Learning Binary Residual Representations for Domain-specific Video Streaming

We study domain-specific video streaming. Specifically, we target a streaming setting where the videos to be streamed from a server to a client are all in the same domain and they have to be compressed to a small size for low-latency transmission. Several popular video streaming services, such as the video game streaming services of GeForce Now and Twitch, fall in this category. While conventional video compression standards such as H.264 are commonly used for this task, we hypothesize that one can leverage the property that the videos are all in the same domain to achieve better video quality. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a novel video compression pipeline. Specifically, we first apply H.264 to compress domain-specific videos. We then train a novel binary autoencoder to encode the leftover domain-specific residual information frame-by-frame into binary representations. These binary representations are then compressed and sent to the client together with the H.264 stream. In our experiments, we show that our pipeline yields consistent gains over standard H.264 compression across several benchmark datasets while using the same channel bandwidth.Comment: Accepted in AAAI'18. Project website at https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2018-02_Learning-Binary-Residua

SegFlow: Joint Learning for Video Object Segmentation and Optical Flow

This paper proposes an end-to-end trainable network, SegFlow, for simultaneously predicting pixel-wise object segmentation and optical flow in videos. The proposed SegFlow has two branches where useful information of object segmentation and optical flow is propagated bidirectionally in a unified framework. The segmentation branch is based on a fully convolutional network, which has been proved effective in image segmentation task, and the optical flow branch takes advantage of the FlowNet model. The unified framework is trained iteratively offline to learn a generic notion, and fine-tuned online for specific objects. Extensive experiments on both the video object segmentation and optical flow datasets demonstrate that introducing optical flow improves the performance of segmentation and vice versa, against the state-of-the-art algorithms.Comment: Accepted in ICCV'17. Code is available at https://sites.google.com/site/yihsuantsai/research/iccv17-segflo

Generative Face Completion

In this paper, we propose an effective face completion algorithm using a deep generative model. Different from well-studied background completion, the face completion task is more challenging as it often requires to generate semantically new pixels for the missing key components (e.g., eyes and mouths) that contain large appearance variations. Unlike existing nonparametric algorithms that search for patches to synthesize, our algorithm directly generates contents for missing regions based on a neural network. The model is trained with a combination of a reconstruction loss, two adversarial losses and a semantic parsing loss, which ensures pixel faithfulness and local-global contents consistency. With extensive experimental results, we demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively that our model is able to deal with a large area of missing pixels in arbitrary shapes and generate realistic face completion results.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 201

PiCANet: Learning Pixel-wise Contextual Attention for Saliency Detection

Contexts play an important role in the saliency detection task. However, given a context region, not all contextual information is helpful for the final task. In this paper, we propose a novel pixel-wise contextual attention network, i.e., the PiCANet, to learn to selectively attend to informative context locations for each pixel. Specifically, for each pixel, it can generate an attention map in which each attention weight corresponds to the contextual relevance at each context location. An attended contextual feature can then be constructed by selectively aggregating the contextual information. We formulate the proposed PiCANet in both global and local forms to attend to global and local contexts, respectively. Both models are fully differentiable and can be embedded into CNNs for joint training. We also incorporate the proposed models with the U-Net architecture to detect salient objects. Extensive experiments show that the proposed PiCANets can consistently improve saliency detection performance. The global and local PiCANets facilitate learning global contrast and homogeneousness, respectively. As a result, our saliency model can detect salient objects more accurately and uniformly, thus performing favorably against the state-of-the-art methods