi-class cell segmentation in high-resolution Giga-pixel whole slide images (WSI) is critical for various clinical applications. Training such an AI model typically requires labor-intensive pixel-wise manual annotation from experienced domain experts (e.g., pathologists). Moreover, such annotation is error-prone when differentiating fine-grained cell types (e.g., podocyte and mesangial cells) via the naked human eye. In this study, we assess the feasibility of democratizing pathological AI deployment by only using lay annotators (annotators without medical domain knowledge). The contribution of this paper is threefold: (1) We proposed a molecular-empowered learning scheme for multi-class cell segmentation using partial labels from lay annotators; (2) The proposed method integrated Giga-pixel level molecular-morphology cross-modality registration, molecular-informed annotation, and molecular-oriented segmentation model, so as to achieve significantly superior performance via 3 lay annotators as compared with 2 experienced pathologists; (3) A deep corrective learning (learning with imperfect label) method is proposed to further improve the segmentation performance using partially annotated noisy data. From the experimental results, our learning method achieved F1 = 0.8496 using molecular-informed annotations from lay annotators, which is better than conventional morphology-based annotations (F1 = 0.7051) from experienced pathologists. Our method democratizes the development of a pathological segmentation deep model to the lay annotator level, which consequently scales up the learning process similar to a non-medical computer vision task. The official implementation and cell annotations are publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/MolecularEL.
Reference-based super-resolution (RefSR) has gained considerable success in the field of super-resolution with the addition of high-resolution reference images to reconstruct low-resolution (LR) inputs with more high-frequency details, thereby overcoming some limitations of single image super-resolution (SISR). Previous research in the field of RefSR has mostly focused on two crucial aspects. The first is accurate correspondence matching between the LR and the reference (Ref) image. The second is the effective transfer and aggregation of similar texture information from the Ref images. Nonetheless, an important detail of perceptual loss and adversarial loss has been underestimated, which has a certain adverse effect on texture transfer and reconstruction. In this study, we propose a feature reuse framework that guides the step-by-step texture reconstruction process through different stages, reducing the negative impacts of perceptual and adversarial loss. The feature reuse framework can be used for any RefSR model, and several RefSR approaches have improved their performance after being retrained using our framework. Additionally, we introduce a single image feature embedding module and a texture-adaptive aggregation module. The single image feature embedding module assists in reconstructing the features of the LR inputs itself and effectively lowers the possibility of including irrelevant textures. The texture-adaptive aggregation module dynamically perceives and aggregates texture information between the LR inputs and the Ref images using dynamic filters. This enhances the utilization of the reference texture while reducing reference misuse. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yi-Yang355/FRFSR.
Diffusion models have shown great promise in text-guided image style transfer, but there is a trade-off between style transformation and content preservation due to their stochastic nature. Existing methods require computationally expensive fine-tuning of diffusion models or additional neural network. To address this, here we propose a zero-shot contrastive loss for diffusion models that doesn't require additional fine-tuning or auxiliary networks. By leveraging patch-wise contrastive loss between generated samples and original image embeddings in the pre-trained diffusion model, our method can generate images with the same semantic content as the source image in a zero-shot manner. Our approach outperforms existing methods while preserving content and requiring no additional training, not only for image style transfer but also for image-to-image translation and manipulation. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Layout is essential for graphic design and poster generation. Recently, applying deep learning models to generate layouts has attracted increasing attention. This paper focuses on using the GAN-based model conditioned on image contents to generate advertising poster graphic layouts, which requires an advertising poster layout dataset with paired product images and graphic layouts. However, the paired images and layouts in the existing dataset are collected by inpainting and annotating posters, respectively. There exists a domain gap between inpainted posters (source domain data) and clean product images (target domain data). Therefore, this paper combines unsupervised domain adaption techniques to design a GAN with a novel pixel-level discriminator (PD), called PDA-GAN, to generate graphic layouts according to image contents. The PD is connected to the shallow level feature map and computes the GAN loss for each input-image pixel. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that PDA-GAN can achieve state-of-the-art performances and generate high-quality image-aware graphic layouts for advertising posters.
For the task of semantic segmentation (SS) under domain shift, active learning (AL) acquisition strategies based on image regions and pseudo labels are state-of-the-art (SoA). The presence of diverse pseudo-labels within a region identifies pixels between different classes, which is a labeling efficient active learning data acquisition strategy. However, by design, pseudo-label variations are limited to only select the contours of classes, limiting the final AL performance. We approach AL for SS in the Poincar\'e hyperbolic ball model for the first time and leverage the variations of the radii of pixel embeddings within regions as a novel data acquisition strategy. This stems from a novel geometric property of a hyperbolic space trained without enforced hierarchies, which we experimentally prove. Namely, classes are mapped into compact hyperbolic areas with a comparable intra-class radii variance, as the model places classes of increasing explainable difficulty at denser hyperbolic areas, i.e. closer to the Poincar\'e ball edge. The variation of pixel embedding radii identifies well the class contours, but they also select a few intra-class peculiar details, which boosts the final performance. Our proposed HALO (Hyperbolic Active Learning Optimization) surpasses the supervised learning performance for the first time in AL for SS under domain shift, by only using a small portion of labels (i.e., 1%). The extensive experimental analysis is based on two established benchmarks, i.e. GTAV $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes and SYNTHIA $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes, where we set a new SoA. The code will be released.
Brain structural MRI has been widely used to assess the future progression of cognitive impairment (CI). Previous learning-based studies usually suffer from the issue of small-sized labeled training data, while there exist a huge amount of structural MRIs in large-scale public databases. Intuitively, brain anatomical structures derived from these public MRIs (even without task-specific label information) can be used to boost CI progression trajectory prediction. However, previous studies seldom take advantage of such brain anatomy prior. To this end, this paper proposes a brain anatomy prior modeling (BAPM) framework to forecast the clinical progression of cognitive impairment with small-sized target MRIs by exploring anatomical brain structures. Specifically, the BAPM consists of a pretext model and a downstream model, with a shared brain anatomy-guided encoder to model brain anatomy prior explicitly. Besides the encoder, the pretext model also contains two decoders for two auxiliary tasks (i.e., MRI reconstruction and brain tissue segmentation), while the downstream model relies on a predictor for classification. The brain anatomy-guided encoder is pre-trained with the pretext model on 9,344 auxiliary MRIs without diagnostic labels for anatomy prior modeling. With this encoder frozen, the downstream model is then fine-tuned on limited target MRIs for prediction. We validate the BAPM on two CI-related studies with T1-weighted MRIs from 448 subjects. Experimental results suggest the effectiveness of BAPM in (1) four CI progression prediction tasks, (2) MR image reconstruction, and (3) brain tissue segmentation, compared with several state-of-the-art methods.