EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Hongfa Wang
dblp:91/330
· DBLP profile ↗
25ranked-venue papers
0as first author
22since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-8230-9471ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 17 · 15 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 15 · 13 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 2 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | VCapsBench: A Large-scale Fine-grained Benchmark for Video Caption Quality EvaluationabstractVideo captions play a crucial role in text-to-video generation tasks, as their quality directly influences the semantic coherence and visual fidelity of the generated videos. Although large vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in caption generation, existing benchmarks inadequately address fine-grained evaluation, particularly in capturing spatial-temporal details critical for video generation. To address this gap, we introduce the Fine-grained Video Caption Evaluation Benchmark (VCapsBench), the first large-scale fine-grained benchmark comprising 5,677 (5K+) videos and 109,796 (100K+) question-answer pairs. These QA-pairs are systematically annotated across 21 fine-grained dimensions (e.g., camera movement, and shot type) that are empirically proven critical for text-to-video generation. We further introduce three metrics (Accuracy (AR), Inconsistency Rate (IR), Coverage Rate (CR)), and an automated evaluation pipeline leveraging a large language model (LLM) to verify caption quality via contrastive QA-pairs analysis. Our benchmark can advance the development of robust text-to-video models by providing actionable insights for caption optimization. Shi-Xue Zhang, Hongfa Wang, Duojun Huang, Xiaobin Zhu 0001, Xu-Cheng Yin |
AAAI | 2 |
| 2026 | Follow-Your-Emoji-Faster: Towards Efficient, Fine-Controllable, and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation
Yue Ma 0016, Zexuan Yan, Hongfa Wang, Yingqing He, Junkun Yuan, Ailing Zeng, Chengfei Cai, Harry Shum, Zhifeng Li 0001, Wei Liu 0005, Qifeng Chen 0001 |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 4 |
| 2025 | Infinite-Canvas: Higher-Resolution Video Outpainting with Extensive Content GenerationabstractThis paper explores higher-resolution video outpainting with extensive content generation. We point out common issues faced by existing methods when attempting to largely outpaint videos: the generation of low-quality content and limitations imposed by GPU memory. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based method called Infinite-Canvas. It builds upon two core designs. First, instead of employing the common practice of "single-shot" outpainting, we distribute the task across spatial windows and seamlessly merge them. It allows us to outpaint videos of any size and resolution without being constrained by GPU memory. Second, the source video and its relative positional relation are injected into the generation process of each window. It makes the generated spatial layout within each window harmonize with the source video. Coupling with these two designs enables us to generate higher-resolution outpainting videos with rich content while keeping spatial and temporal consistency. Infinite-Canvas excels in large-scale video outpainting, e.g., from 512 × 512 to 1152 × 2048 (9×), while producing high-quality and aesthetically pleasing results. It achieves the best quantitative results across various resolution and scale setups. The code is available at https://github.com/mayuelala/FollowYourCanvas. Qihua Chen, Yue Ma 0016, Hongfa Wang, Junkun Yuan, Qi Tian 0003, Shaobo Min, Qifeng Chen 0001, Wei Liu 0005 |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2025 | Follow-Your-Click: Open-domain Regional Image Animation via Motion PromptsabstractDespite recent advances in image-to-video generation, better controllability and local animation are less explored. Most existing image-to-video methods are not locally aware and tend to move the entire scene. However, human artists may need to control the movement of different objects or regions. Additionally, current I2V methods require users not only to describe the target motion but also to provide redundant detailed descriptions of frame contents.These two issues hinder the practical utilization of current I2V tools. In this paper, we propose a practical framework, named Follow-Your-Click, to achieve image animation with a simple user click (for specifying what to move) and a motion prompt (for specifying how to move). Technically, we propose the first-frame masking strategy, which significantly improves the video generation quality, and a motion-augmented module equipped with a motion prompt dataset to improve the motion prompt following abilities of our model. To further control the motion speed, we propose flow-based motion magnitude control to control the speed of target movement more precisely. Extensive experiments compared with 7 baselines, including both commercial tools and research methods on 8 metrics, suggest the superiority of our approach. Yue Ma 0016, Yingqing He, Hongfa Wang, Andong Wang, Leqi Shen, Jixuan Ying, Chengfei Cai, Zhifeng Li 0001, Harry Shum, Wei Liu 0005, Qifeng Chen 0001 |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2025 | CoHD: A Counting-Aware Hierarchical Decoding Framework for Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation
Zhuoyan Luo, Yinghao Wu, Tianheng Cheng, Yong Liu 0033, Yicheng Xiao, Hongfa Wang, Yujiu Yang 0001 |
ICCV | 6 |
| 2025 | Instructseg: Unifying Instructed Visual Segmentation with Multi-Modal Large Language ModelsabstractBoosted by Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), text-guided universal segmentation models for the image and video domains have made rapid progress recently. However, these methods are often developed separately for specific domains, overlooking the similarities in task settings and solutions across these two areas. In this paper, we define the union of referring segmentation and reasoning segmentation at both the image and video levels as Instructed Visual Segmentation (IVS). Correspondingly, we propose InstructSeg, an end-to-end segmentation pipeline equipped with MLLMs for IVS. Specifically, we employ an object-aware video perceiver to extract temporal and object information from reference frames, facilitating comprehensive video understanding. Additionally, we introduce vision-guided multi-granularity text fusion to better integrate global and detailed text information with fine-grained visual guidance. By leveraging multi-task and end-to-end training, InstructSeg demonstrates superior performance across diverse image and video segmentation tasks, surpassing both segmentation specialists and MLLM-based methods with a single model. Our code is available at https://github.com/congvvc/InstructSeg. Haoxian Tan, Yingsen Zeng, Yong Liu 0033, Hongfa Wang, Yujiu Yang 0001 |
ICCV | 6 |
| 2025 | Towards Multiple Character Image Animation Through Enhancing Implicit DecouplingabstractControllable character image animation has a wide range of applications. Although existing studies have consistently improved performance, challenges persist in the field of character image animation, particularly concerning stability in complex backgrounds and tasks involving multiple characters. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-condition guided framework for character image animation, employing several well-designed input modules to enhance the implicit decoupling capability of the model. First, the optical flow guider calculates the background optical flow map as guidance information, which enables the model to implicitly learn to decouple the background motion into background constants and background momentum during training, and generate a stable background by setting zero background momentum during inference. Second, the depth order guider calculates the order map of the characters, which transforms the depth information into the positional information of multiple characters. This facilitates the implicit learning of decoupling different characters, especially in accurately separating the occluded body parts of multiple characters. Third, the reference pose map is input to enhance the ability to decouple character texture and pose information in the reference image. Furthermore, to fill the gap of fair evaluation of multi-character image animation, we propose a new benchmark comprising about 4,000 frames. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method excels in generating high-quality character animations, especially in scenarios of complex backgrounds and multiple characters. Jingyun Xue, Hongfa Wang, Qi Tian 0003, Yue Ma 0016, Andong Wang, Zhiyuan Zhao 0002, Shaobo Min, Kaihao Zhang, Harry Shum, Wei Liu 0005, Mengyang Liu, Wenhan Luo |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2025 | Efficient Quantification of Multimodal Interaction at Sample LevelabstractInteractions between modalities—redundancy, uniqueness, and synergy—collectively determine the composition of multimodal information. Understanding these interactions is crucial for analyzing information dynamics in multimodal systems, yet their accurate sample-level quantification presents significant theoretical and computational challenges. To address this, we introduce the Lightweight Sample-wise Multimodal Interaction (LSMI) estimator, rigorously grounded in pointwise information theory. We first develop a redundancy estimation framework, employing an appropriate pointwise information measure to quantify this most decomposable and measurable interaction. Building upon this, we propose a general interaction estimation method that employs efficient entropy estimation, specifically tailored for sample-wise estimation in continuous distributions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate LSMI’s precision and efficiency. Crucially, our sample-wise approach reveals fine-grained sample- and category-level dynamics within multimodal data, enabling practical applications such as redundancy-informed sample partitioning, targeted knowledge distillation, and interaction-aware model ensembling. The code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/LSMI_Estimator. Zequn Yang, Hongfa Wang, Di Hu 0001 |
ICML | 2 |
| 2025 | Global and Local Semantic Completion Learning for Vision-Language Pre-TrainingabstractCross-modal alignment plays a crucial role in vision-language pre-training (VLP) models, enabling them to capture meaningful associations across different modalities. For this purpose, inspired by the success of masked language modeling (MLM) tasks in the NLP pre-training area, numerous masked modeling tasks have been proposed for VLP to further promote cross-modal interactions. The core idea of previous masked modeling tasks is to focus on reconstructing the masked tokens based on visible context for learning local-local alignment, i.e., associations between image patches and text tokens. However, most of them pay little attention to the global semantic features generated for the masked data, resulting in a limited cross-modal alignment ability of global representations to local features of the other modality. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel Global and Local Semantic Completion Learning (GLSCL) task to facilitate global-local alignment and local-local alignment simultaneously. Specifically, the GLSCL task complements the missing semantics of masked data and recovers global and local features by cross-modal interactions. Our GLSCL consists of masked global semantic completion (MGSC) and masked local token completion (MLTC). MGSC promotes learning more representative global features, which have a great impact on the performance of downstream tasks, while MLTC reconstructs modal-fusion local tokens, further enhancing accurate comprehension of multimodal data. To evaluate the proposed approaches on cross-modal alignment, we develop a validation benchmark called ALIGN-BENCH. Moreover, we present a flexible vision encoder, enabling our model to simultaneously perform image-text and video-text multimodal tasks. Experimental results show that our proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language benchmarks, such as visual question answering, image-text retrieval, and video-text retrieval. Rongcheng Tu, Yatai Ji, Jie Jiang 0015, Weijie Kong, Chengfei Cai, Hongfa Wang, Yujiu Yang 0001, Wei Liu 0005 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 7 |
| 2024 | LanguageBind: Extending Video-Language Pretraining to N-modality by Language-based Semantic AlignmentabstractThe video-language (VL) pretraining has achieved remarkable improvement in multiple downstream tasks. However, the current VL pretraining framework is hard to extend to multiple modalities (N modalities, N ≥ 3) beyond vision and language. We thus propose LanguageBind, taking the language as the bind across different modalities because the language modality is well-explored and contains rich semantics. Specifically, we freeze the language encoder acquired by VL pretraining and then train encoders for other modalities with contrastive learning. As a result, all modalities are mapped to a shared feature space, implementing multi-modal semantic alignment. While LanguageBind ensures that we can extend VL modalities to N modalities, we also need a high-quality dataset with alignment data pairs centered on language. We thus propose VIDAL-10M with 10 Million data with Video, Infrared, Depth, Audio and their corresponding Language. In our VIDAL-10M, all videos are from short video platforms with complete semantics rather than truncated segments from long videos, and all the video, depth, infrared, and audio modalities are aligned to their textual descriptions. LanguageBind has achieved superior performance on a wide range of 15 benchmarks covering video, audio, depth, and infrared. Moreover, multiple experiments have provided evidence for the effectiveness of LanguageBind in achieving indirect alignment and complementarity among diverse modalities. Bin Lin 0014, Munan Ning, Jiaxi Cui, Hongfa Wang, Yatian Pang, Junwu Zhang, Caiwan Zhang, Zhifeng Li 0001, Wei Liu 0005, Li Yuan 0007 |
ICLR | 6 |
| 2024 | Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait AnimationabstractWe present Follow-Your-Emoji, a diffusion-based framework for portrait animation, which animates a reference portrait with target landmark sequences. The main challenge of portrait animation is to preserve the identity of the reference portrait and transfer the target expression to this portrait while maintaining temporal consistency and fidelity. To address these challenges, Follow-Your-Emoji equipped the powerful Stable Diffusion model with two well-designed technologies. Specifically, we first adopt a new explicit motion signal, namely expression-aware landmark, to guide the animation process. We discover this landmark can not only ensure the accurate motion alignment between the reference portrait and target motion during inference but also increase the ability to portray exaggerated expressions (i.e., large pupil movements) and avoid identity leakage. Then, we propose a facial fine-grained loss to improve the model’s ability of subtle expression perception and reference portrait appearance reconstruction by using both expression and facial masks. Accordingly, our method demonstrates significant performance in controlling the expression of freestyle portraits, including real humans, cartoons, sculptures, and even animals. By leveraging a simple and effective progressive generation strategy, we extend our model to stable long-term animation, thus increasing its potential application value. To address the lack of a benchmark for this field, we introduce EmojiBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising diverse portrait images, driving videos, and landmarks. We show extensive evaluations on EmojiBench to verify the superiority of Follow-Your-Emoji. The code, training dataset and benchmark will be found in https://github.com/mayuelala/FollowYourEmoji. Yue Ma 0016, Hongfa Wang, Yingqing He, Junkun Yuan, Ailing Zeng, Chengfei Cai, Harry Shum, Wei Liu 0005, Qifeng Chen 0001 |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 3 |
| 2024 | Inverse-Like Antagonistic Scene Text Spotting via Reading-Order Estimation and Dynamic SamplingabstractScene text spotting is a challenging task, especially for inverse-like scene text, which has complex layouts,e.g., mirrored, symmetrical, or retro-flexed. In this paper, we propose a unified end-to-end trainable inverse-like antagonistic text spotting framework dubbed IATS, which can effectively spot inverse-like scene texts without sacrificing general ones. Specifically, we propose an innovative reading-order estimation module (REM) that extracts reading-order information from the initial text boundary generated by an initial boundary module (IBM). To optimize and train REM, we propose a joint reading-order estimation loss (LRE) consisting of a classification loss, an orthogonality loss, and a distribution loss. With the help of IBM, we can divide the initial text boundary into two symmetric control points and iteratively refine the new text boundary using a lightweight boundary refinement module (BRM) for adapting to various shapes and scales. To alleviate the incompatibility between text detection and recognition, we propose a dynamic sampling module (DSM) with a thin-plate spline that can dynamically sample appropriate features for recognition in the detected text region. Without extra supervision, the DSM can proactively learn to sample appropriate features for text recognition through the gradient returned by the recognition module. Extensive experiments on both challenging scene text and inverse-like scene text datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance both on irregular and inverse-like text spotting. Shi-Xue Zhang, Xiaobin Zhu 0001, Hongfa Wang, Xu-Cheng Yin |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 5 |
| 2023 | Seeing What You Miss: Vision-Language Pre-training with Semantic Completion LearningabstractCross-modal alignment is essential for vision-language pre-training (VLP) models to learn the correct corresponding information across different modalities. For this purpose, inspired by the success of masked language modeling (MLM) tasks in the NLP pre-training area, numerous masked modeling tasks have been proposed for VLP to further promote cross-modal interactions. The core idea of previous masked modeling tasks is to focus on reconstructing the masked tokens based on visible context for learning local-to-local alignment. However, most of them pay little attention to the global semantic features generated for the masked data, resulting in a limited cross-modal alignment ability of global representations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Completion Learning (SCL) task, complementary to existing masked modeling tasks, to facilitate global-to-local alignment. Specifically, the SCL task complements the missing semantics of masked data by capturing the corresponding information from the other modality, promoting learning more representative global features which have a great impact on the performance of downstream tasks. Moreover, we present a flexible vision encoder, which enables our model to perform image-text and video-text multimodal tasks simultaneously. Experimental results show that our proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language benchmarks, such as visual question answering, image-text retrieval, and video-text retrieval. Yatai Ji, Rongcheng Tu, Jie Jiang 0015, Weijie Kong, Chengfei Cai, Hongfa Wang, Yujiu Yang 0001, Wei Liu 0005 |
CVPR | 7 |
| 2023 | MAP: Multimodal Uncertainty-Aware Vision-Language Pre-training ModelabstractMultimodal semantic understanding often has to deal with uncertainty, which means the obtained messages tend to refer to multiple targets. Such uncertainty is problematic for our interpretation, including inter- and intra-modal uncertainty. Little effort has studied the modeling of this uncertainty, particularly in pretraining on unlabeled datasets and fine-tuning in task-specific downstream datasets. In this paper, we project the representations of all modalities as probabilistic distributions via a Probability Distribution Encoder (PDE) by utilizing sequence-level interactions. Compared to the existing deterministic methods, such uncertainty modeling can convey richer multimodal semantic information and more complex relationships. Furthermore, we integrate uncertainty modeling with popular pretraining frameworks and propose suitable pretraining tasks: Distribution-based Vision-Language Contrastive learning (D-VLC), Distribution-based Masked Language Modeling (D-MLM), and Distribution-based Image-Text Matching (D-ITM). The fine-tuned models are applied to challenging downstream tasks, including image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment, and achieve state-of-the-art results. Yatai Ji, Junjie Wang 0011, Yuan Gong 0002, Yanru Zhu, Hongfa Wang, Jiaxing Zhang 0001, Tetsuya Sakai, Yujiu Yang 0001 |
CVPR | 6 |
| 2023 | Unsupervised Hashing with Semantic Concept MiningabstractRecently, to improve the unsupervised image retrieval performance, plenty of unsupervised hashing methods have been proposed by designing a semantic similarity matrix, which is based on the similarities between image features extracted by a pre-trained CNN model. However, most of these methods tend to ignore high-level abstract semantic concepts contained in images. Intuitively, concepts play an important role in calculating the similarity among images. In real-world scenarios, each image is associated with some concepts, and the similarity between two images will be larger if they share more identical concepts. Inspired by the above intuition, in this work, we propose a novel Unsupervised Hashing with Semantic Concept Mining, called UHSCM, which leverages a VLP model to construct a high-quality similarity matrix. Specifically, a set of randomly chosen concepts is first collected. Then, by employing a vision-language pretraining (VLP) model with the prompt engineering which has shown strong power in visual representation learning, the set of concepts is denoised according to the training images. Next, the proposed method UHSCM applies the VLP model with prompting again to mine the concept distribution of each image and construct a high-quality semantic similarity matrix based on the mined concept distributions. Finally, with the semantic similarity matrix as guiding information, a novel hashing loss with a modified contrastive loss based regularization item is proposed to optimize the hashing network. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in the image retrieval task. Rongcheng Tu, Xianling Mao, Qinghong Lin, Chengfei Cai, Weize Qin, Wei Wei 0002, Hongfa Wang, Heyan Huang |
Proc. ACM Manag. Data | 7 |
| 2023 | Unsupervised Cross-Modal Hashing With Modality-InteractionabstractRecently, numerous unsupervised cross-modal hashing methods have been proposed to deal the image-text retrieval tasks for the unlabeled cross-modal data. However, when these methods learn to generate hash codes, almost all of them lack modality-interaction in the following two aspects: 1) The instance similarity matrix used to guide the hashing networks training is constructed without image-text interaction, which fails to capture the fine-grained cross-modal cues to elaborately characterize the intrinsic semantic similarity among the datapoints. 2) The binary codes used for quantization loss are inferior because they are generated by directly quantizing a simple combination of continuous hash codes from different modalities without the interaction among these continuous hash codes. Such problems will cause the generated hash codes to be of poor quality and degrade the retrieval performance. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel Unsupervised Cross-modal Hashing with Modality-interaction, termed UCHM. Specifically, by optimizing a novel hash-similarity-friendly loss, a modality-interaction-enabled (MIE) similarity generator is first trained to generate a superior MIE similarity matrix for the training set. Then, the generated MIE similarity matrix is utilized as guiding information to train the deep hashing networks. Furthermore, during the process of training the hashing networks, a novel bit-selection module is proposed to generate high-quality unified binary codes for the quantization loss with the interaction among continuous codes from different modalities, thereby further enhancing the retrieval performance. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets show that the proposed UCHM outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on cross-modal retrieval tasks. Rongcheng Tu, Jie Jiang 0015, Qinghong Lin, Chengfei Cai, Shangxuan Tian, Hongfa Wang, Wei Liu 0005 |
IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. | 6 |
| 2023 | Deep Cross-Modal Proxy HashingabstractDue to the high retrieval efficiency and low storage cost for cross-modal search tasks, cross-modal hashing methods have attracted considerable attention from the researchers. For the supervised cross-modal hashing methods, how to make the learned hash codes sufficiently preserve semantic information contained in the label of datapoints is the key to further enhance the retrieval performance. Hence, almost all supervised cross-modal hashing methods usually depend on defining similarities between datapoints with the label information to guide the hashing model learning fully or partly. However, the defined similarity between datapoints can only capture the label information of datapoints partially and misses abundant semantic information, which then hinders the further improvement of retrieval performance. Thus, in this paper, different from previous works, we propose a novel cross-modal hashing method without defining the similarity between datapoints, called Deep Cross-modal Proxy Hashing (DCPH). Specifically, DCPH first trains a proxy hashing network to transform each category information of a dataset into a semantic discriminative hash code, called proxy hash code. Each proxy hash code can preserve the semantic information of its corresponding category well. Next, without defining the similarity between datapoints to supervise the training process of the modality-specific hashing networks, we propose a novelmargin-dynamic-softmax lossto directly utilize the proxy hashing codes as supervised information. Finally, by minimizing the novelmargin-dynamic-softmax loss, the modality-specific hashing networks can be trained to generate hash codes that can simultaneously preserve the cross-modal similarity and abundant semantic information well. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in the cross-modal retrieval tasks. Rongcheng Tu, Xianling Mao, Rongxin Tu, Bin-Bin Bian, Chengfei Cai, Hongfa Wang, Wei Wei 0002, Heyan Huang |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 6 |
| 2022 | Deep Unsupervised Hashing with Latent Semantic ComponentsabstractDeep unsupervised hashing has been appreciated in the regime of image retrieval. However, most prior arts failed to detect the semantic components and their relationships behind the images, which makes them lack discriminative power. To make up the defect, we propose a novel Deep Semantic Components Hashing (DSCH), which involves a common sense that an image normally contains a bunch of semantic components with homology and co-occurrence relationships. Based on this prior, DSCH regards the semantic components as latent variables under the Expectation-Maximization framework and designs a two-step iterative algorithm with the objective of maximum likelihood of training data. Firstly, DSCH constructs a semantic component structure by uncovering the fine-grained semantics components of images with a Gaussian Mixture Modal~(GMM), where an image is represented as a mixture of multiple components, and the semantics co-occurrence are exploited. Besides, coarse-grained semantics components, are discovered by considering the homology relationships between fine-grained components, and the hierarchy organization is then constructed. Secondly, DSCH makes the images close to their semantic component centers at both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels, and also makes the images share similar semantic components close to each other. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed hierarchical semantic components indeed facilitate the hashing model to achieve superior performance. Qinghong Lin, Xiaojun Chen 0006, Qin Zhang 0011, Shaotian Cai, Hongfa Wang |
AAAI | 6 |
| 2022 | CAliC: Accurate and Efficient Image-Text Retrieval via Contrastive Alignment and Visual Contexts ModelingabstractImage-text retrieval is an essential task of information retrieval, in which the models with the Vision-and-Language Pretraining(VLP) are able to achieve ideal accuracy compared with the ones without VLP. Among different VLP approaches, the single-stream models achieve the overall best retrieval accuracy, but slower inference speed. Recently, researchers have introduced the two-stage retrieval setting commonly used in the information retrieval field to the single-stream VLP model for a better accuracy/efficiency trade-off. However, the retrieval accuracy and efficiency are still unsatisfactory mainly due to the limitations of the patch-based visual unimodal encoder in these VLP models. The unimodal encoders are trained on pure visual data, so the visual features extracted by them are difficult to align with the textual features and it is also difficult for the multi-modal encoder to understand visual information. Under these circumstances, we propose an accurate and efficient two-stage image-text retrieval model via Contrastive Alignment and visual Contexts modeling(CAliC). In the first stage of the proposed model, the visual unimodal encoder is pretrained with cross-modal contrastive learning to extract easily aligned visual features, which improves the retrieval accuracy and the inference speed. In the second stage of the proposed model, we introduce a new visual contexts modeling task during pretraining to help the multi-modal encoder better understand the visual information and get more accurate predictions. Extensive experimental evaluation validates the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which achieves a higher retrieval accuracy while keeping a faster inference speed, and outperforms existing state-of-the-art retrieval methods on image-text retrieval tasks over Flickr30K and COCO benchmarks. Chao Zhu 0003, Mengyin Liu, Weibo Gu, Hongfa Wang, Wei Liu 0005, Xu-Cheng Yin |
ACM Multimedia | 5 |
| 2022 | Egocentric Video-Language PretrainingabstractVideo-Language Pretraining (VLP), which aims to learn transferable representation to advance a wide range of video-text downstream tasks, has recently received increasing attention. Best performing works rely on large-scale, 3rd-person video-text datasets, such as HowTo100M. In this work, we exploit the recently released Ego4D dataset to pioneer Egocentric VLP along three directions. (i) We create EgoClip, a 1st-person video-text pretraining dataset comprising 3.8M clip-text pairs well-chosen from Ego4D, covering a large variety of human daily activities. (ii) We propose a novel pretraining objective, dubbed EgoNCE, which adapts video-text contrastive learning to the egocentric domain by mining egocentric-aware positive and negative samples. (iii) We introduce EgoMCQ, a development benchmark that is close to EgoClip and hence can support effective validation and fast exploration of our design decisions in EgoClip and EgoNCE. Furthermore, we demonstrate strong performance on five egocentric downstream tasks across three datasets: video-text retrieval on EPIC-KITCHENS-100; action recognition on Charades-Ego; natural language query, moment query, and object state change classification on Ego4D challenge benchmarks. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/showlab/EgoVLP. Qinghong Lin, Jinpeng Wang 0001, Mattia Soldan, Michael Wray, Rui Yan 0001, Eric Zhongcong Xu, Difei Gao, Rongcheng Tu, Weijie Kong, Chengfei Cai, Hongfa Wang, Dima Damen, Bernard Ghanem, Wei Liu 0005, Zheng Shou 0001 |
NeurIPS | 12 |
| 2021 | Adaptive Boundary Proposal Network for Arbitrary Shape Text DetectionabstractArbitrary shape text detection is a challenging task due to the high complexity and variety of scene texts. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive boundary proposal network for arbitrary shape text detection, which can learn to directly produce accurate boundary for arbitrary shape text without any post-processing. Our method mainly consists of a boundary proposal model and an innovative adaptive boundary deformation model. The boundary proposal model constructed by multi-layer dilated convolutions is adopted to produce prior information (including classification map, distance field, and direction field) and coarse boundary proposals. The adaptive boundary deformation model is an encoder-decoder network, in which the encoder mainly consists of a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). It aims to perform boundary deformation in an iterative way for obtaining text instance shape guided by prior information from the boundary proposal model. In this way, our method can directly and efficiently generate accurate text boundaries without complex post-processing. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Code is available at the website: https://github.com/GXYM/TextBPN. Shi-Xue Zhang, Xiaobin Zhu 0001, Hongfa Wang, Xu-Cheng Yin |
ICCV | 4 |
| 2021 | Detecting Text in Scene and Traffic Guide Panels With Attention Anchor MechanismabstractText detection in complex scene images is a challenging task for intelligent transportation. Recently, anchor mechanisms are widely utilized in scene text detection tasks. However, in existing methods, anchors are generally predefined empirically, degrading robustness to complex scenarios with various sizes and orientation variations. In this paper, we propose a novel Attention Anchor Mechanism (AAM), especially targeting at predicting appropriate anchors for each pixel. To be concrete, we regard a series of predefined anchors as basic anchors and utilize an attention model to predict weights corresponding to basic anchors. Consequently, the weighted sum of basic anchors in each pixel can obtain a predicted anchor. In this way, the gap between the predicted anchors and the corresponding ground truth boxes could be narrowed, making the network easier to regress. For facilitating the design of basic anchors, we adopt a dimension-decomposition mechanism to predict width, height, and angle of anchors, respectively. Extensive experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Jie-Bo Hou, Xiaobin Zhu 0001, Chang Liu 0083, Long-Huang Wu, Hongfa Wang, Xu-Cheng Yin |
IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. | 6 |
| 2020 | Deep Relational Reasoning Graph Network for Arbitrary Shape Text DetectionabstractArbitrary shape text detection is a challenging task due to the high variety and complexity of scenes texts. In this paper, we propose a novel unified relational reasoning graph network for arbitrary shape text detection. In our method, an innovative local graph bridges a text proposal model via Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a deep relational reasoning network via Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), making our network end-to-end trainable. To be concrete, every text instance will be divided into a series of small rectangular components, and the geometry attributes (e.g., height, width, and orientation) of the small components will be estimated by our text proposal model. Given the geometry attributes, the local graph construction model can roughly establish linkages between different text components. For further reasoning and deducing the likelihood of linkages between the component and its neighbors, we adopt a graph-based network to perform deep relational reasoning on local graphs. Experiments on public available datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/GXYM/DRRG. Shi-Xue Zhang, Xiaobin Zhu 0001, Jie-Bo Hou, Chang Liu 0083, Hongfa Wang, Xu-Cheng Yin |
CVPR | 6 |
| 2020 | HAM: Hidden Anchor Mechanism for Scene Text DetectionabstractDirect regression and anchor are the two mainly effective and prevailing mechanisms in the paradigm of scene text detection. However, the use of direct regression-based methods may be challenging during optimization without the help of anchors as references. Unfortunately, the anchor-based methods always suffer from the careful design of the anchors, degrading the robustness to complex scenes. To address the above-mentioned problems, we propose a novel hidden anchor mechanism (HAM) especially for scene text detection. The predictions of anchors are innovatively regarded as hidden layers, and the weighted sum of the predictions is integrated into a direct regression-based network. Hence, the architecture of our HAM still has the characteristic of simplicity as with direct regression-based methods. Moreover, it is easier to optimize anchors as references with this type of method than with direct regression-based methods. In this way, our network can take advantage of both direct regression and anchor mechanisms. In addition, we decouple three kinds of one-dimensional anchors from three-dimensional anchors, greatly reducing the number of anchors in text bounding box matching without performance degradation. We also propose a post-processing technique for long text detection, named iterative regression box (IRB), which takes a few additional computational costs and can be easily generalized to other methods. Experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available athttps://github.com/hjbplayer/HAM. Jie-Bo Hou, Xiaobin Zhu 0001, Chang Liu 0083, Kekai Sheng, Long-Huang Wu, Hongfa Wang, Xu-Cheng Yin |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 6 |
| 2008 | Singular Points Detection Based on Zero-Pole Model in Fingerprint ImagesabstractAn algorithm is proposed which combines Zero-pole Model and Hough Transform(HT) to detect singular points. Orientation of singular points is defined on basis of Zero-pole Model which can further explain the practicability of Zero-pole Model. Contrary to orientation field generation, detection of singular points is simplified to determine the parameters of Zero-pole Model. HT uses rather global information of fingerprint images to detect singular points. This makes our algorithm more robust to noise than methods which only use local information. As Zero-pole Model may have a little warp from actual fingerprint orientation field, Poincare index is used to make position adjustment in neighborhood of the detected candidate singular points. Experimental results show that our algorithm performs well and fast enough for real time application in database NIST-4. Shuguang Wang, Hongfa Wang, Tiande Guo |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 3 |