Tell-the-difference: Fine-grained Visual Descriptor via a Discriminating Referee

In this paper, we investigate a novel problem of telling the difference between image pairs in natural language. Compared to previous approaches for single image captioning, it is challenging to fetch linguistic representation from two independent visual information. To this end, we have proposed an effective encoder-decoder caption framework based on Hyper Convolution Net. In addition, a series of novel feature fusing techniques for pairwise visual information fusing are introduced and a discriminating referee is proposed to evaluate the pipeline. Because of the lack of appropriate datasets to support this task, we have collected and annotated a large new dataset with Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) for generating captions in a pairwise manner (with 14764 images and 26710 image pairs in total). The dataset is the first one on the relative difference caption task that provides descriptions in free language. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model on two datasets in the field and it outperforms the state-of-the-art approach by a large margin.

A new heuristic algorithm for fast k-segmentation

The $k$-segmentation of a video stream is used to partition it into $k$ piecewise-linear segments, so that each linear segment has a meaningful interpretation. Such segmentation may be used to summarize large videos using a small set of images, to identify anomalies within segments and change points between segments, and to select critical subsets for training machine learning models. Exact and approximate segmentation methods for $k$-segmentation exist in the literature. Each of these algorithms occupies a different spot in the trade-off between computational complexity and accuracy. A novel heuristic algorithm is proposed in this paper to improve upon existing methods. It is empirically found to provide accuracies competitive with exact methods at a fraction of the computational expense. The new algorithm is inspired by Lloyd's algorithm for K-Means and Lloyd-Max algorithm for scalar quantization, and is called the LM algorithm for convenience. It works by iteratively minimizing a cost function from any given initialisation; the commonly used $L_2$ cost is chosen in this paper. While the greedy minimization makes the algorithm sensitive to initialisation, the ability to converge from any initial guess to a local optimum allows the algorithm to be integrated into other existing algorithms. Three variants of the algorithm are tested over a large number of synthetic datasets, one being a standalone LM implementation, and two others that combine with existing algorithms. One of the latter two -- LM-enhanced-Bottom-Up segmentation -- is found to have the best accuracy and the lowest computational complexity among all algorithms. This variant of LM can provide $k$-segmentations over data sets with up to a million image frames within several seconds.

CPR: Classifier-Projection Regularization for Continual Learning

We propose a general, yet simple patch that can be applied to existing regularization-based continual learning methods called classifier-projection regularization (CPR). Inspired by both recent results on neural networks with wide local minima and information theory, CPR adds an additional regularization term that maximizes the entropy of a classifier's output probability. We demonstrate that this additional term can be interpreted as a projection of the conditional probability given by a classifier's output to the uniform distribution. By applying the Pythagorean theorem for KL divergence, we then prove that this projection may (in theory) improve the performance of continual learning methods. In our extensive experimental results, we apply CPR to several state-of-the-art regularization-based continual learning methods and benchmark performance on popular image recognition datasets. Our results demonstrate that CPR indeed promotes a wide local minima and significantly improves both accuracy and plasticity while simultaneously mitigating the catastrophic forgetting of baseline continual learning methods.

Real-time 3D Shape Instantiation for Partially-deployed Stent Segment from a Single 2D Fluoroscopic Image in Robot-assisted Fenestrated Endovascular Aortic Repair

In robot-assisted Fenestrated Endovascular Aortic Repair (FEVAR), accurate alignment of stent graft fenestrations or scallops with aortic branches is essential for establishing complete blood flow perfusion. Current navigation is largely based on 2D fluoroscopic images, which lacks 3D anatomical information, thus causing longer operation time as well as high risks of radiation exposure. Previously, 3D shape instantiation frameworks for real-time 3D shape reconstruction of fully-deployed or fully-compressed stent graft from a single 2D fluoroscopic image have been proposed for 3D navigation in robot-assisted FEVAR. However, these methods could not instantiate partially-deployed stent segments, as the 3D marker references are unknown. In this paper, an adapted Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is proposed to predict 3D marker references from 3D fully-deployed markers. As original GCN is for classification, in this paper, the coarsening layers are removed and the softmax function at the network end is replaced with linear mapping for the regression task. The derived 3D and the 2D marker references are used to instantiate partially-deployed stent segment shape with the existing 3D shape instantiation framework. Validations were performed on three commonly used stent grafts and five patient-specific 3D printed aortic aneurysm phantoms. Comparable performances with average mesh distance errors of 1$\sim$3mm and average angular errors around 7degree were achieved.

Extensions to the Proximal Distance of Method of Constrained Optimization

The current paper studies the problem of minimizing a loss $f(\boldsymbol{x})$ subject to constraints of the form $\boldsymbol{D}\boldsymbol{x} \in S$, where $S$ is a closed set, convex or not, and $\boldsymbol{D}$ is a fusion matrix. Fusion constraints can capture smoothness, sparsity, or more general constraint patterns. To tackle this generic class of problems, we combine the Beltrami-Courant penalty method of optimization with the proximal distance principle. The latter is driven by minimization of penalized objectives $f(\boldsymbol{x})+\frac{\rho}{2}\text{dist}(\boldsymbol{D}\boldsymbol{x},S)^2$ involving large tuning constants $\rho$ and the squared Euclidean distance of $\boldsymbol{D}\boldsymbol{x}$ from $S$. The next iterate $\boldsymbol{x}_{n+1}$ of the corresponding proximal distance algorithm is constructed from the current iterate $\boldsymbol{x}_n$ by minimizing the majorizing surrogate function $f(\boldsymbol{x})+\frac{\rho}{2}\|\boldsymbol{D}\boldsymbol{x}-\mathcal{P}_S(\boldsymbol{D}\boldsymbol{x}_n)\|^2$. For fixed $\rho$ and convex $f(\boldsymbol{x})$ and $S$, we prove convergence, provide convergence rates, and demonstrate linear convergence under stronger assumptions. We also construct a steepest descent (SD) variant to avoid costly linear system solves. To benchmark our algorithms, we adapt the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and compare on extensive numerical tests including problems in metric projection, convex regression, convex clustering, total variation image denoising, and projection of a matrix to one that has a good condition number. Our experiments demonstrate the superior speed and acceptable accuracy of the steepest variant on high-dimensional problems. Julia code to replicate all of our experiments can be found at https://github.com/alanderos91/ProximalDistanceAlgorithms.jl.

Look Locally Infer Globally: A Generalizable Face Anti-Spoofing Approach

State-of-the-art spoof detection methods tend to overfit to the spoof types seen during training and fail to generalize to unknown spoof types. Given that face anti-spoofing is inherently a local task, we propose a face anti-spoofing framework, namely Self-Supervised Regional Fully Convolutional Network (SSR-FCN), that is trained to learn local discriminative cues from a face image in a self-supervised manner. The proposed framework improves generalizability while maintaining the computational efficiency of holistic face anti-spoofing approaches (< 4 ms on a Nvidia GTX 1080Ti GPU). The proposed method is interpretable since it localizes which parts of the face are labeled as spoofs. Experimental results show that SSR-FCN can achieve TDR = 65% @ 2.0% FDR when evaluated on a dataset comprising of 13 different spoof types under unknown attacks while achieving competitive performances under standard benchmark datasets (Oulu-NPU, CASIA-MFSD, and Replay-Attack).

Feature Super-Resolution Based Facial Expression Recognition for Multi-scale Low-Resolution Faces

Facial Expressions Recognition(FER) on low-resolution images is necessary for applications like group expression recognition in crowd scenarios(station, classroom etc.). Classifying a small size facial image into the right expression category is still a challenging task. The main cause of this problem is the loss of discriminative feature due to reduced resolution. Super-resolution method is often used to enhance low-resolution images, but the performance on FER task is limited when on images of very low resolution. In this work, inspired by feature super-resolution methods for object detection, we proposed a novel generative adversary network-based feature level super-resolution method for robust facial expression recognition(FSR-FER). In particular, a pre-trained FER model was employed as feature extractor, and a generator network G and a discriminator network D are trained with features extracted from images of low resolution and original high resolution. Generator network G tries to transform features of low-resolution images to more discriminative ones by making them closer to the ones of corresponding high-resolution images. For better classification performance, we also proposed an effective classification-aware loss re-weighting strategy based on the classification probability calculated by a fixed FER model to make our model focus more on samples that are easily misclassified. Experiment results on Real-World Affective Faces (RAF) Database demonstrate that our method achieves satisfying results on various down-sample factors with a single model and has better performance on low-resolution images compared with methods using image super-resolution and expression recognition separately.

Image Segmentation with Multidimensional Refinement Indicators

We transpose an optimal control technique to the image segmentation problem. The idea is to consider image segmentation as a parameter estimation problem. The parameter to estimate is the color of the pixels of the image. We use the adaptive parameterization technique which builds iteratively an optimal representation of the parameter into uniform regions that form a partition of the domain, hence corresponding to a segmentation of the image. We minimize an error function during the iterations, and the partition of the image into regions is optimally driven by the gradient of this error. The resulting segmentation algorithm inherits desirable properties from its optimal control origin: soundness, robustness, and flexibility.

Band Attention Convolutional Networks For Hyperspectral Image Classification

Redundancy and noise exist in the bands of hyperspectral images (HSIs). Thus, it is a good property to be able to select suitable parts from hundreds of input bands for HSIs classification methods. In this letter, a band attention module (BAM) is proposed to implement the deep learning based HSIs classification with the capacity of band selection or weighting. The proposed BAM can be seen as a plug-and-play complementary component of the existing classification networks which fully considers the adverse effects caused by the redundancy of the bands when using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for HSIs classification. Unlike most of deep learning methods used in HSIs, the band attention module which is customized according to the characteristics of hyperspectral images is embedded in the ordinary CNNs for better performance. At the same time, unlike classical band selection or weighting methods, the proposed method achieves the end-to-end training instead of the separated stages. Experiments are carried out on two HSI benchmark datasets. Compared to some classical and advanced deep learning methods, numerical simulations under different evaluation criteria show that the proposed method have good performance. Last but not least, some advanced CNNs are combined with the proposed BAM for better performance.

PAN: Projective Adversarial Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Adversarial learning has been proven to be effective for capturing long-range and high-level label consistencies in semantic segmentation. Unique to medical imaging, capturing 3D semantics in an effective yet computationally efficient way remains an open problem. In this study, we address this computational burden by proposing a novel projective adversarial network, called PAN, which incorporates high-level 3D information through 2D projections. Furthermore, we introduce an attention module into our framework that helps for a selective integration of global information directly from our segmentor to our adversarial network. For the clinical application we chose pancreas segmentation from CT scans. Our proposed framework achieved state-of-the-art performance without adding to the complexity of the segmentor.