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Siwei Ma

Siwei Ma contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

19 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

SoLAR: Error-Resilient Streamable Long-Horizon Free-Viewpoint Video Reconstruction with Anchor Activation and Latent Recalibration

Free-Viewpoint Video (FVV) has emerged as a cornerstone of next-generation immersive media systems and attracted widespread attention. Previous methods primarily focus on short video sequences and suffer from significant performance degradation when processing long-horizon free-viewpoint video (LFVV). Motivated by bit allocation theory, we analyze dynamic-anchor-based volumetric video representation within a rate-distortion optimization framework and propose \textbf{SoLAR}, which is the first error-resilient streamable FVV framework that maintains stable reconstruction quality on long sequences without requiring group-of-pictures partitioning. We propose the Anchor Activation Dynamics (AAD), which enables dynamic anchors to model non-rigid transformations by dynamically activating informative anchors and suppressing redundant ones. Furthermore, we introduce Latent Discrepancy Aware Recalibration (LaDAR), which is a mechanism to identify discrepancies between latent representations and recalibrate the correspondences encoded in the network, effectively mitigating error propagation in LFVV without compromising real-time performance or storage compactness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textbf{SoLAR} achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance while maintaining minimum storage overhead, which provides a new direction for LFVV reconstruction and advances the practical deployment of immersive systems. Demo free-viewpoint videos are provided in the supplementary material.

preprint2023arXiv

Learning to Compress Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Captured Video: Benchmark and Analysis

During the past decade, the Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicles (UAVs) have attracted increasing attention due to their flexible, extensive, and dynamic space-sensing capabilities. The volume of video captured by UAVs is exponentially growing along with the increased bitrate generated by the advancement of the sensors mounted on UAVs, bringing new challenges for on-device UAV storage and air-ground data transmission. Most existing video compression schemes were designed for natural scenes without consideration of specific texture and view characteristics of UAV videos. In this work, we first contribute a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of UAV video coding. Then we propose to establish a novel task for learned UAV video coding and construct a comprehensive and systematic benchmark for such a task, present a thorough review of high quality UAV video datasets and benchmarks, and contribute extensive rate-distortion efficiency comparison of learned and conventional codecs after. Finally, we discuss the challenges of encoding UAV videos. It is expected that the benchmark will accelerate the research and development in video coding on drone platforms.

preprint2022arXiv

Conceptual Compression via Deep Structure and Texture Synthesis

Existing compression methods typically focus on the removal of signal-level redundancies, while the potential and versatility of decomposing visual data into compact conceptual components still lack further study. To this end, we propose a novel conceptual compression framework that encodes visual data into compact structure and texture representations, then decodes in a deep synthesis fashion, aiming to achieve better visual reconstruction quality, flexible content manipulation, and potential support for various vision tasks. In particular, we propose to compress images by a dual-layered model consisting of two complementary visual features: 1) structure layer represented by structural maps and 2) texture layer characterized by low-dimensional deep representations. At the encoder side, the structural maps and texture representations are individually extracted and compressed, generating the compact, interpretable, inter-operable bitstreams. During the decoding stage, a hierarchical fusion GAN (HF-GAN) is proposed to learn the synthesis paradigm where the textures are rendered into the decoded structural maps, leading to high-quality reconstruction with remarkable visual realism. Extensive experiments on diverse images have demonstrated the superiority of our framework with lower bitrates, higher reconstruction quality, and increased versatility towards visual analysis and content manipulation tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

Consistent Quality Oriented Rate Control in HEVC via Balancing Intra and Inter Frame Coding

Consistent quality oriented rate control in video coding has attracted much more attention. However, the existing efforts only focus on decreasing variations between every two adjacent frames, but neglect coding trade-off problem between intra and inter frames. In this paper, we deal with it from a new perspective, where intra frame quantization parameter (IQP) and rate control are optimized for balanced coding. First, due to the importance of intra frames, a new framework is proposed for consistent quality oriented IQP prediction, and then we remove unqualified IQP candidates using the proposed penalty term. Second, we extensively evaluate possible features, and select target bits per pixel for all remaining frames, average and standard variance of frame QPs, where equivalent acquisition methods for QP features are given. Third, predicted IQPs are clipped effectively according to bandwidth and previous information for better bit rate accuracy. Compared with High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) reference baseline, experiments demonstrate that our method reduces quality fluctuation greatly by 37.2% on frame-level standard variance of peak-signal-noise-ratio (PSNR) and 45.1% on that of structural similarity (SSIM). Moreover, it also can have satisfactory results on Rate-Distortion (R-D) performance, bit accuracy and buffer control.

preprint2022arXiv

Cross-SRN: Structure-Preserving Super-Resolution Network with Cross Convolution

It is challenging to restore low-resolution (LR) images to super-resolution (SR) images with correct and clear details. Existing deep learning works almost neglect the inherent structural information of images, which acts as an important role for visual perception of SR results. In this paper, we design a hierarchical feature exploitation network to probe and preserve structural information in a multi-scale feature fusion manner. First, we propose a cross convolution upon traditional edge detectors to localize and represent edge features. Then, cross convolution blocks (CCBs) are designed with feature normalization and channel attention to consider the inherent correlations of features. Finally, we leverage multi-scale feature fusion group (MFFG) to embed the cross convolution blocks and develop the relations of structural features in different scales hierarchically, invoking a lightweight structure-preserving network named as Cross-SRN. Experimental results demonstrate the Cross-SRN achieves competitive or superior restoration performances against the state-of-the-art methods with accurate and clear structural details. Moreover, we set a criterion to select images with rich structural textures. The proposed Cross-SRN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the selected benchmark, which demonstrates that our network has a significant advantage in preserving edges.

preprint2022arXiv

P-STMO: Pre-Trained Spatial Temporal Many-to-One Model for 3D Human Pose Estimation

This paper introduces a novel Pre-trained Spatial Temporal Many-to-One (P-STMO) model for 2D-to-3D human pose estimation task. To reduce the difficulty of capturing spatial and temporal information, we divide this task into two stages: pre-training (Stage I) and fine-tuning (Stage II). In Stage I, a self-supervised pre-training sub-task, termed masked pose modeling, is proposed. The human joints in the input sequence are randomly masked in both spatial and temporal domains. A general form of denoising auto-encoder is exploited to recover the original 2D poses and the encoder is capable of capturing spatial and temporal dependencies in this way. In Stage II, the pre-trained encoder is loaded to STMO model and fine-tuned. The encoder is followed by a many-to-one frame aggregator to predict the 3D pose in the current frame. Especially, an MLP block is utilized as the spatial feature extractor in STMO, which yields better performance than other methods. In addition, a temporal downsampling strategy is proposed to diminish data redundancy. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with fewer parameters and less computational overhead. For example, our P-STMO model achieves 42.1mm MPJPE on Human3.6M dataset when using 2D poses from CPN as inputs. Meanwhile, it brings a 1.5-7.1 times speedup to state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/paTRICK-swk/P-STMO.

preprint2022arXiv

Rate Distortion Characteristic Modeling for Neural Image Compression

End-to-end optimized neural image compression (NIC) has obtained superior lossy compression performance recently. In this paper, we consider the problem of rate-distortion (R-D) characteristic analysis and modeling for NIC. We make efforts to formulate the essential mathematical functions to describe the R-D behavior of NIC using deep networks. Thus arbitrary bit-rate points could be elegantly realized by leveraging such model via a single trained network. We propose a plugin-in module to learn the relationship between the target bit-rate and the binary representation for the latent variable of auto-encoder. The proposed scheme resolves the problem of training distinct models to reach different points in the R-D space. Furthermore, we model the rate and distortion characteristic of NIC as a function of the coding parameter $λ$ respectively. Our experiments show our proposed method is easy to adopt and realizes state-of-the-art continuous bit-rate coding performance, which implies that our approach would benefit the practical deployment of NIC.

preprint2022arXiv

STAU: A SpatioTemporal-Aware Unit for Video Prediction and Beyond

Video prediction aims to predict future frames by modeling the complex spatiotemporal dynamics in videos. However, most of the existing methods only model the temporal information and the spatial information for videos in an independent manner but haven't fully explored the correlations between both terms. In this paper, we propose a SpatioTemporal-Aware Unit (STAU) for video prediction and beyond by exploring the significant spatiotemporal correlations in videos. On the one hand, the motion-aware attention weights are learned from the spatial states to help aggregate the temporal states in the temporal domain. On the other hand, the appearance-aware attention weights are learned from the temporal states to help aggregate the spatial states in the spatial domain. In this way, the temporal information and the spatial information can be greatly aware of each other in both domains, during which, the spatiotemporal receptive field can also be greatly broadened for more reliable spatiotemporal modeling. Experiments are not only conducted on traditional video prediction tasks but also other tasks beyond video prediction, including the early action recognition and object detection tasks. Experimental results show that our STAU can outperform other methods on all tasks in terms of performance and computation efficiency.

preprint2022arXiv

STIP: A SpatioTemporal Information-Preserving and Perception-Augmented Model for High-Resolution Video Prediction

Although significant achievements have been achieved by recurrent neural network (RNN) based video prediction methods, their performance in datasets with high resolutions is still far from satisfactory because of the information loss problem and the perception-insensitive mean square error (MSE) based loss functions. In this paper, we propose a Spatiotemporal Information-Preserving and Perception-Augmented Model (STIP) to solve the above two problems. To solve the information loss problem, the proposed model aims to preserve the spatiotemporal information for videos during the feature extraction and the state transitions, respectively. Firstly, a Multi-Grained Spatiotemporal Auto-Encoder (MGST-AE) is designed based on the X-Net structure. The proposed MGST-AE can help the decoders recall multi-grained information from the encoders in both the temporal and spatial domains. In this way, more spatiotemporal information can be preserved during the feature extraction for high-resolution videos. Secondly, a Spatiotemporal Gated Recurrent Unit (STGRU) is designed based on the standard Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) structure, which can efficiently preserve spatiotemporal information during the state transitions. The proposed STGRU can achieve more satisfactory performance with a much lower computation load compared with the popular Long Short-Term (LSTM) based predictive memories. Furthermore, to improve the traditional MSE loss functions, a Learned Perceptual Loss (LP-loss) is further designed based on the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which can help obtain a satisfactory trade-off between the objective quality and the perceptual quality. Experimental results show that the proposed STIP can predict videos with more satisfactory visual quality compared with a variety of state-of-the-art methods. Source code has been available at \url{https://github.com/ZhengChang467/STIPHR}.

preprint2022arXiv

STRPM: A Spatiotemporal Residual Predictive Model for High-Resolution Video Prediction

Although many video prediction methods have obtained good performance in low-resolution (64$\sim$128) videos, predictive models for high-resolution (512$\sim$4K) videos have not been fully explored yet, which are more meaningful due to the increasing demand for high-quality videos. Compared with low-resolution videos, high-resolution videos contain richer appearance (spatial) information and more complex motion (temporal) information. In this paper, we propose a Spatiotemporal Residual Predictive Model (STRPM) for high-resolution video prediction. On the one hand, we propose a Spatiotemporal Encoding-Decoding Scheme to preserve more spatiotemporal information for high-resolution videos. In this way, the appearance details for each frame can be greatly preserved. On the other hand, we design a Residual Predictive Memory (RPM) which focuses on modeling the spatiotemporal residual features (STRF) between previous and future frames instead of the whole frame, which can greatly help capture the complex motion information in high-resolution videos. In addition, the proposed RPM can supervise the spatial encoder and temporal encoder to extract different features in the spatial domain and the temporal domain, respectively. Moreover, the proposed model is trained using generative adversarial networks (GANs) with a learned perceptual loss (LP-loss) to improve the perceptual quality of the predictions. Experimental results show that STRPM can generate more satisfactory results compared with various existing methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Hybrid-Optimization Video Coding

Video coding is a mathematical optimization problem of rate and distortion essentially. To solve this complex optimization problem, two popular video coding frameworks have been developed: block-based hybrid video coding and end-to-end learned video coding. If we rethink video coding from the perspective of optimization, we find that the existing two frameworks represent two directions of optimization solutions. Block-based hybrid coding represents the discrete optimization solution because those irrelevant coding modes are discrete in mathematics. It searches for the best one among multiple starting points (i.e. modes). However, the search is not efficient enough. On the other hand, end-to-end learned coding represents the continuous optimization solution because the gradient descent is based on a continuous function. It optimizes a group of model parameters efficiently by the numerical algorithm. However, limited by only one starting point, it is easy to fall into the local optimum. To better solve the optimization problem, we propose to regard video coding as a hybrid of the discrete and continuous optimization problem, and use both search and numerical algorithm to solve it. Our idea is to provide multiple discrete starting points in the global space and optimize the local optimum around each point by numerical algorithm efficiently. Finally, we search for the global optimum among those local optimums. Guided by the hybrid optimization idea, we design a hybrid optimization video coding framework, which is built on continuous deep networks entirely and also contains some discrete modes. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments. Compared to the continuous optimization framework, our method outperforms pure learned video coding methods. Meanwhile, compared to the discrete optimization framework, our method achieves comparable performance to HEVC reference software HM16.10 in PSNR.

preprint2020arXiv

A Similarity Inference Metric for RGB-Infrared Cross-Modality Person Re-identification

RGB-Infrared (IR) cross-modality person re-identification (re-ID), which aims to search an IR image in RGB gallery or vice versa, is a challenging task due to the large discrepancy between IR and RGB modalities. Existing methods address this challenge typically by aligning feature distributions or image styles across modalities, whereas the very useful similarities among gallery samples of the same modality (i.e. intra-modality sample similarities) is largely neglected. This paper presents a novel similarity inference metric (SIM) that exploits the intra-modality sample similarities to circumvent the cross-modality discrepancy targeting optimal cross-modality image matching. SIM works by successive similarity graph reasoning and mutual nearest-neighbor reasoning that mine cross-modality sample similarities by leveraging intra-modality sample similarities from two different perspectives. Extensive experiments over two cross-modality re-ID datasets (SYSU-MM01 and RegDB) show that SIM achieves significant accuracy improvement but with little extra training as compared with the state-of-the-art.

preprint2020arXiv

Direct Speech-to-image Translation

Direct speech-to-image translation without text is an interesting and useful topic due to the potential applications in human-computer interaction, art creation, computer-aided design. etc. Not to mention that many languages have no writing form. However, as far as we know, it has not been well-studied how to translate the speech signals into images directly and how well they can be translated. In this paper, we attempt to translate the speech signals into the image signals without the transcription stage. Specifically, a speech encoder is designed to represent the input speech signals as an embedding feature, and it is trained with a pretrained image encoder using teacher-student learning to obtain better generalization ability on new classes. Subsequently, a stacked generative adversarial network is used to synthesize high-quality images conditioned on the embedding feature. Experimental results on both synthesized and real data show that our proposed method is effective to translate the raw speech signals into images without the middle text representation. Ablation study gives more insights about our method.

preprint2020arXiv

Learning to fool the speaker recognition

Due to the widespread deployment of fingerprint/face/speaker recognition systems, attacking deep learning based biometric systems has drawn more and more attention. Previous research mainly studied the attack to the vision-based system, such as fingerprint and face recognition. While the attack for speaker recognition has not been investigated yet, although it has been widely used in our daily life. In this paper, we attempt to fool the state-of-the-art speaker recognition model and present \textit{speaker recognition attacker}, a lightweight model to fool the deep speaker recognition model by adding imperceptible perturbations onto the raw speech waveform. We find that the speaker recognition system is also vulnerable to the attack, and we achieve a high success rate on the non-targeted attack. Besides, we also present an effective method to optimize the speaker recognition attacker to obtain a trade-off between the attack success rate with the perceptual quality. Experiments on the TIMIT dataset show that we can achieve a sentence error rate of $99.2\%$ with an average SNR $57.2\text{dB}$ and PESQ 4.2 with speed rather faster than real-time.

preprint2020arXiv

Low Complexity Trellis-Coded Quantization in Versatile Video Coding

The forthcoming Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard adopts the trellis-coded quantization, which leverages the delicate trellis graph to map the quantization candidates within one block into the optimal path. Despite the high compression efficiency, the complex trellis search with soft decision quantization may hinder the applications due to high complexity and low throughput capacity. To reduce the complexity, in this paper, we propose a low complexity trellis-coded quantization scheme in a scientifically sound way with theoretical modeling of the rate and distortion. As such, the trellis departure point can be adaptively adjusted, and unnecessarily visited branches are accordingly pruned, leading to the shrink of total trellis stages and simplification of transition branches. Extensive experimental results on the VVC test model show that the proposed scheme is effective in reducing the encoding complexity by 11% and 5% with all intra and random access configurations, respectively, at the cost of only 0.11% and 0.05% BD-Rate increase. Meanwhile, on average 24% and 27% quantization time savings can be achieved under all intra and random access configurations. Due to the excellent performance, the VVC test model has adopted one implementation of the proposed scheme.

preprint2020arXiv

Predictive Generalized Graph Fourier Transform for Attribute Compression of Dynamic Point Clouds

As 3D scanning devices and depth sensors advance, dynamic point clouds have attracted increasing attention as a format for 3D objects in motion, with applications in various fields such as immersive telepresence, navigation for autonomous driving and gaming. Nevertheless, the tremendous amount of data in dynamic point clouds significantly burden transmission and storage. To this end, we propose a complete compression framework for attributes of 3D dynamic point clouds, focusing on optimal inter-coding. Firstly, we derive the optimal inter-prediction and predictive transform coding assuming the Gaussian Markov Random Field model with respect to a spatio-temporal graph underlying the attributes of dynamic point clouds. The optimal predictive transform proves to be the Generalized Graph Fourier Transform in terms of spatio-temporal decorrelation. Secondly, we propose refined motion estimation via efficient registration prior to inter-prediction, which searches the temporal correspondence between adjacent frames of irregular point clouds. Finally, we present a complete framework based on the optimal inter-coding and our previously proposed intra-coding, where we determine the optimal coding mode from rate-distortion optimization with the proposed offline-trained $λ$-Q model. Experimental results show that we achieve around 17% bit rate reduction on average over competitive dynamic point cloud compression methods.

preprint2020arXiv

Reconstruction of Natural Visual Scenes from Neural Spikes with Deep Neural Networks

Neural coding is one of the central questions in systems neuroscience for understanding how the brain processes stimulus from the environment, moreover, it is also a cornerstone for designing algorithms of brain-machine interface, where decoding incoming stimulus is highly demanded for better performance of physical devices. Traditionally researchers have focused on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data as the neural signals of interest for decoding visual scenes. However, our visual perception operates in a fast time scale of millisecond in terms of an event termed neural spike. There are few studies of decoding by using spikes. Here we fulfill this aim by developing a novel decoding framework based on deep neural networks, named spike-image decoder (SID), for reconstructing natural visual scenes, including static images and dynamic videos, from experimentally recorded spikes of a population of retinal ganglion cells. The SID is an end-to-end decoder with one end as neural spikes and the other end as images, which can be trained directly such that visual scenes are reconstructed from spikes in a highly accurate fashion. Our SID also outperforms on the reconstruction of visual stimulus compared to existing fMRI decoding models. In addition, with the aid of a spike encoder, we show that SID can be generalized to arbitrary visual scenes by using the image datasets of MNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100. Furthermore, with a pre-trained SID, one can decode any dynamic videos to achieve real-time encoding and decoding of visual scenes by spikes. Altogether, our results shed new light on neuromorphic computing for artificial visual systems, such as event-based visual cameras and visual neuroprostheses.

preprint2020arXiv

Universal Adversarial Perturbations Generative Network for Speaker Recognition

Attacking deep learning based biometric systems has drawn more and more attention with the wide deployment of fingerprint/face/speaker recognition systems, given the fact that the neural networks are vulnerable to the adversarial examples, which have been intentionally perturbed to remain almost imperceptible for human. In this paper, we demonstrated the existence of the universal adversarial perturbations~(UAPs) for the speaker recognition systems. We proposed a generative network to learn the mapping from the low-dimensional normal distribution to the UAPs subspace, then synthesize the UAPs to perturbe any input signals to spoof the well-trained speaker recognition model with high probability. Experimental results on TIMIT and LibriSpeech datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

preprint2020arXiv

User-generated Video Quality Assessment: A Subjective and Objective Study

Recently, we have observed an exponential increase of user-generated content (UGC) videos. The distinguished characteristic of UGC videos originates from the video production and delivery chain, as they are usually acquired and processed by non-professional users before uploading to the hosting platforms for sharing. As such, these videos usually undergo multiple distortion stages that may affect visual quality before ultimately being viewed. Inspired by the increasing consensus that the optimization of the video coding and processing shall be fully driven by the perceptual quality, in this paper, we propose to study the quality of the UGC videos from both objective and subjective perspectives. We first construct a UGC video quality assessment (VQA) database, aiming to provide useful guidance for the UGC video coding and processing in the hosting platform. The database contains source UGC videos uploaded to the platform and their transcoded versions that are ultimately enjoyed by end-users, along with their subjective scores. Furthermore, we develop an objective quality assessment algorithm that automatically evaluates the quality of the transcoded videos based on the corrupted reference, which is in accordance with the application scenarios of UGC video sharing in the hosting platforms. The information from the corrupted reference is well leveraged and the quality is predicted based on the inferred quality maps with deep neural networks (DNN). Experimental results show that the proposed method yields superior performance. Both subjective and objective evaluations of the UGC videos also shed lights on the design of perceptual UGC video coding.