The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) has recently been applied to generate synthetic images from text. Despite significant advances, most current state-of-the-art algorithms are regular-grid region based; when attention is used, it is mainly applied between individual regular-grid regions and a word. These approaches are sufficient to generate images that contain a single object in its foreground, such as a "bird" or "flower". However, natural languages often involve complex foreground objects and the background may also constitute a variable portion of the generated image. Therefore, the regular-grid based image attention weights may not necessarily concentrate on the intended foreground region(s), which in turn, results in an unnatural looking image. Additionally, individual words such as "a", "blue" and "shirt" do not necessarily provide a full visual context unless they are applied together. For this reason, in our paper, we proposed a novel method in which we introduced an additional set of attentions between true-grid regions and word phrases. The true-grid region is derived using a set of auxiliary bounding boxes. These auxiliary bounding boxes serve as superior location indicators to where the alignment and attention should be drawn with the word phrases. Word phrases are derived from analysing Part-of-Speech (POS) results. We perform experiments on this novel network architecture using the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MSCOCO) dataset and the model generates @math conditioned on a short sentence description. Our proposed approach is capable of generating more realistic images compared with the current state-of-the-art algorithms.
GAWWN @cite_13 proposed an architecture for controllable text-to-image generation that adopted supplementary information such as bounding boxes or part locations of the main object in the image.
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Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently demonstrated the capability to synthesize compelling real-world images, such as room interiors, album covers, manga, faces, birds, and flowers. While existing models can synthesize images based on global constraints such as a class label or caption, they do not provide control over pose or object location. We propose a new model, the Generative Adversarial What-Where Network (GAWWN), that synthesizes images given instructions describing what content to draw in which location. We show high-quality 128 × 128 image synthesis on the Caltech-UCSD Birds dataset, conditioned on both informal text descriptions and also object location. Our system exposes control over both the bounding box around the bird and its constituent parts. By modeling the conditional distributions over part locations, our system also enables conditioning on arbitrary subsets of parts (e.g. only the beak and tail), yielding an efficient interface for picking part locations. We propose a novel hierarchical approach for text-to-image synthesis by inferring semantic layout. Instead of learning a direct mapping from text to image, our algorithm decomposes the generation process into multiple steps, in which it first constructs a semantic layout from the text by the layout generator and converts the layout to an image by the image generator. The proposed layout generator progressively constructs a semantic layout in a coarse-to-fine manner by generating object bounding boxes and refining each box by estimating object shapes inside the box. The image generator synthesizes an image conditioned on the inferred semantic layout, which provides a useful semantic structure of an image matching with the text description. Our model not only generates semantically more meaningful images, but also allows automatic annotation of generated images and user-controlled generation process by modifying the generated scene layout. We demonstrate the capability of the proposed model on challenging MS-COCO dataset and show that the model can substantially improve the image quality, interpretability of output and semantic alignment to input text over existing approaches. The problem of computing category agnostic bounding box proposals is utilized as a core component in many computer vision tasks and thus has lately attracted a lot of attention. In this work we propose a new approach to tackle this problem that is based on an active strategy for generating box proposals that starts from a set of seed boxes, which are uniformly distributed on the image, and then progressively moves its attention on the promising image areas where it is more likely to discover well localized bounding box proposals. We call our approach AttractioNet and a core component of it is a CNN-based category agnostic object location refinement module that is capable of yielding accurate and robust bounding box predictions regardless of the object category. We extensively evaluate our AttractioNet approach on several image datasets (i.e. COCO, PASCAL, ImageNet detection and NYU-Depth V2 datasets) reporting on all of them state-of-the-art results that surpass the previous work in the field by a significant margin and also providing strong empirical evidence that our approach is capable to generalize to unseen categories. Furthermore, we evaluate our AttractioNet proposals in the context of the object detection task using a VGG16-Net based detector and the achieved detection performance on COCO manages to significantly surpass all other VGG16-Net based detectors while even being competitive with a heavily tuned ResNet-101 based detector. Code as well as box proposals computed for several datasets are available at:: this https URL Synthesizing high-quality images from text descriptions is a challenging problem in computer vision and has many practical applications. Samples generated by existing textto- image approaches can roughly reflect the meaning of the given descriptions, but they fail to contain necessary details and vivid object parts. In this paper, we propose Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (StackGAN) to generate 256.256 photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions. We decompose the hard problem into more manageable sub-problems through a sketch-refinement process. The Stage-I GAN sketches the primitive shape and colors of the object based on the given text description, yielding Stage-I low-resolution images. The Stage-II GAN takes Stage-I results and text descriptions as inputs, and generates high-resolution images with photo-realistic details. It is able to rectify defects in Stage-I results and add compelling details with the refinement process. To improve the diversity of the synthesized images and stabilize the training of the conditional-GAN, we introduce a novel Conditioning Augmentation technique that encourages smoothness in the latent conditioning manifold. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-arts on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements on generating photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions. This paper addresses the problem of manipulating images using natural language description. Our task aims to semantically modify visual attributes of an object in an image according to the text describing the new visual appearance. Although existing methods synthesize images having new attributes, they do not fully preserve text-irrelevant contents of the original image. In this paper, we propose the text-adaptive generative adversarial network (TAGAN) to generate semantically manipulated images while preserving text-irrelevant contents. The key to our method is the text-adaptive discriminator that creates word-level local discriminators according to input text to classify fine-grained attributes independently. With this discriminator, the generator learns to generate images where only regions that correspond to the given text are modified. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing methods on CUB and Oxford-102 datasets, and our results were mostly preferred on a user study. Extensive analysis shows that our method is able to effectively disentangle visual attributes and produce pleasing outputs. Synthesizing high-quality images from text descriptions is a challenging problem in computer vision and has many practical applications. Samples generated by existing text-to-image approaches can roughly reflect the meaning of the given descriptions, but they fail to contain necessary details and vivid object parts. In this paper, we propose Stacked Generative Adversarial Networks (StackGAN) to generate 256x256 photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions. We decompose the hard problem into more manageable sub-problems through a sketch-refinement process. The Stage-I GAN sketches the primitive shape and colors of the object based on the given text description, yielding Stage-I low-resolution images. The Stage-II GAN takes Stage-I results and text descriptions as inputs, and generates high-resolution images with photo-realistic details. It is able to rectify defects in Stage-I results and add compelling details with the refinement process. To improve the diversity of the synthesized images and stabilize the training of the conditional-GAN, we introduce a novel Conditioning Augmentation technique that encourages smoothness in the latent conditioning manifold. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-arts on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements on generating photo-realistic images conditioned on text descriptions. Automatic image synthesis research has been rapidly growing with deep networks getting more and more expressive. In the last couple of years, we have observed images of digits, indoor scenes, birds, chairs, etc. being automatically generated. The expressive power of image generators have also been enhanced by introducing several forms of conditioning variables such as object names, sentences, bounding box and key-point locations. In this work, we propose a novel deep conditional generative adversarial network architecture that takes its strength from the semantic layout and scene attributes integrated as conditioning variables. We show that our architecture is able to generate realistic outdoor scene images under different conditions, e.g. day-night, sunny-foggy, with clear object boundaries. Automatic synthesis of realistic images from text would be interesting and useful, but current AI systems are still far from this goal. However, in recent years generic and powerful recurrent neural network architectures have been developed to learn discriminative text feature representations. Meanwhile, deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (GANs) have begun to generate highly compelling images of specific categories, such as faces, album covers, and room interiors. In this work, we develop a novel deep architecture and GAN formulation to effectively bridge these advances in text and image model- ing, translating visual concepts from characters to pixels. We demonstrate the capability of our model to generate plausible images of birds and flowers from detailed text descriptions. Automatic synthesis of realistic images from text would be interesting and useful, but current AI systems are still far from this goal. However, in recent years generic and powerful recurrent neural network architectures have been developed to learn discriminative text feature representations. Meanwhile, deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (GANs) have begun to generate highly compelling images of specific categories, such as faces, album covers, and room interiors. In this work, we develop a novel deep architecture and GAN formulation to effectively bridge these advances in text and image modeling, translating visual concepts from characters to pixels. We demonstrate the capability of our model to generate plausible images of birds and flowers from detailed text descriptions. The visual cues from multiple support regions of different sizes and resolutions are complementary in classifying a candidate box in object detection. How to effectively integrate local and contextual visual cues from these regions has become a fundamental problem in object detection. Most existing works simply concatenated features or scores obtained from support regions. In this paper, we proposal a novel gated bi-directional CNN (GBD-Net) to pass messages between features from different support regions during both feature learning and feature extraction. Such message passing can be implemented through convolution in two directions and can be conducted in various layers. Therefore, local and contextual visual patterns can validate the existence of each other by learning their nonlinear relationships and their close iterations are modeled in a much more complex way. It is also shown that message passing is not always helpful depending on individual samples. Gated functions are further introduced to control message transmission and their on-and-off is controlled by extra visual evidence from the input sample. GBD-Net is implemented under the Fast RCNN detection framework. Its effectiveness is shown through experiments on three object detection datasets, ImageNet, Pascal VOC2007 and Microsoft COCO. We present a generative attribute controller (GAC), a novel functionality for generating or editing an image while intuitively controlling large variations of an attribute. This controller is based on a novel generative model called the conditional filtered generative adversarial network (CFGAN), which is an extension of the conventional conditional GAN (CGAN) that incorporates a filtering architecture into the generator input. Unlike the conventional CGAN, which represents an attribute directly using an observable variable (e.g., the binary indicator of attribute presence) so its controllability is restricted to attribute labeling (e.g., restricted to an ON or OFF control), the CFGAN has a filtering architecture that associates an attribute with a multi-dimensional latent variable, enabling latent variations of the attribute to be represented. We also define the filtering architecture and training scheme considering controllability, enabling the variations of the attribute to be intuitively controlled using typical controllers (radio buttons and slide bars). We evaluated our CFGAN on MNIST, CUB, and CelebA datasets and show that it enables large variations of an attribute to be not only represented but also intuitively controlled while retaining identity. We also show that the learned latent space has enough expressive power to conduct attribute transfer and attribute-based image retrieval. The visual cues from multiple support regions of different sizes and resolutions are complementary in classifying a candidate box in object detection. Effective integration of local and contextual visual cues from these regions has become a fundamental problem in object detection. In this paper, we propose a gated bi-directional CNN (GBD-Net) to pass messages among features from different support regions during both feature learning and feature extraction. Such message passing can be implemented through convolution between neighboring support regions in two directions and can be conducted in various layers. Therefore, local and contextual visual patterns can validate the existence of each other by learning their nonlinear relationships and their close interactions are modeled in a more complex way. It is also shown that message passing is not always helpful but dependent on individual samples. Gated functions are therefore needed to control message transmission, whose on-or-offs are controlled by extra visual evidence from the input sample. The effectiveness of GBD-Net is shown through experiments on three object detection datasets, ImageNet, Pascal VOC2007 and Microsoft COCO. This paper also shows the details of our approach in wining the ImageNet object detection challenge of 2016, with source code provided on this https URL . This paper presents a framework for unsupervised learning of a hierarchical reconfigurable image template - the AND-OR Template (AOT) for visual objects. The AOT includes: 1) hierarchical composition as "AND" nodes, 2) deformation and articulation of parts as geometric "OR" nodes, and 3) multiple ways of composition as structural "OR" nodes. The terminal nodes are hybrid image templates (HIT) [17] that are fully generative to the pixels. We show that both the structures and parameters of the AOT model can be learned in an unsupervised way from images using an information projection principle. The learning algorithm consists of two steps: 1) a recursive block pursuit procedure to learn the hierarchical dictionary of primitives, parts, and objects, and 2) a graph compression procedure to minimize model structure for better generalizability. We investigate the factors that influence how well the learning algorithm can identify the underlying AOT. And we propose a number of ways to evaluate the performance of the learned AOTs through both synthesized examples and real-world images. Our model advances the state of the art for object detection by improving the accuracy of template matching. This paper presents an efficient framework for the categorization of objects in real-world scenes (captured with an RGB-D sensor). The proposed framework uses ensembles of randomized decision trees in a hierarchical cascaded architecture to compute consistent object-class inferences of unseen objects. Specifically, the proposed framework computes object-class probabilities at three levels of an image hierarchy (i.e., pixel-, surfel-, and object-levels) using Random Forest classifiers. Next, these probabilities are fused together to compute a cumulative probabilistic output which is used to infer object categories. This fusion results in an improved object categorization performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods. ImageNet is a large-scale database of object classes with millions of images. Unfortunately only a small fraction of them is manually annotated with bounding-boxes. This prevents useful developments, such as learning reliable object detectors for thousands of classes. In this paper we propose to automatically populate ImageNet with many more bounding-boxes, by leveraging existing manual annotations. The key idea is to localize objects of a target class for which annotations are not available, by transferring knowledge from related source classes with available annotations. We distinguish two kinds of source classes: ancestors and siblings. Each source provides knowledge about the plausible location, appearance and context of the target objects, which induces a probability distribution over windows in images of the target class. We learn to combine these distributions so as to maximize the location accuracy of the most probable window. Finally, we employ the combined distribution in a procedure to jointly localize objects in all images of the target class. Through experiments on 0.5 million images from 219 classes we show that our technique (i) annotates a wide range of classes with bounding-boxes; (ii) effectively exploits the hierarchical structure of ImageNet, since all sources and types of knowledge we propose contribute to the results; (iii) scales efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Rotational Region CNN (R2CNN) for detecting arbitrary-oriented texts in natural scene images. The framework is based on Faster R-CNN [1] architecture. First, we use the Region Proposal Network (RPN) to generate axis-aligned bounding boxes that enclose the texts with different orientations. Second, for each axis-aligned text box proposed by RPN, we extract its pooled features with different pooled sizes and the concatenated features are used to simultaneously predict the text non-text score, axis-aligned box and inclined minimum area box. At last, we use an inclined non-maximum suppression to get the detection results. Our approach achieves competitive results on text detection benchmarks: ICDAR 2015 and ICDAR 2013. We present an image retrieval system for the interactive search of photo collections using free-hand sketches depicting shape. We describe Gradient Field HOG (GF-HOG); an adapted form of the HOG descriptor suitable for Sketch Based Image Retrieval (SBIR). We incorporate GF-HOG into a Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) retrieval framework, and demonstrate how this combination may be harnessed both for robust SBIR, and for localizing sketched objects within an image. We evaluate over a large Flickr sourced dataset comprising 33 shape categories, using queries from 10 non-expert sketchers. We compare GF-HOG against state-of-the-art descriptors with common distance measures and language models for image retrieval, and explore how affine deformation of the sketch impacts search performance. GF-HOG is shown to consistently outperform retrieval versus SIFT, multi-resolution HOG, Self Similarity, Shape Context and Structure Tensor. Further, we incorporate semantic keywords into our GF-HOG system to enable the use of annotated sketches for image search. A novel graph-based measure of semantic similarity is proposed and two applications explored: semantic sketch based image retrieval and a semantic photo montage. Learning to generate natural scenes has always been a challenging task in computer vision. It is even more painstaking when the generation is conditioned on images with drastically different views. This is mainly because understanding, corresponding, and transforming appearance and semantic information across the views is not trivial. In this paper, we attempt to solve the novel problem of cross-view image synthesis, aerial to street-view and vice versa, using conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN). Two new architectures called Crossview Fork (X-Fork) and Crossview Sequential (X-Seq) are proposed to generate scenes with resolutions of 64A—64 and 256A—256 pixels. X-Fork architecture has a single discriminator and a single generator. The generator hallucinates both the image and its semantic segmentation in the target view. X-Seq architecture utilizes two cGANs. The first one generates the target image which is subsequently fed to the second cGAN for generating its corresponding semantic segmentation map. The feedback from the second cGAN helps the first cGAN generate sharper images. Both of our proposed architectures learn to generate natural images as well as their semantic segmentation maps. The proposed methods show that they are able to capture and maintain the true semantics of objects in source and target views better than the traditional image-to-image translation method which considers only the visual appearance of the scene. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations support the effectiveness of our frameworks, compared to two state of the art methods, for natural scene generation across drastically different views. This article deals with the design of a system that automates the generation of image processing applications. Users describe tasks to perform on images and the system constructs a specific plan, which, after being executed, should yield the desired results. Our approach to this problem belongs to a more general category of systems for the supervision of a library of operators. The generation of an application is considered as the dynamic building of chains of image processing through the selection, parameter tuning and scheduling of existing operators. To develop such a system, we suggest to use a knowledge-rich resolution model and to integrate seven design rules. The Borg system has been developed following these prescriptions. It hinges on hierarchical, opportunistic and incremental planning by means of knowledge sources of the blackboard model, which enable to take into account the planning, evaluation and knowledge acquisition issues. The Bag-of-visual Words (BoW) image representation has been applied for various problems in the fields of multimedia and computer vision. The basic idea is to represent images as visual documents composed of repeatable and distinctive visual elements, which are comparable to the words in texts. However, massive experiments show that the commonly used visual words are not as expressive as the text words, which is not desirable because it hinders their effectiveness in various applications. In this paper, Descriptive Visual Words (DVWs) and Descriptive Visual Phrases (DVPs) are proposed as the visual correspondences to text words and phrases, where visual phrases refer to the frequently co-occurring visual word pairs. Since images are the carriers of visual objects and scenes, novel descriptive visual element set can be composed by the visual words and their combinations which are effective in representing certain visual objects or scenes. Based on this idea, a general framework is proposed for generating DVWs and DVPs from classic visual words for various applications. In a large-scale image database containing 1506 object and scene categories, the visual words and visual word pairs descriptive to certain scenes or objects are identified as the DVWs and DVPs. Experiments show that the DVWs and DVPs are compact and descriptive, thus are more comparable with the text words than the classic visual words. We apply the identified DVWs and DVPs in several applications including image retrieval, image re-ranking, and object recognition. The DVW and DVP combination outperforms the classic visual words by 19.5 and 80 in image retrieval and object recognition tasks, respectively. The DVW and DVP based image re-ranking algorithm: DWPRank outperforms the state-of-the-art VisualRank by 12.4 in accuracy and about 11 times faster in efficiency.