Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are known to be brittle under various image transformations, including rotations, scalings, and changes of lighting conditions. We observe that the features of a transformed image are drastically different from the ones of the original image. To make CNNs more invariant to transformations, we propose "Feature Lenses", a set of ad-hoc modules that can be easily plugged into a trained model (referred to as the "host model"). Each individual lens reconstructs the original features given the features of a transformed image under a particular transformation. These lenses jointly counteract feature distortions caused by various transformations, thus making the host model more robust without retraining. By only updating lenses, the host model is freed from iterative updating when facing new transformations absent in the training data; as feature semantics are preserved, downstream applications, such as classifiers and detectors, automatically gain robustness without retraining. Lenses are trained in a self-supervised fashion with no annotations, by minimizing a novel "Top-K Activation Contrast Loss" between lens-transformed features and original features. Evaluated on ImageNet, MNIST-rot, and CIFAR-10, Feature Lenses show clear advantages over baseline methods.
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Hong Kong Centre for Cerebro-Cardiovascular Health Engineering（香港脑心血管健康工程中心）；University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Spherical image processing has been widely applied in many important fields, such as omnidirectional vision for autonomous cars, global climate modelling, and medical imaging. It is non-trivial to extend an algorithm developed for flat images to the spherical ones. In this work, we focus on the challenging task of spherical image inpainting with deep learning-based regularizer. Instead of a naive application of existing models for planar images, we employ a fast directional spherical Haar framelet transform and develop a novel optimization framework based on a sparsity assumption of the framel…
While hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) is a standard staining procedure, immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining further serves as a diagnostic and prognostic method. However, acquiring special staining results requires substantial costs. Hence, we proposed a strategy for ultra-high-resolution unpaired image-to-image translation: Kernelized Instance Normalization (KIN), which preserves local information and successfully achieves seamless stain transformation with constant GPU memory usage. Given a patch, corresponding position, and a kernel, KIN computes local statistics using convolution operation. In…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）
Modeling the visual changes that an action brings to a scene is critical for video understanding. Currently, CNNs process one local neighbourhood at a time, thus contextual relationships over longer ranges, while still learnable, are indirect. We present TROI, a plug-and-play module for CNNs to reason between mid-level feature representations that are otherwise separated in space and time. The module relates localized visual entities such as hands and interacting objects and transforms their corresponding regions of interest directly in the feature maps of convolutional layers. With TROI, we a…
PURe: A Plug-and-Play Product-Unit Residual Module for Vision Networks
Department of Mathematics, Informatics and Technology, University of Applied Sciences Koblenz（科隆应用科学大学数学、信息学与技术系）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）
Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute（协作机器人与智能系统（CoRIS）研究所）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）
CounterFactual (CF) visual explanations try to find images similar to the query image that change the decision of a vision system to a specified outcome. Existing methods either require inference-time optimization or joint training with a generative adversarial model which makes them time-consuming and difficult to use in practice. We propose a novel approach, Cycle-Consistent Counterfactuals by Latent Transformations (C3LT), which learns a latent transformation that automatically generates visual CFs by steering in the latent space of generative models. Our method uses cycle consistency betwe…
We propose a novel visual context-aware filter generation module which incorporates contextual information present in images into Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In contrast to traditional CNNs, we do not employ the same set of learned convolution filters for all input image instances. Our proposed input-conditioned convolution filters when combined with techniques inspired by Multi-instance learning and max-pooling, results in a transformation-invariant neural network. We investigated the performance of our proposed framework on three MNIST variations, which covers both rotation and sca…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Point cloud registration aims at estimating the geometric transformation between two point cloud scans, in which point-wise correspondence estimation is the key to its success. In addition to previous methods that seek correspondences by hand-crafted or learnt geometric features, recent point cloud registration methods have tried to apply RGB-D data to achieve more accurate correspondence. However, it is not trivial to effectively fuse the geometric and visual information from these two distinctive modalities, especially for the registration problem. In this work, we propose a new Geometry-Awa…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；SUSTech（南方科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Learning convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with low bitwidth is challenging because performance may drop significantly after quantization. Prior arts often discretize the network weights by carefully tuning hyper-parameters of quantization (e.g. non-uniform stepsize and layer-wise bitwidths), which are complicated and sub-optimal because the full-precision and low-precision models have a large discrepancy. This work presents a novel quantization pipeline, Frequency-Aware Transformation (FAT), which has several appealing benefits. (1) Rather than designing complicated quantizers like existin…
Most visual retrieval applications store feature vectors for downstream matching tasks. These vectors, from where user information can be spied out, will cause privacy leakage if not carefully protected. To mitigate privacy risks, current works primarily utilize non-invertible transformations or fully cryptographic algorithms. However, transformation-based methods usually fail to achieve satisfying matching performances while cryptosystems suffer from heavy computational overheads. In addition, secure levels of current methods should be improved to confront potential adversary attacks. To addr…
Université de Nantes（南特大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；INSERM（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Laboratoire de Mathématiques Jean Leray（让·勒雷数学实验室）；CHU Nantes（南特大学医院）；SFR Santé（健康科学研究联合会）
Correlative imaging workflows are now widely used in bioimaging and aims to image the same sample using at least two different and complementary imaging modalities. Part of the workflow relies on finding the transformation linking a source image to a target image. We are specifically interested in the estimation of registration error in point-based registration. We propose an application of multivariate linear regression to solve the registration problem allowing us to propose a framework for the estimation of the associated error in the case of rigid and affine transformations and with anisot…
