Defect detection from images is a crucial and challenging topic of industry scenarios due to the scarcity and unpredictability of anomalous samples. However, existing defect detection methods exhibit low detection performance when it comes to small-size defects. In this work, we propose a Cross-Attention Regression Flow (CARF) framework to model a compact distribution of normal visual patterns for separating outliers. To retain rich scale information of defects, we build an interactive cross-attention pattern flow module to jointly transform and align distributions of multi-layer features, which is beneficial for detecting small-size defects that may be annihilated in high-level features. To handle the complexity of multi-layer feature distributions, we introduce a layer-conditional autoregression module to improve the fitting capacity of data likelihoods on multi-layer features. By transforming the multi-layer feature distributions into a latent space, we can better characterize normal visual patterns. Extensive experiments on four public datasets and our collected industrial dataset demonstrate that the proposed CARF outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in detecting small-size defects.

The semi-supervised face recognition problem has become a popular research topic in recent years. However, one common and important situation, in which the unlabeled data is shallow, has rarely been considered in most existing works. In this paper, shallow data means there are only few images per identity. In the unlabeled shallow situation, the existing semi-supervised face recognition methods generally do not work well. Thus, how to effectively utilize the unlabeled shallow face data for improving face recognition performance is an important issue. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised face recognition method, namely VirFace$^{\infty} $, to enhance the face recognition performance effectively with the unlabeled shallow data. VirFace$^{\infty} $consists of VirClass and VirDistribution components. In VirClass, we inject the unlabeled data as virtual classes into the feature space to enlarge the inter-class distance. In VirDistribution, we predict the distribution of each virtual class, namely virtual distribution, and then enhance the inter-class discriminativeness by enlarging the distances between the labeled features and the virtual distributions. To the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to tackle the face recognition problem on unlabeled shallow face data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

Ordinal loss is widely used in solving regression problems with deep learning technologies. Its basic idea is to convert regression to classification while preserving the natural order. However, the order constraint is enforced only by ordinal label implicitly, leading to the real output values not strictly in order. It causes the network to learn separable feature rather than discriminative feature, and possibly overfit on training set. In this paper, we propose order regularization on ordinal loss, which makes the outputs in order by explicitly constraining the ordinal classifiers in order. The proposed method contains two parts, i.e. similar-weights constraint, which reduces the ineffective space between classifiers, and differential-bias constraint, which enforces the decision planes in order and enhances the discrimination power of the classifiers. Experimental results show that our proposed method boosts the performance of original ordinal loss on various regression problems such as head pose, age, and gaze estimation, with significant error reduction of around 5%. Furthermore, our method outperforms the state of the art on all these tasks, with the performance gain of 14.4%, 2.2% and 6.5% on head pose, age and gaze estimation respectively.

Recently, how to exploit unlabeled data for training face recognition models has been attracting increasing attention. However, few works consider the unlabeled shallow data1in real-world scenarios. The existing semi-supervised face recognition methods that focus on generating pseudo labels or minimizing softmax classification probabilities of the unlabeled data do not work very well on the unlabeled shallow data. It is still a challenge on how to effectively utilize the unlabeled shallow face data to improve the performance of face recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel face recognition method, named VirFace, to effectively exploit the unlabeled shallow data for face recognition. VirFace consists of VirClass and VirInstance. Specifically, VirClass enlarges the inter-class distance by injecting the unlabeled data as new identities, while VirInstance produces virtual instances sampled from the learned distribution of each identity to further enlarge the inter-class distance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to tackle the problem of unlabeled shallow face data. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both the small- and large-scale datasets, e.g. LFW and IJB-C, etc, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed method.

Face Parsing assigns every pixel in a facial image with a semantic label, which could be applied in various applications including face recognition, facial beautification, affective computing and animation. While lots of progress have been made in this field, current state-of-the-art methods still fail to extract real effective feature and restore accurate score map, especially for those facial parts which have large variations of deformation and fairly similar appearance, e.g. mouth, eyes and thin eyebrows. In this paper, we propose a novel pixel-wise face parsing method called Residual Encoder Decoder Network (RED-Net), which combines a feature-rich encoder-decoder framework with adaptive prior mechanism. Our encoder-decoder framework extracts feature with ResNet and decodes the feature by elaborately fusing the residual architectures in to deconvolution. This framework learns more effective feature comparing to that learnt by decoding with interpolation or classic deconvolution operations. To overcome the appearance ambiguity between facial parts, an adaptive prior mechanism is proposed in term of the decoder prediction confidence, allowing refining the final result. The experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts significantly, achieving improvements of F-measure from 0.854 to 0.905 on Helen dataset, and pixel accuracy from 95.12% to 97.59% on the LFW dataset. In particular, convincing qualitative examples show that our method parses eye, eyebrow, and lip regins more accurately.