An important problem for both graphics and vision is to synthesize novel views of a 3D object from a single image. This is particularly challenging due to the partial observability inherent in projecting a 3D object onto the image space, and the ill-posedness of inferring object shape and pose. However, we can train a neural network to address the problem if we restrict our attention to specific object categories (in our case faces and chairs) for which we can gather ample training data. In this paper, we propose a novel recurrent convolutional encoder-decoder network that is trained end-to-end on the task of rendering rotated objects starting from a single image. The recurrent structure allows our model to capture long-term dependencies along a sequence of transformations. We demonstrate the quality of its predictions for human faces on the Multi-PIE dataset and for a dataset of 3D chair models, and also show its ability to disentangle latent factors of variation (e.g., identity and pose) without using full supervision.
A related line of work to ours is disentangling the latent factors of variation that generate natural images. Bilinear models for separating style and content are developed in @cite_11 , and are shown to be capable of separating handwriting style and character identity, and also separating face identity and pose. The disentangling Boltzmann Machine (disBM) @cite_15 applies this idea to augment the Restricted Boltzmann Machine by partitioning its hidden state into distinct factors of variation and modeling their higher-order interaction. The multi-view perceptron @cite_14 employs a stochastic feedforward network to disentangle the identity and pose factors of face images in order to achieve view-invariant recognition. The encoder network for IGN is also trained to learn a disentangled representation of images by extracting a graphics code for each factor. @cite_19 , the (potentially unknown) latent factors of variation are both discovered and disentangled using a novel hidden unit regularizer. Our work is also loosely related to the DeepStereo" algorithm @cite_16 that synthesizes novel views of scenes from multiple images using deep convolutional networks.
@cite_14 @cite_19 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_11
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Many latent factors of variation interact to generate sensory data; for example, pose, morphology and expression in face images. In this work, we propose to learn manifold coordinates for the relevant factors of variation and to model their joint interaction. Many existing feature learning algorithms focus on a single task and extract features that are sensitive to the task-relevant factors and invariant to all others. However, models that just extract a single set of invariant features do not exploit the relationships among the latent factors. To address this, we propose a higher-order Boltzmann machine that incorporates multiplicative interactions among groups of hidden units that each learn to encode a distinct factor of variation. Furthermore, we propose correspondence-based training strategies that allow effective disentangling. Our model achieves state-of-the-art emotion recognition and face verification performance on the Toronto Face Database. We also demonstrate disentangled features learned on the CMU Multi-PIE dataset. We propose an alternative generator architecture for generative adversarial networks, borrowing from style transfer literature. The new architecture leads to an automatically learned, unsupervised separation of high-level attributes (e.g., pose and identity when trained on human faces) and stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g., freckles, hair), and it enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis. The new generator improves the state-of-the-art in terms of traditional distribution quality metrics, leads to demonstrably better interpolation properties, and also better disentangles the latent factors of variation. To quantify interpolation quality and disentanglement, we propose two new, automated methods that are applicable to any generator architecture. Finally, we introduce a new, highly varied and high-quality dataset of human faces. Despite the recent advance of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in high-fidelity image synthesis, there lacks enough understandings on how GANs are able to map the latent code sampled from a random distribution to a photo-realistic image. Previous work assumes the latent space learned by GAN follows a distributed representation but observes the vector arithmetic phenomenon of the output's semantics in latent space. In this work, we interpret the semantics hidden in the latent space of well-trained GANs. We find that the latent code for well-trained generative models, such as ProgressiveGAN and StyleGAN, actually learns a disentangled representation after some linear transformations. We make a rigorous analysis on the encoding of various semantics in the latent space as well as their properties, and then study how these semantics are correlated to each other. Based on our analysis, we propose a simple and general technique, called InterFaceGAN, for semantic face editing in latent space. Given a synthesized face, we are able to faithfully edit its various attributes such as pose, expression, age, presence of eyeglasses, without retraining the GAN model. Furthermore, we show that even the artifacts occurred in output images are able to be fixed using same approach. Extensive results suggest that learning to synthesize faces spontaneously brings a disentangled and controllable facial attribute representation We address the problem of image feature learning for the applications where multiple factors exist in the image generation process and only some factors are of our interest. We present a novel multi-task adversarial network based on an encoder-discriminator-generator architecture. The encoder extracts a disentangled feature representation for the factors of interest. The discriminators classify each of the factors as individual tasks. The encoder and the discriminators are trained cooperatively on factors of interest, but in an adversarial way on factors of distraction. The generator provides further regularization on the learned feature by reconstructing images with shared factors as the input image. We design a new optimization scheme to stabilize the adversarial optimization process when multiple distributions need to be aligned. The experiments on face recognition and font recognition tasks show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both recognizing the factors of interest and generalization to images with unseen variations. Photorealistic frontal view synthesis from a single face image has a wide range of applications in the field of face recognition. Although data-driven deep learning methods have been proposed to address this problem by seeking solutions from ample face data, this problem is still challenging because it is intrinsically ill-posed. This paper proposes a Two-Pathway Generative Adversarial Network (TP-GAN) for photorealistic frontal view synthesis by simultaneously perceiving global structures and local details. Four landmark located patch networks are proposed to attend to local textures in addition to the commonly used global encoderdecoder network. Except for the novel architecture, we make this ill-posed problem well constrained by introducing a combination of adversarial loss, symmetry loss and identity preserving loss. The combined loss function leverages both frontal face distribution and pre-trained discriminative deep face models to guide an identity preserving inference of frontal views from profiles. Different from previous deep learning methods that mainly rely on intermediate features for recognition, our method directly leverages the synthesized identity preserving image for downstream tasks like face recognition and attribution estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only presents compelling perceptual results but also outperforms state-of-theart results on large pose face recognition. We present variational generative adversarial networks, a general learning framework that combines a variational auto-encoder with a generative adversarial network, for synthesizing images in fine-grained categories, such as faces of a specific person or objects in a category. Our approach models an image as a composition of label and latent attributes in a probabilistic model. By varying the fine-grained category label fed into the resulting generative model, we can generate images in a specific category with randomly drawn values on a latent attribute vector. Our approach has two novel aspects. First, we adopt a cross entropy loss for the discriminative and classifier network, but a mean discrepancy objective for the generative network. This kind of asymmetric loss function makes the GAN training more stable. Second, we adopt an encoder network to learn the relationship between the latent space and the real image space, and use pairwise feature matching to keep the structure of generated images. We experiment with natural images of faces, flowers, and birds, and demonstrate that the proposed models are capable of generating realistic and diverse samples with fine-grained category labels. We further show that our models can be applied to other tasks, such as image inpainting, super-resolution, and data augmentation for training better face recognition models. We present variational generative adversarial networks, a general learning framework that combines a variational auto-encoder with a generative adversarial network, for synthesizing images in fine-grained categories, such as faces of a specific person or objects in a category. Our approach models an image as a composition of label and latent attributes in a probabilistic model. By varying the fine-grained category label fed into the resulting generative model, we can generate images in a specific category with randomly drawn values on a latent attribute vector. Our approach has two novel aspects. First, we adopt a cross entropy loss for the discriminative and classifier network, but a mean discrepancy objective for the generative network. This kind of asymmetric loss function makes the GAN training more stable. Second, we adopt an encoder network to learn the relationship between the latent space and the real image space, and use pairwise feature matching to keep the structure of generated images. We experiment with natural images of faces, flowers, and birds, and demonstrate that the proposed models are capable of generating realistic and diverse samples with fine-grained category labels. We further show that our models can be applied to other tasks, such as image inpainting, super-resolution, and data augmentation for training better face recognition models. A novel variational autoencoder is developed to model images, as well as associated labels or captions. The Deep Generative Deconvolutional Network (DGDN) is used as a decoder of the latent image features, and a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used as an image encoder; the CNN is used to approximate a distribution for the latent DGDN features code. The latent code is also linked to generative models for labels (Bayesian support vector machine) or captions (recurrent neural network). When predicting a label caption for a new image at test, averaging is performed across the distribution of latent codes; this is computationally efficient as a consequence of the learned CNN-based encoder. Since the framework is capable of modeling the image in the presence absence of associated labels captions, a new semi-supervised setting is manifested for CNN learning with images; the framework even allows unsupervised CNN learning, based on images alone. A novel variational autoencoder is developed to model images, as well as associated labels or captions. The Deep Generative Deconvolutional Network (DGDN) is used as a decoder of the latent image features, and a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used as an image encoder; the CNN is used to approximate a distribution for the latent DGDN features code. The latent code is also linked to generative models for labels (Bayesian support vector machine) or captions (recurrent neural network). When predicting a label caption for a new image at test, averaging is performed across the distribution of latent codes; this is computationally efficient as a consequence of the learned CNN-based encoder. Since the framework is capable of modeling the image in the presence absence of associated labels captions, a new semi-supervised setting is manifested for CNN learning with images; the framework even allows unsupervised CNN learning, based on images alone. We introduce a conditional generative model for learning to disentangle the hidden factors of variation within a set of labeled observations, and separate them into complementary codes. One code summarizes the specified factors of variation associated with the labels. The other summarizes the remaining unspecified variability. During training, the only available source of supervision comes from our ability to distinguish among different observations belonging to the same class. Examples of such observations include images of a set of labeled objects captured at different viewpoints, or recordings of set of speakers dictating multiple phrases. In both instances, the intra-class diversity is the source of the unspecified factors of variation: each object is observed at multiple viewpoints, and each speaker dictates multiple phrases. Learning to disentangle the specified factors from the unspecified ones becomes easier when strong supervision is possible. Suppose that during training, we have access to pairs of images, where each pair shows two different objects captured from the same viewpoint. This source of alignment allows us to solve our task using existing methods. However, labels for the unspecified factors are usually unavailable in realistic scenarios where data acquisition is not strictly controlled. We address the problem of disentanglement in this more general setting by combining deep convolutional autoencoders with a form of adversarial training. Both factors of variation are implicitly captured in the organization of the learned embedding space, and can be used for solving single-image analogies. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets show that the proposed method is capable of generalizing to unseen classes and intra-class variabilities. Generating novel, yet realistic, images of persons is a challenging task due to the complex interplay between the different image factors, such as the foreground, background and pose information. In this work, we aim at generating such images based on a novel, two-stage reconstruction pipeline that learns a disentangled representation of the aforementioned image factors and generates novel person images at the same time. First, a multi-branched reconstruction network is proposed to disentangle and encode the three factors into embedding features, which are then combined to re-compose the input image itself. Second, three corresponding mapping functions are learned in an adversarial manner in order to map Gaussian noise to the learned embedding feature space, for each factor respectively. Using the proposed framework, we can manipulate the foreground, background and pose of the input image, and also sample new embedding features to generate such targeted manipulations, that provide more control over the generation process. Experiments on Market-1501 and Deepfashion datasets show that our model does not only generate realistic person images with new foregrounds, backgrounds and poses, but also manipulates the generated factors and interpolates the in-between states. Another set of experiments on Market-1501 shows that our model can also be beneficial for the person re-identification task. We present a novel probabilistic approach for fitting a statistical model to an image. A 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) of faces is interpreted as a generative (Top-Down) Bayesian model. Random Forests are used as noisy detectors (Bottom-Up) for the face and facial landmark positions. The Top-Down and Bottom-Up parts are then combined using a Data-Driven Markov Chain Monte Carlo Method (DDMCMC). As core of the integration, we use the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which has two main advantages. First, the algorithm can handle unreliable detections and therefore does not need the detectors to take an early and possible wrong hard decision before fitting. Second, it is open for integration of various cues to guide the fitting process. Based on the proposed approach, we implemented a completely automatic, pose and illumination invariant face recognition application. We are able to train and test the building blocks of our application on different databases. The system is evaluated on the Multi-PIE database and reaches state of the art performance. We introduce a conditional generative model for learning to disentangle the hidden factors of variation within a set of labeled observations, and separate them into complementary codes. One code summarizes the specified factors of variation associated with the labels. The other summarizes the remaining unspecified variability. During training, the only available source of supervision comes from our ability to distinguish among different observations belonging to the same class. Examples of such observations include images of a set of labeled objects captured at different viewpoints, or recordings of set of speakers dictating multiple phrases. In both instances, the intra-class diversity is the source of the unspecified factors of variation: each object is observed at multiple viewpoints, and each speaker dictates multiple phrases. Learning to disentangle the specified factors from the unspecified ones becomes easier when strong supervision is possible. Suppose that during training, we have access to pairs of images, where each pair shows two different objects captured from the same viewpoint. This source of alignment allows us to solve our task using existing methods. However, labels for the unspecified factors are usually unavailable in realistic scenarios where data acquisition is not strictly controlled. We address the problem of disentaglement in this more general setting by combining deep convolutional autoencoders with a form of adversarial training. Both factors of variation are implicitly captured in the organization of the learned embedding space, and can be used for solving single-image analogies. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets show that the proposed method is capable of generalizing to unseen classes and intra-class variabilities. Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similarly striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The code and models of our paper will be published on: this https URL . We would like to learn a representation of the data which decomposes an observation into factors of variation which we can independently control. Specifically, we want to use minimal supervision to learn a latent representation that reflects the semantics behind a specific grouping of the data, where within a group the samples share a common factor of variation. For example, consider a collection of face images grouped by identity. We wish to anchor the semantics of the grouping into a relevant and disentangled representation that we can easily exploit. However, existing deep probabilistic models often assume that the observations are independent and identically distributed. We present the Multi-Level Variational Autoencoder (ML-VAE), a new deep probabilistic model for learning a disentangled representation of a set of grouped observations. The ML-VAE separates the latent representation into semantically meaningful parts by working both at the group level and the observation level, while retaining efficient test-time inference. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that the ML-VAE model (i) learns a semantically meaningful disentanglement of grouped data, (ii) enables manipulation of the latent representation, and (iii) generalises to unseen groups. We develop a novel modeling framework for Boltzmann machines, augmenting each hidden unit with a latent transformation assignment variable which describes the selection of the transformed view of the canonical connection weights associated with the unit. This enables the inferences of the model to transform in response to transformed input data in a stable and predictable way, and avoids learning multiple features differing only with respect to the set of transformations. Extending prior work on translation equivariant (convolutional) models, we develop translation and rotation equivariant restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) and deep belief nets (DBNs), and demonstrate their effectiveness in learning frequently occurring statistical structure from artificial and natural images. When training a deep neural network for supervised image classification, one can broadly distinguish between two types of latent features of images that will drive the classification of class Y. Following the notation of (2016), we can divide features broadly into the classes of (i) “core” or “conditionally invariant” features X^ci whose distribution P(X^ci | Y) does not change substantially across domains and (ii) “style” or “orthogonal” features X^orth whose distribution P(X^orth | Y) can change substantially across domains. These latter orthogonal features would generally include features such as position, rotation, image quality or brightness but also more complex ones like hair color or posture for images of persons. We try to guard against future adversarial domain shifts by ideally just using the “conditionally invariant” features for classification. In contrast to previous work, we assume that the domain itself is not observed and hence a latent variable. We can hence not directly see the distributional change of features across different domains. We do assume, however, that we can sometimes observe a so-called identifier or ID variable. We might know, for example, that two images show the same person, with ID referring to the identity of the person. In data augmentation, we generate several images from the same original image, with ID referring to the relevant original image. The method requires only a small fraction of images to have an ID variable. We provide a causal framework for the problem by adding the ID variable to the model of (2016). However, we are interested in settings where we cannot observe the domain directly and we treat domain as a latent variable. If two or more samples share the same class and identifier, (Y, ID)=(y,i), then we treat those samples as counterfactuals under different style interventions on the orthogonal or style features. Using this grouping-by-ID approach, we regularize the network to provide near constant output across samples that share the same ID by penalizing with an appropriate graph Laplacian. This is shown to substantially improve performance in settings where domains change in terms of image quality, brightness, color changes, and more complex changes such as changes in movement and posture. We show links to questions of interpretability, fairness and transfer learning. The large domain discrepancy between faces captured in polarimetric (or conventional) thermal and visible domain makes cross-domain face recognition quite a challenging problem for both human-examiners and computer vision algorithms. Previous approaches utilize a two-step procedure (visible feature estimation and visible image reconstruction) to synthesize the visible image given the corresponding polarimetric thermal image. However, these are regarded as two disjoint steps and hence may hinder the performance of visible face reconstruction. We argue that joint optimization would be a better way to reconstruct more photo-realistic images for both computer vision algorithms and human-examiners to examine. To this end, this paper proposes a Generative Adversarial Network-based Visible Face Synthesis (GAN-VFS) method to synthesize more photo-realistic visible face images from their corresponding polarimetric images. To ensure that the encoded visible-features contain more semantically meaningful information in reconstructing the visible face image, a guidance sub-network is involved into the training procedure. To achieve photo realistic property while preserving discriminative characteristics for the reconstructed outputs, an identity loss combined with the perceptual loss are optimized in the framework. Multiple experiments evaluated on different experimental protocols demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. To allow the hidden units of a restricted Boltzmann machine to model the transformation between two successive images, Memisevic and Hinton (2007) introduced three-way multiplicative interactions that use the intensity of a pixel in the first image as a multiplicative gain on a learned, symmetric weight between a pixel in the second image and a hidden unit. This creates cubically many parameters, which form a three-dimensional interaction tensor. We describe a low-rank approximation to this interaction tensor that uses a sum of factors, each of which is a three-way outer product. This approximation allows efficient learning of transformations between larger image patches. Since each factor can be viewed as an image filter, the model as a whole learns optimal filter pairs for efficiently representing transformations. We demonstrate the learning of optimal filter pairs from various synthetic and real image sequences. We also show how learning about image transformations allows the model to perform a simple visual analogy task, and we show how a completely unsupervised network trained on transformations perceives multiple motions of transparent dot patterns in the same way as humans. We present a novel approach for synthesizing photo-realistic images of people in arbitrary poses using generative adversarial learning. Given an input image of a person and a desired pose represented by a 2D skeleton, our model renders the image of the same person under the new pose, synthesizing novel views of the parts visible in the input image and hallucinating those that are not seen. This problem has recently been addressed in a supervised manner, i.e., during training the ground truth images under the new poses are given to the network. We go beyond these approaches by proposing a fully unsupervised strategy. We tackle this challenging scenario by splitting the problem into two principal subtasks. First, we consider a pose conditioned bidirectional generator that maps back the initially rendered image to the original pose, hence being directly comparable to the input image without the need to resort to any training image. Second, we devise a novel loss function that incorporates content and style terms, and aims at producing images of high perceptual quality. Extensive experiments conducted on the DeepFashion dataset demonstrate that the images rendered by our model are very close in appearance to those obtained by fully supervised approaches.