Generating random photo-realistic images has experienced tremendous growth during the past few years due to the advances of the deep convolutional neural networks and generative models. Among different domains, face photos have received a great deal of attention and a large number of face generation and manipulation models have been proposed. Semantic facial attribute editing is the process of varying the values of one or more attributes of a face image while the other attributes of the image are not affected. The requested modifications are provided as an attribute vector or in the form of driving face image and the whole process is performed by the corresponding models. In this paper, we survey the recent works and advances in semantic facial attribute editing. We cover all related aspects of these models including the related definitions and concepts, architectures, loss functions, datasets, evaluation metrics, and applications. Based on their architectures, the state-of-the-art models are categorized and studied as encoder-decoder, image-to-image, and photo-guided models. The challenges and restrictions of the current state-of-the-art methods are discussed as well.
Placing objects is a fundamental task for domestic service robots (DSRs). Thus, inferring the collision-risk before a placing motion is crucial for achieving the requested task. This problem is particularly challenging because it is necessary to predict what happens if an object is placed in a cluttered designated area. We show that a rule-based approach that uses plane detection, to detect free areas, performs poorly. To address this, we develop PonNet, which has multimodal attention branches and a self-attention mechanism to predict damaging collisions, based on RGBD images. Our method can visualize the risk of damaging collisions, which is convenient because it enables the user to understand the risk. For this purpose, we build and publish an original dataset that contains 12,000 photo-realistic images of specific placing areas, with daily life objects, in home environments. The experimental results show that our approach improves accuracy compared with the baseline methods.
We present Progressively Deblurring Radiance Field (PDRF), a novel approach to efficiently reconstruct high quality radiance fields from blurry images. While current State-of-The-Art (SoTA) scene reconstruction methods achieve photo-realistic rendering results from clean source views, their performances suffer when the source views are affected by blur, which is commonly observed for images in the wild. Previous deblurring methods either do not account for 3D geometry, or are computationally intense. To addresses these issues, PDRF, a progressively deblurring scheme in radiance field modeling, accurately models blur by incorporating 3D scene context. PDRF further uses an efficient importance sampling scheme, which results in fast scene optimization. Specifically, PDRF proposes a Coarse Ray Renderer to quickly estimate voxel density and feature; a Fine Voxel Renderer is then used to achieve high quality ray tracing. We perform extensive experiments and show that PDRF is 15X faster than previous SoTA while achieving better performance on both synthetic and real scenes.
3D-aware image synthesis aims at learning a generative model that can render photo-realistic 2D images while capturing decent underlying 3D shapes. A popular solution is to adopt the generative adversarial network (GAN) and replace the generator with a 3D renderer, where volume rendering with neural radiance field (NeRF) is commonly used. Despite the advancement of synthesis quality, existing methods fail to obtain moderate 3D shapes. We argue that, considering the two-player game in the formulation of GANs, only making the generator 3D-aware is not enough. In other words, displacing the generative mechanism only offers the capability, but not the guarantee, of producing 3D-aware images, because the supervision of the generator primarily comes from the discriminator. To address this issue, we propose GeoD through learning a geometry-aware discriminator to improve 3D-aware GANs. Concretely, besides differentiating real and fake samples from the 2D image space, the discriminator is additionally asked to derive the geometry information from the inputs, which is then applied as the guidance of the generator. Such a simple yet effective design facilitates learning substantially more accurate 3D shapes. Extensive experiments on various generator architectures and training datasets verify the superiority of GeoD over state-of-the-art alternatives. Moreover, our approach is registered as a general framework such that a more capable discriminator (i.e., with a third task of novel view synthesis beyond domain classification and geometry extraction) can further assist the generator with a better multi-view consistency.
Neural volumetric representations have shown the potential that Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs) can be optimized with multi-view calibrated images to represent scene geometry and appearance, without explicit 3D supervision. Object segmentation can enrich many downstream applications based on the learned radiance field. However, introducing hand-crafted segmentation to define regions of interest in a complex real-world scene is non-trivial and expensive as it acquires per view annotation. This paper carries out the exploration of self-supervised learning for object segmentation using NeRF for complex real-world scenes. Our framework, called NeRF with Self-supervised Object Segmentation NeRF-SOS, couples object segmentation and neural radiance field to segment objects in any view within a scene. By proposing a novel collaborative contrastive loss in both appearance and geometry levels, NeRF-SOS encourages NeRF models to distill compact geometry-aware segmentation clusters from their density fields and the self-supervised pre-trained 2D visual features. The self-supervised object segmentation framework can be applied to various NeRF models that both lead to photo-realistic rendering results and convincing segmentation maps for both indoor and outdoor scenarios. Extensive results on the LLFF, Tank & Temple, and BlendedMVS datasets validate the effectiveness of NeRF-SOS. It consistently surpasses other 2D-based self-supervised baselines and predicts finer semantics masks than existing supervised counterparts. Code is available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/NeRF-SOS.
Face photo synthesis from simple line drawing is a one-to-many task as simple line drawing merely contains the contour of human face. Previous exemplar-based methods are over-dependent on the datasets and are hard to generalize to complicated natural scenes. Recently, several works utilize deep neural networks to increase the generalization, but they are still limited in the controllability of the users. In this paper, we propose a deep generative model to synthesize face photo from simple line drawing controlled by face attributes such as hair color and complexion. In order to maximize the controllability of face attributes, an attribute-disentangled variational auto-encoder (AD-VAE) is firstly introduced to learn latent representations disentangled with respect to specified attributes. Then we conduct photo synthesis from simple line drawing based on AD-VAE. Experiments show that our model can well disentangle the variations of attributes from other variations of face photos and synthesize detailed photorealistic face images with desired attributes. Regarding background and illumination as the style and human face as the content, we can also synthesize face photos with the target style of a style photo.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has gained significant traction in the recent years, particularly the context of surveillance. However, video datasets that capture violent and non-violent human activity from aerial point-of-view is scarce. To address this issue, we propose a novel, baseline simulator which is capable of generating sequences of photo-realistic synthetic images of crowds engaging in various activities that can be categorized as violent or non-violent. The crowd groups are annotated with bounding boxes that are automatically computed using semantic segmentation. Our simulator is capable of generating large, randomized urban environments and is able to maintain an average of 25 frames per second on a mid-range computer with 150 concurrent crowd agents interacting with each other. We also show that when synthetic data from the proposed simulator is augmented with real world data, binary video classification accuracy is improved by 5% on average across two different models.
Photorealism is a complex concept that cannot easily be formulated mathematically. Deep Photo Style Transfer is an attempt to transfer the style of a reference image to a content image while preserving its photorealism. This is achieved by introducing a constraint that prevents distortions in the content image and by applying the style transfer independently for semantically different parts of the images. In addition, an automated segmentation process is presented that consists of a neural network based segmentation method followed by a semantic grouping step. To further improve the results a measure for image aesthetics is used and elaborated. If the content and the style image are sufficiently similar, the result images look very realistic. With the automation of the image segmentation the pipeline becomes completely independent from any user interaction, which allows for new applications.
Low-end and compact mobile cameras demonstrate limited photo quality mainly due to space, hardware and budget constraints. In this work, we propose a deep learning solution that translates photos taken by cameras with limited capabilities into DSLR-quality photos automatically. We tackle this problem by introducing a weakly supervised photo enhancer (WESPE) - a novel image-to-image Generative Adversarial Network-based architecture. The proposed model is trained by under weak supervision: unlike previous works, there is no need for strong supervision in the form of a large annotated dataset of aligned original/enhanced photo pairs. The sole requirement is two distinct datasets: one from the source camera, and one composed of arbitrary high-quality images that can be generally crawled from the Internet - the visual content they exhibit may be unrelated. Hence, our solution is repeatable for any camera: collecting the data and training can be achieved in a couple of hours. In this work, we emphasize on extensive evaluation of obtained results. Besides standard objective metrics and subjective user study, we train a virtual rater in the form of a separate CNN that mimics human raters on Flickr data and use this network to get reference scores for both original and enhanced photos. Our experiments on the DPED, KITTI and Cityscapes datasets as well as pictures from several generations of smartphones demonstrate that WESPE produces comparable or improved qualitative results with state-of-the-art strongly supervised methods.
Many people are interested in taking astonishing photos and sharing with others. Emerging hightech hardware and software facilitate ubiquitousness and functionality of digital photography. Because composition matters in photography, researchers have leveraged some common composition techniques to assess the aesthetic quality of photos computationally. However, composition techniques developed by professionals are far more diverse than well-documented techniques can cover. We leverage the vast underexplored innovations in photography for computational composition assistance. We propose a comprehensive framework, named CAPTAIN (Composition Assistance for Photo Taking), containing integrated deep-learned semantic detectors, sub-genre categorization, artistic pose clustering, personalized aesthetics-based image retrieval, and style set matching. The framework is backed by a large dataset crawled from a photo-sharing Website with mostly photography enthusiasts and professionals. The work proposes a sequence of steps that have not been explored in the past by researchers. The work addresses personal preferences for composition through presenting a ranked-list of photographs to the user based on user-specified weights in the similarity measure. The matching algorithm recognizes the best shot among a sequence of shots with respect to the user's preferred style set. We have conducted a number of experiments on the newly proposed components and reported findings. A user study demonstrates that the work is useful to those taking photos.