Artificial intelligence for the metaverse: A survey

In this work we address the task of semantic image segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions that are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit. First, we highlight convolution with upsampled filters, or 'atrous convolution', as a powerful tool in dense prediction tasks. Atrous convolution allows us to explicitly control the resolution at which feature responses are computed within Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. It also allows us to effectively enlarge the field of view of filters to incorporate larger context without increasing the number of parameters or the amount of computation. Second, we propose atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to robustly segment objects at multiple scales. ASPP probes an incoming convolutional feature layer with filters at multiple sampling rates and effective fields-of-views, thus capturing objects as well as image context at multiple scales. Third, we improve the localization of object boundaries by combining methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models. The commonly deployed combination of max-pooling and downsampling in DCNNs achieves invariance but has a toll on localization accuracy. We overcome this by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF), which is shown both qualitatively and quantitatively to improve localization performance. Our proposed "DeepLab" system sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 79.7 percent mIOU in the test set, and advances the results on three other datasets: PASCAL-Context, PASCAL-Person-Part, and Cityscapes. All of our code is made publicly available online.

Convolutional networks are powerful visual models that yield hierarchies of features. We show that convolutional networks by themselves, trained end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels, improve on the previous best result in semantic segmentation. Our key insight is to build "fully convolutional" networks that take input of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with efficient inference and learning. We define and detail the space of fully convolutional networks, explain their application to spatially dense prediction tasks, and draw connections to prior models. We adapt contemporary classification networks (AlexNet, the VGG net, and GoogLeNet) into fully convolutional networks and transfer their learned representations by fine-tuning to the segmentation task. We then define a skip architecture that combines semantic information from a deep, coarse layer with appearance information from a shallow, fine layer to produce accurate and detailed segmentations. Our fully convolutional networks achieve improved segmentation of PASCAL VOC (30% relative improvement to 67.2% mean IU on 2012), NYUDv2, SIFT Flow, and PASCAL-Context, while inference takes one tenth of a second for a typical image.

This paper presents a new approach to single-image super-resolution, based on sparse signal representation. Research on image statistics suggests that image patches can be well-represented as a sparse linear combination of elements from an appropriately chosen over-complete dictionary. Inspired by this observation, we seek a sparse representation for each patch of the low-resolution input, and then use the coefficients of this representation to generate the high-resolution output. Theoretical results from compressed sensing suggest that under mild conditions, the sparse representation can be correctly recovered from the downsampled signals. By jointly training two dictionaries for the low- and high-resolution image patches, we can enforce the similarity of sparse representations between the low resolution and high resolution image patch pair with respect to their own dictionaries. Therefore, the sparse representation of a low resolution image patch can be applied with the high resolution image patch dictionary to generate a high resolution image patch. The learned dictionary pair is a more compact representation of the patch pairs, compared to previous approaches, which simply sample a large amount of image patch pairs, reducing the computational cost substantially. The effectiveness of such a sparsity prior is demonstrated for both general image super-resolution and the special case of face hallucination. In both cases, our algorithm generates high-resolution images that are competitive or even superior in quality to images produced by other similar SR methods. In addition, the local sparse modeling of our approach is naturally robust to noise, and therefore the proposed algorithm can handle super-resolution with noisy inputs in a more unified framework.