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Cartoonization as a special type of artistic style transfer is a difficult image processing task. The current existing artistic style transfer methods cannot generate satisfactory cartoon-style images due to that artistic style images often have delicate strokes and rich hierarchical color changes while cartoon-style images have smooth surfaces without obvious color changes, and sharp edges. To this end, we propose a cartoon loss based generative adversarial network (CartoonLossGAN) for cartoonization. Particularly, we first reuse the encoder part of the discriminator to build a compact generative adversarial network (GAN) based cartoonization architecture. Then we propose a novel cartoon loss function for the architecture. It can imitate the process of sketching to learn the smooth surface of the cartoon image, and imitate the coloring process to learn the coloring of the cartoon image. Furthermore, we also propose an initialization strategy, which is used in the scenario of reusing the discriminator to make our model training easier and more stable. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed CartoonLossGAN can generate fantastic cartoon-style images, and outperforms four representative methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preserving projection-based methods are good for finding the manifold structure embedded in data. As they use the Euclidean distance as a metric, which is sensitive to noise and outliers in data, nuclear norm-based 2D locality preserving projection (NN-2DLPP) is thus proposed to improve the robustness of 2DLPP. However, NN-2DLPP does not consider the discriminant ability of data. In order to improve the discriminant ability of preserving projection methods, in this paper, we use preserving projection learning with structurally incoherence of data and propose structurally incoherent low-rank 2DLPP (SILR-2DLPP) for image classification. This approach provides a discriminative representation of preserving projection learning by recovering the distinct different classes of the data. SILR-2DLPP searches the optimal subspace and low-rank representation simultaneously. We further extend SILR-2DLPP to a kernel case and propose kernel SILR-2DLPP (KSILR-2DLPP) to obtain a nonlinear representation. The theoretical analysis including the convergence and computational complexity of SILR-2DLPP are presented. To verify the performance of SILR-2DLPP and KSILR-2DLPP, six well-known image databases were used in the experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed methods are superior to the previous preserving projection methods for image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scene classification of remote sensing images has drawn great attention because of its wide applications. In this paper, with the guidance of the human visual system (HVS), we explore the attention mechanism and propose a novel end-to-end attention recurrent convolutional network (ARCNet) for scene classification. It can learn to focus selectively on some key regions or locations and just process them at high-level features, thereby discarding the noncritical information and promoting the classification performance. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we design a novel recurrent attention structure to squeeze high-level semantic and spatial features into several simplex vectors for the reduction of learning parameters. Second, an end-to-end network named ARCNet is proposed to adaptively select a series of attention regions and then to generate powerful predictions by learning to process them sequentially. Third, we construct a new data set named OPTIMAL-31, which contains more categories than popular data sets and gives researchers an extra platform to validate their algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our model makes great promotion in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The proportion of aurora to the field-of-view in temporal series of all-sky images is an important index to investigate the evolvement of aurora. To obtain such an index, a crucial phase is to segment the aurora from the background of sky. A new aurora segmentation approach, including a feature extraction method and the segmentation algorithm, is presented in this paper. The proposed feature extraction method, called adaptive local binary patterns (ALBP), selects the frequently occurred patterns to construct the main pattern set, which avoids using the same pattern set to describe different texture structures in traditional local binary patterns. According to the different morphologies and different semantics of aurora, the segmentation algorithm is designed into two parts, texture part segmentation based on ALBP features and patch part segmentation based on modified Otsu method. As it is simple and efficient, our implementation is suitable for large-scale datasets. The experiments exhibited the segmentation effect of the proposed method is satisfactory from human visual aspect and segmentation accuracy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Eye detection plays an important role in many practical applications. This paper presents a novel two-step scheme for eye detection. The first step models an eye by a newly defined visual-context pattern (VCP), and the second step applies semisupervised boosting for precise detection. VCP describes both the space and appearance relations between an eye region (region of eye) and a reference region (region of reference). The context feature of a VCP is extracted by using the integral image. Aiming to reduce the human labeling efforts, we apply semisupervised boosting, which integrates the context feature and the Haar-like features for precise eye detection. Experimental results on several standard face data sets demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective, robust, and efficient. We finally show that this approach is ready for practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The codebook model has been developed as an effective means for image classification. However, the inherent operation of assigning visual words to image feature vectors in traditional codebook approaches causes serious ambiguities in image classification. In particular, the nearest word may not be the best fit to a feature, and multiple words may be equally appropriate for one specific feature. To resolve these ambiguities, we propose a novel visual codebook model based on the n- dimensional fuzzy geometry ( n -D FG) theory, where all visual words and features are modeled as fuzzy points in the n -D FG space, and appropriate uncertainty is introduced to each fuzzy point to enhance the representation capacity. This n -D FG-codebook model not only inherits advantages from the fuzzy set theory, but also facilitates the analysis and determination of the relationship between visual words and features in geometric form. By explicitly taking into account the ambiguities, we propose a novel measure of similarity between the visual words and fuzzy features. Following the proposed codebook model and the novel similarity measure, we develop two useful image classification algorithms by modifying popular image coding algorithms (i.e. SPM and LLC). Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the classification accuracy of the proposed algorithms is dramatically improved for a standard large-scale image database. For example, with a codebook size of 256, the proposed algorithms achieve similar performance as traditional algorithms with a codebook size of 1024, indicating that the proposed algorithms reduce the computational cost by 75% while achieving almost identical classification accuracy to traditional algorithms. Thus, the proposed algorithms represent a more efficient and appropriate scheme for big image data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]