Boosting Unconstrained Face Recognition with Targeted Style Adversary

While deep face recognition models have demonstrated remarkable performance, they often struggle on the inputs from domains beyond their training data. Recent attempts aim to expand the training set by relying on computationally expensive and inherently challenging image-space augmentation of image generation modules. In an orthogonal direction, we present a simple yet effective method to expand the training data by interpolating between instance-level feature statistics across labeled and unlabeled sets. Our method, dubbed Targeted Style Adversary (TSA), is motivated by two observations: (i) the input domain is reflected in feature statistics, and (ii) face recognition model performance is influenced by style information. Shifting towards an unlabeled style implicitly synthesizes challenging training instances. We devise a recognizability metric to constraint our framework to preserve the inherent identity-related information of labeled instances. The efficacy of our method is demonstrated through evaluations on unconstrained benchmarks, outperforming or being on par with its competitors while offering nearly a 70\% improvement in training speed and 40\% less memory consumption.

FDWST: Fingerphoto Deblurring using Wavelet Style Transfer

The challenge of deblurring fingerphoto images, or generating a sharp fingerphoto from a given blurry one, is a significant problem in the realm of computer vision. To address this problem, we propose a fingerphoto deblurring architecture referred to as Fingerphoto Deblurring using Wavelet Style Transfer (FDWST), which aims to utilize the information transmission of Style Transfer techniques to deblur fingerphotos. Additionally, we incorporate the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for its ability to split images into different frequency bands. By combining these two techniques, we can perform Style Transfer over a wide array of wavelet frequency bands, thereby increasing the quality and variety of sharpness information transferred from sharp to blurry images. Using this technique, our model was able to drastically increase the quality of the generated fingerphotos compared to their originals, and achieve a peak matching accuracy of 0.9907 when tasked with matching a deblurred fingerphoto to its sharp counterpart, outperforming multiple other state-of-the-art deblurring and style transfer techniques.

ARoFace: Alignment Robustness to Improve Low-Quality Face Recognition

Aiming to enhance Face Recognition (FR) on Low-Quality (LQ) inputs, recent studies suggest incorporating synthetic LQ samples into training. Although promising, the quality factors that are considered in these works are general rather than FR-specific, \eg, atmospheric turbulence, resolution, \etc. Motivated by the observation of the vulnerability of current FR models to even small Face Alignment Errors (FAE) in LQ images, we present a simple yet effective method that considers FAE as another quality factor that is tailored to FR. We seek to improve LQ FR by enhancing FR models' robustness to FAE. To this aim, we formalize the problem as a combination of differentiable spatial transformations and adversarial data augmentation in FR. We perturb the alignment of the training samples using a controllable spatial transformation and enrich the training with samples expressing FAE. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method by conducting evaluations on IJB-B, IJB-C, IJB-S (+4.3\% Rank1), and TinyFace (+2.63\%). \href{https://github.com/msed-Ebrahimi/ARoFace}{https://github.com/msed-Ebrahimi/ARoFace}

Laplacian-guided Entropy Model in Neural Codec with Blur-dissipated Synthesis

While replacing Gaussian decoders with a conditional diffusion model enhances the perceptual quality of reconstructions in neural image compression, their lack of inductive bias for image data restricts their ability to achieve state-of-the-art perceptual levels. To address this limitation, we adopt a non-isotropic diffusion model at the decoder side. This model imposes an inductive bias aimed at distinguishing between frequency contents, thereby facilitating the generation of high-quality images. Moreover, our framework is equipped with a novel entropy model that accurately models the probability distribution of latent representation by exploiting spatio-channel correlations in latent space, while accelerating the entropy decoding step. This channel-wise entropy model leverages both local and global spatial contexts within each channel chunk. The global spatial context is built upon the Transformer, which is specifically designed for image compression tasks. The designed Transformer employs a Laplacian-shaped positional encoding, the learnable parameters of which are adaptively adjusted for each channel cluster. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework yields better perceptual quality compared to cutting-edge generative-based codecs, and the proposed entropy model contributes to notable bitrate savings.

Contrastive Learning and Cycle Consistency-based Transductive Transfer Learning for Target Annotation

Annotating automatic target recognition (ATR) is a highly challenging task, primarily due to the unavailability of labeled data in the target domain. Hence, it is essential to construct an optimal target domain classifier by utilizing the labeled information of the source domain images. The transductive transfer learning (TTL) method that incorporates a CycleGAN-based unpaired domain translation network has been previously proposed in the literature for effective ATR annotation. Although this method demonstrates great potential for ATR, it severely suffers from lower annotation performance, higher Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score, and the presence of visual artifacts in the synthetic images. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid contrastive learning base unpaired domain translation (H-CUT) network that achieves a significantly lower FID score. It incorporates both attention and entropy to emphasize the domain-specific region, a noisy feature mixup module to generate high variational synthetic negative patches, and a modulated noise contrastive estimation (MoNCE) loss to reweight all negative patches using optimal transport for better performance. Our proposed contrastive learning and cycle-consistency-based TTL (C3TTL) framework consists of two H-CUT networks and two classifiers. It simultaneously optimizes cycle-consistency, MoNCE, and identity losses. In C3TTL, two H-CUT networks have been employed through a bijection mapping to feed the reconstructed source domain images into a pretrained classifier to guide the optimal target domain classifier. Extensive experimental analysis conducted on three ATR datasets demonstrates that the proposed C3TTL method is effective in annotating civilian and military vehicles, as well as ship targets.

CATFace: Cross-Attribute-Guided Transformer with Self-Attention Distillation for Low-Quality Face Recognition

Although face recognition (FR) has achieved great success in recent years, it is still challenging to accurately recognize faces in low-quality images due to the obscured facial details. Nevertheless, it is often feasible to make predictions about specific soft biometric (SB) attributes, such as gender, and baldness even in dealing with low-quality images. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-branch neural network that leverages SB attribute information to boost the performance of FR. To this end, we propose a cross-attribute-guided transformer fusion (CATF) module that effectively captures the long-range dependencies and relationships between FR and SB feature representations. The synergy created by the reciprocal flow of information in the dual cross-attention operations of the proposed CATF module enhances the performance of FR. Furthermore, we introduce a novel self-attention distillation framework that effectively highlights crucial facial regions, such as landmarks by aligning low-quality images with those of their high-quality counterparts in the feature space. The proposed self-attention distillation regularizes our network to learn a unified quality-invariant feature representation in unconstrained environments. We conduct extensive experiments on various FR benchmarks varying in quality. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our FR method compared to state-of-the-art FR studies.

Neural-based Compression Scheme for Solar Image Data

Studying the solar system and especially the Sun relies on the data gathered daily from space missions. These missions are data-intensive and compressing this data to make them efficiently transferable to the ground station is a twofold decision to make. Stronger compression methods, by distorting the data, can increase data throughput at the cost of accuracy which could affect scientific analysis of the data. On the other hand, preserving subtle details in the compressed data requires a high amount of data to be transferred, reducing the desired gains from compression. In this work, we propose a neural network-based lossy compression method to be used in NASA's data-intensive imagery missions. We chose NASA's SDO mission which transmits 1.4 terabytes of data each day as a proof of concept for the proposed algorithm. In this work, we propose an adversarially trained neural network, equipped with local and non-local attention modules to capture both the local and global structure of the image resulting in a better trade-off in rate-distortion (RD) compared to conventional hand-engineered codecs. The RD variational autoencoder used in this work is jointly trained with a channel-dependent entropy model as a shared prior between the analysis and synthesis transforms to make the entropy coding of the latent code more effective. Our neural image compression algorithm outperforms currently-in-use and state-of-the-art codecs such as JPEG and JPEG-2000 in terms of the RD performance when compressing extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) data. As a proof of concept for use of this algorithm in SDO data analysis, we have performed coronal hole (CH) detection using our compressed images, and generated consistent segmentations, even at a compression rate of $\sim0.1$ bits per pixel (compared to 8 bits per pixel on the original data) using EUV data from SDO.

Trading-off Mutual Information on Feature Aggregation for Face Recognition

Despite the advances in the field of Face Recognition (FR), the precision of these methods is not yet sufficient. To improve the FR performance, this paper proposes a technique to aggregate the outputs of two state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep FR models, namely ArcFace and AdaFace. In our approach, we leverage the transformer attention mechanism to exploit the relationship between different parts of two feature maps. By doing so, we aim to enhance the overall discriminative power of the FR system. One of the challenges in feature aggregation is the effective modeling of both local and global dependencies. Conventional transformers are known for their ability to capture long-range dependencies, but they often struggle with modeling local dependencies accurately. To address this limitation, we augment the self-attention mechanism to capture both local and global dependencies effectively. This allows our model to take advantage of the overlapping receptive fields present in corresponding locations of the feature maps. However, fusing two feature maps from different FR models might introduce redundancies to the face embedding. Since these models often share identical backbone architectures, the resulting feature maps may contain overlapping information, which can mislead the training process. To overcome this problem, we leverage the principle of Information Bottleneck to obtain a maximally informative facial representation. This ensures that the aggregated features retain the most relevant and discriminative information while minimizing redundant or misleading details. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conducted experiments on popular benchmarks and compared our results with state-of-the-art algorithms. The consistent improvement we observed in these benchmarks demonstrates the efficacy of our approach in enhancing FR performance.

Multi-spectral Entropy Constrained Neural Compression of Solar Imagery

Missions studying the dynamic behaviour of the Sun are defined to capture multi-spectral images of the sun and transmit them to the ground station in a daily basis. To make transmission efficient and feasible, image compression systems need to be exploited. Recently successful end-to-end optimized neural network-based image compression systems have shown great potential to be used in an ad-hoc manner. In this work we have proposed a transformer-based multi-spectral neural image compressor to efficiently capture redundancies both intra/inter-wavelength. To unleash the locality of window-based self attention mechanism, we propose an inter-window aggregated token multi head self attention. Additionally to make the neural compressor autoencoder shift invariant, a randomly shifted window attention mechanism is used which makes the transformer blocks insensitive to translations in their input domain. We demonstrate that the proposed approach not only outperforms the conventional compression algorithms but also it is able to better decorrelates images along the multiple wavelengths compared to single spectral compression.

Context-Aware Neural Video Compression on Solar Dynamics Observatory

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission collects large data volumes of the Sun's daily activity. Data compression is crucial for space missions to reduce data storage and video bandwidth requirements by eliminating redundancies in the data. In this paper, we present a novel neural Transformer-based video compression approach specifically designed for the SDO images. Our primary objective is to efficiently exploit the temporal and spatial redundancies inherent in solar images to obtain a high compression ratio. Our proposed architecture benefits from a novel Transformer block called Fused Local-aware Window (FLaWin), which incorporates window-based self-attention modules and an efficient fused local-aware feed-forward (FLaFF) network. This architectural design allows us to simultaneously capture short-range and long-range information while facilitating the extraction of rich and diverse contextual representations. Moreover, this design choice results in reduced computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate the significant contribution of the FLaWin Transformer block to the compression performance, outperforming conventional hand-engineered video codecs such as H.264 and H.265 in terms of rate-distortion trade-off.