Sliced Maximal Information Coefficient: A Training-Free Approach for Image Quality Assessment Enhancement

Full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) models generally operate by measuring the visual differences between a degraded image and its reference. However, existing FR-IQA models including both the classical ones (eg, PSNR and SSIM) and deep-learning based measures (eg, LPIPS and DISTS) still exhibit limitations in capturing the full perception characteristics of the human visual system (HVS). In this paper, instead of designing a new FR-IQA measure, we aim to explore a generalized human visual attention estimation strategy to mimic the process of human quality rating and enhance existing IQA models. In particular, we model human attention generation by measuring the statistical dependency between the degraded image and the reference image. The dependency is captured in a training-free manner by our proposed sliced maximal information coefficient and exhibits surprising generalization in different IQA measures. Experimental results verify the performance of existing IQA models can be consistently improved when our attention module is incorporated. The source code is available at https://github.com/KANGX99/SMIC.

Semi-automatic Data Annotation System for Multi-Target Multi-Camera Vehicle Tracking

Multi-target multi-camera tracking (MTMCT) plays an important role in intelligent video analysis, surveillance video retrieval, and other application scenarios. Nowadays, the deep-learning-based MTMCT has been the mainstream and has achieved fascinating improvements regarding tracking accuracy and efficiency. However, according to our investigation, the lacking of datasets focusing on real-world application scenarios limits the further improvements for current learning-based MTMCT models. Specifically, the learning-based MTMCT models training by common datasets usually cannot achieve satisfactory results in real-world application scenarios. Motivated by this, this paper presents a semi-automatic data annotation system to facilitate the real-world MTMCT dataset establishment. The proposed system first employs a deep-learning-based single-camera trajectory generation method to automatically extract trajectories from surveillance videos. Subsequently, the system provides a recommendation list in the following manual cross-camera trajectory matching process. The recommendation list is generated based on side information, including camera location, timestamp relation, and background scene. In the experimental stage, extensive results further demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed system.