Existing deep learning based de-raining approaches have resorted to the convolutional architectures. However, the intrinsic limitations of convolution, including local receptive fields and independence of input content, hinder the model’s ability to capture long-range and complicated rainy artifacts. To overcome these limitations, we propose an effective and efficient transformer-based architecture for the image de-raining. Firstly, we introduce general priors of vision tasks, i.e., locality and hierarchy, into the network architecture so that our model can achieve excellent de-raining performance without costly pre-training. Secondly, since the geometric appearance of rainy artifacts is complicated and of significant variance in space, it is essential for de-raining models to extract both local and non-local features. Therefore, we design the complementary window-based transformer and spatial transformer to enhance locality while capturing long-range dependencies. Besides, to compensate for the positional blindness of self-attention, we establish a separate representative space for modeling positional relationship, and design a new relative position enhanced multi-head self-attention. In this way, our model enjoys powerful abilities to capture dependencies from both content and position, so as to achieve better image content recovery while removing rainy artifacts. Experiments substantiate that our approach attains more appealing results than state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively.

Learning subtle yet discriminative features (e.g., beak and eyes for a bird) plays a significant role in fine-grained image recognition. Existing attention-based approaches localize and amplify significant parts to learn fine-grained details, which often suffer from a limited number of parts and heavy computational cost. In this paper, we propose to learn such fine-grained features from hundreds of part proposals by Trilinear Attention Sampling Network (TASN) in an efficient teacher-student manner. Specifically, TASN consists of 1) a trilinear attention module, which generates attention maps by modeling the inter-channel relationships, 2) an attention-based sampler which highlights attended parts with high resolution, and 3) a feature distiller, which distills part features into an object-level feature by weight sharing and feature preserving strategies. Extensive experiments verify that TASN yields the best performance under the same settings with the most competitive approaches, in iNaturalist-2017, CUB-Bird, and Stanford-Cars datasets.

Due to the popularity of social media websites, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to tag-based social image search. Both visual information and tags have been investigated in the research field. However, most existing methods use tags and visual characteristics either separately or sequentially in order to estimate the relevance of images. In this paper, we propose an approach that simultaneously utilizes both visual and textual information to estimate the relevance of user tagged images. The relevance estimation is determined with a hypergraph learning approach. In this method, a social image hypergraph is constructed, where vertices represent images and hyperedges represent visual or textual terms. Learning is achieved with use of a set of pseudo-positive images, where the weights of hyperedges are updated throughout the learning process. In this way, the impact of different tags and visual words can be automatically modulated. Comparative results of the experiments conducted on a dataset including 370+images are presented, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Recent deep learning based person re-identification approaches have steadily improved the performance for benchmarks, however they often fail to generalize well from one domain to another. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive transfer network (ATNet) for effective cross-domain person re-identification. ATNet looks into the essential causes of domain gap and addresses it following the principle of "divide-and-conquer". It decomposes the complicated cross-domain transfer into a set of factor-wise sub-transfers, each of which concentrates on style transfer with respect to a certain imaging factor, e.g., illumination, resolution and camera view etc. An adaptive ensemble strategy is proposed to fuse factor-wise transfers by perceiving the affect magnitudes of various factors on images. Such "decomposition-and-ensemble" strategy gives ATNet the capability of precise style transfer at factor level and eventually effective transfer across domains. In particular, ATNet consists of a transfer network composed by multiple factor-wise CycleGANs and an ensemble CycleGAN as well as a selection network that infers the affects of different factors on transferring each image. Extensive experimental results on three widely-used datasets, i.e., Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and PRID2011 have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed ATNet with significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

With the explosive growth of web videos on the Internet, it becomes challenging to efficiently browse hundreds or even thousands of videos. When searching an event query, users are often bewildered by the vast quantity of web videos returned by search engines. Exploring such results will be time consuming and it will also degrade user experience. In this paper, we present an approach for event driven web video summarization by tag localization and key-shot mining. We first localize the tags that are associated with each video into its shots. Then, we estimate the relevance of the shots with respect to the event query by matching the shot-level tags with the query. After that, we identify a set of key-shots from the shots that have high relevance scores by exploring the repeated occurrence characteristic of key sub-events. Following the scheme in [6] and [22], we provide two types of summaries, i.e., threaded video skimming and visual-textual storyboard. Experiments are conducted on a corpus that contains 60 queries and more than 10 000 web videos. The evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.