Automatic photo adjustment is to mimic the photo retouching style of professional photographers and automatically adjust photos to the learned style. There have been many attempts to model the tone and the color adjustment globally with low-level color statistics. Also, spatially varying photo adjustment methods have been studied by exploiting high-level features and semantic label maps. Those methods are semantics-aware since the color mapping is dependent on the high-level semantic context. However, their performance is limited to the pre-computed hand-crafted features and it is hard to reflect user's preference to the adjustment. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network that models the semantics-aware photo adjustment. The proposed network exploits bilinear models that are the multiplicative interaction of the color and the contexual features. As the contextual features we propose the semantic adjustment map, which discovers the inherent photo retouching presets that are applied according to the scene context. The proposed method is trained using a robust loss with a scene parsing task. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing method both quantitatively and qualitatively. The proposed method also provides users a way to retouch the photo by their own likings by giving customized adjustment maps.
Hwang al @cite_12 presented a locally varying photo enhancement method that is based on both low- and high-level contexts. Their method finds an appropriate color mapping from external images using pixel-wise contextual features. The work of Yan al @cite_22 is closely related to our work. The authors combine multiple hand-crafted features including a multi-scale pooling of a scene parsing map for semantics-aware color regression. While the multi-scale pooling features were effective in modelling the semantics-aware photo adjustment, the performance is limited to the quality of the scene parsing map since the features are not trained in an end-to-end manner.
@cite_22 @cite_12
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Convolutional Neural Networks have demonstrated superior performance on single image depth estimation in recent years. These works usually use stacked spatial pooling or strided convolution to get high-level information which are common practices in classification task. However, depth estimation is a dense prediction problem and low-resolution feature maps usually generate blurred depth map which is undesirable in application. In order to produce high quality depth map, say clean and accurate, we propose a network consists of a Dense Feature Extractor (DFE) and a Depth Map Generator (DMG). The DFE combines ResNet and dilated convolutions. It extracts multi-scale information from input image while keeping the feature maps dense. As for DMG, we use attention mechanism to fuse multi-scale features produced in DFE. Our Network is trained end-to-end and does not need any post-processing. Hence, it runs fast and can predict depth map in about 15 fps. Experiment results show that our method is competitive with the state-of-the-art in quantitative evaluation, but can preserve better structural details of the scene depth. Accurate semantic image segmentation requires the joint consideration of local appearance, semantic information, and global scene context. In today’s age of pre-trained deep networks and their powerful convolutional features, state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches differ mostly in how they choose to combine together these different kinds of information. In this work, we propose a novel scheme for aggregating features from different scales, which we refer to as Multi-Scale Context Intertwining (MSCI). In contrast to previous approaches, which typically propagate information between scales in a one-directional manner, we merge pairs of feature maps in a bidirectional and recurrent fashion, via connections between two LSTM chains. By training the parameters of the LSTM units on the segmentation task, the above approach learns how to extract powerful and effective features for pixel-level semantic segmentation, which are then combined hierarchically. Furthermore, rather than using fixed information propagation routes, we subdivide images into super-pixels, and use the spatial relationship between them in order to perform image-adapted context aggregation. Our extensive evaluation on public benchmarks indicates that all of the aforementioned components of our approach increase the effectiveness of information propagation throughout the network, and significantly improve its eventual segmentation accuracy. We present 3DMV, a novel method for 3D semantic scene segmentation of RGB-D scans in indoor environments using a joint 3D-multi-view prediction network. In contrast to existing methods that either use geometry or RGB data as input for this task, we combine both data modalities in a joint, end-to-end network architecture. Rather than simply projecting color data into a volumetric grid and operating solely in 3D – which would result in insufficient detail – we first extract feature maps from associated RGB images. These features are then mapped into the volumetric feature grid of a 3D network using a differentiable back-projection layer. Since our target is 3D scanning scenarios with possibly many frames, we use a multi-view pooling approach in order to handle a varying number of RGB input views. This learned combination of RGB and geometric features with our joint 2D-3D architecture achieves significantly better results than existing baselines. For instance, our final result on the ScanNet 3D segmentation benchmark increases from 52.8 to 75 accuracy compared to existing volumetric architectures. Semantic image segmentation is a basic street scene understanding task in autonomous driving, where each pixel in a high resolution image is categorized into a set of semantic labels. Unlike other scenarios, objects in autonomous driving scene exhibit very large scale changes, which poses great challenges for high-level feature representation in a sense that multi-scale information must be correctly encoded. To remedy this problem, atrous convolution[14]was introduced to generate features with larger receptive fields without sacrificing spatial resolution. Built upon atrous convolution, Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP)[2] was proposed to concatenate multiple atrous-convolved features using different dilation rates into a final feature representation. Although ASPP is able to generate multi-scale features, we argue the feature resolution in the scale-axis is not dense enough for the autonomous driving scenario. To this end, we propose Densely connected Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (DenseASPP), which connects a set of atrous convolutional layers in a dense way, such that it generates multi-scale features that not only cover a larger scale range, but also cover that scale range densely, without significantly increasing the model size. We evaluate DenseASPP on the street scene benchmark Cityscapes[4] and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown outstanding performance in many dense labeling problems. One key pillar of these successes is mining relevant information from features in convolutional layers. However, how to better aggregate multi-level convolutional feature maps for salient object detection is underexplored. In this work, we present Amulet, a generic aggregating multi-level convolutional feature framework for salient object detection. Our framework first integrates multi-level feature maps into multiple resolutions, which simultaneously incorporate coarse semantics and fine details. Then it adaptively learns to combine these feature maps at each resolution and predict saliency maps with the combined features. Finally, the predicted results are efficiently fused to generate the final saliency map. In addition, to achieve accurate boundary inference and semantic enhancement, edge-aware feature maps in low-level layers and the predicted results of low resolution features are recursively embedded into the learning framework. By aggregating multi-level convolutional features in this efficient and flexible manner, the proposed saliency model provides accurate salient object labeling. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches in terms of near all compared evaluation metrics. Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown outstanding performance in many dense labeling problems. One key pillar of these successes is mining relevant information from features in convolutional layers. However, how to better aggregate multi-level convolutional feature maps for salient object detection is underexplored. In this work, we present Amulet, a generic aggregating multi-level convolutional feature framework for salient object detection. Our framework first integrates multi-level feature maps into multiple resolutions, which simultaneously incorporate coarse semantics and fine details. Then it adaptively learns to combine these feature maps at each resolution and predict saliency maps with the combined features. Finally, the predicted results are efficiently fused to generate the final saliency map. In addition, to achieve accurate boundary inference and semantic enhancement, edge-aware feature maps in low-level layers and the predicted results of low resolution features are recursively embedded into the learning framework. By aggregating multi-level convolutional features in this efficient and flexible manner, the proposed saliency model provides accurate salient object labeling. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the art approaches in terms of near all compared evaluation metrics. Extracting skeletons from natural images is a challenging problem, due to complex backgrounds in the scene and various scales of objects. To address this problem, we propose a two-stream fully convolutional neural network which uses the original image and its corresponding semantic segmentation probability map as inputs and predicts the skeleton map using merged multi-scale features. We find that the semantic segmentation probability map is complementary to the corresponding color image and can boost the performance of our baseline model which trained only on color images. We conduct experiments on SK-LARGE dataset and the F-measure of our method on validation set is 0.738 which outperforms current state-of-the-art significantly and demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Finding visual correspondence between local features is key to many computer vision problems. While defining features with larger contextual scales usually implies greater discriminativeness, it could also lead to less spatial accuracy of the features. We propose AutoScaler, a scale-attention network to explicitly optimize this trade-off in visual correspondence tasks. Our network consists of a weight-sharing feature network to compute multi-scale feature maps and an attention network to combine them optimally in the scale space. This allows our network to have adaptive receptive field sizes over different scales of the input. The entire network is trained end-to-end in a siamese framework for visual correspondence tasks. Our method achieves favorable results compared to state-of-the-art methods on challenging optical flow and semantic matching benchmarks, including Sintel, KITTI and CUB-2011. We also show that our method can generalize to improve hand-crafted descriptors (e.g Daisy) on general visual correspondence tasks. Finally, our attention network can generate visually interpretable scale attention maps. Predicting the depth (or surface normal) of a scene from single monocular color images is a challenging task. This paper tackles this challenging and essentially underdetermined problem by regression on deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) features, combined with a post-processing refining step using conditional random fields (CRF). Our framework works at two levels, super-pixel level and pixel level. First, we design a DCNN model to learn the mapping from multi-scale image patches to depth or surface normal values at the super-pixel level. Second, the estimated super-pixel depth or surface normal is refined to the pixel level by exploiting various potentials on the depth or surface normal map, which includes a data term, a smoothness term among super-pixels and an auto-regression term characterizing the local structure of the estimation map. The inference problem can be efficiently solved because it admits a closed-form solution. Experiments on the Make3D and NYU Depth V2 datasets show competitive results compared with recent state-of-the-art methods. Recent work on scene classification still makes use of generic CNN features in a rudimentary manner. In this paper, we present a novel pipeline built upon deep CNN features to harvest discriminative visual objects and parts for scene classification. We first use a region proposal technique to generate a set of high-quality patches potentially containing objects, and apply a pre-trained CNN to extract generic deep features from these patches. Then we perform both unsupervised and weakly supervised learning to screen these patches and discover discriminative ones representing category-specific objects and parts. We further apply discriminative clustering enhanced with local CNN fine-tuning to aggregate similar objects and parts into groups, called meta objects. A scene image representation is constructed by pooling the feature response maps of all the learned meta objects at multiple spatial scales. We have confirmed that the scene image representation obtained using this new pipeline is capable of delivering state-of-the-art performance on two popular scene benchmark datasets, MIT Indoor 67 [22] and Sun397 [31]. We present a novel and practical deep fully convolutional neural network architecture for semantic pixel-wise segmentation termed SegNet. This core trainable segmentation engine consists of an encoder network, a corresponding decoder network followed by a pixel-wise classification layer. The architecture of the encoder network is topologically identical to the 13 convolutional layers in the VGG16 network [1] . The role of the decoder network is to map the low resolution encoder feature maps to full input resolution feature maps for pixel-wise classification. The novelty of SegNet lies is in the manner in which the decoder upsamples its lower resolution input feature map(s). Specifically, the decoder uses pooling indices computed in the max-pooling step of the corresponding encoder to perform non-linear upsampling. This eliminates the need for learning to upsample. The upsampled maps are sparse and are then convolved with trainable filters to produce dense feature maps. We compare our proposed architecture with the widely adopted FCN [2] and also with the well known DeepLab-LargeFOV [3] , DeconvNet [4] architectures. This comparison reveals the memory versus accuracy trade-off involved in achieving good segmentation performance. SegNet was primarily motivated by scene understanding applications. Hence, it is designed to be efficient both in terms of memory and computational time during inference. It is also significantly smaller in the number of trainable parameters than other competing architectures and can be trained end-to-end using stochastic gradient descent. We also performed a controlled benchmark of SegNet and other architectures on both road scenes and SUN RGB-D indoor scene segmentation tasks. These quantitative assessments show that SegNet provides good performance with competitive inference time and most efficient inference memory-wise as compared to other architectures. We also provide a Caffe implementation of SegNet and a web demo at http: mi.eng.cam.ac.uk projects segnet . We present a novel method called Contextual Pyramid CNN (CP-CNN) for generating high-quality crowd density and count estimation by explicitly incorporating global and local contextual information of crowd images. The proposed CP-CNN consists of four modules: Global Context Estimator (GCE), Local Context Estimator (LCE), Density Map Estimator (DME) and a Fusion-CNN (F-CNN). GCE is a VGG-16 based CNN that encodes global context and it is trained to classify input images into different density classes, whereas LCE is another CNN that encodes local context information and it is trained to perform patch-wise classification of input images into different density classes. DME is a multi-column architecture-based CNN that aims to generate high-dimensional feature maps from the input image which are fused with the contextual information estimated by GCE and LCE using F-CNN. To generate high resolution and high-quality density maps, F-CNN uses a set of convolutional and fractionally-strided convolutional layers and it is trained along with the DME in an end-to-end fashion using a combination of adversarial loss and pixel-level Euclidean loss. Extensive experiments on highly challenging datasets show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. Scene parsing is an important and challenging prob- lem in computer vision. It requires labeling each pixel in an image with the category it belongs to. Tradition- ally, it has been approached with hand-engineered features from color information in images. Recently convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which automatically learn hierar- chies of features, have achieved record performance on the task. These approaches typically include a post-processing technique, such as superpixels, to produce the final label- ing. In this paper, we propose a novel network architecture that combines deep deconvolutional neural networks with CNNs. Our experiments show that deconvolutional neu- ral networks are capable of learning higher order image structure beyond edge primitives in comparison to CNNs. The new network architecture is employed for multi-patch training, introduced as part of this work. Multi-patch train- ing makes it possible to effectively learn spatial priors from scenes. The proposed approach yields state-of-the-art per- formance on four scene parsing datasets, namely Stanford Background, SIFT Flow, CamVid, and KITTI. In addition, our system has the added advantage of having a training system that can be completely automated end-to-end with- out requiring any post-processing. Semantic parsing of large-scale 3D point clouds is an important research topic in computer vision and remote sensing fields. Most existing approaches utilize hand-crafted features for each modality independently and combine them in a heuristic manner. They often fail to consider the consistency and complementary information among features adequately, which makes them difficult to capture high-level semantic structures. The features learned by most of the current deep learning methods can obtain high-quality image classification results. However, these methods are hard to be applied to recognize 3D point clouds due to unorganized distribution and various point density of data. In this paper, we propose a 3DCNN-DQN-RNN method which fuses the 3D convolutional neural network (CNN), Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Residual recurrent neural network (RNN)for an efficient semantic parsing of large-scale 3D point clouds. In our method, an eye window under control of the 3D CNN and DQN can localize and segment the points of the object's class efficiently. The 3D CNN and Residual RNN further extract robust and discriminative features of the points in the eye window, and thus greatly enhance the parsing accuracy of large-scale point clouds. Our method provides an automatic process that maps the raw data to the classification results. It also integrates object localization, segmentation and classification into one framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art point cloud classification methods. In this paper, we consider the scene parsing problem and propose a novel Multi-Path Feedback recurrent neural network (MPF-RNN) for parsing scene images. MPF-RNN can enhance the capability of RNNs in modeling long-range context information at multiple levels and better distinguish pixels that are easy to confuse. Different from feedforward CNNs and RNNs with only single feedback, MPF-RNN propagates the contextual features learned at top layer through weighted recurrent connections to learn bottom features. For better training MPF-RNN, we propose a new strategy that considers accumulative loss at multiple recurrent steps to improve performance of the MPF-RNN on parsing small objects. With these two novel components, MPF-RNN has achieved significant improvement over strong baselines (VGG16 and Res101) on five challenging scene parsing benchmarks, including traditional SiftFlow, Barcelona, CamVid, Stanford Background as well as the recently released large-scale ADE20K. Semantic object parsing is a fundamental task for understanding objects in detail in computer vision community, where incorporating multi-level contextual information is critical for achieving such fine-grained pixel-level recognition. Prior methods often leverage the contextual information through post-processing predicted confidence maps. In this work, we propose a novel deep Local-Global Long Short-Term Memory (LG-LSTM) architecture to seamlessly incorporate short-distance and long-distance spatial dependencies into the feature learning over all pixel positions. In each LG-LSTM layer, local guidance from neighboring positions and global guidance from the whole image are imposed on each position to better exploit complex local and global contextual information. Individual LSTMs for distinct spatial dimensions are also utilized to intrinsically capture various spatial layouts of semantic parts in the images, yielding distinct hidden and memory cells of each position for each dimension. In our parsing approach, several LG-LSTM layers are stacked and appended to the intermediate convolutional layers to directly enhance visual features, allowing network parameters to be learned in an end-to-end way. The long chains of sequential computation by stacked LG-LSTM layers also enable each pixel to sense a much larger region for inference benefiting from the memorization of previous dependencies in all positions along all dimensions. Comprehensive evaluations on three public datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our LG-LSTM over other state-of-the-art methods. Compositing is one of the most common operations in photo editing. To generate realistic composites, the appearances of foreground and background need to be adjusted to make them compatible. Previous approaches to harmonize composites have focused on learning statistical relationships between hand-crafted appearance features of the foreground and background, which is unreliable especially when the contents in the two layers are vastly different. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep convolutional neural network for image harmonization, which can capture both the context and semantic information of the composite images during harmonization. We also introduce an efficient way to collect large-scale and high-quality training data that can facilitate the training process. Experiments on the synthesized dataset and real composite images show that the proposed network outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. While efforts have been made on bridging the semantic gap in image understanding, the in situ understanding of social media images is arguably more important but has had less progress. In this work, we enrich the representation of images in image tweets by considering their social context. We argue that in the microblog context, traditional image features, e.g., low-level SIFT or high-level detected objects, are far from adequate in interpreting the necessary semantics latent in image tweets. To bridge this gap, we move from the images' pixels to their context and propose a context-aware image bf tweet modelling (CITING) framework to mine and fuse contextual text to model such social media images' semantics. We start with tweet's intrinsic contexts, namely, 1) text within the image itself and 2) its accompanying text; and then we turn to the extrinsic contexts: 3) the external web page linked to by the tweet's embedded URL, and 4) the Web as a whole. These contexts can be leveraged to benefit many fundamental applications. To demonstrate the effectiveness our framework, we focus on the task of personalized image tweet recommendation, developing a feature-aware matrix factorization framework that encodes the contexts as a part of user interest modelling. Extensive experiments on a large Twitter dataset show that our proposed method significantly improves performance. Finally, to spur future studies, we have released both the code of our recommendation model and our image tweet dataset. Multi-focus image fusion has emerged as a major topic in image processing to generate all-focus images with increased depth-of-field from multi-focus photographs. Different approaches have been used in spatial or transform domain for this purpose. But most of them are subject to one or more of image fusion quality degradations such as blocking artifacts, ringing effects, artificial edges, halo artifacts, contrast decrease, sharpness reduction, and misalignment of decision map with object boundaries. In this paper we present a novel multi-focus image fusion method in spatial domain that utilizes a dictionary which is learned from local patches of source images. Sparse representation of relative sharpness measure over this trained dictionary are pooled together to get the corresponding pooled features. Correlation of the pooled features with sparse representations of input images produces a pixel level score for decision map of fusion. Final regularized decision map is obtained using Markov Random Field (MRF) optimization. We also gathered a new color multi-focus image dataset which has more variety than traditional multi-focus image sets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, in terms of visual and quantitative evaluations. Harvesting dense pixel-level annotations to train deep neural networks for semantic segmentation is extremely expensive and unwieldy at scale. While learning from synthetic data where labels are readily available sounds promising, performance degrades significantly when testing on novel realistic data due to domain discrepancies. We present Dual Channel-wise Alignment Networks (DCAN), a simple yet effective approach to reduce domain shift at both pixel-level and feature-level. Exploring statistics in each channel of CNN feature maps, our framework performs channel-wise feature alignment, which preserves spatial structures and semantic information, in both an image generator and a segmentation network. In particular, given an image from the source domain and unlabeled samples from the target domain, the generator synthesizes new images on-the-fly to resemble samples from the target domain in appearance and the segmentation network further refines high-level features before predicting semantic maps, both of which leverage feature statistics of sampled images from the target domain. Unlike much recent and concurrent work relying on adversarial training, our framework is lightweight and easy to train. Extensive experiments on adapting models trained on synthetic segmentation benchmarks to real urban scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.