Patch-based Probabilistic Image Quality Assessment for Face Selection and Improved Video-based Face Recognition

In video based face recognition, face images are typically captured over multiple frames in uncontrolled conditions, where head pose, illumination, shadowing, motion blur and focus change over the sequence. Additionally, inaccuracies in face localisation can also introduce scale and alignment variations. Using all face images, including images of poor quality, can actually degrade face recognition performance. While one solution it to use only the "best" subset of images, current face selection techniques are incapable of simultaneously handling all of the abovementioned issues. We propose an efficient patch-based face image quality assessment algorithm which quantifies the similarity of a face image to a probabilistic face model, representing an "ideal" face. Image characteristics that affect recognition are taken into account, including variations in geometric alignment (shift, rotation and scale), sharpness, head pose and cast shadows. Experiments on FERET and PIE datasets show that the proposed algorithm is able to identify images which are simultaneously the most frontal, aligned, sharp and well illuminated. Further experiments on a new video surveillance dataset (termed ChokePoint) show that the proposed method provides better face subsets than existing face selection techniques, leading to significant improvements in recognition accuracy.

Vision-Infused Deep Audio Inpainting

Multi-modality perception is essential to develop interactive intelligence. In this work, we consider a new task of visual information-infused audio inpainting, \ie synthesizing missing audio segments that correspond to their accompanying videos. We identify two key aspects for a successful inpainter: (1) It is desirable to operate on spectrograms instead of raw audios. Recent advances in deep semantic image inpainting could be leveraged to go beyond the limitations of traditional audio inpainting. (2) To synthesize visually indicated audio, a visual-audio joint feature space needs to be learned with synchronization of audio and video. To facilitate a large-scale study, we collect a new multi-modality instrument-playing dataset called MUSIC-Extra-Solo (MUSICES) by enriching MUSIC dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework is capable of inpainting realistic and varying audio segments with or without visual contexts. More importantly, our synthesized audio segments are coherent with their video counterparts, showing the effectiveness of our proposed Vision-Infused Audio Inpainter (VIAI). Code, models, dataset and video results are available at https://hangz-nju-cuhk.github.io/projects/AudioInpainting

DeepGoal: Learning to Drive with driving intention from Human Control Demonstration

Recent research on automotive driving developed an efficient end-to-end learning mode that directly maps visual input to control commands. However, it models distinct driving variations in a single network, which increases learning complexity and is less adaptive for modular integration. In this paper, we re-investigate human's driving style and propose to learn an intermediate driving intention region to relax difficulties in end-to-end approach. The intention region follows both road structure in image and direction towards goal in public route planner, which addresses visual variations only and figures out where to go without conventional precise localization. Then the learned visual intention is projected on vehicle local coordinate and fused with reliable obstacle perception to render a navigation score map widely used for motion planning. The core of the proposed system is a weakly-supervised cGAN-LSTM model trained to learn driving intention from human demonstration. The adversarial loss learns from limited demonstration data with one local planned route and enables reasoning of multi-modal behavior with diverse routes while testing. Comprehensive experiments are conducted with real-world datasets. Results show the proposed paradigm can produce more consistent motion commands with human demonstration, and indicates better reliability and robustness to environment change.

Convolutional Prototype Learning for Zero-Shot Recognition

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) has received increasing attention in recent years especially in areas of fine-grained object recognition, retrieval, and image captioning. The key to ZSL is to transfer knowledge from the seen to the unseen classes via auxiliary class attribute vectors. However, the popularly learned projection functions in previous works cannot generalize well since they assume the distribution consistency between seen and unseen domains at sample-level.Besides, the provided non-visual and unique class attributes can significantly degrade the recognition performance in semantic space. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective convolutional prototype learning (CPL) framework for zero-shot recognition. By assuming distribution consistency at task-level, our CPL is capable of transferring knowledge smoothly to recognize unseen samples.Furthermore, inside each task, discriminative visual prototypes are learned via a distance based training mechanism. Consequently, we can perform recognition in visual space, instead of semantic space. An extensive group of experiments are then carefully designed and presented, demonstrating that CPL obtains more favorable effectiveness, over currently available alternatives under various settings.

Domain Intersection and Domain Difference

We present a method for recovering the shared content between two visual domains as well as the content that is unique to each domain. This allows us to map from one domain to the other, in a way in which the content that is specific for the first domain is removed and the content that is specific for the second is imported from any image in the second domain. In addition, our method enables generation of images from the intersection of the two domains as well as their union, despite having no such samples during training. The method is shown analytically to contain all the sufficient and necessary constraints. It also outperforms the literature methods in an extensive set of experiments. Our code is available at https://github.com/sagiebenaim/DomainIntersectionDifference.

How Old Are You? Face Age Translation with Identity Preservation Using GANs

We present a novel framework to generate images of different age while preserving identity information, which is known as face aging. Different from most recent popular face aging networks utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs) application, our approach do not simply transfer a young face to an old one. Instead, we employ the edge map as intermediate representations, firstly edge maps of young faces are extracted, a CycleGAN-based network is adopted to transfer them into edge maps of old faces, then another pix2pixHD-based network is adopted to transfer the synthesized edge maps, concatenated with identity information, into old faces. In this way, our method can generate more realistic transfered images, simultaneously ensuring that face identity information be preserved well, and the apparent age of the generated image be accurately appropriate. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is feasible for face age translation.

Generalized Separable Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a linear dimensionality technique for nonnegative data with applications such as image analysis, text mining, audio source separation and hyperspectral unmixing. Given a data matrix $M$ and a factorization rank $r$, NMF looks for a nonnegative matrix $W$ with $r$ columns and a nonnegative matrix $H$ with $r$ rows such that $M \approx WH$. NMF is NP-hard to solve in general. However, it can be computed efficiently under the separability assumption which requires that the basis vectors appear as data points, that is, that there exists an index set $\mathcal{K}$ such that $W = M(:,\mathcal{K})$. In this paper, we generalize the separability assumption: We only require that for each rank-one factor $W(:,k)H(k,:)$ for $k=1,2,\dots,r$, either $W(:,k) = M(:,j)$ for some $j$ or $H(k,:) = M(i,:)$ for some $i$. We refer to the corresponding problem as generalized separable NMF (GS-NMF). We discuss some properties of GS-NMF and propose a convex optimization model which we solve using a fast gradient method. We also propose a heuristic algorithm inspired by the successive projection algorithm. To verify the effectiveness of our methods, we compare them with several state-of-the-art separable NMF algorithms on synthetic, document and image data sets.

Spot Evasion Attacks: Adversarial Examples for License Plate Recognition Systems with Convolutional Neural Networks

Recent studies have shown convolution neural networks (CNNs) for image recognition are vulnerable to evasion attacks with carefully manipulated adversarial examples. Previous work primarily focused on how to generate adversarial examples closed to source images, by introducing pixel-level perturbations into the whole or specific part of images. In this paper, we propose an evasion attack on CNN classifiers in the context of License Plate Recognition (LPR), which adds predetermined perturbations to specific regions of license plate images, simulating some sort of naturally formed spots (such as sludge, etc.). Therefore, the problem is modeled as an optimization process searching for optimal perturbation positions, which is different from previous work that consider pixel values as decision variables. Notice that this is a complex nonlinear optimization problem, and we use a genetic-algorithm based approach to obtain optimal perturbation positions. In experiments, we use the proposed algorithm to generate various adversarial examples in the form of rectangle, circle, ellipse and spots cluster. Experimental results show that these adversarial examples are almost ignored by human eyes, but can fool HyperLPR with high attack success rate over 93%. Therefore, we believe that this kind of spot evasion attacks would pose a great threat to current LPR systems, and needs to be investigated further by the security community.

Unsupervised Visual Feature Learning with Spike-timing-dependent Plasticity: How Far are we from Traditional Feature Learning Approaches?

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) equipped with latency coding and spike-timing dependent plasticity rules offer an alternative to solve the data and energy bottlenecks of standard computer vision approaches: they can learn visual features without supervision and can be implemented by ultra-low power hardware architectures. However, their performance in image classification has never been evaluated on recent image datasets. In this paper, we compare SNNs to auto-encoders on three visual recognition datasets, and extend the use of SNNs to color images. Results show that SNNs are not competitive yet with traditional feature learning approaches, especially for color features. Further analyses of the results allow us to identify some of the bottlenecks of SNNs and provide specific directions towards improving their performance on vision tasks.

Fast Video Retargeting Based on Seam Carving with Parental Labeling

Seam carving is a state-of-the-art content-aware image resizing technique that effectively preserves the salient areas of an image. However, when applied to video retargeting, not only is it time intensive, but it also creates highly visible frame-wise discontinuities. In this paper, we propose a novel video retargeting method based on seam carving. First, for a single frame, we locate and remove several seams instead of one seam at once. Second, we use a dynamic spatiotemporal buffer of energy maps and a standard deviation operator to carve out the same seams in a temporal cube of frames with low variation in energy. Last but not least, an improved energy function that considers motions detected through difference method is employed. During testing, these enhancements result in a 93 percent reduction in processing time and a higher frame-wise consistency, thus showing superior performance compared to existing video retargeting methods.