Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven highly effective at image synthesis and style transfer. For most users, however, using them as tools can be a challenging task due to their unpredictable behavior that goes against common intuitions. This paper introduces a novel concept to augment such generative architectures with semantic annotations, either by manually authoring pixel labels or using existing solutions for semantic segmentation. The result is a content-aware generative algorithm that offers meaningful control over the outcome. Thus, we increase the quality of images generated by avoiding common glitches, make the results look significantly more plausible, and extend the functional range of these algorithms---whether for portraits or landscapes, etc. Applications include semantic style transfer and turning doodles with few colors into masterful paintings!
The first neural network approach to style transfer is @cite_8 , using so-called Gram Matrices'' to represent global statistics about the image based on output from convolution layers. These statistics are computed by taking the inner product of intermediate activations---a tensor operation that results in a (N N ) matrix for each layer of (N ) channels. During this operation, all local information about pixels is lost, and only correlations between the different channel activations remain. When glitches occur, it's most often due to these global statistics being imposed onto the target image regardless of its own statistical distribution, and without any understanding of local pixel context.
@cite_8
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Neural Style Transfer has recently demonstrated very exciting results which catches eyes in both academia and industry. Despite the amazing results, the principle of neural style transfer, especially why the Gram matrices could represent style remains unclear. In this paper, we propose a novel interpretation of neural style transfer by treating it as a domain adaptation problem. Specifically, we theoretically show that matching the Gram matrices of feature maps is equivalent to minimize the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) with the second order polynomial kernel. Thus, we argue that the essence of neural style transfer is to match the feature distributions between the style images and the generated images. To further support our standpoint, we experiment with several other distribution alignment methods, and achieve appealing results. We believe this novel interpretation connects these two important research fields, and could enlighten future researches. We explore the method of style transfer presented in the article "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" by Leon A. Gatys, Alexander S. Ecker and Matthias Bethge (arXiv:1508.06576). We first demonstrate the power of the suggested style space on a few examples. We then vary different hyper-parameters and program properties that were not discussed in the original paper, among which are the recognition network used, starting point of the gradient descent and different ways to partition style and content layers. We also give a brief comparison of some of the existing algorithm implementations and deep learning frameworks used. To study the style space further we attempt to generate synthetic images by maximizing a single entry in one of the Gram matrices @math and some interesting results are observed. Next, we try to mimic the sparsity and intensity distribution of Gram matrices obtained from a real painting and generate more complex textures. Finally, we propose two new style representations built on top of network's features and discuss how one could be used to achieve local and potentially content-aware style transfer. Recently, neuron activations extracted from a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) show promising performance in various visual tasks. However, due to the domain and task bias, using the features generated from the model pre-trained for image classification as image representations for instance retrieval is problematic. In this paper, we propose quartet-net learning to improve the discriminative power of CNN features for instance retrieval. The general idea is to map the features into a space where the image similarity can be better evaluated. Our network differs from the traditional Siamese-net in two ways. First, we adopt a double-margin contrastive loss with a dynamic margin tuning strategy to train the network which leads to more robust performance. Second, we introduce in the mimic learning regularization to improve the generalization ability of the network by preventing it from overfitting to the training data. Catering for the network learning, we collect a large-scale dataset, namely GeoPair, which consists of 68k matching image pairs and 63k non-matching pairs. Experiments on several standard instance retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Neural style transfer has recently received significant attention and demonstrated amazing results. An efficient solution proposed by trains feed-forward convolutional neural networks by defining and optimizing perceptual loss functions. Such methods are typically based on high-level features extracted from pre-trained neural networks, where the loss functions contain two components: style loss and content loss. However, such pre-trained networks are originally designed for object recognition, and hence the high-level features often focus on the primary target and neglect other details. As a result, when input images contain multiple objects potentially at different depths, the resulting images are often unsatisfactory because image layout is destroyed and the boundary between the foreground and background as well as different objects becomes obscured. We observe that the depth map effectively reflects the spatial distribution in an image and preserving the depth map of the content image after stylization helps produce an image that preserves its semantic content. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for neural style transfer that integrates depth preservation as additional loss, preserving overall image layout while performing style transfer. The intermediate map responses of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) contain contextual knowledge about its input. In this paper, we present a framework that uses these activation maps from several layers of a CNN as features to a Deep Belief Network (DBN) using transfer learning to provide an understanding of an input image. We create a representation of these features and the training data and use them to extract more information from an image at the pixel level, hence gaining understanding of the whole image. We experimentally demonstrate the usefulness of our framework using a pretrained model and use a DBN to perform segmentation on the BAERI dataset of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery and the CAMVID dataset with a relatively smaller training dataset. The seminal work of demonstrated the power of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in creating artistic imagery by separating and recombining image content and style. This process of using CNNs to render a content image in different styles is referred to as Neural Style Transfer (NST). Since then, NST has become a trending topic both in academic literature and industrial applications. It is receiving increasing attention and a variety of approaches are proposed to either improve or extend the original NST algorithm. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the current progress towards NST. We first propose a taxonomy of current algorithms in the field of NST. Then, we present several evaluation methods and compare different NST algorithms both qualitatively and quantitatively. The review concludes with a discussion of various applications of NST and open problems for future research. A list of papers discussed in this review, corresponding codes, pre-trained models and more comparison results are publicly available at this https URL. Compared to image representation based on low-level local descriptors, deep neural activations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are richer in mid-level representation, but poorer in geometric invariance properties. In this paper, we present a straightforward framework for better image representation by combining the two approaches. To take advantages of both representations, we extract a fair amount of multi-scale dense local activations from a pre-trained CNN. We then aggregate the activations by Fisher kernel framework, which has been modified with a simple scale-wise normalization essential to make it suitable for CNN activations. Our representation demonstrates new state-of-the-art performances on three public datasets: 80.78 (Acc.) on MIT Indoor 67, 83.20 (mAP) on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 91.28 (Acc.) on Oxford 102 Flowers. The results suggest that our proposal can be used as a primary image representation for better performances in wide visual recognition tasks. Compared to image representation based on low-level local descriptors, deep neural activations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are richer in mid-level representation, but poorer in geometric invariance properties. In this paper, we present a straightforward framework for better image representation by combining the two approaches. To take advantages of both representations, we propose an efficient method to extract a fair amount of multi-scale dense local activations from a pre-trained CNN. We then aggregate the activations by Fisher kernel framework, which has been modified with a simple scale-wise normalization essential to make it suitable for CNN activations. Replacing the direct use of a single activation vector with our representation demonstrates significant performance improvements: +17.76 (Acc.) on MIT Indoor 67 and +7.18 (mAP) on PASCAL VOC 2007. The results suggest that our proposal can be used as a primary image representation for better performances in visual recognition tasks. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven highly effective at image synthesis and style transfer. For most users, however, using them as tools can be a challenging task due to their unpredictable behavior that goes against common intuitions. This paper introduces a novel concept to augment such generative architectures with semantic annotations, either by manually authoring pixel labels or using existing solutions for semantic segmentation. The result is a content-aware generative algorithm that offers meaningful control over the outcome. Thus, we increase the quality of images generated by avoiding common glitches, make the results look significantly more plausible, and extend the functional range of these algorithms---whether for portraits or landscapes, etc. Applications include semantic style transfer and turning doodles with few colors into masterful paintings! In this work, we address the human parsing task with a novel Contextualized Convolutional Neural Network (Co-CNN) architecture, which well integrates the cross-layer context, global image-level context, within-super-pixel context and cross-super-pixel neighborhood context into a unified network. Given an input human image, Co-CNN produces the pixel-wise categorization in an end-to-end way. First, the cross-layer context is captured by our basic local-to-global-to-local structure, which hierarchically combines the global semantic structure and the local fine details within the cross-layers. Second, the global image-level label prediction is used as an auxiliary objective in the intermediate layer of the Co-CNN, and its outputs are further used for guiding the feature learning in subsequent convolutional layers to leverage the global image-level context. Finally, to further utilize the local super-pixel contexts, the within-super-pixel smoothing and cross-super-pixel neighbourhood voting are formulated as natural sub-components of the Co-CNN to achieve the local label consistency in both training and testing process. Comprehensive evaluations on two public datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Co-CNN architecture over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F-1 score on the large dataset [15] reaches 76.95 by Co-CNN, significantly higher than 62.81 and 64.38 by the state-of-the-art algorithms, M-CNN [21] and ATR [15], respectively. We propose StyleBank, which is composed of multiple convolution filter banks and each filter bank explicitly represents one style, for neural image style transfer. To transfer an image to a specific style, the corresponding filter bank is operated on top of the intermediate feature embedding produced by a single auto-encoder. The StyleBank and the auto-encoder are jointly learnt, where the learning is conducted in such a way that the auto-encoder does not encode any style information thanks to the flexibility introduced by the explicit filter bank representation. It also enables us to conduct incremental learning to add a new image style by learning a new filter bank while holding the auto-encoder fixed. The explicit style representation along with the flexible network design enables us to fuse styles at not only the image level, but also the region level. Our method is the first style transfer network that links back to traditional texton mapping methods, and hence provides new understanding on neural style transfer. Our method is easy to train, runs in real-time, and produces results that qualitatively better or at least comparable to existing methods. We propose StyleBank, which is composed of multiple convolution filter banks and each filter bank explicitly represents one style, for neural image style transfer. To transfer an image to a specific style, the corresponding filter bank is operated on top of the intermediate feature embedding produced by a single auto-encoder. The StyleBank and the auto-encoder are jointly learnt, where the learning is conducted in such a way that the auto-encoder does not encode any style information thanks to the flexibility introduced by the explicit filter bank representation. It also enables us to conduct incremental learning to add a new image style by learning a new filter bank while holding the auto-encoder fixed. The explicit style representation along with the flexible network design enables us to fuse styles at not only the image level, but also the region level. Our method is the first style transfer network that links back to traditional texton mapping methods, and hence provides new understanding on neural style transfer. Our method is easy to train, runs in real-time, and produces results that qualitatively better or at least comparable to existing methods. In recent years, state-of-the-art methods in computer vision have utilized increasingly deep convolutional neural network architectures (CNNs), with some of the most successful models employing hundreds or even thousands of layers. A variety of pathologies such as vanishing exploding gradients make training such deep networks challenging. While residual connections and batch normalization do enable training at these depths, it has remained unclear whether such specialized architecture designs are truly necessary to train deep CNNs. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to train vanilla CNNs with ten thousand layers or more simply by using an appropriate initialization scheme. We derive this initialization scheme theoretically by developing a mean field theory for signal propagation and by characterizing the conditions for dynamical isometry, the equilibration of singular values of the input-output Jacobian matrix. These conditions require that the convolution operator be an orthogonal transformation in the sense that it is norm-preserving. We present an algorithm for generating such random initial orthogonal convolution kernels and demonstrate empirically that they enable efficient training of extremely deep architectures. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently become the state-of-the-art tool for large-scale image classification. In this work we propose the use of activation features from CNNs as local descriptors for writer identification. A global descriptor is then formed by means of GMM supervector encoding, which is further improved by normalization with the KL-Kernel. We evaluate our method on two publicly available datasets: the ICDAR 2013 benchmark database and the CVL dataset. While we perform comparably to the state of the art on CVL, our proposed method yields about 0.21 absolute improvement in terms of ( mAP ) on the challenging bilingual ICDAR dataset. Convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in many different visual tasks. Learned from a large-scale training data set, CNN features are much more discriminative and accurate than the handcrafted features. Moreover, CNN features are also transferable among different domains. On the other hand, traditional dictionary-based features (such as BoW and spatial pyramid matching) contain much more local discriminative and structural information, which is implicitly embedded in the images. To further improve the performance, in this paper, we propose to combine CNN with dictionary-based models for scene recognition and visual domain adaptation (DA). Specifically, based on the well-tuned CNN models (e.g., AlexNet and VGG Net), two dictionary-based representations are further constructed, namely, mid-level local representation (MLR) and convolutional Fisher vector (CFV) representation. In MLR, an efficient two-stage clustering method, i.e., weighted spatial and feature space spectral clustering on the parts of a single image followed by clustering all representative parts of all images, is used to generate a class-mixture or a class-specific part dictionary. After that, the part dictionary is used to operate with the multiscale image inputs for generating mid-level representation. In CFV, a multiscale and scale-proportional Gaussian mixture model training strategy is utilized to generate Fisher vectors based on the last convolutional layer of CNN. By integrating the complementary information of MLR, CFV, and the CNN features of the fully connected layer, the state-of-the-art performance can be achieved on scene recognition and DA problems. An interested finding is that our proposed hybrid representation (from VGG net trained on ImageNet) is also complementary to GoogLeNet and or VGG-11 (trained on Place205) greatly. We present a deep convolutional neural network for estimating the relative homography between a pair of images. Our feed-forward network has 10 layers, takes two stacked grayscale images as input, and produces an 8 degree of freedom homography which can be used to map the pixels from the first image to the second. We present two convolutional neural network architectures for HomographyNet: a regression network which directly estimates the real-valued homography parameters, and a classification network which produces a distribution over quantized homographies. We use a 4-point homography parameterization which maps the four corners from one image into the second image. Our networks are trained in an end-to-end fashion using warped MS-COCO images. Our approach works without the need for separate local feature detection and transformation estimation stages. Our deep models are compared to a traditional homography estimator based on ORB features and we highlight the scenarios where HomographyNet outperforms the traditional technique. We also describe a variety of applications powered by deep homography estimation, thus showcasing the flexibility of a deep learning approach. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved remarkable successes in various image classification and understanding tasks. The deep features obtained at the top fully connected layer of the CNN (FC-features) exhibit rich global semantic information and are extremely effective in image classification. On the other hand, the convolutional features in the middle layers of the CNN also contain meaningful local information, but are not fully explored for image representation. In this paper, we propose a novel locally supervised deep hybrid model (LS-DHM) that effectively enhances and explores the convolutional features for scene recognition. First, we notice that the convolutional features capture local objects and fine structures of scene images, which yield important cues for discriminating ambiguous scenes, whereas these features are significantly eliminated in the highly compressed FC representation. Second, we propose a new local convolutional supervision layer to enhance the local structure of the image by directly propagating the label information to the convolutional layers. Third, we propose an efficient Fisher convolutional vector (FCV) that successfully rescues the orderless mid-level semantic information (e.g., objects and textures) of scene image. The FCV encodes the large-sized convolutional maps into a fixed-length mid-level representation, and is demonstrated to be strongly complementary to the high-level FC-features. Finally, both the FCV and FC-features are collaboratively employed in the LS-DHM representation, which achieves outstanding performance in our experiments. It obtains 83.75 and 67.56 accuracies, respectively, on the heavily benchmarked MIT Indoor67 and SUN397 data sets, advancing the state-of-the-art substantially. We aim to apply sparse autoencoder-based unsupervised feature learning to emotional semantic analysis for textile images. To tackle the problem of limited training data, we present a cross-domain feature learning scheme for emotional textile image classification using convolutional autoencoders. We further propose a correlation-analysis-based feature selection method for the weights learned by sparse autoencoders to reduce the number of features extracted from large size images. First, we randomly collect image patches on an unlabeled image dataset in the source domain and learn local features with a sparse autoencoder. We then conduct feature selection according to the correlation between different weight vectors corresponding to the autoencoder’s hidden units. We finally adopt a convolutional neural network including a pooling layer to obtain global feature activations of textile images in the target domain and send these global feature vectors into logistic regression models for emotional image classification. The cross-domain unsupervised feature learning method achieves 65 to 78 average accuracy in the cross-validation experiments corresponding to eight emotional categories and performs better than conventional methods. Feature selection can reduce the computational cost of global feature extraction by about 50 while improving classification performance. Despite the rapid progress in style transfer, existing approaches using feed-forward generative network for multi-style or arbitrary-style transfer are usually compromised of image quality and model flexibility. We find it is fundamentally difficult to achieve comprehensive style modeling using 1-dimensional style embedding. Motivated by this, we introduce CoMatch Layer that learns to match the second order feature statistics with the target styles. With the CoMatch Layer, we build a Multi-style Generative Network (MSG-Net), which achieves real-time performance. We also employ an specific strategy of upsampled convolution which avoids checkerboard artifacts caused by fractionally-strided convolution. Our method has achieved superior image quality comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed MSG-Net as a general approach for real-time style transfer is compatible with most existing techniques including content-style interpolation, color-preserving, spatial control and brush stroke size control. MSG-Net is the first to achieve real-time brush-size control in a purely feed-forward manner for style transfer. Our implementations and pre-trained models for Torch, PyTorch and MXNet frameworks will be publicly available. We introduce a novel embedding method for knowledge base completion task. Our approach advances state-of-the-art (SOTA) by employing a convolutional neural network (CNN) for the task which can capture global relationships and transitional characteristics. We represent each triple (head entity, relation, tail entity) as a 3-column matrix which is the input for the convolution layer. Different filters having a same shape of 1x3 are operated over the input matrix to produce different feature maps which are then concatenated into a single feature vector. This vector is used to return a score for the triple via a dot product. The returned score is used to predict whether the triple is valid or not. Experiments show that ConvKB achieves better link prediction results than previous SOTA models on two current benchmark datasets WN18RR and FB15k-237.