We consider the novel task of learning disentangled representations of object shape and appearance across multiple domains (e.g., dogs and cars). The goal is to learn a generative model that learns an intermediate distribution, which borrows a subset of properties from each domain, enabling the generation of images that did not exist in any domain exclusively. This challenging problem requires an accurate disentanglement of object shape, appearance, and background from each domain, so that the appearance and shape factors from the two domains can be interchanged. We augment an existing approach that can disentangle factors within a single domain but struggles to do so across domains. Our key technical contribution is to represent object appearance with a differentiable histogram of visual features, and to optimize the generator so that two images with the same latent appearance factor but different latent shape factors produce similar histograms. On multiple multi-domain datasets, we demonstrate our method leads to accurate and consistent appearance and shape transfer across domains.
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Harmony: A Generic Unsupervised Approach for Disentangling Semantic Content from Parameterized Transformations
In many real-life image analysis applications, particularly in biomedical research domains, the objects of interest undergo multiple transformations that alter their visual properties while keeping the semantic content unchanged. Disentangling images into semantic content factors and transformations can provide significant benefits into many domain-specific image analysis tasks. To this end, we propose a generic unsupervised framework, Harmony, that simultaneously and explicitly disentangles semantic content from multiple parameterized transformations. Harmony leverages a simple cross-contrastive learning framework with multiple explicitly parameterized latent representations to disentangle content from transformations. To demonstrate the efficacy of Harmony, we apply it to disentangle image semantic content from several parameterized transformations (rotation, translation, scaling, and contrast). Harmony achieves significantly improved disentanglement over the baseline models on several image datasets of diverse domains. With such disentanglement, Harmony is demonstrated to incentivize bioimage analysis research by modeling structural heterogeneity of macromolecules from cryo-ET images and learning transformation-invariant representations of protein particles from single-particle cryo-EM images. Harmony also performs very well in disentangling content from 3D transformations and can perform coarse and fast alignment of 3D cryo-ET subtomograms. Therefore, Harmony is generalizable to many other imaging domains and can potentially be extended to domains beyond imaging as well.
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- PAR ID:
- 10327697
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- ISSN:
- 2163-6648
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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