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Steerable properties dominate the design of traditional filters, e.g., Gabor filters, and endow features the capability of dealing with spatial transformations. However, such excellent properties have not been well explored in the popular deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). In this paper, we propose a new deep model, termed Gabor Convolutional Networks (GCNs or Gabor CNNs), which incorporates Gabor filters into DCNNs to enhance the resistance of deep learned features to the orientation and scale changes. By only manipulating the basic element of DCNNs based on Gabor filters, i.e., the convolution operator, GCNs can be easily implemented and are compatible with any popular deep learning architecture. Experimental results demonstrate the super capability of our algorithm in recognizing objects, where the scale and rotation changes occur frequently. The proposed GCNs have much fewer learnable network parameters, and thus is easier to train with an endto-end pipeline.

Age invariant face recognition has received increasing attention due to its great potential in real world applications. In spite of the great progress in face recognition techniques, reliably recognizing faces across ages remains a difficult task. The facial appearance of a person changes substantially over time, resulting in significant intra-class variations. Hence, the key to tackle this problem is to separate the variation caused by aging from the person-specific features that are stable. Specifically, we propose a new method, called Hidden Factor Analysis (HFA). This method captures the intuition above through a probabilistic model with two latent factors: an identity factor that is age-invariant and an age factor affected by the aging process. Then, the observed appearance can be modeled as a combination of the components generated based on these factors. We also develop a learning algorithm that jointly estimates the latent factors and the model parameters using an EM procedure. Extensive experiments on two well-known public domain face aging datasets: MORPH (the largest public face aging database) and FGNET, clearly show that the proposed method achieves notable improvement over state-of-the-art algorithms.

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Abstract-In steerable filters, a filter of arbitrary orientation can be generated by a linear combination of a set of "basis filters". Steerable properties dominate the design of the traditional filters e.g., Gabor filters and endow features the capability of handling spatial transformations. However, such properties have not yet been well explored in the deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). In this paper, we develop a new deep model, namely Gabor Convolutional Networks (GCNs or Gabor CNNs), with Gabor filters incorporated into DCNNs such that the robustness of learned features against the orientation and scale changes can be reinforced. By manipulating the basic element of DCNNs, i.e., the convolution operator, based on Gabor filters, GCNs can be easily implemented and are readily compatible with any popular deep learning architecture. We carry out extensive experiments to demonstrate the promising performance of our GCNs framework and the results show its superiority in recognizing objects, especially when the scale and rotation changes take place frequently. Moreover, the proposed GCNs have much fewer network parameters to be learned and can effectively reduce the training complexity of the network, leading to a more compact deep learning model while still maintaining a high feature representation capacity. The source code can be found at https://github.com/bczhangbczhang .

We consider the general problem of learning from both pairwise constraints and unlabeled data. The pairwise constraints specify whether two objects belong to the same class or not, known as the must-link constraints and the cannot-link constraints. We propose to learn a mapping that is smooth over the data graph and maps the data onto a unit hypersphere, where two must-link objects are mapped to the same point while two cannot-link objects are mapped to be orthogonal. We show that such a mapping can be achieved by formulating a semidefinite programming problem, which is convex and can be solved globally. Our approach can effectively propagate pairwise constraints to the whole data set. It can be directly applied to multi-class classification and can handle data labels, pairwise constraints, or a mixture of them in a unified framework. Promising experimental results are presented for classification tasks on a variety of synthetic and real data sets.

In this paper, we present Uformer, an effective and efficient Transformer-based architecture, in which we build a hierarchical encoder-decoder network using the Transformer block for image restoration. Uformer has two core designs to make it suitable for this task. The first key element is a local-enhanced window Transformer block, where we use non-overlapping window-based self-attention to reduce the computational requirement and employ the depth-wise convolution in the feedforward network to further improve its potential for capturing local context. The second key element is that we explore three skip-connection schemes to effectively deliver information from the encoder to the decoder. Powered by these two designs, Uformer enjoys a high capability for capturing useful dependencies for image restoration. Extensive experiments on several image restoration tasks demonstrate the superiority of Uformer, including image denoising, deraining, deblurring and demoireing. We expect that our work will encourage further research to explore Transformer-based architectures for low-level vision tasks. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/ZhendongWang6/Uformer.

This paper proposes a novel high-order local pattern descriptor, local derivative pattern (LDP), for face recognition. LDP is a general framework to encode directional pattern features based on local derivative variations. The n(th)-order LDP is proposed to encode the (n-1)(th) -order local derivative direction variations, which can capture more detailed information than the first-order local pattern used in local binary pattern (LBP). Different from LBP encoding the relationship between the central point and its neighbors, the LDP templates extract high-order local information by encoding various distinctive spatial relationships contained in a given local region. Both gray-level images and Gabor feature images are used to evaluate the comparative performances of LDP and LBP. Extensive experimental results on FERET, CAS-PEAL, CMU-PIE, Extended Yale B, and FRGC databases show that the high-order LDP consistently performs much better than LBP for both face identification and face verification under various conditions.