Adaptive Siamese Tracking With a Compact Latent Network.

In this article, we provide an intuitive viewing to simplify the Siamese-based trackers by converting the tracking task to a classification. Under this viewing, we perform an in-depth analysis for them through visual simulations and real tracking examples, and find that the failure cases in some challenging situations can be regarded as the issue of missing decisive samples in offline training. Since the samples in the initial (first) frame contain rich sequence-specific information, we can regard them as the decisive samples to represent the whole sequence. To quickly adapt the base model to new scenes, a compact latent network is presented via fully using these decisive samples. Specifically, we present a statistics-based compact latent feature for fast adjustment by efficiently extracting the sequence-specific information. Furthermore, a new diverse sample mining strategy is designed for training to further improve the discrimination ability of the proposed compact latent network. Finally, a conditional updating strategy is proposed to efficiently update the basic models to handle scene variation during the tracking phase. To evaluate the generalization ability and effectiveness and of our method, we apply it to adjust three classical Siamese-based trackers, namely SiamRPN++, SiamFC, and SiamBAN. Extensive experimental results on six recent datasets demonstrate that all three adjusted trackers obtain the superior performance in terms of the accuracy, while having high running speed.

Consistency and Diversity Induced Human Motion Segmentation.

Subspace clustering is a classical technique that has been widely used for human motion segmentation and other related tasks. However, existing segmentation methods often cluster data without guidance from prior knowledge, resulting in unsatisfactory segmentation results. To this end, we propose a novel Consistency and Diversity induced human Motion Segmentation (CDMS) algorithm. Specifically, our model factorizes the source and target data into distinct multi-layer feature spaces, in which transfer subspace learning is conducted on different layers to capture multi-level information. A multi-mutual consistency learning strategy is carried out to reduce the domain gap between the source and target data. In this way, the domain-specific knowledge and domain-invariant properties can be explored simultaneously. Besides, a novel constraint based on the Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) is introduced to ensure the diversity of multi-level subspace representations, which enables the complementarity of multi-level representations to be explored to boost the transfer learning performance. Moreover, to preserve the temporal correlations, an enhanced graph regularizer is imposed on the learned representation coefficients and the multi-level representations of the source data. The proposed model can be efficiently solved using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Extensive experimental results on public human motion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method against several state-of-the-art approaches.

A Survey on Deep Learning Technique for Video Segmentation.

Video segmentation-partitioning video frames into multiple segments or objects-plays a critical role in a broad range of practical applications, from enhancing visual effects in movie, to understanding scenes in autonomous driving, to creating virtual background in video conferencing. Recently, with the renaissance of connectionism in computer vision, there has been an influx of deep learning based approaches for video segmentation that have delivered compelling performance. In this survey, we comprehensively review two basic lines of research - generic object segmentation (of unknown categories) in videos, and video semantic segmentation - by introducing their respective task settings, background concepts, perceived need, development history, and main challenges. We also offer a detailed overview of representative literature on both methods and datasets. We further benchmark the reviewed methods on several well-known datasets. Finally, we point out open issues in this field, and suggest opportunities for further research. We also provide a public website to continuously track developments in this fast advancing field: https://github.com/tfzhou/VS-Survey.

Stylized Adversarial Defense.

Deep Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) can easily be fooled by subtle, imperceptible changes to the input images. To address this vulnerability, adversarial training creates perturbation patterns and includes them in the training set to robustify the model. In contrast to existing adversarial training methods that only use class-boundary information (e.g., using a cross-entropy loss), we propose to exploit additional information from the feature space to craft stronger adversaries that are in turn used to learn a robust model. Specifically, we use the style and content information of the target sample from another class, alongside its class-boundary information to create adversarial perturbations. We apply our proposed multi-task objective in a deeply supervised manner, extracting multi-scale feature knowledge to create maximally separating adversaries. Subsequently, we propose a max-margin adversarial training approach that minimizes the distance between source image and its adversary and maximizes the distance between the adversary and the target image. Our adversarial training approach demonstrates strong robustness compared to state-of-the-art defenses, generalizes well to naturally occurring corruptions and data distributional shifts, and retains the model's accuracy on clean examples.

Underwater Image Enhancement With Hyper-Laplacian Reflectance Priors.

Underwater image enhancement aims at improving the visibility and eliminating color distortions of underwater images degraded by light absorption and scattering in water. Recently, retinex variational models show remarkable capacity of enhancing images by estimating reflectance and illumination in a retinex decomposition course. However, ambiguous details and unnatural color still challenge the performance of retinex variational models on underwater image enhancement. To overcome these limitations, we propose a hyper-laplacian reflectance priors inspired retinex variational model to enhance underwater images. Specifically, the hyper-laplacian reflectance priors are established with the l1/2 -norm penalty on first-order and second-order gradients of the reflectance. Such priors exploit sparsity-promoting and complete-comprehensive reflectance that is used to enhance both salient structures and fine-scale details and recover the naturalness of authentic colors. Besides, the l2 norm is found to be suitable for accurately estimating the illumination. As a result, we turn a complex underwater image enhancement issue into simple subproblems that separately and simultaneously estimate the reflection and the illumination that are harnessed to enhance underwater images in a retinex variational model. We mathematically analyze and solve the optimal solution of each subproblem. In the optimization course, we develop an alternating minimization algorithm that is efficient on element-wise operations and independent of additional prior knowledge of underwater conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in both subjective results and objective assessments over existing methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/zhuangpeixian/HLRP.

Guidance Through Surrogate: Toward a Generic Diagnostic Attack.

Adversarial training (AT) is an effective approach to making deep neural networks robust against adversarial attacks. Recently, different AT defenses are proposed that not only maintain a high clean accuracy but also show significant robustness against popular and well-studied adversarial attacks, such as projected gradient descent (PGD). High adversarial robustness can also arise if an attack fails to find adversarial gradient directions, a phenomenon known as "gradient masking." In this work, we analyze the effect of label smoothing on AT as one of the potential causes of gradient masking. We then develop a guided mechanism to avoid local minima during attack optimization, leading to a novel attack dubbed guided projected gradient attack (G-PGA). Our attack approach is based on a "match and deceive" loss that finds optimal adversarial directions through guidance from a surrogate model. Our modified attack does not require random restarts a large number of attack iterations or a search for optimal step size. Furthermore, our proposed G-PGA is generic, thus it can be combined with an ensemble attack strategy as we demonstrate in the case of auto-attack, leading to efficiency and convergence speed improvements. More than an effective attack, G-PGA can be used as a diagnostic tool to reveal elusive robustness due to gradient masking in adversarial defenses.

Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey.

Image segmentation is a key task in computer vision and image processing with important applications such as scene understanding, medical image analysis, robotic perception, video surveillance, augmented reality, and image compression, among others, and numerous segmentation algorithms are found in the literature. Against this backdrop, the broad success of deep learning (DL) has prompted the development of new image segmentation approaches leveraging DL models. We provide a comprehensive review of this recent literature, covering the spectrum of pioneering efforts in semantic and instance segmentation, including convolutional pixel-labeling networks, encoder-decoder architectures, multiscale and pyramid-based approaches, recurrent networks, visual attention models, and generative models in adversarial settings. We investigate the relationships, strengths, and challenges of these DL-based segmentation models, examine the widely used datasets, compare performances, and discuss promising research directions.

Dynamical Hyperparameter Optimization via Deep Reinforcement Learning in Tracking.

Hyperparameters are numerical pre-sets whose values are assigned prior to the commencement of a learning process. Selecting appropriate hyperparameters is often critical for achieving satisfactory performance in many vision problems, such as deep learning-based visual object tracking. However, it is often difficult to determine their optimal values, especially if they are specific to each video input. Most hyperparameter optimization algorithms tend to search a generic range and are imposed blindly on all sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamical hyperparameter optimization method that adaptively optimizes hyperparameters for a given sequence using an action-prediction network leveraged on continuous deep Q-learning. Since the observation space for object tracking is significantly more complex than those in traditional control problems, existing continuous deep Q-learning algorithms cannot be directly applied. To overcome this challenge, we introduce an efficient heuristic strategy to handle high dimensional state space, while also accelerating the convergence behavior. The proposed algorithm is applied to improve two representative trackers, a Siamese-based one and a correlation-filter-based one, to evaluate its generalizability. Their superior performances on several popular benchmarks are clearly demonstrated. Our source code is available at https://github.com/shenjianbing/dqltracking.

Can We See More? Joint Frontalization and Hallucination of Unaligned Tiny Faces.

In popular TV programs (such as CSI), a very low-resolution face image of a person, who is not even looking at the camera in many cases, is digitally super-resolved to a degree that suddenly the person's identity is made visible and recognizable. Of course, we suspect that this is merely a cinematographic special effect and such a magical transformation of a single image is not technically possible. Or, is it? In this paper, we push the boundaries of super-resolving (hallucinating to be more accurate) a tiny, non-frontal face image to understand how much of this is possible by leveraging the availability of large datasets and deep networks. To this end, we introduce a novel Transformative Adversarial Neural Network (TANN) to jointly frontalize very-low resolution (i.e., 16 × 16 pixels) out-of-plane rotated face images (including profile views) and aggressively super-resolve them (8×), regardless of their original poses and without using any 3D information. TANN is composed of two components: a transformative upsampling network which embodies encoding, spatial transformation and deconvolutional layers, and a discriminative network that enforces the generated high-resolution frontal faces to lie on the same manifold as real frontal face images. We evaluate our method on a large set of synthesized non-frontal face images to assess its reconstruction performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TANN generates both qualitatively and quantitatively superior results achieving over 4 dB improvement over the state-of-the-art.

Semantic Face Hallucination: Super-Resolving Very Low-Resolution Face Images with Supplementary Attributes.

Given a tiny face image, existing face hallucination methods aim at super-resolving its high-resolution (HR) counterpart by learning a mapping from an exemplary dataset. Since a low-resolution (LR) input patch may correspond to many HR candidate patches, this ambiguity may lead to distorted HR facial details and wrong attributes such as gender reversal and rejuvenation. An LR input contains low-frequency facial components of its HR version while its residual face image, defined as the difference between the HR ground-truth and interpolated LR images, contains the missing high-frequency facial details. We demonstrate that supplementing residual images or feature maps with additional facial attribute information can significantly reduce the ambiguity in face super-resolution. To explore this idea, we develop an attribute-embedded upsampling network, which consists of an upsampling network and a discriminative network. The upsampling network is composed of an autoencoder with skip-connections, which incorporates facial attribute vectors into the residual features of LR inputs at the bottleneck of the autoencoder, and deconvolutional layers used for upsampling. The discriminative network is designed to examine whether super-resolved faces contain the desired attributes or not and then its loss is used for updating the upsampling network. In this manner, we can super-resolve tiny (16×16 pixels) unaligned face images with a large upscaling factor of 8× while reducing the uncertainty of one-to-many mappings remarkably. By conducting extensive evaluations on a large-scale dataset, we demonstrate that our method achieves superior face hallucination results and outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Joint Stereo Video Deblurring, Scene Flow Estimation and Moving Object Segmentation.

Stereo videos for the dynamic scenes often show unpleasant blurred effects due to the camera motion and the multiple moving objects with large depth variations. Given consecutive blurred stereo video frames, we aim to recover the latent clean images, estimate the 3D scene flow and segment the multiple moving objects. These three tasks have been previously addressed separately, which fail to exploit the internal connections among these tasks and cannot achieve optimality. In this paper, we propose to jointly solve these three tasks in a unified framework by exploiting their intrinsic connections. To this end, we represent the dynamic scenes with the piece-wise planar model, which exploits the local structure of the scene and expresses various dynamic scenes. Under our model, these three tasks are naturally connected and expressed as the parameter estimation of 3D scene structure and camera motion (structure and motion for the dynamic scenes). By exploiting the blur model constraint, the moving objects and the 3D scene structure, we reach an energy minimization formulation for joint deblurring, scene flow and segmentation. We evaluate our approach extensively on both synthetic datasets and publicly available real datasets with fast-moving objects, camera motion, uncontrolled lighting conditions and shadows. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve significant improvement in stereo video deblurring, scene flow estimation and moving object segmentation, over state-of-the-art methods.

Video Saliency Detection via Sparsity-Based Reconstruction and Propagation.

Video saliency detection aims to continuously discover the motion-related salient objects from the video sequences. Since it needs to consider the spatial and temporal constraints jointly, video saliency detection is more challenging than image saliency detection. In this paper, we propose a new method to detect the salient objects in video based on sparse reconstruction and propagation. With the assistance of novel static and motion priors, a single-frame saliency model is first designed to represent the spatial saliency in each individual frame via the sparsity-based reconstruction. Then, through a progressive sparsity-based propagation, the sequential correspondence in the temporal space is captured to produce the inter-frame saliency map. Finally, these two maps are incorporated into a global optimization model to achieve spatio-temporal smoothness and global consistency of the salient object in the whole video. The experiments on three large-scale video saliency datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Quadruplet Network With One-Shot Learning for Fast Visual Object Tracking.

In the same vein of discriminative one-shot learning, Siamese networks allow recognizing an object from a single exemplar with the same class label. However, they do not take advantage of the underlying structure of the data and the relationship among the multitude of samples as they only rely on the pairs of instances for training. In this paper, we propose a new quadruplet deep network to examine the potential connections among the training instances, aiming to achieve a more powerful representation. We design a shared network with four branches that receive a multi-tuple of instances as inputs and are connected by a novel loss function consisting of pair loss and triplet loss. According to the similarity metric, we select the most similar and the most dissimilar instances as the positive and negative inputs of triplet loss from each multi-tuple. We show that this scheme improves the training performance. Furthermore, we introduce a new weight layer to automatically select suitable combination weights, which will avoid the conflict between triplet and pair loss leading to worse performance. We evaluate our quadruplet framework by model-free tracking-by-detection of objects from a single initial exemplar in several visual object tracking benchmarks. Our extensive experimental analysis demonstrates that our tracker achieves superior performance with a real-time processing speed of 78 frames/s. Our source code is available.

Submodular Function Optimization for Motion Clustering and Image Segmentation.

In this paper, we propose a framework of maximizing quadratic submodular energy with a knapsack constraint approximately, to solve certain computer vision problems. The proposed submodular maximization problem can be viewed as a generalization of the classic 0/1 knapsack problem. Importantly, maximization of our knapsack constrained submodular energy function can be solved via dynamic programing. We further introduce a range-reduction step prior to dynamic programing as a two-stage procedure for more efficient maximization. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed energy function and its maximization algorithm, we apply it to two representative computer vision tasks: image segmentation and motion trajectory clustering. Experimental results of image segmentation demonstrate that our method outperforms the classic segmentation algorithms of graph cuts and random walks. Moreover, our framework achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods on the motion trajectory clustering task.

Image Deblurring with a Class-Specific Prior.

A fundamental problem in image deblurring is to recover reliably distinct spatial frequencies that have been suppressed by the blur kernel. To tackle this issue, existing image deblurring techniques often rely on generic image priors such as the sparsity of salient features including image gradients and edges. However, these priors only help recover part of the frequency spectrum, such as the frequencies near the high-end. To this end, we pose the following specific questions: (i) Does any image class information offer an advantage over existing generic priors for image quality restoration? (ii) If a class-specific prior exists, how should it be encoded into a deblurring framework to recover attenuated image frequencies? Throughout this work, we devise a class-specific prior based on the band-pass filter responses and incorporate it into a deblurring strategy. More specifically, we show that the subspace of band-pass filtered images and their intensity distributions serve as useful priors for recovering image frequencies that are difficult to recover by generic image priors. We demonstrate that our image deblurring framework, when equipped with the above priors, significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art methods using generic image priors or class-specific exemplars.

Regularization of deep neural networks with spectral dropout.

The big breakthrough on the ImageNet challenge in 2012 was partially due to the 'Dropout' technique used to avoid overfitting. Here, we introduce a new approach called 'Spectral Dropout' to improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks. We cast the proposed approach in the form of regular Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) weight layers using a decorrelation transform with fixed basis functions. Our spectral dropout method prevents overfitting by eliminating weak and 'noisy' Fourier domain coefficients of the neural network activations, leading to remarkably better results than the current regularization methods. Furthermore, the proposed is very efficient due to the fixed basis functions used for spectral transformation. In particular, compared to Dropout and Drop-Connect, our method significantly speeds up the network convergence rate during the training process (roughly ×2), with considerably higher neuron pruning rates (an increase of ∼30%). We demonstrate that the spectral dropout can also be used in conjunction with other regularization approaches resulting in additional performance gains.

A Unified approach for Conventional Zero-shot, Generalized Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning.

Prevalent techniques in zero-shot learning do not generalize well to other related problem scenarios. Here, we present a unified approach for conventional zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and few-shot learning problems. Our approach is based on a novel Class Adapting Principal Directions (CAPD) concept that allows multiple embeddings of image features into a semantic space. Given an image, our method produces one principal direction for each seen class. Then, it learns how to combine these directions to obtain the principal direction for each unseen class such that the CAPD of the test image is aligned with the semantic embedding of the true class, and opposite to the other classes. This allows efficient and class-adaptive information transfer from seen to unseen classes. In addition, we propose an automatic process for selection of the most useful seen classes for each unseen class to achieve robustness in zero-shot learning. Our method can update the unseen CAPD taking the advantages of few unseen images to work in a few-shot learning scenario. Furthermore, our method can generalize the seen CAPDs by estimating seen-unseen diversity that significantly improves the performance of generalized zero-shot learning. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently achieves superior performance in zero-shot, generalized zero-shot and few/one-shot learning problems.

Large-Scale Metric Learning: A Voyage From Shallow to Deep.

Despite its attractive properties, the performance of the recently introduced Keep It Simple and Straightforward MEtric learning (KISSME) method is greatly dependent on principal component analysis as a preprocessing step. This dependence can lead to difficulties, e.g., when the dimensionality is not meticulously set. To address this issue, we devise a unified formulation for joint dimensionality reduction and metric learning based on the KISSME algorithm. Our joint formulation is expressed as an optimization problem on the Grassmann manifold, and hence enjoys the properties of Riemannian optimization techniques. Following the success of deep learning in recent years, we also devise end-to-end learning of a generic deep network for metric learning using our derivation.

Robust Object Tracking by Nonlinear Learning.

We propose a method that obtains a discriminative visual dictionary and a nonlinear classifier for visual tracking tasks in a sparse coding manner based on the globally linear approximation for a nonlinear learning theory. Traditional discriminative tracking methods based on sparse representation learn a dictionary in an unsupervised way and then train a classifier, which may not generate both descriptive and discriminative models for targets by treating dictionary learning and classifier learning separately. In contrast, the proposed tracking approach can construct a dictionary that fully reflects the intrinsic manifold structure of visual data and introduces more discriminative ability in a unified learning framework. Finally, an iterative optimization approach, which computes the optimal dictionary, the associated sparse coding, and a classifier, is introduced. Experiments on two benchmarks show that our tracker achieves a better performance compared with some popular tracking algorithms.

Semi-Supervised Video Object Segmentation with Super-Trajectories.

We introduce a semi-supervised video segmentation approach based on an efficient video representation, called as "super-trajectory". A super-trajectory corresponds to a group of compact point trajectories that exhibit consistent motion patterns, similar appearances, and close spatiotemporal relationships. We generate the compact trajectories using a probabilistic model, which enables handling of occlusions and drifts effectively. To reliably group point trajectories, we adopt a modified version of the density peaks based clustering algorithm that allows capturing rich spatiotemporal relations among trajectories in the clustering process. We incorporate two intuitive mechanisms for segmentation, called as reverse-tracking and object re-occurrence, for robustness and boosting the performance. Building on the proposed video representation, our segmentation method is discriminative enough to accurately propagate the initial annotations in the first frame onto the remaining frames. Our extensive experimental analyses on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate that, given the annotation in the first frame, our method is capable of extracting the target objects from complex backgrounds, and even reidentifying them after prolonged occlusions, producing high-quality video object segments.