Existing domain adaptation approaches often try to reduce distribution difference between source and target domains and respect domain-specific discriminative structures by some distribution [e.g., maximum mean discrepancy (MMD)] and discriminative distances (e.g., intra-class and inter-class distances). However, they usually consider these losses together and trade off their relative importance by estimating parameters empirically. It is still under insufficient exploration so far to deeply study their relationships to each other so that we cannot manipulate them correctly and the model's performance degrades. To this end, this article theoretically proves two essential facts: 1) minimizing MMD equals to jointly minimizing their data variance with some implicit weights but, respectively, maximizing the source and target intra-class distances so that feature discriminability degrades and 2) the relationship between intra-class and inter-class distances is as one falls and another rises. Based on this, we propose a novel discriminative MMD with two parallel strategies to correctly restrain the degradation of feature discriminability or the expansion of intra-class distance; specifically: 1) we directly impose a tradeoff parameter on the intra-class distance that is implicit in the MMD according to 1) and 2) we reformulate the inter-class distance with special weights that are analogical to those implicit ones in the MMD and maximizing it can also lead to the intra-class distance falling according to 2). Notably, we do not consider the two strategies in one model due to 2). The experiments on several benchmark datasets not only prove the validity of our revealed theoretical results but also demonstrate that the proposed approach could perform better than some compared state-of-art methods substantially. Our preliminary MATLAB code will be available at https://github.com/WWLoveTransfer/.

Rain removal is an important but challenging computer vision task as rain streaks can severely degrade the visibility of images that may make other visions or multimedia tasks fail to work. Previous works mainly focused on feature extraction and processing or neural network structure, while the current rain removal methods can already achieve remarkable results, training based on single network structure without considering the cross-scale relationship may cause information drop-out. In this paper, we explore the cross-scale manner between networks and inner-scale fusion operation to solve the image rain removal task. Specifically, to learn features with different scales, we propose a multi-sub-networks structure, where these sub-networks are fused via a cross-scale manner by Gate Recurrent Unit to inner-learn and make full use of information at different scales in these sub-networks. Further, we design an inner-scale connection block to utilize the multi-scale information and features fusion way between different scales to improve rain representation ability and we introduce the dense block with skip connection to inner-connect these blocks. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets have demonstrated the superiority of our proposed method, which outperforms over the state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://supercong94.wixsite.com/supercong94.

In the field of multimedia, single image deraining is a basic pre-processing work, which can greatly improve the visual effect of subsequent high-level tasks in rainy conditions. In this paper, we propose an effective algorithm, called JDNet, to solve the single image deraining problem and conduct the segmentation and detection task for applications. Specifically, considering the important information on multi-scale features, we propose a Scale-Aggregation module to learn the features with different scales. Simultaneously, Self-Attention module is introduced to match or outperform their convolutional counterparts, which allows the feature aggregation to adapt to each channel. Furthermore, to improve the basic convolutional feature transformation process of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Self-Calibrated convolution is applied to build long-range spatial and inter-channel dependencies around each spatial location that explicitly expand fields-of-view of each convolutional layer through internal communications and hence enriches the output features. By designing the Scale-Aggregation and Self-Attention modules with Self-Calibrated convolution skillfully, the proposed model has better deraining results both on real-world and synthetic datasets. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods. The source code will be available at https://supercong94.wixsite.com/supercong94.