Light field (LF) technology is considered as a promising way for providing a high-quality virtual reality (VR) content. However, such an imaging technology produces a large amount of data requiring efficient LF image compression solutions. In this paper, we propose a LF image coding method based on a view synthesis and view quality enhancement techniques. Instead of transmitting all the LF views, only a sparse set of reference views are encoded and transmitted, while the remaining views are synthesized at the decoder side. The transmitted views are encoded using the versatile video coding (VVC) standard and are used as reference views to synthesize the dropped views. The selection of non-reference dropped views is performed using a rate-distortion optimization based on the VVC temporal scalability. The dropped views are reconstructed using the LF dual discriminator GAN (LF-D2GAN) model. In addition, to ensure that the quality of the views is consistent, at the decoder, a quality enhancement procedure is performed on the reconstructed views allowing smooth navigation across views. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides high coding performance and overcomes the state-of-the-art LF image compression methods by -36.22% in terms of BD-BR and 1.35 dB in BD-PSNR. The web page of this work is available at https://naderbakir79.github.io/LFD2GAN.html.
Light field technology represents a viable path for providing a high-quality VR content. However, such an imaging system generates a high amount of data leading to an urgent need for LF image compression solution. In this paper, we propose an efficient LF image coding scheme based on view synthesis. Instead of transmitting all the LF views, only some of them are coded and transmitted, while the remaining views are dropped. The transmitted views are coded using Versatile Video Coding (VVC) and used as reference views to synthesize the missing views at decoder side. The dropped views are generat…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Versatile Video Coding (H.266/VVC) standard achieves better image quality when keeping the same bits than any other conventional image codec, such as BPG, JPEG, and etc. However, it is still attractive and challenging to improve the image quality with high compression ratio on the basis of traditional coding techniques. In this paper, we design the multi-scale grouped dense network (MSGDN) to further reduce the compression artifacts by combining the multi-scale and grouped dense block, which are integrated as the post-process network of VVC intra coding. Besides, to improve the subjective qual…
In this work, we propose a method for training distributed GAN with sequential temporary discriminators. Our proposed method tackles the challenge of training GAN in the federated learning manner: How to update the generator with a flow of temporary discriminators? We apply our proposed method to learn a self-adaptive generator with a series of local discriminators from multiple data centers. We show our design of loss function indeed learns the correct distribution with provable guarantees. The empirical experiments show that our approach is capable of generating synthetic data which is pract…
CUHK（香港中文大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）；UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
Discriminator plays a vital role in training generative adversarial networks (GANs) via distinguishing real and synthesized samples. While the real data distribution remains the same, the synthesis distribution keeps varying because of the evolving generator, and thus effects a corresponding change to the bi-classification task for the discriminator. We argue that a discriminator with an on-the-fly adjustment on its capacity can better accommodate such a time-varying task. A comprehensive empirical study confirms that the proposed training strategy, termed as DynamicD, improves the synthesis p…
Korea Advances Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院（KAist））
Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) is a very active research field. This paper addresses SISR by using a GAN-based approach with dual discriminators and incorporating it with an attention mechanism. The experimental results show that GDCA can generate sharper and high pleasing images compare to other conventional methods.
GAN-HA: A generative adversarial network with a novel heterogeneous dual-discriminator network and a new attention-based fusion strategy for infrared and visible image fusion
College of New Materials and New Energies, Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学新材料与新能源学院）
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are well known for their unsupervised learning capabilities. A recent success in the field of astronomy is deblending two overlapping galaxy images via a branched GAN model. However, it remains a significant challenge to comprehend how the network works, which is particularly difficult for non-expert users. This research focuses on behaviors of one of the network's major components, the Discriminator, which plays a vital role but is often overlooked, Specifically, we enhance the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) scheme to generate a heatmap-based vis…
As an important and challenging problem, few-shot image generation aims at generating realistic images through training a GAN model given few samples. A typical solution for few-shot generation is to transfer a well-trained GAN model from a data-rich source domain to the data-deficient target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised transfer scheme termed D3T-GAN, addressing the cross-domain GANs transfer in few-shot image generation. Specifically, we design two individual strategies to transfer knowledge between generators and discriminators, respectively. To transfer knowled…
Graduate School of Fundamental Science and Engineering, Waseda University（早稻田大学基础科学与工程研究院）
This paper presents Capsule GAN, a Generative adversarial network using Capsule Network not only in the discriminator but also in the generator. Recently, Generative adversarial networks (GANs) has been intensively studied. However, generating images by GANs is difficult. Therefore, GANs sometimes generate poor quality images. These GANs use convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, CNNs have the defect that the relational information between features of the image may be lost. Capsule Network, proposed by Hinton in 2017, overcomes the defect of CNNs. Capsule GAN reported previously uses C…
Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Though recent research has achieved remarkable progress in generating realistic images with generative adversarial networks (GANs), the lack of training stability is still a lingering concern of most GANs, especially on high-resolution inputs and complex datasets. Since the randomly generated distribution can hardly overlap with the real distribution, training GANs often suffers from the gradient vanishing problem. A number of approaches have been proposed to address this issue by constraining the discriminator's capabilities using empirical techniques, like weight clipping, gradient penalty, …
For steel product manufacturing in indoor factories, steel defect detection is important for quality control. For example, a steel sheet is extremely delicate, and must be accurately inspected. However, to maintain the painted steel parts of the infrastructure around a severe outdoor environment, corrosion detection is critical for predictive maintenance. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose application for steel anomaly detection that consists of the following four components. The first, a learner, is a unit image classification network to determine whether the region of interest or ba…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
In this paper, we propose a data privacy-preserving and communication efficient distributed GAN learning framework named Distributed Asynchronized Discriminator GAN (AsynDGAN). Our proposed framework aims to train a central generator learns from distributed discriminator, and use the generated synthetic image solely to train the segmentation model.We validate the proposed framework on the application of health entities learning problem which is known to be privacy sensitive. Our experiments show that our approach: 1) could learn the real image's distribution from multiple datasets without shar…
Criteo Inc.（科韬公司）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Amazon（亚马逊）；Linkedin Corporation（领英公司）
For a given image generation problem, the intrinsic image manifold is often low dimensional. We use the intuition that it is much better to train the GAN generator by minimizing the distributional distance between real and generated images in a small dimensional feature space representing such a manifold than on the original pixel-space. We use the feature space of the GAN discriminator for such a representation. For distributional distance, we employ one of two choices: the Fréchet distance or direct optimal transport (OT); these respectively lead us to two new GAN methods: Fréchet-GAN and OT…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Sichuan University（四川大学）；Shanghai Center for Brain Science and Brain-inspired Technology（上海脑科学与类脑研究中心）
LDCT has drawn major attention in the medical imaging field due to the potential health risks of CT-associated X-ray radiation to patients. Reducing the radiation dose, however, decreases the quality of the reconstructed images, which consequently compromises the diagnostic performance. Various deep learning techniques have been introduced to improve the image quality of LDCT images through denoising. GANs-based denoising methods usually leverage an additional classification network, i.e. discriminator, to learn the most discriminate difference between the denoised and normal-dose images and, …
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；CSIRO’s Data61（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
The goal of Image-to-image (I2I) translation is to transfer an image from a source domain to a target domain, which has recently drawn increasing attention. One major branch of this research is to formulate I2I translation based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). As a zero-sum game, GAN can be reformulated as a Partially-observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP) for generators, where generators cannot access full state information of their environments. This formulation illustrates the information insufficiency in the GAN training. To mitigate this problem, we propose to add a communicati…
NVIDIA Corporation（英伟达公司）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is now regarded as the gold standard for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). However, PET imaging can be prohibitive in terms of cost and planning, and is also among the imaging techniques with the highest dosage of radiation. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), in contrast, is more widely available and provides more flexibility when setting the desired image resolution. Unfortunately, the diagnosis of AD using MRI is difficult due to the very subtle physiological differences between healthy and AD subjects visible on MRI. As a result, many attempts have…
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）
Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) have been used in many image processing tasks. However, they still have serious problems maintaining the balance between conditioning the output on the input and creating the output with the desired distribution based on the corresponding ground truth. The traditional cGANs, similar to most conventional GANs, suffer from vanishing gradients, which backpropagate from the discriminator to the generator. Moreover, the traditional cGANs are sensitive to architectural changes due to previously mentioned gradient problems. Therefore, balancing the …
School of Electronic Information and Communication, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学电子信息与通信学院）；Shenzhen Research Institute, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学深圳研究院）；Discipline of ICT, University of Tasmania（塔斯马尼亚大学信息与通信技术学科）；School of Information Science and Technology, Nantong University（南通大学信息科学与技术学院）
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been a popular deep generative model for real-world applications. Despite many recent efforts on GANs that have been contributed, mode collapse and instability of GANs are still open problems caused by their adversarial optimization difficulties. In this paper, motivated by the cooperative co-evolutionary algorithm, we propose a Cooperative Dual Evolution based Generative Adversarial Network (CDE-GAN) to circumvent these drawbacks. In essence, CDE-GAN incorporates dual evolution with respect to the generator(s) and discriminators into a unified evolu…
Optimizing the discriminator in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to completion in the inner training loop is computationally prohibitive, and on finite datasets would result in overfitting. To address this, a common update strategy is to alternate between k optimization steps for the discriminator D and one optimization step for the generator G. This strategy is repeated in various GAN algorithms where k is selected empirically. In this paper, we show that this update strategy is not optimal in terms of accuracy and convergence speed, and propose a new update strategy for Wasserstein GAN…
