Diffuse to Choose: Enriching Image Conditioned Inpainting in Latent Diffusion Models for Virtual Try-All

As online shopping is growing, the ability for buyers to virtually visualize products in their settings-a phenomenon we define as "Virtual Try-All"-has become crucial. Recent diffusion models inherently contain a world model, rendering them suitable for this task within an inpainting context. However, traditional image-conditioned diffusion models often fail to capture the fine-grained details of products. In contrast, personalization-driven models such as DreamPaint are good at preserving the item's details but they are not optimized for real-time applications. We present "Diffuse to Choose," a novel diffusion-based image-conditioned inpainting model that efficiently balances fast inference with the retention of high-fidelity details in a given reference item while ensuring accurate semantic manipulations in the given scene content. Our approach is based on incorporating fine-grained features from the reference image directly into the latent feature maps of the main diffusion model, alongside with a perceptual loss to further preserve the reference item's details. We conduct extensive testing on both in-house and publicly available datasets, and show that Diffuse to Choose is superior to existing zero-shot diffusion inpainting methods as well as few-shot diffusion personalization algorithms like DreamPaint.

Score-based generative models break the curse of dimensionality in learning a family of sub-Gaussian probability distributions

While score-based generative models (SGMs) have achieved remarkable success in enormous image generation tasks, their mathematical foundations are still limited. In this paper, we analyze the approximation and generalization of SGMs in learning a family of sub-Gaussian probability distributions. We introduce a notion of complexity for probability distributions in terms of their relative density with respect to the standard Gaussian measure. We prove that if the log-relative density can be locally approximated by a neural network whose parameters can be suitably bounded, then the distribution generated by empirical score matching approximates the target distribution in total variation with a dimension-independent rate. We illustrate our theory through examples, which include certain mixtures of Gaussians. An essential ingredient of our proof is to derive a dimension-free deep neural network approximation rate for the true score function associated with the forward process, which is interesting in its own right.

Enhancing Image Retrieval : A Comprehensive Study on Photo Search using the CLIP Mode

Photo search, the task of retrieving images based on textual queries, has witnessed significant advancements with the introduction of CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) model. CLIP leverages a vision-language pre training approach, wherein it learns a shared representation space for images and text, enabling cross-modal understanding. This model demonstrates the capability to understand the semantic relationships between diverse image and text pairs, allowing for efficient and accurate retrieval of images based on natural language queries. By training on a large-scale dataset containing images and their associated textual descriptions, CLIP achieves remarkable generalization, providing a powerful tool for tasks such as zero-shot learning and few-shot classification. This abstract summarizes the foundational principles of CLIP and highlights its potential impact on advancing the field of photo search, fostering a seamless integration of natural language understanding and computer vision for improved information retrieval in multimedia applications

Event-to-Video Conversion for Overhead Object Detection

Collecting overhead imagery using an event camera is desirable due to the energy efficiency of the image sensor compared to standard cameras. However, event cameras complicate downstream image processing, especially for complex tasks such as object detection. In this paper, we investigate the viability of event streams for overhead object detection. We demonstrate that across a number of standard modeling approaches, there is a significant gap in performance between dense event representations and corresponding RGB frames. We establish that this gap is, in part, due to a lack of overlap between the event representations and the pre-training data used to initialize the weights of the object detectors. Then, we apply event-to-video conversion models that convert event streams into gray-scale video to close this gap. We demonstrate that this approach results in a large performance increase, outperforming even event-specific object detection techniques on our overhead target task. These results suggest that better alignment between event representations and existing large pre-trained models may result in greater short-term performance gains compared to end-to-end event-specific architectural improvements.

Spatially-Attentive Patch-Hierarchical Network with Adaptive Sampling for Motion Deblurring

This paper tackles the problem of motion deblurring of dynamic scenes. Although end-to-end fully convolutional designs have recently advanced the state-of-the-art in non-uniform motion deblurring, their performance-complexity trade-off is still sub-optimal. Most existing approaches achieve a large receptive field by increasing the number of generic convolution layers and kernel size. In this work, we propose a pixel adaptive and feature attentive design for handling large blur variations across different spatial locations and process each test image adaptively. We design a content-aware global-local filtering module that significantly improves performance by considering not only global dependencies but also by dynamically exploiting neighboring pixel information. We further introduce a pixel-adaptive non-uniform sampling strategy that implicitly discovers the difficult-to-restore regions present in the image and, in turn, performs fine-grained refinement in a progressive manner. Extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons with prior art on deblurring benchmarks demonstrate that our approach performs favorably against the state-of-the-art deblurring algorithms.

Wavelet-Guided Acceleration of Text Inversion in Diffusion-Based Image Editing

In the field of image editing, Null-text Inversion (NTI) enables fine-grained editing while preserving the structure of the original image by optimizing null embeddings during the DDIM sampling process. However, the NTI process is time-consuming, taking more than two minutes per image. To address this, we introduce an innovative method that maintains the principles of the NTI while accelerating the image editing process. We propose the WaveOpt-Estimator, which determines the text optimization endpoint based on frequency characteristics. Utilizing wavelet transform analysis to identify the image's frequency characteristics, we can limit text optimization to specific timesteps during the DDIM sampling process. By adopting the Negative-Prompt Inversion (NPI) concept, a target prompt representing the original image serves as the initial text value for optimization. This approach maintains performance comparable to NTI while reducing the average editing time by over 80% compared to the NTI method. Our method presents a promising approach for efficient, high-quality image editing based on diffusion models.

SHMC-Net: A Mask-guided Feature Fusion Network for Sperm Head Morphology Classification

Male infertility accounts for about one-third of global infertility cases. Manual assessment of sperm abnormalities through head morphology analysis encounters issues of observer variability and diagnostic discrepancies among experts. Its alternative, Computer-Assisted Semen Analysis (CASA), suffers from low-quality sperm images, small datasets, and noisy class labels. We propose a new approach for sperm head morphology classification, called SHMC-Net, which uses segmentation masks of sperm heads to guide the morphology classification of sperm images. SHMC-Net generates reliable segmentation masks using image priors, refines object boundaries with an efficient graph-based method, and trains an image network with sperm head crops and a mask network with the corresponding masks. In the intermediate stages of the networks, image and mask features are fused with a fusion scheme to better learn morphological features. To handle noisy class labels and regularize training on small datasets, SHMC-Net applies Soft Mixup to combine mixup augmentation and a loss function. We achieve state-of-the-art results on SCIAN and HuSHeM datasets, outperforming methods that use additional pre-training or costly ensembling techniques.

Offline Deep Model Predictive Control (MPC) for Visual Navigation

In this paper, we propose a new visual navigation method based on a single RGB perspective camera. Using the Visual Teach & Repeat (VT&R) methodology, the robot acquires a visual trajectory consisting of multiple subgoal images in the teaching step. In the repeat step, we propose two network architectures, namely ViewNet and VelocityNet. The combination of the two networks allows the robot to follow the visual trajectory. ViewNet is trained to generate a future image based on the current view and the velocity command. The generated future image is combined with the subgoal image for training VelocityNet. We develop an offline Model Predictive Control (MPC) policy within VelocityNet with the dual goals of (1) reducing the difference between current and subgoal images and (2) ensuring smooth trajectories by mitigating velocity discontinuities. Offline training conserves computational resources, making it a more suitable option for scenarios with limited computational capabilities, such as embedded systems. We validate our experiments in a simulation environment, demonstrating that our model can effectively minimize the metric error between real and played trajectories.

Sheet Music Transformer: End-To-End Optical Music Recognition Beyond Monophonic Transcription

State-of-the-art end-to-end Optical Music Recognition (OMR) has, to date, primarily been carried out using monophonic transcription techniques to handle complex score layouts, such as polyphony, often by resorting to simplifications or specific adaptations. Despite their efficacy, these approaches imply challenges related to scalability and limitations. This paper presents the Sheet Music Transformer, the first end-to-end OMR model designed to transcribe complex musical scores without relying solely on monophonic strategies. Our model employs a Transformer-based image-to-sequence framework that predicts score transcriptions in a standard digital music encoding format from input images. Our model has been tested on two polyphonic music datasets and has proven capable of handling these intricate music structures effectively. The experimental outcomes not only indicate the competence of the model, but also show that it is better than the state-of-the-art methods, thus contributing to advancements in end-to-end OMR transcription.

Feature Denoising Diffusion Model for Blind Image Quality Assessment

Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) aims to evaluate image quality in line with human perception, without reference benchmarks. Currently, deep learning BIQA methods typically depend on using features from high-level tasks for transfer learning. However, the inherent differences between BIQA and these high-level tasks inevitably introduce noise into the quality-aware features. In this paper, we take an initial step towards exploring the diffusion model for feature denoising in BIQA, namely Perceptual Feature Diffusion for IQA (PFD-IQA), which aims to remove noise from quality-aware features. Specifically, (i) We propose a {Perceptual Prior Discovery and Aggregation module to establish two auxiliary tasks to discover potential low-level features in images that are used to aggregate perceptual text conditions for the diffusion model. (ii) We propose a Perceptual Prior-based Feature Refinement strategy, which matches noisy features to predefined denoising trajectories and then performs exact feature denoising based on text conditions. Extensive experiments on eight standard BIQA datasets demonstrate the superior performance to the state-of-the-art BIQA methods, i.e., achieving the PLCC values of 0.935 ( vs. 0.905 in KADID) and 0.922 ( vs. 0.894 in LIVEC).