Search

Image ordinal classification refers to predicting a discrete target value which carries ordering correlation among image categories. The limited size of labeled ordinal data renders modern deep learning approaches easy to overfit. To tackle this issue, neuron dropout and data augmentation were proposed which, however, still suffer from over-parameterization and breaking spatial structure, respectively. To address the issues, we first propose a grid dropout method that randomly dropout/blackout some areas of the raining image. Then we combine the objective of predicting the blackout patches with classification to take advantage of the spatial information. Finally we demonstrate the effectiveness of both approaches by visualizing the Class Activation Map (CAM) and discover that grid dropout is more aware of the whole facial areas and more robust than neuron dropout for small training dataset. Experiments are conducted on a challenging age estimation dataset - Adience dataset with very competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods., Comment: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Expo (ICME Oral Presentation)

Deep network pruning is an effective method to reduce the storage and computation cost of deep neural networks when applying them to resource-limited devices. Among many pruning granularities, neuron level pruning will remove redundant neurons and filters in the model and result in thinner networks. In this paper, we propose a gradually global pruning scheme for neuron level pruning. In each pruning step, a small percent of neurons were selected and dropped across all layers in the model. We also propose a simple method to eliminate the biases in evaluating the importance of neurons to make the scheme feasible. Compared with layer-wise pruning scheme, our scheme avoid the difficulty in determining the redundancy in each layer and is more effective for deep networks. Our scheme would automatically find a thinner sub-network in original network under a given performance.

Face photo synthesis from simple line drawing is a one-to-many task as simple line drawing merely contains the contour of human face. Previous exemplar-based methods are over-dependent on the datasets and are hard to generalize to complicated natural scenes. Recently, several works utilize deep neural networks to increase the generalization, but they are still limited in the controllability of the users. In this paper, we propose a deep generative model to synthesize face photo from simple line drawing controlled by face attributes such as hair color and complexion. In order to maximize the controllability of face attributes, an attribute-disentangled variational auto-encoder (AD-VAE) is firstly introduced to learn latent representations disentangled with respect to specified attributes. Then we conduct photo synthesis from simple line drawing based on AD-VAE. Experiments show that our model can well disentangle the variations of attributes from other variations of face photos and synthesize detailed photorealistic face images with desired attributes. Regarding background and illumination as the style and human face as the content, we can also synthesize face photos with the target style of a style photo., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures

Tensor principal component analysis (TPCA) is a multi-linear extension of principal component analysis which converts a set of correlated measurements into several principal components. In this paper, we propose a new robust TPCA method to extract the princi- pal components of the multi-way data based on tensor singular value decomposition. The tensor is split into a number of blocks of the same size. The low rank component of each block tensor is extracted using iterative tensor singular value thresholding method. The prin- cipal components of the multi-way data are the concatenation of all the low rank components of all the block tensors. We give the block tensor incoherence conditions to guarantee the successful decom- position. This factorization has similar optimality properties to that of low rank matrix derived from singular value decomposition. Ex- perimentally, we demonstrate its effectiveness in two applications, including motion separation for surveillance videos and illumination normalization for face images., Comment: accepted by ICASSP 2017

Many works have concentrated on visualizing and understanding the inner mechanism of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by generating images that activate some specific neurons, which is called deep visualization. However, it is still unclear what the filters extract from images intuitively. In this paper, we propose a modified code inversion algorithm, called feature map inversion, to understand the function of filter of interest in CNNs. We reveal that every filter extracts a specific texture. The texture from higher layer contains more colours and more intricate structures. We also demonstrate that style of images could be a combination of these texture primitives. Two methods are proposed to reallocate energy distribution of feature maps randomly and purposefully. Then, we inverse the modified code and generate images of diverse styles. With these results, we provide an explanation about why Gram matrix of feature maps \cite{Gatys_2016_CVPR} could represent image style., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures

Researchers have proposed various methods to extract 3D keypoints from the surface of 3D mesh models over the last decades, but most of them are based on geometric methods, which lack enough flexibility to meet the requirements for various applications. In this paper, we propose a new method on the basis of deep learning by formulating the 3D keypoint detection as a regression problem using deep neural network (DNN) with sparse autoencoder (SAE) as our regression model. Both local information and global information of a 3D mesh model in multi-scale space are fully utilized to detect whether a vertex is a keypoint or not. SAE can effectively extract the internal structure of these two kinds of information and formulate high-level features for them, which is beneficial to the regression model. Three SAEs are used to formulate the hidden layers of the DNN and then a logistic regression layer is trained to process the high-level features produced in the third SAE. Numerical experiments show that the proposed DNN based 3D keypoint detection algorithm outperforms current five state-of-the-art methods for various 3D mesh models., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures

Three dimensional (3D) interest point detection plays a fundamental role in 3D computer vision and graphics. In this paper, we introduce a new method for detecting mesh interest points based on geometric measures and sparse refinement (GMSR). The key point of our approach is to calculate the 3D interest point response function using two intuitive and effective geometric properties of the local surface on a 3D mesh model, namely Euclidean distances between the neighborhood vertices to the tangent plane of a vertex and the angles of normal vectors of them. The response function is defined in multi-scale space and can be utilized to effectively distinguish 3D interest points from edges and flat areas. Those points with local maximal 3D interest point response value are selected as the candidates of 3D interest points. Finally, we utilize an $\ell_0$ norm based optimization method to refine the candidates of 3D interest points by constraining its quality and quantity. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed GMSR based 3D interest point detector outperforms current several state-of-the-art methods for different kinds of 3D mesh models., Comment: 17 pages

Goal: This paper deals with the problems that some EEG signals have no good sparse representation and single channel processing is not computationally efficient in compressed sensing of multi-channel EEG signals. Methods: An optimization model with L0 norm and Schatten-0 norm is proposed to enforce cosparsity and low rank structures in the reconstructed multi-channel EEG signals. Both convex relaxation and global consensus optimization with alternating direction method of multipliers are used to compute the optimization model. Results: The performance of multi-channel EEG signal reconstruction is improved in term of both accuracy and computational complexity. Conclusion: The proposed method is a better candidate than previous sparse signal recovery methods for compressed sensing of EEG signals. Significance: The proposed method enables successful compressed sensing of EEG signals even when the signals have no good sparse representation. Using compressed sensing would much reduce the power consumption of wireless EEG system., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures; accepted by IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering

This paper considers solving the unconstrained $\ell_q$-norm ($0\leq q<1$) regularized least squares ($\ell_q$-LS) problem for recovering sparse signals in compressive sensing. We propose two highly efficient first-order algorithms via incorporating the proximity operator for nonconvex $\ell_q$-norm functions into the fast iterative shrinkage/thresholding (FISTA) and the alternative direction method of multipliers (ADMM) frameworks, respectively. Furthermore, in solving the nonconvex $\ell_q$-LS problem, a sequential minimization strategy is adopted in the new algorithms to gain better global convergence performance. Unlike most existing $\ell_q$-minimization algorithms, the new algorithms solve the $\ell_q$-minimization problem without smoothing (approximating) the $\ell_q$-norm. Meanwhile, the new algorithms scale well for large-scale problems, as often encountered in image processing. We show that the proposed algorithms are the fastest methods in solving the nonconvex $\ell_q$-minimization problem, while offering competent performance in recovering sparse signals and compressible images compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms., Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to a crucial error in the convergence analysis