DiffSTR: Controlled Diffusion Models for Scene Text Removal

To prevent unauthorized use of text in images, Scene Text Removal (STR) has become a crucial task. It focuses on automatically removing text and replacing it with a natural, text-less background while preserving significant details such as texture, color, and contrast. Despite its importance in privacy protection, STR faces several challenges, including boundary artifacts, inconsistent texture and color, and preserving correct shadows. Most STR approaches estimate a text region mask to train a model, solving for image translation or inpainting to generate a text-free image. Thus, the quality of the generated image depends on the accuracy of the inpainting mask and the generator's capability. In this work, we leverage the superior capabilities of diffusion models in generating high-quality, consistent images to address the STR problem. We introduce a ControlNet diffusion model, treating STR as an inpainting task. To enhance the model's robustness, we develop a mask pretraining pipeline to condition our diffusion model. This involves training a masked autoencoder (MAE) using a combination of box masks and coarse stroke masks, and fine-tuning it using masks derived from our novel segmentation-based mask refinement framework. This framework iteratively refines an initial mask and segments it using the SLIC and Hierarchical Feature Selection (HFS) algorithms to produce an accurate final text mask. This improves mask prediction and utilizes rich textural information in natural scene images to provide accurate inpainting masks. Experiments on the SCUT-EnsText and SCUT-Syn datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques.

A Comprehensive Survey on Synthetic Infrared Image synthesis

Synthetic infrared (IR) scene and target generation is an important computer vision problem as it allows the generation of realistic IR images and targets for training and testing of various applications, such as remote sensing, surveillance, and target recognition. It also helps reduce the cost and risk associated with collecting real-world IR data. This survey paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the conventional mathematical modelling-based methods and deep learning-based methods used for generating synthetic IR scenes and targets. The paper discusses the importance of synthetic IR scene and target generation and briefly covers the mathematics of blackbody and grey body radiations, as well as IR image-capturing methods. The potential use cases of synthetic IR scenes and target generation are also described, highlighting the significance of these techniques in various fields. Additionally, the paper explores possible new ways of developing new techniques to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of synthetic IR scenes and target generation while highlighting the need for further research to advance this field.

Optimizing Vision Transformers with Data-Free Knowledge Transfer

The groundbreaking performance of transformers in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks has led to their replacement of traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), owing to the efficiency and accuracy achieved through the self-attention mechanism. This success has inspired researchers to explore the use of transformers in computer vision tasks to attain enhanced long-term semantic awareness. Vision transformers (ViTs) have excelled in various computer vision tasks due to their superior ability to capture long-distance dependencies using the self-attention mechanism. Contemporary ViTs like Data Efficient Transformers (DeiT) can effectively learn both global semantic information and local texture information from images, achieving performance comparable to traditional CNNs. However, their impressive performance comes with a high computational cost due to very large number of parameters, hindering their deployment on devices with limited resources like smartphones, cameras, drones etc. Additionally, ViTs require a large amount of data for training to achieve performance comparable to benchmark CNN models. Therefore, we identified two key challenges in deploying ViTs on smaller form factor devices: the high computational requirements of large models and the need for extensive training data. As a solution to these challenges, we propose compressing large ViT models using Knowledge Distillation (KD), which is implemented data-free to circumvent limitations related to data availability. Additionally, we conducted experiments on object detection within the same environment in addition to classification tasks. Based on our analysis, we found that datafree knowledge distillation is an effective method to overcome both issues, enabling the deployment of ViTs on less resourceconstrained devices.

Dual Thinking and Perceptual Analysis of Deep Learning Models using Human Adversarial Examples

The dual thinking framework considers fast, intuitive processing and slower, logical processing. The perception of dual thinking in vision requires images where inferences from intuitive and logical processing differ. We introduce an adversarial dataset to provide evidence for the dual thinking framework in human vision, which also aids in studying the qualitative behavior of deep learning models. Our study also addresses a major criticism of using classification models as computational models of human vision by using instance segmentation models that localize objects. The evidence underscores the importance of shape in identifying instances in human vision and shows that deep learning models lack an understanding of sub-structures, as indicated by errors related to the position and number of sub-components. Additionally, the similarity in errors made by models and intuitive human processing indicates that models only address intuitive thinking in human vision.

GraVITON: Graph based garment warping with attention guided inversion for Virtual-tryon

Virtual try-on, a rapidly evolving field in computer vision, is transforming e-commerce by improving customer experiences through precise garment warping and seamless integration onto the human body. While existing methods such as TPS and flow address the garment warping but overlook the finer contextual details. In this paper, we introduce a novel graph based warping technique which emphasizes the value of context in garment flow. Our graph based warping module generates warped garment as well as a coarse person image, which is utilised by a simple refinement network to give a coarse virtual tryon image. The proposed work exploits latent diffusion model to generate the final tryon, treating garment transfer as an inpainting task. The diffusion model is conditioned with decoupled cross attention based inversion of visual and textual information. We introduce an occlusion aware warping constraint that generates dense warped garment, without any holes and occlusion. Our method, validated on VITON-HD and Dresscode datasets, showcases substantial state-of-the-art qualitative and quantitative results showing considerable improvement in garment warping, texture preservation, and overall realism.

A Comprehensive Review of Knowledge Distillation in Computer Vision

Deep learning techniques have been demonstrated to surpass preceding cutting-edge machine learning techniques in recent years, with computer vision being one of the most prominent examples. However, deep learning models suffer from significant drawbacks when deployed in resource-constrained environments due to their large model size and high complexity. Knowledge Distillation is one of the prominent solutions to overcome this challenge. This review paper examines the current state of research on knowledge distillation, a technique for compressing complex models into smaller and simpler ones. The paper provides an overview of the major principles and techniques associated with knowledge distillation and reviews the applications of knowledge distillation in the domain of computer vision. The review focuses on the benefits of knowledge distillation, as well as the problems that must be overcome to improve its effectiveness.

Insights into the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis and Iterative Magnitude Pruning

Lottery ticket hypothesis for deep neural networks emphasizes the importance of initialization used to re-train the sparser networks obtained using the iterative magnitude pruning process. An explanation for why the specific initialization proposed by the lottery ticket hypothesis tends to work better in terms of generalization (and training) performance has been lacking. Moreover, the underlying principles in iterative magnitude pruning, like the pruning of smaller magnitude weights and the role of the iterative process, lack full understanding and explanation. In this work, we attempt to provide insights into these phenomena by empirically studying the volume/geometry and loss landscape characteristics of the solutions obtained at various stages of the iterative magnitude pruning process.

Style Description based Text-to-Speech with Conditional Prosodic Layer Normalization based Diffusion GAN

In this paper, we present a Diffusion GAN based approach (Prosodic Diff-TTS) to generate the corresponding high-fidelity speech based on the style description and content text as an input to generate speech samples within only 4 denoising steps. It leverages the novel conditional prosodic layer normalization to incorporate the style embeddings into the multi head attention based phoneme encoder and mel spectrogram decoder based generator architecture to generate the speech. The style embedding is generated by fine tuning the pretrained BERT model on auxiliary tasks such as pitch, speaking speed, emotion,gender classifications. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed architecture on multi-speaker LibriTTS and PromptSpeech datasets, using multiple quantitative metrics that measure generated accuracy and MOS.

Distilling Inductive Bias: Knowledge Distillation Beyond Model Compression

With the rapid development of computer vision, Vision Transformers (ViTs) offer the tantalizing prospect of unified information processing across visual and textual domains. But due to the lack of inherent inductive biases in ViTs, they require enormous amount of data for training. To make their applications practical, we introduce an innovative ensemble-based distillation approach distilling inductive bias from complementary lightweight teacher models. Prior systems relied solely on convolution-based teaching. However, this method incorporates an ensemble of light teachers with different architectural tendencies, such as convolution and involution, to instruct the student transformer jointly. Because of these unique inductive biases, instructors can accumulate a wide range of knowledge, even from readily identifiable stored datasets, which leads to enhanced student performance. Our proposed framework also involves precomputing and storing logits in advance, essentially the unnormalized predictions of the model. This optimization can accelerate the distillation process by eliminating the need for repeated forward passes during knowledge distillation, significantly reducing the computational burden and enhancing efficiency.

Single Stage Warped Cloth Learning and Semantic-Contextual Attention Feature Fusion for Virtual TryOn

Image-based virtual try-on aims to fit an in-shop garment onto a clothed person image. Garment warping, which aligns the target garment with the corresponding body parts in the person image, is a crucial step in achieving this goal. Existing methods often use multi-stage frameworks to handle clothes warping, person body synthesis and tryon generation separately or rely on noisy intermediate parser-based labels. We propose a novel single-stage framework that implicitly learns the same without explicit multi-stage learning. Our approach utilizes a novel semantic-contextual fusion attention module for garment-person feature fusion, enabling efficient and realistic cloth warping and body synthesis from target pose keypoints. By introducing a lightweight linear attention framework that attends to garment regions and fuses multiple sampled flow fields, we also address misalignment and artifacts present in previous methods. To achieve simultaneous learning of warped garment and try-on results, we introduce a Warped Cloth Learning Module. WCLM uses segmented warped garments as ground truth, operating within a single-stage paradigm. Our proposed approach significantly improves the quality and efficiency of virtual try-on methods, providing users with a more reliable and realistic virtual try-on experience. We evaluate our method on the VITON dataset and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance in terms of both qualitative and quantitative metrics.