Li Xu

Bio: Li Xu is an academic researcher from SenseTime. The author has contributed to research in topics: Image restoration & Image processing. The author has an hindex of 38, co-authored 69 publications receiving 9594 citations. Previous affiliations of Li Xu include Shanghai Jiao Tong University & The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Hierarchical Saliency Detection

Abstract: When dealing with objects with complex structures, saliency detection confronts a critical problem - namely that detection accuracy could be adversely affected if salient foreground or background in an image contains small-scale high-contrast patterns. This issue is common in natural images and forms a fundamental challenge for prior methods. We tackle it from a scale point of view and propose a multi-layer approach to analyze saliency cues. The final saliency map is produced in a hierarchical model. Different from varying patch sizes or downsizing images, our scale-based region handling is by finding saliency values optimally in a tree model. Our approach improves saliency detection on many images that cannot be handled well traditionally. A new dataset is also constructed.

Two-phase kernel estimation for robust motion deblurring

Abstract: We discuss a few new motion deblurring problems that are significant to kernel estimation and non-blind deconvolution. We found that strong edges do not always profit kernel estimation, but instead under certain circumstance degrade it. This finding leads to a new metric to measure the usefulness of image edges in motion deblurring and a gradient selection process to mitigate their possible adverse effect. We also propose an efficient and high-quality kernel estimation method based on using the spatial prior and the iterative support detection (ISD) kernel refinement, which avoids hard threshold of the kernel elements to enforce sparsity. We employ the TV-l1 deconvolution model, solved with a new variable substitution scheme to robustly suppress noise.

Unnatural L0 Sparse Representation for Natural Image Deblurring

Abstract: We show in this paper that the success of previous maximum a posterior (MAP) based blur removal methods partly stems from their respective intermediate steps, which implicitly or explicitly create an unnatural representation containing salient image structures. We propose a generalized and mathematically sound L0 sparse expression, together with a new effective method, for motion deblurring. Our system does not require extra filtering during optimization and demonstrates fast energy decreasing, making a small number of iterations enough for convergence. It also provides a unified framework for both uniform and non-uniform motion deblurring. We extensively validate our method and show comparison with other approaches with respect to convergence speed, running time, and result quality.

Image smoothing via L0 gradient minimization

Abstract: We present a new image editing method, particularly effective for sharpening major edges by increasing the steepness of transition while eliminating a manageable degree of low-amplitude structures. The seemingly contradictive effect is achieved in an optimization framework making use of L0 gradient minimization, which can globally control how many non-zero gradients are resulted in to approximate prominent structure in a sparsity-control manner. Unlike other edge-preserving smoothing approaches, our method does not depend on local features, but instead globally locates important edges. It, as a fundamental tool, finds many applications and is particularly beneficial to edge extraction, clip-art JPEG artifact removal, and non-photorealistic effect generation.

Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Image Deconvolution

Abstract: Many fundamental image-related problems involve deconvolution operators. Real blur degradation seldom complies with an ideal linear convolution model due to camera noise, saturation, image compression, to name a few. Instead of perfectly modeling outliers, which is rather challenging from a generative model perspective, we develop a deep convolutional neural network to capture the characteristics of degradation. We note directly applying existing deep neural networks does not produce reasonable results. Our solution is to establish the connection between traditional optimization-based schemes and a neural network architecture where a novel, separable structure is introduced as a reliable support for robust deconvolution against artifacts. Our network contains two submodules, both trained in a supervised manner with proper initialization. They yield decent performance on non-blind image deconvolution compared to previous generative-model based methods.

Going deeper with convolutions

Abstract: We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.

Guided Image Filtering

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel explicit image filter called guided filter. Derived from a local linear model, the guided filter computes the filtering output by considering the content of a guidance image, which can be the input image itself or another different image. The guided filter can be used as an edge-preserving smoothing operator like the popular bilateral filter [1], but it has better behaviors near edges. The guided filter is also a more generic concept beyond smoothing: It can transfer the structures of the guidance image to the filtering output, enabling new filtering applications like dehazing and guided feathering. Moreover, the guided filter naturally has a fast and nonapproximate linear time algorithm, regardless of the kernel size and the intensity range. Currently, it is one of the fastest edge-preserving filters. Experiments show that the guided filter is both effective and efficient in a great variety of computer vision and computer graphics applications, including edge-aware smoothing, detail enhancement, HDR compression, image matting/feathering, dehazing, joint upsampling, etc.

Global contrast based salient region detection

Abstract: Automatic estimation of salient object regions across images, without any prior assumption or knowledge of the contents of the corresponding scenes, enhances many computer vision and computer graphics applications. We introduce a regional contrast based salient object detection algorithm, which simultaneously evaluates global contrast differences and spatial weighted coherence scores. The proposed algorithm is simple, efficient, naturally multi-scale, and produces full-resolution, high-quality saliency maps. These saliency maps are further used to initialize a novel iterative version of GrabCut, namely SaliencyCut, for high quality unsupervised salient object segmentation. We extensively evaluated our algorithm using traditional salient object detection datasets, as well as a more challenging Internet image dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm consistently outperforms 15 existing salient object detection and segmentation methods, yielding higher precision and better recall rates. We also show that our algorithm can be used to efficiently extract salient object masks from Internet images, enabling effective sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) via simple shape comparisons. Despite such noisy internet images, where the saliency regions are ambiguous, our saliency guided image retrieval achieves a superior retrieval rate compared with state-of-the-art SBIR methods, and additionally provides important target object region information.

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.