Dr Tu Bui

Rapid advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) raise new challenges for image attribution; detecting whether an image is synthetic and, if so, determining which GAN architecture created it. Uniquely, we present a solution to this task capable of 1) matching images invariant to their semantic content; 2) robust to benign transformations (changes in quality, resolution, shape, etc.) commonly encountered as images are re-shared online. In order to formalize our research, a challenging benchmark, Attribution88, is collected for robust and practical image attribution. We then propose RepMix, our GAN fingerprinting technique based on representation mixing and a novel loss. We validate its capability of tracing the provenance of GAN-generated images invariant to the semantic content of the image and also robust to perturbations. We show our approach improves significantly from existing GAN finger-printing works on both semantic generalization and robustness. Data and code are available at https://github.com/TuBui/image attribution.

We present CoGS, a novel method for the style-conditioned, sketch-driven synthesis of images. CoGS enables exploration of diverse appearance possibilities for a given sketched object, enabling decoupled control over the structure and the appearance of the output. Coarse-grained control over object structure and appearance are enabled via an input sketch and an exemplar "style" conditioning image to a transformer-based sketch and style encoder to generate a discrete codebook representation. We map the codebook representation into a metric space, enabling fine-grained control over selection and interpolation between multiple synthesis options before generating the image via a vector quantized GAN (VQGAN) decoder. Our framework thereby unifies search and synthesis tasks, in that a sketch and style pair may be used to run an initial synthesis which may be refined via combination with similar results in a search corpus to produce an image more closely matching the user's intent. We show that our model, trained on the 125 object classes of our newly created Pseudosketches dataset, is capable of producing a diverse gamut of semantic content and appearance styles.

Scene Designer is a novel method for searching and generating images using free-hand sketches of scene compositions; i.e. drawings that describe both the appearance and relative positions of objects. Our core contribution is a single unified model to learn both a cross-modal search embedding for matching sketched compositions to images, and an object embedding for layout synthesis. We show that a graph neural network (GNN) followed by Transformer under our novel contrastive learning setting is required to allow learning correlations between object type, appearance and arrangement, driving a mask generation module that synthesizes coherent scene layouts, whilst also delivering state of the art sketch based visual search of scenes.

Images tell powerful stories but cannot always be trusted. Matching images back to trusted sources (attribution) enables users to make a more informed judgment of the images they encounter online. We propose a robust image hashing algorithm to perform such matching. Our hash is sensitive to manipulation of subtle, salient visual details that can substantially change the story told by an image. Yet the hash is invariant to benign transformations (changes in quality, codecs, sizes, shapes, etc.) experienced by images during online redistribution. Our key contribution is OSCAR-Net 1 (Object-centric Scene Graph Attention for Image Attribution Network); a robust image hashing model inspired by recent successes of Transformers in the visual domain. OSCAR-Net constructs a scene graph representation that attends to fine-grained changes of every object's visual appearance and their spatial relationships. The network is trained via contrastive learning on a dataset of original and manipulated images yielding a state of the art image hash for content fingerprinting that scales to millions of images.

We present an algorithm for searching image collections using free-hand sketches that describe the appearance and relative positions of multiple objects 1 Sketch based image retrieval (SBIR) methods predominantly match queries containing a single, dominant object invariant to its position within an image. Our work exploits drawings as a concise and intuitive representation for specifying entire scene compositions. We train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to encode masked visual features from sketched objects, pooling these into a spatial descriptor encoding the spatial relationships and appearances of objects in the composition. Training the CNN backbone as a Siamese network under triplet loss yields a metric search embedding for measuring compositional similarity which may be efficiently leveraged for visual search by applying product quantization.

Image attribution -- matching an image back to a trusted source -- is an emerging tool in the fight against online misinformation. Deep visual fingerprinting models have recently been explored for this purpose. However, they are not robust to tiny input perturbations known as adversarial examples. First we illustrate how to generate valid adversarial images that can easily cause incorrect image attribution. Then we describe an approach to prevent imperceptible adversarial attacks on deep visual fingerprinting models, via robust contrastive learning. The proposed training procedure leverages training on \(\ell_\infty\)-bounded adversarial examples, it is conceptually simple and incurs only a small computational overhead. The resulting models are substantially more robust, are accurate even on unperturbed images, and perform well even over a database with millions of images. In particular, we achieve 91.6% standard and 85.1% adversarial recall under \(\ell_\infty\)-bounded perturbations on manipulated images compared to 80.1% and 0.0% from prior work. We also show that robustness generalizes to other types of imperceptible perturbations unseen during training. Finally, we show how to train an adversarially robust image comparator model for detecting editorial changes in matched images.

Scene Designer is a novel method for Compositional Sketch-based Image Retrieval (CSBIR) that combines semantic layout synthesis with its main task both to boost performance and enable new creative workflows. While most studies on sketch focus on single-object retrieval, we look to multi-object scenes instead for increased query specificity and flexibility. Our training protocol improves contrastive learning by synthesising harder negative samples and introduces a layout synthesis task that further improves the semantic scene representations. We show that our object-oriented graph neural network (GNN) more than doubles the current SoTA recall@1 on the SketchyCOCO CSBIR benchmark under our novel contrastive learning setting and combined search and synthesis tasks. Furthermore, we introduce the first large-scale sketched scene dataset and benchmark in QuickDrawCOCO.

We present VPN - a content attribution method for recovering provenance information from videos shared online. Platforms, and users, often transform video into different quality, codecs, sizes, shapes, etc. or slightly edit its content such as adding text or emoji, as they are redistributed online. We learn a robust search embedding for matching such video, invariant to these transformations, using full-length or truncated video queries. Once matched against a trusted database of video clips, associated information on the provenance of the clip is presented to the user. We use an inverted index to match temporal chunks of video using late-fusion to combine both visual and audio features. In both cases, features are extracted via a deep neural network trained using contrastive learning on a dataset of original and augmented video clips. We demonstrate high accuracy recall over a corpus of 100,000 videos.

Rapid advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) raise new challenges for image attribution; detecting whether an image is synthetic and, if so, determining which GAN architecture created it. Uniquely, we present a solution to this task capable of 1) matching images invariant to their semantic content; 2) robust to benign transformations (changes in quality, resolution, shape, etc.) commonly encountered as images are re-shared online. In order to formalize our research, a challenging benchmark, Attribution88, is collected for robust and practical image attribution. We then propose RepMix, our GAN fingerprinting technique based on representation mixing and a novel loss. We validate its capability of tracing the provenance of GAN-generated images invariant to the semantic content of the image and also robust to perturbations. We show our approach improves significantly from existing GAN fingerprinting works on both semantic generalization and robustness. Data and code are available at https://github.com/TuBui/image_attribution.

We present an efficient representation for sketch based image retrieval (SBIR) derived from a triplet loss convolutional neural network (CNN). We treat SBIR as a cross-domain modelling problem, in which a depiction invariant embedding of sketch and photo data is learned by regression over a siamese CNN architecture with half-shared weights and modified triplet loss function. Uniquely, we demonstrate the ability of our learned image descriptor to generalise beyond the categories of object present in our training data, forming a basis for general cross-category SBIR. We explore appropriate strategies for training, and for deriving a compact image descriptor from the learned representation suitable for indexing data on resource constrained e. g. mobile devices. We show the learned descriptors to outperform state of the art SBIR on the defacto standard Flickr15k dataset using a significantly more compact (56 bits per image, i. e. ≈ 105KB total) search index than previous methods.

We present ARCHANGEL; a novel distributed ledger based system for assuring the long-term integrity of digital video archives. First, we introduce a novel deep network architecture using a hierarchical attention autoencoder (HAAE) to compute temporal content hashes (TCHs) from minutes or hourlong audio-visual streams. Our TCHs are sensitive to accidental or malicious content modification (tampering). The focus of our self-supervised HAAE is to guard against content modification such as frame truncation or corruption but ensure invariance against format shift (i.e. codec change). This is necessary due to the curatorial requirement for archives to format shift video over time to ensure future accessibility. Second, we describe how the TCHs (and the models used to derive them) are secured via a proof-of-authority blockchain distributed across multiple independent archives.We report on the efficacy of ARCHANGEL within the context of a trial deployment in which the national government archives of the United Kingdom, United States of America, Estonia, Australia and Norway participated.

We propose and evaluate several deep network architectures for measuring the similarity between sketches and photographs, within the context of the sketch based image retrieval (SBIR) task. We study the ability of our networks to generalize across diverse object categories from limited training data, and explore in detail strategies for weight sharing, pre-processing, data augmentation and dimensionality reduction. In addition to a detailed comparative study of network configurations, we contribute by describing a hybrid multi-stage training network that exploits both contrastive and triplet networks to exceed state of the art performance on several SBIR benchmarks by a significant margin.

We present an algorithm for visually searching image collections using free-hand sketched queries. Prior sketch based image retrieval (SBIR) algorithms adopt either a category-level or fine-grain (instance-level) definition of cross-domain similarity—returning images that match the sketched object class (category-level SBIR), or a specific instance of that object (fine-grain SBIR). In this paper we take the middle-ground; proposing an SBIR algorithm that returns images sharing both the object category and key visual characteristics of the sketched query without assuming photo-approximate sketches from the user. We describe a deeply learned cross-domain embedding in which ‘mid-grain’ sketch-image similarity may be measured, reporting on the efficacy of unsupervised and semi-supervised manifold alignment techniques to encourage better intra-category (mid-grain) discrimination within that embedding. We propose a new mid-grain sketch-image dataset (MidGrain65c) and demonstrate not only mid-grain discrimination, but also improved category-level discrimination using our approach.

We present ARCHANGEL; a novel distributed ledger based system for assuring the long-term integrity of digital video archives. First, we describe a novel deep network architecture for computing compact temporal content hashes (TCHs) from audio-visual streams with durations of minutes or hours. Our TCHs are sensitive to accidental or malicious content modification (tampering) but invariant to the codec used to encode the video. This is necessary due to the curatorial requirement for archives to format shift video over time to ensure future accessibility. Second, we describe how the TCHs (and the models used to derive them) are secured via a proof-of-authority blockchain distributed across multiple independent archives. We report on the efficacy of ARCHANGEL within the context of a trial deployment in which the national government archives of the United Kingdom, Estonia and Norway participated.

LiveSketch is a novel algorithm for searching large image collections using hand-sketched queries. LiveSketch tackles the inherent ambiguity of sketch search by creating visual suggestions that augment the query as it is drawn, making query specification an iterative rather than one-shot process that helps disambiguate users' search intent. Our technical contributions are: a triplet convnet architecture that incorporates an RNN based variational autoencoder to search for images using vector (stroke-based) queries; real-time clustering to identify likely search intents (and so, targets within the search embedding); and the use of backpropagation from those targets to perturb the input stroke sequence, so suggesting alterations to the query in order to guide the search. We show improvements in accuracy and time-to-task over contemporary baselines using a 67M image corpus.

We describe a novel algorithm for visually identifying the font used in a scanned printed document. Our algorithm requires no pre-recognition of characters in the string (i. e. optical character recognition). Gradient orientation features are collected local the character boundaries, and quantized into a hierarchical Bag of Visual Words representation. Following stop-word analysis, classification via logistic regression (LR) of the codebooked features yields per-character probabilities which are combined across the string to decide the posterior for each font. We achieve 93.4% accuracy over a 1000 font database of scanned printed text comprising Latin characters.

Sketchformer is a novel transformer-based representation for encoding free-hand sketches input in a vector form, i.e. as a sequence of strokes. Sketchformer effectively addresses multiple tasks: sketch classification, sketch based image retrieval (SBIR), and the reconstruction and interpolation of sketches. We report several variants exploring continuous and tokenized input representations, and contrast their performance. Our learned embedding, driven by a dictionary learning tokenization scheme, yields state of the art performance in classification and image retrieval tasks, when compared against baseline representations driven by LSTM sequence to sequence architectures: SketchRNN and derivatives. We show that sketch reconstruction and interpolation are improved significantly by the Sketchformer embedding for complex sketches with longer stroke sequences.

Deep Learning methods are currently the state-of-the-art in many Computer Vision and Image Processing problems, in particular image classification. After years of intensive investigation, a few models matured and became important tools, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Siamese and Triplet Networks, Auto-Encoders (AEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The field is fast-paced and there is a lot of terminologies to catch up for those who want to adventure in Deep Learning waters. This paper has the objective to introduce the most fundamental concepts of Deep Learning for Computer Vision in particular CNNs, AEs and GANs, including architectures, inner workings and optimization. We offer an updated description of the theoretical and practical knowledge of working with those models. After that, we describe Siamese and Triplet Networks, not often covered in tutorial papers, as well as review the literature on recent and exciting topics such as visual stylization, pixel-wise prediction and video processing. Finally, we discuss the limitations of Deep Learning for Computer Vision.

We present a scalable system for sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR), extending the state of the art Gradient Field HoG (GF-HoG) retrieval framework through two technical contributions. First, we extend GF-HoG to enable color-shape retrieval and comprehensively evaluate several early-and late-fusion approaches for integrating the modality of color, considering both the accuracy and speed of sketch retrieval. Second, we propose an efficient inverse-index representation for GF-HoG that delivers scalable search with interactive query times over millions of images. A mobile app demo accompanies this paper (Android).

We propose a novel measure of visual similarity for image retrieval that incorporates both structural and aesthetic (style) constraints. Our algorithm accepts a query as sketched shape, and a set of one or more contextual images specifying the desired visual aesthetic. A triplet network is used to learn a feature embedding capable of measuring style similarity independent of structure, delivering significant gains over previous networks for style discrimination. We incorporate this model within a hierarchical triplet network to unify and learn a joint space from two discriminatively trained streams for style and structure. We demonstrate that this space enables, for the first time, style-constrained sketch search over a diverse domain of digital artwork comprising graphics, paintings and drawings. We also briefly explore alternative query modalities.

We present an algorithm for searching image collections using free-hand sketches that describe the appearance and relative positions of multiple objects. Sketch based image retrieval (SBIR) methods predominantly match queries containing a single, dominant object invariant to its position within an image. Our work exploits drawings as a concise and intuitive representation for specifying entire scene compositions. We train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to encode masked visual features from sketched objects, pooling these into a spatial descriptor encoding the spatial relationships and appearances of objects in the composition. Training the CNN backbone as a Siamese network under triplet loss yields a metric search embedding for measuring compositional similarity which may be efficiently leveraged for visual search by applying product quantization.

We present a novel architecture for comparing a pair of images to identify image regions that have been subjected to editorial manipulation. We first describe a robust near-duplicate search, for matching a potentially manipulated image circulating online to an image within a trusted database of originals. We then describe a novel architecture for comparing that image pair, to localize regions that have been manipulated to differ from the retrieved original. The localization ignores discrepancies due to benign image transformations that commonly occur during online redistribution. These include artifacts due to noise and recom-pression degradation, as well as out-of-place transformations due to image padding, warping, and changes in size and shape. Robustness towards out-of-place transformations is achieved via the end-to-end training of a differen-tiable warping module within the comparator architecture. We demonstrate effective retrieval and comparison of benign transformed and manipulated images, over a dataset of millions of photographs.

We present ARCHANGEL; a decentralised platform for ensuring the long-term integrity of digital documents stored within public archives. Document integrity is fundamental to public trust in archives. Yet currently that trust is built upon institutional reputation --- trust at face value in a centralised authority, like a national government archive or University. ARCHANGEL proposes a shift to a technological underscoring of that trust, using distributed ledger technology (DLT) to cryptographically guarantee the provenance, immutability and so the integrity of archived documents. We describe the ARCHANGEL architecture, and report on a prototype of that architecture build over the Ethereum infrastructure. We report early evaluation and feedback of ARCHANGEL from stakeholders in the research data archives space.

Scene Designer is a novel method for searching and generating images using free-hand sketches of scene compositions; i.e. drawings that describe both the appearance and relative positions of objects. Our core contribution is a single unified model to learn both a cross-modal search embedding for matching sketched compositions to images, and an object embedding for layout synthesis. We show that a graph neural network (GNN) followed by Transformer under our novel contrastive learning setting is required to allow learning correlations between object type, appearance and arrangement, driving a mask generation module that synthesizes coherent scene layouts, whilst also delivering state of the art sketch based visual search of scenes.

Images tell powerful stories but cannot always be trusted. Matching images back to trusted sources (attribution) enables users to make a more informed judgment of the images they encounter online. We propose a robust image hashing algorithm to perform such matching. Our hash is sensitive to manipulation of subtle, salient visual details that can substantially change the story told by an image. Yet the hash is invariant to benign transformations (changes in quality, codecs, sizes, shapes, etc.) experienced by images during online redistribution. Our key contribution is OSCAR-Net1 (Object-centric Scene Graph Attention for Image Attribution Network); a robust image hashing model inspired by recent successes of Transformers in the visual domain. OSCAR-Net constructs a scene graph representation that attends to fine-grained changes of every object’s visual appearance and their spatial relationships. The network is trained via contrastive learning on a dataset of original and manipulated images yielding a state of the art image hash for content fingerprinting that scales to millions of images