A Reverse Hierarchy Model for Predicting Eye Fixations

A number of psychological and physiological evidences suggest that early visual attention works in a coarse-to-fine way, which lays a basis for the reverse hierarchy theory (RHT). This theory states that attention propagates from the top level of the visual hierarchy that processes gist and abstract information of input, to the bottom level that processes local details. Inspired by the theory, we develop a computational model for saliency detection in images. First, the original image is downsampled to different scales to constitute a pyramid. Then, saliency on each layer is obtained by image super-resolution reconstruction from the layer above, which is defined as unpredictability from this coarse-to-fine reconstruction. Finally, saliency on each layer of the pyramid is fused into stochastic fixations through a probabilistic model, where attention initiates from the top layer and propagates downward through the pyramid. Extensive experiments on two standard eye-tracking datasets show that the proposed method can achieve competitive results with state-of-the-art models.Comment: CVPR 2014, 27th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). CVPR 201

SASA: Saliency-Aware Self-Adaptive Snapshot Compressive Imaging

The ability of snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) systems to efficiently capture high-dimensional (HD) data depends on the advent of novel optical designs to sample the HD data as two-dimensional (2D) compressed measurements. Nonetheless, the traditional SCI scheme is fundamentally limited, due to the complete disregard for high-level information in the sampling process. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we pave the first mile toward the advanced design of adaptive coding masks for SCI. Specifically, we propose an efficient and effective algorithm to generate coding masks with the assistance of saliency detection, in a low-cost and low-power fashion. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Code is available at: https://github.com/IndigoPurple/SASAComment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Multi-Channel Deep Networks for Block-Based Image Compressive Sensing

Incorporating deep neural networks in image compressive sensing (CS) receives intensive attentions recently. As deep network approaches learn the inverse mapping directly from the CS measurements, a number of models have to be trained, each of which corresponds to a sampling rate. This may potentially degrade the performance of image CS, especially when multiple sampling rates are assigned to different blocks within an image. In this paper, we develop a multi-channel deep network for block-based image CS with performance significantly exceeding the current state-of-the-art methods. The significant performance improvement of the model is attributed to block-based sampling rates allocation and model-level removal of blocking artifacts. Specifically, the image blocks with a variety of sampling rates can be reconstructed in a single model by exploiting inter-block correlation. At the same time, the initially reconstructed blocks are reassembled into a full image to remove blocking artifacts within the network by unrolling a hand-designed block-based CS algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art CS methods by a large margin in terms of objective metrics, PSNR, SSIM, and subjective visual quality.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

MB-RACS: Measurement-Bounds-based Rate-Adaptive Image Compressed Sensing Network

Conventional compressed sensing (CS) algorithms typically apply a uniform sampling rate to different image blocks. A more strategic approach could be to allocate the number of measurements adaptively, based on each image block's complexity. In this paper, we propose a Measurement-Bounds-based Rate-Adaptive Image Compressed Sensing Network (MB-RACS) framework, which aims to adaptively determine the sampling rate for each image block in accordance with traditional measurement bounds theory. Moreover, since in real-world scenarios statistical information about the original image cannot be directly obtained, we suggest a multi-stage rate-adaptive sampling strategy. This strategy sequentially adjusts the sampling ratio allocation based on the information gathered from previous samplings. We formulate the multi-stage rate-adaptive sampling as a convex optimization problem and address it using a combination of Newton's method and binary search techniques. Additionally, we enhance our decoding process by incorporating skip connections between successive iterations to facilitate a richer transmission of feature information across iterations. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed MB-RACS method surpasses current leading methods, with experimental evidence also underscoring the effectiveness of each module within our proposed framework

Adaptive Sensing and Processing for Some Computer Vision Problems

This dissertation is concerned with adaptive sensing and processing in computer vision, specifically through the application of computer vision techniques to non-standard sensors. In the first part, we adapt techniques designed to solve the classical computer vision problem of gradient-based surface reconstruction to the problem of phase unwrapping that presents itself in applications such as interferometric synthetic aperture radar. Specifically, we propose a new formulation of and solution to the classical two-dimensional phase unwrapping problem. As is usually done, we use the wrapped principal phase gradient field as a measurement of the absolute phase gradient field. Since this model rarely holds in practice, we explicitly enforce integrability of the gradient measurements through a sparse error-correction model. Using a novel energy-minimization functional, we formulate the phase unwrapping task as a generalized lasso problem. We then jointly estimate the absolute phase and the sparse measurement errors using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Using an interferometric synthetic aperture radar noise model, we evaluate our technique for several synthetic surfaces and compare the results to recently-proposed phase unwrapping techniques. Our method applies new ideas from convex optimization and sparse regularization to this well-studied problem. In the second part, we consider the problem of controlling and processing measurements from a non-traditional, compressive sensing (CS) camera in real time. We focus on how to control the number of measurements it acquires such that this number remains proportional to the amount of foreground information currently present in the scene under observations. To this end, we provide two novel adaptive-rate CS strategies for sparse, time-varying signals using side information. The first method utilizes extra cross-validation measurements, and the second exploits extra low-resolution measurements. Unlike the majority of current CS techniques, we do not assume that we know an upper bound on the number of significant coefficients pertaining to the images that comprise the video sequence. Instead, we use the side information to predict this quantity for each upcoming image. Our techniques specify a fixed number of spatially-multiplexed CS measurements to acquire, and they adjust this quantity from image to image. Our strategies are developed in the specific context of background subtraction for surveillance video, and we experimentally validate the proposed methods on real video sequences. Finally, we consider a problem motivated by the application of active pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera control in response to visual saliency. We extend the classical notion of this concept to multi-image data collected using a stationary PTZ camera by requiring consistency: the property that each saliency map in the set of those that are generated should assign the same saliency value to distinct regions of the environment that appear in more than one image. We show that processing each image independently will often fail to provide a consistent measure of saliency, and that using an image mosaic to quantify saliency suffers from several drawbacks. We then propose ray saliency: a mosaic-free method for calculating a consistent measure of bottom-up saliency. Experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach are presented