Jian Sun

Bio: Jian Sun is an academic researcher from Xi'an Jiaotong University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Object detection & Computer science. The author has an hindex of 109, co-authored 360 publications receiving 239387 citations. Previous affiliations of Jian Sun include French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation & Tsinghua University.

AutoAssign: Differentiable Label Assignment for Dense Object Detection.

Abstract: Determining positive/negative samples for object detection is known as label assignment. Here we present an anchor-free detector named AutoAssign. It requires little human knowledge and achieves appearance-aware through a fully differentiable weighting mechanism. During training, to both satisfy the prior distribution of data and adapt to category characteristics, we present Center Weighting to adjust the category-specific prior distributions. To adapt to object appearances, Confidence Weighting is proposed to adjust the specific assign strategy of each instance. The two weighting modules are then combined to generate positive and negative weights to adjust each location's confidence. Extensive experiments on the MS COCO show that our method steadily surpasses other best sampling strategies by large margins with various backbones. Moreover, our best model achieves 52.1% AP, outperforming all existing one-stage detectors. Besides, experiments on other datasets, e.g., PASCAL VOC, Objects365, and WiderFace, demonstrate the broad applicability of AutoAssign.

Image vectorization using optimized gradient meshes

Abstract: Recently, gradient meshes have been introduced as a powerful vector graphics representation to draw multicolored mesh objects with smooth transitions. Using tools from Abode Illustrator and Corel CorelDraw, a user can manually create gradient meshes even for photo-realistic vector arts, which can be further edited, stylized and animated. In this paper, we present an easy-to-use interactive tool, called optimized gradient mesh, to semi-automatically and quickly create gradient meshes from a raster image. We obtain the optimized gradient mesh by formulating an energy minimization problem. The user can also interactively specify a few vector lines to guide the mesh generation. The resulting optimized gradient mesh is an editable and scalable mesh that otherwise would have taken many hours for a user to manually create.

Instance-sensitive Fully Convolutional Networks

Abstract: Fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been proven very successful for semantic segmentation, but the FCN outputs are unaware of object instances. In this paper, we develop FCNs that are capable of proposing instance-level segment candidates. In contrast to the previous FCN that generates one score map, our FCN is designed to compute a small set of instance-sensitive score maps, each of which is the outcome of a pixel-wise classifier of a relative position to instances. On top of these instance-sensitive score maps, a simple assembling module is able to output instance candidate at each position. In contrast to the recent DeepMask method for segmenting instances, our method does not have any high-dimensional layer related to the mask resolution, but instead exploits image local coherence for estimating instances. We present competitive results of instance segment proposal on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO.

Scalable Face Image Retrieval with Identity-Based Quantization and Multireference Reranking

Abstract: State-of-the-art image retrieval systems achieve scalability by using a bag-of-words representation and textual retrieval methods, but their performance degrades quickly in the face image domain, mainly because they produce visual words with low discriminative power for face images and ignore the special properties of faces. The leading features for face recognition can achieve good retrieval performance, but these features are not suitable for inverted indexing as they are high-dimensional and global and thus not scalable in either computational or storage cost. In this paper, we aim to build a scalable face image retrieval system. For this purpose, we develop a new scalable face representation using both local and global features. In the indexing stage, we exploit special properties of faces to design new component-based local features, which are subsequently quantized into visual words using a novel identity-based quantization scheme. We also use a very small Hamming signature (40 bytes) to encode the discriminative global feature for each face. In the retrieval stage, candidate images are first retrieved from the inverted index of visual words. We then use a new multireference distance to rerank the candidate images using the Hamming signature. On a one millon face database, we show that our local features and global Hamming signatures are complementary-the inverted index based on local features provides candidate images with good recall, while the multireference reranking with global Hamming signature leads to good precision. As a result, our system is not only scalable but also outperforms the linear scan retrieval system using the state-of-the-art face recognition feature in term of the quality.

Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition

Abstract: Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers—8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

Abstract: In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

Abstract: In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation

Abstract: There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ronneber/u-net .

Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition

Abstract: Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers---8x deeper than VGG nets but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.