Physical photographs now can be conveniently scanned by smartphones and stored forever as a digital version, but the scanned photos are not restored well. One solution is to train a supervised deep neural network on many digital photos and the corresponding scanned photos. However, human annotation costs a huge resource leading to limited training data. Previous works create training pairs by simulating degradation using image processing techniques. Their synthetic images are formed with perfectly scanned photos in latent space. Even so, the real-world degradation in smartphone photo scanning remains unsolved since it is more complicated due to real lens defocus, lighting conditions, losing details via printing, various photo materials, and more. To solve these problems, we propose a Deep Photo Scan (DPScan) based on semi-supervised learning. First, we present the way to produce real-world degradation and provide the DIV2K-SCAN dataset for smartphone-scanned photo restoration. Second, by using DIV2K-SCAN, we adopt the concept of Generative Adversarial Networks to learn how to degrade a high-quality image as if it were scanned by a real smartphone, then generate pseudo-scanned photos for unscanned photos. Finally, we propose to train on the scanned and pseudo-scanned photos representing a semi-supervised approach with a cycle process as: high-quality images --> real-/pseudo-scanned photos --> reconstructed images. The proposed semi-supervised scheme can balance between supervised and unsupervised errors while optimizing to limit imperfect pseudo inputs but still enhance restoration. As a result, the proposed DPScan quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms its baseline architecture, state-of-the-art academic research, and industrial products in smartphone photo scanning.
In this work, we analyze more than two million news photos published in January 2016. We demonstrate i) which objects appear the most in news photos; ii) what the sentiments of news photos are; iii) whether the sentiment of news photos is aligned with the tone of the text; iv) how gender is treated; and v) how differently political candidates are portrayed. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale study of news photo contents using deep learning-based vision APIs.
We present a method and application for animating a human subject from a single photo. E.g., the character can walk out, run, sit, or jump in 3D. The key contributions of this paper are: 1) an application of viewing and animating humans in single photos in 3D, 2) a novel 2D warping method to deform a posable template body model to fit the person's complex silhouette to create an animatable mesh, and 3) a method for handling partial self occlusions. We compare to state-of-the-art related methods and evaluate results with human studies. Further, we present an interactive interface that allows re-posing the person in 3D, and an augmented reality setup where the animated 3D person can emerge from the photo into the real world. We demonstrate the method on photos, posters, and art.
We propose to restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. Unlike conventional restoration tasks that can be solved through supervised learning, the degradation in real photos is complex and the domain gap between synthetic images and real old photos makes the network fail to generalize. Therefore, we propose a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs. Specifically, we train two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to respectively transform old photos and clean photos into two latent spaces. And the translation between these two latent spaces is learned with synthetic paired data. This translation generalizes well to real photos because the domain gap is closed in the compact latent space. Besides, to address multiple degradations mixed in one old photo, we design a global branch with a partial nonlocal block targeting to the structured defects, such as scratches and dust spots, and a local branch targeting to the unstructured defects, such as noises and blurriness. Two branches are fused in the latent space, leading to improved capability to restore old photos from multiple defects. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality for old photos restoration.
In this paper, we propose a novel model with a hierarchical photo-scene encoder and a reconstructor for the task of album storytelling. The photo-scene encoder contains two sub-encoders, namely the photo and scene encoders, which are stacked together and behave hierarchically to fully exploit the structure information of the photos within an album. Specifically, the photo encoder generates semantic representation for each photo while exploiting temporal relationships among them. The scene encoder, relying on the obtained photo representations, is responsible for detecting the scene changes and generating scene representations. Subsequently, the decoder dynamically and attentively summarizes the encoded photo and scene representations to generate a sequence of album representations, based on which a story consisting of multiple coherent sentences is generated. In order to fully extract the useful semantic information from an album, a reconstructor is employed to reproduce the summarized album representations based on the hidden states of the decoder. The proposed model can be trained in an end-to-end manner, which results in an improved performance over the state-of-the-arts on the public visual storytelling (VIST) dataset. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical photo-scene encoder and reconstructor.
We propose to restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. Unlike conventional restoration tasks that can be solved through supervised learning, the degradation in real photos is complex and the domain gap between synthetic images and real old photos makes the network fail to generalize. Therefore, we propose a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs. Specifically, we train two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to respectively transform old photos and clean photos into two latent spaces. And the translation between these two latent spaces is learned with synthetic paired data. This translation generalizes well to real photos because the domain gap is closed in the compact latent space. Besides, to address multiple degradations mixed in one old photo, we design a global branch with apartial nonlocal block targeting to the structured defects, such as scratches and dust spots, and a local branch targeting to the unstructured defects, such as noises and blurriness. Two branches are fused in the latent space, leading to improved capability to restore old photos from multiple defects. Furthermore, we apply another face refinement network to recover fine details of faces in the old photos, thus ultimately generating photos with enhanced perceptual quality. With comprehensive experiments, the proposed pipeline demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art methods as well as existing commercial tools in terms of visual quality for old photos restoration.
Face photo-sketch synthesis aims at generating a facial sketch (or photo) conditioned on a given photo (or sketch). It is of wide applications including digital entertainment and law enforcement. Despite the great progress achieved by existing methods, they mostly yield blurred effects and great deformation over various facial components. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose to use the facial composition information to help the synthesis of face sketch/photo. Specially, we propose a novel composition-aided generative adversarial network (CA-GAN) for face photo-sketch synthesis. First, we utilize paired inputs including a face photo/sketch and the corresponding pixel-wise face labels for generating the sketch/photo. Second, we propose an improved pixel loss, termed compositional loss, to focus training on hard-generated components and delicate facial structures. Moreover, we use stacked CA-GANs (SCA-GAN) to further rectify defects and add compelling details. Experimental results show that our method is capable of generating identity-preserving and visually comfortable sketches and photos over a wide range of challenging data. Besides, cross-dataset photo-sketch synthesis evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method is of considerable generalization ability.
Face sketch-photo synthesis is a critical application in law enforcement and digital entertainment industry where the goal is to learn the mapping between a face sketch image and its corresponding photo-realistic image. However, the limited number of paired sketch-photo training data usually prevents the current frameworks to learn a robust mapping between the geometry of sketches and their matching photo-realistic images. Consequently, in this work, we present an approach for learning to synthesize a photo-realistic image from a face sketch in an unsupervised fashion. In contrast to current unsupervised image-to-image translation techniques, our framework leverages a novel perceptual discriminator to learn the geometry of human face. Learning facial prior information empowers the network to remove the geometrical artifacts in the face sketch. We demonstrate that a simultaneous optimization of the face photo generator network, employing the proposed perceptual discriminator in combination with a texture-wise discriminator, results in a significant improvement in quality and recognition rate of the synthesized photos. We evaluate the proposed network by conducting extensive experiments on multiple baseline sketch-photo datasets.
Geo-tagged photo based tourist attraction recommendation can discover users' travel preferences from their taken photos, so as to recommend suitable tourist attractions to them. However, existing visual content based methods cannot fully exploit the user and tourist attraction information of photos to extract visual features, and do not differentiate the significances of different photos. In this paper, we propose multi-level visual similarity based personalized tourist attraction recommendation using geo-tagged photos (MEAL). MEAL utilizes the visual contents of photos and interaction behavior data to obtain the final embeddings of users and tourist attractions, which are then used to predict the visit probabilities. Specifically, by crossing the user and tourist attraction information of photos, we define four visual similarity levels and introduce a corresponding quintuplet loss to embed the visual contents of photos. In addition, to capture the significances of different photos, we exploit the self-attention mechanism to obtain the visual representations of users and tourist attractions. We conducted experiments on a dataset crawled from Flickr, and the experimental results proved the advantage of this method.
In this paper, we explore the open-domain sketch-to-photo translation, which aims to synthesize a realistic photo from a freehand sketch with its class label, even if the sketches of that class are missing in the training data. It is challenging due to the lack of training supervision and the large geometry distortion between the freehand sketch and photo domains. To synthesize the absent freehand sketches from photos, we propose a framework that jointly learns sketch-to-photo and photo-to-sketch generation. However, the generator trained from fake sketches might lead to unsatisfying results when dealing with sketches of missing classes, due to the domain gap between synthesized sketches and real ones. To alleviate this issue, we further propose a simple yet effective open-domain sampling and optimization strategy to "fool" the generator into treating fake sketches as real ones. Our method takes advantage of the learned sketch-to-photo and photo-to-sketch mapping of in-domain data and generalizes them to the open-domain classes. We validate our method on the Scribble and SketchyCOCO datasets. Compared with the recent competing methods, our approach shows impressive results in synthesizing realistic color, texture, and maintaining the geometric composition for various categories of open-domain sketches.
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