Semantic Perceptual Image Compression using Deep Convolution Networks

It has long been considered a significant problem to improve the visual quality of lossy image and video compression. Recent advances in computing power together with the availability of large training data sets has increased interest in the application of deep learning cnns to address image recognition and image processing tasks. Here, we present a powerful cnn tailored to the specific task of semantic image understanding to achieve higher visual quality in lossy compression. A modest increase in complexity is incorporated to the encoder which allows a standard, off-the-shelf jpeg decoder to be used. While jpeg encoding may be optimized for generic images, the process is ultimately unaware of the specific content of the image to be compressed. Our technique makes jpeg content-aware by designing and training a model to identify multiple semantic regions in a given image. Unlike object detection techniques, our model does not require labeling of object positions and is able to identify objects in a single pass. We present a new cnn architecture directed specifically to image compression, which generates a map that highlights semantically-salient regions so that they can be encoded at higher quality as compared to background regions. By adding a complete set of features for every class, and then taking a threshold over the sum of all feature activations, we generate a map that highlights semantically-salient regions so that they can be encoded at a better quality compared to background regions. Experiments are presented on the Kodak PhotoCD dataset and the MIT Saliency Benchmark dataset, in which our algorithm achieves higher visual quality for the same compressed size.Comment: Accepted to Data Compression Conference, 11 pages, 5 figure

Attention and Anticipation in Fast Visual-Inertial Navigation

We study a Visual-Inertial Navigation (VIN) problem in which a robot needs to estimate its state using an on-board camera and an inertial sensor, without any prior knowledge of the external environment. We consider the case in which the robot can allocate limited resources to VIN, due to tight computational constraints. Therefore, we answer the following question: under limited resources, what are the most relevant visual cues to maximize the performance of visual-inertial navigation? Our approach has four key ingredients. First, it is task-driven, in that the selection of the visual cues is guided by a metric quantifying the VIN performance. Second, it exploits the notion of anticipation, since it uses a simplified model for forward-simulation of robot dynamics, predicting the utility of a set of visual cues over a future time horizon. Third, it is efficient and easy to implement, since it leads to a greedy algorithm for the selection of the most relevant visual cues. Fourth, it provides formal performance guarantees: we leverage submodularity to prove that the greedy selection cannot be far from the optimal (combinatorial) selection. Simulations and real experiments on agile drones show that our approach ensures state-of-the-art VIN performance while maintaining a lean processing time. In the easy scenarios, our approach outperforms appearance-based feature selection in terms of localization errors. In the most challenging scenarios, it enables accurate visual-inertial navigation while appearance-based feature selection fails to track robot's motion during aggressive maneuvers.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

DISC: Deep Image Saliency Computing via Progressive Representation Learning

Salient object detection increasingly receives attention as an important component or step in several pattern recognition and image processing tasks. Although a variety of powerful saliency models have been intensively proposed, they usually involve heavy feature (or model) engineering based on priors (or assumptions) about the properties of objects and backgrounds. Inspired by the effectiveness of recently developed feature learning, we provide a novel Deep Image Saliency Computing (DISC) framework for fine-grained image saliency computing. In particular, we model the image saliency from both the coarse- and fine-level observations, and utilize the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn the saliency representation in a progressive manner. Specifically, our saliency model is built upon two stacked CNNs. The first CNN generates a coarse-level saliency map by taking the overall image as the input, roughly identifying saliency regions in the global context. Furthermore, we integrate superpixel-based local context information in the first CNN to refine the coarse-level saliency map. Guided by the coarse saliency map, the second CNN focuses on the local context to produce fine-grained and accurate saliency map while preserving object details. For a testing image, the two CNNs collaboratively conduct the saliency computing in one shot. Our DISC framework is capable of uniformly highlighting the objects-of-interest from complex background while preserving well object details. Extensive experiments on several standard benchmarks suggest that DISC outperforms other state-of-the-art methods and it also generalizes well across datasets without additional training. The executable version of DISC is available online: http://vision.sysu.edu.cn/projects/DISC.Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (T-NNLS), 201

Panoramic Vision Transformer for Saliency Detection in 360{\deg} Videos

360$^\circ$ video saliency detection is one of the challenging benchmarks for 360$^\circ$ video understanding since non-negligible distortion and discontinuity occur in the projection of any format of 360$^\circ$ videos, and capture-worthy viewpoint in the omnidirectional sphere is ambiguous by nature. We present a new framework named Panoramic Vision Transformer (PAVER). We design the encoder using Vision Transformer with deformable convolution, which enables us not only to plug pretrained models from normal videos into our architecture without additional modules or finetuning but also to perform geometric approximation only once, unlike previous deep CNN-based approaches. Thanks to its powerful encoder, PAVER can learn the saliency from three simple relative relations among local patch features, outperforming state-of-the-art models for the Wild360 benchmark by large margins without supervision or auxiliary information like class activation. We demonstrate the utility of our saliency prediction model with the omnidirectional video quality assessment task in VQA-ODV, where we consistently improve performance without any form of supervision, including head movement.Comment: Published to ECCV202