This article presents a novel person reidentification model, named multihead self-attention network (MHSA-Net), to prune unimportant information and capture key local information from person images. MHSA-Net contains two main novel components: multihead self-attention branch (MHSAB) and attention competition mechanism (ACM). The MHSAB adaptively captures key local person information and then produces effective diversity embeddings of an image for the person matching. The ACM further helps filter out attention noise and nonkey information. Through extensive ablation studies, we verified that the MHSAB and ACM both contribute to the performance improvement of the MHSA-Net. Our MHSA-Net achieves competitive performance in the standard and occluded person Re-ID tasks.

In this paper, we propose a novel person Re-ID model, Consecutive Batch DropBlock Network (CBDB-Net), to capture the attentive and robust person descriptor for the person Re-ID task. The CBDB-Net contains two novel designs: the Consecutive Batch DropBlock Module (CBDBM) and the Elastic Loss (EL). In the Consecutive Batch DropBlock Module (CBDBM), we firstly conduct uniform partition on the feature maps. And then, we independently and continuously drop each patch from top to bottom on the feature maps, which can output multiple incomplete feature maps. In the training stage, these multiple incomplete features can better encourage the Re-ID model to capture the robust person descriptor for the Re-ID task. In the Elastic Loss (EL), we design a novel weight control item to help the Re-ID model adaptively balance hard sample pairs and easy sample pairs in the whole training process. Through an extensive set of ablation studies, we verify that the Consecutive Batch DropBlock Module (CBDBM) and the Elastic Loss (EL) each contribute to the performance boosts of CBDB-Net. We demonstrate that our CBDB-Net can achieve the competitive performance on the three standard person Re-ID datasets (the Market-1501, the DukeMTMC-Re-ID, and the CUHK03 dataset), three occluded Person Re-ID datasets (the Occluded DukeMTMC, the Partial-REID, and the Partial iLIDS dataset), and a general image retrieval dataset (In-Shop Clothes Retrieval dataset).

Recent advancements in blind image quality assessment (BIQA) are primarily propelled by deep learning technologies. While leveraging transformers can effectively capture long-range dependencies and contextual details in images, the significance of local information in image quality assessment can be undervalued. To address this challenging problem, we propose a novel feature enhancement framework tailored for BIQA. Specifically, we devise an Adaptive Graph Attention (AGA) module to simultaneously augment both local and contextual information. It not only refines the post-transformer features into an adaptive graph, facilitating local information enhancement, but also exploits interactions amongst diverse feature channels. The proposed technique can better reduce redundant information introduced during feature updates compared to traditional convolution layers, streamlining the self-updating process for feature maps. Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art BIQA models in predicting the perceived quality of images. The code of the model will be made publicly available.

This paper presents a new framework, Knowledge-Transfer Generative Adversarial Network (KT-GAN), for fine-grained text-to-image generation. We introduce two novel mechanisms: an Alternate Attention-Transfer Mechanism (AATM) and a Semantic Distillation Mechanism (SDM), to help generator better bridge the cross-domain gap between text and image. The AATM updates word attention weights and attention weights of image sub-regions alternately, to progressively highlight important word information and enrich details of synthesized images. The SDM uses the image encoder trained in the Image-to-Image task to guide training of the text encoder in the Text-to-Image task, for generating better text features and higher-quality images. With extensive experimental validation on two public datasets, our KT-GAN outperforms the baseline method significantly, and also achieves the competive results over different evaluation metrics.

This article presents a new text-to-image (T2I) generation model, named distribution regularization generative adversarial network (DR-GAN), to generate images from text descriptions from improved distribution learning. In DR-GAN, we introduce two novel modules: a semantic disentangling module (SDM) and a distribution normalization module (DNM). SDM combines the spatial self-attention mechanism (SSAM) and a new semantic disentangling loss (SDL) to help the generator distill key semantic information for the image generation. DNM uses a variational auto-encoder (VAE) to normalize and denoise the image latent distribution, which can help the discriminator better distinguish synthesized images from real images. DNM also adopts a distribution adversarial loss (DAL) to guide the generator to align with normalized real image distributions in the latent space. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrated that our DR-GAN achieved a competitive performance in the T2I task. The code link: https://github.com/Tan-H-C/DR-GAN-Distribution-Regularization-for-Text-to-Image-Generation.

Synthesizing photo-realistic images based on text descriptions is a challenging image generation problem. Although many recent approaches have significantly advanced the performance of text-to-image generation, to guarantee semantic matchings between the text description and synthesized image remains very challenging. In this paper, we propose a new model, Cross-modal Semantic Matching Generative Adversarial Networks (CSM-GAN), to improve the semantic consistency between text description and synthesized image for a fine-grained text-to-image generation. Two new modules are proposed in CSM-GAN: Text Encoder Module (TEM) and Textual-Visual Semantic Matching Module (TVSMM). TVSMM is aimed at making the distance of the pairs of synthesized image and its corresponding text description closer, in global semantic embedding space, than those of mismatched pairs. This improves the semantic consistency and consequently, the generalizability of CSM-GAN. In TEM, we introduce Text Convolutional Neural Networks (Text_CNNs) to capture and highlight local visual features in textual descriptions. Thorough experiments on two public benchmark datasets demonstrated the superiority of CSM-GAN over other representative state-of-the-art methods.