Social networks like Facebook and WhatsApp have enabled users to share images with other users around the world. Along with this has come the rapid spread of misinformation. One step towards verifying the authenticity of an image is understanding its origin, including it distribution history through social media. In this paper, we present a method for tracing the posting history of an image across different social networks. To do this, we propose a two-stage deep-learning-based approach, which takes advantage of cascaded fingerprints in images left by social networks during uploading. Our proposed system is not reliant upon metadata or similar easily falsifiable information. Through a series of experiments, we show that we are able to outperform existing social media source identification algorithms. and identify chains of social networks up to length two with over over 84% accuracy.
We investigate a well-known phenomenon of variational approaches in image processing, where typically the best image quality is achieved when the gradient flow process is stopped before converging to a stationary point. This paradox originates from a tradeoff between optimization and modelling errors of the underlying variational model and holds true even if deep learning methods are used to learn highly expressive regularizers from data. In this paper, we take advantage of this paradox and introduce an optimal stopping time into the gradient flow process, which in turn is learned from data by means of an optimal control approach. As a result, we obtain highly efficient numerical schemes that achieve competitive results for image denoising and image deblurring. A nonlinear spectral analysis of the gradient of the learned regularizer gives enlightening insights about the different regularization properties.
Hazy images are common in real scenarios and many dehazing methods have been developed to automatically remove the haze from images. Typically, the goal of image dehazing is to produce clearer images from which human vision can better identify the object and structural details present in the images. When the ground-truth haze-free image is available for a hazy image, quantitative evaluation of image dehazing is usually based on objective metrics, such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM). However, in many applications, large-scale images are collected not for visual examination by human. Instead, they are used for many high-level vision tasks, such as automatic classification, recognition and categorization. One fundamental problem here is whether various dehazing methods can produce clearer images that can help improve the performance of the high-level tasks. In this paper, we empirically study this problem in the important task of image classification by using both synthetic and real hazy image datasets. From the experimental results, we find that the existing image-dehazing methods cannot improve much the image-classification performance and sometimes even reduce the image-classification performance.
There is a proliferation in the number of satellites launched each year, resulting in downlinking of terabytes of data each day. The data received by ground stations is often unprocessed, making this an expensive process considering the large data sizes and that not all of the data is useful. This, coupled with the increasing demand for real-time data processing, has led to a growing need for on-orbit processing solutions. In this work, we investigate the performance of CNN-based object detectors on constrained devices by applying different image compression techniques to satellite data. We examine the capabilities of the NVIDIA Jetson Nano and NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier; low-power, high-performance computers, with integrated GPUs, small enough to fit on-board a nanosatellite. We take a closer look at object detection networks, including the Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) and Region-based Fully Convolutional Network (R-FCN) models that are pre-trained on DOTA - a Large Scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images. The performance is measured in terms of execution time, memory consumption, and accuracy, and are compared against a baseline containing a server with two powerful GPUs. The results show that by applying image compression techniques, we are able to improve the execution time and memory consumption, achieving a fully runnable dataset. A lossless compression technique achieves roughly a 10% reduction in execution time and about a 3% reduction in memory consumption, with no impact on the accuracy. While a lossy compression technique improves the execution time by up to 144% and the memory consumption is reduced by as much as 97%. However, it has a significant impact on accuracy, varying depending on the compression ratio. Thus the application and ratio of these compression techniques may differ depending on the required level of accuracy for a particular task.
Nowadays the deep learning technology is growing faster and shows dramatic performance in computer vision areas. However, it turns out a deep learning based model is highly vulnerable to some small perturbation called an adversarial attack. It can easily fool the deep learning model by adding small perturbations. On the other hand, tensor decomposition method widely uses for compressing the tensor data, including data matrix, image, etc. In this paper, we suggest combining tensor decomposition for defending the model against adversarial example. We verify this idea is simple and effective to resist adversarial attack. In addition, this method rarely degrades the original performance of clean data. We experiment on MNIST, CIFAR10 and ImageNet data and show our method robust on state-of-the-art attack methods.
Scene understanding under low-light conditions is a challenging problem. This is due to the small number of photons captured by the camera and the resulting low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Single-photon cameras (SPCs) are an emerging sensing modality that are capable of capturing images with high sensitivity. Despite having minimal read-noise, images captured by SPCs in photon-starved conditions still suffer from strong shot noise, preventing reliable scene inference. We propose photon scale-space a collection of high-SNR images spanning a wide range of photons-per-pixel (PPP) levels (but same scene content) as guides to train inference model on low photon flux images. We develop training techniques that push images with different illumination levels closer to each other in feature representation space. The key idea is that having a spectrum of different brightness levels during training enables effective guidance, and increases robustness to shot noise even in extreme noise cases. Based on the proposed approach, we demonstrate, via simulations and real experiments with a SPAD camera, high-performance on various inference tasks such as image classification and monocular depth estimation under ultra low-light, down to < 1 PPP.
The prevalence of digital sensors, such as digital cameras and mobile phones, simplifies the acquisition of photos. Digital sensors, however, suffer from producing Moire when photographing objects having complex textures, which deteriorates the quality of photos. Moire spreads across various frequency bands of images and is a dynamic texture with varying colors and shapes, which pose two main challenges in demoireing---an important task in image restoration. In this paper, towards addressing the first challenge, we design a multi-scale network to process images at different spatial resolutions, obtaining features in different frequency bands, and thus our method can jointly remove moire in different frequency bands. Towards solving the second challenge, we propose a dynamic feature encoding module (DFE), embedded in each scale, for dynamic texture. Moire pattern can be eliminated more effectively via DFE.Our proposed method, termed Multi-scale convolutional network with Dynamic feature encoding for image DeMoireing (MDDM), can outperform the state of the arts in fidelity as well as perceptual on benchmarks.
Deep learning (DL) has arguably emerged as the method of choice for the detection and segmentation of biological structures in microscopy images. However, DL typically needs copious amounts of annotated training data that is for biomedical projects typically not available and excessively expensive to generate. Additionally, tasks become harder in the presence of noise, requiring even more high-quality training data. Hence, we propose to use denoising networks to improve the performance of other DL-based image segmentation methods. More specifically, we present ideas on how state-of-the-art self-supervised CARE networks can improve cell/nuclei segmentation in microscopy data. Using two state-of-the-art baseline methods, U-Net and StarDist, we show that our ideas consistently improve the quality of resulting segmentations, especially when only limited training data for noisy micrographs are available.
Visual emotion analysis (VEA) has attracted great attention recently, due to the increasing tendency of expressing and understanding emotions through images on social networks. Different from traditional vision tasks, VEA is inherently more challenging since it involves a much higher level of complexity and ambiguity in human cognitive process. Most of the existing methods adopt deep learning techniques to extract general features from the whole image, disregarding the specific features evoked by various emotional stimuli. Inspired by the \textit{Stimuli-Organism-Response (S-O-R)} emotion model in psychological theory, we proposed a stimuli-aware VEA method consisting of three stages, namely stimuli selection (S), feature extraction (O) and emotion prediction (R). First, specific emotional stimuli (i.e., color, object, face) are selected from images by employing the off-the-shelf tools. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to introduce stimuli selection process into VEA in an end-to-end network. Then, we design three specific networks, i.e., Global-Net, Semantic-Net and Expression-Net, to extract distinct emotional features from different stimuli simultaneously. Finally, benefiting from the inherent structure of Mikel's wheel, we design a novel hierarchical cross-entropy loss to distinguish hard false examples from easy ones in an emotion-specific manner. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on four public visual emotion datasets. Ablation study and visualizations further prove the validity and interpretability of our method.
In the last years, image classification processes like neural networks in the area of art-history and Heritage Informatics have experienced a broad distribution (Lang and Ommer 2018). These methods face several challenges, including the handling of comparatively small amounts of data as well as high-dimensional data in the Digital Humanities. Here, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used that output is not, as usual, a series of flat text labels but a series of semantically loaded vectors. These vectors result from a Distributional Semantic Model (DSM) which is generated from an in-domain text corpus. ----- In den letzten Jahren hat die Verwendung von Bildklassifizierungsverfahren wie neuronalen Netzwerken auch im Bereich der historischen Bildwissenschaften und der Heritage Informatics weite Verbreitung gefunden (Lang und Ommer 2018). Diese Verfahren stehen dabei vor einer Reihe von Herausforderungen, darunter dem Umgangmit den vergleichsweise kleinen Datenmengen sowie zugleich hochdimensionalen Da-tenr\"aumen in den digitalen Geisteswissenschaften. Meist bilden diese Methoden dieKlassifizierung auf einen vergleichsweise flachen Raum ab. Dieser flache Zugang verliert im Bem\"uhen um ontologische Eindeutigkeit eine Reihe von relevanten Dimensionen, darunter taxonomische, mereologische und assoziative Beziehungen zwischenden Klassen beziehungsweise dem nicht formalisierten Kontext. Dabei wird ein Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) genutzt, dessen Ausgabe im Trainingsprozess, anders als herk\"ommlich, nicht auf einer Serie flacher Textlabel beruht, sondern auf einer Serie von Vektoren. Diese Vektoren resultieren aus einem Distributional Semantic Model (DSM), welches aus einem Dom\"ane-Textkorpus generiert wird.