Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in image quality. However, complex scene generation remains relatively unexplored, and even the definition of ‘complex scene’ itself remains unclear. In this paper, we address this gap by providing a precise definition of complex scenes and introducing a set of Complex Decomposition Criteria (CDC) based on this definition. Inspired by the artist’s painting process, we propose a training-free diffusion framework called Complex Diffusion (CxD), which divides the process into three stages: composition, painting and retouching. Our method leverages the powerful chain-of-thought capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to decompose complex prompts based on CDC and to manage composition and layout. We then develop an attention modulation method that guides simple prompts to specific regions to complete the complex scene painting. Finally, we inject the detailed output of the LLM into a retouching model to enhance the image details, thus implementing the retouching stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous SOTA approaches, significantly improving the generation of high-quality, semantically consistent, and visually diverse images for complex scenes, even with intricate prompts.

Transformer-based models have recently achieved outstanding performance in image matting. However, their application to high-resolution images remains challenging due to the quadratic complexity of global self-attention. To address this issue, we propose MEMatte, a memory-efficient matting framework for processing high-resolution images. MEMatte incorporates a router before each global attention block, directing informative tokens to the global attention while routing other tokens to a Lightweight Token Refinement Module (LTRM). Specifically, the router employs a local-global strategy to predict the routing probability of each token, and the LTRM utilizes efficient modules to simulate global attention. Additionally, we introduce a Batch-constrained Adaptive Token Routing (BATR) mechanism, which allows each router to dynamically route tokens based on image content and the stages of attention block in the network. Furthermore, we construct an ultra high-resolution image matting dataset, UHR-395, comprising 35,500 training images and 1,000 test images, with an average resolution of 4872 × 6017. This dataset is created by compositing 395 different alpha mattes across 11 categories onto various backgrounds, all with high-quality manual annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MEMatte outperforms existing methods on both high-resolution and real-world datasets, significantly reducing memory usage by approximately 88% and latency by 50% on the Composition-1K benchmark.

Interactive segmentation is a pivotal task in computer vision, focused on predicting precise masks with minimal user input. Although the click has recently become the most prevalent form of interaction due to its flexibility and efficiency, its advantages diminish as the complexity and details of target objects increase because it’s time-consuming and user-unfriendly to precisely locate and click on narrow, fine regions. To tackle this problem, we propose NTClick, a powerful click-based interactive segmentation method capable of predicting accurate masks even with imprecise user clicks when dealing with intricate targets. We first introduce a novel interaction form called noise-tolerant click, a type of click that does not require user’s precise localization when selecting fine regions. Then, we design a two-stage workflow, consisting of an Explicit Coarse Perception network for initial estimation and a High Resolution Refinement network for final classification. Quantitative results across extensive datasets demonstrate that NTClick not only maintains an efficient and user-friendly interaction mode but also significantly outperforms existing methods in segmentation accuracy.

Gaussian Splatting (GS)-based methods rely on sufficient training view coverage and perform synthesis on interpolated views. In this work, we tackle the more challenging and underexplored Extrapolated View Synthesis (EVS) task. Here we enable GS-based models trained with limited view coverage to generalize well to extrapolated views. To achieve our goal, we propose a view augmentation framework to guide training through a coarse-to-fine process. At the coarse stage, we reduce rendering artifacts due to insufficient view coverage by introducing a regularization strategy at both appearance and geometry levels. At the fine stage, we generate reliable view priors to provide further training guidance. To this end, we incorporate an occlusion awareness into the view prior generation process, and refine the view priors with the aid of coarse stage output. We call our framework Enhanced View Prior Guidance for Splatting (EVPGS). To comprehensively evaluate EVPGS on the EVS task, we collect a real-world dataset called Merchandise3D dedicated to the EVS scenario. Experiments on three datasets including both real and synthetic demonstrate EVPGS achieves state-of-the-art performance, while improving synthesis quality at extrapolated views for GS-based methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our code and dataset are available on the EVPGS Homepage.

Advancements in generative models have enabled image inpainting models to generate content within specific regions of an image based on provided prompts and masks. However, existing inpainting methods often suffer from problems such as semantic misalignment, structural distortion, and style inconsistency. In this work, we present MTADiffusion, a Mask-Text Alignment diffusion model designed for object inpainting. To enhance the semantic capabilities of the inpainting model, we introduce MTAPipeline, an automatic solution for annotating masks with detailed descriptions. Based on the MTAPipeline, we construct a new MTADataset comprising 5 million images and 25 million mask-text pairs. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task training strategy that integrates both inpainting and edge prediction tasks to improve structural stability. To promote style consistency, we present a novel inpainting style-consistency loss using a pre-trained VGG network and the Gram matrix. Comprehensive evaluations on BrushBench and EditBench demonstrate that MTADiffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other methods.

Scene text editing, a subfield of image editing, requires modifying texts in images while preserving style consistency and visual coherence with the surrounding environment. While diffusion-based methods have shown promise in text generation, they still struggle to produce high-quality results. These methods often generate distorted or unrecognizable characters, particularly when dealing with complex characters like Chinese. In such systems, characters are composed of intricate stroke patterns and spatial relationships that must be precisely maintained. We present Glyph-Mastero, a specialized glyph encoder designed to guide the latent diffusion model for generating texts with stroke-level precision. Our key insight is that existing methods, despite using pretrained OCR models for feature extraction, fail to capture the hierarchical nature of text structures - from individual strokes to stroke-level interactions to overall character-level structure. To address this, our glyph encoder explicitly models and captures the cross-level interactions between local-level individual characters and global-level text lines through our novel glyph attention module. Meanwhile, our model implements a feature pyramid network to fuse the multi-scale OCR backbone features at the global-level. Through these cross-level and multi-scale fusions, we obtain more detailed glyph-aware guidance, enabling precise control over the scene text generation process. Our method achieves an 18.02% improvement in sentence accuracy over the state-of-the-art multi-lingual scene text editing baseline, while simultaneously reducing the text-region Fréchet inception distance by 53.28%.

Interactive segmentation is to segment the mask of the target object according to the user’s interactive prompts. There are two mainstream strategies: early fusion and late fusion. Current specialist models utilize the early fusion strategy that encodes the combination of images and prompts to target the prompted objects, yet repetitive complex computations on the images result in high latency. Late fusion models extract image embeddings once and merge them with the prompts in later interactions. This strategy avoids redundant image feature extraction and improves efficiency significantly. A recent milestone is the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, this strategy limits the models’ ability to extract detailed information from the prompted target zone. To address this issue, we propose SAM-REF, a two-stage refinement framework that fully integrates images and prompts by using a lightweight refiner into the interaction of late fusion, which combines the accuracy of early fusion and maintains the efficiency of late fusion. Through extensive experiments, we show that our SAM-REF model outperforms the current state-of-the-art method in most metrics on segmentation quality without compromising efficiency.

In this paper, we target the adaptive source driven 3D scene editing task by proposing a CustomNeRF model that unifies a text description or a reference image as the editing prompt. However, obtaining desired editing results conformed with the editing prompt is nontrivial since there exist two significant challenges, including accurate editing of only foreground regions and multi-view consistency given a single-view reference image. To tackle the first challenge, we propose a Local-Global Iterative Editing (LGIE) training scheme that alternates between foreground region editing and full-image editing, aimed at foreground-only manipulation while preserving the background. For the second challenge, we also design a class-guided regularization that exploits class priors within the generation model to alleviate the inconsistency problem among different views in image-driven editing. Extensive experiments show that our CustomNeRF produces precise editing results under various real scenes for both text- and image-driven settings. The code is available at: https://github.com/hrz2000/CustomNeRF.

Understanding human posture is a challenging topic, which encompasses several tasks, e.g., pose estimation, body mesh recovery and pose tracking. In this article, we propose a novel Distribution-Aware Single-stage (DAS) model for the pose-related tasks. The proposed DAS model estimates human position and localizes joints simultaneously, which requires only a single pass. Meanwhile, we utilize normalizing flow to enable DAS to learn the true distribution of joint locations, rather than making simple Gaussian or Laplacian assumptions. This provides a pivotal prior and greatly boosts the accuracy of regression-based methods, thus making DAS achieve comparable performance to the volumetric-based methods. We also introduce a recursively update strategy to progressively approach the regression target, reducing the difficulty of regression and improving the regression performance. We further adapt DAS to multi-person mesh recovery and pose tracking tasks and achieve considerable performance on both tasks. Comprehensive experiments on CMU Panoptic and MuPoTS-3D demonstrate the superior efficiency of DAS, specifically 1.5 times speedup over previous best method, and its state-of-the-art accuracy for multi-person pose estimation. Extensive experiments on 3DPW and PoseTrack2018 indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of DAS for human body mesh recovery and pose tracking, respectively, which prove the generality of our proposed DAS model.

This work addresses the problem of cross-domain few-shot classification which aims at recognizing novel categories in unseen domains with only a few labeled data samples. We think that the pre-trained model contains the redundant elements which are useless or even harmful for the downstream tasks. To remedy the drawback, we introduce an$L^{2}$-SP regularized dense-sparse-dense (DSD) fine-tuning flow for regularizing the capacity of pre-trained networks and achieving efficient few-shot domain adaptation. Given a pre-trained model from the source domain, we start by carrying out a conventional dense fine-tuning step using the target data. Then we execute a sparse pruning step that prunes the unimportant connections and fine-tunes the weights of sub-network. Finally, initialized with the fine-tuned sub-network, we retrain the original dense network as the output model for the target domain. The whole fine-tuning procedure is regularized by an$L^{2}$-SP term. In contrast to the existing methods that either tune the weights or prune the network structure for domain adaptation, our regularized DSD fine-tuning flow simultaneously exploits the benefits of sparsity regularity and dense network capacity to gain the best of both worlds. Our method can be applied in a plug-and-play manner to improve the existing fine-tuning methods. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method in many cases outperforms the existing cross-domain few-shot classification methods in significant margins. Our code will be released soon.

In this paper, we focus on analyzing and improving the dropout technique for self-attention layers of Vision Transformer, which is important while surprisingly ignored by prior works. In particular, we conduct researches on three core questions: First, what to drop in self-attention layers? Different from dropping attention weights in literature, we propose to move dropout operations forward ahead of attention matrix calculation and set the Key as the dropout unit, yielding a novel dropout-before-softmax scheme. We theoretically verify that this scheme helps keep both regularization and probability features of attention weights, alleviating the overfittings problem to specific patterns and enhancing the model to globally capture vital information; Second, how to schedule the drop ratio in consecutive layers? In contrast to exploit a constant drop ratio for all layers, we present a new decreasing schedule that gradually decreases the drop ratio along the stack of self-attention layers. We experimentally validate the proposed schedule can avoid overfittings in low-level features and missing in high-level semantics, thus improving the robustness and stableness of model training; Third, whether need to perform structured dropout operation as CNN? We attempt patch-based block-version of dropout operation and find that this useful trick for CNN is not essential for ViT. Given exploration on the above three questions, we present the novel Drop-Key method that regards Key as the drop unit and exploits decreasing schedule for drop ratio, improving ViTs in a general way. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DropKey for various ViT architectures, e.g. T2T, VOLO, CeiT and DeiT, as well as for various vision tasks, e.g., image classification, object detection, human-object interaction detection and human body shape recovery.

We investigate semi-supervised semantic segmentation with self-training, where a teacher model generates pseudo masks to exploit the benefits of a large amount of unlabeled images. We notice that the noisy label from the generated pseudo masks is the major obstacle to achieving good performance. Previous works all treat the noise in pixel level and ignore the contextual information of the noise. This work shows that locating the patch-wise noisy region is a better way to deal with noise. To be specific, our method, named Uncertainty-aware Patch CutMix (UPC), first estimates the uncertainty of per-pixel prediction for pseudo masks of unlabeled images. Then UPC splits the uncertainty map into patches and calculates patch-wise uncertainty. UPC selects top-k most uncertain patches to generate the uncertain regions. Finally, uncertain regions are replaced with reliable ones from labeled images. We conduct extensive experiments using standard semi-supervised settings on Pascal VOC and Cityscapes. Experiment results show that UPC can significantly boost the performance of the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we further demonstrate that our UPC is robust to out-of-distribution unlabeled images, e.g., MSCOCO.

Existing works have advanced Text-to-Image (TTI) diffusion models for video editing in a one-shot learning manner. Despite their low requirements of data and computation, these methods might produce results of unsatisfied consistency with text prompt as well as temporal sequence, limiting their applications in the real world. In this paper, we propose to address the above issues with a novel EI$^2$ model towards Enhancing vIdeo Editing consIstency of TTI-based frameworks. Specifically, we analyze and find that the inconsistent problem is caused by newly added modules into TTI models for learning temporal information. These modules lead to covariate shift in the feature space, which harms the editing capability. Thus, we design EI$^2$ to tackle the above drawbacks with two classical modules: Shift-restricted Temporal Attention Module (STAM) and Fine-coarse Frame Attention Module (FFAM). First, through theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that covariate shift is highly related to Layer Normalization, thus STAM employs a Instance Centering layer replacing it to preserve the distribution of temporal features. In addition, STAM employs an attention layer with normalized mapping to transform temporal features while constraining the variance shift. As the second part, we incorporate STAM with a novel FFAM, which efficiently leverages fine-coarse spatial information of overall frames to further enhance temporal consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed EI$^2$ model.

Given a natural language referring expression, the goal of referring video segmentation task is to predict the segmentation mask of the referred object in the video. Previous methods only adopt 3D CNNs upon the video clip as a single encoder to extract a mixed spatio-temporal feature for the target frame. Though 3D convolutions are able to recognize which object is performing the described actions, they still introduce misaligned spatial information from adjacent frames, which inevitably confuses features of the target frame and leads to inaccurate segmentation. To tackle this issue, we propose a language-aware spatial-temporal collaboration framework that contains a 3D temporal encoder upon the video clip to recognize the described actions, and a 2D spatial encoder upon the target frame to provide undisturbed spatial features of the referred object. For multimodal features extraction, we propose a Cross-Modal Adaptive Modulation (CMAM) module and its improved version CMAM+ to conduct adaptive cross-modal interaction in the encoders with spatial- or temporal-relevant language features which are also updated progressively to enrich linguistic global context. In addition, we also propose a Language-Aware Semantic Propagation (LASP) module in the decoder to propagate semantic information from deep stages to the shallow stages with language-aware sampling and assignment, which is able to highlight language-compatible foreground visual features and suppress language-incompatible background visual features for better facilitating the spatial-temporal collaboration. Extensive experiments on four popular referring video segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method over the previous state-of-the-art methods.

We introduce Grouping by Center, a novel grouping approach for the bottom-up human pose estimation, which detects human joint first and then does grouping. The grouping strategy is the critical factor for the bottom-up pose estimation. To increase the conciseness and accuracy, we propose to use the center of the body as a grouping clue. More concretely, we predict the offsets from the keypoints to the body centers. Keypoints with aligned shifted results will be grouped as one person. However, the multi-scale variance of people can affect the prediction of the grouping clue, which has been neglected in previous research. To resolve the scale variance of the offset, we put forward a Multi-scale Translation Layer and an iterative refinement. Furthermore, we scheme a greedy grouping strategy with a dynamic threshold due to the various scales of instances. Through a comprehensive comparison, our framework is validated to be effective and practical. We also lay out the state-of-the-art performance revolving the bottom-up multi-person pose estimation on the MS-COCO dataset and the CrowdPose dataset.

Understanding human and the surrounding context is crucial for the perception of the image and video. It benefits many related applications, such as person search, virtual tryon/makeup, abnormal action detection. In the proposed 4th Person in Context (PIC) workshop, to further promote the progress in the above-mentioned areas, we hold three human-centric perception and cognition challenges including Make-up Temporal Video Grounding (MTVG), Make-up Dense Video Caption (MDVC) and Human-centric Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (HC-STVG). All the human-centric challenges focus on understanding the human behavior, interactions and relationships in video sequences, which requires understanding both visual and linguistic information, as well as complicated multimodal reasoning. The three sub-problems are complementary and collaboratively contribute to a unified human-centric perception and cognition solution.

Referring image segmentation aims at segmenting the foreground masks of the entities that can well match the description given in the natural language expression. Previous approaches tackle this problem using implicit feature interaction and fusion between visual and linguistic modalities, but usually fail to explore informative words of the expression to well align features from the two modalities for accurately identifying the referred entity. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension (CMPC) module and a Text-Guided Feature Exchange (TGFE) module to effectively address the challenging task. Concretely, the CMPC module first employs entity and attribute words to perceive all the related entities that might be considered by the expression. Then, the relational words are adopted to highlight the correct entity as well as suppress other irrelevant ones by multimodal graph reasoning. In addition to the CMPC module, we further leverage a simple yet effective TGFE module to integrate the reasoned multimodal features from different levels with the guidance of textual information. In this way, features from multi-levels could communicate with each other and be refined based on the textual context. We conduct extensive experiments on four popular referring segmentation benchmarks and achieve new state-of-the-art performances. Code is available at https://github.com/spyflying/CMPC-Refseg.

In this paper, we aim to build a comprehensive face detection system which provides a one-stop solution to various practical challenges for face detection in realistic scenarios, e.g., detecting faces from multiple-views, faces with occlusions, exaggerated expressions or blurred faces. Moreover, we introduce an automatic data harvest algorithm to effectively improve the generalization performance of the system even when collecting training faces containing various challenging patterns is difficult. In particular, we introduce three critical components to build the system, i.e., a recently widely used deep convolutional neural network (CNN), a novel blur-aware bi-channel network architecture, and a new self-learning mechanism capable of exploiting video contexts continuously. The aforementioned challenges except for detecting blurred faces can potentially be addressed by the CNN component owing its robustness to local deformation of target faces. The more challenging problem of detecting blurred faces is addressed by the bi-channel architecture component which processes blurred and clear faces adaptively. In addition, to address the difficulties in improving the generalization performance of the learning-based face detection system, we introduce a video-context-based self-learning mechanism into the system, which enables the system to continuously enhance its performance by harvesting faces with challenging training patterns automatically. To exploit video context, the detector is applied to massive unlabeled videos, and challenging faces are captured based on temporal inference. These recaptured faces, generally corresponding to one or multiple challenges mentioned above, are fed into the detection system to further improve its performance. Extensive experiments with the proposed detection system provide new state-of-the-art performance on FDDB data set, PASCAL face data set, AFW data set, and WIDER Face data set.

Both accuracy and speed are equally important in urban scene parsing. Most of the existing methods mainly focus on improving parsing accuracy, ignoring the problem of low inference speed due to large-sized input and high resolution feature maps. To tackle this issue, we propose a High Resolution Feature Recovering (HRFR) framework to accelerate a given parsing network. A Super-Resolution Recovering module is employed to recover features of large original-sized images from features of down-sampled input. Therefore, our framework can combine the advantages of (1) fast speed of networks with down-sampled input and (2) high accuracy of networks with large original-sized input. Additionally, we employ auxiliary intermediate supervision and boundary region re-weighting to facilitate the optimization of the network. Extensive experiments on the two challenging Cityscapes and CamVid datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HRFR framework, which can accelerate the scene parsing inference process by about 3.0x speedup from 1/2 down-sampled input with negligible accuracy reduction.

Face detectors are usually trained on static images but deployed in the wild such as surveillance videos. Due to the domain shift between images and videos, directly applying the image-based face detectors onto videos usually gives unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we introduce the BoxFlow - a new unsupervised detector adaptation method that can effectively adapt a face detector pre-trained on static images to videos. BoxFlow unsupervisedly adapts face detectors through fully exploiting the motion contexts across video frames. In particular, BoxFlow introduces three novel components: (1) generalized heat map representation of face locations with augmented shape flexibility; (2) motion based temporal contextual regularization among adjacent frames for unsupervised face detection refinement; (3) a self-paced learning strategy that adapts face detectors from easy data samples to challenging ones progressively. With these key components, we develop a systematic unsupervised face detector adaptation framework to help face detectors adapt to various deployed environments. Extensive experiments on the IDA dataset clearly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method. Without utilizing any annotation, the BoxFlow achieves about 10%-20% performance gain in terms of Average Precision than directly applying image-based face detectors.

Video scene parsing is challenging due to the following two reasons: firstly, it is non-trivial to learn meaningful video representations for producing the temporally consistent labeling map; secondly, such a learning process becomes more difficult with insufficient labeled video training data. In this work, we propose a unified framework to address the above two problems, which is to our knowledge the first model to employ predictive feature learning in the video scene parsing. The predictive feature learning is carried out in two predictive tasks: frame prediction and predictive parsing. It is experimentally proved that the learned predictive features in our model are able to significantly enhance the video parsing performance by combining with the standard image parsing network. Interestingly, the performance gain brought by the predictive learning is almost costless as the features are learned from a large amount of unlabeled video data in an unsupervised way. Extensive experiments over two challenging datasets, Cityscapes and Camvid, have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model by showing remarkable improvement over well-established baselines.

Despite remarkable progress of face analysis techniques, detecting landmarks on large-pose faces is still difficult due to self-occlusion, subtle landmark difference and incomplete information. To address these challenging issues, we introduce a novel recurrent 3D-2D dual learning model that alternatively performs 2D-based 3D face model refinement and 3D-to-2D projection based 2D landmark refinement to reliably reason about self-occluded landmarks, precisely capture the subtle landmark displacement and accurately detect landmarks even in presence of extremely large poses. The proposed model presents the first loop-closed learning framework that effectively exploits the informative feedback from the 3D-2D learning and its dual 2D-3D refinement tasks in a recurrent manner. Benefiting from these two mutual-boosting steps, our proposed model demonstrates appealing robustness to large poses (up to profile pose) and outstanding ability to capture fine-scale landmark displacement compared with existing 3D models. It achieves new state-of-the-art on the challenging AFLW benchmark. Moreover, our proposed model introduces a new architectural design that economically utilizes intermediate features and achieves 4× faster speed than its deep learning based counterparts.

Salient object detection has increasingly become a popular topic in cognitive and computational sciences, including computer vision and artificial intelligence research. In this paper, we propose integrating semantic priors into the salient object detection process. Our algorithm consists of three basic steps. Firstly, the explicit saliency map is obtained based on the semantic segmentation refined by the explicit saliency priors learned from the data. Next, the implicit saliency map is computed based on a trained model which maps the implicit saliency priors embedded into regional features with the saliency values. Finally, the explicit semantic map and the implicit map are adaptively fused to form a pixel-accurate saliency map which uniformly covers the objects of interest. We further evaluate the proposed framework on two challenging datasets, namely, ECSSD and HKUIS. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

The female facial image beautification usually requires professional editing softwares, which are relatively difficult for common users. In this demo, we introduce a practical system for automatic and personalized facial makeup recommendation and synthesis. First, a model describing the relations among facial features, facial attributes and makeup attributes is learned as the makeup recommendation model for suggesting the most suitable makeup attributes. Then the recommended makeup attributes are seamlessly synthesized onto the input facial image.

Face aging, also known as age progression, is attracting more and more research interests. It has plenty of applications in various domains including cross-age face recognition, finding lost children, and entertainments. In recent years, face aging has witnessed various breakthroughs and a number of face aging models have been proposed. Face aging, however, is still a very challenging task in practice for various reasons. First, faces may have many different expressions and lighting conditions, which pose great challenges to modeling the aging patterns. Besides, the training data are usually very limited and the face images for the same person only cover a narrow range of ages.

The human vision system usually has a specifically activated area of neurons when recognizing a category of images. Inspired by this visual mechanism, we propose a layerwise class-aware convolutional neural network architecture to explicitly discover category-tailored neurons on intermediate hidden layers to improve the network learning ability. Instead of directly selecting activated neurons for different categories, we inversely suppress those neurons of intermediate layers irrelevant with the given target class to produce a class-specific subnetwork, which implicitly enhances the discriminability of hidden layer features due to the increase of the inter-class discrepancy on them. Together with the classifier of the top layer, we jointly learn this network by formulating the suppressor of hidden layers as a penalty term in the objective function. To address class-specific neuron suppression in each hidden layer, we also introduce a statistic method based on mutual information to dynamically and automatically update the suppressed neurons during the network training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model is superior to the state-of-the-art models.

Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) visual features have demonstrated their powerful ability as a universal representation for various recognition tasks. In this paper, cross-modal retrieval with CNN visual features is implemented with several classic methods. Specifically, off-the-shelf CNN visual features are extracted from the CNN model, which is pretrained on ImageNet with more than one million images from 1000 object categories, as a generic image representation to tackle cross-modal retrieval. To further enhance the representational ability of CNN visual features, based on the pretrained CNN model on ImageNet, a fine-tuning step is performed by using the open source Caffe CNN library for each target data set. Besides, we propose a deep semantic matching method to address the cross-modal retrieval problem with respect to samples which are annotated with one or multiple labels. Extensive experiments on five popular publicly available data sets well demonstrate the superiority of CNN visual features for cross-modal retrieval.

Furniture style describes the discriminative appearance characteristics of furniture. It plays an important role in real-world indoor decoration. In this article, we explore the furniture style features and study the problem of furniture style classification. Differing from traditional object classification, furniture style classification aims at classifying different furniture in terms of the “style” that describes its appearance (e.g., American style, Gothic style, Rococo style, etc.) rather than the “kind” that is more related to its functional structure (e.g., bed, desk, etc.). To pursue efficient furniture style features, we construct a novel dataset of furniture styles that contains 16 common style categories and implement three strategies with respect to two categories of classification, that is, handcrafted classification and learning-based classification. First, we follow the typical image classification pipeline to extract the handcrafted features and train the classifier by support vector machine. Then we use the convolutional neural network to extract learning-based features from training images. To obtain comprehensive furniture style features, we finally combine the handcrafted image classification pipeline and the learning-based network. We experimentally evaluate the performances of handcrafted features and learning-based features of each strategy, and the results show the superiority of learning-based features and also the comprehensiveness of handcrafted features.

In this paper, we introduce the application of generic multi-level Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) approach into the scene understanding or image parsing task. Given an input image, first, a set of similar images from the training set are retrieved based on global-level CNN feature matching similarities. Then, the input test image and the similar images are oversegmented into superpixels. Next, the class of each test image's superpixel is initialized by the majority vote of the k-nearest-neighbor superpixels based on regional-level CNN features and hand-crafted features matching. The initial superpixel parsing is later combined with per-exemplar sliding windows to roughly form the pixel labels. Eventually, the final labels are further refined by the contextual smoothing. Extensive experiments on different challenging datasets demonstrate the potentials of the proposed method.

In this technical demonstration, we propose a face swapping framework, which is able to interactively change the appearance of a face in the wild to a different person/creature's face in real time on a mobile device. To realize this objective, we develop a deep learning-based face detector which is able to accurately detect faces in the wild. Our face feature points tracking system based on progressive initialization ensures accurate and robust localization of facial landmarks under extreme poses and expressions in real time. Relying on the advances of our face detector and face feature points tracker, we construct the Face Swapper which can smoothly replace the face appearance of a user in real time.

Part-based methods have seen popular applications for face verification in the wild, since they are more robust to local variations in terms of pose, illumination, and so on. However, most of the part-based approaches are built on hand-crafted features, which may not be suitable for the specific face verification purpose. In this paper, we propose to learn a part-based feature representation under the supervision of face identities through a deep model that ensures that the generated representations are more robust and suitable for face verification. The proposed framework consists of the following two deliberate components: 1) a deep mixture model (DMM) to find accurate patch correspondence and 2) a convolutional fusion network (CFN) to extract the part-based facial features. Specifically, DMM robustly depicts the spatial-appearance distribution of patch features over the faces via several Gaussian mixtures, which provide more accurate patch correspondence even in the presence of local distortions. Then, DMM only feeds the patches which preserve the identity information to the following CFN. The proposed CFN is a two-layer cascade of convolutional neural networks: 1) a local layer built on face patches to deal with local variations and 2) a fusion layer integrating the responses from the local layer. CFN jointly learns and fuses multiple local responses to optimize the verification performance. The composite representation obtained possesses certain robustness to pose and illumination variations and shows comparable performance with the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark data sets.

Along with the long-time evolution of popular social networks, e.g. Facebook, social media analysis research inevitably arrived at the era of considering face/user recognition with large age gaps. However, related research with adequate subjects and large age gaps is surprisingly rare. In this work, we first collect a so-called cross-age face (CAFE) dataset, ranging from child, to young, to adult, to old groups. Then, we propose a novel framework, called deep aging face verification (DAFV), for this challenging task. DAFV includes two modules: aging pattern synthesis and aging face verification. The aging pattern synthesis module synthesizes the faces of all age groups for the input face of an arbitrary age, and the core structure is a deep aging-aware denoising auto-encoder ( a2-DAE) with multiple outputs. The aging face verification module then takes the synthesized aging patterns of a face pair as the input, and each pair of synthesized images of the same age group is fed into a parallel CNN; finally, all parallel CNN outputs are fused to provide similar/dissimilar prediction. For DAFV, the training of the aging face verification module easily suffers from the overfitting results from the aging pattern synthesis module, and we propose to use the cross- validation strategy to produce error-aware outputs for the synthesis module. Extensive experiments on the CAFE dataset well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DAFV framework over other solutions for aging face verification.

Both parametric and non-parametric approaches have demonstrated encouraging performances in the human parsing task, namely segmenting a human image into several semantic regions (e.g., hat, bag, left arm, face). In this work, we aim to develop a new solution with the advantages of both methodologies, namely supervision from annotated data and the flexibility to use newly annotated (possibly uncommon) images, and present a quasi-parametric human parsing model. Under the classic K Nearest Neighbor (KNN)-based nonparametric framework, the parametric Matching Convolutional Neural Network (M-CNN) is proposed to predict the matching confidence and displacements of the best matched region in the testing image for a particular semantic region in one KNN image. Given a testing image, we first retrieve its KNN images from the annotated/manually-parsed human image corpus. Then each semantic region in each KNN image is matched with confidence to the testing image using M-CNN, and the matched regions from all KNN images are further fused, followed by a superpixel smoothing procedure to obtain the ultimate human parsing result. The M-CNN differs from the classic CNN [12] in that the tailored cross image matching filters are introduced to characterize the matching between the testing image and the semantic region of a KNN image. The cross image matching filters are defined at different convolutional layers, each aiming to capture a particular range of displacements. Comprehensive evaluations over a large dataset with 7,700 annotated human images well demonstrate the significant performance gain from the quasi-parametric model over the state-of-the-arts [29, 30], for the human parsing task.

Intuitive observations show that a baby may inherently possess the capability of recognizing a new visual concept (e.g., chair, dog) by learning from only very few positive instances taught by parent(s) or others, and this recognition capability can be gradually further improved by exploring and/or interacting with the real instances in the physical world. Inspired by these observations, we propose a computational model for weakly-supervised object detection, based on prior knowledge modelling, exemplar learning and learning with video contexts. The prior knowledge is modeled with a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). When very few instances of a new concept are given, an initial concept detector is built by exemplar learning over the deep features the pre-trained CNN. The well-designed tracking solution is then used to discover more diverse instances from the massive online weakly labeled videos. Once a positive instance is detected/identified with high score in each video, more instances possibly from different view-angles and/or different distances are tracked and accumulated. Then the concept detector can be fine-tuned based on these new instances. This process can be repeated again and again till we obtain a very mature concept detector. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC-07/10/12 object detection datasets [9] well demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. It can beat the state-of-the-art full-training based performances by learning from very few samples for each object category, along with about 20,000 weakly labeled videos.

In this paper, we aim to automatically render aging faces in a personalized way. Basically, a set of age-group specific dictionaries are learned, where the dictionary bases corresponding to the same index yet from different dictionaries form a particular aging process pattern cross different age groups, and a linear combination of these patterns expresses a particular personalized aging process. Moreover, two factors are taken into consideration in the dictionary learning process. First, beyond the aging dictionaries, each subject may have extra personalized facial characteristics, e.g. mole, which are invariant in the aging process. Second, it is challenging or even impossible to collect faces of all age groups for a particular subject, yet much easier and more practical to get face pairs from neighboring age groups. Thus a personality-aware coupled reconstruction loss is utilized to learn the dictionaries based on face pairs from neighboring age groups. Extensive experiments well demonstrate the advantages of our proposed solution over other state-of-the-arts in term of personalized aging progression, as well as the performance gain for cross-age face verification by synthesizing aging faces.

The beautification of human photos usually requires professional editing softwares, which are difficult for most users. In this technical demonstration, we propose a deep face beautification framework, which is able to automatically modify the geometrical structure of a face so as to boost the attractiveness. A learning based approach is adopted to capture the underlying relations between the facial shape and the attractiveness via training the Deep Beauty Predictor (DBP). Relying on the pre-trained DBP, we construct the BeAuty SHaper (BASH) to infer the "flows" of landmarks towards the maximal aesthetic level. BASH modifies the facial landmarks with the direct guidance of the beauty score estimated by DBP.

"What shall I look like after N years?" In this paper, we present an Auto Age Progression system, which automatically renders a series of aging faces in the future age ranges and generates an aging sequence (aging video) covering the entire life for an individual input. In the offline stage, a set of age-range specific dictionaries are learned from the constructed database, where the dictionary bases corresponding to the same index yet from different dictionaries form a particular aging process pattern across different age groups, and a linear combination of these patterns expresses a particular personalized aging process. In the online stage, for an input face of an individual, our system renders the aging faces corresponding to different age ranges through the aging dictionaries, and then generates an age progression by the presented face morphing technology.

In this work, the human parsing task, namely decomposing a human image into semantic fashion/body regions, is formulated as an active template regression (ATR) problem, where the normalized mask of each fashion/body item is expressed as the linear combination of the learned mask templates, and then morphed to a more precise mask with the active shape parameters, including position, scale and visibility of each semantic region. The mask template coefficients and the active shape parameters together can generate the human parsing results, and are thus called the structure outputs for human parsing. The deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is utilized to build the end-to-end relation between the input human image and the structure outputs for human parsing. More specifically, the structure outputs are predicted by two separate networks. The first CNN network is with max-pooling, and designed to predict the template coefficients for each label mask, while the second CNN network is without max-pooling to preserve sensitivity to label mask position and accurately predict the active shape parameters. For a new image, the structure outputs of the two networks are fused to generate the probability of each label for each pixel, and super-pixel smoothing is finally used to refine the human parsing result. Comprehensive evaluations on a large dataset well demonstrate the significant superiority of the ATR framework over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F1-score reaches 64.38 percent by our ATR framework, significantly higher than 44.76 percent based on the state-of-the-art algorithm [28].

Person reidentification across nonoverlapping camera views is a rather challenging task. Due to the difficulties in obtaining identifiable faces, clothing appearance becomes the main cue for identification purposes. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on clothing attributes assisted person reidentification. First, the body parts and their local features are extracted for alleviating the pose-misalignment issue. A latent support vector machine (LSVM)-based person reidentification approach is proposed to describe the relations among the low-level part features, middle-level clothing attributes, and high-level reidentification labels of person pairs. Motivated by the uncertainties of clothing attributes, we treat them as real-value variables instead of using them as discrete variables. Moreover, a large-scale real-world dataset with 10 camera views and about 200 subjects is collected and thoroughly annotated for this paper. The extensive experiments on this dataset show: 1) part features are more effective than features extracted from the holistic human bounding boxes; 2) the clothing attributes embedded in the LSVM model may further boost reidentification performance compared with support vector machine without clothing attributes; and 3) treating clothing attributes as real-value variables is more effective than using them as discrete variables in person reidentification.

Online selection of dynamic features has attracted intensive interest in recent years. However, existing online feature selection methods evaluate features individually and ignore the underlying structure of a feature stream. For instance, in image analysis, features are generated in groups which represent color, texture, and other visual information. Simply breaking the group structure in feature selection may degrade performance. Motivated by this observation, we formulate the problem as an online group feature selection. The problem assumes that features are generated individually but there are group structures in the feature stream. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the correlation among streaming features has been considered in the online feature selection process. To solve this problem, we develop a novel online group feature selection method named OGFS. Our proposed approach consists of two stages: online intra-group selection and online inter-group selection. In the intra-group selection, we design a criterion based on spectral analysis to select discriminative features in each group. In the inter-group selection, we utilize a linear regression model to select an optimal subset. This two-stage procedure continues until there are no more features arriving or some predefined stopping conditions are met. Finally, we apply our method to multiple tasks including image classification and face verification. Extensive empirical studies performed on real-world and benchmark data sets demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art online feature selection methods.

Human group, which indicates the people who share similar characteristics, is used to categorize humans into distinct populations or groups. In recent years, with the explosive growth of image, new concepts of human group are blooming in social networks . People in the same human group can be categorized by their facial and clothes appearance characteristics. In this work, we propose an approach to understanding the new concepts of human group with few positive samples. To this end, we construct visual models crossing two modalities related to human images and surrounding texts. Two convolutional neural networks based on face and upper body are constructed separately. Two different convolutional neural networks (CNNs) architectures are explored for visual pre-traing. To assist the human group recognition, we also merge global convolutional feature of the image. The surrounding texts are represented by semantical vectors and utilized as image labels. We transform words in the text into fixed length vectors by the skip-gram model. Then the texts corresponding to each image are converted into one feature vector by sparse coding and max pooling. Given a few positive samples of new concepts of human group, the visual model can be improved to understand the semantical meaning of the new label. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed visual model and show the excellent learning capacity with few samples.

In this paper, we propose a novel semi- supervised learning strategy to address human parsing. Existing human parsing datasets are relatively small due to the required tedious human labeling. We present a general, affordable and scalable solution, which harnesses the rich contexts in those easily available web videos to boost any existing human parser. First, we crawl a large number of unlabeled videos from the web. Then for each video, the cross-frame contexts are utilized for human pose co- estimation , and then video co-parsing to obtain satisfactory human parsing results for all frames. More specifically, SIFT flow and super-pixel matching are used to build correspondences across different frames, and these correspondences then contextualize the pose estimation and human parsing in individual frames. Finally these parsed video frames are used as the reference corpus for the non-parametric human parsing component of the whole solution. To further improve the accuracy of video co-parsing, we propose an active learning method to incorporate human guidance, where the labelers are required to assess the accuracies of the pose estimation results of certain selected video frames. Then we take reliable frames as the seed frames to guide the video pose co-estimation. Our human parsing framework can then easily incorporate the human feedback to train a better fashion parser. Extensive experiments on two benchmark fashion datasets as well as a newly collected challenging Fashion Icon dataset well demonstrate the encouraging performance gain from our general pipeline for human parsing.

In this paper, we explore how to utilize the video context to facilitate fashion parsing. Instead of annotating a large amount of fashion images, we present a general, affordable and scalable solution, which harnesses the rich contexts in easily available fashion videos to boost any existing fashion parser. First, we crawl a large unlabelled fashion video corpus with fashion frames. Then for each fashion video, the cross-frame contexts are utilized for human pose co-estimation, and then video co-parsing to obtain satisfactory fashion parsing results for all frames. More specifically, Sift Flow and super-pixel matching are used to build correspondences across frames, and these correspondences then con- textualize the pose estimations and fashion parsing in individual frames. Finally, these parsed video frames are used as the reference corpus for the non-parametric fashion parsing component of the whole solution. Extensive experiments on two benchmark fashion datasets as well as a newly collected challenging Fashion Icon (FI) dataset demonstrate the encouraging performance gain from our general pipeline for fashion parsing.

We investigate large-scale face identification in unconstrained videos with 1000 subjects. This problem is very challenging, and until now most studies have only considered the scenarios with a small number of subjects and videos captured in controlled laboratory environments. Our contributions in this paper are twofold. First, we set up a large-scale video database in an unconstrained environment, Celebrity-1000, with data collected from two popular video-sharing websites, YouTube and Youku, for face identification research. It contains 1000 celebrities from different countries, ~7000 videos, ~160 K tracking sequences, and ~2.4 M sampled frames. Second, we boost the efficiency of multitask joint sparse representation (MTJSR) algorithm for video-based face identification on Celebrity-1000. MTJSR is training free and can naturally integrate multiple frames of the same tracking sequence for collaborative inference, and thus is suitable for video-based face identification. We present a sparsity-induced scalable optimization method, which solves the large-scale MTJSR problem by sequentially solving a series of smaller-scale subproblems with theoretically guaranteed convergency. Extensive experiments show several orders-of-magnitude speedup with this new optimization method, and also demonstrate the superiorities of the accelerated MTJSR algorithm over several popular baseline algorithms.

Beauty e-Experts, a fully automatic system for makeover recommendation and synthesis, is developed in this work. The makeover recommendation and synthesis system simultaneously considers many kinds of makeover items on hairstyle and makeup. Given a user-provided frontal face image with short/bound hair and no/light makeup, the Beauty e-Experts system not only recommends the most suitable hairdo and makeup, but also synthesizes the virtual hairdo and makeup effects. To acquire enough knowledge for beauty modeling, we built the Beauty e-Experts Database, which contains 1,505 female photos with a variety of attributes annotated with different discrete values. We organize these attributes into two different categories, beauty attributes and beauty-related attributes. Beauty attributes refer to those values that are changeable during the makeover process and thus need to be recommended by the system. Beauty-related attributes are those values that cannot be changed during the makeup process but can help the system to perform recommendation. Based on this Beauty e-Experts Dataset, two problems are addressed for the Beauty e-Experts system: what to recommend and how to wear it, which describes a similar process of selecting hairstyle and cosmetics in daily life. For the what-to-recommend problem, we propose a multiple tree-structured supergraph model to explore the complex relationships among high-level beauty attributes, mid-level beauty-related attributes, and low-level image features. Based on this model, the most compatible beauty attributes for a given facial image can be efficiently inferred. For the how-to-wear-it problem, an effective and efficient facial image synthesis module is designed to seamlessly synthesize the recommended makeovers into the user facial image. We have conducted extensive experiments on testing images of various conditions to evaluate and analyze the proposed system. The experimental results well demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system.

In this demo, we present Beauty e-Experts, a fully automatic system for hairstyle and facial makeup recommendation and synthesis. Given a user-provided frontal facial image with short/bound hair and no/light makeup, the Beauty e-Experts system can not only recommend the most suitable hairstyle and makeup, but also show the synthesis effects. Two problems are considered for the Beauty e-Experts system: what to recommend and how to wear, which describe a similar process of selecting and applying hairstyle and cosmetics in our daily life. For the what-to-recommend problem, we propose a multiple tree-structured super-graphs model to explore the complex relationships among the beauty attributes, beauty-related attributes and image features, and then based on this model, the most suitable beauty attributes for a given facial image can be efficiently inferred. For the how-to-wear problem, a facial image synthesis module is designed to seamlessly blend the recommended hairstyle and makeup into the user facial image. Extensive experimental evaluations and analysis on testing images well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

Beauty e-Experts, a fully automatic system for hairstyle and facial makeup recommendation and synthesis, is developed in this work. Given a user-provided frontal face image with short/bound hair and no/light makeup, the Beauty e-Experts system can not only recommend the most suitable hairdo and makeup, but also show the synthetic effects. To obtain enough knowledge for beauty modeling, we build the Beauty e-Experts Database, which contains 1,505 attractive female photos with a variety of beauty attributes and beauty-related attributes annotated. Based on this Beauty e-Experts Dataset, two problems are considered for the Beauty e-Experts system: what to recommend and how to wear, which describe a similar process of selecting hairstyle and cosmetics in our daily life. For the what-to-recommend problem, we propose a multiple tree-structured super-graphs model to explore the complex relationships among the high-level beauty attributes, mid-level beauty-related attributes and low-level image features, and then based on this model, the most compatible beauty attributes for a given facial image can be efficiently inferred. For the how-to-wear problem, an effective and efficient facial image synthesis module is designed to seamlessly synthesize the recommended hairstyle and makeup into the user facial image. Extensive experimental evaluations and analysis on testing images of various conditions well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.

We introduce a curve process framework to solve the challenging problem of curve extraction from “non-traceable” curve groups. We propose a comprehensive curve model, which consists of the geometric, photometric and topological sub-models. Two typical categories of the non-traceable curve groups are considered. First, for the interlaced curves with complex structures, we show how to use the proposed curve model especially the topological sub-model to extract curves from the group. Second, for the non-interlaced but over-dense or faint curves we leverage the curve group pattern priors in addition, and extract the whole pattern in a global optimization. Applications and experiments demonstrate the competence of our models and methods.