Learning and Sharing: A Multitask Genetic Programming Approach to Image Feature Learning

Using evolutionary computation algorithms to solve multiple tasks with knowledge sharing is a promising approach. Image feature learning can be considered as a multitask problem because different tasks may have a similar feature space. Genetic programming (GP) has been successfully applied to image feature learning for classification. However, most of the existing GP methods solve one task, independently, using sufficient training data. No multitask GP method has been developed for image feature learning. Therefore, this paper develops a multitask GP approach to image feature learning for classification with limited training data. Owing to the flexible representation of GP, a new knowledge sharing mechanism based on a new individual representation is developed to allow GP to automatically learn what to share across two tasks and to improve its learning performance. The shared knowledge is encoded as a common tree, which can represent the common/general features of two tasks. With the new individual representation, each task is solved using the features extracted from a common tree and a task-specific tree representing task-specific features. To learn the best common and task-specific trees, a new evolutionary process and new fitness functions are developed. The performance of the proposed approach is examined on six multitask problems of 12 image classification datasets with limited training data and compared with three GP and 14 non-GP-based competitive methods. Experimental results show that the new approach outperforms these compared methods in almost all the comparisons. Further analysis reveals that the new approach learns simple yet effective common trees with high effectiveness and transferability.

Asymmetric Generative Adversarial Networks for Image-to-Image Translation

State-of-the-art models for unpaired image-to-image translation with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can learn the mapping from the source domain to the target domain using a cycle-consistency loss. The intuition behind these models is that if we translate from one domain to the other and back again we should arrive at where we started. However, existing methods always adopt a symmetric network architecture to learn both forward and backward cycles. Because of the task complexity and cycle input difference between the source and target image domains, the inequality in bidirectional forward-backward cycle translations is significant and the amount of information between two domains is different. In this paper, we analyze the limitation of the existing symmetric GAN models in asymmetric translation tasks, and propose an AsymmetricGAN model with both translation and reconstruction generators of unequal sizes and different parameter-sharing strategy to adapt to the asymmetric need in both unsupervised and supervised image-to-image translation tasks. Moreover, the training stage of existing methods has the common problem of model collapse that degrades the quality of the generated images, thus we explore different optimization losses for better training of AsymmetricGAN, and thus make image-to-image translation with higher consistency and better stability. Extensive experiments on both supervised and unsupervised generative tasks with several publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed AsymmetricGAN achieves superior model capacity and better generation performance compared with existing GAN models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the asymmetric GAN framework on both unsupervised and supervised image-to-image translation tasks. The source code, data and trained models are available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/AsymmetricGAN.

FlowReg: Fast Deformable Unsupervised Medical Image Registration using Optical Flow

We propose FlowReg, a deep learning-based framework for unsupervised image registration for neuroimaging applications. The system is composed of two architectures that are trained sequentially: FlowReg-A which affinely corrects for gross differences between moving and fixed volumes in 3D followed by FlowReg-O which performs pixel-wise deformations on a slice-by-slice basis for fine tuning in 2D. The affine network regresses the 3D affine matrix based on a correlation loss function that enforces global similarity. The deformable network operates on 2D image slices based on the optical flow network FlowNet-Simple but with three loss components. The photometric loss minimizes pixel intensity differences differences, the smoothness loss encourages similar magnitudes between neighbouring vectors, and a correlation loss that is used to maintain the intensity similarity between fixed and moving image slices. The proposed method is compared to four open source registration techniques ANTs, Demons, SE, and Voxelmorph. In total, 4643 FLAIR MR imaging volumes are used from dementia and vascular disease cohorts, acquired from over 60 international centres with varying acquisition parameters. A battery of quantitative novel registration validation metrics are proposed that focus on the structural integrity of tissues, spatial alignment, and intensity similarity. Experimental results show FlowReg (FlowReg-A+O) performs better than iterative-based registration algorithms for intensity and spatial alignment metrics with a Pixelwise Agreement of 0.65, correlation coefficient of 0.80, and Mutual Information of 0.29. Among the deep learning frameworks, FlowReg-A or FlowReg-A+O provided the highest performance over all but one of the metrics. Results show that FlowReg is able to obtain high intensity and spatial similarity while maintaining the shape and structure of anatomy and pathology.

An implementation of the "Guess who?" game using CLIP

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) is an efficient method for learning computer vision tasks from natural language supervision that has powered a recent breakthrough in deep learning due to its zero-shot transfer capabilities. By training from image-text pairs available on the internet, the CLIP model transfers non-trivially to most tasks without the need for any data set specific training. In this work, we use CLIP to implement the engine of the popular game "Guess who?", so that the player interacts with the game using natural language prompts and CLIP automatically decides whether an image in the game board fulfills that prompt or not. We study the performance of this approach by benchmarking on different ways of prompting the questions to CLIP, and show the limitations of its zero-shot capabilites.

Fabric Image Representation Encoding Networks for Large-scale 3D Medical Image Analysis

Deep neural networks are parameterised by weights that encode feature representations, whose performance is dictated through generalisation by using large-scale feature-rich datasets. The lack of large-scale labelled 3D medical imaging datasets restrict constructing such generalised networks. In this work, a novel 3D segmentation network, Fabric Image Representation Networks (FIRENet), is proposed to extract and encode generalisable feature representations from multiple medical image datasets in a large-scale manner. FIRENet learns image specific feature representations by way of 3D fabric network architecture that contains exponential number of sub-architectures to handle various protocols and coverage of anatomical regions and structures. The fabric network uses Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) extended to 3D to extract local and image-level features at a fine selection of scales. The fabric is constructed with weighted edges allowing the learnt features to dynamically adapt to the training data at an architecture level. Conditional padding modules, which are integrated into the network to reinsert voxels discarded by feature pooling, allow the network to inherently process different-size images at their original resolutions. FIRENet was trained for feature learning via automated semantic segmentation of pelvic structures and obtained a state-of-the-art median DSC score of 0.867. FIRENet was also simultaneously trained on MR (Magnatic Resonance) images acquired from 3D examinations of musculoskeletal elements in the (hip, knee, shoulder) joints and a public OAI knee dataset to perform automated segmentation of bone across anatomy. Transfer learning was used to show that the features learnt through the pelvic segmentation helped achieve improved mean DSC scores of 0.962, 0.963, 0.945 and 0.986 for automated segmentation of bone across datasets.

GasHis-Transformer: A Multi-scale Visual Transformer Approach for Gastric Histopathology Image Classification

For deep learning methods applied to the diagnosis of gastric cancer intelligently, existing methods concentrate more on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) but no approaches are available using Visual Transformer (VT). VT's efficient and stable deep learning models with the most recent application in the field of computer vision, which is capable of improving the recognition of global information in images. In this paper, a multi-scale visual transformer model (GasHis-Transformer) is proposed for a gastric histopathology image classification (GHIC) task, which enables the automatic classification of gastric histological images of abnormal and normal cancer by obtained by optical microscopy to facilitate the medical work of histopathologists. This GasHis-Transformer model is built on two fundamental modules, including a global information module (GIM) and a local information module (LIM). In the experiment, an open source hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained gastric histopathology dataset with 280 abnormal or normal images are divided into training, validation, and test sets at a ratio of 1:1:2 first. Then, GasHis-Transformer obtains precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy on the testing set of 98.0%, 100.0%, 96.0%, and 98.0%. Furthermore, a contrast experiment also tests the generalization ability of the proposed GatHis-Transformer model with a lymphoma image dataset including 374 images and a breast cancer dataset including 1390 images in two extended experiments and achieves an accuracy of 83.9% and 89.4%, respectively. Finally, GasHis-Transformer model demonstrates high classification performance and shows its effectiveness and enormous potential in GHIC tasks.

Neural Crossbreed: Neural Based Image Metamorphosis

We propose Neural Crossbreed, a feed-forward neural network that can learn a semantic change of input images in a latent space to create the morphing effect. Because the network learns a semantic change, a sequence of meaningful intermediate images can be generated without requiring the user to specify explicit correspondences. In addition, the semantic change learning makes it possible to perform the morphing between the images that contain objects with significantly different poses or camera views. Furthermore, just as in conventional morphing techniques, our morphing network can handle shape and appearance transitions separately by disentangling the content and the style transfer for rich usability. We prepare a training dataset for morphing using a pre-trained BigGAN, which generates an intermediate image by interpolating two latent vectors at an intended morphing value. This is the first attempt to address image morphing using a pre-trained generative model in order to learn semantic transformation. The experiments show that Neural Crossbreed produces high quality morphed images, overcoming various limitations associated with conventional approaches. In addition, Neural Crossbreed can be further extended for diverse applications such as multi-image morphing, appearance transfer, and video frame interpolation.

Visual Feature Encoding for GNNs on Road Networks

In this work, we present a novel approach to learning an encoding of visual features into graph neural networks with the application on road network data. We propose an architecture that combines state-of-the-art vision backbone networks with graph neural networks. More specifically, we perform a road type classification task on an Open Street Map road network through encoding of satellite imagery using various ResNet architectures. Our architecture further enables fine-tuning and a transfer-learning approach is evaluated by pretraining on the NWPU-RESISC45 image classification dataset for remote sensing and comparing them to purely ImageNet-pretrained ResNet models as visual feature encoders. The results show not only that the visual feature encoders are superior to low-level visual features, but also that the fine-tuning of the visual feature encoder to a general remote sensing dataset such as NWPU-RESISC45 can further improve the performance of a GNN on a machine learning task like road type classification.

Omnidirectional MediA Format (OMAF): Toolbox for Virtual Reality Services

This paper provides an overview of the Omnidirectional Media Format (OMAF) standard, second edition, which has been recently finalized. OMAF specifies the media format for coding, storage, delivery, and rendering of omnidirectional media, including video, audio, images, and timed text. Additionally, OMAF supports multiple viewpoints corresponding to omnidirectional cameras and overlay images or video rendered over the omnidirectional background image or video. Many examples of usage scenarios for multiple viewpoints and overlays are described in the paper. OMAF provides a toolbox of features, which can be selectively used in virtual reality services. Consequently, the paper presents the interoperability points specified in the OMAF standard, which enable signaling which OMAF features are in use or required to be supported in implementations. Finally, the paper summarizes which OMAF interoperability points have been taken into use in virtual reality service specifications by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the Virtual Reality Industry Forum (VRIF).

Pseudo-Q: Generating Pseudo Language Queries for Visual Grounding

Visual grounding, i.e., localizing objects in images according to natural language queries, is an important topic in visual language understanding. The most effective approaches for this task are based on deep learning, which generally require expensive manually labeled image-query or patch-query pairs. To eliminate the heavy dependence on human annotations, we present a novel method, named Pseudo-Q, to automatically generate pseudo language queries for supervised training. Our method leverages an off-the-shelf object detector to identify visual objects from unlabeled images, and then language queries for these objects are obtained in an unsupervised fashion with a pseudo-query generation module. Then, we design a task-related query prompt module to specifically tailor generated pseudo language queries for visual grounding tasks. Further, in order to fully capture the contextual relationships between images and language queries, we develop a visual-language model equipped with multi-level cross-modality attention mechanism. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method has two notable benefits: (1) it can reduce human annotation costs significantly, e.g., 31% on RefCOCO without degrading original model's performance under the fully supervised setting, and (2) without bells and whistles, it achieves superior or comparable performance compared to state-of-the-art weakly-supervised visual grounding methods on all the five datasets we have experimented. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Pseudo-Q.