Learning to Generate 3D Training Data

Human-level visual 3D perception ability has long been pursued by researchers in computer vision, computer graphics, and robotics. Recent years have seen an emerging line of works using synthetic images to train deep networks for single image 3D perception. Synthetic images rendered by graphics engines are a promising source for training deep neural networks because it comes with perfect 3D ground truth for free. However, the 3D shapes and scenes to be rendered are largely made manual. Besides, it is challenging to ensure that synthetic images collected this way can help train a deep network to perform well on real images. This is because graphics generation pipelines require numerous design decisions such as the selection of 3D shapes and the placement of the camera. In this dissertation, we propose automatic generation pipelines of synthetic data that aim to improve the task performance of a trained network. We explore both supervised and unsupervised directions for automatic optimization of 3D decisions. For supervised learning, we demonstrate how to optimize 3D parameters such that a trained network can generalize well to real images. We first show that we can construct a pure synthetic 3D shape to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a shape-from-shading benchmark. We further parameterize the decisions as a vector and propose a hybrid gradient approach to efficiently optimize the vector towards usefulness. Our hybrid gradient is able to outperform classic black-box approaches on a wide selection of 3D perception tasks. For unsupervised learning, we propose a novelty metric for 3D parameter evolution based on deep autoregressive models. We show that without any extrinsic motivation, the novelty computed from autoregressive models alone is helpful. Our novelty metric can consistently encourage a random synthetic generator to produce more useful training data for downstream 3D perception tasks.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163240/1/ydawei_1.pd

Deep Unrolling for Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting

Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) has emerged as a promising quantitative MR imaging approach. Deep learning methods have been proposed for MRF and demonstrated improved performance over classical compressed sensing algorithms. However many of these end-to-end models are physics-free, while consistency of the predictions with respect to the physical forward model is crucial for reliably solving inverse problems. To address this, recently [1] proposed a proximal gradient descent framework that directly incorporates the forward acquisition and Bloch dynamic models within an unrolled learning mechanism. However, [1] only evaluated the unrolled model on synthetic data using Cartesian sampling trajectories. In this paper, as a complementary to [1], we investigate other choices of encoders to build the proximal neural network, and evaluate the deep unrolling algorithm on real accelerated MRF scans with non-Cartesian k-space sampling trajectories.Comment: Tech report. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2006.1527

Deep Decomposition Learning for Inverse Imaging Problems

Deep learning is emerging as a new paradigm for solving inverse imaging problems. However, the deep learning methods often lack the assurance of traditional physics-based methods due to the lack of physical information considerations in neural network training and deploying. The appropriate supervision and explicit calibration by the information of the physic model can enhance the neural network learning and its practical performance. In this paper, inspired by the geometry that data can be decomposed by two components from the null-space of the forward operator and the range space of its pseudo-inverse, we train neural networks to learn the two components and therefore learn the decomposition, i.e. we explicitly reformulate the neural network layers as learning range-nullspace decomposition functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We empirically show that the proposed framework demonstrates superior performance over recent deep residual learning, unrolled learning and nullspace learning on tasks including compressive sensing medical imaging and natural image super-resolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/edongdongchen/DDN.Comment: To appear in ECCV 202

Interpretable Hyperspectral AI: When Non-Convex Modeling meets Hyperspectral Remote Sensing

Hyperspectral imaging, also known as image spectrometry, is a landmark technique in geoscience and remote sensing (RS). In the past decade, enormous efforts have been made to process and analyze these hyperspectral (HS) products mainly by means of seasoned experts. However, with the ever-growing volume of data, the bulk of costs in manpower and material resources poses new challenges on reducing the burden of manual labor and improving efficiency. For this reason, it is, therefore, urgent to develop more intelligent and automatic approaches for various HS RS applications. Machine learning (ML) tools with convex optimization have successfully undertaken the tasks of numerous artificial intelligence (AI)-related applications. However, their ability in handling complex practical problems remains limited, particularly for HS data, due to the effects of various spectral variabilities in the process of HS imaging and the complexity and redundancy of higher dimensional HS signals. Compared to the convex models, non-convex modeling, which is capable of characterizing more complex real scenes and providing the model interpretability technically and theoretically, has been proven to be a feasible solution to reduce the gap between challenging HS vision tasks and currently advanced intelligent data processing models

Image Processing and Machine Learning for Hyperspectral Unmixing: An Overview and the HySUPP Python Package

Spectral pixels are often a mixture of the pure spectra of the materials, called endmembers, due to the low spatial resolution of hyperspectral sensors, double scattering, and intimate mixtures of materials in the scenes. Unmixing estimates the fractional abundances of the endmembers within the pixel. Depending on the prior knowledge of endmembers, linear unmixing can be divided into three main groups: supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised (blind) linear unmixing. Advances in Image processing and machine learning substantially affected unmixing. This paper provides an overview of advanced and conventional unmixing approaches. Additionally, we draw a critical comparison between advanced and conventional techniques from the three categories. We compare the performance of the unmixing techniques on three simulated and two real datasets. The experimental results reveal the advantages of different unmixing categories for different unmixing scenarios. Moreover, we provide an open-source Python-based package available at https://github.com/BehnoodRasti/HySUPP to reproduce the results