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Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, Muhammad Anwer Rao, Andrew Bagdanov, Michael Felsberg, & Jorma. (2018). Scale coding bag of deep features for human attribute and action recognition. MVAP - Machine Vision and Applications, 29(1), 55–71.
Abstract: Most approaches to human attribute and action recognition in still images are based on image representation in which multi-scale local features are pooled across scale into a single, scale-invariant encoding. Both in bag-of-words and the recently popular representations based on convolutional neural networks, local features are computed at multiple scales. However, these multi-scale convolutional features are pooled into a single scale-invariant representation. We argue that entirely scale-invariant image representations are sub-optimal and investigate approaches to scale coding within a bag of deep features framework. Our approach encodes multi-scale information explicitly during the image encoding stage. We propose two strategies to encode multi-scale information explicitly in the final image representation. We validate our two scale coding techniques on five datasets: Willow, PASCAL VOC 2010, PASCAL VOC 2012, Stanford-40 and Human Attributes (HAT-27). On all datasets, the proposed scale coding approaches outperform both the scale-invariant method and the standard deep features of the same network. Further, combining our scale coding approaches with standard deep features leads to consistent improvement over the state of the art.
Keywords: Action recognition; Attribute recognition; Bag of deep features
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Sudeep Katakol, Basem Elbarashy, Luis Herranz, Joost Van de Weijer, & Antonio Lopez. (2021). Distributed Learning and Inference with Compressed Images. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 30, 3069–3083.
Abstract: Modern computer vision requires processing large amounts of data, both while training the model and/or during inference, once the model is deployed. Scenarios where images are captured and processed in physically separated locations are increasingly common (e.g. autonomous vehicles, cloud computing). In addition, many devices suffer from limited resources to store or transmit data (e.g. storage space, channel capacity). In these scenarios, lossy image compression plays a crucial role to effectively increase the number of images collected under such constraints. However, lossy compression entails some undesired degradation of the data that may harm the performance of the downstream analysis task at hand, since important semantic information may be lost in the process. Moreover, we may only have compressed images at training time but are able to use original images at inference time, or vice versa, and in such a case, the downstream model suffers from covariate shift. In this paper, we analyze this phenomenon, with a special focus on vision-based perception for autonomous driving as a paradigmatic scenario. We see that loss of semantic information and covariate shift do indeed exist, resulting in a drop in performance that depends on the compression rate. In order to address the problem, we propose dataset restoration, based on image restoration with generative adversarial networks (GANs). Our method is agnostic to both the particular image compression method and the downstream task; and has the advantage of not adding additional cost to the deployed models, which is particularly important in resource-limited devices. The presented experiments focus on semantic segmentation as a challenging use case, cover a broad range of compression rates and diverse datasets, and show how our method is able to significantly alleviate the negative effects of compression on the downstream visual task.
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Pedro Martins, Paulo Carvalho, & Carlo Gatta. (2014). Context-aware features and robust image representations. JVCIR - Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 25(2), 339–348.
Abstract: Local image features are often used to efficiently represent image content. The limited number of types of features that a local feature extractor responds to might be insufficient to provide a robust image representation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a context-aware feature extraction formulated under an information theoretic framework. The algorithm does not respond to a specific type of features; the idea is to retrieve complementary features which are relevant within the image context. We empirically validate the method by investigating the repeatability, the completeness, and the complementarity of context-aware features on standard benchmarks. In a comparison with strictly local features, we show that our context-aware features produce more robust image representations. Furthermore, we study the complementarity between strictly local features and context-aware ones to produce an even more robust representation.
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Tao Wu, Kai Wang, Chuanming Tang, & Jianlin Zhang. (2024). Diffusion-based network for unsupervised landmark detection. Knowledge-Based Systems, 292, 111627.
Abstract: Landmark detection is a fundamental task aiming at identifying specific landmarks that serve as representations of distinct object features within an image. However, the present landmark detection algorithms often adopt complex architectures and are trained in a supervised manner using large datasets to achieve satisfactory performance. When faced with limited data, these algorithms tend to experience a notable decline in accuracy. To address these drawbacks, we propose a novel diffusion-based network (DBN) for unsupervised landmark detection, which leverages the generation ability of the diffusion models to detect the landmark locations. In particular, we introduce a dual-branch encoder (DualE) for extracting visual features and predicting landmarks. Additionally, we lighten the decoder structure for faster inference, referred to as LightD. By this means, we avoid relying on extensive data comparison and the necessity of designing complex architectures as in previous methods. Experiments on CelebA, AFLW, 300W and Deepfashion benchmarks have shown that DBN performs state-of-the-art compared to the existing methods. Furthermore, DBN shows robustness even when faced with limited data cases.
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Yaxing Wang, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Luis Herranz, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2021). Controlling biases and diversity in diverse image-to-image translation. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 202, 103082.
Abstract: JCR 2019 Q2, IF=3.121
The task of unpaired image-to-image translation is highly challenging due to the lack of explicit cross-domain pairs of instances. We consider here diverse image translation (DIT), an even more challenging setting in which an image can have multiple plausible translations. This is normally achieved by explicitly disentangling content and style in the latent representation and sampling different styles codes while maintaining the image content. Despite the success of current DIT models, they are prone to suffer from bias. In this paper, we study the problem of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets may add undesired changes (e.g. change gender or race in face images) to the output translations as a consequence of the particular underlying visual distribution in the target domain. In order to alleviate the effects of this problem we propose the use of semantic constraints that enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Our proposed model is a step towards unbiased diverse image-to-image translation (UDIT), and results in less unwanted changes in the translated images while still performing the wanted transformation. Experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in different domains such as faces, objects, and scenes.
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