Specifically, we introduce a unified probabilistic graph model that represents the complex interactions in image completion.

Understanding satire and humor is a challenging task for even current Vision-Language models. In this paper, we propose the challenging tasks of Satirical Image Detection (detecting whether an image is satirical), Understanding (generating the reason behind the image being satirical), and Completion (given one half of the image, selecting the other half from 2 given options, such that the complete image is satirical) and release a high-quality dataset YesBut, consisting of 2547 images, 1084 satirical and 1463 non-satirical, containing different artistic styles, to evaluate those tasks. Each satirical image in the dataset depicts a normal scenario, along with a conflicting scenario which is funny or ironic. Despite the success of current Vision-Language Models on multimodal tasks such as Visual QA and Image Captioning, our benchmarking experiments show that such models perform poorly on the proposed tasks on the YesBut Dataset in Zero-Shot Settings w.r.t both automated as well as human evaluation. Additionally, we release a dataset of 119 real, satirical photographs for further research. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/abhi1nandy2/yesbut_dataset.

Early infancy is a rapid and dynamic neurodevelopmental period for behavior and neurocognition. Longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an effective tool to investigate such a crucial stage by capturing the developmental trajectories of the brain structures. However, longitudinal MRI acquisition always meets a serious data-missing problem due to participant dropout and failed scans, making longitudinal infant brain atlas construction and developmental trajectory delineation quite challenging. Thanks to the development of an AI-based generative model, neuroimage completion has become a powerful technique to retain as much available data as possible. However, current image completion methods usually suffer from inconsistency within each individual subject in the time dimension, compromising the overall quality. To solve this problem, our paper proposed a two-stage cascaded diffusion model, Cas-DiffCom, for dense and longitudinal 3D infant brain MRI completion and super-resolution. We applied our proposed method to the Baby Connectome Project (BCP) dataset. The experiment results validate that Cas-DiffCom achieves both individual consistency and high fidelity in longitudinal infant brain image completion. We further applied the generated infant brain images to two downstream tasks, brain tissue segmentation and developmental trajectory delineation, to declare its task-oriented potential in the neuroscience field.

Land use / land cover (LULC) modeling is a challenging task due to long-range dependencies between geographic features and distinct spatial patterns related to topography, ecology, and human development. We identify a close connection between modeling of spatial patterns of land use and the task of image inpainting from computer vision and conduct a study of a modified PixelCNN architecture with approximately 19 million parameters for modeling LULC. In comparison with a benchmark spatial statistical model, we find that the former is capable of capturing much richer spatial correlation patterns such as roads and water bodies but does not produce a calibrated predictive distribution, suggesting the need for additional tuning. We find evidence of predictive underdispersion with regard to important ecologically-relevant land use statistics such as patch count and adjacency which can be ameliorated to some extent by manipulating sampling variability.

Image completion is a task that aims to fill in the missing region of a masked image with plausible contents. However, existing image completion methods tend to fill in the missing region with the surrounding texture instead of hallucinating a visual instance that is suitable in accordance with the context of the scene. In this work, we propose a novel image completion model, dubbed ImComplete, that hallucinates the missing instance that harmonizes well with - and thus preserves - the original context. ImComplete first adopts a transformer architecture that considers the visible instances and the location of the missing region. Then, ImComplete completes the semantic segmentation masks within the missing region, providing pixel-level semantic and structural guidance. Finally, the image synthesis blocks generate photo-realistic content. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of the results in terms of visual quality (LPIPS and FID) and contextual preservation scores (CLIPscore and object detection accuracy) with COCO-panoptic and Visual Genome datasets. Experimental results show the superiority of ImComplete on various natural images.

Automated tumor detection in Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) is a difficult task due to natural tumor rarity, breast tissue variability, and high resolution. Given the scarcity of abnormal images and the abundance of normal images for this problem, an anomaly detection/localization approach could be well-suited. However, most anomaly localization research in machine learning focuses on non-medical datasets, and we find that these methods fall short when adapted to medical imaging datasets. The problem is alleviated when we solve the task from the image completion perspective, in which the presence of anomalies can be indicated by a discrepancy between the original appearance and its auto-completion conditioned on the surroundings. However, there are often many valid normal completions given the same surroundings, especially in the DBT dataset, making this evaluation criterion less precise. To address such an issue, we consider pluralistic image completion by exploring the distribution of possible completions instead of generating fixed predictions. This is achieved through our novel application of spatial dropout on the completion network during inference time only, which requires no additional training cost and is effective at generating diverse completions. We further propose minimum completion distance (MCD), a new metric for detecting anomalies, thanks to these stochastic completions. We provide theoretical as well as empirical support for the superiority over existing methods of using the proposed method for anomaly localization. On the DBT dataset, our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by at least 10\% AUROC for pixel-level detection.

This paper raises the new task of Fisheye Semantic Completion (FSC), where dense texture, structure, and semantics of a fisheye image are inferred even beyond the sensor field-of-view (FoV). Fisheye cameras have larger FoV than ordinary pinhole cameras, yet its unique special imaging model naturally leads to a blind area at the edge of the image plane. This is suboptimal for safety-critical applications since important perception tasks, such as semantic segmentation, become very challenging within the blind zone. Previous works considered the out-FoV outpainting and in-FoV segmentation separately. However, we observe that these two tasks are actually closely coupled. To jointly estimate the tightly intertwined complete fisheye image and scene semantics, we introduce the new FishDreamer which relies on successful ViTs enhanced with a novel Polar-aware Cross Attention module (PCA) to leverage dense context and guide semantically-consistent content generation while considering different polar distributions. In addition to the contribution of the novel task and architecture, we also derive Cityscapes-BF and KITTI360-BF datasets to facilitate training and evaluation of this new track. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed FishDreamer outperforms methods solving each task in isolation and surpasses alternative approaches on the Fisheye Semantic Completion. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/MasterHow/FishDreamer.

Near-Periodic Patterns (NPP) are ubiquitous in man-made scenes and are composed of tiled motifs with appearance differences caused by lighting, defects, or design elements. A good NPP representation is useful for many applications including image completion, segmentation, and geometric remapping. But representing NPP is challenging because it needs to maintain global consistency (tiled motifs layout) while preserving local variations (appearance differences). Methods trained on general scenes using a large dataset or single-image optimization struggle to satisfy these constraints, while methods that explicitly model periodicity are not robust to periodicity detection errors. To address these challenges, we learn a neural implicit representation using a coordinate-based MLP with single image optimization. We design an input feature warping module and a periodicity-guided patch loss to handle both global consistency and local variations. To further improve the robustness, we introduce a periodicity proposal module to search and use multiple candidate periodicities in our pipeline. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on more than 500 images of building facades, friezes, wallpapers, ground, and Mondrian patterns in single and multi-planar scenes.

In this paper, we evaluate the effects of occlusions in the performance of a face recognition pipeline that uses a ResNet backbone. The classifier was trained on a subset of the CelebA-HQ dataset containing 5,478 images from 307 classes, to achieve top-1 error rate of 17.91%. We designed 8 different occlusion masks which were applied to the input images. This caused a significant drop in the classifier performance: its error rate for each mask became at least two times worse than before. In order to increase robustness under occlusions, we followed two approaches. The first is image inpainting using the pre-trained pluralistic image completion network. The second is Cutmix, a regularization strategy consisting of mixing training images and their labels using rectangular patches, making the classifier more robust against input corruptions. Both strategies revealed effective and interesting results were observed. In particular, the Cutmix approach makes the network more robust without requiring additional steps at the application time, though its training time is considerably longer. Our datasets containing the different occlusion masks as well as their inpainted counterparts are made publicly available to promote research on the field.

Deep neural networks recognize objects by analyzing local image details and summarizing their information along the inference layers to derive the final decision. Because of this, they are prone to adversarial attacks. Small sophisticated noise in the input images can accumulate along the network inference path and produce wrong decisions at the network output. On the other hand, human eyes recognize objects based on their global structure and semantic cues, instead of local image textures. Because of this, human eyes can still clearly recognize objects from images which have been heavily damaged by adversarial attacks. This leads to a very interesting approach for defending deep neural networks against adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose to develop a structure-preserving progressive low-rank image completion (SPLIC) method to remove unneeded texture details from the input images and shift the bias of deep neural networks towards global object structures and semantic cues. We formulate the problem into a low-rank matrix completion problem with progressively smoothed rank functions to avoid local minimums during the optimization process. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to successfully remove the insignificant local image details while preserving important global object structures. On black-box, gray-box, and white-box attacks, our method outperforms existing defense methods (by up to 12.6%) and significantly improves the adversarial robustness of the network.