Industrial designers' thinking in the stage of concept generation for social design: themes, strategies and modes.

Social design produces strategic, systematic solutions or new cultures as a response to the complexity of social changes and, in consequence, designers who are used to the traditional way of ideation may not be well prepared for the requirements of social design. This paper identified the characteristics of the concept generation of industrial design students participating in a social design practice as novices. Using the think-aloud protocol, we collected the conversations and self-reports of students (n = 42). We then conducted a qualitative analysis of the designers' activities with the inductive and deductive coding method. An effect of prior knowledge was found on the themes of concept, as well as on the concept generation strategies and modes that industrial designers would prefer. Through a factor analysis of the frequency of students' design activities, six concept generation strategies were clustered. There were eight concept generation modes for social design we summarized with the journeys of designers' activities. This study also revealed the effect of concept generation strategies and modes of industrial design students on the quality of their social design concepts. The results may also shed light on the question how we can foster the quality of industrial designers to adapt to the extension of disciplinary boundary in design.

Deeply Unsupervised Patch Re-Identification for Pre-training Object Detectors.

Unsupervised pre-training aims at learning transferable features that are beneficial for downstream tasks. However, most state-of-the-art unsupervised methods concentrate on learning global representations for image-level classification tasks instead of discriminative local region representations, which limits their transferability to region-level downstream tasks, such as object detection. To improve the transferability of pre-trained features to object detection, we present Deeply Unsupervised Patch Re-ID (DUPR), a simple yet effective method for unsupervised visual representation learning. The patch Re-ID task treats individual patch as a pseudo-identity and contrastively learns its correspondence in two views, enabling us to obtain discriminative local features for object detection. Then the proposed patch Re-ID is performed in a deeply unsupervised manner, appealing to object detection, which usually requires multi-level feature maps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DUPR outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised pre-trainings and even the ImageNet supervised pre-training on various downstream tasks related to object detection.

3D Human Pose Machines with Self-Supervised Learning.

Driven by recent computer vision and robotic applications, recovering 3D human poses has become increasingly important and attracted growing interests. In fact, completing this task is quite challenging due to the diverse appearances, viewpoints, occlusions and inherently geometric ambiguities inside monocular images. Most of the existing methods focus on designing some elaborate priors /constraints to directly regress 3D human poses based on the corresponding 2D human pose-aware features or 2D pose predictions. However, due to the insufficient 3D pose data for training and the domain gap between 2D space and 3D space, these methods have limited scalabilities for all practical scenarios (e.g., outdoor scene). Attempt to address this issue, this paper proposes a simple yet effective self-supervised correction mechanism to learn all intrinsic structures of human poses from abundant images. Specifically, the proposed mechanism involves two dual learning tasks, i.e., the 2D-to-3D pose transformation and 3D-to-2D pose projection, to serve as a bridge between 3D and 2D human poses in a type of "free" self-supervision for accurate 3D human pose estimation. The 2D-to-3D pose implies to sequentially regress intermediate 3D poses by transforming the pose representation from the 2D domain to the 3D domain under the sequence-dependent temporal context, while the 3D-to-2D pose projection contributes to refining the intermediate 3D poses by maintaining geometric consistency between the 2D projections of 3D poses and the estimated 2D poses. Therefore, these two dual learning tasks enable our model to adaptively learn from 3D human pose data and external large-scale 2D human pose data. We further apply our self-supervised correction mechanism to develop a 3D human pose machine, which jointly integrates the 2D spatial relationship, temporal smoothness of predictions and 3D geometric knowledge. Extensive evaluations on the Human3.6M and HumanEva-I benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our framework over all the compared competing methods.