Recently, the research on monocular 3D target detection based on pseudo-LiDAR data has made some progress. In contrast to LiDAR-based algorithms, the robustness of pseudo-LiDAR methods is still inferior. After conducting in-depth experiments, we realized that the main limitations are due to the inaccuracy of the target position and the uncertainty in the depth distribution of the foreground target. These two problems arise from the inaccurate depth estimation. To deal with the aforementioned problems, we propose two innovative solutions. The first is a novel method based on joint image segmentation and geometric constraints, used to predict the target depth and provide the depth prediction confidence measure. The predicted target depth is fused with the overall depth of the scene and results in the optimal target position. For the second, we utilize the target scale, normalized with the Gaussian function, as a priori information. The uncertainty of depth distribution, which can be visualized as long-tail noise, is reduced. With the refined depth information, we convert the optimized depth map into the point cloud representation, called a pseudo-LiDAR point cloud. Finally, we input the pseudo-LiDAR point cloud to the LiDAR-based algorithm to detect the 3D target. We conducted extensive experiments on the challenging KITTI dataset. The results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms various state-of-the-art methods by more than 12.37% and 5.34% on the easy and hard settings of the KITTI validation subset, respectively. On the KITTI test set, our framework also outperformed state-of-the-art methods by 5.1% and 1.76% on the easy and hard settings, respectively.

Humans show micro-expressions (MEs) under some circumstances. MEs are a display of emotions that a human wants to conceal. The recognition of MEs has been applied in various fields. However, automatic ME recognition remains a challenging problem due to two major obstacles. As MEs are typically of short duration and low intensity, it is hard to extract discriminative features from ME videos. Moreover, it is tedious to collect ME data. Existing ME datasets usually contain insufficient video samples. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model, double-stream 3D convolutional neural network (DS-3DCNN), for recognizing MEs captured in video. The recognition framework contains two streams of 3D-CNN. The first extracts spatiotemporal features from the raw ME videos. The second extracts variations of the facial motions within the spatiotemporal domain. To facilitate feature extraction, the subtle motion embedded in a ME is amplified. To address the insufficient ME data, a macro-expression dataset is employed to expand the training sample size. Supervised domain adaptation is adopted in model training in order to bridge the difference between ME and macro-expression datasets. The DS-3DCNN model is evaluated on two publicly available ME datasets. The results show that the model outperforms various state-of-the-art models; in particular, the model outperformed the best model presented in MEGC2019 by more than 6%.

Object detection is a classic image processing problem. For instance, in autonomous driving applications, targets such as cars and pedestrians are detected in the road scene video. Many image-based object detection methods utilizing hand-crafted features have been proposed. Recently, more research has adopted a deep learning approach. Object detectors rely on useful features, such as the object’s boundary, which are extracted via analyzing the image pixels. However, the images captured, for instance, in an outdoor environment, may be degraded due to bad weather such as haze and fog. One possible remedy is to recover the image radiance through the use of a pre-processing method such as image dehazing. We propose a dehazing model for image enhancement. The framework was based on the conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). Our proposed model was improved with two modifications. Various image dehazing datasets were employed for comparative analysis. Our proposed model outperformed other hand-crafted and deep learning-based image dehazing methods by 2dB or more in PSNR. Moreover, we utilized the dehazed images for target detection using the object detector YOLO. In the experimentations, images were degraded by two weather conditions—rain and fog. We demonstrated that the objects detected in images enhanced by our proposed dehazing model were significantly improved over those detected in the degraded images.