Search

As a fine-grained and local expression behavior measurement, facial action unit (FAU) analysis (e.g., detection and intensity estimation) has been documented for its time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone annotation. Thus a long-standing challenge of FAU analysis arises from the data scarcity of manual annotations, limiting the generalization ability of trained models to a large extent. Amounts of previous works have made efforts to alleviate this issue via semi/weakly supervised methods and extra auxiliary information. However, these methods still require domain knowledge and have not yet avoided the high dependency on data annotation. This article introduces a robust facial representation model MAE-Face for AU analysis. Using masked autoencoding as the self-supervised pre-training approach, MAE-Face first learns a high-capacity model from a feasible collection of face images without additional data annotations. Then after being fine-tuned on AU datasets, MAE-Face exhibits convincing performance for both AU detection and AU intensity estimation, achieving a new state-of-the-art on nearly all the evaluation results. Further investigation shows that MAE-Face achieves decent performance even when fine-tuned on only 1% of the AU training set, strongly proving its robustness and generalization performance. The pre-trained model is available at our GitHub repository. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is time-consuming and expensive to take high-quality or high-resolution electron microscopy (EM) and fluorescence microscopy (FM) images. Taking these images could be even invasive to samples and may damage certain subtleties in the samples after long or intense exposures, often necessary for achieving high-quality or high-resolution in the first place. Advances in deep learning enable us to perform various types of microscopy image-to-image transformation tasks such as image denoising, super-resolution, and segmentation that computationally produce high-quality images from the physically acquired low-quality ones. When training image-to-image transformation models on pairs of experimentally acquired microscopy images, prior models suffer from performance loss due to their inability to capture inter-image dependencies and common features shared among images. Existing methods that take advantage of shared features in image classification tasks cannot be properly applied to image transformation tasks because they fail to preserve the equivariance property under spatial permutations, something essential in image-to-image transformation. To address these limitations, we propose the augmented equivariant attention networks (AEANets) with better capability to capture inter-image dependencies, while preserving the equivariance property. The proposed AEANets captures inter-image dependencies and shared features via two augmentations on the attention mechanism, which are the shared references and the batch-aware attention during training. We theoretically derive the equivariance property of the proposed augmented attention model and experimentally demonstrate its consistent superiority in both quantitative and visual results over the baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracking multiple moving objects in real-time in a dynamic threat environment is an important element in national security and surveillance system. It helps pinpoint and distinguish potential candidates posing threats from other normal objects and monitor the anomalous trajectories until intervention. To locate the anomalous pattern of movements, one needs to have an accurate data association algorithm that can associate the sequential observations of locations and motion with the underlying moving objects, and therefore, build the trajectories of the objects as the objects are moving. In this work, we develop a spatio-temporal approach for tracking maritime vessels as the vessel’s location and motion observations are collected by an Automatic Identification System. The proposed approach is developed as an effort to address a data association challenge in which the number of vessels as well as the vessel identification are purposely withheld and time gaps are created in the datasets to mimic the real-life operational complexities under a threat environment. Three training datasets and five test sets are provided in the challenge and a set of quantitative performance metrics is devised by the data challenge organizer for evaluating and comparing resulting methods developed by participants. When our proposed track association algorithm is applied to the five test sets, the algorithm scores a very competitive performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to perceive human facial emotions is an essential feature of various multi-modal applications, especially in the intelligent human-computer interaction (HCI) area. In recent decades, considerable efforts have been put into researching automatic facial emotion recognition (FER). However, most of the existing FER methods only focus on either basic emotions such as the seven/eight categories (e.g., happiness, anger and surprise) or abstract dimensions (valence, arousal, etc.), while neglecting the fruitful nature of emotion statements. In real-world scenarios, there is definitely a larger vocabulary for describing human's inner feelings as well as their reflection on facial expressions. In this work, we propose to address the semantic richness issue in the FER problem, with an emphasis on the granularity of the emotion concepts. Particularly, we take inspiration from former psycho-linguistic research, which conducted a prototypicality rating study and chose 135 emotion names from hundreds of English emotion terms. Based on the 135 emotion categories, we investigate the corresponding facial expressions by collecting a large-scale 135-class FER image dataset and propose a consequent facial emotion recognition framework. To demonstrate the accessibility of prompting FER research to a fine-grained level, we conduct extensive evaluations on the dataset credibility and the accompanying baseline classification model. The qualitative and quantitative results prove that the problem is meaningful and our solution is effective. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work aimed at exploiting such a large semantic space for emotion representation in the FER problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]