Learning image representations using synthetic data allows training neural networks without some of the concerns associated with real images, such as privacy and bias. Existing work focuses on a handful of curated generative processes which require expert knowledge to design, making it hard to scale up. To overcome this, we propose training with a large dataset of twenty-one thousand programs, each one generating a diverse set of synthetic images. These programs are short code snippets, which are easy to modify and fast to execute using OpenGL. The proposed dataset can be used for both supervised and unsupervised representation learning, and reduces the gap between pre-training with real and procedurally generated images by 38%.

Current vision systems are trained on huge datasets, and these datasets come with costs: curation is expensive, they inherit human biases, and there are concerns over privacy and usage rights. To counter these costs, interest has surged in learning from cheaper data sources, such as unlabeled images. In this paper we go a step further and ask if we can do away with real image datasets entirely, instead learning from procedural noise processes. We investigate a suite of image generation models that produce images from simple random processes. These are then used as training data for a visual representation learner with a contrastive loss. In particular, we study statistical image models, randomly initialized deep generative models, and procedural graphics models.Our findings show that it is important for the noise to capture certain structural properties of real data but that good performance can be achieved even with processes that are far from realistic. We also find that diversity is a key property to learn good representations.

We address the unsupervised learning of several interconnected problems in low-level vision: single view depth prediction, camera motion estimation, optical flow, and segmentation of a video into the static scene and moving regions. Our key insight is that these four fundamental vision problems are coupled through geometric constraints. Consequently, learning to solve them together simplifies the problem because the solutions can reinforce each other. We go beyond previous work by exploiting geometry more explicitly and segmenting the scene into static and moving regions. To that end, we introduce Competitive Collaboration, a framework that facilitates the coordinated training of multiple specialized neural networks to solve complex problems. Competitive Collaboration works much like expectation-maximization, but with neural networks that act as both competitors to explain pixels that correspond to static or moving regions, and as collaborators through a moderator that assigns pixels to be either static or independently moving. Our novel method integrates all these problems in a common framework and simultaneously reasons about the segmentation of the scene into moving objects and the static background, the camera motion, depth of the static scene structure, and the optical flow of moving objects. Our model is trained without any supervision and achieves state-of-the-art performance among joint unsupervised methods on all sub-problems.

Despite the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), mode collapse remains a serious issue during GAN training. To date, little work has focused on understanding and quantifying which modes have been dropped by a model. In this work, we visualize mode collapse at both the distribution level and the instance level. First, we deploy a semantic segmentation network to compare the distribution of segmented objects in the generated images with the target distribution in the training set. Differences in statistics reveal object classes that are omitted by a GAN. Second, given the identified omitted object classes, we visualize the GAN's omissions directly. In particular, we compare specific differences between individual photos and their approximate inversions by a GAN. To this end, we relax the problem of inversion and solve the tractable problem of inverting a GAN layer instead of the entire generator. Finally, we use this framework to analyze several recent GANs trained on multiple datasets and identify their typical failure cases.

Despite the recent success of GANs in synthesizing images conditioned on inputs such as a user sketch, text, or semantic labels, manipulating the high-level attributes of an existing natural photograph with GANs is challenging for two reasons. First, it is hard for GANs to precisely reproduce an input image. Second, after manipulation, the newly synthesized pixels often do not fit the original image. In this paper, we address these issues by adapting the image prior learned by GANs to image statistics of an individual image. Our method can accurately reconstruct the input image and synthesize new content, consistent with the appearance of the input image. We demonstrate our interactive system on several semantic image editing tasks, including synthesizing new objects consistent with background, removing unwanted objects, and changing the appearance of an object. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons against several existing methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Existing optical flow datasets are limited in size and variability due to the difficulty of capturing dense ground truth. In this paper, we tackle this problem by tracking pixels through densely sampled space-time volumes recorded with a high-speed video camera. Our model exploits the linearity of small motions and reasons about occlusions from multiple frames. Using our technique, we are able to establish accurate reference flow fields outside the laboratory in natural environments. Besides, we show how our predictions can be used to augment the input images with realistic motion blur. We demonstrate the quality of the produced flow fields on synthetic and real-world datasets. Finally, we collect a novel challenging optical flow dataset by applying our technique on data from a high-speed camera and analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art in optical flow under various levels of motion blur.

The optical flow of natural scenes is a combination of the motion of the observer and the independent motion of objects. Existing algorithms typically focus on either recovering motion and structure under the assumption of a purely static world or optical flow for general unconstrained scenes. We combine these approaches in an optical flow algorithm that estimates an explicit segmentation of moving objects from appearance and physical constraints. In static regions we take advantage of strong constraints to jointly estimate the camera motion and the 3D structure of the scene over multiple frames. This allows us to also regularize the structure instead of the motion. Our formulation uses a Plane+Parallax framework, which works even under small baselines, and reduces the motion estimation to a one-dimensional search problem, resulting in more accurate estimation. In moving regions the flow is treated as unconstrained, and computed with an existing optical flow method. The resulting Mostly-Rigid Flow (MR-Flow) method achieves state-of-the-art results on both the MPI-Sintel and KITTI-2015 benchmarks.

We address the elusive goal of estimating optical flow both accurately and efficiently by adopting a sparse-to-dense approach. Given a set of sparse matches, we regress to dense optical flow using a learned set of full-frame basis flow fields. We learn the principal components of natural flow fields using flow computed from four Hollywood movies. Optical flow fields are then compactly approximated as a weighted sum of the basis flow fields. Our new PCA-Flow algorithm robustly estimates these weights from sparse feature matches. The method runs in under 200ms/frame on the MPI-Sintel dataset using a single CPU and is more accurate and significantly faster than popular methods such as LDOF and Classic+NL. For some applications, however, the results are too smooth. Consequently, we develop a novel sparse layered flow method in which each layer is represented by PCA-Flow. Unlike existing layered methods, estimation is fast because it uses only sparse matches. We combine information from different layers into a dense flow field using an image-aware MRF. The resulting PCA-Layers method runs in 3.2s/frame, is significantly more accurate than PCA-Flow, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in occluded regions on MPI-Sintel.

Abstract Converting unconstrained video sequences into videos that loop seamlessly is an extremely challenging problem. In this work, we take the first steps towards automating this process by focusing on an important subclass of videos containing a single dominant foreground object. Our technique makes two novel contributions over previous work: first, we propose a correspondence‐based similarity metric to automatically identify a good transition point in the video where the appearance and dynamics of the foreground are most consistent. Second, we develop a technique that aligns both the foreground and background about this transition point using a combination of global camera path planning and patch‐based video morphing. We demonstrate that this allows us to create natural, compelling, loopy videos from a wide range of videos collected from the internet.

Layered models allow scene segmentation and motion estimation to be formulated together and to inform one another. Traditional layered motion methods, however, employ fairly weak models of scene structure, relying on locally connected Ising/Potts models which have limited ability to capture long-range correlations in natural scenes. To address this, we formulate a fully-connected layered model that enables global reasoning about the complicated segmentations of real objects. Optimization with fully-connected graphical models is challenging, and our inference algorithm leverages recent work on efficient mean field updates for fully-connected conditional random fields. These methods can be implemented efficiently using high-dimensional Gaussian filtering. We combine these ideas with a layered flow model, and find that the long-range connections greatly improve segmentation into figure-ground layers when compared with locally connected MRF models. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the method can recover fine structures and large occlusion regions, with good flow accuracy and much lower computational cost than previous locally-connected layered models.