Jianhuang Lai

Bio: Jianhuang Lai is an academic researcher from Sun Yat-sen University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Facial recognition system & Cluster analysis. The author has an hindex of 34, co-authored 272 publications receiving 3746 citations. Previous affiliations of Jianhuang Lai include Chinese Ministry of Education & Hong Kong Baptist University.

Interactive Two-Stream Decoder for Accurate and Fast Saliency Detection

Abstract: Recently, contour information largely improves the performance of saliency detection. However, the discussion on the correlation between saliency and contour remains scarce. In this paper, we first analyze such correlation and then propose an interactive two-stream decoder to explore multiple cues, including saliency, contour and their correlation. Specifically, our decoder consists of two branches, a saliency branch and a contour branch. Each branch is assigned to learn distinctive features for predicting the corresponding map. Meanwhile, the intermediate connections are forced to learn the correlation by interactively transmitting the features from each branch to the other one. In addition, we develop an adaptive contour loss to automatically discriminate hard examples during learning process. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks well demonstrate that our network achieves competitive performance with a fast speed around 50 FPS. Moreover, our VGG-based model only contains 17.08 million parameters, which is significantly smaller than other VGG-based approaches. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/moothes/ITSD-pytorch.

Learning Modality-Specific Representations for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Abstract: Traditional person re-identification (re-id) methods perform poorly under changing illuminations. This situation can be addressed by using dual-cameras that capture visible images in a bright environment and infrared images in a dark environment. Yet, this scheme needs to solve the visible-infrared matching issue, which is largely under-studied. Matching pedestrians across heterogeneous modalities is extremely challenging because of different visual characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that employs modality-specific networks to tackle with the heterogeneous matching problem. The proposed framework utilizes the modality-related information and extracts modality-specific representations (MSR) by constructing an individual network for each modality. In addition, a cross-modality Euclidean constraint is introduced to narrow the gap between different networks. We also integrate the modality-shared layers into modality-specific networks to extract shareable information and use a modality-shared identity loss to facilitate the extraction of modality-invariant features. Then a modality-specific discriminant metric is learned for each domain to strengthen the discriminative power of MSR. Eventually, we use a view classifier to learn view information. The experiments demonstrate that the MSR effectively improves the performance of deep networks on VI-REID and remarkably outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-View Clustering Based on Belief Propagation

Abstract: The availability of many heterogeneous but related views of data has arisen in numerous clustering problems. Different views encode distinct representations of the same data, which often admit the same underlying cluster structure. The goal of multi-view clustering is to properly combine information from multiple views so as to generate high quality clustering results that are consistent across different views. Based on max-product belief propagation, we propose a novel multi-view clustering algorithm termed multi-view affinity propagation (MVAP). The basic idea is to establish a multi-view clustering model consisting of two components, which measure the within-view clustering quality and the explicit clustering consistency across different views, respectively. Solving this model is NP-hard, and a multi-view affinity propagation is proposed, which works by passing messages both within individual views and across different views. However, the exemplar consistency constraint makes the optimization almost impossible. To this end, by using some previously designed mathematical techniques, the messages as well as the cluster assignment vector computations are simplified to get simple yet functionally equivalent computations. Experimental results on several real-world multi-view datasets show that MVAP outperforms existing multi-view clustering algorithms. It is especially suitable for clustering more than two views.

Early Action Prediction by Soft Regression

Abstract: We propose a novel approach for predicting on-going action with the assistance of a low-cost depth camera. Our approach introduces a soft regression-based early prediction framework. In this framework, we estimate soft labels for the subsequences at different progress levels, jointly learned with an action predictor. Our formulation of soft regression framework 1) overcomes a usual assumption in existing early action prediction systems that the progress level of on-going sequence is given in the testing stage; and 2) presents a theoretical framework to better resolve the ambiguity and uncertainty of subsequences at early performing stage. The proposed soft regression framework is further enhanced in order to take the relationships among subsequences and the discrepancy of soft labels over different classes into consideration, so that a Multiple Soft labels Recurrent Neural Network (MSRNN) is finally developed. For real-time performance, we also introduce a new RGB-D feature called “local accumulative frame feature (LAFF)”, which can be computed efficiently by constructing an integral feature map. Our experiments on three RGB-D benchmark datasets and an unconstrained RGB action set demonstrate that the proposed regression-based early action prediction model outperforms existing models significantly and also show that the early action prediction on RGB-D sequence is more accurate than that on RGB channel.

Interleaved Structured Sparse Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of designing efficient convolutional neural network architectures with the interest in eliminating the redundancy in convolution kernels. In addition to structured sparse kernels, low-rank kernels and the product of low-rank kernels, the product of structured sparse kernels, which is a framework for interpreting the recently-developed interleaved group convolutions (IGC) and its variants (e.g., Xception), has been attracting increasing interests. Motivated by the observation that the convolutions contained in a group convolution in IGC can be further decomposed in the same manner, we present a modularized building block, IGC-V2: interleaved structured sparse convolutions. It generalizes interleaved group convolutions, which is composed of two structured sparse kernels, to the product of more structured sparse kernels, further eliminating the redundancy. We present the complementary condition and the balance condition to guide the design of structured sparse kernels, obtaining a balance among three aspects: model size, computation complexity and classification accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the advantage on the balance among these three aspects compared to interleaved group convolutions and Xception, and competitive performance compared to other state-of-the-art architecture design methods.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Abstract: Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design

Abstract: Currently, the neural network architecture design is mostly guided by the indirect metric of computation complexity, i.e., FLOPs. However, the direct metric, e.g., speed, also depends on the other factors such as memory access cost and platform characterics. Thus, this work proposes to evaluate the direct metric on the target platform, beyond only considering FLOPs. Based on a series of controlled experiments, this work derives several practical guidelines for efficient network design. Accordingly, a new architecture is presented, called ShuffleNet V2. Comprehensive ablation experiments verify that our model is the state-of-the-art in terms of speed and accuracy tradeoff.

Object Detection With Deep Learning: A Review

Abstract: Due to object detection’s close relationship with video analysis and image understanding, it has attracted much research attention in recent years. Traditional object detection methods are built on handcrafted features and shallow trainable architectures. Their performance easily stagnates by constructing complex ensembles that combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context from object detectors and scene classifiers. With the rapid development in deep learning, more powerful tools, which are able to learn semantic, high-level, deeper features, are introduced to address the problems existing in traditional architectures. These models behave differently in network architecture, training strategy, and optimization function. In this paper, we provide a review of deep learning-based object detection frameworks. Our review begins with a brief introduction on the history of deep learning and its representative tool, namely, the convolutional neural network. Then, we focus on typical generic object detection architectures along with some modifications and useful tricks to improve detection performance further. As distinct specific detection tasks exhibit different characteristics, we also briefly survey several specific tasks, including salient object detection, face detection, and pedestrian detection. Experimental analyses are also provided to compare various methods and draw some meaningful conclusions. Finally, several promising directions and tasks are provided to serve as guidelines for future work in both object detection and relevant neural network-based learning systems.