As a generic modeling tool, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely employed in image generation and translation tasks. However, when fed with a flat input, current CNN models may fail to generate vivid results due to the spatially shared convolution kernels. We call it the flatness degradation of CNNs. Unfortunately, such degradation is the greatest obstacles to generate a spatially-variant output from a flat input, which has been barely discussed in the previous literature. To tackle this problem, we propose a model agnostic solution, i.e. Noise Incentive Block (NIB), which serves as a generic plug-in for any CNN generation model. The key idea is to break the flat input condition while keeping the intactness of the original information. Specifically, the NIB perturbs the input data symmetrically with a noise map and reassembles them in the feature domain as driven by the objective function. Extensive experiments show that existing CNN models equipped with NIB survive from the flatness degradation and are able to generate visually better results with richer details in some specific image generation tasks given flat inputs, e.g. semantic image synthesis, data-hidden image generation, and deep neural dithering.
Learning Positive-Incentive Point Sampling in Neural Implicit Fields for Object Pose Estimation
College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（智能科学与技术学院，国防科技大学）；College of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology（计算机科学学院，国防科技大学）
The performance of convolutional neural networks (CNN) depends heavily on their architectures. Transfer learning performance of a CNN relies quite strongly on selection of its trainable layers. Selecting the most effective update layers for a certain target dataset often requires expert knowledge on CNN architecture which many practitioners do not posses. General users prefer to use an available architecture (e.g. GoogleNet, ResNet, EfficientNet etc.) that is developed by domain experts. With the ever-growing number of layers, it is increasingly becoming quite difficult and cumbersome to handp…
Recently, deep learning methods have made a significant improvement in compressive sensing image reconstruction task. In the existing methods, the scene is measured block by block due to the high computational complexity. This results in block-effect of the recovered images. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional measurement network, where the scene is measured as a whole. The proposed method powerfully removes the block-effect since the structure information of scene images is preserved. To make the measure more flexible, the measurement and the recovery parts are jointly trained. Fr…
National Cheng Kung University（台湾成功大学）；Kun Shan University（昆山科技大学）；National Cheng Kung University Hospital（台湾成功大学医院）
In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully implemented to various image recognition applications, such as medical image analysis, object detection, and image segmentation. Many studies and applications have been working on improving the performance of CNN algorithms and models. The strategies that aim to improve the performance of CNNs can be grouped into three major approaches: (1) deeper and wider network architecture, (2) automatic architecture search, and (3) convolutional attention block. Unlike approaches (1) and (2), the convolutional attention block ap…
The shapes and morphology of the organs and tissues are important prior knowledge in medical imaging recognition and segmentation. The morphological operation is a well-known method for morphological feature extraction. As the morphological operation is performed well in hand-crafted image segmentation techniques, it is also promising to design an approach to approximate morphological operation in the convolutional networks. However, using the traditional convolutional neural network as a black-box is usually hard to specify the morphological operation action. Here, we introduced a 3D morpholo…
Convolutional neural networks have become a popular research in the field of finger vein recognition because of their powerful image feature representation. However, most researchers focus on improving the performance of the network by increasing the CNN depth and width, which often requires high computational effort. Moreover, we can notice that not only the importance of pixels in different channels is different, but also the importance of pixels in different positions of the same channel is different. To reduce the computational effort and to take into account the different importance of pi…
There are two main streams in up-to-date image denoising algorithms: non-local self similarity (NSS) prior based methods and convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods. The NSS based methods are favorable on images with regular and repetitive patterns while the CNN based methods perform better on irregular structures. In this paper, we propose a block-matching convolutional neural network (BMCNN) method that combines NSS prior and CNN. Initially, similar local patches in the input image are integrated into a 3D block. In order to prevent the noise from messing up the block matching, we f…
This paper addresses representational block named Hierarchical-Split Block, which can be taken as a plug-and-play block to upgrade existing convolutional neural networks, improves model performance significantly in a network. Hierarchical-Split Block contains many hierarchical split and concatenate connections within one single residual block. We find multi-scale features is of great importance for numerous vision tasks. Moreover, Hierarchical-Split block is very flexible and efficient, which provides a large space of potential network architectures for different applications. In this work, we…
Deep convolutional neural networks have demonstrated promising performance on image classification tasks, but the manual design process becomes more and more complex due to the fast depth growth and the increasingly complex topologies of convolutional neural networks. As a result, neural architecture search has emerged to automatically design convolutional neural networks that outperform handcrafted counterparts. However, the computational cost is immense, e.g. 22,400 GPU-days and 2,000 GPU-days for two outstanding neural architecture search works named NAS and NASNet, respectively, which moti…
It is challenging to bridge the performance gap between Binary CNN (BCNN) and Floating point CNN (FCNN). We observe that, this performance gap leads to substantial residuals between intermediate feature maps of BCNN and FCNN. To minimize the performance gap, we enforce BCNN to produce similar intermediate feature maps with the ones of FCNN. This training strategy, i.e., optimizing each binary convolutional block with block-wise distillation loss derived from FCNN, leads to a more effective optimization to BCNN. It also motivates us to update the binary convolutional block architecture to facil…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Lunit Inc.（Lunit公司）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
We propose Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), a simple yet effective attention module for feed-forward convolutional neural networks. Given an intermediate feature map, our module sequentially infers attention maps along two separate dimensions, channel and spatial, then the attention maps are multiplied to the input feature map for adaptive feature refinement. Because CBAM is a lightweight and general module, it can be integrated into any CNN architectures seamlessly with negligible overheads and is end-to-end trainable along with base CNNs. We validate our CBAM through extensive ex…
Compressive sensing (CS), aiming to reconstruct an image/signal from a small set of random measurements has attracted considerable attentions in recent years. Due to the high dimensionality of images, previous CS methods mainly work on image blocks to avoid the huge requirements of memory and computation, i.e., image blocks are measured with Gaussian random matrices, and the whole images are recovered from the reconstructed image blocks. Though efficient, such methods suffer from serious blocking artifacts. In this paper, we propose a convolutional CS framework that senses the whole image usin…
While convolutional sparse representations enjoy a number of useful properties, they have received limited attention for image reconstruction problems. The present paper compares the performance of block-based and convolutional sparse representations in the removal of Gaussian white noise. While the usual formulation of the convolutional sparse coding problem is slightly inferior to the block-based representations in this problem, the performance of the convolutional form can be boosted beyond that of the block-based form by the inclusion of suitable penalties on the gradients of the coefficie…
Traditional intra prediction methods for HEVC rely on using the nearest reference lines for predicting a block, which ignore much richer context between the current block and its neighboring blocks and therefore cause inaccurate prediction especially when weak spatial correlation exists between the current block and the reference lines. To overcome this problem, in this paper, an intra prediction convolutional neural network (IPCNN) is proposed for intra prediction, which exploits the rich context of the current block and therefore is capable of improving the accuracy of predicting the current…
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
Deep learning has shown promising results on many machine learning tasks but DL models are often complex networks with large number of neurons and layers, and recently, complex layer structures known as building blocks. Finding the best deep model requires a combination of finding both the right architecture and the correct set of parameters appropriate for that architecture. In addition, this complexity (in terms of layer types, number of neurons, and number of layers) also present problems with generalization since larger networks are easier to overfit to the data. In this paper, we propose …
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Portland State University（波特兰州立大学）
Convolutional neural networks are prevailing in deep learning tasks. However, they suffer from massive cost issues when working on mobile devices. Network pruning is an effective method of model compression to handle such problems. This paper presents a novel structured network pruning method with auxiliary gating structures which assigns importance marks to blocks in backbone network as a criterion when pruning. Block-wise pruning is then realized by proposed voting strategy, which is different from prevailing methods who prune a model in small granularity like channel-wise. We further develo…
