Jimei Yang

Top-down visual saliency via joint CRF and dictionary learning

Top-down visual saliency facilities object localization by providing a discriminative representation of target objects and a probability map for reducing the search space. In this paper, we propose a novel top-down saliency model that jointly learns a Conditional Random Field (CRF) and a discriminative dictionary. The proposed model is formulated based on a CRF with latent variables. By using sparse codes as latent variables, we train the dictionary modulated by CRF, and meanwhile a CRF with sparse coding. We propose a max-margin approach to train our model via fast inference algorithms. We evaluate our model on the Graz-02 and PASCAL VOC 2007 datasets. Experimental results show that our model performs favorably against the state-of-the-art top-down saliency methods. We also observe that the dictionary update significantly improves the model performance.

Attribute2Image: Conditional Image Generation from Visual Attributes

This paper investigates a novel problem of generating images from visual attributes. We model the image as a composite of foreground and background and develop a layered generative model with disentangled latent variables that can be learned end-to-end using a variational auto-encoder. We experiment with natural images of faces and birds and demonstrate that the proposed models are capable of generating realistic and diverse samples with disentangled latent representations. We use a general energy minimization algorithm for posterior inference of latent variables given novel images. Therefore, the learned generative models show excellent quantitative and visual results in the tasks of attribute-conditioned image reconstruction and completion.

Context Driven Scene Parsing with Attention to Rare Classes

This paper presents a scalable scene parsing algorithm based on image retrieval and superpixel matching. We focus on rare object classes, which play an important role in achieving richer semantic understanding of visual scenes, compared to common background classes. Towards this end, we make two novel contributions: rare class expansion and semantic context description. First, considering the long-tailed nature of the label distribution, we expand the retrieval set by rare class exemplars and thus achieve more balanced superpixel classification results. Second, we incorporate both global and local semantic context information through a feedback based mechanism to refine image retrieval and superpixel matching. Results on the SIFTflow and LMSun datasets show the superior performance of our algorithm, especially on the rare classes, without sacrificing overall labeling accuracy.

Transferring Visual Prior for Online Object Tracking

Visual prior from generic real-world images can be learned and transferred for representing objects in a scene. Motivated by this, we propose an algorithm that transfers visual prior learned offline for online object tracking. From a collection of real-world images, we learn an overcomplete dictionary to represent visual prior. The prior knowledge of objects is generic, and the training image set does not necessarily contain any observation of the target object. During the tracking process, the learned visual prior is transferred to construct an object representation by sparse coding and multiscale max pooling. With this representation, a linear classifier is learned online to distinguish the target from the background and to account for the target and background appearance variations over time. Tracking is then carried out within a Bayesian inference framework, in which the learned classifier is used to construct the observation model and a particle filter is used to estimate the tracking result sequentially. Experiments on a variety of challenging sequences with comparisons to several state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that more robust object tracking can be achieved by transferring visual prior.

Object Contour Detection with a Fully Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Network

We develop a deep learning algorithm for contour detection with a fully convolutional encoder-decoder network. Different from previous low-level edge detection, our algorithm focuses on detecting higher-level object contours. Our network is trained end-to-end on PASCAL VOC with refined ground truth from inaccurate polygon annotations, yielding much higher precision in object contour detection than previous methods. We find that the learned model generalizes well to unseen object classes from the same supercategories on MS COCO and can match state-of-the-art edge detection on BSDS500 with fine-tuning. By combining with the multiscale combinatorial grouping algorithm, our method can generate high-quality segmented object proposals, which significantly advance the state-of-the-art on PASCAL VOC (improving average recall from 0.62 to 0.67) with a relatively small amount of candidates (~1660 per image).

Learning mappings for face synthesis from near infrared to visual light images

This paper deals with a new problem in face recognition research, in which the enrollment and query face samples are captured under different lighting conditions. In our case, the enrollment samples are visual light (VIS) images, whereas the query samples are taken under near infrared (NIR) condition. It is very difficult to directly match the face samples captured under these two lighting conditions due to their different visual appearances. In this paper, we propose a novel method for synthesizing VIS images from NIR images based on learning the mappings between images of different spectra (i.e., NIR and VIS). In our approach, we reduce the inter-spectral differences significantly, thus allowing effective matching between faces taken under different imaging conditions. Face recognition experiments clearly show the efficacy of the proposed approach.

The 2nd competition on counter measures to 2D face spoofing attacks

As a crucial security problem, anti-spoofing in biometrics, and particularly for the face modality, has achieved great progress in the recent years. Still, new threats arrive inform of better, more realistic and more sophisticated spoofing attacks. The objective of the 2nd Competition on Counter Measures to 2D Face Spoofing Attacks is to challenge researchers to create counter measures effectively detecting a variety of attacks. The submitted propositions are evaluated on the Replay-Attack database and the achieved results are presented in this paper.

Generative Face Completion

In this paper, we propose an effective face completion algorithm using a deep generative model. Different from well-studied background completion, the face completion task is more challenging as it often requires to generate semantically new pixels for the missing key components (e.g., eyes and mouths) that contain large appearance variations. Unlike existing nonparametric algorithms that search for patches to synthesize, our algorithm directly generates contents for missing regions based on a neural network. The model is trained with a combination of a reconstruction loss, two adversarial losses and a semantic parsing loss, which ensures pixel faithfulness and local-global contents consistency. With extensive experimental results, we demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively that our model is able to deal with a large area of missing pixels in arbitrary shapes and generate realistic face completion results.

Transformation-Grounded Image Generation Network for Novel 3D View Synthesis

We present a transformation-grounded image generation network for novel 3D view synthesis from a single image. Our approach first explicitly infers the parts of the geometry visible both in the input and novel views and then casts the remaining synthesis problem as image completion. Specifically, we both predict a flow to move the pixels from the input to the novel view along with a novel visibility map that helps deal with occulsion/disocculsion. Next, conditioned on those intermediate results, we hallucinate (infer) parts of the object invisible in the input image. In addition to the new network structure, training with a combination of adversarial and perceptual loss results in a reduction in common artifacts of novel view synthesis such as distortions and holes, while successfully generating high frequency details and preserving visual aspects of the input image. We evaluate our approach on a wide range of synthetic and real examples. Both qualitative and quantitative results show our method achieves significantly better results compared to existing methods.

An Ensemble Color Model for Human Re-identification

Appearance-based human re-identification is challenging due to different camera characteristics, varying lighting conditions, pose variations across camera views, etc. Recent studies have revealed that color information plays a critical role on performance. However, two problems remain unclear: (1) how do different color descriptors perform under the same scene in re-identification problem? and (2) how can we combine these descriptors without losing their invariance property and distinctiveness power? In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble model that combines different color descriptors in the decision level through metric learning. Experiments show that the proposed system significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on two challenging datasets (VIPeR and PRID 450S). We have improved the Rank 1 recognition rate on VIPeR dataset by 8.7%.