ShanshanCai

MCL member, Ye Wang presented Qin Huang’s paper at Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2018, Lake Tahoe, NV/CA

The title of Qin’s paper is “Unsupervised Clustering Guided Semantic Segmentation”, with Chunyang Xia, Siyang Li, Ye Wang, Yuhang Song and C.-C. Jay Kuo as the co-authors. Here is a brief summary:

“With the development of Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCN), there have been progressive advances in the field of semantic segmentation in recent years. The FCN-based solutions are able to summarize features across training images and generate matching templates for the desired object classes, yet they overlook intra-class difference (ICD) among multiple instances in the same class. In this work, we present a novel fine-to-coarse learning (FCL) procedure, which first guides the network with designed ‘finer’ sub-class labels, whose decisions are mapped to the original ‘coarse’ object category through end-to-end learning. A sub-class labeling strategy is designed with unsupervised clustering upon deep convolutional features, and the proposed FCL procedure enables a balance between the fine-scale (i.e. sub-class) and the coarse-scale (i.e. class) knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments on several popular datasets, including PASCAL VOC, Context, Person-Part and NYUDepth-v2 to demonstrate the advantage of learning finer sub-classes and the potential to guide the learning of deep networks with unsupervised clustering.”

Congratulations to Qin Huang for his successful presentation at WACV!

We are so happy to welcome a new Master’s member of MCL, Tianxiao Zhang. Here is an interview with Tianxiao:

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and your research interests?

I am Tianxiao Zhang, and I just graduated from USC in December 2017 and received my M.S. degree, and I joined the Media Communication Lab in January 2018, guided by professor C.-C. Jay Kuo. I love mathematics and programming and my research interests are deep learning and image processing. I think the future belongs to deep learning and deep learning belongs to image understanding. By the way, I love music and I am also a professional pianist. Hope I can combine these two different areas and do a good job in deep learning in the future.
 
2. What is your impression about MCL and USC?

MCL is like a great family and we have meetings for all MCL members every week. In the meeting, I could meet with other members and make friends with them. I really love the atmosphere in MCL, happy and friendly. What’s more, professor Kuo, the director of MCL, is not only an excellent professor but also a hard-working person. I have never seen any professor starting their work at 6:30 am in the morning until I meet professor Kuo. So I can learn a lot from professor Kuo not only the knowledge but also how to work hard. 
 
3. What is your future expectation and plan in MCL?

I will cooperate with other MCL members and follow the instructions of professor Kuo, and contribute as much as I can to the research in MCL, especially in deep learning.