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).

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.

The normals of feature points, i.e., the intersection points of multiple smooth surfaces, are ambiguous and undefined. This paper presents a unified definition for point cloud normals of feature and non-feature points, which allows feature points to possess multiple normals. This definition facilitates several succeeding operations, such as feature points extraction and point cloud filtering. We also develop a feature preserving normal estimation method which outputs multiple normals per feature point. The core of the method is a pair consistency voting scheme. All neighbor point pairs vote for the local tangent plane. Each vote takes the fitting residuals of the pair of points and their preliminary normal consistency into consideration. Thus the pairs from the same subspace and relatively far off features dominate the voting. An adaptive strategy is designed to overcome sampling anisotropy. In addition, we introduce an error measure compatible with traditional normal estimators, and present the first benchmark for normal estimation, composed of 152 synthesized data with various features and sampling densities, and 288 real scans with different noise levels. Comprehensive and quantitative experiments show that our method generates faithful feature preserving normals and outperforms previous cutting edge normal estimation methods, including the latest deep learning based method.