Surface normal estimation serves as a cornerstone for a spectrum of computer vision applications. While numerous efforts have been devoted to static image scenarios, ensuring temporal coherence in video-based normal estimation remains a formidable challenge. Instead of merely augmenting existing methods with temporal components, we present NormalCrafter to leverage the inherent temporal priors of video diffusion models. To secure high-fidelity normal estimation across sequences, we propose Semantic Feature Regularization (SFR), which aligns diffusion features with semantic cues, encouraging the model to concentrate on the intrinsic semantics of the scene. Moreover, we introduce a two-stage training protocol that leverages both latent and pixel space learning to preserve spatial accuracy while maintaining long temporal context. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our method, showcasing a superior performance in generating temporally consistent normal sequences with intricate details from diverse videos.

Unsupervised learning of 3D-aware generative adversarial networks has lately made much progress. Some recent work demonstrates promising results of learning human generative models using neural articulated radiance fields, yet their generalization ability and controllability lag behind parametric human models, i.e., they do not perform well when generalizing to novel pose/shape and are not part controllable. To solve these problems, we propose VeRi3D, a generative human vertex-based radiance field parameterized by vertices of the parametric human template, SMPL. We map each 3D point to the local coordinate system defined on its neighboring vertices, and use the corresponding vertex feature and local coordinates for mapping it to color and density values. We demonstrate that our simple approach allows for generating photorealistic human images with free control over camera pose, human pose, shape, as well as enabling part-level editing.

Urban functional zones (UFZs) contain abundant landscape information that can be adopted to better understand the surroundings. Various landscape compositions and configurations reflect different human activities, which may affect the particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations. The very high-resolution (VHR) image features can reflect the physical and spatial structures of the UFZs. However, the existing PM2.5 estimation methods neither have been based on the scale of UFZs, nor have the VHR image features of UFZs as independent variables. Hence, this article proposes a spatiotemporal interpolation graph convolutional network (STI-GCN) model and introduces VHR image features to achieve PM2.5 estimation in UFZs. First, UFZs are split, and VHR image features are extracted by the visual geometry group 16 (VGG16). Subsequently, meteorological factors, aerosol optical depth (AOD), and VHR image features are used to estimate the PM2.5 concentrations at the scale of the UFZs. The two metropolises, Beijing and Shanghai, are chosen to assess the validity of the STI-GCN model. As for Beijing and Shanghai, the overall accuracy${R^{2}}$of the STI-GCN model can reach 0.96 and 0.89, the root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) are 8.15 and 6.40$\mu \text {g}/{\text {m}^{3}}$, the mean absolute errors (MAEs) are 5.51 and 4.78$\mu \text {g}/{\text {m}^{3}}$, and the relative prediction errors (RPEs) are 18.53% and 17.38%, respectively. Experiments show that the STI-GCN consistently outperforms other models. What’s more, the PM2.5 values are relatively high in commercial and official zones (COZs) and relatively low in urban green zones (UGZs).

Affected by COVID-19, Chinese Ministry of Education issued an important deployment named “Classes Suspended while Learning Continues” during Spring Semester, 2020. Online teaching, therefore, has been carried out in all of Chinese universities between March and June, 2020. College teachers should adjust their teaching behaviors to adapt to large scale online education situation and they might meet some challenges during the implementation of online teaching. This study aimed to investigate college teachers' TPACK level during the epidemic situation. 91 teachers from Chu Kochen Honors College, Zhejiang University, were randomly invited to fill in the survey. The findings of the study indicated that: (1) the scores of teachers in content knowledge (CK) dimension were the highest, while it was lowest in technology knowledge (TK) dimension, in addition, technology-related knowledge was kept at a low level relatively; (2) gender and age had no significant impact on surveyed teachers' TPACK level while online teaching experience had a significant impact on TK dimension. Based on the findings, the researchers put forward several suggestions including perspectives from teacher training, comprehensive utilization of emerging technology to improve teachers' TPACK level.

Facial attributes are important since they provide a detailed description and determine the visual appearance of human faces. In this paper, we aim at converting a face image to a sketch while simultaneously generating facial attributes. To this end, we propose a novel Attribute-Guided Sketch Generative Adversarial Network (ASGAN) which is an end-to-end framework and contains two pairs of generators and discriminators, one of which is used to generate faces with attributes while the other one is employed for image-to-sketch translation. The two generators form a W-shaped network (W-net) and they are trained jointly with a weight-sharing constraint. Additionally, we also propose two novel discriminators, the residual one focusing on attribute generation and the triplex one helping to generate realistic looking sketches. To validate our model, we have created a new large dataset with 8,804 images, named the Attribute Face Photo & Sketch (AFPS) dataset which is the first dataset containing attributes associated to face sketch images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network (i) generates more photo-realistic faces with sharper facial attributes than baselines and (ii) has good generalization capability on different generative tasks.

In this paper, we focus on the facial expression translation task and propose a novel Expression Conditional GAN (ECGAN) which can learn the mapping from one image domain to another one based on an additional expression attribute. The proposed ECGAN is a generic framework and is applicable to different expression generation tasks where specific facial expression can be easily controlled by the conditional attribute label. Besides, we introduce a novel face mask loss to reduce the influence of background changing. Moreover, we propose an entire framework for facial expression generation and recognition in the wild, which consists of two modules, i.e., generation and recognition. Finally, we evaluate our framework on several public face datasets in which the subjects have different races, illumination, occlusion, pose, color, content and background conditions. Even though these datasets are very diverse, both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our approach is able to generate facial expressions accurately and robustly.

Crowd counting is a concerned yet challenging task in computer vision. The difficulty is particularly pronounced by scale variations in crowd images. Most state-of-art approaches tackle the multi-scale problem by adopting multi-column CNN architectures where different columns are designed with different filter sizes to adapt to variable pedestrian/object sizes. However, the structure is bloated and inefficient, and it is infeasible to adopt multiple deep columns due to the huge resource cost. We instead propose a Scale Pyramid Network (SPN) which adopts a shared single deep column structure and extracts multi-scale information in high layers by Scale Pyramid Module. In Scale Pyramid Module, we specifically employ different rates of dilated convolutions in parallel instead of traditional convolutions with different sizes. Compared to other methods of coping with scale issues, our single column structure with Scale Pyramid Module can get more accurate estimation with simpler structure and less complexity of training. And our Scale Pyramid Module can be easily applied to a deep network. Experimental results on four datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. On ShanghaiTech Part_A dataset which is challenging for its highly congested scenes and scale variation, we achieve 9.5% lower MAE and 13.5% lower MSE than the previous state-of-the-art method. We also extend our model on TRANCOS vehicle counting dataset and significantly achieve 5.9% lower GAME(0), 10% lower GAME(1), 24.5% lower GAME(2), 38.7% lower GAME(3) than the previous state-of-the-art method. The experimental results prove the robustness of our model for crowd counting, especially with scale variations.