arXiv daily: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

Authors:Yusheng Guo, Nan Zhong, Zhenxing Qian, Xinpeng Zhang

Abstract: Backdoor attack aims to compromise a model, which returns an adversary-wanted output when a specific trigger pattern appears yet behaves normally for clean inputs. Current backdoor attacks require changing pixels of clean images, which results in poor stealthiness of attacks and increases the difficulty of the physical implementation. This paper proposes a novel physical invisible backdoor based on camera imaging without changing nature image pixels. Specifically, a compromised model returns a target label for images taken by a particular camera, while it returns correct results for other images. To implement and evaluate the proposed backdoor, we take shots of different objects from multi-angles using multiple smartphones to build a new dataset of 21,500 images. Conventional backdoor attacks work ineffectively with some classical models, such as ResNet18, over the above-mentioned dataset. Therefore, we propose a three-step training strategy to mount the backdoor attack. First, we design and train a camera identification model with the phone IDs to extract the camera fingerprint feature. Subsequently, we elaborate a special network architecture, which is easily compromised by our backdoor attack, by leveraging the attributes of the CFA interpolation algorithm and combining it with the feature extraction block in the camera identification model. Finally, we transfer the backdoor from the elaborated special network architecture to the classical architecture model via teacher-student distillation learning. Since the trigger of our method is related to the specific phone, our attack works effectively in the physical world. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed approach and robustness against various backdoor defenses.

Authors:Ji Zhang, Shihan Wu, Lianli Gao, Hengtao Shen, Jingkuan Song

Abstract: This work breaks through the Base-New Tradeoff (BNT)dilemma in prompt tuning, i.e., the better the tuned model generalizes to the base (or target) task, the worse it generalizes to new tasks, and vice versa. Specifically, through an in-depth analysis of the learned features of the base and new tasks, we observe that the BNT stems from a channel bias issue, i.e., the vast majority of feature channels are occupied by base-specific knowledge, resulting in the collapse of taskshared knowledge important to new tasks. To address this, we propose the Decoupled Prompt Tuning (DePT) framework, which decouples base-specific knowledge from feature channels into an isolated feature space during prompt tuning, so as to maximally preserve task-shared knowledge in the original feature space for achieving better zero-shot generalization on new tasks. Importantly, our DePT is orthogonal to existing prompt tuning methods, hence it can improve all of them. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets show the strong flexibility and effectiveness of DePT. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/Koorye/DePT.

Authors:Xiaoxu Ren, Haili Sun, Zhenxin Zhang

Abstract: With the vigorous development of the urban construction industry, engineering deformation or changes often occur during the construction process. To combat this phenomenon, it is necessary to detect changes in order to detect construction loopholes in time, ensure the integrity of the project and reduce labor costs. Or the inconvenience and injuriousness of the road. In the study of change detection in 3D point clouds, researchers have published various research methods on 3D point clouds. Directly based on but mostly based ontraditional threshold distance methods (C2C, M3C2, M3C2-EP), and some are to convert 3D point clouds into DSM, which loses a lot of original information. Although deep learning is used in remote sensing methods, in terms of change detection of 3D point clouds, it is more converted into two-dimensional patches, and neural networks are rarely applied directly. We prefer that the network is given at the level of pixels or points. Variety. Therefore, in this article, our network builds a network for 3D point cloud change detection, and proposes a new module Cross transformer suitable for change detection. Simultaneously simulate tunneling data for change detection, and do test experiments with our network.

Authors:Minjung Kim, Junseo Koo, Gunhee Kim

Abstract: Visual localization is the task of estimating a 6-DoF camera pose of a query image within a provided 3D reference map. Thanks to recent advances in various 3D sensors, 3D point clouds are becoming a more accurate and affordable option for building the reference map, but research to match the points of 3D point clouds with pixels in 2D images for visual localization remains challenging. Existing approaches that jointly learn 2D-3D feature matching suffer from low inliers due to representational differences between the two modalities, and the methods that bypass this problem into classification have an issue of poor refinement. In this work, we propose EP2P-Loc, a novel large-scale visual localization method that mitigates such appearance discrepancy and enables end-to-end training for pose estimation. To increase the number of inliers, we propose a simple algorithm to remove invisible 3D points in the image, and find all 2D-3D correspondences without keypoint detection. To reduce memory usage and search complexity, we take a coarse-to-fine approach where we extract patch-level features from 2D images, then perform 2D patch classification on each 3D point, and obtain the exact corresponding 2D pixel coordinates through positional encoding. Finally, for the first time in this task, we employ a differentiable PnP for end-to-end training. In the experiments on newly curated large-scale indoor and outdoor benchmarks based on 2D-3D-S and KITTI, we show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared to existing visual localization and image-to-point cloud registration methods.

Authors:Yongyuan Li, Xiuyuan Qin, Chao Liang, Mingqiang Wei

Abstract: Talking Face Generation (TFG) aims to reconstruct facial movements to achieve high natural lip movements from audio and facial features that are under potential connections. Existing TFG methods have made significant advancements to produce natural and realistic images. However, most work rarely takes visual quality into consideration. It is challenging to ensure lip synchronization while avoiding visual quality degradation in cross-modal generation methods. To address this issue, we propose a universal High-Definition Teeth Restoration Network, dubbed HDTR-Net, for arbitrary TFG methods. HDTR-Net can enhance teeth regions at an extremely fast speed while maintaining synchronization, and temporal consistency. In particular, we propose a Fine-Grained Feature Fusion (FGFF) module to effectively capture fine texture feature information around teeth and surrounding regions, and use these features to fine-grain the feature map to enhance the clarity of teeth. Extensive experiments show that our method can be adapted to arbitrary TFG methods without suffering from lip synchronization and frame coherence. Another advantage of HDTR-Net is its real-time generation ability. Also under the condition of high-definition restoration of talking face video synthesis, its inference speed is $300\%$ faster than the current state-of-the-art face restoration based on super-resolution.

Authors:Nishant Jain, Harkirat Behl, Yogesh Singh Rawat, Vibhav Vineet

Abstract: A recent trend in deep learning algorithms has been towards training large scale models, having high parameter count and trained on big dataset. However, robustness of such large scale models towards real-world settings is still a less-explored topic. In this work, we first benchmark the performance of these models under different perturbations and datasets thereby representing real-world shifts, and highlight their degrading performance under these shifts. We then discuss on how complete model fine-tuning based existing robustification schemes might not be a scalable option given very large scale networks and can also lead them to forget some of the desired characterstics. Finally, we propose a simple and cost-effective method to solve this problem, inspired by knowledge transfer literature. It involves robustifying smaller models, at a lower computation cost, and then use them as teachers to tune a fraction of these large scale networks, reducing the overall computational overhead. We evaluate our proposed method under various vision perturbations including ImageNet-C,R,S,A datasets and also for transfer learning, zero-shot evaluation setups on different datasets. Benchmark results show that our method is able to induce robustness to these large scale models efficiently, requiring significantly lower time and also preserves the transfer learning, zero-shot properties of the original model which none of the existing methods are able to achieve.

Authors:Zipeng Qi, Xulong Zhang, Ning Cheng, Jing Xiao, Jianzong Wang

Abstract: Generating realistic talking faces is a complex and widely discussed task with numerous applications. In this paper, we present DiffTalker, a novel model designed to generate lifelike talking faces through audio and landmark co-driving. DiffTalker addresses the challenges associated with directly applying diffusion models to audio control, which are traditionally trained on text-image pairs. DiffTalker consists of two agent networks: a transformer-based landmarks completion network for geometric accuracy and a diffusion-based face generation network for texture details. Landmarks play a pivotal role in establishing a seamless connection between the audio and image domains, facilitating the incorporation of knowledge from pre-trained diffusion models. This innovative approach efficiently produces articulate-speaking faces. Experimental results showcase DiffTalker's superior performance in producing clear and geometrically accurate talking faces, all without the need for additional alignment between audio and image features.

Authors:Gregor Koehler, Tassilo Wald, Constantin Ulrich, David Zimmerer, Paul F. Jaeger, Jörg K. H. Franke, Simon Kohl, Fabian Isensee, Klaus H. Maier-Hein

Abstract: Despite the remarkable success of deep learning systems over the last decade, a key difference still remains between neural network and human decision-making: As humans, we cannot only form a decision on the spot, but also ponder, revisiting an initial guess from different angles, distilling relevant information, arriving at a better decision. Here, we propose RecycleNet, a latent feature recycling method, instilling the pondering capability for neural networks to refine initial decisions over a number of recycling steps, where outputs are fed back into earlier network layers in an iterative fashion. This approach makes minimal assumptions about the neural network architecture and thus can be implemented in a wide variety of contexts. Using medical image segmentation as the evaluation environment, we show that latent feature recycling enables the network to iteratively refine initial predictions even beyond the iterations seen during training, converging towards an improved decision. We evaluate this across a variety of segmentation benchmarks and show consistent improvements even compared with top-performing segmentation methods. This allows trading increased computation time for improved performance, which can be beneficial, especially for safety-critical applications.

Authors:Md. Fahad Hossain

Abstract: This dataset represents almost all the harmful diseases for rice in Bangladesh. This dataset consists of 1106 image of five harmful diseases called Brown Spot, Leaf Scaled, Rice Blast, Rice Turngo, Steath Blight in two different background variation named field background picture and white background picture. Two different background variation helps the dataset to perform more accurately so that the user can use this data for field use as well as white background for decision making. The data is collected from rice field of Dhaka Division. This dataset can use for rice leaf diseases classification, diseases detection using Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition for different rice leaf disease.

Authors:Yujie Feng, Yin Yang, Xiaohong Fan, Zhengpeng Zhang, Jianping Zhang

Abstract: Remote sensing images are essential for many earth science applications, but their quality can be degraded due to limitations in sensor technology and complex imaging environments. To address this, various remote sensing image deblurring methods have been developed to restore sharp, high-quality images from degraded observational data. However, most traditional model-based deblurring methods usually require predefined hand-craft prior assumptions, which are difficult to handle in complex applications, and most deep learning-based deblurring methods are designed as a black box, lacking transparency and interpretability. In this work, we propose a novel blind deblurring learning framework based on alternating iterations of shrinkage thresholds, alternately updating blurring kernels and images, with the theoretical foundation of network design. Additionally, we propose a learnable blur kernel proximal mapping module to improve the blur kernel evaluation in the kernel domain. Then, we proposed a deep proximal mapping module in the image domain, which combines a generalized shrinkage threshold operator and a multi-scale prior feature extraction block. This module also introduces an attention mechanism to adaptively adjust the prior importance, thus avoiding the drawbacks of hand-crafted image prior terms. Thus, a novel multi-scale generalized shrinkage threshold network (MGSTNet) is designed to specifically focus on learning deep geometric prior features to enhance image restoration. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our MGSTNet framework on remote sensing image datasets compared to existing deblurring methods.

Authors:Yuval Meir, Yarden Tzach, Shiri Hodassman, Ofek Tevet, Ido Kanter

Abstract: An underlying mechanism for successful deep learning (DL) with a limited deep architecture and dataset, namely VGG-16 on CIFAR-10, was recently presented based on a quantitative method to measure the quality of a single filter in each layer. In this method, each filter identifies small clusters of possible output labels, with additional noise selected as labels out of the clusters. This feature is progressively sharpened with the layers, resulting in an enhanced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and higher accuracy. In this study, the suggested universal mechanism is verified for VGG-16 and EfficientNet-B0 trained on the CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets with the following main results. First, the accuracy progressively increases with the layers, whereas the noise per filter typically progressively decreases. Second, for a given deep architecture, the maximal error rate increases approximately linearly with the number of output labels. Third, the average filter cluster size and the number of clusters per filter at the last convolutional layer adjacent to the output layer are almost independent of the number of dataset labels in the range [3, 1,000], while a high SNR is preserved. The presented DL mechanism suggests several techniques, such as applying filter's cluster connections (AFCC), to improve the computational complexity and accuracy of deep architectures and furthermore pinpoints the simplification of pre-existing structures while maintaining their accuracies.

Authors:Juwu Zheng, Jiangtao Ren

Abstract: Road disease detection is challenging due to the the small proportion of road damage in target region and the diverse background,which introduce lots of domain information.Besides, disease categories have high similarity,makes the detection more difficult. In this paper, we propose a new LDBFSS(Latent Domain Background Feature Separation and Suppression) network which could perform background information separation and suppression without domain supervision and contrastive enhancement of object features.We combine our LDBFSS network with YOLOv5 model to enhance disease features for better road disease detection. As the components of LDBFSS network, we first design a latent domain discovery module and a domain adversarial learning module to obtain pseudo domain labels through unsupervised method, guiding domain discriminator and model to train adversarially to suppress background information. In addition, we introduce a contrastive learning module and design k-instance contrastive loss, optimize the disease feature representation by increasing the inter-class distance and reducing the intra-class distance for object features. We conducted experiments on two road disease detection datasets, GRDDC and CNRDD, and compared with other models,which show an increase of nearly 4% on GRDDC dataset compared with optimal model, and an increase of 4.6% on CNRDD dataset. Experimental results prove the effectiveness and superiority of our model.

Authors:Xinyu Wang, Bohan Zhuang, Qi Wu

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), primarily trained on text-based datasets, exhibit exceptional proficiencies in understanding and executing complex linguistic instructions via text outputs. However, they falter when requests to generate non-text ones. Concurrently, modality conversion models, such as text-to-image, despite generating high-quality images, suffer from a lack of extensive textual pretraining. As a result, these models are only capable of accommodating specific image descriptions rather than comprehending more complex instructions. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel approach, \methodname, from a modality conversion perspective that evolves a text-based LLM into a multi-modal one. We specifically employ a minimal dataset to instruct LLMs to recognize the intended output modality as directed by the instructions. Consequently, the adapted LLM can effectively summon various off-the-shelf modality conversion models from the model zoos to generate non-text responses. This circumvents the necessity for complicated pretraining that typically requires immense quantities of paired multi-modal data, while simultaneously inheriting the extensive knowledge of LLMs and the ability of high-quality generative models. To evaluate and compare the adapted multi-modal LLM with its traditional counterparts, we have constructed a multi-modal instruction benchmark that solicits diverse modality outputs. The experiment results reveal that, with minimal training, LLMs can be conveniently adapted to comprehend requests for non-text responses, thus achieving higher flexibility in multi-modal scenarios. Code and data will be made available at https://github.com/xinke-wang/SwitchGPT.

Authors:Sheng Ye, Yubin Hu, Matthieu Lin, Yu-Hui Wen, Wang Zhao, Wenping Wang, Yong-Jin Liu

Abstract: The reconstruction of indoor scenes from multi-view RGB images is challenging due to the coexistence of flat and texture-less regions alongside delicate and fine-grained regions. Recent methods leverage neural radiance fields aided by predicted surface normal priors to recover the scene geometry. These methods excel in producing complete and smooth results for floor and wall areas. However, they struggle to capture complex surfaces with high-frequency structures due to the inadequate neural representation and the inaccurately predicted normal priors. To improve the capacity of the implicit representation, we propose a hybrid architecture to represent low-frequency and high-frequency regions separately. To enhance the normal priors, we introduce a simple yet effective image sharpening and denoising technique, coupled with a network that estimates the pixel-wise uncertainty of the predicted surface normal vectors. Identifying such uncertainty can prevent our model from being misled by unreliable surface normal supervisions that hinder the accurate reconstruction of intricate geometries. Experiments on the benchmark datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of reconstruction quality.

Authors:Thorsten Hempel, Ahmed A. Abdelrahman, Ayoub Al-Hamadi

Abstract: Estimating the head pose of a person is a crucial problem for numerous applications that is yet mainly addressed as a subtask of frontal pose prediction. We present a novel method for unconstrained end-to-end head pose estimation to tackle the challenging task of full range of orientation head pose prediction. We address the issue of ambiguous rotation labels by introducing the rotation matrix formalism for our ground truth data and propose a continuous 6D rotation matrix representation for efficient and robust direct regression. This allows to efficiently learn full rotation appearance and to overcome the limitations of the current state-of-the-art. Together with new accumulated training data that provides full head pose rotation data and a geodesic loss approach for stable learning, we design an advanced model that is able to predict an extended range of head orientations. An extensive evaluation on public datasets demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in an efficient and robust manner, while its advanced prediction range allows the expansion of the application area. We open-source our training and testing code along with our trained models: https://github.com/thohemp/6DRepNet360.

Authors:Ankit Dhiman, R Srinath, Srinjay Sarkar, Lokesh R Boregowda, R Venkatesh Babu

Abstract: Neural radiance field (NeRF) based methods enable high-quality novel-view synthesis for multi-view images. This work presents a method for synthesizing colorized novel views from input grey-scale multi-view images. When we apply image or video-based colorization methods on the generated grey-scale novel views, we observe artifacts due to inconsistency across views. Training a radiance field network on the colorized grey-scale image sequence also does not solve the 3D consistency issue. We propose a distillation based method to transfer color knowledge from the colorization networks trained on natural images to the radiance field network. Specifically, our method uses the radiance field network as a 3D representation and transfers knowledge from existing 2D colorization methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method produces superior colorized novel views for indoor and outdoor scenes while maintaining cross-view consistency than baselines. Further, we show the efficacy of our method on applications like colorization of radiance field network trained from 1.) Infra-Red (IR) multi-view images and 2.) Old grey-scale multi-view image sequences.

Authors:David Junhao Zhang, Heng Wang, Chuhui Xue, Rui Yan, Wenqing Zhang, Song Bai, Mike Zheng Shou

Abstract: Dataset condensation aims to condense a large dataset with a lot of training samples into a small set. Previous methods usually condense the dataset into the pixels format. However, it suffers from slow optimization speed and large number of parameters to be optimized. When increasing image resolutions and classes, the number of learnable parameters grows accordingly, prohibiting condensation methods from scaling up to large datasets with diverse classes. Moreover, the relations among condensed samples have been neglected and hence the feature distribution of condensed samples is often not diverse. To solve these problems, we propose to condense the dataset into another format, a generative model. Such a novel format allows for the condensation of large datasets because the size of the generative model remains relatively stable as the number of classes or image resolution increases. Furthermore, an intra-class and an inter-class loss are proposed to model the relation of condensed samples. Intra-class loss aims to create more diverse samples for each class by pushing each sample away from the others of the same class. Meanwhile, inter-class loss increases the discriminability of samples by widening the gap between the centers of different classes. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods and our ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our method and its individual component. To our best knowledge, we are the first to successfully conduct condensation on ImageNet-1k.

Authors:Chi-en Amy Tai, Matthew Keller, Saeejith Nair, Yuhao Chen, Yifan Wu, Olivia Markham, Krish Parmar, Pengcheng Xi, Heather Keller, Sharon Kirkpatrick, Alexander Wong

Abstract: Accurate dietary intake estimation is critical for informing policies and programs to support healthy eating, as malnutrition has been directly linked to decreased quality of life. However self-reporting methods such as food diaries suffer from substantial bias. Other conventional dietary assessment techniques and emerging alternative approaches such as mobile applications incur high time costs and may necessitate trained personnel. Recent work has focused on using computer vision and machine learning to automatically estimate dietary intake from food images, but the lack of comprehensive datasets with diverse viewpoints, modalities and food annotations hinders the accuracy and realism of such methods. To address this limitation, we introduce NutritionVerse-Synth, the first large-scale dataset of 84,984 photorealistic synthetic 2D food images with associated dietary information and multimodal annotations (including depth images, instance masks, and semantic masks). Additionally, we collect a real image dataset, NutritionVerse-Real, containing 889 images of 251 dishes to evaluate realism. Leveraging these novel datasets, we develop and benchmark NutritionVerse, an empirical study of various dietary intake estimation approaches, including indirect segmentation-based and direct prediction networks. We further fine-tune models pretrained on synthetic data with real images to provide insights into the fusion of synthetic and real data. Finally, we release both datasets (NutritionVerse-Synth, NutritionVerse-Real) on https://www.kaggle.com/nutritionverse/datasets as part of an open initiative to accelerate machine learning for dietary sensing.

Authors:Geng Lin, Chen Gao, Jia-Bin Huang, Changil Kim, Yipeng Wang, Matthias Zwicker, Ayush Saraf

Abstract: Video matting has broad applications, from adding interesting effects to casually captured movies to assisting video production professionals. Matting with associated effects such as shadows and reflections has also attracted increasing research activity, and methods like Omnimatte have been proposed to separate dynamic foreground objects of interest into their own layers. However, prior works represent video backgrounds as 2D image layers, limiting their capacity to express more complicated scenes, thus hindering application to real-world videos. In this paper, we propose a novel video matting method, OmnimatteRF, that combines dynamic 2D foreground layers and a 3D background model. The 2D layers preserve the details of the subjects, while the 3D background robustly reconstructs scenes in real-world videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reconstructs scenes with better quality on various videos.

Authors:Yaoyu Su, Shaohui Wang, Haoqian Wang

Abstract: In this paper, we present the decomposed triplane-hash neural radiance fields (DT-NeRF), a framework that significantly improves the photorealistic rendering of talking faces and achieves state-of-the-art results on key evaluation datasets. Our architecture decomposes the facial region into two specialized triplanes: one specialized for representing the mouth, and the other for the broader facial features. We introduce audio features as residual terms and integrate them as query vectors into our model through an audio-mouth-face transformer. Additionally, our method leverages the capabilities of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to enrich the volumetric representation of the entire face through additive volumetric rendering techniques. Comprehensive experimental evaluations corroborate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed approach.

Authors:Peiran Xu, Yadong Mu

Abstract: Given a group of images, co-salient object detection (CoSOD) aims to highlight the common salient object in each image. There are two factors closely related to the success of this task, namely consensus extraction, and the dispersion of consensus to each image. Most previous works represent the group consensus using local features, while we instead utilize a hierarchical Transformer module for extracting semantic-level consensus. Therefore, it can obtain a more comprehensive representation of the common object category, and exclude interference from other objects that share local similarities with the target object. In addition, we propose a Transformer-based dispersion module that takes into account the variation of the co-salient object in different scenes. It distributes the consensus to the image feature maps in an image-specific way while making full use of interactions within the group. These two modules are integrated with a ViT encoder and an FPN-like decoder to form an end-to-end trainable network, without additional branch and auxiliary loss. The proposed method is evaluated on three commonly used CoSOD datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Authors:Anh Pham Thi Minh

Abstract: Large pre-trained vision-language models such as CLIP have demonstrated great potential in zero-shot transferability to downstream tasks. However, to attain optimal performance, the manual selection of prompts is necessary to improve alignment between the downstream image distribution and the textual class descriptions. This manual prompt engineering is the major challenge for deploying such models in practice since it requires domain expertise and is extremely time-consuming. To avoid non-trivial prompt engineering, recent work Context Optimization (CoOp) introduced the concept of prompt learning to the vision domain using learnable textual tokens. While CoOp can achieve substantial improvements over manual prompts, its learned context is worse generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset. In this work, we present Prompt Learning with Reparameterization Encoder (PRE) - a simple and efficient method that enhances the generalization ability of the learnable prompt to unseen classes while maintaining the capacity to learn Base classes. Instead of directly optimizing the prompts, PRE employs a prompt encoder to reparameterize the input prompt embeddings, enhancing the exploration of task-specific knowledge from few-shot samples. Experiments and extensive ablation studies on 8 benchmarks demonstrate that our approach is an efficient method for prompt learning. Specifically, PRE achieves a notable enhancement of 5.60% in average accuracy on New classes and 3% in Harmonic mean compared to CoOp in the 16-shot setting, all achieved within a good training time.

Authors:Yang Li, Fan Zhong, Xin Wang, Shuangbing Song, Jiachen Li, Xueying Qin, Changhe Tu

Abstract: Previous evaluations on 6DoF object pose tracking have presented obvious limitations along with the development of this area. In particular, the evaluation protocols are not unified for different methods, the widely-used YCBV dataset contains significant annotation error, and the error metrics also may be biased. As a result, it is hard to fairly compare the methods, which has became a big obstacle for developing new algorithms. In this paper we contribute a unified benchmark to address the above problems. For more accurate annotation of YCBV, we propose a multi-view multi-object global pose refinement method, which can jointly refine the poses of all objects and view cameras, resulting in sub-pixel sub-millimeter alignment errors. The limitations of previous scoring methods and error metrics are analyzed, based on which we introduce our improved evaluation methods. The unified benchmark takes both YCBV and BCOT as base datasets, which are shown to be complementary in scene categories. In experiments, we validate the precision and reliability of the proposed global pose refinement method with a realistic semi-synthesized dataset particularly for YCBV, and then present the benchmark results unifying learning&non-learning and RGB&RGBD methods, with some finds not discovered in previous studies.

Authors:Hongkuan Zhou, Aifen Sui, Wei Cao, Letian Shi

Abstract: More research attention has recently been given to end-to-end autonomous driving technologies where the entire driving pipeline is replaced with a single neural network because of its simpler structure and faster inference time. Despite this appealing approach largely reducing the components in driving pipeline, its simplicity also leads to interpretability problems and safety issues arXiv:2003.06404. The trained policy is not always compliant with the traffic rules and it is also hard to discover the reason for the misbehavior because of the lack of intermediate outputs. Meanwhile, Sensors are also critical to autonomous driving's security and feasibility to perceive the surrounding environment under complex driving scenarios. In this paper, we proposed P-CSG, a novel penalty-based imitation learning approach with cross semantics generation sensor fusion technologies to increase the overall performance of End-to-End Autonomous Driving. We conducted an assessment of our model's performance using the Town 05 Long benchmark, achieving an impressive driving score improvement of over 15%. Furthermore, we conducted robustness evaluations against adversarial attacks like FGSM and Dot attacks, revealing a substantial increase in robustness compared to baseline models.More detailed information, such as code-based resources, ablation studies and videos can be found at https://hk-zh.github.io/p-csg-plus.

Authors:Claudio Turchetti

Abstract: One of the main issues in computing a tensor decomposition is how to choose the number of rank-one components, since there is no finite algorithms for determining the rank of a tensor. A commonly used approach for this purpose is to find a low-dimensional subspace by solving an optimization problem and assuming the number of components is fixed. However, even though this algorithm is efficient and easy to implement, it often converges to poor local minima and suffers from outliers and noise. The aim of this paper is to develop a mathematical framework for exact tensor decomposition that is able to represent a tensor as the sum of a finite number of low-rank tensors. In the paper three different problems will be carried out to derive: i) the decomposition of a non-negative self-adjoint tensor operator; ii) the decomposition of a linear tensor transformation; iii) the decomposition of a generic tensor.

Authors:Shiqiao Meng, Zonglin Di, Siwei Yang, Yin Wang

Abstract: Automatic road extraction from satellite imagery using deep learning is a viable alternative to traditional manual mapping. Therefore it has received considerable attention recently. However, most of the existing methods are supervised and require pixel-level labeling, which is tedious and error-prone. To make matters worse, the earth has a diverse range of terrain, vegetation, and man-made objects. It is well known that models trained in one area generalize poorly to other areas. Various shooting conditions such as light and angel, as well as different image processing techniques further complicate the issue. It is impractical to develop training data to cover all image styles. This paper proposes to leverage OpenStreetMap road data as weak labels and large scale satellite imagery to pre-train semantic segmentation models. Our extensive experimental results show that the prediction accuracy increases with the amount of the weakly labeled data, as well as the road density in the areas chosen for training. Using as much as 100 times more data than the widely used DeepGlobe road dataset, our model with the D-LinkNet architecture and the ResNet-50 backbone exceeds the top performer of the current DeepGlobe leaderboard. Furthermore, due to large-scale pre-training, our model generalizes much better than those trained with only the curated datasets, implying great application potential.

Authors:Yu Gao, Lutong Su, Hao Liang, Yufeng Yue, Yi Yang, Mengyin Fu

Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) employ multi-view images for 3D scene representation and have shown remarkable performance. As one of the primary sources of multi-view images, multi-camera systems encounter challenges such as varying intrinsic parameters and frequent pose changes. Most previous NeRF-based methods often assume a global unique camera and seldom consider scenarios with multiple cameras. Besides, some pose-robust methods still remain susceptible to suboptimal solutions when poses are poor initialized. In this paper, we propose MC-NeRF, a method can jointly optimize both intrinsic and extrinsic parameters for bundle-adjusting Neural Radiance Fields. Firstly, we conduct a theoretical analysis to tackle the degenerate case and coupling issue that arise from the joint optimization between intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. Secondly, based on the proposed solutions, we introduce an efficient calibration image acquisition scheme for multi-camera systems, including the design of calibration object. Lastly, we present a global end-to-end network with training sequence that enables the regression of intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, along with the rendering network. Moreover, most existing datasets are designed for unique camera, we create a new dataset that includes four different styles of multi-camera acquisition systems, allowing readers to generate custom datasets. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of our method when each image corresponds to different camera parameters. Specifically, we adopt up to 110 images with 110 different intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, to achieve 3D scene representation without providing initial poses. The Code and supplementary materials are available at https://in2-viaun.github.io/MC-NeRF.

Authors:Rong Li, ShiJie Li, Xieyuanli Chen, Teli Ma, Wang Hao, Juergen Gall, Junwei Liang

Abstract: LiDAR semantic segmentation plays a crucial role in enabling autonomous driving and robots to understand their surroundings accurately and robustly. There are different types of methods, such as point-based, range image-based, and polar-based. Among these, range image-based methods are widely used due to their balance between accuracy and speed. However, they face a significant challenge known as the ``many-to-one'' problem caused by the range image's limited horizontal and vertical angular resolution, where around 20% of the 3D points are occluded during model inference based on our observation. In this paper, we present TFNet, a range image-based LiDAR semantic segmentation method that utilizes temporal information to address this issue. Specifically, we incorporate a temporal fusion layer to extract useful information from previous scans and integrate it with the current scan. We then design a max-voting-based post-processing technique to correct false predictions, particularly those caused by the ``many-to-one'' issue. Experiments on two benchmarks and seven backbones of three modalities demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed method.

Authors:Liangchen Liu, Nannan Wang, Dawei Zhou, Xinbo Gao, Decheng Liu, Xi Yang, Tongliang Liu

Abstract: This paper targets a novel trade-off problem in generalizable prompt learning for vision-language models (VLM), i.e., improving the performance on unseen classes while maintaining the performance on seen classes. Comparing with existing generalizable methods that neglect the seen classes degradation, the setting of this problem is more strict and fits more closely with practical applications. To solve this problem, we start from the optimization perspective, and leverage the relationship between loss landscape geometry and model generalization ability. By analyzing the loss landscape of the state-of-the-art method and the widely-used Sharpness-aware Minimization (SAM), we conclude that the trade-off performance correlates to both loss value and loss sharpness, while each of them are indispensable. However, we find the optimizing gradient of existing methods cannot always maintain high consistency with both loss value and loss sharpness during the whole optimization procedure. To this end, we propose an novel SAM-based method for prompt learning, denoted as Gradient Constrained Sharpness-aware Context Optimization (GCSCoOp), to dynamically constrains the optimizing gradient, thus achieving above two-fold optimization objective simultaneously. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of GCSCoOp in the trade-off problem.

Authors:Roberto Daza, Aythami Morales, Julian Fierrez, Ruben Tolosana, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez

Abstract: This work introduces a new multispectral database and novel approaches for eyeblink detection in RGB and Near-Infrared (NIR) individual images. Our contributed dataset (mEBAL2, multimodal Eye Blink and Attention Level estimation, Version 2) is the largest existing eyeblink database, representing a great opportunity to improve data-driven multispectral approaches for blink detection and related applications (e.g., attention level estimation and presentation attack detection in face biometrics). mEBAL2 includes 21,100 image sequences from 180 different students (more than 2 million labeled images in total) while conducting a number of e-learning tasks of varying difficulty or taking a real course on HTML initiation through the edX MOOC platform. mEBAL2 uses multiple sensors, including two Near-Infrared (NIR) and one RGB camera to capture facial gestures during the execution of the tasks, as well as an Electroencephalogram (EEG) band to get the cognitive activity of the user and blinking events. Furthermore, this work proposes a Convolutional Neural Network architecture as benchmark for blink detection on mEBAL2 with performances up to 97%. Different training methodologies are implemented using the RGB spectrum, NIR spectrum, and the combination of both to enhance the performance on existing eyeblink detectors. We demonstrate that combining NIR and RGB images during training improves the performance of RGB eyeblink detectors (i.e., detection based only on a RGB image). Finally, the generalization capacity of the proposed eyeblink detectors is validated in wilder and more challenging environments like the HUST-LEBW dataset to show the usefulness of mEBAL2 to train a new generation of data-driven approaches for eyeblink detection.

Authors:Davinder Pal Singh, Lala Shakti Swarup Ray, Bo Zhou, Sungho Suh, Paul Lukowicz

Abstract: We present a novel local-global feature fusion framework for body-weight exercise recognition with floor-based dynamic pressure maps. One step further from the existing studies using deep neural networks mainly focusing on global feature extraction, the proposed framework aims to combine local and global features using image processing techniques and the YOLO object detection to localize pressure profiles from different body parts and consider physical constraints. The proposed local feature extraction method generates two sets of high-level local features consisting of cropped pressure mapping and numerical features such as angular orientation, location on the mat, and pressure area. In addition, we adopt a knowledge distillation for regularization to preserve the knowledge of the global feature extraction and improve the performance of the exercise recognition. Our experimental results demonstrate a notable 11 percent improvement in F1 score for exercise recognition while preserving label-specific features.

Authors:Hongsuk Choi, Nikhil Chavan-Dafle, Jiacheng Yuan, Volkan Isler, Hyunsoo Park

Abstract: This paper presents a method to learn hand-object interaction prior for reconstructing a 3D hand-object scene from a single RGB image. The inference as well as training-data generation for 3D hand-object scene reconstruction is challenging due to the depth ambiguity of a single image and occlusions by the hand and object. We turn this challenge into an opportunity by utilizing the hand shape to constrain the possible relative configuration of the hand and object geometry. We design a generalizable implicit function, HandNeRF, that explicitly encodes the correlation of the 3D hand shape features and 2D object features to predict the hand and object scene geometry. With experiments on real-world datasets, we show that HandNeRF is able to reconstruct hand-object scenes of novel grasp configurations more accurately than comparable methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that object reconstruction from HandNeRF ensures more accurate execution of a downstream task, such as grasping for robotic hand-over.

Authors:Zhengqi Li, Richard Tucker, Noah Snavely, Aleksander Holynski

Abstract: We present an approach to modeling an image-space prior on scene dynamics. Our prior is learned from a collection of motion trajectories extracted from real video sequences containing natural, oscillating motion such as trees, flowers, candles, and clothes blowing in the wind. Given a single image, our trained model uses a frequency-coordinated diffusion sampling process to predict a per-pixel long-term motion representation in the Fourier domain, which we call a neural stochastic motion texture. This representation can be converted into dense motion trajectories that span an entire video. Along with an image-based rendering module, these trajectories can be used for a number of downstream applications, such as turning still images into seamlessly looping dynamic videos, or allowing users to realistically interact with objects in real pictures.

Authors:Rohan Choudhury, Kris Kitani, Laszlo A. Jeni

Abstract: Existing volumetric methods for predicting 3D human pose estimation are accurate, but computationally expensive and optimized for single time-step prediction. We present TEMPO, an efficient multi-view pose estimation model that learns a robust spatiotemporal representation, improving pose accuracy while also tracking and forecasting human pose. We significantly reduce computation compared to the state-of-the-art by recurrently computing per-person 2D pose features, fusing both spatial and temporal information into a single representation. In doing so, our model is able to use spatiotemporal context to predict more accurate human poses without sacrificing efficiency. We further use this representation to track human poses over time as well as predict future poses. Finally, we demonstrate that our model is able to generalize across datasets without scene-specific fine-tuning. TEMPO achieves 10$\%$ better MPJPE with a 33$\times$ improvement in FPS compared to TesseTrack on the challenging CMU Panoptic Studio dataset.

Authors:Zhiwu Qing, Shiwei Zhang, Ziyuan Huang, Yingya Zhang, Changxin Gao, Deli Zhao, Nong Sang

Abstract: Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.

Authors:Yuting Wang, Velibor Ilic, Jiatong Li, Branislav Kisacanin, Vladimir Pavlovic

Abstract: Object detection (OD), a crucial vision task, remains challenged by the lack of large training datasets with precise object localization labels. In this work, we propose ALWOD, a new framework that addresses this problem by fusing active learning (AL) with weakly and semi-supervised object detection paradigms. Because the performance of AL critically depends on the model initialization, we propose a new auxiliary image generator strategy that utilizes an extremely small labeled set, coupled with a large weakly tagged set of images, as a warm-start for AL. We then propose a new AL acquisition function, another critical factor in AL success, that leverages the student-teacher OD pair disagreement and uncertainty to effectively propose the most informative images to annotate. Finally, to complete the AL loop, we introduce a new labeling task delegated to human annotators, based on selection and correction of model-proposed detections, which is both rapid and effective in labeling the informative images. We demonstrate, across several challenging benchmarks, that ALWOD significantly narrows the gap between the ODs trained on few partially labeled but strategically selected image instances and those that rely on the fully-labeled data. Our code is publicly available on https://github.com/seqam-lab/ALWOD.

Authors:Andrea Amaduzzi, Giuseppe Lisanti, Samuele Salti, Luigi Di Stefano

Abstract: While text-conditional 3D object generation and manipulation have seen rapid progress, the evaluation of coherence between generated 3D shapes and input textual descriptions lacks a clear benchmark. The reason is twofold: a) the low quality of the textual descriptions in the only publicly available dataset of text-shape pairs; b) the limited effectiveness of the metrics used to quantitatively assess such coherence. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive solution that addresses both weaknesses. Firstly, we employ large language models to automatically refine textual descriptions associated with shapes. Secondly, we propose a quantitative metric to assess text-to-shape coherence, through cross-attention mechanisms. To validate our approach, we conduct a user study and compare quantitatively our metric with existing ones. The refined dataset, the new metric and a set of text-shape pairs validated by the user study comprise a novel, fine-grained benchmark that we publicly release to foster research on text-to-shape coherence of text-conditioned 3D generative models. Benchmark available at https://cvlab-unibo.github.io/CrossCoherence-Web/.

Authors:Zeqi Xiao, Tai Wang, Jingbo Wang, Jinkun Cao, Wenwei Zhang, Bo Dai, Dahua Lin, Jiangmiao Pang

Abstract: Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) is a vital component of fields like embodied AI and virtual reality. Despite advancements in motion quality and physical plausibility, two pivotal factors, versatile interaction control and the development of a user-friendly interface, require further exploration before the practical application of HSI. This paper presents a unified HSI framework, UniHSI, which supports unified control of diverse interactions through language commands. This framework is built upon the definition of interaction as Chain of Contacts (CoC): steps of human joint-object part pairs, which is inspired by the strong correlation between interaction types and human-object contact regions. Based on the definition, UniHSI constitutes a Large Language Model (LLM) Planner to translate language prompts into task plans in the form of CoC, and a Unified Controller that turns CoC into uniform task execution. To facilitate training and evaluation, we collect a new dataset named ScenePlan that encompasses thousands of task plans generated by LLMs based on diverse scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in versatile task execution and generalizability to real scanned scenes. The project page is at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/UniHSI .

Authors:Isabella Liu, Linghao Chen, Ziyang Fu, Liwen Wu, Haian Jin, Zhong Li, Chin Ming Ryan Wong, Yi Xu, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Zexiang Xu, Hao Su

Abstract: We introduce OpenIllumination, a real-world dataset containing over 108K images of 64 objects with diverse materials, captured under 72 camera views and a large number of different illuminations. For each image in the dataset, we provide accurate camera parameters, illumination ground truth, and foreground segmentation masks. Our dataset enables the quantitative evaluation of most inverse rendering and material decomposition methods for real objects. We examine several state-of-the-art inverse rendering methods on our dataset and compare their performances. The dataset and code can be found on the project page: https://oppo-us-research.github.io/OpenIllumination.

Authors:Ziang Cao, Fangzhou Hong, Tong Wu, Liang Pan, Ziwei Liu

Abstract: Creating diverse and high-quality 3D assets with an automatic generative model is highly desirable. Despite extensive efforts on 3D generation, most existing works focus on the generation of a single category or a few categories. In this paper, we introduce a diffusion-based feed-forward framework for synthesizing massive categories of real-world 3D objects with a single generative model. Notably, there are three major challenges for this large-vocabulary 3D generation: a) the need for expressive yet efficient 3D representation; b) large diversity in geometry and texture across categories; c) complexity in the appearances of real-world objects. To this end, we propose a novel triplane-based 3D-aware Diffusion model with TransFormer, DiffTF, for handling challenges via three aspects. 1) Considering efficiency and robustness, we adopt a revised triplane representation and improve the fitting speed and accuracy. 2) To handle the drastic variations in geometry and texture, we regard the features of all 3D objects as a combination of generalized 3D knowledge and specialized 3D features. To extract generalized 3D knowledge from diverse categories, we propose a novel 3D-aware transformer with shared cross-plane attention. It learns the cross-plane relations across different planes and aggregates the generalized 3D knowledge with specialized 3D features. 3) In addition, we devise the 3D-aware encoder/decoder to enhance the generalized 3D knowledge in the encoded triplanes for handling categories with complex appearances. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet and OmniObject3D (over 200 diverse real-world categories) convincingly demonstrate that a single DiffTF model achieves state-of-the-art large-vocabulary 3D object generation performance with large diversity, rich semantics, and high quality.

Authors:Jianqiao Wangni

Abstract: We aim to provide a general framework of for computational photography that recovers the real scene from imperfect images, via the Deep Nonparametric Convexified Filtering (DNCF). It is consists of a nonparametric deep network to resemble the physical equations behind the image formation, such as denoising, super-resolution, inpainting, and flash. DNCF has no parameterization dependent on training data, therefore has a strong generalization and robustness to adversarial image manipulation. During inference, we also encourage the network parameters to be nonnegative and create a bi-convex function on the input and parameters, and this adapts to second-order optimization algorithms with insufficient running time, having 10X acceleration over Deep Image Prior. With these tools, we empirically verify its capability to defend image classification deep networks against adversary attack algorithms in real-time.

Authors:Swapnil Bhosale, Haosen Yang, Diptesh Kanojia, Xiatian Zhu

Abstract: Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to precisely outline audible objects in a visual scene at the pixel level. Existing AVS methods require fine-grained annotations of audio-mask pairs in supervised learning fashion. This limits their scalability since it is time consuming and tedious to acquire such cross-modality pixel level labels. To overcome this obstacle, in this work we introduce unsupervised audio-visual segmentation with no need for task-specific data annotations and model training. For tackling this newly proposed problem, we formulate a novel Cross-Modality Semantic Filtering (CMSF) approach to accurately associate the underlying audio-mask pairs by leveraging the off-the-shelf multi-modal foundation models (e.g., detection [1], open-world segmentation [2] and multi-modal alignment [3]). Guiding the proposal generation by either audio or visual cues, we design two training-free variants: AT-GDINO-SAM and OWOD-BIND. Extensive experiments on the AVS-Bench dataset show that our unsupervised approach can perform well in comparison to prior art supervised counterparts across complex scenarios with multiple auditory objects. Particularly, in situations where existing supervised AVS methods struggle with overlapping foreground objects, our models still excel in accurately segmenting overlapped auditory objects. Our code will be publicly released.

Authors:Zhiyuan Zhang, Hua Yang, Zhouping Yin

Abstract: High-resolution multi-modality information acquired by vision-based tactile sensors can support more dexterous manipulations for robot fingers. Optical flow is low-level information directly obtained by vision-based tactile sensors, which can be transformed into other modalities like force, geometry and depth. Current vision-tactile sensors employ optical flow methods from OpenCV to estimate the deformation of markers in gels. However, these methods need to be more precise for accurately measuring the displacement of markers during large elastic deformation of the gel, as this can significantly impact the accuracy of downstream tasks. This study proposes a self-supervised optical flow method based on deep learning to achieve high accuracy in displacement measurement for vision-based tactile sensors. The proposed method employs a coarse-to-fine strategy to handle large deformations by constructing a multi-scale feature pyramid from the input image. To better deal with the elastic deformation caused by the gel, the Helmholtz velocity decomposition constraint combined with the elastic deformation constraint are adopted to address the distortion rate and area change rate, respectively. A local flow fusion module is designed to smooth the optical flow, taking into account the prior knowledge of the blurred effect of gel deformation. We trained the proposed self-supervised network using an open-source dataset and compared it with traditional and deep learning-based optical flow methods. The results show that the proposed method achieved the highest displacement measurement accuracy, thereby demonstrating its potential for enabling more precise measurement of downstream tasks using vision-based tactile sensors.

Authors:Yihui Huang, Ningjiang Chen

Abstract: Autonomous driving systems require real-time environmental perception to ensure user safety and experience. Streaming perception is a task of reporting the current state of the world, which is used to evaluate the delay and accuracy of autonomous driving systems. In real-world applications, factors such as hardware limitations and high temperatures inevitably cause delays in autonomous driving systems, resulting in the offset between the model output and the world state. In order to solve this problem, this paper propose the Multi- Timestep Detector (MTD), an end-to-end detector which uses dynamic routing for multi-branch future prediction, giving model the ability to resist delay fluctuations. A Delay Analysis Module (DAM) is proposed to optimize the existing delay sensing method, continuously monitoring the model inference stack and calculating the delay trend. Moreover, a novel Timestep Branch Module (TBM) is constructed, which includes static flow and adaptive flow to adaptively predict specific timesteps according to the delay trend. The proposed method has been evaluated on the Argoverse-HD dataset, and the experimental results show that it has achieved state-of-the-art performance across various delay settings.

Authors:Zhihang Ren, Jefferson Ortega, Yifan Wang, Zhimin Chen, David Whitney, Yunhui Guo, Stella X. Yu

Abstract: Human affect recognition has been a significant topic in psychophysics and computer vision. However, the currently published datasets have many limitations. For example, most datasets contain frames that contain only information about facial expressions. Due to the limitations of previous datasets, it is very hard to either understand the mechanisms for affect recognition of humans or generalize well on common cases for computer vision models trained on those datasets. In this work, we introduce a brand new large dataset, the Video-based Emotion and Affect Tracking in Context Dataset (VEATIC), that can conquer the limitations of the previous datasets. VEATIC has 124 video clips from Hollywood movies, documentaries, and home videos with continuous valence and arousal ratings of each frame via real-time annotation. Along with the dataset, we propose a new computer vision task to infer the affect of the selected character via both context and character information in each video frame. Additionally, we propose a simple model to benchmark this new computer vision task. We also compare the performance of the pretrained model using our dataset with other similar datasets. Experiments show the competing results of our pretrained model via VEATIC, indicating the generalizability of VEATIC. Our dataset is available at https://veatic.github.io.

Authors:Tengyang Chen, Jiangtao Ren

Abstract: In the domain of traffic safety and road maintenance, precise detection of road damage is crucial for ensuring safe driving and prolonging road durability. However, current methods often fall short due to limited data. Prior attempts have used Generative Adversarial Networks to generate damage with diverse shapes and manually integrate it into appropriate positions. However, the problem has not been well explored and is faced with two challenges. First, they only enrich the location and shape of damage while neglect the diversity of severity levels, and the realism still needs further improvement. Second, they require a significant amount of manual effort. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative approach. In addition to using GAN to generate damage with various shapes, we further employ texture synthesis techniques to extract road textures. These two elements are then mixed with different weights, allowing us to control the severity of the synthesized damage, which are then embedded back into the original images via Poisson blending. Our method ensures both richness of damage severity and a better alignment with the background. To save labor costs, we leverage structural similarity for automated sample selection during embedding. Each augmented data of an original image contains versions with varying severity levels. We implement a straightforward screening strategy to mitigate distribution drift. Experiments are conducted on a public road damage dataset. The proposed method not only eliminates the need for manual labor but also achieves remarkable enhancements, improving the mAP by 4.1% and the F1-score by 4.5%.

Authors:Tengyang Chen, Jiangtao Ren

Abstract: Traffic signs are important facilities to ensure traffic safety and smooth flow, but may be damaged due to many reasons, which poses a great safety hazard. Therefore, it is important to study a method to detect damaged traffic signs. Existing object detection techniques for damaged traffic signs are still absent. Since damaged traffic signs are closer in appearance to normal ones, it is difficult to capture the detailed local damage features of damaged traffic signs using traditional object detection methods. In this paper, we propose an improved object detection method based on YOLOv5s, namely MFL-YOLO (Mutual Feature Levels Loss enhanced YOLO). We designed a simple cross-level loss function so that each level of the model has its own role, which is beneficial for the model to be able to learn more diverse features and improve the fine granularity. The method can be applied as a plug-and-play module and it does not increase the structural complexity or the computational complexity while improving the accuracy. We also replaced the traditional convolution and CSP with the GSConv and VoVGSCSP in the neck of YOLOv5s to reduce the scale and computational complexity. Compared with YOLOv5s, our MFL-YOLO improves 4.3 and 5.1 in F1 scores and mAP, while reducing the FLOPs by 8.9%. The Grad-CAM heat map visualization shows that our model can better focus on the local details of the damaged traffic signs. In addition, we also conducted experiments on CCTSDB2021 and TT100K to further validate the generalization of our model.

Authors:Xiangrong Zhang, Tianyang Zhang, Guanchun Wang, Peng Zhu, Xu Tang, Xiuping Jia, Licheng Jiao

Abstract: Remote sensing object detection (RSOD), one of the most fundamental and challenging tasks in the remote sensing field, has received longstanding attention. In recent years, deep learning techniques have demonstrated robust feature representation capabilities and led to a big leap in the development of RSOD techniques. In this era of rapid technical evolution, this review aims to present a comprehensive review of the recent achievements in deep learning based RSOD methods. More than 300 papers are covered in this review. We identify five main challenges in RSOD, including multi-scale object detection, rotated object detection, weak object detection, tiny object detection, and object detection with limited supervision, and systematically review the corresponding methods developed in a hierarchical division manner. We also review the widely used benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics within the field of RSOD, as well as the application scenarios for RSOD. Future research directions are provided for further promoting the research in RSOD.

Authors:Alejandro Fontan, Javier Civera, Michael Milford

Abstract: For SLAM to be safely deployed in unstructured real world environments, it must possess several key properties that are not encompassed by conventional benchmarks. In this paper we show that SLAM commutativity, that is, consistency in trajectory estimates on forward and reverse traverses of the same route, is a significant issue for the state of the art. Current pipelines show a significant bias between forward and reverse directions of travel, that is in addition inconsistent regarding which direction of travel exhibits better performance. In this paper we propose several contributions to feature-based SLAM pipelines that remedies the motion bias problem. In a comprehensive evaluation across four datasets, we show that our contributions implemented in ORB-SLAM2 substantially reduce the bias between forward and backward motion and additionally improve the aggregated trajectory error. Removing the SLAM motion bias has significant relevance for the wide range of robotics and computer vision applications where performance consistency is important.

Authors:Sacha Lewin, Maxime Vandegar, Thomas Hoyoux, Olivier Barnich, Gilles Louppe

Abstract: The long-standing problem of novel view synthesis has many applications, notably in sports broadcasting. Photorealistic novel view synthesis of soccer actions, in particular, is of enormous interest to the broadcast industry. Yet only a few industrial solutions have been proposed, and even fewer that achieve near-broadcast quality of the synthetic replays. Except for their setup of multiple static cameras around the playfield, the best proprietary systems disclose close to no information about their inner workings. Leveraging multiple static cameras for such a task indeed presents a challenge rarely tackled in the literature, for a lack of public datasets: the reconstruction of a large-scale, mostly static environment, with small, fast-moving elements. Recently, the emergence of neural radiance fields has induced stunning progress in many novel view synthesis applications, leveraging deep learning principles to produce photorealistic results in the most challenging settings. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of basing a solution to the task on dynamic NeRFs, i.e., neural models purposed to reconstruct general dynamic content. We compose synthetic soccer environments and conduct multiple experiments using them, identifying key components that help reconstruct soccer scenes with dynamic NeRFs. We show that, although this approach cannot fully meet the quality requirements for the target application, it suggests promising avenues toward a cost-efficient, automatic solution. We also make our work dataset and code publicly available, with the goal to encourage further efforts from the research community on the task of novel view synthesis for dynamic soccer scenes. For code, data, and video results, please see https://soccernerfs.isach.be.

Authors:Rebecca S. Stone, Pedro E. Chavarrias-Solano, Andrew J. Bulpitt, David C. Hogg, Sharib Ali

Abstract: While several previous studies have devised methods for segmentation of polyps, most of these methods are not rigorously assessed on multi-center datasets. Variability due to appearance of polyps from one center to another, difference in endoscopic instrument grades, and acquisition quality result in methods with good performance on in-distribution test data, and poor performance on out-of-distribution or underrepresented samples. Unfair models have serious implications and pose a critical challenge to clinical applications. We adapt an implicit bias mitigation method which leverages Bayesian epistemic uncertainties during training to encourage the model to focus on underrepresented sample regions. We demonstrate the potential of this approach to improve generalisability without sacrificing state-of-the-art performance on a challenging multi-center polyp segmentation dataset (PolypGen) with different centers and image modalities.

Authors:M. Jehanzeb Mirza, Leonid Karlinsky, Wei Lin, Horst Possegger, Rogerio Feris, Horst Bischof

Abstract: Vision and Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have enabled visual recognition of a potentially unlimited set of categories described by text prompts. However, for the best visual recognition performance, these models still require tuning to better fit the data distributions of the downstream tasks, in order to overcome the domain shift from the web-based pre-training data. Recently, it has been shown that it is possible to effectively tune VLMs without any paired data, and in particular to effectively improve VLMs visual recognition performance using text-only training data generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we dive deeper into this exciting text-only VLM training approach and explore ways it can be significantly further improved taking the specifics of the downstream task into account when sampling text data from LLMs. In particular, compared to the SOTA text-only VLM training approach, we demonstrate up to 8.4% performance improvement in (cross) domain-specific adaptation, up to 8.7% improvement in fine-grained recognition, and 3.1% overall average improvement in zero-shot classification compared to strong baselines.

Authors:Ruihai Wu, Chenrui Tie, Yushi Du, Yan Zhao, Hao Dong

Abstract: Shape assembly aims to reassemble parts (or fragments) into a complete object, which is a common task in our daily life. Different from the semantic part assembly (e.g., assembling a chair's semantic parts like legs into a whole chair), geometric part assembly (e.g., assembling bowl fragments into a complete bowl) is an emerging task in computer vision and robotics. Instead of semantic information, this task focuses on geometric information of parts. As the both geometric and pose space of fractured parts are exceptionally large, shape pose disentanglement of part representations is beneficial to geometric shape assembly. In our paper, we propose to leverage SE(3) equivariance for such shape pose disentanglement. Moreover, while previous works in vision and robotics only consider SE(3) equivariance for the representations of single objects, we move a step forward and propose leveraging SE(3) equivariance for representations considering multi-part correlations, which further boosts the performance of the multi-part assembly. Experiments demonstrate the significance of SE(3) equivariance and our proposed method for geometric shape assembly. Project page: https://crtie.github.io/SE-3-part-assembly/

Authors:Loïc J. Azzalini, Dario Izzo

Abstract: Early detection and tracking of ejecta in the vicinity of small solar system bodies is crucial to guarantee spacecraft safety and support scientific observation. During the visit of active asteroid Bennu, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft relied on the analysis of images captured by onboard navigation cameras to detect particle ejection events, which ultimately became one of the mission's scientific highlights. To increase the scientific return of similar time-constrained missions, this work proposes an event-based solution that is dedicated to the detection and tracking of centimetre-sized particles. Unlike a standard frame-based camera, the pixels of an event-based camera independently trigger events indicating whether the scene brightness has increased or decreased at that time and location in the sensor plane. As a result of the sparse and asynchronous spatiotemporal output, event cameras combine very high dynamic range and temporal resolution with low-power consumption, which could complement existing onboard imaging techniques. This paper motivates the use of a scientific event camera by reconstructing the particle ejection episodes reported by the OSIRIS-REx mission in a photorealistic scene generator and in turn, simulating event-based observations. The resulting streams of spatiotemporal data support future work on event-based multi-object tracking.

Authors:Xian Lin, Yangyang Xiang, Li Zhang, Xin Yang, Zengqiang Yan, Li Yu

Abstract: Segment anything model (SAM), an eminent universal image segmentation model, has recently gathered considerable attention within the domain of medical image segmentation. Despite the remarkable performance of SAM on natural images, it grapples with significant performance degradation and limited generalization when confronted with medical images, particularly with those involving objects of low contrast, faint boundaries, intricate shapes, and diminutive sizes. In this paper, we propose SAMUS, a universal model tailored for ultrasound image segmentation. In contrast to previous SAM-based universal models, SAMUS pursues not only better generalization but also lower deployment cost, rendering it more suitable for clinical applications. Specifically, based on SAM, a parallel CNN branch is introduced to inject local features into the ViT encoder through cross-branch attention for better medical image segmentation. Then, a position adapter and a feature adapter are developed to adapt SAM from natural to medical domains and from requiring large-size inputs (1024x1024) to small-size inputs (256x256) for more clinical-friendly deployment. A comprehensive ultrasound dataset, comprising about 30k images and 69k masks and covering six object categories, is collected for verification. Extensive comparison experiments demonstrate SAMUS's superiority against the state-of-the-art task-specific models and universal foundation models under both task-specific evaluation and generalization evaluation. Moreover, SAMUS is deployable on entry-level GPUs, as it has been liberated from the constraints of long sequence encoding. The code, data, and models will be released at https://github.com/xianlin7/SAMUS.

Authors:Jiayu Lei, Lisong Dai, Haoyun Jiang, Chaoyi Wu, Xiaoman Zhang, Yao Zhang, Jiangchao Yao, Weidi Xie, Yanyong Zhang, Yuehua Li, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang

Abstract: Magnetic resonance imaging~(MRI) have played a crucial role in brain disease diagnosis, with which a range of computer-aided artificial intelligence methods have been proposed. However, the early explorations usually focus on the limited types of brain diseases in one study and train the model on the data in a small scale, yielding the bottleneck of generalization. Towards a more effective and scalable paradigm, we propose a hierarchical knowledge-enhanced pre-training framework for the universal brain MRI diagnosis, termed as UniBrain. Specifically, UniBrain leverages a large-scale dataset of 24,770 imaging-report pairs from routine diagnostics. Different from previous pre-training techniques for the unitary vision or textual feature, or with the brute-force alignment between vision and language information, we leverage the unique characteristic of report information in different granularity to build a hierarchical alignment mechanism, which strengthens the efficiency in feature learning. Our UniBrain is validated on three real world datasets with severe class imbalance and the public BraTS2019 dataset. It not only consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art diagnostic methods by a large margin and provides a superior grounding performance but also shows comparable performance compared to expert radiologists on certain disease types.

Authors:Zhenguang Liu, Xinyang Yu, Ruili Wang, Shuai Ye, Zhe Ma, Jianfeng Dong, Sifeng He, Feng Qian, Xiaobo Zhang, Roger Zimmermann, Lei Yang

Abstract: The self-media era provides us tremendous high quality videos. Unfortunately, frequent video copyright infringements are now seriously damaging the interests and enthusiasm of video creators. Identifying infringing videos is therefore a compelling task. Current state-of-the-art methods tend to simply feed high-dimensional mixed video features into deep neural networks and count on the networks to extract useful representations. Despite its simplicity, this paradigm heavily relies on the original entangled features and lacks constraints guaranteeing that useful task-relevant semantics are extracted from the features. In this paper, we seek to tackle the above challenges from two aspects: (1) We propose to disentangle an original high-dimensional feature into multiple sub-features, explicitly disentangling the feature into exclusive lower-dimensional components. We expect the sub-features to encode non-overlapping semantics of the original feature and remove redundant information. (2) On top of the disentangled sub-features, we further learn an auxiliary feature to enhance the sub-features. We theoretically analyzed the mutual information between the label and the disentangled features, arriving at a loss that maximizes the extraction of task-relevant information from the original feature. Extensive experiments on two large-scale benchmark datasets (i.e., SVD and VCSL) demonstrate that our method achieves 90.1% TOP-100 mAP on the large-scale SVD dataset and also sets the new state-of-the-art on the VCSL benchmark dataset. Our code and model have been released at https://github.com/yyyooooo/DMI/, hoping to contribute to the community.

Authors:Devang Mehta, Noah Klarmann

Abstract: Manufacturing industries require efficient and voluminous production of high-quality finished goods. In the context of Industry 4.0, visual anomaly detection poses an optimistic solution for automatically controlling product quality with high precision. Automation based on computer vision poses a promising solution to prevent bottlenecks at the product quality checkpoint. We considered recent advancements in machine learning to improve visual defect localization, but challenges persist in obtaining a balanced feature set and database of the wide variety of defects occurring in the production line. This paper proposes a defect localizing autoencoder with unsupervised class selection by clustering with k-means the features extracted from a pre-trained VGG-16 network. The selected classes of defects are augmented with natural wild textures to simulate artificial defects. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of the defect localizing autoencoder with unsupervised class selection for improving defect detection in manufacturing industries. The proposed methodology shows promising results with precise and accurate localization of quality defects on melamine-faced boards for the furniture industry. Incorporating artificial defects into the training data shows significant potential for practical implementation in real-world quality control scenarios.

Authors:Bill Psomas, Ioannis Kakogeorgiou, Konstantinos Karantzalos, Yannis Avrithis

Abstract: Convolutional networks and vision transformers have different forms of pairwise interactions, pooling across layers and pooling at the end of the network. Does the latter really need to be different? As a by-product of pooling, vision transformers provide spatial attention for free, but this is most often of low quality unless self-supervised, which is not well studied. Is supervision really the problem? In this work, we develop a generic pooling framework and then we formulate a number of existing methods as instantiations. By discussing the properties of each group of methods, we derive SimPool, a simple attention-based pooling mechanism as a replacement of the default one for both convolutional and transformer encoders. We find that, whether supervised or self-supervised, this improves performance on pre-training and downstream tasks and provides attention maps delineating object boundaries in all cases. One could thus call SimPool universal. To our knowledge, we are the first to obtain attention maps in supervised transformers of at least as good quality as self-supervised, without explicit losses or modifying the architecture. Code at: https://github.com/billpsomas/simpool.

Authors:Junha Hyung, Jaeyo Shin, Jaegul Choo

Abstract: Large-scale text-to-image models including Stable Diffusion are capable of generating high-fidelity photorealistic portrait images. There is an active research area dedicated to personalizing these models, aiming to synthesize specific subjects or styles using provided sets of reference images. However, despite the plausible results from these personalization methods, they tend to produce images that often fall short of realism and are not yet on a commercially viable level. This is particularly noticeable in portrait image generation, where any unnatural artifact in human faces is easily discernible due to our inherent human bias. To address this, we introduce MagiCapture, a personalization method for integrating subject and style concepts to generate high-resolution portrait images using just a few subject and style references. For instance, given a handful of random selfies, our fine-tuned model can generate high-quality portrait images in specific styles, such as passport or profile photos. The main challenge with this task is the absence of ground truth for the composed concepts, leading to a reduction in the quality of the final output and an identity shift of the source subject. To address these issues, we present a novel Attention Refocusing loss coupled with auxiliary priors, both of which facilitate robust learning within this weakly supervised learning setting. Our pipeline also includes additional post-processing steps to ensure the creation of highly realistic outputs. MagiCapture outperforms other baselines in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations and can also be generalized to other non-human objects.

Authors:Haoqin Hong, Yue Zhou, Xiangyu Shu, Xiangfang Hu

Abstract: Traffic sign detection is an important research direction in intelligent driving. Unfortunately, existing methods often overlook extreme conditions such as fog, rain, and motion blur. Moreover, the end-to-end training strategy for image denoising and object detection models fails to utilize inter-model information effectively. To address these issues, we propose CCSPNet, an efficient feature extraction module based on Transformers and CNNs, which effectively leverages contextual information, achieves faster inference speed and provides stronger feature enhancement capabilities. Furthermore, we establish the correlation between object detection and image denoising tasks and propose a joint training model, CCSPNet-Joint, to improve data efficiency and generalization. Finally, to validate our approach, we create the CCTSDB-AUG dataset for traffic sign detection in extreme scenarios. Extensive experiments have shown that CCSPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in traffic sign detection under extreme conditions. Compared to end-to-end methods, CCSPNet-Joint achieves a 5.32% improvement in precision and an 18.09% improvement in [email protected].

Authors:Sanghyeon Kim, Hyunmo Yang, Younghyun Kim, Youngjoon Hong, Eunbyung Park

Abstract: The recent surge in large-scale foundation models has spurred the development of efficient methods for adapting these models to various downstream tasks. Low-rank adaptation methods, such as LoRA, have gained significant attention due to their outstanding parameter efficiency and no additional inference latency. This paper investigates a more general form of adapter module based on the analysis that parallel and sequential adaptation branches learn novel and general features during fine-tuning, respectively. The proposed method, named Hydra, due to its multi-head computational branches, combines parallel and sequential branch to integrate capabilities, which is more expressive than existing single branch methods and enables the exploration of a broader range of optimal points in the fine-tuning process. In addition, the proposed adaptation method explicitly leverages the pre-trained weights by performing a linear combination of the pre-trained features. It allows the learned features to have better generalization performance across diverse downstream tasks. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the characteristics of each adaptation branch with empirical evidence. Through an extensive range of experiments, encompassing comparisons and ablation studies, we substantiate the efficiency and demonstrate the superior performance of Hydra. This comprehensive evaluation underscores the potential impact and effectiveness of Hydra in a variety of applications. Our code is available on \url{https://github.com/extremebird/Hydra}

Authors:Zhaodong Sun, Xiaobai Li

Abstract: Video-based remote physiological measurement utilizes facial videos to measure the blood volume change signal, which is also called remote photoplethysmography (rPPG). Supervised methods for rPPG measurements have been shown to achieve good performance. However, the drawback of these methods is that they require facial videos with ground truth (GT) physiological signals, which are often costly and difficult to obtain. In this paper, we propose Contrast-Phys+, a method that can be trained in both unsupervised and weakly-supervised settings. We employ a 3DCNN model to generate multiple spatiotemporal rPPG signals and incorporate prior knowledge of rPPG into a contrastive loss function. We further incorporate the GT signals into contrastive learning to adapt to partial or misaligned labels. The contrastive loss encourages rPPG/GT signals from the same video to be grouped together, while pushing those from different videos apart. We evaluate our methods on five publicly available datasets that include both RGB and Near-infrared videos. Contrast-Phys+ outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised methods, even when using partially available or misaligned GT signals, or no labels at all. Additionally, we highlight the advantages of our methods in terms of computational efficiency, noise robustness, and generalization.

Authors:Namhyuk Ahn, Junsoo Lee, Chunggi Lee, Kunhee Kim, Daesik Kim, Seung-Hun Nam, Kibeom Hong

Abstract: Recent progresses in large-scale text-to-image models have yielded remarkable accomplishments, finding various applications in art domain. However, expressing unique characteristics of an artwork (e.g. brushwork, colortone, or composition) with text prompts alone may encounter limitations due to the inherent constraints of verbal description. To this end, we introduce DreamStyler, a novel framework designed for artistic image synthesis, proficient in both text-to-image synthesis and style transfer. DreamStyler optimizes a multi-stage textual embedding with a context-aware text prompt, resulting in prominent image quality. In addition, with content and style guidance, DreamStyler exhibits flexibility to accommodate a range of style references. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance across multiple scenarios, suggesting its promising potential in artistic product creation.

Authors:Xiangchen Yin, Zhenda Yu, Xin Gao, Ran Ju, Xiao Sun, Xinyu Zhang

Abstract: The goal of low-light image enhancement is to restore the color and details of the image and is of great significance for high-level visual tasks in autonomous driving. However, it is difficult to restore the lost details in the dark area by relying only on the RGB domain. In this paper we introduce frequency as a new clue into the network and propose a novel DCT-driven enhancement transformer (DEFormer). First, we propose a learnable frequency branch (LFB) for frequency enhancement contains DCT processing and curvature-based frequency enhancement (CFE). CFE calculates the curvature of each channel to represent the detail richness of different frequency bands, then we divides the frequency features, which focuses on frequency bands with richer textures. In addition, we propose a cross domain fusion (CDF) for reducing the differences between the RGB domain and the frequency domain. We also adopt DEFormer as a preprocessing in dark detection, DEFormer effectively improves the performance of the detector, bringing 2.1% and 3.4% improvement in ExDark and DARK FACE datasets on mAP respectively.

Authors:K. Alomar, X. Cai

Abstract: Human action recognition (HAR) is a high-level and significant research area in computer vision due to its ubiquitous applications. The main limitations of the current HAR models are their complex structures and lengthy training time. In this paper, we propose a simple yet versatile and effective end-to-end deep learning architecture, coined as TransNet, for HAR. TransNet decomposes the complex 3D-CNNs into 2D- and 1D-CNNs, where the 2D- and 1D-CNN components extract spatial features and temporal patterns in videos, respectively. Benefiting from its concise architecture, TransNet is ideally compatible with any pretrained state-of-the-art 2D-CNN models in other fields, being transferred to serve the HAR task. In other words, it naturally leverages the power and success of transfer learning for HAR, bringing huge advantages in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Extensive experimental results and the comparison with the state-of-the-art models demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed TransNet in HAR in terms of flexibility, model complexity, training speed and classification accuracy.

Authors:Ivan Kruzhilov, Egor Ikryannikov, Artem Shadrin, Ruslan Utegenov, Galina Zubkova, Ivan Bessonov

Abstract: Background. Cardiac dominance classification is essential for SYNTAX score estimation, which is a tool used to determine the complexity of coronary artery disease and guide patient selection toward optimal revascularization strategy. Objectives. Cardiac dominance classification algorithm based on the analysis of right coronary artery (RCA) angiograms using neural network Method. We employed convolutional neural network ConvNext and Swin transformer for 2D image (frames) classification, along with a majority vote for cardio angiographic view classification. An auxiliary network was also used to detect irrelevant images which were then excluded from the data set. Our data set consisted of 828 angiographic studies, 192 of them being patients with left dominance. Results. 5-fold cross validation gave the following dominance classification metrics (p=95%): macro recall=93.1%, accuracy=93.5%, macro F1=89.2%. The most common case in which the model regularly failed was RCA occlusion, as it requires utilization of LCA information. Another cause for false prediction is a small diameter combined with poor quality cardio angiographic view. In such cases, cardiac dominance classification can be complex and may require discussion among specialists to reach an accurate conclusion. Conclusion. The use of machine learning approaches to classify cardiac dominance based on RCA alone has been shown to be successful with satisfactory accuracy. However, for higher accuracy, it is necessary to utilize LCA information in the case of an occluded RCA and detect cases where there is high uncertainty.

Authors:Fabian Gröger, Simone Lionetti, Philippe Gottfrois, Alvaro Gonzalez-Jimenez, Matthew Groh, Roxana Daneshjou, Labelling Consortium, Alexander A. Navarini, Marc Pouly

Abstract: Benchmark datasets for digital dermatology unwittingly contain inaccuracies that reduce trust in model performance estimates. We propose a resource-efficient data cleaning protocol to identify issues that escaped previous curation. The protocol leverages an existing algorithmic cleaning strategy and is followed by a confirmation process terminated by an intuitive stopping criterion. Based on confirmation by multiple dermatologists, we remove irrelevant samples and near duplicates and estimate the percentage of label errors in six dermatology image datasets for model evaluation promoted by the International Skin Imaging Collaboration. Along with this paper, we publish revised file lists for each dataset which should be used for model evaluation. Our work paves the way for more trustworthy performance assessment in digital dermatology.

Authors:Christoph Reich, Biplob Debnath, Deep Patel, Srimat Chakradhar

Abstract: JPEG remains one of the most widespread lossy image coding methods. However, the non-differentiable nature of JPEG restricts the application in deep learning pipelines. Several differentiable approximations of JPEG have recently been proposed to address this issue. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of existing diff. JPEG approaches and identifies critical details that have been missed by previous methods. To this end, we propose a novel diff. JPEG approach, overcoming previous limitations. Our approach is differentiable w.r.t. the input image, the JPEG quality, the quantization tables, and the color conversion parameters. We evaluate the forward and backward performance of our diff. JPEG approach against existing methods. Additionally, extensive ablations are performed to evaluate crucial design choices. Our proposed diff. JPEG resembles the (non-diff.) reference implementation best, significantly surpassing the recent-best diff. approach by $3.47$dB (PSNR) on average. For strong compression rates, we can even improve PSNR by $9.51$dB. Strong adversarial attack results are yielded by our diff. JPEG, demonstrating the effective gradient approximation. Our code is available at https://github.com/necla-ml/Diff-JPEG.

Authors:Riti Paul, Sahil Vora, Baoxin Li

Abstract: Generalized zero-shot learning(GZSL) aims to classify samples from seen and unseen labels, assuming unseen labels are not accessible during training. Recent advancements in GZSL have been expedited by incorporating contrastive-learning-based (instance-based) embedding in generative networks and leveraging the semantic relationship between data points. However, existing embedding architectures suffer from two limitations: (1) limited discriminability of synthetic features' embedding without considering fine-grained cluster structures; (2) inflexible optimization due to restricted scaling mechanisms on existing contrastive embedding networks, leading to overlapped representations in the embedding space. To enhance the quality of representations in the embedding space, as mentioned in (1), we propose a margin-based prototypical contrastive learning embedding network that reaps the benefits of prototype-data (cluster quality enhancement) and implicit data-data (fine-grained representations) interaction while providing substantial cluster supervision to the embedding network and the generator. To tackle (2), we propose an instance adaptive contrastive loss that leads to generalized representations for unseen labels with increased inter-class margin. Through comprehensive experimental evaluation, we show that our method can outperform the current state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. Our approach also consistently achieves the best unseen performance in the GZSL setting.

Authors:Federico Lincetto, Gianluca Agresti, Mattia Rossi, Pietro Zanuttigh

Abstract: Neural implicit modeling permits to achieve impressive 3D reconstruction results on small objects, while it exhibits significant limitations in large indoor scenes. In this work, we propose a novel neural implicit modeling method that leverages multiple regularization strategies to achieve better reconstructions of large indoor environments, while relying only on images. A sparse but accurate depth prior is used to anchor the scene to the initial model. A dense but less accurate depth prior is also introduced, flexible enough to still let the model diverge from it to improve the estimated geometry. Then, a novel self-supervised strategy to regularize the estimated surface normals is presented. Finally, a learnable exposure compensation scheme permits to cope with challenging lighting conditions. Experimental results show that our approach produces state-of-the-art 3D reconstructions in challenging indoor scenarios.

Authors:Dongwei Ren, Wei Shang, Yi Yang, Wangmeng Zuo

Abstract: Video deblurring methods, aiming at recovering consecutive sharp frames from a given blurry video, usually assume that the input video suffers from consecutively blurry frames. However, in real-world blurry videos taken by modern imaging devices, sharp frames usually appear in the given video, thus making temporal long-term sharp features available for facilitating the restoration of a blurry frame. In this work, we propose a video deblurring method that leverages both neighboring frames and present sharp frames using hybrid Transformers for feature aggregation. Specifically, we first train a blur-aware detector to distinguish between sharp and blurry frames. Then, a window-based local Transformer is employed for exploiting features from neighboring frames, where cross attention is beneficial for aggregating features from neighboring frames without explicit spatial alignment. To aggregate long-term sharp features from detected sharp frames, we utilize a global Transformer with multi-scale matching capability. Moreover, our method can easily be extended to event-driven video deblurring by incorporating an event fusion module into the global Transformer. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art video deblurring methods as well as event-driven video deblurring methods in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/shangwei5/STGTN.

Authors:Tongkun Liu, Bing Li, Xiao Du, Bingke Jiang, Leqi Geng, Feiyang Wang, Zhuo Zhao

Abstract: Image reconstruction-based anomaly detection models are widely explored in industrial visual inspection. However, existing models usually suffer from the trade-off between normal reconstruction fidelity and abnormal reconstruction distinguishability, which damages the performance. In this paper, we find that the above trade-off can be better mitigated by leveraging the distinct frequency biases between normal and abnormal reconstruction errors. To this end, we propose Frequency-aware Image Restoration (FAIR), a novel self-supervised image restoration task that restores images from their high-frequency components. It enables precise reconstruction of normal patterns while mitigating unfavorable generalization to anomalies. Using only a simple vanilla UNet, FAIR achieves state-of-the-art performance with higher efficiency on various defect detection datasets. Code: https://github.com/liutongkun/FAIR.

Authors:Yiran Qin, Chaoqun Wang, Zijian Kang, Ningning Ma, Zhen Li, Ruimao Zhang

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel training strategy called SupFusion, which provides an auxiliary feature level supervision for effective LiDAR-Camera fusion and significantly boosts detection performance. Our strategy involves a data enhancement method named Polar Sampling, which densifies sparse objects and trains an assistant model to generate high-quality features as the supervision. These features are then used to train the LiDAR-Camera fusion model, where the fusion feature is optimized to simulate the generated high-quality features. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective deep fusion module, which contiguously gains superior performance compared with previous fusion methods with SupFusion strategy. In such a manner, our proposal shares the following advantages. Firstly, SupFusion introduces auxiliary feature-level supervision which could boost LiDAR-Camera detection performance without introducing extra inference costs. Secondly, the proposed deep fusion could continuously improve the detector's abilities. Our proposed SupFusion and deep fusion module is plug-and-play, we make extensive experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness. Specifically, we gain around 2% 3D mAP improvements on KITTI benchmark based on multiple LiDAR-Camera 3D detectors.

Authors:Ke Zhang, Neman Abdoli, Patrik Gilley, Youkabed Sadri, Xuxin Chen, Theresa C. Thai, Lauren Dockery, Kathleen Moore, Robert S. Mannel, Yuchen Qiu

Abstract: Objective: Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) is one kind of treatment for advanced stage ovarian cancer patients. However, due to the nature of tumor heterogeneity, the patients' responses to NACT varies significantly among different subgroups. To address this clinical challenge, the purpose of this study is to develop a novel image marker to achieve high accuracy response prediction of the NACT at an early stage. Methods: For this purpose, we first computed a total of 1373 radiomics features to quantify the tumor characteristics, which can be grouped into three categories: geometric, intensity, and texture features. Second, all these features were optimized by principal component analysis algorithm to generate a compact and informative feature cluster. Using this cluster as the input, an SVM based classifier was developed and optimized to create a final marker, indicating the likelihood of the patient being responsive to the NACT treatment. To validate this scheme, a total of 42 ovarian cancer patients were retrospectively collected. A nested leave-one-out cross-validation was adopted for model performance assessment. Results: The results demonstrate that the new method yielded an AUC (area under the ROC [receiver characteristic operation] curve) of 0.745. Meanwhile, the model achieved overall accuracy of 76.2%, positive predictive value of 70%, and negative predictive value of 78.1%. Conclusion: This study provides meaningful information for the development of radiomics based image markers in NACT response prediction.

Authors:Derek Gloudemans, Xinxuan Lu, Shepard Xia, Daniel B. Work

Abstract: Monocular 3D object detection is a challenging task because depth information is difficult to obtain from 2D images. A subset of viewpoint-agnostic monocular 3D detection methods also do not explicitly leverage scene homography or geometry during training, meaning that a model trained thusly can detect objects in images from arbitrary viewpoints. Such works predict the projections of the 3D bounding boxes on the image plane to estimate the location of the 3D boxes, but these projections are not rectangular so the calculation of IoU between these projected polygons is not straightforward. This work proposes an efficient, fully differentiable algorithm for the calculation of IoU between two convex polygons, which can be utilized to compute the IoU between two 3D bounding box footprints viewed from an arbitrary angle. We test the performance of the proposed polygon IoU loss (PIoU loss) on three state-of-the-art viewpoint-agnostic 3D detection models. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed PIoU loss converges faster than L1 loss and that in 3D detection models, a combination of PIoU loss and L1 loss gives better results than L1 loss alone (+1.64% AP70 for MonoCon on cars, +0.18% AP70 for RTM3D on cars, and +0.83%/+2.46% AP50/AP25 for MonoRCNN on cyclists).

Authors:Yang Zheng, Luca Demetrio, Antonio Emanuele Cinà, Xiaoyi Feng, Zhaoqiang Xia, Xiaoyue Jiang, Ambra Demontis, Battista Biggio, Fabio Roli

Abstract: RGB-D object recognition systems improve their predictive performances by fusing color and depth information, outperforming neural network architectures that rely solely on colors. While RGB-D systems are expected to be more robust to adversarial examples than RGB-only systems, they have also been proven to be highly vulnerable. Their robustness is similar even when the adversarial examples are generated by altering only the original images' colors. Different works highlighted the vulnerability of RGB-D systems; however, there is a lacking of technical explanations for this weakness. Hence, in our work, we bridge this gap by investigating the learned deep representation of RGB-D systems, discovering that color features make the function learned by the network more complex and, thus, more sensitive to small perturbations. To mitigate this problem, we propose a defense based on a detection mechanism that makes RGB-D systems more robust against adversarial examples. We empirically show that this defense improves the performances of RGB-D systems against adversarial examples even when they are computed ad-hoc to circumvent this detection mechanism, and that is also more effective than adversarial training.

Authors:Nirhoshan Sivaroopan, Chamuditha Jayanga, Chalani Ekanayake, Hasindri Watawana, Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Mithunjha Anandakumar, Ranga Rodrigo, Chamira U. S. Edussooriya, Dushan N. Wadduwage

Abstract: Deep neural network models can learn clinically relevant features from millions of histopathology images. However generating high-quality annotations to train such models for each hospital, each cancer type, and each diagnostic task is prohibitively laborious. On the other hand, terabytes of training data -- while lacking reliable annotations -- are readily available in the public domain in some cases. In this work, we explore how these large datasets can be consciously utilized to pre-train deep networks to encode informative representations. We then fine-tune our pre-trained models on a fraction of annotated training data to perform specific downstream tasks. We show that our approach can reach the state-of-the-art (SOTA) for patch-level classification with only 1-10% randomly selected annotations compared to other SOTA approaches. Moreover, we propose an uncertainty-aware loss function, to quantify the model confidence during inference. Quantified uncertainty helps experts select the best instances to label for further training. Our uncertainty-aware labeling reaches the SOTA with significantly fewer annotations compared to random labeling. Last, we demonstrate how our pre-trained encoders can surpass current SOTA for whole-slide image classification with weak supervision. Our work lays the foundation for data and task-agnostic pre-trained deep networks with quantified uncertainty.

Authors:Chen Geng, Hong-Xing Yu, Sharon Zhang, Maneesh Agrawala, Jiajun Wu

Abstract: We study inferring a tree-structured representation from a single image for object shading. Prior work typically uses the parametric or measured representation to model shading, which is neither interpretable nor easily editable. We propose using the shade tree representation, which combines basic shading nodes and compositing methods to factorize object surface shading. The shade tree representation enables novice users who are unfamiliar with the physical shading process to edit object shading in an efficient and intuitive manner. A main challenge in inferring the shade tree is that the inference problem involves both the discrete tree structure and the continuous parameters of the tree nodes. We propose a hybrid approach to address this issue. We introduce an auto-regressive inference model to generate a rough estimation of the tree structure and node parameters, and then we fine-tune the inferred shade tree through an optimization algorithm. We show experiments on synthetic images, captured reflectance, real images, and non-realistic vector drawings, allowing downstream applications such as material editing, vectorized shading, and relighting. Project website: https://chen-geng.com/inv-shade-trees

Authors:Hao Zhang, Yao Feng, Peter Kulits, Yandong Wen, Justus Thies, Michael J. Black

Abstract: Our goal is to create a realistic 3D facial avatar with hair and accessories using only a text description. While this challenge has attracted significant recent interest, existing methods either lack realism, produce unrealistic shapes, or do not support editing, such as modifications to the hairstyle. We argue that existing methods are limited because they employ a monolithic modeling approach, using a single representation for the head, face, hair, and accessories. Our observation is that the hair and face, for example, have very different structural qualities that benefit from different representations. Building on this insight, we generate avatars with a compositional model, in which the head, face, and upper body are represented with traditional 3D meshes, and the hair, clothing, and accessories with neural radiance fields (NeRF). The model-based mesh representation provides a strong geometric prior for the face region, improving realism while enabling editing of the person's appearance. By using NeRFs to represent the remaining components, our method is able to model and synthesize parts with complex geometry and appearance, such as curly hair and fluffy scarves. Our novel system synthesizes these high-quality compositional avatars from text descriptions. The experimental results demonstrate that our method, Text-guided generation and Editing of Compositional Avatars (TECA), produces avatars that are more realistic than those of recent methods while being editable because of their compositional nature. For example, our TECA enables the seamless transfer of compositional features like hairstyles, scarves, and other accessories between avatars. This capability supports applications such as virtual try-on.

Authors:Tetsuya Abe, Ryusuke Sagawa, Ko Ayusawa, Wataru Takano

Abstract: The present paper proposes an encoder-decoder model for extracting the structures of human motions represented by frame-wise discrete features in a self-supervised manner. In the proposed method, features are extracted as codes in a motion codebook without the use of human knowledge, and the relationship between these codes can be visualized on a graph. Since the codes are expected to be temporally sparse compared to the captured frame rate and can be shared by multiple sequences, the proposed network model also addresses the need for training constraints. Specifically, the model consists of self-attention layers and a vector clustering block. The attention layers contribute to finding sparse keyframes and discrete features as motion codes, which are then extracted by vector clustering. The constraints are realized as training losses so that the same motion codes can be as contiguous as possible and can be shared by multiple sequences. In addition, we propose the use of causal self-attention as a method by which to calculate attention for long sequences consisting of numerous frames. In our experiments, the sparse structures of motion codes were used to compile a graph that facilitates visualization of the relationship between the codes and the differences between sequences. We then evaluated the effectiveness of the extracted motion codes by applying them to multiple recognition tasks and found that performance levels comparable to task-optimized methods could be achieved by linear probing.

Authors:Xuefeng Wei, Xuan Zhou

Abstract: Given the close association between colorectal cancer and polyps, the diagnosis and identification of colorectal polyps play a critical role in the detection and surgical intervention of colorectal cancer. In this context, the automatic detection and segmentation of polyps from various colonoscopy images has emerged as a significant problem that has attracted broad attention. Current polyp segmentation techniques face several challenges: firstly, polyps vary in size, texture, color, and pattern; secondly, the boundaries between polyps and mucosa are usually blurred, existing studies have focused on learning the local features of polyps while ignoring the long-range dependencies of the features, and also ignoring the local context and global contextual information of the combined features. To address these challenges, we propose FLDNet (Foreground-Long-Distance Network), a Transformer-based neural network that captures long-distance dependencies for accurate polyp segmentation. Specifically, the proposed model consists of three main modules: a pyramid-based Transformer encoder, a local context module, and a foreground-Aware module. Multilevel features with long-distance dependency information are first captured by the pyramid-based transformer encoder. On the high-level features, the local context module obtains the local characteristics related to the polyps by constructing different local context information. The coarse map obtained by decoding the reconstructed highest-level features guides the feature fusion process in the foreground-Aware module of the high-level features to achieve foreground enhancement of the polyps. Our proposed method, FLDNet, was evaluated using seven metrics on common datasets and demonstrated superiority over state-of-the-art methods on widely-used evaluation measures.

Authors:Zhitong Gao, Shipeng Yan, Xuming He

Abstract: Recent advancements in dense out-of-distribution (OOD) detection have primarily focused on scenarios where the training and testing datasets share a similar domain, with the assumption that no domain shift exists between them. However, in real-world situations, domain shift often exits and significantly affects the accuracy of existing out-of-distribution (OOD) detection models. In this work, we propose a dual-level OOD detection framework to handle domain shift and semantic shift jointly. The first level distinguishes whether domain shift exists in the image by leveraging global low-level features, while the second level identifies pixels with semantic shift by utilizing dense high-level feature maps. In this way, we can selectively adapt the model to unseen domains as well as enhance model's capacity in detecting novel classes. We validate the efficacy of our proposed method on several OOD segmentation benchmarks, including those with significant domain shifts and those without, observing consistent performance improvements across various baseline models.

Authors:Haibo Chen, Lei Zhao, Jun Li, Jian Yang

Abstract: Artistic style transfer aims to create new artistic images by rendering a given photograph with the target artistic style. Existing methods learn styles simply based on global statistics or local patches, lacking careful consideration of the drawing process in practice. Consequently, the stylization results either fail to capture abundant and diversified local style patterns, or contain undesired semantic information of the style image and deviate from the global style distribution. To address this issue, we imitate the drawing process of humans and propose a Two-Stage Statistics-Aware Transformation (TSSAT) module, which first builds the global style foundation by aligning the global statistics of content and style features and then further enriches local style details by swapping the local statistics (instead of local features) in a patch-wise manner, significantly improving the stylization effects. Moreover, to further enhance both content and style representations, we introduce two novel losses: an attention-based content loss and a patch-based style loss, where the former enables better content preservation by enforcing the semantic relation in the content image to be retained during stylization, and the latter focuses on increasing the local style similarity between the style and stylized images. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify the effectiveness of our method.

Authors:Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Vladimir Somers, Floriane Magera, Xin Zhou, Hassan Mkhallati, Adrien Deliège, Jan Held, Carlos Hinojosa, Amir M. Mansourian, Pierre Miralles, Olivier Barnich, Christophe De Vleeschouwer, Alexandre Alahi, Bernard Ghanem, Marc Van Droogenbroeck, Abdullah Kamal, Adrien Maglo, Albert Clapés, Amr Abdelaziz, Artur Xarles, Astrid Orcesi, Atom Scott, Bin Liu, Byoungkwon Lim, Chen Chen, Fabian Deuser, Feng Yan, Fufu Yu, Gal Shitrit, Guanshuo Wang, Gyusik Choi, Hankyul Kim, Hao Guo, Hasby Fahrudin, Hidenari Koguchi, Håkan Ardö, Ibrahim Salah, Ido Yerushalmy, Iftikar Muhammad, Ikuma Uchida, Ishay Be'ery, Jaonary Rabarisoa, Jeongae Lee, Jiajun Fu, Jianqin Yin, Jinghang Xu, Jongho Nang, Julien Denize, Junjie Li, Junpei Zhang, Juntae Kim, Kamil Synowiec, Kenji Kobayashi, Kexin Zhang, Konrad Habel, Kota Nakajima, Licheng Jiao, Lin Ma, Lizhi Wang, Luping Wang, Menglong Li, Mengying Zhou, Mohamed Nasr, Mohamed Abdelwahed, Mykola Liashuha, Nikolay Falaleev, Norbert Oswald, Qiong Jia, Quoc-Cuong Pham, Ran Song, Romain Hérault, Rui Peng, Ruilong Chen, Ruixuan Liu, Ruslan Baikulov, Ryuto Fukushima, Sergio Escalera, Seungcheon Lee, Shimin Chen, Shouhong Ding, Taiga Someya, Thomas B. Moeslund, Tianjiao Li, Wei Shen, Wei Zhang, Wei Li, Wei Dai, Weixin Luo, Wending Zhao, Wenjie Zhang, Xinquan Yang, Yanbiao Ma, Yeeun Joo, Yingsen Zeng, Yiyang Gan, Yongqiang Zhu, Yujie Zhong, Zheng Ruan, Zhiheng Li, Zhijian Huang, Ziyu Meng

Abstract: The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet.

Authors:Xuan Zhou, Xuefeng Wei

Abstract: The rapid advancement in high-resolution satellite remote sensing data acquisition, particularly those achieving submeter precision, has uncovered the potential for detailed extraction of surface architectural features. However, the diversity and complexity of surface distributions frequently lead to current methods focusing exclusively on localized information of surface features. This often results in significant intraclass variability in boundary recognition and between buildings. Therefore, the task of fine-grained extraction of surface features from high-resolution satellite imagery has emerged as a critical challenge in remote sensing image processing. In this work, we propose the Feature Aggregation Network (FANet), concentrating on extracting both global and local features, thereby enabling the refined extraction of landmark buildings from high-resolution satellite remote sensing imagery. The Pyramid Vision Transformer captures these global features, which are subsequently refined by the Feature Aggregation Module and merged into a cohesive representation by the Difference Elimination Module. In addition, to ensure a comprehensive feature map, we have incorporated the Receptive Field Block and Dual Attention Module, expanding the receptive field and intensifying attention across spatial and channel dimensions. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets have validated the outstanding capability of FANet in extracting features from high-resolution satellite images. This signifies a major breakthrough in the field of remote sensing image processing. We will release our code soon.

Authors:Gang Wu, Junjun Jiang, Kui Jiang, Xianming Liu

Abstract: Contrastive learning has emerged as a prevailing paradigm for high-level vision tasks, which, by introducing properly negative samples, has also been exploited for low-level vision tasks to achieve a compact optimization space to account for their ill-posed nature. However, existing methods rely on manually predefined, task-oriented negatives, which often exhibit pronounced task-specific biases. In this paper, we propose a innovative approach for the adaptive generation of negative samples directly from the target model itself, called ``learning from history``. We introduce the Self-Prior guided Negative loss for image restoration (SPNIR) to enable this approach. Our approach is task-agnostic and generic, making it compatible with any existing image restoration method or task. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by retraining existing models with SPNIR. The results show significant improvements in image restoration across various tasks and architectures. For example, models retrained with SPNIR outperform the original FFANet and DehazeFormer by 3.41 dB and 0.57 dB on the RESIDE indoor dataset for image dehazing. Similarly, they achieve notable improvements of 0.47 dB on SPA-Data over IDT for image deraining and 0.12 dB on Manga109 for a 4x scale super-resolution over lightweight SwinIR, respectively. Code and retrained models are available at https://github.com/Aitical/Task-agnostic_Model_Contrastive_Learning_Image_Restoration.

Authors:Clara Ciocan ALSOC, Mathuran Kandeepan ALSOC, Adrien Cassagne ALSOC, Jeremie Vaubaillon IMCCE, Fabian Zander USQ, Lionel Lacassagne ALSOC

Abstract: This article presents a new tool for the automatic detection of meteors. Fast Meteor Detection Toolbox (FMDT) is able to detect meteor sightings by analyzing videos acquired by cameras onboard weather balloons or within airplane with stabilization. The challenge consists in designing a processing chain composed of simple algorithms, that are robust to the high fluctuation of the videos and that satisfy the constraints on power consumption (10 W) and real-time processing (25 frames per second).

Authors:Teppei Suzuki

Abstract: We envision a system to continuously build and maintain a map based on earth-scale neural radiance fields (NeRF) using data collected from vehicles and drones in a lifelong learning manner. However, existing large-scale modeling by NeRF has problems in terms of scalability and maintainability when modeling earth-scale environments. Therefore, to address these problems, we propose a federated learning pipeline for large-scale modeling with NeRF. We tailor the model aggregation pipeline in federated learning for NeRF, thereby allowing local updates of NeRF. In the aggregation step, the accuracy of the clients' global pose is critical. Thus, we also propose global pose alignment to align the noisy global pose of clients before the aggregation step. In experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed pose alignment and the federated learning pipeline on the large-scale scene dataset, Mill19.

Authors:Clifford Broni-Bediako, Junshi Xia, Naoto Yokoya

Abstract: Real-time semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery is a challenging task that requires a trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. It has many applications including tracking forest fires, detecting changes in land use and land cover, crop health monitoring, and so on. With the success of efficient deep learning methods (i.e., efficient deep neural networks) for real-time semantic segmentation in computer vision, researchers have adopted these efficient deep neural networks in remote sensing image analysis. This paper begins with a summary of the fundamental compression methods for designing efficient deep neural networks and provides a brief but comprehensive survey, outlining the recent developments in real-time semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery. We examine several seminal efficient deep learning methods, placing them in a taxonomy based on the network architecture design approach. Furthermore, we evaluate the quality and efficiency of some existing efficient deep neural networks on a publicly available remote sensing semantic segmentation benchmark dataset, the OpenEarthMap. The experimental results of an extensive comparative study demonstrate that most of the existing efficient deep neural networks have good segmentation quality, but they suffer low inference speed (i.e., high latency rate), which may limit their capability of deployment in real-time applications of remote sensing image segmentation. We provide some insights into the current trend and future research directions for real-time semantic segmentation of remote sensing imagery.

Authors:Manuel Lage Cañellas, Constantino Álvarez Casado, Le Nguyen, Miguel Bordallo López

Abstract: Exercise-induced fatigue resulting from physical activity can be an early indicator of overtraining, illness, or other health issues. In this article, we present an automated method for estimating exercise-induced fatigue levels through the use of thermal imaging and facial analysis techniques utilizing deep learning models. Leveraging a novel dataset comprising over 400,000 thermal facial images of rested and fatigued users, our results suggest that exercise-induced fatigue levels could be predicted with only one static thermal frame with an average error smaller than 15\%. The results emphasize the viability of using thermal imaging in conjunction with deep learning for reliable exercise-induced fatigue estimation.

Authors:Alessandro Duico, Ombretta Strafforello, Jan van Gemert

Abstract: Predicting which specific parts of a video users will replay is important for several applications, including targeted advertisement placement on video platforms and assisting video creators. In this work, we explore whether it is possible to predict the Most Replayed (MR) data from YouTube videos. To this end, we curate a large video benchmark, the YTMR500 dataset, which comprises 500 YouTube videos with MR data annotations. We evaluate Deep Learning (DL) models of varying complexity on our dataset and perform an extensive ablation study. In addition, we conduct a user study to estimate the human performance on MR data prediction. Our results show that, although by a narrow margin, all the evaluated DL models outperform random predictions. Additionally, they exceed human-level accuracy. This suggests that predicting the MR data is a difficult task that can be enhanced through the assistance of DL. Finally, we believe that DL performance on MR data prediction can be further improved, for example, by using multi-modal learning. We encourage the research community to use our benchmark dataset to further investigate automatic MR data prediction.

Authors:Tinghui Zhu, Jingping Liu, Jiaqing Liang, Haiyun Jiang, Yanghua Xiao, Zongyu Wang, Rui Xie, Yunsen Xian

Abstract: Taxonomy expansion task is essential in organizing the ever-increasing volume of new concepts into existing taxonomies. Most existing methods focus exclusively on using textual semantics, leading to an inability to generalize to unseen terms and the "Prototypical Hypernym Problem." In this paper, we propose Visual Taxonomy Expansion (VTE), introducing visual features into the taxonomy expansion task. We propose a textual hypernymy learning task and a visual prototype learning task to cluster textual and visual semantics. In addition to the tasks on respective modalities, we introduce a hyper-proto constraint that integrates textual and visual semantics to produce fine-grained visual semantics. Our method is evaluated on two datasets, where we obtain compelling results. Specifically, on the Chinese taxonomy dataset, our method significantly improves accuracy by 8.75 %. Additionally, our approach performs better than ChatGPT on the Chinese taxonomy dataset.

Authors:Stefan Ainetter, Sinisa Stekovic, Friedrich Fraundorfer, Vincent Lepetit

Abstract: We present an automated and efficient approach for retrieving high-quality CAD models of objects and their poses in a scene captured by a moving RGB-D camera. We first investigate various objective functions to measure similarity between a candidate CAD object model and the available data, and the best objective function appears to be a "render-and-compare" method comparing depth and mask rendering. We thus introduce a fast-search method that approximates an exhaustive search based on this objective function for simultaneously retrieving the object category, a CAD model, and the pose of an object given an approximate 3D bounding box. This method involves a search tree that organizes the CAD models and object properties including object category and pose for fast retrieval and an algorithm inspired by Monte Carlo Tree Search, that efficiently searches this tree. We show that this method retrieves CAD models that fit the real objects very well, with a speed-up factor of 10x to 120x compared to exhaustive search.

Authors:Yafei Zhang, Keying Du, Huafeng Li, Zhengtao Yu, Yu Liu

Abstract: Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) aims to extract and integrate the complementary information in two different modalities to generate high-quality fused images with salient targets and abundant texture details. However, current image fusion methods go to great lengths to excavate complementary features, which is generally achieved through two efforts. On the one hand, the feature extraction network is expected to have excellent performance in extracting complementary information. On the other hand, complex fusion strategies are often designed to aggregate the complementary information. In other words, enabling the network to perceive and extract complementary information is extremely challenging. Complicated fusion strategies, while effective, still run the risk of losing weak edge details. To this end, this paper rethinks the IVIF outside the box, proposing a complementary-redundant information transfer network (C-RITNet). It reasonably transfers complementary information into redundant one, which integrates both the shared and complementary features from two modalities. Hence, the proposed method is able to alleviate the challenges posed by the complementary information extraction and reduce the reliance on sophisticated fusion strategies. Specifically, to skillfully sidestep aggregating complementary information in IVIF, we first design the mutual information transfer (MIT) module to mutually represent features from two modalities, roughly transferring complementary information into redundant one. Then, a redundant information acquisition supervised by source image (RIASSI) module is devised to further ensure the complementary-redundant information transfer after MIT. Meanwhile, we also propose a structure information preservation (SIP) module to guarantee that the edge structure information of the source images can be transferred to the fusion results.

Authors:Chunqing Ruan, Hongjian Wang

Abstract: Parameter efficient transfer learning (PETL) is an emerging research spot that aims to adapt large-scale pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Recent advances have achieved great success in saving storage and computation costs. However, these methods do not take into account instance-specific visual clues for visual tasks. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Visual Prompt Tuning framework (DVPT), which can generate a dynamic instance-wise token for each image. In this way, it can capture the unique visual feature of each image, which can be more suitable for downstream visual tasks. We designed a Meta-Net module that can generate learnable prompts based on each image, thereby capturing dynamic instance-wise visual features. Extensive experiments on a wide range of downstream recognition tasks show that DVPT achieves superior performance than other PETL methods. More importantly, DVPT even outperforms full fine-tuning on 17 out of 19 downstream tasks while maintaining high parameter efficiency. Our code will be released soon.

Authors:sean anthony byrne, virmarie maquiling, marcus nyström, enkelejda kasneci, diederick c. niehorster

Abstract: Deep learning has bolstered gaze estimation techniques, but real-world deployment has been impeded by inadequate training datasets. This problem is exacerbated by both hardware-induced variations in eye images and inherent biological differences across the recorded participants, leading to both feature and pixel-level variance that hinders the generalizability of models trained on specific datasets. While synthetic datasets can be a solution, their creation is both time and resource-intensive. To address this problem, we present a framework called Light Eyes or "LEyes" which, unlike conventional photorealistic methods, only models key image features required for video-based eye tracking using simple light distributions. LEyes facilitates easy configuration for training neural networks across diverse gaze-estimation tasks. We demonstrate that models trained using LEyes outperform other state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of pupil and CR localization across well-known datasets. In addition, a LEyes trained model outperforms the industry standard eye tracker using significantly more cost-effective hardware. Going forward, we are confident that LEyes will revolutionize synthetic data generation for gaze estimation models, and lead to significant improvements of the next generation video-based eye trackers.

Authors:Mohammed Guermal, Francois Bremond, Rui Dai, Abid Ali

Abstract: Action anticipation involves forecasting future actions by connecting past events to future ones. However, this reasoning ignores the real-life hierarchy of events which is considered to be composed of three main parts: past, present, and future. We argue that considering these three main parts and their dependencies could improve performance. On the other hand, online action detection is the task of predicting actions in a streaming manner. In this case, one has access only to the past and present information. Therefore, in online action detection (OAD) the existing approaches miss semantics or future information which limits their performance. To sum up, for both of these tasks, the complete set of knowledge (past-present-future) is missing, which makes it challenging to infer action dependencies, therefore having low performances. To address this limitation, we propose to fuse both tasks into a single uniform architecture. By combining action anticipation and online action detection, our approach can cover the missing dependencies of future information in online action detection. This method referred to as JOADAA, presents a uniform model that jointly performs action anticipation and online action detection. We validate our proposed model on three challenging datasets: THUMOS'14, which is a sparsely annotated dataset with one action per time step, CHARADES, and Multi-THUMOS, two densely annotated datasets with more complex scenarios. JOADAA achieves SOTA results on these benchmarks for both tasks.

Authors:Jiao Zhang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu

Abstract: There are ubiquitous distribution shifts in the real world. However, deep neural networks (DNNs) are easily biased towards the training set, which causes severe performance degradation when they receive out-of-distribution data. Many methods are studied to train models that generalize under various distribution shifts in the literature of domain generalization (DG). However, the recent DomainBed and WILDS benchmarks challenged the effectiveness of these methods. Aiming at the problems in the existing research, we propose a new domain generalization task for handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) to enrich the application scenarios of DG method research. We evaluate eighteen DG methods on the proposed PaHCC (Printed and Handwritten Chinese Characters) dataset and show that the performance of existing methods on this dataset is still unsatisfactory. Besides, under a designed dynamic DG setting, we reveal more properties of DG methods and argue that only the leave-one-domain-out protocol is unreliable. We advocate that researchers in the DG community refer to dynamic performance of methods for more comprehensive and reliable evaluation. Our dataset and evaluations bring new perspectives to the community for more substantial progress. We will make our dataset public with the article published to facilitate the study of domain generalization.

Authors:Tuan Pham Minh, Jayan Wijesingha, Daniel Kottke, Marek Herde, Denis Huseljic, Bernhard Sick, Michael Wachendorf, Thomas Esch

Abstract: Remote sensing through semantic segmentation of satellite images contributes to the understanding and utilisation of the earth's surface. For this purpose, semantic segmentation networks are typically trained on large sets of labelled satellite images. However, obtaining expert labels for these images is costly. Therefore, we propose to rely on a low-cost approach, e.g. crowdsourcing or pretrained networks, to label the images in the first step. Since these initial labels are partially erroneous, we use active learning strategies to cost-efficiently refine the labels in the second step. We evaluate the active learning strategies using satellite images of Bengaluru in India, labelled with land cover and land use labels. Our experimental results suggest that an active label refinement to improve the semantic segmentation network's performance is beneficial.

Authors:Jiaxiu Li, Kun Li, Jia Li, Guoliang Chen, Dan Guo, Meng Wang

Abstract: Make-up temporal video grounding (MTVG) aims to localize the target video segment which is semantically related to a sentence describing a make-up activity, given a long video. Compared with the general video grounding task, MTVG focuses on meticulous actions and changes on the face. The make-up instruction step, usually involving detailed differences in products and facial areas, is more fine-grained than general activities (e.g, cooking activity and furniture assembly). Thus, existing general approaches cannot locate the target activity effectually. More specifically, existing proposal generation modules are not yet fully developed in providing semantic cues for the more fine-grained make-up semantic comprehension. To tackle this issue, we propose an effective proposal-based framework named Dual-Path Temporal Map Optimization Network (DPTMO) to capture fine-grained multimodal semantic details of make-up activities. DPTMO extracts both query-agnostic and query-guided features to construct two proposal sets and uses specific evaluation methods for the two sets. Different from the commonly used single structure in previous methods, our dual-path structure can mine more semantic information in make-up videos and distinguish fine-grained actions well. These two candidate sets represent the cross-modal makeup video-text similarity and multi-modal fusion relationship, complementing each other. Each set corresponds to its respective optimization perspective, and their joint prediction enhances the accuracy of video timestamp prediction. Comprehensive experiments on the YouMakeup dataset demonstrate our proposed dual structure excels in fine-grained semantic comprehension.

Authors:Mazvydas Gudelis, Michal Mackiewicz, Julie Bremner, Sophie Fielding

Abstract: British Antarctic Survey (BAS) researchers launch annual expeditions to the Antarctic in order to estimate Antarctic Krill biomass and assess the change from previous years. These comparisons provide insight into the effects of the current environment on this key component of the marine food chain. In this work we have developed tools for automating the data collection and analysis process, using web-based image annotation tools and deep learning image classification and regression models. We achieve highly accurate krill instance segmentation results with an average 77.28% AP score, as well as separate maturity stage and length estimation of krill specimens with 62.99% accuracy and a 1.96 mm length error respectively.

Authors:Jing Yang, Nur Intan Raihana Ruhaiyem, Chichun Zhou

Abstract: The Yongle Palace murals, as valuable cultural heritage, have suffered varying degrees of damage, making their restoration of significant importance. However, the giant size and unique data of Yongle Palace murals present challenges for existing deep-learning based restoration methods: 1) The distinctive style introduces domain bias in traditional transfer learning-based restoration methods, while the scarcity of mural data further limits the applicability of these methods. 2) Additionally, the giant size of these murals results in a wider range of defect types and sizes, necessitating models with greater adaptability. Consequently, there is a lack of focus on deep learning-based restoration methods for the unique giant murals of Yongle Palace. Here, a 3M-Hybrid model is proposed to address these challenges. Firstly, based on the characteristic that the mural data frequency is prominent in the distribution of low and high frequency features, high and low frequency features are separately abstracted for complementary learning. Furthermore, we integrate a pre-trained Vision Transformer model (VIT) into the CNN module, allowing us to leverage the benefits of a large model while mitigating domain bias. Secondly, we mitigate seam and structural distortion issues resulting from the restoration of large defects by employing a multi-scale and multi-perspective strategy, including data segmentation and fusion. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed model. In regular-sized mural restoration, it improves SSIM and PSNR by 14.61% and 4.73%, respectively, compared to the best model among four representative CNN models. Additionally, it achieves favorable results in the final restoration of giant murals.

Authors:Laurenz Reichardt, Nikolas Ebert, Oliver Wasenmüller

Abstract: Deep learning applications on LiDAR data suffer from a strong domain gap when applied to different sensors or tasks. In order for these methods to obtain similar accuracy on different data in comparison to values reported on public benchmarks, a large scale annotated dataset is necessary. However, in practical applications labeled data is costly and time consuming to obtain. Such factors have triggered various research in label-efficient methods, but a large gap remains to their fully-supervised counterparts. Thus, we propose ImageTo360, an effective and streamlined few-shot approach to label-efficient LiDAR segmentation. Our method utilizes an image teacher network to generate semantic predictions for LiDAR data within a single camera view. The teacher is used to pretrain the LiDAR segmentation student network, prior to optional fine-tuning on 360$^\circ$ data. Our method is implemented in a modular manner on the point level and as such is generalizable to different architectures. We improve over the current state-of-the-art results for label-efficient methods and even surpass some traditional fully-supervised segmentation networks.

Authors:Yiming Shan, Yan Xia, Yuhong Chen, Daniel Cremers

Abstract: 3D object detection using LiDAR point clouds is a fundamental task in the fields of computer vision, robotics, and autonomous driving. However, existing 3D detectors heavily rely on annotated datasets, which are both time-consuming and prone to errors during the process of labeling 3D bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a Scene Completion Pre-training (SCP) method to enhance the performance of 3D object detectors with less labeled data. SCP offers three key advantages: (1) Improved initialization of the point cloud model. By completing the scene point clouds, SCP effectively captures the spatial and semantic relationships among objects within urban environments. (2) Elimination of the need for additional datasets. SCP serves as a valuable auxiliary network that does not impose any additional efforts or data requirements on the 3D detectors. (3) Reduction of the amount of labeled data for detection. With the help of SCP, the existing state-of-the-art 3D detectors can achieve comparable performance while only relying on 20% labeled data.

Authors:Junjing Zheng, Xinyu Zhang, Yongxiang Liu, Weidong Jiang, Kai Huo, Li Liu

Abstract: In the field of unsupervised feature selection, sparse principal component analysis (SPCA) methods have attracted more and more attention recently. Compared to spectral-based methods, SPCA methods don't rely on the construction of a similarity matrix and show better feature selection ability on real-world data. The original SPCA formulates a nonconvex optimization problem. Existing convex SPCA methods reformulate SPCA as a convex model by regarding the reconstruction matrix as an optimization variable. However, they are lack of constraints equivalent to the orthogonality restriction in SPCA, leading to larger solution space. In this paper, it's proved that the optimal solution to a convex SPCA model falls onto the Positive Semidefinite (PSD) cone. A standard convex SPCA-based model with PSD constraint for unsupervised feature selection is proposed. Further, a two-step fast optimization algorithm via PSD projection is presented to solve the proposed model. Two other existing convex SPCA-based models are also proven to have their solutions optimized on the PSD cone in this paper. Therefore, the PSD versions of these two models are proposed to accelerate their convergence as well. We also provide a regularization parameter setting strategy for our proposed method. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.

Authors:Qianliang Wu, Yaqing Ding, Lei Luo, Chuanwei Zhou, Jin Xie, Jian Yang

Abstract: Point Cloud Registration (PCR) is a critical and challenging task in computer vision. One of the primary difficulties in PCR is identifying salient and meaningful points that exhibit consistent semantic and geometric properties across different scans. Previous methods have encountered challenges with ambiguous matching due to the similarity among patch blocks throughout the entire point cloud and the lack of consideration for efficient global geometric consistency. To address these issues, we propose a new framework that includes several novel techniques. Firstly, we introduce a semantic-aware geometric encoder that combines object-level and patch-level semantic information. This encoder significantly improves registration recall by reducing ambiguity in patch-level superpoint matching. Additionally, we incorporate a prior knowledge approach that utilizes an intrinsic shape signature to identify salient points. This enables us to extract the most salient super points and meaningful dense points in the scene. Secondly, we introduce an innovative transformer that encodes High-Order (HO) geometric features. These features are crucial for identifying salient points within initial overlap regions while considering global high-order geometric consistency. To optimize this high-order transformer further, we introduce an anchor node selection strategy. By encoding inter-frame triangle or polyhedron consistency features based on these anchor nodes, we can effectively learn high-order geometric features of salient super points. These high-order features are then propagated to dense points and utilized by a Sinkhorn matching module to identify key correspondences for successful registration. In our experiments conducted on well-known datasets such as 3DMatch/3DLoMatch and KITTI, our approach has shown promising results, highlighting the effectiveness of our novel method.

Authors:Oana Ignat, Santiago Castro, Weiji Li, Rada Mihalcea

Abstract: We introduce the task of automatic human action co-occurrence identification, i.e., determine whether two human actions can co-occur in the same interval of time. We create and make publicly available the ACE (Action Co-occurrencE) dataset, consisting of a large graph of ~12k co-occurring pairs of visual actions and their corresponding video clips. We describe graph link prediction models that leverage visual and textual information to automatically infer if two actions are co-occurring. We show that graphs are particularly well suited to capture relations between human actions, and the learned graph representations are effective for our task and capture novel and relevant information across different data domains. The ACE dataset and the code introduced in this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/MichiganNLP/vlog_action_co-occurrence.

Authors:JiaJun Zhu, Zichuan Yang, Binjie Hong, Jiacheng Song, Jiwei Wang, Tianhao Chen, Shuilan Yang, Zixun Lan, Fei Ma

Abstract: Correcting students' multiple-choice answers is a repetitive and mechanical task that can be considered an image multi-classification task. Assuming possible options are 'abcd' and the correct option is one of the four, some students may write incorrect symbols or options that do not exist. In this paper, five classifications were set up - four for possible correct options and one for other incorrect writing. This approach takes into account the possibility of non-standard writing options.

Authors:Yake Wei, Ruoxuan Feng, Zihe Wang, Di Hu

Abstract: One primary topic of multi-modal learning is to jointly incorporate heterogeneous information from different modalities. However, most models often suffer from unsatisfactory multi-modal cooperation, which could not jointly utilize all modalities well. Some methods are proposed to identify and enhance the worse learnt modality, but are often hard to provide the fine-grained observation of multi-modal cooperation at sample-level with theoretical support. Hence, it is essential to reasonably observe and improve the fine-grained cooperation between modalities, especially when facing realistic scenarios where the modality discrepancy could vary across different samples. To this end, we introduce a fine-grained modality valuation metric to evaluate the contribution of each modality at sample-level. Via modality valuation, we regretfully observe that the multi-modal model tends to rely on one specific modality, resulting in other modalities being low-contributing. We further analyze this issue and improve cooperation between modalities by enhancing the discriminative ability of low-contributing modalities in a targeted manner. Overall, our methods reasonably observe the fine-grained uni-modal contribution at sample-level and achieve considerable improvement on different multi-modal models.

Authors:Hao Yu, Xu Cheng, Wei Peng, Weihao Liu, Guoying Zhao

Abstract: Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is a challenging task due to large cross-modality discrepancies and intra-class variations. Existing methods mainly focus on learning modality-shared representations by embedding different modalities into the same feature space. As a result, the learned feature emphasizes the common patterns across modalities while suppressing modality-specific and identity-aware information that is valuable for Re-ID. To address these issues, we propose a novel Modality Unifying Network (MUN) to explore a robust auxiliary modality for VI-ReID. First, the auxiliary modality is generated by combining the proposed cross-modality learner and intra-modality learner, which can dynamically model the modality-specific and modality-shared representations to alleviate both cross-modality and intra-modality variations. Second, by aligning identity centres across the three modalities, an identity alignment loss function is proposed to discover the discriminative feature representations. Third, a modality alignment loss is introduced to consistently reduce the distribution distance of visible and infrared images by modality prototype modeling. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin.

Authors:Yuerong Li, Zhengrong Xue, Huazhe Xu

Abstract: Temporal action segmentation is typically achieved by discovering the dramatic variances in global visual descriptors. In this paper, we explore the merits of local features by proposing the unsupervised framework of Object-centric Temporal Action Segmentation (OTAS). Broadly speaking, OTAS consists of self-supervised global and local feature extraction modules as well as a boundary selection module that fuses the features and detects salient boundaries for action segmentation. As a second contribution, we discuss the pros and cons of existing frame-level and boundary-level evaluation metrics. Through extensive experiments, we find OTAS is superior to the previous state-of-the-art method by $41\%$ on average in terms of our recommended F1 score. Surprisingly, OTAS even outperforms the ground-truth human annotations in the user study. Moreover, OTAS is efficient enough to allow real-time inference.

Authors:Qiyu Sun, Huilin Chen, Meng Zheng, Ziyan Wu, Michael Felsberg, Yang Tang

Abstract: Domain generalized semantic segmentation (DGSS) is a critical yet challenging task, where the model is trained only on source data without access to any target data. Despite the proposal of numerous DGSS strategies, the generalization capability remains limited in CNN architectures. Though some Transformer-based segmentation models show promising performance, they primarily focus on capturing intra-sample attentive relationships, disregarding inter-sample correlations which can potentially benefit DGSS. To this end, we enhance the attention modules in Transformer networks for improving DGSS by incorporating information from other independent samples in the same batch, enriching contextual information, and diversifying the training data for each attention block. Specifically, we propose two alternative intra-batch attention mechanisms, namely mean-based intra-batch attention (MIBA) and element-wise intra-batch attention (EIBA), to capture correlations between different samples, enhancing feature representation and generalization capabilities. Building upon intra-batch attention, we introduce IBAFormer, which integrates self-attention modules with the proposed intra-batch attention for DGSS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IBAFormer achieves SOTA performance in DGSS, and ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each introduced component.

Authors:Yin Wang, Zhiying Leng, Frederick W. B. Li, Shun-Cheng Wu, Xiaohui Liang

Abstract: Text-driven human motion generation in computer vision is both significant and challenging. However, current methods are limited to producing either deterministic or imprecise motion sequences, failing to effectively control the temporal and spatial relationships required to conform to a given text description. In this work, we propose a fine-grained method for generating high-quality, conditional human motion sequences supporting precise text description. Our approach consists of two key components: 1) a linguistics-structure assisted module that constructs accurate and complete language feature to fully utilize text information; and 2) a context-aware progressive reasoning module that learns neighborhood and overall semantic linguistics features from shallow and deep graph neural networks to achieve a multi-step inference. Experiments show that our approach outperforms text-driven motion generation methods on HumanML3D and KIT test sets and generates better visually confirmed motion to the text conditions.

Authors:Bavesh Balaji, Jerrin Bright, Harish Prakash, Yuhao Chen, David A Clausi, John Zelek

Abstract: Player identification is a crucial component in vision-driven soccer analytics, enabling various downstream tasks such as player assessment, in-game analysis, and broadcast production. However, automatically detecting jersey numbers from player tracklets in videos presents challenges due to motion blur, low resolution, distortions, and occlusions. Existing methods, utilizing Spatial Transformer Networks, CNNs, and Vision Transformers, have shown success in image data but struggle with real-world video data, where jersey numbers are not visible in most of the frames. Hence, identifying frames that contain the jersey number is a key sub-problem to tackle. To address these issues, we propose a robust keyframe identification module that extracts frames containing essential high-level information about the jersey number. A spatio-temporal network is then employed to model spatial and temporal context and predict the probabilities of jersey numbers in the video. Additionally, we adopt a multi-task loss function to predict the probability distribution of each digit separately. Extensive evaluations on the SoccerNet dataset demonstrate that incorporating our proposed keyframe identification module results in a significant 37.81% and 37.70% increase in the accuracies of 2 different test sets with domain gaps. These results highlight the effectiveness and importance of our approach in tackling the challenges of automatic jersey number detection in sports videos.

Authors:Hoàng-Ân Lê, Minh-Tan Pham

Abstract: Self-training allows a network to learn from the predictions of a more complicated model, thus often requires well-trained teacher models and mixture of teacher-student data while multi-task learning jointly optimizes different targets to learn salient interrelationship and requires multi-task annotations for each training example. These frameworks, despite being particularly data demanding have potentials for data exploitation if such assumptions can be relaxed. In this paper, we compare self-training object detection under the deficiency of teacher training data where students are trained on unseen examples by the teacher, and multi-task learning with partially annotated data, i.e. single-task annotation per training example. Both scenarios have their own limitation but potentially helpful with limited annotated data. Experimental results show the improvement of performance when using a weak teacher with unseen data for training a multi-task student. Despite the limited setup we believe the experimental results show the potential of multi-task knowledge distillation and self-training, which could be beneficial for future study. Source code is at https://lhoangan.github.io/multas.

Authors:Gang Fu, Qing Zhang, Lei Zhu, Chunxia Xiao, Ping Li

Abstract: This paper aims to remove specular highlights from a single object-level image. Although previous methods have made some progresses, their performance remains somewhat limited, particularly for real images with complex specular highlights. To this end, we propose a three-stage network to address them. Specifically, given an input image, we first decompose it into the albedo, shading, and specular residue components to estimate a coarse specular-free image. Then, we further refine the coarse result to alleviate its visual artifacts such as color distortion. Finally, we adjust the tone of the refined result to match that of the input as closely as possible. In addition, to facilitate network training and quantitative evaluation, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of object-level images, covering diverse objects and illumination conditions. Extensive experiments illustrate that our network is able to generalize well to unseen real object-level images, and even produce good results for scene-level images with multiple background objects and complex lighting.

Authors:Sergio Romero-Tapiador, Ruben Tolosana, Aythami Morales, Isabel Espinosa-Salinas, Gala Freixer, Julian Fierrez, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Enrique Carrillo de Santa Pau, Ana Ramírez de Molina, Javier Ortega-Garcia

Abstract: Nowadays millions of images are shared on social media and web platforms. In particular, many of them are food images taken from a smartphone over time, providing information related to the individual's diet. On the other hand, eating behaviours are directly related to some of the most prevalent diseases in the world. Exploiting recent advances in image processing and Artificial Intelligence (AI), this scenario represents an excellent opportunity to: i) create new methods that analyse the individuals' health from what they eat, and ii) develop personalised recommendations to improve nutrition and diet under specific circumstances (e.g., obesity or COVID). Having tunable tools for creating food image datasets that facilitate research in both lines is very much needed. This paper proposes AI4Food-NutritionFW, a framework for the creation of food image datasets according to configurable eating behaviours. AI4Food-NutritionFW simulates a user-friendly and widespread scenario where images are taken using a smartphone. In addition to the framework, we also provide and describe a unique food image dataset that includes 4,800 different weekly eating behaviours from 15 different profiles and 1,200 subjects. Specifically, we consider profiles that comply with actual lifestyles from healthy eating behaviours (according to established knowledge), variable profiles (e.g., eating out, holidays), to unhealthy ones (e.g., excess of fast food or sweets). Finally, we automatically evaluate a healthy index of the subject's eating behaviours using multidimensional metrics based on guidelines for healthy diets proposed by international organisations, achieving promising results (99.53% and 99.60% accuracy and sensitivity, respectively). We also release to the research community a software implementation of our proposed AI4Food-NutritionFW and the mentioned food image dataset created with it.

Authors:Maria Priisalu

Abstract: It is difficult to perform 3D reconstruction from on-vehicle gathered video due to the large forward motion of the vehicle. Even object detection and human sensing models perform significantly worse on onboard videos when compared to standard benchmarks because objects often appear far away from the camera compared to the standard object detection benchmarks, image quality is often decreased by motion blur and occlusions occur often. This has led to the popularisation of traffic data-specific benchmarks. Recently Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) sensors have become popular to directly estimate depths without the need to perform 3D reconstructions. However, LiDAR-based methods still lack in articulated human detection at a distance when compared to image-based methods. We hypothesize that benchmarks targeted at articulated human sensing from LiDAR data could bring about increased research in human sensing and prediction in traffic and could lead to improved traffic safety for pedestrians.

Authors:Xiaoyu Zhou, Zhiwei Lin, Xiaojun Shan, Yongtao Wang, Deqing Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Abstract: Recent novel view synthesis methods obtain promising results for relatively small scenes, e.g., indoor environments and scenes with a few objects, but tend to fail for unbounded outdoor scenes with a single image as input. In this paper, we introduce SAMPLING, a Scene-adaptive Hierarchical Multiplane Images Representation for Novel View Synthesis from a Single Image based on improved multiplane images (MPI). Observing that depth distribution varies significantly for unbounded outdoor scenes, we employ an adaptive-bins strategy for MPI to arrange planes in accordance with each scene image. To represent intricate geometry and multi-scale details, we further introduce a hierarchical refinement branch, which results in high-quality synthesized novel views. Our method demonstrates considerable performance gains in synthesizing large-scale unbounded outdoor scenes using a single image on the KITTI dataset and generalizes well to the unseen Tanks and Temples dataset. The code and models will be made public.

Authors:James Robert Kubricht, Zhaoyuan Yang, Jianwei Qiu, Peter Henry Tu

Abstract: Deep learning approaches to natural language processing have made great strides in recent years. While these models produce symbols that convey vast amounts of diverse knowledge, it is unclear how such symbols are grounded in data from the world. In this paper, we explore the development of a private language for visual data representation by training emergent language (EL) encoders/decoders in both i) a traditional referential game environment and ii) a contrastive learning environment utilizing a within-class matching training paradigm. An additional classification layer utilizing neural machine translation and random forest classification was used to transform symbolic representations (sequences of integer symbols) to class labels. These methods were applied in two experiments focusing on object recognition and action recognition. For object recognition, a set of sketches produced by human participants from real imagery was used (Sketchy dataset) and for action recognition, 2D trajectories were generated from 3D motion capture systems (MOVI dataset). In order to interpret the symbols produced for data in each experiment, gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) methods were used to identify pixel regions indicating semantic features which contribute evidence towards symbols in learned languages. Additionally, a t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) method was used to investigate embeddings learned by CNN feature extractors.

Authors:Jian Zhang, Lei Qi, Yinghuan Shi, Yang Gao

Abstract: Domain Generalization (DG) aims to generalize to arbitrary unseen domains. A promising approach to improve model generalization in DG is the identification of flat minima. One typical method for this task is SWAD, which involves averaging weights along the training trajectory. However, the success of weight averaging depends on the diversity of weights, which is limited when training with a small learning rate. Instead, we observe that leveraging a large learning rate can simultaneously promote weight diversity and facilitate the identification of flat regions in the loss landscape. However, employing a large learning rate suffers from the convergence problem, which cannot be resolved by simply averaging the training weights. To address this issue, we introduce a training strategy called Lookahead which involves the weight interpolation, instead of average, between fast and slow weights. The fast weight explores the weight space with a large learning rate, which is not converged while the slow weight interpolates with it to ensure the convergence. Besides, weight interpolation also helps identify flat minima by implicitly optimizing the local entropy loss that measures flatness. To further prevent overfitting during training, we propose two variants to regularize the training weight with weighted averaged weight or with accumulated history weight. Taking advantage of this new perspective, our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on both classification and semantic segmentation domain generalization benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/koncle/DG-with-Large-LR.

Authors:Kuangdai Leng, Jeyan Thiyagalingam

Abstract: Convolution is a fundamental operation in image processing and machine learning. Aimed primarily at maintaining image size, padding is a key ingredient of convolution, which, however, can introduce undesirable boundary effects. We present a non-padding-based method for size-keeping convolution based on the preservation of differential characteristics of kernels. The main idea is to make convolution over an incomplete sliding window "collapse" to a linear differential operator evaluated locally at its central pixel, which no longer requires information from the neighbouring missing pixels. While the underlying theory is rigorous, our final formula turns out to be simple: the convolution over an incomplete window is achieved by convolving its nearest complete window with a transformed kernel. This formula is computationally lightweight, involving neither interpolation or extrapolation nor restrictions on image and kernel sizes. Our method favours data with smooth boundaries, such as high-resolution images and fields from physics. Our experiments include: i) filtering analytical and non-analytical fields from computational physics and, ii) training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the tasks of image classification, semantic segmentation and super-resolution reconstruction. In all these experiments, our method has exhibited visible superiority over the compared ones.

Authors:Jindong Gu, Fangyun Wei, Philip Torr, Han Hu

Abstract: Deep Neural Networks can be easily fooled by small and imperceptible perturbations. The query-based black-box attack (QBBA) is able to create the perturbations using model output probabilities of image queries requiring no access to the underlying models. QBBA poses realistic threats to real-world applications. Recently, various types of robustness have been explored to defend against QBBA. In this work, we first taxonomize the stochastic defense strategies against QBBA. Following our taxonomy, we propose to explore non-additive randomness in models to defend against QBBA. Specifically, we focus on underexplored Vision Transformers based on their flexible architectures. Extensive experiments show that the proposed defense approach achieves effective defense, without much sacrifice in performance.

Authors:Saarthak Kapse, Srijan Das, Jingwei Zhang, Rajarsi R. Gupta, Joel Saltz, Dimitris Samaras, Prateek Prasanna

Abstract: We propose DiRL, a Diversity-inducing Representation Learning technique for histopathology imaging. Self-supervised learning techniques, such as contrastive and non-contrastive approaches, have been shown to learn rich and effective representations of digitized tissue samples with limited pathologist supervision. Our analysis of vanilla SSL-pretrained models' attention distribution reveals an insightful observation: sparsity in attention, i.e, models tends to localize most of their attention to some prominent patterns in the image. Although attention sparsity can be beneficial in natural images due to these prominent patterns being the object of interest itself, this can be sub-optimal in digital pathology; this is because, unlike natural images, digital pathology scans are not object-centric, but rather a complex phenotype of various spatially intermixed biological components. Inadequate diversification of attention in these complex images could result in crucial information loss. To address this, we leverage cell segmentation to densely extract multiple histopathology-specific representations, and then propose a prior-guided dense pretext task for SSL, designed to match the multiple corresponding representations between the views. Through this, the model learns to attend to various components more closely and evenly, thus inducing adequate diversification in attention for capturing context rich representations. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis on multiple tasks across cancer types, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method and observe that the attention is more globally distributed.

Authors:Yao Feng, Weiyang Liu, Timo Bolkart, Jinlong Yang, Marc Pollefeys, Michael J. Black

Abstract: Tremendous efforts have been made to learn animatable and photorealistic human avatars. Towards this end, both explicit and implicit 3D representations are heavily studied for a holistic modeling and capture of the whole human (e.g., body, clothing, face and hair), but neither representation is an optimal choice in terms of representation efficacy since different parts of the human avatar have different modeling desiderata. For example, meshes are generally not suitable for modeling clothing and hair. Motivated by this, we present Disentangled Avatars~(DELTA), which models humans with hybrid explicit-implicit 3D representations. DELTA takes a monocular RGB video as input, and produces a human avatar with separate body and clothing/hair layers. Specifically, we demonstrate two important applications for DELTA. For the first one, we consider the disentanglement of the human body and clothing and in the second, we disentangle the face and hair. To do so, DELTA represents the body or face with an explicit mesh-based parametric 3D model and the clothing or hair with an implicit neural radiance field. To make this possible, we design an end-to-end differentiable renderer that integrates meshes into volumetric rendering, enabling DELTA to learn directly from monocular videos without any 3D supervision. Finally, we show that how these two applications can be easily combined to model full-body avatars, such that the hair, face, body and clothing can be fully disentangled yet jointly rendered. Such a disentanglement enables hair and clothing transfer to arbitrary body shapes. We empirically validate the effectiveness of DELTA's disentanglement by demonstrating its promising performance on disentangled reconstruction, virtual clothing try-on and hairstyle transfer. To facilitate future research, we also release an open-sourced pipeline for the study of hybrid human avatar modeling.

Authors:Xiangyu Chen, Xintao Wang, Wenlong Zhang, Xiangtao Kong, Yu Qiao, Jiantao Zhou, Chao Dong

Abstract: Transformer-based methods have shown impressive performance in image restoration tasks, such as image super-resolution and denoising. However, we find that these networks can only utilize a limited spatial range of input information through attribution analysis. This implies that the potential of Transformer is still not fully exploited in existing networks. In order to activate more input pixels for better restoration, we propose a new Hybrid Attention Transformer (HAT). It combines both channel attention and window-based self-attention schemes, thus making use of their complementary advantages. Moreover, to better aggregate the cross-window information, we introduce an overlapping cross-attention module to enhance the interaction between neighboring window features. In the training stage, we additionally adopt a same-task pre-training strategy to further exploit the potential of the model for further improvement. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed modules. We further scale up the model to show that the performance of the SR task can be greatly improved. Besides, we extend HAT to more image restoration applications, including real-world image super-resolution, Gaussian image denoising and image compression artifacts reduction. Experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate that our HAT achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/HAT.

Authors:Yiming Zhang, ZeMing Gong, Angel X. Chang

Abstract: We introduce the task of localizing a flexible number of objects in real-world 3D scenes using natural language descriptions. Existing 3D visual grounding tasks focus on localizing a unique object given a text description. However, such a strict setting is unnatural as localizing potentially multiple objects is a common need in real-world scenarios and robotic tasks (e.g., visual navigation and object rearrangement). To address this setting we propose Multi3DRefer, generalizing the ScanRefer dataset and task. Our dataset contains 61926 descriptions of 11609 objects, where zero, single or multiple target objects are referenced by each description. We also introduce a new evaluation metric and benchmark methods from prior work to enable further investigation of multi-modal 3D scene understanding. Furthermore, we develop a better baseline leveraging 2D features from CLIP by rendering object proposals online with contrastive learning, which outperforms the state of the art on the ScanRefer benchmark.

Authors:Jinfeng Liu, Lingtong Kong, Jie Yang, Wei Liu

Abstract: Depth estimation plays an important role in the robotic perception system. Self-supervised monocular paradigm has gained significant attention since it can free training from the reliance on depth annotations. Despite recent advancements, existing self-supervised methods still underutilize the available training data, limiting their generalization ability. In this paper, we take two data augmentation techniques, namely Resizing-Cropping and Splitting-Permuting, to fully exploit the potential of training datasets. Specifically, the original image and the generated two augmented images are fed into the training pipeline simultaneously and we leverage them to conduct self-distillation. Additionally, we introduce the detail-enhanced DepthNet with an extra full-scale branch in the encoder and a grid decoder to enhance the restoration of fine details in depth maps. Experimental results demonstrate our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark, with both raw ground truth and improved ground truth. Moreover, our models also show superior generalization performance when transferring to Make3D and NYUv2 datasets. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Sauf4896/BDEdepth.

Authors:Chunyong Hu, Hang Zheng, Kun Li, Jianyun Xu, Weibo Mao, Maochun Luo, Lingxuan Wang, Mingxia Chen, Kaixuan Liu, Yiru Zhao, Peihan Hao, Minzhe Liu, Kaicheng Yu

Abstract: Multi-sensor modal fusion has demonstrated strong advantages in 3D object detection tasks. However, existing methods that fuse multi-modal features through a simple channel concatenation require transformation features into bird's eye view space and may lose the information on Z-axis thus leads to inferior performance. To this end, we propose FusionFormer, an end-to-end multi-modal fusion framework that leverages transformers to fuse multi-modal features and obtain fused BEV features. And based on the flexible adaptability of FusionFormer to the input modality representation, we propose a depth prediction branch that can be added to the framework to improve detection performance in camera-based detection tasks. In addition, we propose a plug-and-play temporal fusion module based on transformers that can fuse historical frame BEV features for more stable and reliable detection results. We evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset and achieve 72.6% mAP and 75.1% NDS for 3D object detection tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

Authors:Soumen Basu, Ashish Papanai, Mayank Gupta, Pankaj Gupta, Chetan Arora

Abstract: Automated detection of Gallbladder Cancer (GBC) from Ultrasound (US) images is an important problem, which has drawn increased interest from researchers. However, most of these works use difficult-to-acquire information such as bounding box annotations or additional US videos. In this paper, we focus on GBC detection using only image-level labels. Such annotation is usually available based on the diagnostic report of a patient, and do not require additional annotation effort from the physicians. However, our analysis reveals that it is difficult to train a standard image classification model for GBC detection. This is due to the low inter-class variance (a malignant region usually occupies only a small portion of a US image), high intra-class variance (due to the US sensor capturing a 2D slice of a 3D object leading to large viewpoint variations), and low training data availability. We posit that even when we have only the image level label, still formulating the problem as object detection (with bounding box output) helps a deep neural network (DNN) model focus on the relevant region of interest. Since no bounding box annotations is available for training, we pose the problem as weakly supervised object detection (WSOD). Motivated by the recent success of transformer models in object detection, we train one such model, DETR, using multi-instance-learning (MIL) with self-supervised instance selection to suit the WSOD task. Our proposed method demonstrates an improvement of AP and detection sensitivity over the SOTA transformer-based and CNN-based WSOD methods. Project page is at https://gbc-iitd.github.io/wsod-gbc

Authors:Yassir Zardoua, Abdelhamid El Wahabi, Mohammed Boulaala, Abdelali Astito

Abstract: Horizon line (or sea line) detection (HLD) is a critical component in multiple marine autonomous navigation tasks, such as identifying the navigation area (i.e., the sea), obstacle detection and geo-localization, and digital video stabilization. A recent survey highlighted several weaknesses of such detectors, particularly on sea conditions lacking from the most extensive dataset currently used by HLD researchers. Experimental validation of more robust HLDs involves collecting an extensive set of these lacking sea conditions and annotating each collected image with the correct position and orientation of the horizon line. The annotation task is daunting without a proper tool. Therefore, we present the first public annotation software with tailored features to make the sea line annotation process fast and easy. The software is available at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1c0ZmvYDckuQCPIWfh_70P7E1A_DWlIvF?usp=sharing

Authors:Jiaxin Gao, Ziyu Yue, Yaohua Liu, Sihan Xie, Xin Fan, Risheng Liu

Abstract: Super-resolution tasks oriented to images captured in ultra-dark environments is a practical yet challenging problem that has received little attention. Due to uneven illumination and low signal-to-noise ratio in dark environments, a multitude of problems such as lack of detail and color distortion may be magnified in the super-resolution process compared to normal-lighting environments. Consequently, conventional low-light enhancement or super-resolution methods, whether applied individually or in a cascaded manner for such problem, often encounter limitations in recovering luminance, color fidelity, and intricate details. To conquer these issues, this paper proposes a specialized dual-modulated learning framework that, for the first time, attempts to deeply dissect the nature of the low-light super-resolution task. Leveraging natural image color characteristics, we introduce a self-regularized luminance constraint as a prior for addressing uneven lighting. Expanding on this, we develop Illuminance-Semantic Dual Modulation (ISDM) components to enhance feature-level preservation of illumination and color details. Besides, instead of deploying naive up-sampling strategies, we design the Resolution-Sensitive Merging Up-sampler (RSMU) module that brings together different sampling modalities as substrates, effectively mitigating the presence of artifacts and halos. Comprehensive experiments showcases the applicability and generalizability of our approach to diverse and challenging ultra-low-light conditions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with a notable improvement (i.e., $\uparrow$5\% in PSNR, and $\uparrow$43\% in LPIPS). Especially noteworthy is the 19-fold increase in the RMSE score, underscoring our method's exceptional generalization across different darkness levels. The code will be available online upon publication of the paper.

Authors:Yifeng Huang, Viresh Ranjan, Minh Hoai

Abstract: We propose a novel framework for interactive class-agnostic object counting, where a human user can interactively provide feedback to improve the accuracy of a counter. Our framework consists of two main components: a user-friendly visualizer to gather feedback and an efficient mechanism to incorporate it. In each iteration, we produce a density map to show the current prediction result, and we segment it into non-overlapping regions with an easily verifiable number of objects. The user can provide feedback by selecting a region with obvious counting errors and specifying the range for the estimated number of objects within it. To improve the counting result, we develop a novel adaptation loss to force the visual counter to output the predicted count within the user-specified range. For effective and efficient adaptation, we propose a refinement module that can be used with any density-based visual counter, and only the parameters in the refinement module will be updated during adaptation. Our experiments on two challenging class-agnostic object counting benchmarks, FSCD-LVIS and FSC-147, show that our method can reduce the mean absolute error of multiple state-of-the-art visual counters by roughly 30% to 40% with minimal user input. Our project can be found at https://yifehuang97.github.io/ICACountProjectPage/.

Authors:Shentong Mo, Weiguo Pian, Yapeng Tian

Abstract: Continual learning is a challenging problem in which models need to be trained on non-stationary data across sequential tasks for class-incremental learning. While previous methods have focused on using either regularization or rehearsal-based frameworks to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in image classification, they are limited to a single modality and cannot learn compact class-aware cross-modal representations for continual audio-visual learning. To address this gap, we propose a novel class-incremental grouping network (CIGN) that can learn category-wise semantic features to achieve continual audio-visual learning. Our CIGN leverages learnable audio-visual class tokens and audio-visual grouping to continually aggregate class-aware features. Additionally, it utilizes class tokens distillation and continual grouping to prevent forgetting parameters learned from previous tasks, thereby improving the model's ability to capture discriminative audio-visual categories. We conduct extensive experiments on VGGSound-Instruments, VGGSound-100, and VGG-Sound Sources benchmarks. Our experimental results demonstrate that the CIGN achieves state-of-the-art audio-visual class-incremental learning performance. Code is available at https://github.com/stoneMo/CIGN.

Authors:Ali Keysan, Andreas Look, Eitan Kosman, Gonca Gürsun, Jörg Wagner, Yao Yu, Barbara Rakitsch

Abstract: In autonomous driving tasks, scene understanding is the first step towards predicting the future behavior of the surrounding traffic participants. Yet, how to represent a given scene and extract its features are still open research questions. In this study, we propose a novel text-based representation of traffic scenes and process it with a pre-trained language encoder. First, we show that text-based representations, combined with classical rasterized image representations, lead to descriptive scene embeddings. Second, we benchmark our predictions on the nuScenes dataset and show significant improvements compared to baselines. Third, we show in an ablation study that a joint encoder of text and rasterized images outperforms the individual encoders confirming that both representations have their complementary strengths.

Authors:Mihir Kulkarni, Kostas Alexis

Abstract: This paper contributes a novel learning-based method for aggressive task-driven compression of depth images and their encoding as images tailored to collision prediction for robotic systems. A novel 3D image processing methodology is proposed that accounts for the robot's size in order to appropriately "inflate" the obstacles represented in the depth image and thus obtain the distance that can be traversed by the robot in a collision-free manner along any given ray within the camera frustum. Such depth-and-collision image pairs are used to train a neural network that follows the architecture of Variational Autoencoders to compress-and-transform the information in the original depth image to derive a latent representation that encodes the collision information for the given depth image. We compare our proposed task-driven encoding method with classical task-agnostic methods and demonstrate superior performance for the task of collision image prediction from extremely low-dimensional latent spaces. A set of comparative studies show that the proposed approach is capable of encoding depth image-and-collision image tuples from complex scenes with thin obstacles at long distances better than the classical methods at compression ratios as high as 4050:1.

Authors:Yi Wang, Conrad M Albrecht, Nassim Ait Ali Braham, Chenying Liu, Zhitong Xiong, Xiao Xiang Zhu

Abstract: The increasing availability of multi-sensor data sparks interest in multimodal self-supervised learning. However, most existing approaches learn only common representations across modalities while ignoring intra-modal training and modality-unique representations. We propose Decoupling Common and Unique Representations (DeCUR), a simple yet effective method for multimodal self-supervised learning. By distinguishing inter- and intra-modal embeddings, DeCUR is trained to integrate complementary information across different modalities. We evaluate DeCUR in three common multimodal scenarios (radar-optical, RGB-elevation, and RGB-depth), and demonstrate its consistent benefits on scene classification and semantic segmentation downstream tasks. Notably, we get straightforward improvements by transferring our pretrained backbones to state-of-the-art supervised multimodal methods without any hyperparameter tuning. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive explainability analysis to shed light on the interpretation of common and unique features in our multimodal approach. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/zhu-xlab/DeCUR}.

Authors:Binglei Li, Zhizhong Huang, Hongming Shan, Junping Zhang

Abstract: Navigating in the latent space of StyleGAN has shown effectiveness for face editing. However, the resulting methods usually encounter challenges in complicated navigation due to the entanglement among different attributes in the latent space. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel framework, termed SDFlow, with a semantic decomposition in original latent space using continuous conditional normalizing flows. Specifically, SDFlow decomposes the original latent code into different irrelevant variables by jointly optimizing two components: (i) a semantic encoder to estimate semantic variables from input faces and (ii) a flow-based transformation module to map the latent code into a semantic-irrelevant variable in Gaussian distribution, conditioned on the learned semantic variables. To eliminate the entanglement between variables, we employ a disentangled learning strategy under a mutual information framework, thereby providing precise manipulation controls. Experimental results demonstrate that SDFlow outperforms existing state-of-the-art face editing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. The source code is made available at https://github.com/phil329/SDFlow.

Authors:Xiao He, Mingrui Zhu, Dongxin Chen, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao

Abstract: Privacy protection has become a top priority as the proliferation of AI techniques has led to widespread collection and misuse of personal data. Anonymization and visual identity information hiding are two important facial privacy protection tasks that aim to remove identification characteristics from facial images at the human perception level. However, they have a significant difference in that the former aims to prevent the machine from recognizing correctly, while the latter needs to ensure the accuracy of machine recognition. Therefore, it is difficult to train a model to complete these two tasks simultaneously. In this paper, we unify the task of anonymization and visual identity information hiding and propose a novel face privacy protection method based on diffusion models, dubbed Diff-Privacy. Specifically, we train our proposed multi-scale image inversion module (MSI) to obtain a set of SDM format conditional embeddings of the original image. Based on the conditional embeddings, we design corresponding embedding scheduling strategies and construct different energy functions during the denoising process to achieve anonymization and visual identity information hiding. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in protecting facial privacy.

Authors:Eden Belouadah, Arnaud Dapogny, Kevin Bailly

Abstract: Class-Incremental learning (CIL) is the ability of artificial agents to accommodate new classes as they appear in a stream. It is particularly interesting in evolving environments where agents have limited access to memory and computational resources. The main challenge of class-incremental learning is catastrophic forgetting, the inability of neural networks to retain past knowledge when learning a new one. Unfortunately, most existing class-incremental object detectors are applied to two-stage algorithms such as Faster-RCNN and rely on rehearsal memory to retain past knowledge. We believe that the current benchmarks are not realistic, and more effort should be dedicated to anchor-free and rehearsal-free object detection. In this context, we propose MultIOD, a class-incremental object detector based on CenterNet. Our main contributions are: (1) we propose a multihead feature pyramid and multihead detection architecture to efficiently separate class representations, (2) we employ transfer learning between classes learned initially and those learned incrementally to tackle catastrophic forgetting, and (3) we use a class-wise non-max-suppression as a post-processing technique to remove redundant boxes. Without bells and whistles, our method outperforms a range of state-of-the-art methods on two Pascal VOC datasets.

Authors:Chenghao Li, Chaoning Zhang

Abstract: The success of Vision Transformer (ViT) has been widely reported on a wide range of image recognition tasks. The merit of ViT over CNN has been largely attributed to large training datasets or auxiliary pre-training. Without pre-training, the performance of ViT on small datasets is limited because the global self-attention has limited capacity in local modeling. Towards boosting ViT on small datasets without pre-training, this work improves its local modeling by applying a weight mask on the original self-attention matrix. A straightforward way to locally adapt the self-attention matrix can be realized by an element-wise learnable weight mask (ELM), for which our preliminary results show promising results. However, the element-wise simple learnable weight mask not only induces a non-trivial additional parameter overhead but also increases the optimization complexity. To this end, this work proposes a novel Gaussian mixture mask (GMM) in which one mask only has two learnable parameters and it can be conveniently used in any ViT variants whose attention mechanism allows the use of masks. Experimental results on multiple small datasets demonstrate that the effectiveness of our proposed Gaussian mask for boosting ViTs for free (almost zero additional parameter or computation cost). Our code will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/CatworldLee/Gaussian-Mixture-Mask-Attention}{https://github.com/CatworldLee/Gaussian-Mixture-Mask-Attention}.

Authors:Sven Teufel, Jörg Gamerdinger, Georg Volk, Oliver Bringmann

Abstract: Comprehensive perception of the environment is crucial for the safe operation of autonomous vehicles. However, the perception capabilities of autonomous vehicles are limited due to occlusions, limited sensor ranges, or environmental influences. Collective Perception (CP) aims to mitigate these problems by enabling the exchange of information between vehicles. A major challenge in CP is the fusion of the exchanged information. Due to the enormous bandwidth requirement of early fusion approaches and the interchangeability issues of intermediate fusion approaches, only the late fusion of shared detections is practical. Current late fusion approaches neglect valuable information for local detection, this is why we propose a novel fusion method to fuse the detections of cooperative vehicles within the local LiDAR-based detection pipeline. Therefore, we present Collective PV-RCNN (CPV-RCNN), which extends the PV-RCNN++ framework to fuse collective detections. Code is available at https://github.com/ekut-es

Authors:Seong Hun Lee, Javier Civera

Abstract: In this work, we propose a novel method for robust single rotation averaging that can efficiently handle an extremely large fraction of outliers. Our approach is to minimize the total truncated least unsquared deviations (TLUD) cost of geodesic distances. The proposed algorithm consists of three steps: First, we consider each input rotation as a potential initial solution and choose the one that yields the least sum of truncated chordal deviations. Next, we obtain the inlier set using the initial solution and compute its chordal $L_2$-mean. Finally, starting from this estimate, we iteratively compute the geodesic $L_1$-mean of the inliers using the Weiszfeld algorithm on $SO(3)$. An extensive evaluation shows that our method is robust against up to 99% outliers given a sufficient number of accurate inliers, outperforming the current state of the art.

Authors:Marcel Büsching, Josef Bengtson, David Nilsson, Mårten Björkman

Abstract: We introduce a novel approach for monocular novel view synthesis of dynamic scenes. Existing techniques already show impressive rendering quality but tend to focus on optimization within a single scene without leveraging prior knowledge. This limitation has been primarily attributed to the lack of datasets of dynamic scenes available for training and the diversity of scene dynamics. Our method FlowIBR circumvents these issues by integrating a neural image-based rendering method, pre-trained on a large corpus of widely available static scenes, with a per-scene optimized scene flow field. Utilizing this flow field, we bend the camera rays to counteract the scene dynamics, thereby presenting the dynamic scene as if it were static to the rendering network. The proposed method reduces per-scene optimization time by an order of magnitude, achieving comparable results to existing methods - all on a single consumer-grade GPU.

Authors:Guoyuan An, Woo Jae Kim, Saelyne Yang, Rong Li, Yuchi Huo, Sung-Eui Yoon

Abstract: This paper introduces the first two pixel retrieval benchmarks. Pixel retrieval is segmented instance retrieval. Like semantic segmentation extends classification to the pixel level, pixel retrieval is an extension of image retrieval and offers information about which pixels are related to the query object. In addition to retrieving images for the given query, it helps users quickly identify the query object in true positive images and exclude false positive images by denoting the correlated pixels. Our user study results show pixel-level annotation can significantly improve the user experience. Compared with semantic and instance segmentation, pixel retrieval requires a fine-grained recognition capability for variable-granularity targets. To this end, we propose pixel retrieval benchmarks named PROxford and PRParis, which are based on the widely used image retrieval datasets, ROxford and RParis. Three professional annotators label 5,942 images with two rounds of double-checking and refinement. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis on the SOTA methods in image search, image matching, detection, segmentation, and dense matching using our pixel retrieval benchmarks. Results show that the pixel retrieval task is challenging to these approaches and distinctive from existing problems, suggesting that further research can advance the content-based pixel-retrieval and thus user search experience. The datasets can be downloaded from \href{https://github.com/anguoyuan/Pixel_retrieval-Segmented_instance_retrieval}{this link}.

Authors:Haoran Chen, Kenneth Blomqvist, Francesco Milano, Roland Siegwart

Abstract: Recently, methods have been proposed for 3D open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. Such methods are able to segment scenes into arbitrary classes given at run-time using their text description. In this paper, we propose to our knowledge the first algorithm for open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation, simultaneously performing both semantic and instance segmentation. Our algorithm, Panoptic Vision-Language Feature Fields (PVLFF) learns a feature field of the scene, jointly learning vision-language features and hierarchical instance features through a contrastive loss function from 2D instance segment proposals on input frames. Our method achieves comparable performance against the state-of-the-art close-set 3D panoptic systems on the HyperSim, ScanNet and Replica dataset and outperforms current 3D open-vocabulary systems in terms of semantic segmentation. We additionally ablate our method to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model architecture. Our code will be available at https://github.com/ethz-asl/autolabel.

Authors:Yabing Wang, Shuhui Wang, Hao Luo, Jianfeng Dong, Fan Wang, Meng Han, Xun Wang, Meng Wang

Abstract: Current research on cross-modal retrieval is mostly English-oriented, as the availability of a large number of English-oriented human-labeled vision-language corpora. In order to break the limit of non-English labeled data, cross-lingual cross-modal retrieval (CCR) has attracted increasing attention. Most CCR methods construct pseudo-parallel vision-language corpora via Machine Translation (MT) to achieve cross-lingual transfer. However, the translated sentences from MT are generally imperfect in describing the corresponding visual contents. Improperly assuming the pseudo-parallel data are correctly correlated will make the networks overfit to the noisy correspondence. Therefore, we propose Dual-view Curricular Optimal Transport (DCOT) to learn with noisy correspondence in CCR. In particular, we quantify the confidence of the sample pair correlation with optimal transport theory from both the cross-lingual and cross-modal views, and design dual-view curriculum learning to dynamically model the transportation costs according to the learning stage of the two views. Extensive experiments are conducted on two multilingual image-text datasets and one video-text dataset, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Besides, our proposed method also shows a good expansibility to cross-lingual image-text baselines and a decent generalization on out-of-domain data.

Authors:Santiago Rivier, Carlos Hinojosa, Silvio Giancola, Bernard Ghanem

Abstract: Semantic segmentation is crucial in remote sensing, where high-resolution satellite images are segmented into meaningful regions. Recent advancements in deep learning have significantly improved satellite image segmentation. However, most of these methods are typically trained in fully supervised settings that require high-quality pixel-level annotations, which are expensive and time-consuming to obtain. In this work, we present a weakly supervised learning algorithm to train semantic segmentation algorithms that only rely on query point annotations instead of full mask labels. Our proposed approach performs accurate semantic segmentation and improves efficiency by significantly reducing the cost and time required for manual annotation. Specifically, we generate superpixels and extend the query point labels into those superpixels that group similar meaningful semantics. Then, we train semantic segmentation models, supervised with images partially labeled with the superpixels pseudo-labels. We benchmark our weakly supervised training approach on an aerial image dataset and different semantic segmentation architectures, showing that we can reach competitive performance compared to fully supervised training while reducing the annotation effort.

Authors:Haoke Xiao, Lv Tang, Bo Li, Zhiming Luo, Shaozi Li

Abstract: Co-salient Object Detection (CoSOD) endeavors to replicate the human visual system's capacity to recognize common and salient objects within a collection of images. Despite recent advancements in deep learning models, these models still rely on training with well-annotated CoSOD datasets. The exploration of training-free zero-shot CoSOD frameworks has been limited. In this paper, taking inspiration from the zero-shot transfer capabilities of foundational computer vision models, we introduce the first zero-shot CoSOD framework that harnesses these models without any training process. To achieve this, we introduce two novel components in our proposed framework: the group prompt generation (GPG) module and the co-saliency map generation (CMP) module. We evaluate the framework's performance on widely-used datasets and observe impressive results. Our approach surpasses existing unsupervised methods and even outperforms fully supervised methods developed before 2020, while remaining competitive with some fully supervised methods developed before 2022.

Authors:Sebastian Schmidt BMW and TUM, Stephan Günnemann TUM

Abstract: Active learning (AL) reduces the amount of labeled data needed to train a machine learning model by intelligently choosing which instances to label. Classic pool-based AL requires all data to be present in a datacenter, which can be challenging with the increasing amounts of data needed in deep learning. However, AL on mobile devices and robots, like autonomous cars, can filter the data from perception sensor streams before reaching the datacenter. We exploited the temporal properties for such image streams in our work and proposed the novel temporal predicted loss (TPL) method. To evaluate the stream-based setting properly, we introduced the GTA V streets and the A2D2 streets dataset and made both publicly available. Our experiments showed that our approach significantly improves the diversity of the selection while being an uncertainty-based method. As pool-based approaches are more common in perception applications, we derived a concept for comparing pool-based and stream-based AL, where TPL out-performed state-of-the-art pool- or stream-based approaches for different models. TPL demonstrated a gain of 2.5 precept points (pp) less required data while being significantly faster than pool-based methods.

Authors:Bo Zhang, Xinyu Cai, Jiakang Yuan, Donglin Yang, Jianfei Guo, Renqiu Xia, Botian Shi, Min Dou, Tao Chen, Si Liu, Junchi Yan, Yu Qiao

Abstract: Domain shifts such as sensor type changes and geographical situation variations are prevalent in Autonomous Driving (AD), which poses a challenge since AD model relying on the previous-domain knowledge can be hardly directly deployed to a new domain without additional costs. In this paper, we provide a new perspective and approach of alleviating the domain shifts, by proposing a Reconstruction-Simulation-Perception (ReSimAD) scheme. Specifically, the implicit reconstruction process is based on the knowledge from the previous old domain, aiming to convert the domain-related knowledge into domain-invariant representations, \textit{e.g.}, 3D scene-level meshes. Besides, the point clouds simulation process of multiple new domains is conditioned on the above reconstructed 3D meshes, where the target-domain-like simulation samples can be obtained, thus reducing the cost of collecting and annotating new-domain data for the subsequent perception process. For experiments, we consider different cross-domain situations such as Waymo-to-KITTI, Waymo-to-nuScenes, Waymo-to-ONCE, \textit{etc}, to verify the \textbf{zero-shot} target-domain perception using ReSimAD. Results demonstrate that our method is beneficial to boost the domain generalization ability, even promising for 3D pre-training.

Authors:Loïc Le Bescond, Maria Vakalopoulou, Stergios Christodoulidis, Fabrice André, Hugues Talbot

Abstract: The deployment of machine learning solutions in real-world scenarios often involves addressing the challenge of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While significant efforts have been devoted to OOD detection in classical supervised settings, the context of weakly supervised learning, particularly the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) framework, remains under-explored. In this study, we tackle this challenge by adapting post-hoc OOD detection methods to the MIL setting while introducing a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess OOD detection performance in weakly supervised scenarios. Extensive experiments based on diverse public datasets do not reveal a single method with a clear advantage over the others. Although DICE emerges as the best-performing method overall, it exhibits significant shortcomings on some datasets, emphasizing the complexity of this under-explored and challenging topic. Our findings shed light on the complex nature of OOD detection under the MIL framework, emphasizing the importance of developing novel, robust, and reliable methods that can generalize effectively in a weakly supervised context. The code for the paper is available here: https://github.com/loic-lb/OOD_MIL.

Authors:Misgina Tsighe Hagos, Niamh Belton, Kathleen M. Curran, Brian Mac Namee

Abstract: eXplanation Based Learning (XBL) is an interactive learning approach that provides a transparent method of training deep learning models by interacting with their explanations. XBL augments loss functions to penalize a model based on deviation of its explanations from user annotation of image features. The literature on XBL mostly depends on the intersection of visual model explanations and image feature annotations. We present a method to add a distance-aware explanation loss to categorical losses that trains a learner to focus on important regions of a training dataset. Distance is an appropriate approach for calculating explanation loss since visual model explanations such as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAMs) are not strictly bounded as annotations and their intersections may not provide complete information on the deviation of a model's focus from relevant image regions. In addition to assessing our model using existing metrics, we propose an interpretability metric for evaluating visual feature-attribution based model explanations that is more informative of the model's performance than existing metrics. We demonstrate performance of our proposed method on three image classification tasks.

Authors:Giuseppe Cartella, Alberto Baldrati, Davide Morelli, Marcella Cornia, Marco Bertini, Rita Cucchiara

Abstract: The inexorable growth of online shopping and e-commerce demands scalable and robust machine learning-based solutions to accommodate customer requirements. In the context of automatic tagging classification and multimodal retrieval, prior works either defined a low generalizable supervised learning approach or more reusable CLIP-based techniques while, however, training on closed source data. In this work, we propose OpenFashionCLIP, a vision-and-language contrastive learning method that only adopts open-source fashion data stemming from diverse domains, and characterized by varying degrees of specificity. Our approach is extensively validated across several tasks and benchmarks, and experimental results highlight a significant out-of-domain generalization capability and consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods both in terms of accuracy and recall. Source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/open-fashion-clip.

Authors:Cheng Zhang, Xuanbai Chen, Siqi Chai, Chen Henry Wu, Dmitry Lagun, Thabo Beeler, Fernando De la Torre

Abstract: Text-to-image generative models often reflect the biases of the training data, leading to unequal representations of underrepresented groups. This study investigates inclusive text-to-image generative models that generate images based on human-written prompts and ensure the resulting images are uniformly distributed across attributes of interest. Unfortunately, directly expressing the desired attributes in the prompt often leads to sub-optimal results due to linguistic ambiguity or model misrepresentation. Hence, this paper proposes a drastically different approach that adheres to the maxim that "a picture is worth a thousand words". We show that, for some attributes, images can represent concepts more expressively than text. For instance, categories of skin tones are typically hard to specify by text but can be easily represented by example images. Building upon these insights, we propose a novel approach, ITI-GEN, that leverages readily available reference images for Inclusive Text-to-Image GENeration. The key idea is learning a set of prompt embeddings to generate images that can effectively represent all desired attribute categories. More importantly, ITI-GEN requires no model fine-tuning, making it computationally efficient to augment existing text-to-image models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ITI-GEN largely improves over state-of-the-art models to generate inclusive images from a prompt. Project page: https://czhang0528.github.io/iti-gen.

Authors:Youquan Liu, Runnan Chen, Xin Li, Lingdong Kong, Yuchen Yang, Zhaoyang Xia, Yeqi Bai, Xinge Zhu, Yuexin Ma, Yikang Li, Yu Qiao, Yuenan Hou

Abstract: Point-, voxel-, and range-views are three representative forms of point clouds. All of them have accurate 3D measurements but lack color and texture information. RGB images are a natural complement to these point cloud views and fully utilizing the comprehensive information of them benefits more robust perceptions. In this paper, we present a unified multi-modal LiDAR segmentation network, termed UniSeg, which leverages the information of RGB images and three views of the point cloud, and accomplishes semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation simultaneously. Specifically, we first design the Learnable cross-Modal Association (LMA) module to automatically fuse voxel-view and range-view features with image features, which fully utilize the rich semantic information of images and are robust to calibration errors. Then, the enhanced voxel-view and range-view features are transformed to the point space,where three views of point cloud features are further fused adaptively by the Learnable cross-View Association module (LVA). Notably, UniSeg achieves promising results in three public benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD); it ranks 1st on two challenges of two benchmarks, including the LiDAR semantic segmentation challenge of nuScenes and panoptic segmentation challenges of SemanticKITTI. Besides, we construct the OpenPCSeg codebase, which is the largest and most comprehensive outdoor LiDAR segmentation codebase. It contains most of the popular outdoor LiDAR segmentation algorithms and provides reproducible implementations. The OpenPCSeg codebase will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSeg.

Authors:Dingfeng Shi, Qiong Cao, Yujie Zhong, Shan An, Jian Cheng, Haogang Zhu, Dacheng Tao

Abstract: Temporal action detection (TAD) aims to detect all action boundaries and their corresponding categories in an untrimmed video. The unclear boundaries of actions in videos often result in imprecise predictions of action boundaries by existing methods. To resolve this issue, we propose a one-stage framework named TriDet. First, we propose a Trident-head to model the action boundary via an estimated relative probability distribution around the boundary. Then, we analyze the rank-loss problem (i.e. instant discriminability deterioration) in transformer-based methods and propose an efficient scalable-granularity perception (SGP) layer to mitigate this issue. To further push the limit of instant discriminability in the video backbone, we leverage the strong representation capability of pretrained large models and investigate their performance on TAD. Last, considering the adequate spatial-temporal context for classification, we design a decoupled feature pyramid network with separate feature pyramids to incorporate rich spatial context from the large model for localization. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of TriDet and its state-of-the-art performance on multiple TAD datasets, including hierarchical (multilabel) TAD datasets.

Authors:Bo Pang, Zhongtian Zheng, Guoping Wang, Peng-Shuai Wang

Abstract: We present GeGnn, a learning-based method for computing the approximate geodesic distance between two arbitrary points on discrete polyhedra surfaces with constant time complexity after fast precomputation. Previous relevant methods either focus on computing the geodesic distance between a single source and all destinations, which has linear complexity at least or require a long precomputation time. Our key idea is to train a graph neural network to embed an input mesh into a high-dimensional embedding space and compute the geodesic distance between a pair of points using the corresponding embedding vectors and a lightweight decoding function. To facilitate the learning of the embedding, we propose novel graph convolution and graph pooling modules that incorporate local geodesic information and are verified to be much more effective than previous designs. After training, our method requires only one forward pass of the network per mesh as precomputation. Then, we can compute the geodesic distance between a pair of points using our decoding function, which requires only several matrix multiplications and can be massively parallelized on GPUs. We verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our method on ShapeNet and demonstrate that our method is faster than existing methods by orders of magnitude while achieving comparable or better accuracy. Additionally, our method exhibits robustness on noisy and incomplete meshes and strong generalization ability on out-of-distribution meshes. The code and pretrained model can be found on https://github.com/IntelligentGeometry/GeGnn.

Authors:Jordan A. James, Heather K. Manching, Matthew R. Mattia, Kim D. Bowman, Amanda M. Hulse-Kemp, William J. Beksi

Abstract: In this letter, we present a new dataset to advance the state of the art in detecting citrus fruit and accurately estimate yield on trees affected by the Huanglongbing (HLB) disease in orchard environments via imaging. Despite the fact that significant progress has been made in solving the fruit detection problem, the lack of publicly available datasets has complicated direct comparison of results. For instance, citrus detection has long been of interest in the agricultural research community, yet there is an absence of work, particularly involving public datasets of citrus affected by HLB. To address this issue, we enhance state-of-the-art object detection methods for use in typical orchard settings. Concretely, we provide high-resolution images of citrus trees located in an area known to be highly affected by HLB, along with high-quality bounding box annotations of citrus fruit. Fruit on both the trees and the ground are labeled to allow for identification of fruit location, which contributes to advancements in yield estimation and potential measure of HLB impact via fruit drop. The dataset consists of over 32,000 bounding box annotations for fruit instances contained in 579 high-resolution images. In summary, our contributions are the following: (i) we introduce a novel dataset along with baseline performance benchmarks on multiple contemporary object detection algorithms, (ii) we show the ability to accurately capture fruit location on tree or on ground, and finally (ii) we present a correlation of our results with yield estimations.

Authors:Zheng Wang, Dong Xie, Hanzhi Wang, Jiang Tian

Abstract: Learning from the limited amount of labeled data to the pre-train model has always been viewed as a challenging task. In this report, an effective and robust solution, the two-stage training paradigm YOLOv8 detector (TP-YOLOv8), is designed for the object detection track in VIPriors Challenge 2023. First, the backbone of YOLOv8 is pre-trained as the encoder using the masked image modeling technique. Then the detector is fine-tuned with elaborate augmentations. During the test stage, test-time augmentation (TTA) is used to enhance each model, and weighted box fusion (WBF) is implemented to further boost the performance. With the well-designed structure, our approach has achieved 30.4% average precision from 0.50 to 0.95 on the DelftBikes test set, ranking 4th on the leaderboard.

Authors:Yufei Ye, Poorvi Hebbar, Abhinav Gupta, Shubham Tulsiani

Abstract: We tackle the task of reconstructing hand-object interactions from short video clips. Given an input video, our approach casts 3D inference as a per-video optimization and recovers a neural 3D representation of the object shape, as well as the time-varying motion and hand articulation. While the input video naturally provides some multi-view cues to guide 3D inference, these are insufficient on their own due to occlusions and limited viewpoint variations. To obtain accurate 3D, we augment the multi-view signals with generic data-driven priors to guide reconstruction. Specifically, we learn a diffusion network to model the conditional distribution of (geometric) renderings of objects conditioned on hand configuration and category label, and leverage it as a prior to guide the novel-view renderings of the reconstructed scene. We empirically evaluate our approach on egocentric videos across 6 object categories, and observe significant improvements over prior single-view and multi-view methods. Finally, we demonstrate our system's ability to reconstruct arbitrary clips from YouTube, showing both 1st and 3rd person interactions.

Authors:Weijian Xie, Guanyi Chu, Quanhao Qian, Yihao Yu, Hai Li, Danpeng Chen, Shangjin Zhai, Nan Wang, Hujun Bao, Guofeng Zhang

Abstract: Dense SLAM based on monocular cameras does indeed have immense application value in the field of AR/VR, especially when it is performed on a mobile device. In this paper, we propose a novel method that integrates a light-weight depth completion network into a sparse SLAM system using a multi-basis depth representation, so that dense mapping can be performed online even on a mobile phone. Specifically, we present a specifically optimized multi-basis depth completion network, called BBC-Net, tailored to the characteristics of traditional sparse SLAM systems. BBC-Net can predict multiple balanced bases and a confidence map from a monocular image with sparse points generated by off-the-shelf keypoint-based SLAM systems. The final depth is a linear combination of predicted depth bases that can be optimized by tuning the corresponding weights. To seamlessly incorporate the weights into traditional SLAM optimization and ensure efficiency and robustness, we design a set of depth weight factors, which makes our network a versatile plug-in module, facilitating easy integration into various existing sparse SLAM systems and significantly enhancing global depth consistency through bundle adjustment. To verify the portability of our method, we integrate BBC-Net into two representative SLAM systems. The experimental results on various datasets show that the proposed method achieves better performance in monocular dense mapping than the state-of-the-art methods. We provide an online demo running on a mobile phone, which verifies the efficiency and mapping quality of the proposed method in real-world scenarios.

Authors:Akankshya Kar, Sajal Maheshwari, Shamit Lal, Vinay Sameer Raja Kad

Abstract: Visual odometry (VO) and SLAM have been using multi-view geometry via local structure from motion for decades. These methods have a slight disadvantage in challenging scenarios such as low-texture images, dynamic scenarios, etc. Meanwhile, use of deep neural networks to extract high level features is ubiquitous in computer vision. For VO, we can use these deep networks to extract depth and pose estimates using these high level features. The visual odometry task then can be modeled as an image generation task where the pose estimation is the by-product. This can also be achieved in a self-supervised manner, thereby eliminating the data (supervised) intensive nature of training deep neural networks. Although some works tried the similar approach [1], the depth and pose estimation in the previous works are vague sometimes resulting in accumulation of error (drift) along the trajectory. The goal of this work is to tackle these limitations of past approaches and to develop a method that can provide better depths and pose estimates. To address this, a couple of approaches are explored: 1) Modeling: Using optical flow and recurrent neural networks (RNN) in order to exploit spatio-temporal correlations which can provide more information to estimate depth. 2) Loss function: Generative adversarial network (GAN) [2] is deployed to improve the depth estimation (and thereby pose too), as shown in Figure 1. This additional loss term improves the realism in generated images and reduces artifacts.

Authors:Hiroki Nakamura, Masashi Okada, Tadahiro Taniguchi

Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) using mixed images has been studied to learn various image representations. Existing methods using mixed images learn a representation by maximizing the similarity between the representation of the mixed image and the synthesized representation of the original images. However, few methods consider the synthesis of representations from the perspective of mathematical logic. In this study, we focused on a synthesis method of representations. We proposed a new SSL with mixed images and a new representation format based on many-valued logic. This format can indicate the feature-possession degree, that is, how much of each image feature is possessed by a representation. This representation format and representation synthesis by logic operation realize that the synthesized representation preserves the remarkable characteristics of the original representations. Our method performed competitively with previous representation synthesis methods for image classification tasks. We also examined the relationship between the feature-possession degree and the number of classes of images in the multilabel image classification dataset to verify that the intended learning was achieved. In addition, we discussed image retrieval, which is an application of our proposed representation format using many-valued logic.

Authors:Yiqian Yang, Zhengqiao Zhao, Qian Wang, Yan Yang, Jingdong Chen

Abstract: Existing approaches to modeling associations between visual stimuli and brain responses are facing difficulties in handling between-subject variance and model generalization. Inspired by the recent progress in modeling speech-brain response, we propose in this work a ``match-vs-mismatch'' deep learning model to classify whether a video clip induces excitatory responses in recorded EEG signals and learn associations between the visual content and corresponding neural recordings. Using an exclusive experimental dataset, we demonstrate that the proposed model is able to achieve the highest accuracy on unseen subjects as compared to other baseline models. Furthermore, we analyze the inter-subject noise using a subject-level silhouette score in the embedding space and show that the developed model is able to mitigate inter-subject noise and significantly reduce the silhouette score. Moreover, we examine the Grad-CAM activation score and show that the brain regions associated with language processing contribute most to the model predictions, followed by regions associated with visual processing. These results have the potential to facilitate the development of neural recording-based video reconstruction and its related applications.

Authors:Hongyu Hu, Tiancheng Lin, Jie Wang, Zhenbang Sun, Yi Xu

Abstract: Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), e.g., CLIP, learn broad visual concepts from tedious training data, showing superb generalization ability. Amount of prompt learning methods have been proposed to efficiently adapt the VLMs to downstream tasks with only a few training samples. We introduce a novel method to improve the prompt learning of vision-language models by incorporating pre-trained large language models (LLMs), called Dual-Aligned Prompt Tuning (DuAl-PT). Learnable prompts, like CoOp, implicitly model the context through end-to-end training, which are difficult to control and interpret. While explicit context descriptions generated by LLMs, like GPT-3, can be directly used for zero-shot classification, such prompts are overly relying on LLMs and still underexplored in few-shot domains. With DuAl-PT, we propose to learn more context-aware prompts, benefiting from both explicit and implicit context modeling. To achieve this, we introduce a pre-trained LLM to generate context descriptions, and we encourage the prompts to learn from the LLM's knowledge by alignment, as well as the alignment between prompts and local image features. Empirically, DuAl-PT achieves superior performance on 11 downstream datasets on few-shot recognition and base-to-new generalization. Hopefully, DuAl-PT can serve as a strong baseline. Code will be available.

Authors:Li Liu, Da Chen, Minglei Shu, Laurent D. Cohen

Abstract: Geodesic models are known as an efficient tool for solving various image segmentation problems. Most of existing approaches only exploit local pointwise image features to track geodesic paths for delineating the objective boundaries. However, such a segmentation strategy cannot take into account the connectivity of the image edge features, increasing the risk of shortcut problem, especially in the case of complicated scenario. In this work, we introduce a new image segmentation model based on the minimal geodesic framework in conjunction with an adaptive cut-based circular optimal path computation scheme and a graph-based boundary proposals grouping scheme. Specifically, the adaptive cut can disconnect the image domain such that the target contours are imposed to pass through this cut only once. The boundary proposals are comprised of precomputed image edge segments, providing the connectivity information for our segmentation model. These boundary proposals are then incorporated into the proposed image segmentation model, such that the target segmentation contours are made up of a set of selected boundary proposals and the corresponding geodesic paths linking them. Experimental results show that the proposed model indeed outperforms state-of-the-art minimal paths-based image segmentation approaches.

Authors:Aoxu Liu, Xiaohong Fan, Yin Yang, Jianping Zhang

Abstract: The problem of phase retrieval (PR) involves recovering an unknown image from limited amplitude measurement data and is a challenge nonlinear inverse problem in computational imaging and image processing. However, many of the PR methods are based on black-box network models that lack interpretability and plug-and-play (PnP) frameworks that are computationally complex and require careful parameter tuning. To address this, we have developed PRISTA-Net, a deep unfolding network (DUN) based on the first-order iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (ISTA). This network utilizes a learnable nonlinear transformation to address the proximal-point mapping sub-problem associated with the sparse priors, and an attention mechanism to focus on phase information containing image edges, textures, and structures. Additionally, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) is used to learn global features to enhance local information, and the designed logarithmic-based loss function leads to significant improvements when the noise level is low. All parameters in the proposed PRISTA-Net framework, including the nonlinear transformation, threshold parameters, and step size, are learned end-to-end instead of being manually set. This method combines the interpretability of traditional methods with the fast inference ability of deep learning and is able to handle noise at each iteration during the unfolding stage, thus improving recovery quality. Experiments on Coded Diffraction Patterns (CDPs) measurements demonstrate that our approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Our source codes are available at \emph{https://github.com/liuaxou/PRISTA-Net}.

Authors:Yeonghwan Song, Seokwoo Jang, Dina Katabi, Jeany Son

Abstract: We propose a novel unsupervised object localization method that allows us to explain the predictions of the model by utilizing self-supervised pre-trained models without additional finetuning. Existing unsupervised and self-supervised object localization methods often utilize class-agnostic activation maps or self-similarity maps of a pre-trained model. Although these maps can offer valuable information for localization, their limited ability to explain how the model makes predictions remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised object localization method based on representer point selection, where the predictions of the model can be represented as a linear combination of representer values of training points. By selecting representer points, which are the most important examples for the model predictions, our model can provide insights into how the model predicts the foreground object by providing relevant examples as well as their importance. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised and self-supervised object localization methods on various datasets with significant margins and even outperforms recent weakly supervised and few-shot methods.

Authors:Ziang Cheng, Jiayu Yang, Hongdong Li

Abstract: Real-time Stereo Matching is a cornerstone algorithm for many Extended Reality (XR) applications, such as indoor 3D understanding, video pass-through, and mixed-reality games. Despite significant advancements in deep stereo methods, achieving real-time depth inference with high accuracy on a low-power device remains a major challenge. One of the major difficulties is the lack of high-quality indoor video stereo training datasets captured by head-mounted VR/AR glasses. To address this issue, we introduce a novel video stereo synthetic dataset that comprises photorealistic renderings of various indoor scenes and realistic camera motion captured by a 6-DoF moving VR/AR head-mounted display (HMD). This facilitates the evaluation of existing approaches and promotes further research on indoor augmented reality scenarios. Our newly proposed dataset enables us to develop a novel framework for continuous video-rate stereo matching. As another contribution, our dataset enables us to proposed a new video-based stereo matching approach tailored for XR applications, which achieves real-time inference at an impressive 134fps on a standard desktop computer, or 30fps on a battery-powered HMD. Our key insight is that disparity and contextual information are highly correlated and redundant between consecutive stereo frames. By unrolling an iterative cost aggregation in time (i.e. in the temporal dimension), we are able to distribute and reuse the aggregated features over time. This approach leads to a substantial reduction in computation without sacrificing accuracy. We conducted extensive evaluations and comparisons and demonstrated that our method achieves superior performance compared to the current state-of-the-art, making it a strong contender for real-time stereo matching in VR/AR applications.

Authors:Junfeng Cheng, Mingdong Wu, Ruiyuan Zhang, Guanqi Zhan, Chao Wu, Hao Dong

Abstract: Autonomous 3D part assembly is a challenging task in the areas of robotics and 3D computer vision. This task aims to assemble individual components into a complete shape without relying on predefined instructions. In this paper, we formulate this task from a novel generative perspective, introducing the Score-based 3D Part Assembly framework (Score-PA) for 3D part assembly. Knowing that score-based methods are typically time-consuming during the inference stage. To address this issue, we introduce a novel algorithm called the Fast Predictor-Corrector Sampler (FPC) that accelerates the sampling process within the framework. We employ various metrics to assess assembly quality and diversity, and our evaluation results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. We release our code at https://github.com/J-F-Cheng/Score-PA_Score-based-3D-Part-Assembly.

Authors:Dawen Yu, Shunping Ji

Abstract: Long-range dependency modeling has been widely considered in modern deep learning based semantic segmentation methods, especially those designed for large-size remote sensing images, to compensate the intrinsic locality of standard convolutions. However, in previous studies, the long-range dependency, modeled with an attention mechanism or transformer model, has been based on unsupervised learning, instead of explicit supervision from the objective ground truth. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised long-range correlation method for land-cover classification, called the supervised long-range correlation network (SLCNet), which is shown to be superior to the currently used unsupervised strategies. In SLCNet, pixels sharing the same category are considered highly correlated and those having different categories are less relevant, which can be easily supervised by the category consistency information available in the ground truth semantic segmentation map. Under such supervision, the recalibrated features are more consistent for pixels of the same category and more discriminative for pixels of other categories, regardless of their proximity. To complement the detailed information lacking in the global long-range correlation, we introduce an auxiliary adaptive receptive field feature extraction module, parallel to the long-range correlation module in the encoder, to capture finely detailed feature representations for multi-size objects in multi-scale remote sensing images. In addition, we apply multi-scale side-output supervision and a hybrid loss function as local and global constraints to further boost the segmentation accuracy. Experiments were conducted on three remote sensing datasets. Compared with the advanced segmentation methods from the computer vision, medicine, and remote sensing communities, the SLCNet achieved a state-of-the-art performance on all the datasets.

Authors:Felix Rosberg, Eren Erdal Aksoy, Cristofer Englund, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new approach for facial anonymization in images and videos, abbreviated as FIVA. Our proposed method is able to maintain the same face anonymization consistently over frames with our suggested identity-tracking and guarantees a strong difference from the original face. FIVA allows for 0 true positives for a false acceptance rate of 0.001. Our work considers the important security issue of reconstruction attacks and investigates adversarial noise, uniform noise, and parameter noise to disrupt reconstruction attacks. In this regard, we apply different defense and protection methods against these privacy threats to demonstrate the scalability of FIVA. On top of this, we also show that reconstruction attack models can be used for detection of deep fakes. Last but not least, we provide experimental results showing how FIVA can even enable face swapping, which is purely trained on a single target image.

Authors:Haotian Yang, Mingwu Zheng, Wanquan Feng, Haibin Huang, Yu-Kun Lai, Pengfei Wan, Zhongyuan Wang, Chongyang Ma

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Tracking-free Relightable Avatar (TRAvatar), for capturing and reconstructing high-fidelity 3D avatars. Compared to previous methods, TRAvatar works in a more practical and efficient setting. Specifically, TRAvatar is trained with dynamic image sequences captured in a Light Stage under varying lighting conditions, enabling realistic relighting and real-time animation for avatars in diverse scenes. Additionally, TRAvatar allows for tracking-free avatar capture and obviates the need for accurate surface tracking under varying illumination conditions. Our contributions are two-fold: First, we propose a novel network architecture that explicitly builds on and ensures the satisfaction of the linear nature of lighting. Trained on simple group light captures, TRAvatar can predict the appearance in real-time with a single forward pass, achieving high-quality relighting effects under illuminations of arbitrary environment maps. Second, we jointly optimize the facial geometry and relightable appearance from scratch based on image sequences, where the tracking is implicitly learned. This tracking-free approach brings robustness for establishing temporal correspondences between frames under different lighting conditions. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance for photorealistic avatar animation and relighting.

Authors:Youssef Shoeb, Robin Chan, Gesina Schwalbe, Azarm Nowzard, Fatma Güney, Hanno Gottschalk

Abstract: In the life cycle of highly automated systems operating in an open and dynamic environment, the ability to adjust to emerging challenges is crucial. For systems integrating data-driven AI-based components, rapid responses to deployment issues require fast access to related data for testing and reconfiguration. In the context of automated driving, this especially applies to road obstacles that were not included in the training data, commonly referred to as out-of-distribution (OoD) road obstacles. Given the availability of large uncurated recordings of driving scenes, a pragmatic approach is to query a database to retrieve similar scenarios featuring the same safety concerns due to OoD road obstacles. In this work, we extend beyond identifying OoD road obstacles in video streams and offer a comprehensive approach to extract sequences of OoD road obstacles using text queries, thereby proposing a way of curating a collection of OoD data for subsequent analysis. Our proposed method leverages the recent advances in OoD segmentation and multi-modal foundation models to identify and efficiently extract safety-relevant scenes from unlabeled videos. We present a first approach for the novel task of text-based OoD object retrieval, which addresses the question ''Have we ever encountered this before?''.

Authors:Xiangtao Wang, Ruizhi Wang, Jie Zhou, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Zhenghua Xu

Abstract: Self-supervised masked image modeling has shown promising results on natural images. However, directly applying such methods to medical images remains challenging. This difficulty stems from the complexity and distinct characteristics of lesions compared to natural images, which impedes effective representation learning. Additionally, conventional high fixed masking ratios restrict reconstructing fine lesion details, limiting the scope of learnable information. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised medical image segmentation framework, Adaptive Masking Lesion Patches (AMLP). Specifically, we design a Masked Patch Selection (MPS) strategy to identify and focus learning on patches containing lesions. Lesion regions are scarce yet critical, making their precise reconstruction vital. To reduce misclassification of lesion and background patches caused by unsupervised clustering in MPS, we introduce an Attention Reconstruction Loss (ARL) to focus on hard-to-reconstruct patches likely depicting lesions. We further propose a Category Consistency Loss (CCL) to refine patch categorization based on reconstruction difficulty, strengthening distinction between lesions and background. Moreover, we develop an Adaptive Masking Ratio (AMR) strategy that gradually increases the masking ratio to expand reconstructible information and improve learning. Extensive experiments on two medical segmentation datasets demonstrate AMLP's superior performance compared to existing self-supervised approaches. The proposed strategies effectively address limitations in applying masked modeling to medical images, tailored to capturing fine lesion details vital for segmentation tasks.

Authors:Rayson Laroca, Luiz A. Zanlorensi, Valter Estevam, Rodrigo Minetto, David Menotti

Abstract: License Plate Recognition (LPR) plays a critical role in various applications, such as toll collection, parking management, and traffic law enforcement. Although LPR has witnessed significant advancements through the development of deep learning, there has been a noticeable lack of studies exploring the potential improvements in results by fusing the outputs from multiple recognition models. This research aims to fill this gap by investigating the combination of up to 12 different models using straightforward approaches, such as selecting the most confident prediction or employing majority vote-based strategies. Our experiments encompass a wide range of datasets, revealing substantial benefits of fusion approaches in both intra- and cross-dataset setups. Essentially, fusing multiple models reduces considerably the likelihood of obtaining subpar performance on a particular dataset/scenario. We also found that combining models based on their speed is an appealing approach. Specifically, for applications where the recognition task can tolerate some additional time, though not excessively, an effective strategy is to combine 4-6 models. These models may not be the most accurate individually, but their fusion strikes an optimal balance between accuracy and speed.

Authors:Erik Daxberger, Floris Weers, Bowen Zhang, Tom Gunter, Ruoming Pang, Marcin Eichner, Michael Emmersberger, Yinfei Yang, Alexander Toshev, Xianzhi Du

Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models (MoEs) have recently gained popularity due to their ability to decouple model size from inference efficiency by only activating a small subset of the model parameters for any given input token. As such, sparse MoEs have enabled unprecedented scalability, resulting in tremendous successes across domains such as natural language processing and computer vision. In this work, we instead explore the use of sparse MoEs to scale-down Vision Transformers (ViTs) to make them more attractive for resource-constrained vision applications. To this end, we propose a simplified and mobile-friendly MoE design where entire images rather than individual patches are routed to the experts. We also propose a stable MoE training procedure that uses super-class information to guide the router. We empirically show that our sparse Mobile Vision MoEs (V-MoEs) can achieve a better trade-off between performance and efficiency than the corresponding dense ViTs. For example, for the ViT-Tiny model, our Mobile V-MoE outperforms its dense counterpart by 3.39% on ImageNet-1k. For an even smaller ViT variant with only 54M FLOPs inference cost, our MoE achieves an improvement of 4.66%.

Authors:Casper van Engelenburg, Seyran Khademi, Jan van Gemert

Abstract: We propose a simple yet effective metric that measures structural similarity between visual instances of architectural floor plans, without the need for learning. Qualitatively, our experiments show that the retrieval results are similar to deeply learned methods. Effectively comparing instances of floor plan data is paramount to the success of machine understanding of floor plan data, including the assessment of floor plan generative models and floor plan recommendation systems. Comparing visual floor plan images goes beyond a sole pixel-wise visual examination and is crucially about similarities and differences in the shapes and relations between subdivisions that compose the layout. Currently, deep metric learning approaches are used to learn a pair-wise vector representation space that closely mimics the structural similarity, in which the models are trained on similarity labels that are obtained by Intersection-over-Union (IoU). To compensate for the lack of structural awareness in IoU, graph-based approaches such as Graph Matching Networks (GMNs) are used, which require pairwise inference for comparing data instances, making GMNs less practical for retrieval applications. In this paper, an effective evaluation metric for judging the structural similarity of floor plans, coined SSIG (Structural Similarity by IoU and GED), is proposed based on both image and graph distances. In addition, an efficient algorithm is developed that uses SSIG to rank a large-scale floor plan database. Code will be openly available.

Authors:Shuning Xu, Xiangyu Chen, Binbin Song, Jiantao Zhou

Abstract: Capturing images with incorrect exposure settings fails to deliver a satisfactory visual experience. Only when the exposure is properly set, can the color and details of the images be appropriately preserved. Previous exposure correction methods based on convolutions often produce exposure deviation in images as a consequence of the restricted receptive field of convolutional kernels. This issue arises because convolutions are not capable of capturing long-range dependencies in images accurately. To overcome this challenge, we can apply the Transformer to address the exposure correction problem, leveraging its capability in modeling long-range dependencies to capture global representation. However, solely relying on the window-based Transformer leads to visually disturbing blocking artifacts due to the application of self-attention in small patches. In this paper, we propose a CNN Injected Transformer (CIT) to harness the individual strengths of CNN and Transformer simultaneously. Specifically, we construct the CIT by utilizing a window-based Transformer to exploit the long-range interactions among different regions in the entire image. Within each CIT block, we incorporate a channel attention block (CAB) and a half-instance normalization block (HINB) to assist the window-based self-attention to acquire the global statistics and refine local features. In addition to the hybrid architecture design for exposure correction, we apply a set of carefully formulated loss functions to improve the spatial coherence and rectify potential color deviations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our image exposure correction method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Authors:Sijia Li, Chen Chen, Haonan Lu

Abstract: Diffusion-model-based text-guided image generation has recently made astounding progress, producing fascinating results in open-domain image manipulation tasks. Few models, however, currently have complete zero-shot capabilities for both global and local image editing due to the complexity and diversity of image manipulation tasks. In this work, we propose a method with a mixture-of-expert (MOE) controllers to align the text-guided capacity of diffusion models with different kinds of human instructions, enabling our model to handle various open-domain image manipulation tasks with natural language instructions. First, we use large language models (ChatGPT) and conditional image synthesis models (ControlNet) to generate a large number of global image transfer dataset in addition to the instruction-based local image editing dataset. Then, using an MOE technique and task-specific adaptation training on a large-scale dataset, our conditional diffusion model can edit images globally and locally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs surprisingly well on various image manipulation tasks when dealing with open-domain images and arbitrary human instructions. Please refer to our project page: [https://oppo-mente-lab.github.io/moe_controller/]

Authors:Dongming Wu, Wencheng Han, Tiancai Wang, Yingfei Liu, Xiangyu Zhang, Jianbing Shen

Abstract: A new trend in the computer vision community is to capture objects of interest following flexible human command represented by a natural language prompt. However, the progress of using language prompts in driving scenarios is stuck in a bottleneck due to the scarcity of paired prompt-instance data. To address this challenge, we propose the first object-centric language prompt set for driving scenes within 3D, multi-view, and multi-frame space, named NuPrompt. It expands Nuscenes dataset by constructing a total of 35,367 language descriptions, each referring to an average of 5.3 object tracks. Based on the object-text pairs from the new benchmark, we formulate a new prompt-based driving task, \ie, employing a language prompt to predict the described object trajectory across views and frames. Furthermore, we provide a simple end-to-end baseline model based on Transformer, named PromptTrack. Experiments show that our PromptTrack achieves impressive performance on NuPrompt. We hope this work can provide more new insights for the autonomous driving community. Dataset and Code will be made public at \href{https://github.com/wudongming97/Prompt4Driving}{https://github.com/wudongming97/Prompt4Driving}.

Authors:Yupeng Zhou, Daquan Zhou, Zuo-Liang Zhu, Yaxing Wang, Qibin Hou, Jiashi Feng

Abstract: Recent advancements in diffusion models have showcased their impressive capacity to generate visually striking images. Nevertheless, ensuring a close match between the generated image and the given prompt remains a persistent challenge. In this work, we identify that a crucial factor leading to the text-image mismatch issue is the inadequate cross-modality relation learning between the prompt and the output image. To better align the prompt and image content, we advance the cross-attention with an adaptive mask, which is conditioned on the attention maps and the prompt embeddings, to dynamically adjust the contribution of each text token to the image features. This mechanism explicitly diminishes the ambiguity in semantic information embedding from the text encoder, leading to a boost of text-to-image consistency in the synthesized images. Our method, termed MaskDiffusion, is training-free and hot-pluggable for popular pre-trained diffusion models. When applied to the latent diffusion models, our MaskDiffusion can significantly improve the text-to-image consistency with negligible computation overhead compared to the original diffusion models.

Authors:Junzhe Zhang, Yushi Lan, Shuai Yang, Fangzhou Hong, Quan Wang, Chai Kiat Yeo, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy

Abstract: In this paper, we address the challenging problem of 3D toonification, which involves transferring the style of an artistic domain onto a target 3D face with stylized geometry and texture. Although fine-tuning a pre-trained 3D GAN on the artistic domain can produce reasonable performance, this strategy has limitations in the 3D domain. In particular, fine-tuning can deteriorate the original GAN latent space, which affects subsequent semantic editing, and requires independent optimization and storage for each new style, limiting flexibility and efficient deployment. To overcome these challenges, we propose DeformToon3D, an effective toonification framework tailored for hierarchical 3D GAN. Our approach decomposes 3D toonification into subproblems of geometry and texture stylization to better preserve the original latent space. Specifically, we devise a novel StyleField that predicts conditional 3D deformation to align a real-space NeRF to the style space for geometry stylization. Thanks to the StyleField formulation, which already handles geometry stylization well, texture stylization can be achieved conveniently via adaptive style mixing that injects information of the artistic domain into the decoder of the pre-trained 3D GAN. Due to the unique design, our method enables flexible style degree control and shape-texture-specific style swap. Furthermore, we achieve efficient training without any real-world 2D-3D training pairs but proxy samples synthesized from off-the-shelf 2D toonification models.

Authors:Amr Gomaa, Robin Zitt, Guillermo Reyes, Antonio Krüger

Abstract: Creating a diverse and comprehensive dataset of hand gestures for dynamic human-machine interfaces in the automotive domain can be challenging and time-consuming. To overcome this challenge, we propose using synthetic gesture datasets generated by virtual 3D models. Our framework utilizes Unreal Engine to synthesize realistic hand gestures, offering customization options and reducing the risk of overfitting. Multiple variants, including gesture speed, performance, and hand shape, are generated to improve generalizability. In addition, we simulate different camera locations and types, such as RGB, infrared, and depth cameras, without incurring additional time and cost to obtain these cameras. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework, SynthoGestures\footnote{\url{https://github.com/amrgomaaelhady/SynthoGestures}}, improves gesture recognition accuracy and can replace or augment real-hand datasets. By saving time and effort in the creation of the data set, our tool accelerates the development of gesture recognition systems for automotive applications.

Authors:Thomas E. Huang, Yifan Liu, Luc Van Gool, Fisher Yu

Abstract: Performing multiple heterogeneous visual tasks in dynamic scenes is a hallmark of human perception capability. Despite remarkable progress in image and video recognition via representation learning, current research still focuses on designing specialized networks for singular, homogeneous, or simple combination of tasks. We instead explore the construction of a unified model for major image and video recognition tasks in autonomous driving with diverse input and output structures. To enable such an investigation, we design a new challenge, Video Task Decathlon (VTD), which includes ten representative image and video tasks spanning classification, segmentation, localization, and association of objects and pixels. On VTD, we develop our unified network, VTDNet, that uses a single structure and a single set of weights for all ten tasks. VTDNet groups similar tasks and employs task interaction stages to exchange information within and between task groups. Given the impracticality of labeling all tasks on all frames, and the performance degradation associated with joint training of many tasks, we design a Curriculum training, Pseudo-labeling, and Fine-tuning (CPF) scheme to successfully train VTDNet on all tasks and mitigate performance loss. Armed with CPF, VTDNet significantly outperforms its single-task counterparts on most tasks with only 20% overall computations. VTD is a promising new direction for exploring the unification of perception tasks in autonomous driving.

Authors:Gan Sun, Wenqi Liang, Jiahua Dong, Jun Li, Zhengming Ding, Yang Cong

Abstract: Text-to-image generative models can produce diverse high-quality images of concepts with a text prompt, which have demonstrated excellent ability in image generation, image translation, etc. We in this work study the problem of synthesizing instantiations of a use's own concepts in a never-ending manner, i.e., create your world, where the new concepts from user are quickly learned with a few examples. To achieve this goal, we propose a Lifelong text-to-image Diffusion Model (L2DM), which intends to overcome knowledge "catastrophic forgetting" for the past encountered concepts, and semantic "catastrophic neglecting" for one or more concepts in the text prompt. In respect of knowledge "catastrophic forgetting", our L2DM framework devises a task-aware memory enhancement module and a elastic-concept distillation module, which could respectively safeguard the knowledge of both prior concepts and each past personalized concept. When generating images with a user text prompt, the solution to semantic "catastrophic neglecting" is that a concept attention artist module can alleviate the semantic neglecting from concept aspect, and an orthogonal attention module can reduce the semantic binding from attribute aspect. To the end, our model can generate more faithful image across a range of continual text prompts in terms of both qualitative and quantitative metrics, when comparing with the related state-of-the-art models. The code will be released at https://wenqiliang.github.io/.

Authors:Brandon Zhao, Aviad Levis, Liam Connor, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Katherine L. Bouman

Abstract: Refractive Index Tomography is an inverse problem in which we seek to reconstruct a scene's 3D refractive field from 2D projected image measurements. The refractive field is not visible itself, but instead affects how the path of a light ray is continuously curved as it travels through space. Refractive fields appear across a wide variety of scientific applications, from translucent cell samples in microscopy to fields of dark matter bending light from faraway galaxies. This problem poses a unique challenge because the refractive field directly affects the path that light takes, making its recovery a non-linear problem. In addition, in contrast with traditional tomography, we seek to recover the refractive field using a projected image from only a single viewpoint by leveraging knowledge of light sources scattered throughout the medium. In this work, we introduce a method that uses a coordinate-based neural network to model the underlying continuous refractive field in a scene. We then use explicit modeling of rays' 3D spatial curvature to optimize the parameters of this network, reconstructing refractive fields with an analysis-by-synthesis approach. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated by recovering refractive fields in simulation, and analyzing how recovery is affected by the light source distribution. We then test our method on a simulated dark matter mapping problem, where we recover the refractive field underlying a realistic simulated dark matter distribution.

Authors:Aman Bhatta, Gabriella Pangelinan, Micheal C. King, Kevin W. Bowyer

Abstract: Most studies to date that have examined demographic variations in face recognition accuracy have analyzed 1-to-1 matching accuracy, using images that could be described as "government ID quality". This paper analyzes the accuracy of 1-to-many facial identification across demographic groups, and in the presence of blur and reduced resolution in the probe image as might occur in "surveillance camera quality" images. Cumulative match characteristic curves(CMC) are not appropriate for comparing propensity for rank-one recognition errors across demographics, and so we introduce three metrics for this: (1) d' metric between mated and non-mated score distributions, (2) absolute score difference between thresholds in the high-similarity tail of the non-mated and the low-similarity tail of the mated distribution, and (3) distribution of (mated - non-mated rank one scores) across the set of probe images. We find that demographic variation in 1-to-many accuracy does not entirely follow what has been observed in 1-to-1 matching accuracy. Also, different from 1-to-1 accuracy, demographic comparison of 1-to-many accuracy can be affected by different numbers of identities and images across demographics. Finally, we show that increased blur in the probe image, or reduced resolution of the face in the probe image, can significantly increase the false positive identification rate. And we show that the demographic variation in these high blur or low resolution conditions is much larger for male/ female than for African-American / Caucasian. The point that 1-to-many accuracy can potentially collapse in the context of processing "surveillance camera quality" probe images against a "government ID quality" gallery is an important one.

Authors:Daniel Broyles, Christopher R. Hayner, Karen Leung

Abstract: Sensor-equipped unoccupied aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to help reduce search times and alleviate safety risks for first responders carrying out Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) operations, the process of finding and rescuing person(s) lost in wilderness areas. Unfortunately, visual sensors alone do not address the need for robustness across all the possible terrains, weather, and lighting conditions that WiSAR operations can be conducted in. The use of multi-modal sensors, specifically visual-thermal cameras, is critical in enabling WiSAR UAVs to perform in diverse operating conditions. However, due to the unique challenges posed by the wilderness context, existing dataset benchmarks are inadequate for developing vision-based algorithms for autonomous WiSAR UAVs. To this end, we present WiSARD, a dataset with roughly 56,000 labeled visual and thermal images collected from UAV flights in various terrains, seasons, weather, and lighting conditions. To the best of our knowledge, WiSARD is the first large-scale dataset collected with multi-modal sensors for autonomous WiSAR operations. We envision that our dataset will provide researchers with a diverse and challenging benchmark that can test the robustness of their algorithms when applied to real-world (life-saving) applications.

Authors:Aroof Aimen, Arsh Verma, Makarand Tapaswi, Narayanan C. Krishnan

Abstract: Real-world application of chest X-ray abnormality classification requires dealing with several challenges: (i) limited training data; (ii) training and evaluation sets that are derived from different domains; and (iii) classes that appear during training may have partial overlap with classes of interest during evaluation. To address these challenges, we present an integrated framework called Generalized Cross-Domain Multi-Label Few-Shot Learning (GenCDML-FSL). The framework supports overlap in classes during training and evaluation, cross-domain transfer, adopts meta-learning to learn using few training samples, and assumes each chest X-ray image is either normal or associated with one or more abnormalities. Furthermore, we propose Generalized Episodic Training (GenET), a training strategy that equips models to operate with multiple challenges observed in the GenCDML-FSL scenario. Comparisons with well-established methods such as transfer learning, hybrid transfer learning, and multi-label meta-learning on multiple datasets show the superiority of our approach.

Authors:Dongyeun Lee, Chaewon Kim, Sangjoon Yu, Jaejun Yoo, Gyeong-Moon Park

Abstract: One of the most challenging problems in audio-driven talking head generation is achieving high-fidelity detail while ensuring precise synchronization. Given only a single reference image, extracting meaningful identity attributes becomes even more challenging, often causing the network to mirror the facial and lip structures too closely. To address these issues, we introduce RADIO, a framework engineered to yield high-quality dubbed videos regardless of the pose or expression in reference images. The key is to modulate the decoder layers using latent space composed of audio and reference features. Additionally, we incorporate ViT blocks into the decoder to emphasize high-fidelity details, especially in the lip region. Our experimental results demonstrate that RADIO displays high synchronization without the loss of fidelity. Especially in harsh scenarios where the reference frame deviates significantly from the ground truth, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its robustness. Pre-trained model and codes will be made public after the review.

Authors:Naishan Zheng, Man Zhou, Yanmeng Dong, Xiangyu Rui, Jie Huang, Chongyi Li, Feng Zhao

Abstract: Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable progress in enhancing low-light images by improving their brightness and eliminating noise. However, most existing methods construct end-to-end mapping networks heuristically, neglecting the intrinsic prior of image enhancement task and lacking transparency and interpretability. Although some unfolding solutions have been proposed to relieve these issues, they rely on proximal operator networks that deliver ambiguous and implicit priors. In this work, we propose a paradigm for low-light image enhancement that explores the potential of customized learnable priors to improve the transparency of the deep unfolding paradigm. Motivated by the powerful feature representation capability of Masked Autoencoder (MAE), we customize MAE-based illumination and noise priors and redevelop them from two perspectives: 1) \textbf{structure flow}: we train the MAE from a normal-light image to its illumination properties and then embed it into the proximal operator design of the unfolding architecture; and m2) \textbf{optimization flow}: we train MAE from a normal-light image to its gradient representation and then employ it as a regularization term to constrain noise in the model output. These designs improve the interpretability and representation capability of the model.Extensive experiments on multiple low-light image enhancement datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed paradigm over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zheng980629/CUE.

Authors:Taehoon Kim, Pyunghwan Ahn, Sangyun Kim, Sihaeng Lee, Mark Marsden, Alessandra Sala, Seung Hwan Kim, Honglak Lee, Kyounghoon Bae, Bohyung Han, Kyoung Mu Lee, Xiangyu Wu, Yi Gao, Hailiang Zhang, Yang Yang, Weili Guo, Jianfeng Lu, Youngtaek Oh, Jae Won Cho, Dong-jin Kim, In So Kweon, Junmo Kim, Wooyoung Kang, Won Young Jhoo, Byungseok Roh, Jonghwan Mun, Solgil Oh, Kenan Emir Ak, Gwang-Gook Lee, Yan Xu, Mingwei Shen, Kyomin Hwang, Wonsik Shin, Kamin Lee, Wonhark Park, Dongkwan Lee, Nojun Kwak, Yujin Wang, Yimu Wang, Tiancheng Gu, Xingchang Lv, Mingmao Sun

Abstract: In this report, we introduce NICE project\footnote{\url{https://nice.lgresearch.ai/}} and share the results and outcomes of NICE challenge 2023. This project is designed to challenge the computer vision community to develop robust image captioning models that advance the state-of-the-art both in terms of accuracy and fairness. Through the challenge, the image captioning models were tested using a new evaluation dataset that includes a large variety of visual concepts from many domains. There was no specific training data provided for the challenge, and therefore the challenge entries were required to adapt to new types of image descriptions that had not been seen during training. This report includes information on the newly proposed NICE dataset, evaluation methods, challenge results, and technical details of top-ranking entries. We expect that the outcomes of the challenge will contribute to the improvement of AI models on various vision-language tasks.

Authors:George Stoica, Mihaela Breaban, Vlad Barbu

Abstract: Using additional training data is known to improve the results, especially for medical image 3D segmentation where there is a lack of training material and the model needs to generalize well from few available data. However, the new data could have been acquired using other instruments and preprocessed such its distribution is significantly different from the original training data. Therefore, we study techniques which ameliorate domain shift during training so that the additional data becomes better usable for preprocessing and training together with the original data. Our results show that transforming the additional data using histogram matching has better results than using simple normalization.

Authors:Lorenzo Papa, Paolo Russo, Irene Amerini, Luping Zhou

Abstract: Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures are becoming increasingly popular and widely employed to tackle computer vision applications. Their main feature is the capacity to extract global information through the self-attention mechanism, outperforming earlier convolutional neural networks. However, ViT deployment and performance have grown steadily with their size, number of trainable parameters, and operations. Furthermore, self-attention's computational and memory cost quadratically increases with the image resolution. Generally speaking, it is challenging to employ these architectures in real-world applications due to many hardware and environmental restrictions, such as processing and computational capabilities. Therefore, this survey investigates the most efficient methodologies to ensure sub-optimal estimation performances. More in detail, four efficient categories will be analyzed: compact architecture, pruning, knowledge distillation, and quantization strategies. Moreover, a new metric called Efficient Error Rate has been introduced in order to normalize and compare models' features that affect hardware devices at inference time, such as the number of parameters, bits, FLOPs, and model size. Summarizing, this paper firstly mathematically defines the strategies used to make Vision Transformer efficient, describes and discusses state-of-the-art methodologies, and analyzes their performances over different application scenarios. Toward the end of this paper, we also discuss open challenges and promising research directions.

Authors:Guanghui Li, Mingqi Gao, Heng Liu, Xiantong Zhen, Feng Zheng

Abstract: Referring video object segmentation (RVOS), as a supervised learning task, relies on sufficient annotated data for a given scene. However, in more realistic scenarios, only minimal annotations are available for a new scene, which poses significant challenges to existing RVOS methods. With this in mind, we propose a simple yet effective model with a newly designed cross-modal affinity (CMA) module based on a Transformer architecture. The CMA module builds multimodal affinity with a few samples, thus quickly learning new semantic information, and enabling the model to adapt to different scenarios. Since the proposed method targets limited samples for new scenes, we generalize the problem as - few-shot referring video object segmentation (FS-RVOS). To foster research in this direction, we build up a new FS-RVOS benchmark based on currently available datasets. The benchmark covers a wide range and includes multiple situations, which can maximally simulate real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments show that our model adapts well to different scenarios with only a few samples, reaching state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark. On Mini-Ref-YouTube-VOS, our model achieves an average performance of 53.1 J and 54.8 F, which are 10% better than the baselines. Furthermore, we show impressive results of 77.7 J and 74.8 F on Mini-Ref-SAIL-VOS, which are significantly better than the baselines. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/hengliusky/Few_shot_RVOS.

Authors:Yufei Wang, Yuxin Mao, Qi Liu, Yuchao Dai

Abstract: RGB-guided depth completion aims at predicting dense depth maps from sparse depth measurements and corresponding RGB images, where how to effectively and efficiently exploit the multi-modal information is a key issue. Guided dynamic filters, which generate spatially-variant depth-wise separable convolutional filters from RGB features to guide depth features, have been proven to be effective in this task. However, the dynamically generated filters require massive model parameters, computational costs and memory footprints when the number of feature channels is large. In this paper, we propose to decompose the guided dynamic filters into a spatially-shared component multiplied by content-adaptive adaptors at each spatial location. Based on the proposed idea, we introduce two decomposition schemes A and B, which decompose the filters by splitting the filter structure and using spatial-wise attention, respectively. The decomposed filters not only maintain the favorable properties of guided dynamic filters as being content-dependent and spatially-variant, but also reduce model parameters and hardware costs, as the learned adaptors are decoupled with the number of feature channels. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the methods using our schemes outperform state-of-the-art methods on the KITTI dataset, and rank 1st and 2nd on the KITTI benchmark at the time of submission. Meanwhile, they also achieve comparable performance on the NYUv2 dataset. In addition, our proposed methods are general and could be employed as plug-and-play feature fusion blocks in other multi-modal fusion tasks such as RGB-D salient object detection.

Authors:Xin Zhou, Jinghua Hou, Tingting Yao, Dingkang Liang, Zhe Liu, Zhikang Zou, Xiaoqing Ye, Jianwei Cheng, Xiang Bai

Abstract: 3D object detection is an essential task for achieving autonomous driving. Existing anchor-based detection methods rely on empirical heuristics setting of anchors, which makes the algorithms lack elegance. In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of several generative models, among which diffusion models show great potential for learning the transformation of two distributions. Our proposed Diff3Det migrates the diffusion model to proposal generation for 3D object detection by considering the detection boxes as generative targets. During training, the object boxes diffuse from the ground truth boxes to the Gaussian distribution, and the decoder learns to reverse this noise process. In the inference stage, the model progressively refines a set of random boxes to the prediction results. We provide detailed experiments on the KITTI benchmark and achieve promising performance compared to classical anchor-based 3D detection methods.

Authors:Yongkang Zhao, Chuang Zhu, Yuan Li, Shuaishuai Wang, Zihan Lan, Yuanyuan Qiao

Abstract: Detecting small moving targets accurately in infrared (IR) image sequences is a significant challenge. To address this problem, we propose a novel method called spatial-temporal local feature difference (STLFD) with adaptive background suppression (ABS). Our approach utilizes filters in the spatial and temporal domains and performs pixel-level ABS on the output to enhance the contrast between the target and the background. The proposed method comprises three steps. First, we obtain three temporal frame images based on the current frame image and extract two feature maps using the designed spatial domain and temporal domain filters. Next, we fuse the information of the spatial domain and temporal domain to produce the spatial-temporal feature maps and suppress noise using our pixel-level ABS module. Finally, we obtain the segmented binary map by applying a threshold. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for infrared small-moving target detection.

Authors:Anand Sharma MIET, Meerut, A. G. Ramakrishnan IISc, Bengaluru

Abstract: A set of features independent of character stroke direction and order variations is proposed for online handwritten character recognition. A method is developed that maps features like co-ordinates of points, orientations of strokes at points, and dynamics of orientations of strokes at points spatially as a function of co-ordinate values of the points and computes histograms of these features from different regions in the spatial map. Different features like spatio-temporal, discrete Fourier transform, discrete cosine transform, discrete wavelet transform, spatial, and histograms of oriented gradients used in other studies for training classifiers for character recognition are considered. The classifier chosen for classification performance comparison, when trained with different features, is support vector machines (SVM). The character datasets used for training and testing the classifiers consist of online handwritten samples of 96 different Hindi characters. There are 12832 and 2821 samples in training and testing datasets, respectively. SVM classifiers trained with the proposed features has the highest classification accuracy of 92.9\% when compared to the performances of SVM classifiers trained with the other features and tested on the same testing dataset. Therefore, the proposed features have better character discriminative capability than the other features considered for comparison.

Authors:Siyang Jiang, Rui Fang, Hsi-Wen Chen, Wei Ding, Ming-Syan Chen

Abstract: Support-query shift few-shot learning aims to classify unseen examples (query set) to labeled data (support set) based on the learned embedding in a low-dimensional space under a distribution shift between the support set and the query set. However, in real-world scenarios the shifts are usually unknown and varied, making it difficult to estimate in advance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel but more difficult challenge, RSQS, focusing on Realistic Support-Query Shift few-shot learning. The key feature of RSQS is that the individual samples in a meta-task are subjected to multiple distribution shifts in each meta-task. In addition, we propose a unified adversarial feature alignment method called DUal adversarial ALignment framework (DuaL) to relieve RSQS from two aspects, i.e., inter-domain bias and intra-domain variance. On the one hand, for the inter-domain bias, we corrupt the original data in advance and use the synthesized perturbed inputs to train the repairer network by minimizing distance in the feature level. On the other hand, for intra-domain variance, we proposed a generator network to synthesize hard, i.e., less similar, examples from the support set in a self-supervised manner and introduce regularized optimal transportation to derive a smooth optimal transportation plan. Lastly, a benchmark of RSQS is built with several state-of-the-art baselines among three datasets (CIFAR100, mini-ImageNet, and Tiered-Imagenet). Experiment results show that DuaL significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in our benchmark.

Authors:Sander Riisøen Jyhne, Per-Arne Andersen, Morten Goodwin

Abstract: This paper presents Deep Networks for Improved Segmentation Edges (DeNISE), a novel data enhancement technique using edge detection and segmentation models to improve the boundary quality of segmentation masks. DeNISE utilizes the inherent differences in two sequential deep neural architectures to improve the accuracy of the predicted segmentation edge. DeNISE applies to all types of neural networks and is not trained end-to-end, allowing rapid experiments to discover which models complement each other. We test and apply DeNISE for building segmentation in aerial images. Aerial images are known for difficult conditions as they have a low resolution with optical noise, such as reflections, shadows, and visual obstructions. Overall the paper demonstrates the potential for DeNISE. Using the technique, we improve the baseline results with a building IoU of 78.9%.

Authors:Wataru Shimoda, Daichi Haraguchi, Seiichi Uchida, Kota Yamaguchi

Abstract: In this work, we consider the typography generation task that aims at producing diverse typographic styling for the given graphic document. We formulate typography generation as a fine-grained attribute generation for multiple text elements and build an autoregressive model to generate diverse typography that matches the input design context. We further propose a simple yet effective sampling approach that respects the consistency and distinction principle of typography so that generated examples share consistent typographic styling across text elements. Our empirical study shows that our model successfully generates diverse typographic designs while preserving a consistent typographic structure.

Authors:Stephan Alaniz, Massimiliano Mancini, Zeynep Akata

Abstract: Humans are good at recomposing novel objects, i.e. they can identify commonalities between unknown objects from general structure to finer detail, an ability difficult to replicate by machines. We propose a framework, ISCO, to recompose an object using 3D superquadrics as semantic parts directly from 2D views without training a model that uses 3D supervision. To achieve this, we optimize the superquadric parameters that compose a specific instance of the object, comparing its rendered 3D view and 2D image silhouette. Our ISCO framework iteratively adds new superquadrics wherever the reconstruction error is high, abstracting first coarse regions and then finer details of the target object. With this simple coarse-to-fine inductive bias, ISCO provides consistent superquadrics for related object parts, despite not having any semantic supervision. Since ISCO does not train any neural network, it is also inherently robust to out-of-distribution objects. Experiments show that, compared to recent single instance superquadrics reconstruction approaches, ISCO provides consistently more accurate 3D reconstructions, even from images in the wild. Code available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/ISCO .

Authors:Fanda Fan, Chaoxu Guo, Litong Gong, Biao Wang, Tiezheng Ge, Yuning Jiang, Chunjie Luo, Jianfeng Zhan

Abstract: Video outpainting aims to adequately complete missing areas at the edges of video frames. Compared to image outpainting, it presents an additional challenge as the model should maintain the temporal consistency of the filled area. In this paper, we introduce a masked 3D diffusion model for video outpainting. We use the technique of mask modeling to train the 3D diffusion model. This allows us to use multiple guide frames to connect the results of multiple video clip inferences, thus ensuring temporal consistency and reducing jitter between adjacent frames. Meanwhile, we extract the global frames of the video as prompts and guide the model to obtain information other than the current video clip using cross-attention. We also introduce a hybrid coarse-to-fine inference pipeline to alleviate the artifact accumulation problem. The existing coarse-to-fine pipeline only uses the infilling strategy, which brings degradation because the time interval of the sparse frames is too large. Our pipeline benefits from bidirectional learning of the mask modeling and thus can employ a hybrid strategy of infilling and interpolation when generating sparse frames. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in video outpainting tasks. More results are provided at our https://fanfanda.github.io/M3DDM/.

Authors:Lorenzo Mur-Labadia, Jose J. Guerrero, Ruben Martinez-Cantin

Abstract: Accurate affordance detection and segmentation with pixel precision is an important piece in many complex systems based on interactions, such as robots and assitive devices. We present a new approach to affordance perception which enables accurate multi-label segmentation. Our approach can be used to automatically extract grounded affordances from first person videos of interactions using a 3D map of the environment providing pixel level precision for the affordance location. We use this method to build the largest and most complete dataset on affordances based on the EPIC-Kitchen dataset, EPIC-Aff, which provides interaction-grounded, multi-label, metric and spatial affordance annotations. Then, we propose a new approach to affordance segmentation based on multi-label detection which enables multiple affordances to co-exists in the same space, for example if they are associated with the same object. We present several strategies of multi-label detection using several segmentation architectures. The experimental results highlight the importance of the multi-label detection. Finally, we show how our metric representation can be exploited for build a map of interaction hotspots in spatial action-centric zones and use that representation to perform a task-oriented navigation.

Authors:Mariona Carós, Ariadna Just, Santi Seguí, Jordi Vitrià

Abstract: Airborne LiDAR systems have the capability to capture the Earth's surface by generating extensive point cloud data comprised of points mainly defined by 3D coordinates. However, labeling such points for supervised learning tasks is time-consuming. As a result, there is a need to investigate techniques that can learn from unlabeled data to significantly reduce the number of annotated samples. In this work, we propose to train a self-supervised encoder with Barlow Twins and use it as a pre-trained network in the task of semantic scene segmentation. The experimental results demonstrate that our unsupervised pre-training boosts performance once fine-tuned on the supervised task, especially for under-represented categories.

Authors:Andrew Du, Anh-Dzung Doan, Yee Wei Law, Tat-Jun Chin

Abstract: The advent of satellite-borne machine learning hardware accelerators has enabled the on-board processing of payload data using machine learning techniques such as convolutional neural networks (CNN). A notable example is using a CNN to detect the presence of clouds in hyperspectral data captured on Earth observation (EO) missions, whereby only clear sky data is downlinked to conserve bandwidth. However, prior to deployment, new missions that employ new sensors will not have enough representative datasets to train a CNN model, while a model trained solely on data from previous missions will underperform when deployed to process the data on the new missions. This underperformance stems from the domain gap, i.e., differences in the underlying distributions of the data generated by the different sensors in previous and future missions. In this paper, we address the domain gap problem in the context of on-board hyperspectral cloud detection. Our main contributions lie in formulating new domain adaptation tasks that are motivated by a concrete EO mission, developing a novel algorithm for bandwidth-efficient supervised domain adaptation, and demonstrating test-time adaptation algorithms on space deployable neural network accelerators. Our contributions enable minimal data transmission to be invoked (e.g., only 1% of the weights in ResNet50) to achieve domain adaptation, thereby allowing more sophisticated CNN models to be deployed and updated on satellites without being hampered by domain gap and bandwidth limitations.

Authors:Wei Suo, Mengyang Sun, Weisong Liu, Yiqi Gao, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang, Qi Wu

Abstract: VQA Natural Language Explanation (VQA-NLE) task aims to explain the decision-making process of VQA models in natural language. Unlike traditional attention or gradient analysis, free-text rationales can be easier to understand and gain users' trust. Existing methods mostly use post-hoc or self-rationalization models to obtain a plausible explanation. However, these frameworks are bottlenecked by the following challenges: 1) the reasoning process cannot be faithfully responded to and suffer from the problem of logical inconsistency. 2) Human-annotated explanations are expensive and time-consuming to collect. In this paper, we propose a new Semi-Supervised VQA-NLE via Self-Critical Learning (S3C), which evaluates the candidate explanations by answering rewards to improve the logical consistency between answers and rationales. With a semi-supervised learning framework, the S3C can benefit from a tremendous amount of samples without human-annotated explanations. A large number of automatic measures and human evaluations all show the effectiveness of our method. Meanwhile, the framework achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the two VQA-NLE datasets.

Authors:Svetlana Pavlitska, Nico Lambing, Ashok Kumar Bangaru, J. Marius Zöllner

Abstract: Real-time traffic light recognition is essential for autonomous driving. Yet, a cohesive overview of the underlying model architectures for this task is currently missing. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive survey and analysis of traffic light recognition methods that use convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We focus on two essential aspects: datasets and CNN architectures. Based on an underlying architecture, we cluster methods into three major groups: (1) modifications of generic object detectors which compensate for specific task characteristics, (2) multi-stage approaches involving both rule-based and CNN components, and (3) task-specific single-stage methods. We describe the most important works in each cluster, discuss the usage of the datasets, and identify research gaps.

Authors:Yiwei Bao, Feng Lu

Abstract: Although recent deep learning based gaze estimation approaches have achieved much improvement, we still know little about how gaze features are connected to the physics of gaze. In this paper, we try to answer this question by analyzing the gaze feature manifold. Our analysis revealed the insight that the geodesic distance between gaze features is consistent with the gaze differences between samples. According to this finding, we construct the Physics- Consistent Feature (PCF) in an analytical way, which connects gaze feature to the physical definition of gaze. We further propose the PCFGaze framework that directly optimizes gaze feature space by the guidance of PCF. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework alleviates the overfitting problem and significantly improves cross-domain gaze estimation accuracy without extra training data. The insight of gaze feature has the potential to benefit other regression tasks with physical meanings.

Authors:Xintong Jiang, Yaxiong Wang, Yujiao Wu, Meng Wang, Xueming Qian

Abstract: Composed image retrieval, a task involving the search for a target image using a reference image and a complementary text as the query, has witnessed significant advancements owing to the progress made in cross-modal modeling. Unlike the general image-text retrieval problem with only one alignment relation, i.e., image-text, we argue for the existence of two types of relations in composed image retrieval. The explicit relation pertains to the reference image & complementary text-target image, which is commonly exploited by existing methods. Besides this intuitive relation, the observations during our practice have uncovered another implicit yet crucial relation, i.e., reference image & target image-complementary text, since we found that the complementary text can be inferred by studying the relation between the target image and the reference image. Regrettably, existing methods largely focus on leveraging the explicit relation to learn their networks, while overlooking the implicit relation. In response to this weakness, We propose a new framework for composed image retrieval, termed dual relation alignment, which integrates both explicit and implicit relations to fully exploit the correlations among the triplets. Specifically, we design a vision compositor to fuse reference image and target image at first, then the resulted representation will serve two roles: (1) counterpart for semantic alignment with the complementary text and (2) compensation for the complementary text to boost the explicit relation modeling, thereby implant the implicit relation into the alignment learning. Our method is evaluated on two popular datasets, CIRR and FashionIQ, through extensive experiments. The results confirm the effectiveness of our dual-relation learning in substantially enhancing composed image retrieval performance.

Authors:Yuxiang Yang, Yingqi Deng, Jiahao Nie, Jing Zhang

Abstract: 3D single object tracking (SOT) in point clouds is still a challenging problem due to appearance variation, distractors, and high sparsity of point clouds. Notably, in autonomous driving scenarios, the target object typically maintains spatial adjacency across consecutive frames, predominantly moving horizontally. This spatial continuity offers valuable prior knowledge for target localization. However, existing trackers, which often employ point-wise representations, struggle to efficiently utilize this knowledge owing to the irregular format of such representations. Consequently, they require elaborate designs and solving multiple subtasks to establish spatial correspondence. In this paper, we introduce BEVTrack, a simple yet strong baseline framework for 3D SOT. After converting consecutive point clouds into the common Bird's-Eye-View representation, BEVTrack inherently encodes spatial proximity and adeptly captures motion cues for tracking via a simple element-wise operation and convolutional layers. Additionally, to better deal with objects having diverse sizes and moving patterns, BEVTrack directly learns the underlying motion distribution rather than making a fixed Laplacian or Gaussian assumption as in previous works. Without bells and whistles, BEVTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on KITTI and NuScenes datasets while maintaining a high inference speed of 122 FPS. The code will be released at https://github.com/xmm-prio/BEVTrack.

Authors:Yue Wu, Sicheng Xu, Jianfeng Xiang, Fangyun Wei, Qifeng Chen, Jiaolong Yang, Xin Tong

Abstract: Previous animatable 3D-aware GANs for human generation have primarily focused on either the human head or full body. However, head-only videos are relatively uncommon in real life, and full body generation typically does not deal with facial expression control and still has challenges in generating high-quality results. Towards applicable video avatars, we present an animatable 3D-aware GAN that generates portrait images with controllable facial expression, head pose, and shoulder movements. It is a generative model trained on unstructured 2D image collections without using 3D or video data. For the new task, we base our method on the generative radiance manifold representation and equip it with learnable facial and head-shoulder deformations. A dual-camera rendering and adversarial learning scheme is proposed to improve the quality of the generated faces, which is critical for portrait images. A pose deformation processing network is developed to generate plausible deformations for challenging regions such as long hair. Experiments show that our method, trained on unstructured 2D images, can generate diverse and high-quality 3D portraits with desired control over different properties.

Authors:Renyu Zhu, Chengcheng Han, Yong Qian, Qiushi Sun, Xiang Li, Ming Gao, Xuezhi Cao, Yunsen Xian

Abstract: We study the problem of multimodal fusion in this paper. Recent exchanging-based methods have been proposed for vision-vision fusion, which aim to exchange embeddings learned from one modality to the other. However, most of them project inputs of multimodalities into different low-dimensional spaces and cannot be applied to the sequential input data. To solve these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel exchanging-based multimodal fusion model MuSE for text-vision fusion based on Transformer. We first use two encoders to separately map multimodal inputs into different low-dimensional spaces. Then we employ two decoders to regularize the embeddings and pull them into the same space. The two decoders capture the correlations between texts and images with the image captioning task and the text-to-image generation task, respectively. Further, based on the regularized embeddings, we present CrossTransformer, which uses two Transformer encoders with shared parameters as the backbone model to exchange knowledge between multimodalities. Specifically, CrossTransformer first learns the global contextual information of the inputs in the shallow layers. After that, it performs inter-modal exchange by selecting a proportion of tokens in one modality and replacing their embeddings with the average of embeddings in the other modality. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of MuSE on the Multimodal Named Entity Recognition task and the Multimodal Sentiment Analysis task. Our results show the superiority of MuSE against other competitors. Our code and data are provided at https://github.com/RecklessRonan/MuSE.

Authors:Thai Ngoc Toan Truong, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Ba Thinh Lam, Vu Minh Duy Nguyen, Hong Phuc Nguyen

Abstract: In many recent years, multi-view mammogram analysis has been focused widely on AI-based cancer assessment. In this work, we aim to explore diverse fusion strategies (average and concatenate) and examine the model's learning behavior with varying individuals and fusion pathways, involving Coarse Layer and Fine Layer. The Ipsilateral Multi-View Network, comprising five fusion types (Pre, Early, Middle, Last, and Post Fusion) in ResNet-18, is employed. Notably, the Middle Fusion emerges as the most balanced and effective approach, enhancing deep-learning models' generalization performance by +5.29\% (concatenate) and +5.9\% (average) in VinDr-Mammo dataset and +2.03\% (concatenate) and +3\% (average) in CMMD dataset on macro F1-Score. The paper emphasizes the crucial role of layer assignment in multi-view network extraction with various strategies.

Authors:Paolo Cudrano, Matteo Bellusci, Giuseppe Macino, Matteo Matteucci

Abstract: Accurate road surface classification is crucial for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to optimize driving conditions, enhance safety, and enable advanced road mapping. However, deep learning models for road surface classification suffer from poor generalization when tested on unseen datasets. To update these models with new information, also the original training dataset must be taken into account, in order to avoid catastrophic forgetting. This is, however, inefficient if not impossible, e.g., when the data is collected in streams or large amounts. To overcome this limitation and enable fast and efficient cross-dataset adaptation, we propose to employ continual learning finetuning methods designed to retain past knowledge while adapting to new data, thus effectively avoiding forgetting. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of this approach over naive finetuning, achieving performance close to fresh retraining. While solving this known problem, we also provide a general description of how the same technique can be adopted in other AV scenarios. We highlight the potential computational and economic benefits that a continual-based adaptation can bring to the AV industry, while also reducing greenhouse emissions due to unnecessary joint retraining.

Authors:Yifan Song, Mengkun She, Kevin Köser

Abstract: Underwater image restoration has been a challenging problem for decades since the advent of underwater photography. Most solutions focus on shallow water scenarios, where the scene is uniformly illuminated by the sunlight. However, the vast majority of uncharted underwater terrain is located beyond 200 meters depth where natural light is scarce and artificial illumination is needed. In such cases, light sources co-moving with the camera, dynamically change the scene appearance, which make shallow water restoration methods inadequate. In particular for multi-light source systems (composed of dozens of LEDs nowadays), calibrating each light is time-consuming, error-prone and tedious, and we observe that only the integrated illumination within the viewing volume of the camera is critical, rather than the individual light sources. The key idea of this paper is therefore to exploit the appearance changes of objects or the seafloor, when traversing the viewing frustum of the camera. Through new constraints assuming Lambertian surfaces, corresponding image pixels constrain the light field in front of the camera, and for each voxel a signal factor and a backscatter value are stored in a volumetric grid that can be used for very efficient image restoration of camera-light platforms, which facilitates consistently texturing large 3D models and maps that would otherwise be dominated by lighting and medium artifacts. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets. The results of these experiments demonstrate the robustness of our approach in restoring the true albedo of objects, while mitigating the influence of lighting and medium effects. Furthermore, we demonstrate our approach can be readily extended to other scenarios, including in-air imaging with artificial illumination or other similar cases.

Authors:Haixu Song, Shiyu Huang, Yinpeng Dong, Wei-Wei Tu

Abstract: The rise of deepfake images, especially of well-known personalities, poses a serious threat to the dissemination of authentic information. To tackle this, we present a thorough investigation into how deepfakes are produced and how they can be identified. The cornerstone of our research is a rich collection of artificial celebrity faces, titled DeepFakeFace (DFF). We crafted the DFF dataset using advanced diffusion models and have shared it with the community through online platforms. This data serves as a robust foundation to train and test algorithms designed to spot deepfakes. We carried out a thorough review of the DFF dataset and suggest two evaluation methods to gauge the strength and adaptability of deepfake recognition tools. The first method tests whether an algorithm trained on one type of fake images can recognize those produced by other methods. The second evaluates the algorithm's performance with imperfect images, like those that are blurry, of low quality, or compressed. Given varied results across deepfake methods and image changes, our findings stress the need for better deepfake detectors. Our DFF dataset and tests aim to boost the development of more effective tools against deepfakes.

Authors:Wencan Huang, Daizong Liu, Wei Hu

Abstract: Localizing objects in 3D scenes according to the semantics of a given natural language is a fundamental yet important task in the field of multimedia understanding, which benefits various real-world applications such as robotics and autonomous driving. However, the majority of existing 3D object grounding methods are restricted to a single-sentence input describing an individual object, which cannot comprehend and reason more contextualized descriptions of multiple objects in more practical 3D cases. To this end, we introduce a new challenging task, called 3D Dense Object Grounding (3D DOG), to jointly localize multiple objects described in a more complicated paragraph rather than a single sentence. Instead of naively localizing each sentence-guided object independently, we found that dense objects described in the same paragraph are often semantically related and spatially located in a focused region of the 3D scene. To explore such semantic and spatial relationships of densely referred objects for more accurate localization, we propose a novel Stacked Transformer based framework for 3D DOG, named 3DOGSFormer. Specifically, we first devise a contextual query-driven local transformer decoder to generate initial grounding proposals for each target object. Then, we employ a proposal-guided global transformer decoder that exploits the local object features to learn their correlation for further refining initial grounding proposals. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks (Nr3D, Sr3D, and ScanRefer) show that our proposed 3DOGSFormer outperforms state-of-the-art 3D single-object grounding methods and their dense-object variants by significant margins.

Authors:Zhechao Wang, Peirui Cheng, Shujing Duan, Kaiqiang Chen, Zhirui Wang, Xinming Li, Xian Sun

Abstract: Onboard intelligent processing is widely applied in emergency tasks in the field of remote sensing. However, it is predominantly confined to an individual platform with a limited observation range as well as susceptibility to interference, resulting in limited accuracy. Considering the current state of multi-platform collaborative observation, this article innovatively presents a distributed collaborative perception network called DCP-Net. Firstly, the proposed DCP-Net helps members to enhance perception performance by integrating features from other platforms. Secondly, a self-mutual information match module is proposed to identify collaboration opportunities and select suitable partners, prioritizing critical collaborative features and reducing redundant transmission cost. Thirdly, a related feature fusion module is designed to address the misalignment between local and collaborative features, improving the quality of fused features for the downstream task. We conduct extensive experiments and visualization analyses using three semantic segmentation datasets, including Potsdam, iSAID and DFC23. The results demonstrate that DCP-Net outperforms the existing methods comprehensively, improving mIoU by 2.61%~16.89% at the highest collaboration efficiency, which promotes the performance to a state-of-the-art level.

Authors:Cathrine Damgaard, Trine Naja Eriksen, Dovile Juodelyte, Veronika Cheplygina, Amelia Jiménez-Sánchez

Abstract: The advancement of machine learning algorithms in medical image analysis requires the expansion of training datasets. A popular and cost-effective approach is automated annotation extraction from free-text medical reports, primarily due to the high costs associated with expert clinicians annotating chest X-ray images. However, it has been shown that the resulting datasets are susceptible to biases and shortcuts. Another strategy to increase the size of a dataset is crowdsourcing, a widely adopted practice in general computer vision with some success in medical image analysis. In a similar vein to crowdsourcing, we enhance two publicly available chest X-ray datasets by incorporating non-expert annotations. However, instead of using diagnostic labels, we annotate shortcuts in the form of tubes. We collect 3.5k chest drain annotations for CXR14, and 1k annotations for 4 different tube types in PadChest. We train a chest drain detector with the non-expert annotations that generalizes well to expert labels. Moreover, we compare our annotations to those provided by experts and show "moderate" to "almost perfect" agreement. Finally, we present a pathology agreement study to raise awareness about ground truth annotations. We make our annotations and code available.

Authors:Siwei Li, Mingxuan Liu, Yating Zhang, Shu Chen, Haoxiang Li, Hong Chen, Zifei Dou

Abstract: Image deblurring is a critical task in the field of image restoration, aiming to eliminate blurring artifacts. However, the challenge of addressing non-uniform blurring leads to an ill-posed problem, which limits the generalization performance of existing deblurring models. To solve the problem, we propose a framework SAM-Deblur, integrating prior knowledge from the Segment Anything Model (SAM) into the deblurring task for the first time. In particular, SAM-Deblur is divided into three stages. First, We preprocess the blurred images, obtain image masks via SAM, and propose a mask dropout method for training to enhance model robustness. Then, to fully leverage the structural priors generated by SAM, we propose a Mask Average Pooling (MAP) unit specifically designed to average SAM-generated segmented areas, serving as a plug-and-play component which can be seamlessly integrated into existing deblurring networks. Finally, we feed the fused features generated by the MAP Unit into the deblurring model to obtain a sharp image. Experimental results on the RealBlurJ, ReloBlur, and REDS datasets reveal that incorporating our methods improves NAFNet's PSNR by 0.05, 0.96, and 7.03, respectively. Code will be available at \href{https://github.com/HPLQAQ/SAM-Deblur}{SAM-Deblur}.

Authors:Julian Lorenz, Florian Barthel, Daniel Kienzle, Rainer Lienhart

Abstract: Current scene graph datasets suffer from strong long-tail distributions of their predicate classes. Due to a very low number of some predicate classes in the test sets, no reliable metrics can be retrieved for the rarest classes. We construct a new panoptic scene graph dataset and a set of metrics that are designed as a benchmark for the predictive performance especially on rare predicate classes. To construct the new dataset, we propose a model-assisted annotation pipeline that efficiently finds rare predicate classes that are hidden in a large set of images like needles in a haystack. Contrary to prior scene graph datasets, Haystack contains explicit negative annotations, i.e. annotations that a given relation does not have a certain predicate class. Negative annotations are helpful especially in the field of scene graph generation and open up a whole new set of possibilities to improve current scene graph generation models. Haystack is 100% compatible with existing panoptic scene graph datasets and can easily be integrated with existing evaluation pipelines. Our dataset and code can be found here: https://lorjul.github.io/haystack/. It includes annotation files and simple to use scripts and utilities, to help with integrating our dataset in existing work.

Authors:Junwen Chen, Jie Zhu, Yu Kong

Abstract: Despite significant progress in video question answering (VideoQA), existing methods fall short of questions that require causal/temporal reasoning across frames. This can be attributed to imprecise motion representations. We introduce Action Temporality Modeling (ATM) for temporality reasoning via three-fold uniqueness: (1) rethinking the optical flow and realizing that optical flow is effective in capturing the long horizon temporality reasoning; (2) training the visual-text embedding by contrastive learning in an action-centric manner, leading to better action representations in both vision and text modalities; and (3) preventing the model from answering the question given the shuffled video in the fine-tuning stage, to avoid spurious correlation between appearance and motion and hence ensure faithful temporality reasoning. In the experiments, we show that ATM outperforms previous approaches in terms of the accuracy on multiple VideoQAs and exhibits better true temporality reasoning ability.

Authors:Hongyu Hu, Jiyuan Zhang, Minyi Zhao, Zhenbang Sun

Abstract: Nowadays, the research on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has been significantly promoted thanks to the success of Large Language Models (LLM). Nevertheless, these Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are suffering from the drawback of hallucination -- due to insufficient understanding of vision and language modalities, VLMs may generate incorrect perception information when doing downstream applications, for example, captioning a non-existent entity. To address the hallucination phenomenon, on the one hand, we introduce a Contrastive Instruction Evaluation Method (CIEM), which is an automatic pipeline that leverages an annotated image-text dataset coupled with an LLM to generate factual/contrastive question-answer pairs for the evaluation of the hallucination of VLMs. On the other hand, based on CIEM, we further propose a new instruction tuning method called CIT (the abbreviation of Contrastive Instruction Tuning) to alleviate the hallucination of VLMs by automatically producing high-quality factual/contrastive question-answer pairs and corresponding justifications for model tuning. Through extensive experiments on CIEM and CIT, we pinpoint the hallucination issues commonly present in existing VLMs, the disability of the current instruction-tuning dataset to handle the hallucination phenomenon and the superiority of CIT-tuned VLMs over both CIEM and public datasets.

Authors:Zhenghong Zhou, Huangxuan Zhao, Jiemin Fang, Dongqiao Xiang, Lei Chen, Lingxia Wu, Feihong Wu, Wenyu Liu, Chuansheng Zheng, Xinggang Wang

Abstract: Four-dimensional Digital Subtraction Angiography (4D DSA) plays a critical role in the diagnosis of many medical diseases, such as Arteriovenous Malformations (AVM) and Arteriovenous Fistulas (AVF). Despite its significant application value, the reconstruction of 4D DSA demands numerous views to effectively model the intricate vessels and radiocontrast flow, thereby implying a significant radiation dose. To address this high radiation issue, we propose a Time-aware Attenuation Voxel (TiAVox) approach for sparse-view 4D DSA reconstruction, which paves the way for high-quality 4D imaging. Additionally, 2D and 3D DSA imaging results can be generated from the reconstructed 4D DSA images. TiAVox introduces 4D attenuation voxel grids, which reflect attenuation properties from both spatial and temporal dimensions. It is optimized by minimizing discrepancies between the rendered images and sparse 2D DSA images. Without any neural network involved, TiAVox enjoys specific physical interpretability. The parameters of each learnable voxel represent the attenuation coefficients. We validated the TiAVox approach on both clinical and simulated datasets, achieving a 31.23 Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) for novel view synthesis using only 30 views on the clinically sourced dataset, whereas traditional Feldkamp-Davis-Kress methods required 133 views. Similarly, with merely 10 views from the synthetic dataset, TiAVox yielded a PSNR of 34.32 for novel view synthesis and 41.40 for 3D reconstruction. We also executed ablation studies to corroborate the essential components of TiAVox. The code will be publically available.

Authors:Alhasan Abdellatif, Ahmed H. Elsheikh

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for generating texture images of infinite resolutions using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) based on a patch-by-patch paradigm. Existing texture synthesis techniques often rely on generating a large-scale texture using a one-forward pass to the generating model, this limits the scalability and flexibility of the generated images. In contrast, the proposed approach trains GANs models on a single texture image to generate relatively small patches that are locally correlated and can be seamlessly concatenated to form a larger image while using a constant GPU memory footprint. Our method learns the local texture structure and is able to generate arbitrary-size textures, while also maintaining coherence and diversity. The proposed method relies on local padding in the generator to ensure consistency between patches and utilizes spatial stochastic modulation to allow for local variations and diversity within the large-scale image. Experimental results demonstrate superior scalability compared to existing approaches while maintaining visual coherence of generated textures.

Authors:Sergi Garcia-Bordils, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Marçal Rusiñol

Abstract: We introduce the structured scene-text spotting task, which requires a scene-text OCR system to spot text in the wild according to a query regular expression. Contrary to generic scene text OCR, structured scene-text spotting seeks to dynamically condition both scene text detection and recognition on user-provided regular expressions. To tackle this task, we propose the Structured TExt sPotter (STEP), a model that exploits the provided text structure to guide the OCR process. STEP is able to deal with regular expressions that contain spaces and it is not bound to detection at the word-level granularity. Our approach enables accurate zero-shot structured text spotting in a wide variety of real-world reading scenarios and is solely trained on publicly available data. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce a new challenging test dataset that contains several types of out-of-vocabulary structured text, reflecting important reading applications of fields such as prices, dates, serial numbers, license plates etc. We demonstrate that STEP can provide specialised OCR performance on demand in all tested scenarios.

Authors:Nanne van Noord

Abstract: Dataset summarisation is a fruitful approach to dataset inspection. However, when applied to a single dataset the discovery of visual concepts is restricted to those most prominent. We argue that a comparative approach can expand upon this paradigm to enable richer forms of dataset inspection that go beyond the most prominent concepts. To enable dataset comparison we present a module that learns concept-level prototypes across datasets. We leverage self-supervised learning to discover these prototypes without supervision, and we demonstrate the benefits of our approach in two case-studies. Our findings show that dataset comparison extends dataset inspection and we hope to encourage more works in this direction. Code and usage instructions available at https://github.com/Nanne/ProtoSim

Authors:Taegyeong Lee, Jeonghun Kang, Hyeonyu Kim, Taehwan Kim

Abstract: Representing wild sounds as images is an important but challenging task due to the lack of paired datasets between sound and images and the significant differences in the characteristics of these two modalities. Previous studies have focused on generating images from sound in limited categories or music. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate images from in-the-wild sounds. First, we convert sound into text using audio captioning. Second, we propose audio attention and sentence attention to represent the rich characteristics of sound and visualize the sound. Lastly, we propose a direct sound optimization with CLIPscore and AudioCLIP and generate images with a diffusion-based model. In experiments, it shows that our model is able to generate high quality images from wild sounds and outperforms baselines in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on wild audio datasets.

Authors:Ruojin Cai, Joseph Tung, Qianqian Wang, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely

Abstract: We consider the visual disambiguation task of determining whether a pair of visually similar images depict the same or distinct 3D surfaces (e.g., the same or opposite sides of a symmetric building). Illusory image matches, where two images observe distinct but visually similar 3D surfaces, can be challenging for humans to differentiate, and can also lead 3D reconstruction algorithms to produce erroneous results. We propose a learning-based approach to visual disambiguation, formulating it as a binary classification task on image pairs. To that end, we introduce a new dataset for this problem, Doppelgangers, which includes image pairs of similar structures with ground truth labels. We also design a network architecture that takes the spatial distribution of local keypoints and matches as input, allowing for better reasoning about both local and global cues. Our evaluation shows that our method can distinguish illusory matches in difficult cases, and can be integrated into SfM pipelines to produce correct, disambiguated 3D reconstructions. See our project page for our code, datasets, and more results: http://doppelgangers-3d.github.io/.

Authors:Yue Xu, Yong-Lu Li, Zhemin Huang, Michael Xu Liu, Cewu Lu, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang

Abstract: With the surge in attention to Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction (Ego-HOI), large-scale datasets such as Ego4D and EPIC-KITCHENS have been proposed. However, most current research is built on resources derived from third-person video action recognition. This inherent domain gap between first- and third-person action videos, which have not been adequately addressed before, makes current Ego-HOI suboptimal. This paper rethinks and proposes a new framework as an infrastructure to advance Ego-HOI recognition by Probing, Curation and Adaption (EgoPCA). We contribute comprehensive pre-train sets, balanced test sets and a new baseline, which are complete with a training-finetuning strategy. With our new framework, we not only achieve state-of-the-art performance on Ego-HOI benchmarks but also build several new and effective mechanisms and settings to advance further research. We believe our data and the findings will pave a new way for Ego-HOI understanding. Code and data are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/ego_pca

Authors:Vimal K B, Saketh Bachu, Tanmay Garg, Niveditha Lakshmi Narasimhan, Raghavan Konuru, Vineeth N Balasubramanian

Abstract: Estimating the transferability of publicly available pretrained models to a target task has assumed an important place for transfer learning tasks in recent years. Existing efforts propose metrics that allow a user to choose one model from a pool of pre-trained models without having to fine-tune each model individually and identify one explicitly. With the growth in the number of available pre-trained models and the popularity of model ensembles, it also becomes essential to study the transferability of multiple-source models for a given target task. The few existing efforts study transferability in such multi-source ensemble settings using just the outputs of the classification layer and neglect possible domain or task mismatch. Moreover, they overlook the most important factor while selecting the source models, viz., the cohesiveness factor between them, which can impact the performance and confidence in the prediction of the ensemble. To address these gaps, we propose a novel Optimal tranSport-based suBmOdular tRaNsferability metric (OSBORN) to estimate the transferability of an ensemble of models to a downstream task. OSBORN collectively accounts for image domain difference, task difference, and cohesiveness of models in the ensemble to provide reliable estimates of transferability. We gauge the performance of OSBORN on both image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. Our setup includes 28 source datasets, 11 target datasets, 5 model architectures, and 2 pre-training methods. We benchmark our method against current state-of-the-art metrics MS-LEEP and E-LEEP, and outperform them consistently using the proposed approach.

Authors:Haonan Qiu, Zhaoxi Chen, Yuming Jiang, Hang Zhou, Xiangyu Fan, Lei Yang, Wayne Wu, Ziwei Liu

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed great progress in creating vivid audio-driven portraits from monocular videos. However, how to seamlessly adapt the created video avatars to other scenarios with different backgrounds and lighting conditions remains unsolved. On the other hand, existing relighting studies mostly rely on dynamically lighted or multi-view data, which are too expensive for creating video portraits. To bridge this gap, we propose ReliTalk, a novel framework for relightable audio-driven talking portrait generation from monocular videos. Our key insight is to decompose the portrait's reflectance from implicitly learned audio-driven facial normals and images. Specifically, we involve 3D facial priors derived from audio features to predict delicate normal maps through implicit functions. These initially predicted normals then take a crucial part in reflectance decomposition by dynamically estimating the lighting condition of the given video. Moreover, the stereoscopic face representation is refined using the identity-consistent loss under simulated multiple lighting conditions, addressing the ill-posed problem caused by limited views available from a single monocular video. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our proposed framework on both real and synthetic datasets. Our code is released in https://github.com/arthur-qiu/ReliTalk.

Authors:Youmin Zhang, Fabio Tosi, Stefano Mattoccia, Matteo Poggi

Abstract: Neural implicit representations have recently demonstrated compelling results on dense Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) but suffer from the accumulation of errors in camera tracking and distortion in the reconstruction. Purposely, we present GO-SLAM, a deep-learning-based dense visual SLAM framework globally optimizing poses and 3D reconstruction in real-time. Robust pose estimation is at its core, supported by efficient loop closing and online full bundle adjustment, which optimize per frame by utilizing the learned global geometry of the complete history of input frames. Simultaneously, we update the implicit and continuous surface representation on-the-fly to ensure global consistency of 3D reconstruction. Results on various synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that GO-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art approaches at tracking robustness and reconstruction accuracy. Furthermore, GO-SLAM is versatile and can run with monocular, stereo, and RGB-D input.

Authors:Tin Lai

Abstract: Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have facilitated its widespread adoption in primary medical services, addressing the demand-supply imbalance in healthcare. Vision Transformers (ViT) have emerged as state-of-the-art computer vision models, benefiting from self-attention modules. However, compared to traditional machine-learning approaches, deep-learning models are complex and are often treated as a "black box" that can cause uncertainty regarding how they operate. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) refers to methods that explain and interpret machine learning models' inner workings and how they come to decisions, which is especially important in the medical domain to guide the healthcare decision-making process. This review summarises recent ViT advancements and interpretative approaches to understanding the decision-making process of ViT, enabling transparency in medical diagnosis applications.

Authors:Lulin Zhang, Ewelina Rupnik

Abstract: Digital surface model generation using traditional multi-view stereo matching (MVS) performs poorly over non-Lambertian surfaces, with asynchronous acquisitions, or at discontinuities. Neural radiance fields (NeRF) offer a new paradigm for reconstructing surface geometries using continuous volumetric representation. NeRF is self-supervised, does not require ground truth geometry for training, and provides an elegant way to include in its representation physical parameters about the scene, thus potentially remedying the challenging scenarios where MVS fails. However, NeRF and its variants require many views to produce convincing scene's geometries which in earth observation satellite imaging is rare. In this paper we present SparseSat-NeRF (SpS-NeRF) - an extension of Sat-NeRF adapted to sparse satellite views. SpS-NeRF employs dense depth supervision guided by crosscorrelation similarity metric provided by traditional semi-global MVS matching. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on stereo and tri-stereo Pleiades 1B/WorldView-3 images, and compare against NeRF and Sat-NeRF. The code is available at https://github.com/LulinZhang/SpS-NeRF

Authors:Charles Laroche, Andrés Almansa, Eva Coupete

Abstract: Using diffusion models to solve inverse problems is a growing field of research. Current methods assume the degradation to be known and provide impressive results in terms of restoration quality and diversity. In this work, we leverage the efficiency of those models to jointly estimate the restored image and unknown parameters of the degradation model. In particular, we designed an algorithm based on the well-known Expectation-Minimization (EM) estimation method and diffusion models. Our method alternates between approximating the expected log-likelihood of the inverse problem using samples drawn from a diffusion model and a maximization step to estimate unknown model parameters. For the maximization step, we also introduce a novel blur kernel regularization based on a Plug \& Play denoiser. Diffusion models are long to run, thus we provide a fast version of our algorithm. Extensive experiments on blind image deblurring demonstrate the effectiveness of our method when compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.

Authors:Minghao Zhu, Xiao Lin, Ronghao Dang, Chengju Liu, Qijun Chen

Abstract: As the most essential property in a video, motion information is critical to a robust and generalized video representation. To inject motion dynamics, recent works have adopted frame difference as the source of motion information in video contrastive learning, considering the trade-off between quality and cost. However, existing works align motion features at the instance level, which suffers from spatial and temporal weak alignment across modalities. In this paper, we present a \textbf{Fi}ne-grained \textbf{M}otion \textbf{A}lignment (FIMA) framework, capable of introducing well-aligned and significant motion information. Specifically, we first develop a dense contrastive learning framework in the spatiotemporal domain to generate pixel-level motion supervision. Then, we design a motion decoder and a foreground sampling strategy to eliminate the weak alignments in terms of time and space. Moreover, a frame-level motion contrastive loss is presented to improve the temporal diversity of the motion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the representations learned by FIMA possess great motion-awareness capabilities and achieve state-of-the-art or competitive results on downstream tasks across UCF101, HMDB51, and Diving48 datasets. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ZMHH-H/FIMA}.

Authors:Shaohua Pan, Qi Ma, Xinyu Yi, Weifeng Hu, Xiong Wang, Xingkang Zhou, Jijunnan Li, Feng Xu

Abstract: Either RGB images or inertial signals have been used for the task of motion capture (mocap), but combining them together is a new and interesting topic. We believe that the combination is complementary and able to solve the inherent difficulties of using one modality input, including occlusions, extreme lighting/texture, and out-of-view for visual mocap and global drifts for inertial mocap. To this end, we propose a method that fuses monocular images and sparse IMUs for real-time human motion capture. Our method contains a dual coordinate strategy to fully explore the IMU signals with different goals in motion capture. To be specific, besides one branch transforming the IMU signals to the camera coordinate system to combine with the image information, there is another branch to learn from the IMU signals in the body root coordinate system to better estimate body poses. Furthermore, a hidden state feedback mechanism is proposed for both two branches to compensate for their own drawbacks in extreme input cases. Thus our method can easily switch between the two kinds of signals or combine them in different cases to achieve a robust mocap. %The two divided parts can help each other for better mocap results under different conditions. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that by delicately designing the fusion method, our technique significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art vision, IMU, and combined methods on both global orientation and local pose estimation. Our codes are available for research at https://shaohua-pan.github.io/robustcap-page/.

Authors:Wenxuan Zhang, Xuechao Zou, Li Wu, Jianqiang Huang, Xiaoying Wang

Abstract: Spatiotemporal prediction aims to generate future sequences by paradigms learned from historical contexts. It holds significant importance in numerous domains, including traffic flow prediction and weather forecasting. However, existing methods face challenges in handling spatiotemporal correlations, as they commonly adopt encoder and decoder architectures with identical receptive fields, which adversely affects prediction accuracy. This paper proposes an Asymmetric Receptive Field Autoencoder (ARFA) model to address this issue. Specifically, we design corresponding sizes of receptive field modules tailored to the distinct functionalities of the encoder and decoder. In the encoder, we introduce a large kernel module for global spatiotemporal feature extraction. In the decoder, we develop a small kernel module for local spatiotemporal information reconstruction. To address the scarcity of meteorological prediction data, we constructed the RainBench, a large-scale radar echo dataset specific to the unique precipitation characteristics of inland regions in China for precipitation prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that ARFA achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance on two mainstream spatiotemporal prediction datasets and our RainBench dataset, affirming the effectiveness of our approach. This work not only explores a novel method from the perspective of receptive fields but also provides data support for precipitation prediction, thereby advancing future research in spatiotemporal prediction.

Authors:Amin Manafi Soltan Ahmadi, Samaneh Hoseini Semnani

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a human trajectory prediction model that combines a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network with an attention mechanism. To do that, we use attention scores to determine which parts of the input data the model should focus on when making predictions. Attention scores are calculated for each input feature, with a higher score indicating the greater significance of that feature in predicting the output. Initially, these scores are determined for the target human position, velocity, and their neighboring individual's positions and velocities. By using attention scores, our model can prioritize the most relevant information in the input data and make more accurate predictions. We extract attention scores from our attention mechanism and integrate them into the trajectory prediction module to predict human future trajectories. To achieve this, we introduce a new neural layer that processes attention scores after extracting them and concatenates them with positional information. We evaluate our approach on the publicly available ETH and UCY datasets and measure its performance using the final displacement error (FDE) and average displacement error (ADE) metrics. We show that our modified algorithm performs better than the Social LSTM in predicting the future trajectory of pedestrians in crowded spaces. Specifically, our model achieves an improvement of 6.2% in ADE and 6.3% in FDE compared to the Social LSTM results in the literature.

Authors:Jianqiao Zheng, Xueqian Li, Sameera Ramasinghe, Simon Lucey

Abstract: End-to-end trained per-point embeddings are an essential ingredient of any state-of-the-art 3D point cloud processing such as detection or alignment. Methods like PointNet, or the more recent point cloud transformer -- and its variants -- all employ learned per-point embeddings. Despite impressive performance, such approaches are sensitive to out-of-distribution (OOD) noise and outliers. In this paper, we explore the role of an analytical per-point embedding based on the criterion of bandwidth. The concept of bandwidth enables us to draw connections with an alternate per-point embedding -- positional embedding, particularly random Fourier features. We present compelling robust results across downstream tasks such as point cloud classification and registration with several categories of OOD noise.

Authors:Lingxiao Huang, Jung-Hsuan Wu, Chiching Wei, Wilson Li

Abstract: The recognition of information in floor plan data requires the use of detection and segmentation models. However, relying on several single-task models can result in ineffective utilization of relevant information when there are multiple tasks present simultaneously. To address this challenge, we introduce MuraNet, an attention-based multi-task model for segmentation and detection tasks in floor plan data. In MuraNet, we adopt a unified encoder called MURA as the backbone with two separated branches: an enhanced segmentation decoder branch and a decoupled detection head branch based on YOLOX, for segmentation and detection tasks respectively. The architecture of MuraNet is designed to leverage the fact that walls, doors, and windows usually constitute the primary structure of a floor plan's architecture. By jointly training the model on both detection and segmentation tasks, we believe MuraNet can effectively extract and utilize relevant features for both tasks. Our experiments on the CubiCasa5k public dataset show that MuraNet improves convergence speed during training compared to single-task models like U-Net and YOLOv3. Moreover, we observe improvements in the average AP and IoU in detection and segmentation tasks, respectively.Our ablation experiments demonstrate that the attention-based unified backbone of MuraNet achieves better feature extraction in floor plan recognition tasks, and the use of decoupled multi-head branches for different tasks further improves model performance. We believe that our proposed MuraNet model can address the disadvantages of single-task models and improve the accuracy and efficiency of floor plan data recognition.

Authors:Haodong Chen, Vera Chung, Li Tan, Xiaoming Chen

Abstract: Event cameras are sensors inspired by biological systems that specialize in capturing changes in brightness. These emerging cameras offer many advantages over conventional frame-based cameras, including high dynamic range, high frame rates, and extremely low power consumption. Due to these advantages, event cameras have increasingly been adapted in various fields, such as frame interpolation, semantic segmentation, odometry, and SLAM. However, their application in 3D reconstruction for VR applications is underexplored. Previous methods in this field mainly focused on 3D reconstruction through depth map estimation. Methods that produce dense 3D reconstruction generally require multiple cameras, while methods that utilize a single event camera can only produce a semi-dense result. Other single-camera methods that can produce dense 3D reconstruction rely on creating a pipeline that either incorporates the aforementioned methods or other existing Structure from Motion (SfM) or Multi-view Stereo (MVS) methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for solving dense 3D reconstruction using only a single event camera. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first attempt in this regard. Our preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed method can produce visually distinguishable dense 3D reconstructions directly without requiring pipelines like those used by existing methods. Additionally, we have created a synthetic dataset with $39,739$ object scans using an event camera simulator. This dataset will help accelerate other relevant research in this field.

Authors:Xin Li, Wenqing Chu, Ye Wu, Weihang Yuan, Fanglong Liu, Qi Zhang, Fu Li, Haocheng Feng, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang

Abstract: In this paper, we present VideoGen, a text-to-video generation approach, which can generate a high-definition video with high frame fidelity and strong temporal consistency using reference-guided latent diffusion. We leverage an off-the-shelf text-to-image generation model, e.g., Stable Diffusion, to generate an image with high content quality from the text prompt, as a reference image to guide video generation. Then, we introduce an efficient cascaded latent diffusion module conditioned on both the reference image and the text prompt, for generating latent video representations, followed by a flow-based temporal upsampling step to improve the temporal resolution. Finally, we map latent video representations into a high-definition video through an enhanced video decoder. During training, we use the first frame of a ground-truth video as the reference image for training the cascaded latent diffusion module. The main characterises of our approach include: the reference image generated by the text-to-image model improves the visual fidelity; using it as the condition makes the diffusion model focus more on learning the video dynamics; and the video decoder is trained over unlabeled video data, thus benefiting from high-quality easily-available videos. VideoGen sets a new state-of-the-art in text-to-video generation in terms of both qualitative and quantitative evaluation.

Authors:Yifan Pu, Yizeng Han, Yulin Wang, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Gao Huang

Abstract: Fine-grained image recognition is a longstanding computer vision challenge that focuses on differentiating objects belonging to multiple subordinate categories within the same meta-category. Since images belonging to the same meta-category usually share similar visual appearances, mining discriminative visual cues is the key to distinguishing fine-grained categories. Although commonly used image-level data augmentation techniques have achieved great success in generic image classification problems, they are rarely applied in fine-grained scenarios, because their random editing-region behavior is prone to destroy the discriminative visual cues residing in the subtle regions. In this paper, we propose diversifying the training data at the feature-level to alleviate the discriminative region loss problem. Specifically, we produce diversified augmented samples by translating image features along semantically meaningful directions. The semantic directions are estimated with a covariance prediction network, which predicts a sample-wise covariance matrix to adapt to the large intra-class variation inherent in fine-grained images. Furthermore, the covariance prediction network is jointly optimized with the classification network in a meta-learning manner to alleviate the degenerate solution problem. Experiments on four competitive fine-grained recognition benchmarks (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars, FGVC Aircrafts, NABirds) demonstrate that our method significantly improves the generalization performance on several popular classification networks (e.g., ResNets, DenseNets, EfficientNets, RegNets and ViT). Combined with a recently proposed method, our semantic data augmentation approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CUB-200-2011 dataset. The source code will be released.

Authors:Hayato Mitani, Akisato Kimura, Seiichi Uchida

Abstract: Scene text removal (STR) is the image transformation task to remove text regions in scene images. The conventional STR methods remove all scene text. This means that the existing methods cannot select text to be removed. In this paper, we propose a novel task setting named selective scene text removal (SSTR) that removes only target words specified by the user. Although SSTR is a more complex task than STR, the proposed multi-module structure enables efficient training for SSTR. Experimental results show that the proposed method can remove target words as expected.

Authors:Felipe Cadar, Welerson, Vaishnavi Kanagasabapathi, Guilherme Potje, Renato Martins, Erickson R. Nascimento

Abstract: We propose a novel learned keypoint detection method to increase the number of correct matches for the task of non-rigid image correspondence. By leveraging true correspondences acquired by matching annotated image pairs with a specified descriptor extractor, we train an end-to-end convolutional neural network (CNN) to find keypoint locations that are more appropriate to the considered descriptor. For that, we apply geometric and photometric warpings to images to generate a supervisory signal, allowing the optimization of the detector. Experiments demonstrate that our method enhances the Mean Matching Accuracy of numerous descriptors when used in conjunction with our detection method, while outperforming the state-of-the-art keypoint detectors on real images of non-rigid objects by 20 p.p. We also apply our method on the complex real-world task of object retrieval where our detector performs on par with the finest keypoint detectors currently available for this task. The source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/verlab/LearningToDetect_PRL_2023

Authors:Nicolás Gaggion, Rodrigo Echeveste, Lucas Mansilla, Diego H. Milone, Enzo Ferrante

Abstract: It has recently been shown that deep learning models for anatomical segmentation in medical images can exhibit biases against certain sub-populations defined in terms of protected attributes like sex or ethnicity. In this context, auditing fairness of deep segmentation models becomes crucial. However, such audit process generally requires access to ground-truth segmentation masks for the target population, which may not always be available, especially when going from development to deployment. Here we propose a new method to anticipate model biases in biomedical image segmentation in the absence of ground-truth annotations. Our unsupervised bias discovery method leverages the reverse classification accuracy framework to estimate segmentation quality. Through numerical experiments in synthetic and realistic scenarios we show how our method is able to successfully anticipate fairness issues in the absence of ground-truth labels, constituting a novel and valuable tool in this field.

Authors:Johannes Flotzinger, Philipp J. Rösch, Thomas Braml

Abstract: Reliably identifying reinforced concrete defects (RCDs)plays a crucial role in assessing the structural integrity, traffic safety, and long-term durability of concrete bridges, which represent the most common bridge type worldwide. Nevertheless, available datasets for the recognition of RCDs are small in terms of size and class variety, which questions their usability in real-world scenarios and their role as a benchmark. Our contribution to this problem is "dacl10k", an exceptionally diverse RCD dataset for multi-label semantic segmentation comprising 9,920 images deriving from real-world bridge inspections. dacl10k distinguishes 12 damage classes as well as 6 bridge components that play a key role in the building assessment and recommending actions, such as restoration works, traffic load limitations or bridge closures. In addition, we examine baseline models for dacl10k which are subsequently evaluated. The best model achieves a mean intersection-over-union of 0.42 on the test set. dacl10k, along with our baselines, will be openly accessible to researchers and practitioners, representing the currently biggest dataset regarding number of images and class diversity for semantic segmentation in the bridge inspection domain.

Authors:Pedro Conde, Rui L. Lopes, Cristiano Premebida

Abstract: The proliferation of Deep Neural Networks has resulted in machine learning systems becoming increasingly more present in various real-world applications. Consequently, there is a growing demand for highly reliable models in these domains, making the problem of uncertainty calibration pivotal, when considering the future of deep learning. This is especially true when considering object detection systems, that are commonly present in safety-critical application such as autonomous driving and robotics. For this reason, this work presents a novel theoretical and practical framework to evaluate object detection systems in the context of uncertainty calibration. The robustness of the proposed uncertainty calibration metrics is shown through a series of representative experiments. Code for the proposed uncertainty calibration metrics at: https://github.com/pedrormconde/Uncertainty_Calibration_Object_Detection.

Authors:Jack Ma, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu

Abstract: Dietary assessment is essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Automatic image-based dietary assessment is a growing field of research due to the increasing prevalence of image capturing devices (e.g. mobile phones). In this work, we estimate food energy from a single monocular image, a difficult task due to the limited hard-to-extract amount of energy information present in an image. To do so, we employ an improved encoder-decoder framework for energy estimation; the encoder transforms the image into a representation embedded with food energy information in an easier-to-extract format, which the decoder then extracts the energy information from. To implement our method, we compile a high-quality food image dataset verified by registered dietitians containing eating scene images, food-item segmentation masks, and ground truth calorie values. Our method improves upon previous caloric estimation methods by over 10\% and 30 kCal in terms of MAPE and MAE respectively.

Authors:Qun Zheng, Xihong Yang, Siwei Wang, Xinru An, Qi Liu

Abstract: In unsupervised scenarios, deep contrastive multi-view clustering (DCMVC) is becoming a hot research spot, which aims to mine the potential relationships between different views. Most existing DCMVC algorithms focus on exploring the consistency information for the deep semantic features, while ignoring the diverse information on shallow features. To fill this gap, we propose a novel multi-view clustering network termed CodingNet to explore the diverse and consistent information simultaneously in this paper. Specifically, instead of utilizing the conventional auto-encoder, we design an asymmetric structure network to extract shallow and deep features separately. Then, by aligning the similarity matrix on the shallow feature to the zero matrix, we ensure the diversity for the shallow features, thus offering a better description of multi-view data. Moreover, we propose a dual contrastive mechanism that maintains consistency for deep features at both view-feature and pseudo-label levels. Our framework's efficacy is validated through extensive experiments on six widely used benchmark datasets, outperforming most state-of-the-art multi-view clustering algorithms.

Authors:Fanyi Wang, Pin Cao, Yihui Zhang, Haotian Hu, Yongying Yang

Abstract: In the procedure of surface defects detection for large-aperture aspherical optical elements, it is of vital significance to adjust the optical axis of the element to be coaxial with the mechanical spin axis accurately. Therefore, a machine vision method for eccentric error correction is proposed in this paper. Focusing on the severe defocus blur of reference crosshair image caused by the imaging characteristic of the aspherical optical element, which may lead to the failure of correction, an Adaptive Enhancement Algorithm (AEA) is proposed to strengthen the crosshair image. AEA is consisted of existed Guided Filter Dark Channel Dehazing Algorithm (GFA) and proposed lightweight Multi-scale Densely Connected Network (MDC-Net). The enhancement effect of GFA is excellent but time-consuming, and the enhancement effect of MDC-Net is slightly inferior but strongly real-time. As AEA will be executed dozens of times during each correction procedure, its real-time performance is very important. Therefore, by setting the empirical threshold of definition evaluation function SMD2, GFA and MDC-Net are respectively applied to highly and slightly blurred crosshair images so as to ensure the enhancement effect while saving as much time as possible. AEA has certain robustness in time-consuming performance, which takes an average time of 0.2721s and 0.0963s to execute GFA and MDC-Net separately on ten 200pixels 200pixels Region of Interest (ROI) images with different degrees of blur. And the eccentricity error can be reduced to within 10um by our method.

Authors:Youhong Wang, Yunji Liang, Hao Xu, Shaohui Jiao, Hongkai Yu

Abstract: Recently, self-supervised monocular depth estimation has gained popularity with numerous applications in autonomous driving and robotics. However, existing solutions primarily seek to estimate depth from immediate visual features, and struggle to recover fine-grained scene details with limited generalization. In this paper, we introduce SQLdepth, a novel approach that can effectively learn fine-grained scene structures from motion. In SQLdepth, we propose a novel Self Query Layer (SQL) to build a self-cost volume and infer depth from it, rather than inferring depth from feature maps. The self-cost volume implicitly captures the intrinsic geometry of the scene within a single frame. Each individual slice of the volume signifies the relative distances between points and objects within a latent space. Ultimately, this volume is compressed to the depth map via a novel decoding approach. Experimental results on KITTI and Cityscapes show that our method attains remarkable state-of-the-art performance (AbsRel = $0.082$ on KITTI, $0.052$ on KITTI with improved ground-truth and $0.106$ on Cityscapes), achieves $9.9\%$, $5.5\%$ and $4.5\%$ error reduction from the previous best. In addition, our approach showcases reduced training complexity, computational efficiency, improved generalization, and the ability to recover fine-grained scene details. Moreover, the self-supervised pre-trained and metric fine-tuned SQLdepth can surpass existing supervised methods by significant margins (AbsRel = $0.043$, $14\%$ error reduction). self-matching-oriented relative distance querying in SQL improves the robustness and zero-shot generalization capability of SQLdepth. Code and the pre-trained weights will be publicly available. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/hisfog/SQLdepth-Impl}{https://github.com/hisfog/SQLdepth-Impl}.

Authors:Shiqi Yang, Yaxing Wang, Joost van de Weijer, Luis Herranz, Shangling Jui, Jian Yang

Abstract: Domain adaptation (DA) aims to alleviate the domain shift between source domain and target domain. Most DA methods require access to the source data, but often that is not possible (e.g. due to data privacy or intellectual property). In this paper, we address the challenging source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) problem, where the source pretrained model is adapted to the target domain in the absence of source data. Our method is based on the observation that target data, which might not align with the source domain classifier, still forms clear clusters. We capture this intrinsic structure by defining local affinity of the target data, and encourage label consistency among data with high local affinity. We observe that higher affinity should be assigned to reciprocal neighbors. To aggregate information with more context, we consider expanded neighborhoods with small affinity values. Furthermore, we consider the density around each target sample, which can alleviate the negative impact of potential outliers. In the experimental results we verify that the inherent structure of the target features is an important source of information for domain adaptation. We demonstrate that this local structure can be efficiently captured by considering the local neighbors, the reciprocal neighbors, and the expanded neighborhood. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on several 2D image and 3D point cloud recognition datasets.

Authors:Joana Pimenta, Iurii Medvedev, Nuno Gonçalves

Abstract: The increase in security concerns due to technological advancements has led to the popularity of biometric approaches that utilize physiological or behavioral characteristics for enhanced recognition. Face recognition systems (FRSs) have become prevalent, but they are still vulnerable to image manipulation techniques such as face morphing attacks. This study investigates the impact of the alignment settings of input images on deep learning face morphing detection performance. We analyze the interconnections between the face contour and image context and suggest optimal alignment conditions for face morphing detection.

Authors:Diego Marcondes, Junior Barrera

Abstract: A classical approach to designing binary image operators is Mathematical Morphology (MM). We propose the Discrete Morphological Neural Networks (DMNN) for binary image analysis to represent W-operators and estimate them via machine learning. A DMNN architecture, which is represented by a Morphological Computational Graph, is designed as in the classical heuristic design of morphological operators, in which the designer should combine a set of MM operators and Boolean operations based on prior information and theoretical knowledge. Then, once the architecture is fixed, instead of adjusting its parameters (i.e., structural elements or maximal intervals) by hand, we propose a lattice gradient descent algorithm (LGDA) to train these parameters based on a sample of input and output images under the usual machine learning approach. We also propose a stochastic version of the LGDA that is more efficient, is scalable and can obtain small error in practical problems. The class represented by a DMNN can be quite general or specialized according to expected properties of the target operator, i.e., prior information, and the semantic expressed by algebraic properties of classes of operators is a differential relative to other methods. The main contribution of this paper is the merger of the two main paradigms for designing morphological operators: classical heuristic design and automatic design via machine learning. Thus, conciliating classical heuristic morphological operator design with machine learning. We apply the DMNN to recognize the boundary of digits with noise, and we discuss many topics for future research.

Authors:Alex Levering, Diego Marcos, Devis Tuia

Abstract: In this paper we explore deep learning models to monitor longitudinal liveability changes in Dutch cities at the neighbourhood level. Our liveability reference data is defined by a country-wise yearly survey based on a set of indicators combined into a liveability score, the Leefbaarometer. We pair this reference data with yearly-available high-resolution aerial images, which creates yearly timesteps at which liveability can be monitored. We deploy a convolutional neural network trained on an aerial image from 2016 and the Leefbaarometer score to predict liveability at new timesteps 2012 and 2020. The results in a city used for training (Amsterdam) and one never seen during training (Eindhoven) show some trends which are difficult to interpret, especially in light of the differences in image acquisitions at the different time steps. This demonstrates the complexity of liveability monitoring across time periods and the necessity for more sophisticated methods compensating for changes unrelated to liveability dynamics.

Authors:Haozhe Xie, Zhaoxi Chen, Fangzhou Hong, Ziwei Liu

Abstract: In recent years, extensive research has focused on 3D natural scene generation, but the domain of 3D city generation has not received as much exploration. This is due to the greater challenges posed by 3D city generation, mainly because humans are more sensitive to structural distortions in urban environments. Additionally, generating 3D cities is more complex than 3D natural scenes since buildings, as objects of the same class, exhibit a wider range of appearances compared to the relatively consistent appearance of objects like trees in natural scenes. To address these challenges, we propose CityDreamer, a compositional generative model designed specifically for unbounded 3D cities, which separates the generation of building instances from other background objects, such as roads, green lands, and water areas, into distinct modules. Furthermore, we construct two datasets, OSM and GoogleEarth, containing a vast amount of real-world city imagery to enhance the realism of the generated 3D cities both in their layouts and appearances. Through extensive experiments, CityDreamer has proven its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in generating a wide range of lifelike 3D cities.

Authors:K J Joseph, Prateksha Udhayanan, Tripti Shukla, Aishwarya Agarwal, Srikrishna Karanam, Koustava Goswami, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan

Abstract: Recent advances in text-guided image synthesis has dramatically changed how creative professionals generate artistic and aesthetically pleasing visual assets. To fully support such creative endeavors, the process should possess the ability to: 1) iteratively edit the generations and 2) control the spatial reach of desired changes (global, local or anything in between). We formalize this pragmatic problem setting as Iterative Multi-granular Editing. While there has been substantial progress with diffusion-based models for image synthesis and editing, they are all one shot (i.e., no iterative editing capabilities) and do not naturally yield multi-granular control (i.e., covering the full spectrum of local-to-global edits). To overcome these drawbacks, we propose EMILIE: Iterative Multi-granular Image Editor. EMILIE introduces a novel latent iteration strategy, which re-purposes a pre-trained diffusion model to facilitate iterative editing. This is complemented by a gradient control operation for multi-granular control. We introduce a new benchmark dataset to evaluate our newly proposed setting. We conduct exhaustive quantitatively and qualitatively evaluation against recent state-of-the-art approaches adapted to our task, to being out the mettle of EMILIE. We hope our work would attract attention to this newly identified, pragmatic problem setting.

Authors:Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Xiangyang Zhu, Yiwen Tang, Xianzheng Ma, Jiaming Han, Kexin Chen, Peng Gao, Xianzhi Li, Hongsheng Li, Pheng-Ann Heng

Abstract: We introduce Point-Bind, a 3D multi-modality model aligning point clouds with 2D image, language, audio, and video. Guided by ImageBind, we construct a joint embedding space between 3D and multi-modalities, enabling many promising applications, e.g., any-to-3D generation, 3D embedding arithmetic, and 3D open-world understanding. On top of this, we further present Point-LLM, the first 3D large language model (LLM) following 3D multi-modal instructions. By parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques, Point-LLM injects the semantics of Point-Bind into pre-trained LLMs, e.g., LLaMA, which requires no 3D instruction data, but exhibits superior 3D and multi-modal question-answering capacity. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for extending 3D point clouds to multi-modality applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Point-Bind_Point-LLM.

Authors:Zhening Huang, Xiaoyang Wu, Xi Chen, Hengshuang Zhao, Lei Zhu, Joan Lasenby

Abstract: Current 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding methods mostly utilize well-aligned 2D images as the bridge to learn 3D features with language. However, applying these approaches becomes challenging in scenarios where 2D images are absent. In this work, we introduce a completely new pipeline, namely, OpenIns3D, which requires no 2D image inputs, for 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding at the instance level. The OpenIns3D framework employs a "Mask-Snap-Lookup" scheme. The "Mask" module learns class-agnostic mask proposals in 3D point clouds. The "Snap" module generates synthetic scene-level images at multiple scales and leverages 2D vision language models to extract interesting objects. The "Lookup" module searches through the outcomes of "Snap" with the help of Mask2Pixel maps, which contain the precise correspondence between 3D masks and synthetic images, to assign category names to the proposed masks. This 2D input-free, easy-to-train, and flexible approach achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of indoor and outdoor datasets with a large margin. Furthermore, OpenIns3D allows for effortless switching of 2D detectors without re-training. When integrated with state-of-the-art 2D open-world models such as ODISE and GroundingDINO, superb results are observed on open-vocabulary instance segmentation. When integrated with LLM-powered 2D models like LISA, it demonstrates a remarkable capacity to process highly complex text queries, including those that require intricate reasoning and world knowledge. The code and model will be made publicly available.

Authors:Qi Chen, Wei Huang, Yueyi Zhang, Zhiwei Xiong

Abstract: The development of learning-based methods has greatly improved the detection of synapses from electron microscopy (EM) images. However, training a model for each dataset is time-consuming and requires extensive annotations. Additionally, it is difficult to apply a learned model to data from different brain regions due to variations in data distributions. In this paper, we present AdaSyn, a two-stage segmentation-based framework for domain adaptive synapse detection with weak point annotations. In the first stage, we address the detection problem by utilizing a segmentation-based pipeline to obtain synaptic instance masks. In the second stage, we improve model generalizability on target data by regenerating square masks to get high-quality pseudo labels. Benefiting from our high-accuracy detection results, we introduce the distance nearest principle to match paired pre-synapses and post-synapses. In the WASPSYN challenge at ISBI 2023, our method ranks the 1st place.

Authors:Yupan Huang, Zaiqiao Meng, Fangyu Liu, Yixuan Su, Nigel Collier, Yutong Lu

Abstract: Large language models exhibit enhanced zero-shot performance on various tasks when fine-tuned with instruction-following data. Multimodal instruction-following models extend these capabilities by integrating both text and images. However, existing models such as MiniGPT-4 face challenges in maintaining dialogue coherence in scenarios involving multiple images. A primary reason is the lack of a specialized dataset for this critical application. To bridge these gaps, we present SparklesChat, a multimodal instruction-following model for open-ended dialogues across multiple images. To support the training, we introduce SparklesDialogue, the first machine-generated dialogue dataset tailored for word-level interleaved multi-image and text interactions. Furthermore, we construct SparklesEval, a GPT-assisted benchmark for quantitatively assessing a model's conversational competence across multiple images and dialogue turns. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of SparklesChat in understanding and reasoning across multiple images and dialogue turns. Specifically, SparklesChat outperformed MiniGPT-4 on established vision-and-language benchmarks, including the BISON binary image selection task and the NLVR2 visual reasoning task. Moreover, SparklesChat scored 8.56 out of 10 on SparklesEval, substantially exceeding MiniGPT-4's score of 3.91 and nearing GPT-4's score of 9.26. Qualitative evaluations further demonstrate SparklesChat's generality in handling real-world applications. All resources will be available at https://github.com/HYPJUDY/Sparkles.

Authors:Yiming Zhang, Tianang Leng, Kun Han, Xiaohui Xie

Abstract: While the Segment Anything Model (SAM) excels in semantic segmentation for general-purpose images, its performance significantly deteriorates when applied to medical images, primarily attributable to insufficient representation of medical images in its training dataset. Nonetheless, gathering comprehensive datasets and training models that are universally applicable is particularly challenging due to the long-tail problem common in medical images. To address this gap, here we present a Self-Sampling Meta SAM (SSM-SAM) framework for few-shot medical image segmentation. Our innovation lies in the design of three key modules: 1) An online fast gradient descent optimizer, further optimized by a meta-learner, which ensures swift and robust adaptation to new tasks. 2) A Self-Sampling module designed to provide well-aligned visual prompts for improved attention allocation; and 3) A robust attention-based decoder specifically designed for medical few-shot learning to capture relationship between different slices. Extensive experiments on a popular abdominal CT dataset and an MRI dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods in few-shot segmentation, with an average improvements of 10.21% and 1.80% in terms of DSC, respectively. In conclusion, we present a novel approach for rapid online adaptation in interactive image segmentation, adapting to a new organ in just 0.83 minutes. Code is publicly available on GitHub upon acceptance.

Authors:Wenjie Ding, Limeng Qiao, Xi Qiu, Chi Zhang

Abstract: Vectorized high-definition map online construction has garnered considerable attention in the field of autonomous driving research. Most existing approaches model changeable map elements using a fixed number of points, or predict local maps in a two-stage autoregressive manner, which may miss essential details and lead to error accumulation. Towards precise map element learning, we propose a simple yet effective architecture named PivotNet, which adopts unified pivot-based map representations and is formulated as a direct set prediction paradigm. Concretely, we first propose a novel Point-to-Line Mask module to encode both the subordinate and geometrical point-line priors in the network. Then, a well-designed Pivot Dynamic Matching module is proposed to model the topology in dynamic point sequences by introducing the concept of sequence matching. Furthermore, to supervise the position and topology of the vectorized point predictions, we propose a Dynamic Vectorized Sequence loss. Extensive experiments and ablations show that PivotNet is remarkably superior to other SOTAs by 5.9 mAP at least. The code will be available soon.

Authors:Ahmed Hatem, Yiming Qian, Yang Wang

Abstract: We present Point-TTA, a novel test-time adaptation framework for point cloud registration (PCR) that improves the generalization and the performance of registration models. While learning-based approaches have achieved impressive progress, generalization to unknown testing environments remains a major challenge due to the variations in 3D scans. Existing methods typically train a generic model and the same trained model is applied on each instance during testing. This could be sub-optimal since it is difficult for the same model to handle all the variations during testing. In this paper, we propose a test-time adaptation approach for PCR. Our model can adapt to unseen distributions at test-time without requiring any prior knowledge of the test data. Concretely, we design three self-supervised auxiliary tasks that are optimized jointly with the primary PCR task. Given a test instance, we adapt our model using these auxiliary tasks and the updated model is used to perform the inference. During training, our model is trained using a meta-auxiliary learning approach, such that the adapted model via auxiliary tasks improves the accuracy of the primary task. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving generalization of point cloud registration and outperforming other state-of-the-art approaches.

Authors:Ahmed Hatem, Yiming Qian, Yang Wang

Abstract: Affordable 3D scanners often produce sparse and non-uniform point clouds that negatively impact downstream applications in robotic systems. While existing point cloud upsampling architectures have demonstrated promising results on standard benchmarks, they tend to experience significant performance drops when the test data have different distributions from the training data. To address this issue, this paper proposes a test-time adaption approach to enhance model generality of point cloud upsampling. The proposed approach leverages meta-learning to explicitly learn network parameters for test-time adaption. Our method does not require any prior information about the test data. During meta-training, the model parameters are learned from a collection of instance-level tasks, each of which consists of a sparse-dense pair of point clouds from the training data. During meta-testing, the trained model is fine-tuned with a few gradient updates to produce a unique set of network parameters for each test instance. The updated model is then used for the final prediction. Our framework is generic and can be applied in a plug-and-play manner with existing backbone networks in point cloud upsampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach improves the performance of state-of-the-art models.

Authors:Andong Lu, Zhang Zhang, Yan Huang, Yifan Zhang, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang, Liang Wang

Abstract: Nighttime person Re-ID (person re-identification in the nighttime) is a very important and challenging task for visual surveillance but it has not been thoroughly investigated. Under the low illumination condition, the performance of person Re-ID methods usually sharply deteriorates. To address the low illumination challenge in nighttime person Re-ID, this paper proposes an Illumination Distillation Framework (IDF), which utilizes illumination enhancement and illumination distillation schemes to promote the learning of Re-ID models. Specifically, IDF consists of a master branch, an illumination enhancement branch, and an illumination distillation module. The master branch is used to extract the features from a nighttime image. The illumination enhancement branch first estimates an enhanced image from the nighttime image using a nonlinear curve mapping method and then extracts the enhanced features. However, nighttime and enhanced features usually contain data noise due to unstable lighting conditions and enhancement failures. To fully exploit the complementary benefits of nighttime and enhanced features while suppressing data noise, we propose an illumination distillation module. In particular, the illumination distillation module fuses the features from two branches through a bottleneck fusion model and then uses the fused features to guide the learning of both branches in a distillation manner. In addition, we build a real-world nighttime person Re-ID dataset, named Night600, which contains 600 identities captured from different viewpoints and nighttime illumination conditions under complex outdoor environments. Experimental results demonstrate that our IDF can achieve state-of-the-art performance on two nighttime person Re-ID datasets (i.e., Night600 and Knight ). We will release our code and dataset at https://github.com/Alexadlu/IDF.

Authors:Shih-Chieh Su

Abstract: Latent diffusers revolutionized the generative AI and inspired creative art. When denoising the latent, the predicted original image at each step collectively animates the formation. However, the animation is limited by the denoising nature of the diffuser, and only renders a sharpening process. This work presents Latent Painter, which uses the latent as the canvas, and the diffuser predictions as the plan, to generate painting animation. Latent Painter also transits one generated image to another, which can happen between images from two different sets of checkpoints.

Authors:Egor Sevriugov, Ivan Oseledets

Abstract: Recent advancements in real image editing have been attributed to the exploration of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) latent space. However, the main challenge of this procedure is GAN inversion, which aims to map the image to the latent space accurately. Existing methods that work on extended latent space $W+$ are unable to achieve low distortion and high editability simultaneously. To address this issue, we propose an approach which works in native latent space $W$ and tunes the generator network to restore missing image details. We introduce a novel regularization strategy with learnable coefficients obtained by training randomized StyleGAN 2 model - WRanGAN. This method outperforms traditional approaches in terms of reconstruction quality and computational efficiency, achieving the lowest distortion with 4 times fewer parameters. Furthermore, we observe a slight improvement in the quality of constructing hyperplanes corresponding to binary image attributes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two complex datasets: Flickr-Faces-HQ and LSUN Church.

Authors:Yichun Shi, Peng Wang, Jianglong Ye, Mai Long, Kejie Li, Xiao Yang

Abstract: We propose MVDream, a multi-view diffusion model that is able to generate geometrically consistent multi-view images from a given text prompt. By leveraging image diffusion models pre-trained on large-scale web datasets and a multi-view dataset rendered from 3D assets, the resulting multi-view diffusion model can achieve both the generalizability of 2D diffusion and the consistency of 3D data. Such a model can thus be applied as a multi-view prior for 3D generation via Score Distillation Sampling, where it greatly improves the stability of existing 2D-lifting methods by solving the 3D consistency problem. Finally, we show that the multi-view diffusion model can also be fine-tuned under a few shot setting for personalized 3D generation, i.e. DreamBooth3D application, where the consistency can be maintained after learning the subject identity.

Authors:Yongxin Shao, Aihong Tan, Tianhong Yan, Zhetao Sun

Abstract: Lidar point clouds, as a type of data with accurate distance perception, can effectively represent the motion and posture of objects in three-dimensional space. However, the sparsity and disorderliness of point clouds make it challenging to extract features directly from them. Many studies have addressed this issue by transforming point clouds into regular voxel representations. However, these methods often lead to the loss of fine-grained local feature information due to downsampling. Moreover, the sparsity of point clouds poses difficulties in efficiently aggregating features in 3D feature layers using voxel-based two-stage methods. To address these issues, this paper proposes a two-stage 3D detection framework called MS$^{2}$3D. In MS$^{2}$3D, we utilize small-sized voxels to extract fine-grained local features and large-sized voxels to capture long-range local features. Additionally, we propose a method for constructing 3D feature layers using multi-scale semantic feature points, enabling the transformation of sparse 3D feature layers into more compact representations. Furthermore, we compute the offset between feature points in the 3D feature layers and the centroid of objects, aiming to bring them as close as possible to the object's center. It significantly enhances the efficiency of feature aggregation. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we evaluated our method on the KITTI dataset and ONCE dataset together.

Authors:Ruohuan Fang, Guansong Pang, Lei Zhou, Xiao Bai, Jin Zheng

Abstract: Open-World Object Detection (OWOD) extends object detection problem to a realistic and dynamic scenario, where a detection model is required to be capable of detecting both known and unknown objects and incrementally learning newly introduced knowledge. Current OWOD models, such as ORE and OW-DETR, focus on pseudo-labeling regions with high objectness scores as unknowns, whose performance relies heavily on the supervision of known objects. While they can detect the unknowns that exhibit similar features to the known objects, they suffer from a severe label bias problem that they tend to detect all regions (including unknown object regions) that are dissimilar to the known objects as part of the background. To eliminate the label bias, this paper proposes a novel approach that learns an unsupervised discriminative model to recognize true unknown objects from raw pseudo labels generated by unsupervised region proposal methods. The resulting model can be further refined by a classification-free self-training method which iteratively extends pseudo unknown objects to the unlabeled regions. Experimental results show that our method 1) significantly outperforms the prior SOTA in detecting unknown objects while maintaining competitive performance of detecting known object classes on the MS COCO dataset, and 2) achieves better generalization ability on the LVIS and Objects365 datasets.

Authors:Ning Gao, Ngo Anh Vien, Hanna Ziesche, Gerhard Neumann

Abstract: To enable meaningful robotic manipulation of objects in the real-world, 6D pose estimation is one of the critical aspects. Most existing approaches have difficulties to extend predictions to scenarios where novel object instances are continuously introduced, especially with heavy occlusions. In this work, we propose a few-shot pose estimation (FSPE) approach called SA6D, which uses a self-adaptive segmentation module to identify the novel target object and construct a point cloud model of the target object using only a small number of cluttered reference images. Unlike existing methods, SA6D does not require object-centric reference images or any additional object information, making it a more generalizable and scalable solution across categories. We evaluate SA6D on real-world tabletop object datasets and demonstrate that SA6D outperforms existing FSPE methods, particularly in cluttered scenes with occlusions, while requiring fewer reference images.

Authors:Binjie Chen, Yunzhou Xia, Yu Zang, Cheng Wang, Jonathan Li

Abstract: The unstructured nature of point clouds demands that local aggregation be adaptive to different local structures. Previous methods meet this by explicitly embedding spatial relations into each aggregation process. Although this coupled approach has been shown effective in generating clear semantics, aggregation can be greatly slowed down due to repeated relation learning and redundant computation to mix directional and point features. In this work, we propose to decouple the explicit modelling of spatial relations from local aggregation. We theoretically prove that basic neighbor pooling operations can too function without loss of clarity in feature fusion, so long as essential spatial information has been encoded in point features. As an instantiation of decoupled local aggregation, we present DeLA, a lightweight point network, where in each learning stage relative spatial encodings are first formed, and only pointwise convolutions plus edge max-pooling are used for local aggregation then. Further, a regularization term is employed to reduce potential ambiguity through the prediction of relative coordinates. Conceptually simple though, experimental results on five classic benchmarks demonstrate that DeLA achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced or comparable latency. Specifically, DeLA achieves over 90\% overall accuracy on ScanObjectNN and 74\% mIoU on S3DIS Area 5. Our code is available at https://github.com/Matrix-ASC/DeLA .

Authors:Yang Liu, Xiaoyun Zhong, Shiyao Zhai, Zhicheng Du, Zhenyuan Gao, Qiming Huang, Canyang Zhang, Bin Jiang, Vijay Kumar Pandey, Sanyang Han, Runming Wang, Yuxing Han, Peiwu Qin

Abstract: The vast majority of people who suffer unexpected cardiac arrest are performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) by passersby in a desperate attempt to restore life, but endeavors turn out to be fruitless on account of disqualification. Fortunately, many pieces of research manifest that disciplined training will help to elevate the success rate of resuscitation, which constantly desires a seamless combination of novel techniques to yield further advancement. To this end, we collect a custom CPR video dataset in which trainees make efforts to behave resuscitation on mannequins independently in adherence to approved guidelines, thereby devising an auxiliary toolbox to assist supervision and rectification of intermediate potential issues via modern deep learning methodologies. Our research empirically views this problem as a temporal action segmentation (TAS) task in computer vision, which aims to segment an untrimmed video at a frame-wise level. Here, we propose a Prompt-enhanced hierarchical Transformer (PhiTrans) that integrates three indispensable modules, including a textual prompt-based Video Features Extractor (VFE), a transformer-based Action Segmentation Executor (ASE), and a regression-based Prediction Refinement Calibrator (PRC). The backbone of the model preferentially derives from applications in three approved public datasets (GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast) collected for TAS tasks, which accounts for the excavation of the segmentation pipeline on the CPR dataset. In general, we unprecedentedly probe into a feasible pipeline that genuinely elevates the CPR instruction qualification via action segmentation in conjunction with cutting-edge deep learning techniques. Associated experiments advocate our implementation with multiple metrics surpassing 91.0%.

Authors:Chenbo Zhou, Shuai Su, Qijun Chen, Rui Fan

Abstract: Accurate and robust correspondence matching is of utmost importance for various 3D computer vision tasks. However, traditional explicit programming-based methods often struggle to handle challenging scenarios, and deep learning-based methods require large well-labeled datasets for network training. In this article, we introduce Epipolar-Constrained Cascade Correspondence (E3CM), a novel approach that addresses these limitations. Unlike traditional methods, E3CM leverages pre-trained convolutional neural networks to match correspondence, without requiring annotated data for any network training or fine-tuning. Our method utilizes epipolar constraints to guide the matching process and incorporates a cascade structure for progressive refinement of matches. We extensively evaluate the performance of E3CM through comprehensive experiments and demonstrate its superiority over existing methods. To promote further research and facilitate reproducibility, we make our source code publicly available at https://mias.group/E3CM.

Authors:Fei Yang, Kai Wang, Joost van de Weijer

Abstract: The principle underlying most existing continual learning (CL) methods is to prioritize stability by penalizing changes in parameters crucial to old tasks, while allowing for plasticity in other parameters. The importance of weights for each task can be determined either explicitly through learning a task-specific mask during training (e.g., parameter isolation-based approaches) or implicitly by introducing a regularization term (e.g., regularization-based approaches). However, all these methods assume that the importance of weights for each task is unknown prior to data exposure. In this paper, we propose ScrollNet as a scrolling neural network for continual learning. ScrollNet can be seen as a dynamic network that assigns the ranking of weight importance for each task before data exposure, thus achieving a more favorable stability-plasticity tradeoff during sequential task learning by reassigning this ranking for different tasks. Additionally, we demonstrate that ScrollNet can be combined with various CL methods, including regularization-based and replay-based approaches. Experimental results on CIFAR100 and TinyImagenet datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed method. We release our code at https://github.com/FireFYF/ScrollNet.git.

Authors:Ashrafur Rahman Khan, Asif Azad

Abstract: In the rapidly evolving digital era, the analysis of document layouts plays a pivotal role in automated information extraction and interpretation. In our work, we have trained MViTv2 transformer model architecture with cascaded mask R-CNN on BaDLAD dataset to extract text box, paragraphs, images and tables from a document. After training on 20365 document images for 36 epochs in a 3 phase cycle, we achieved a training loss of 0.2125 and a mask loss of 0.19. Our work extends beyond training, delving into the exploration of potential enhancement avenues. We investigate the impact of rotation and flip augmentation, the effectiveness of slicing input images pre-inference, the implications of varying the resolution of the transformer backbone, and the potential of employing a dual-pass inference to uncover missed text-boxes. Through these explorations, we observe a spectrum of outcomes, where some modifications result in tangible performance improvements, while others offer unique insights for future endeavors.

Authors:Neelu Madan, Nicolae-Catalin Ristea, Kamal Nasrollahi, Thomas B. Moeslund, Radu Tudor Ionescu

Abstract: Masked image modeling has been demonstrated as a powerful pretext task for generating robust representations that can be effectively generalized across multiple downstream tasks. Typically, this approach involves randomly masking patches (tokens) in input images, with the masking strategy remaining unchanged during training. In this paper, we propose a curriculum learning approach that updates the masking strategy to continually increase the complexity of the self-supervised reconstruction task. We conjecture that, by gradually increasing the task complexity, the model can learn more sophisticated and transferable representations. To facilitate this, we introduce a novel learnable masking module that possesses the capability to generate masks of different complexities, and integrate the proposed module into masked autoencoders (MAE). Our module is jointly trained with the MAE, while adjusting its behavior during training, transitioning from a partner to the MAE (optimizing the same reconstruction loss) to an adversary (optimizing the opposite loss), while passing through a neutral state. The transition between these behaviors is smooth, being regulated by a factor that is multiplied with the reconstruction loss of the masking module. The resulting training procedure generates an easy-to-hard curriculum. We train our Curriculum-Learned Masked Autoencoder (CL-MAE) on ImageNet and show that it exhibits superior representation learning capabilities compared to MAE. The empirical results on five downstream tasks confirm our conjecture, demonstrating that curriculum learning can be successfully used to self-supervise masked autoencoders.

Authors:Chen Li, Jihao Lin, Gim Hee Lee

Abstract: In this paper, we tackle the challenging task of learning a generalizable human NeRF model from a monocular video. Although existing generalizable human NeRFs have achieved impressive results, they require muti-view images or videos which might not be always available. On the other hand, some works on free-viewpoint rendering of human from monocular videos cannot be generalized to unseen identities. In view of these limitations, we propose GHuNeRF to learn a generalizable human NeRF model from a monocular video of the human performer. We first introduce a visibility-aware aggregation scheme to compute vertex-wise features, which is used to construct a 3D feature volume. The feature volume can only represent the overall geometry of the human performer with insufficient accuracy due to the limited resolution. To solve this, we further enhance the volume feature with temporally aligned point-wise features using an attention mechanism. Finally, the enhanced feature is used for predicting density and color for each sampled point. A surface-guided sampling strategy is also introduced to improve the efficiency for both training and inference. We validate our approach on the widely-used ZJU-MoCap dataset, where we achieve comparable performance with existing multi-view video based approaches. We also test on the monocular People-Snapshot dataset and achieve better performance than existing works when only monocular video is used.

Authors:Qingping Zheng, Yuanfan Guo, Jiankang Deng, Jianhua Han, Ying Li, Songcen Xu, Hang Xu

Abstract: Stable diffusion, a generative model used in text-to-image synthesis, frequently encounters resolution-induced composition problems when generating images of varying sizes. This issue primarily stems from the model being trained on pairs of single-scale images and their corresponding text descriptions. Moreover, direct training on images of unlimited sizes is unfeasible, as it would require an immense number of text-image pairs and entail substantial computational expenses. To overcome these challenges, we propose a two-stage pipeline named Any-Size-Diffusion (ASD), designed to efficiently generate well-composed images of any size, while minimizing the need for high-memory GPU resources. Specifically, the initial stage, dubbed Any Ratio Adaptability Diffusion (ARAD), leverages a selected set of images with a restricted range of ratios to optimize the text-conditional diffusion model, thereby improving its ability to adjust composition to accommodate diverse image sizes. To support the creation of images at any desired size, we further introduce a technique called Fast Seamless Tiled Diffusion (FSTD) at the subsequent stage. This method allows for the rapid enlargement of the ASD output to any high-resolution size, avoiding seaming artifacts or memory overloads. Experimental results on the LAION-COCO and MM-CelebA-HQ benchmarks demonstrate that ASD can produce well-structured images of arbitrary sizes, cutting down the inference time by 2x compared to the traditional tiled algorithm.

Authors:Eivind Moholdt, Sohail Ahmed Khan, Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen

Abstract: The growth of misinformation and re-contextualized media in social media and news leads to an increasing need for fact-checking methods. Concurrently, the advancement in generative models makes cheapfakes and deepfakes both easier to make and harder to detect. In this paper, we present a novel approach using generative image models to our advantage for detecting Out-of-Context (OOC) use of images-caption pairs in news. We present two new datasets with a total of $6800$ images generated using two different generative models including (1) DALL-E 2, and (2) Stable-Diffusion. We are confident that the method proposed in this paper can further research on generative models in the field of cheapfake detection, and that the resulting datasets can be used to train and evaluate new models aimed at detecting cheapfakes. We run a preliminary qualitative and quantitative analysis to evaluate the performance of each image generation model for this task, and evaluate a handful of methods for computing image similarity.

Authors:Shuang Xu, Yifan Wang, Zixiang Zhao, Jiangjun Peng, Xiangyong Cao, Deyu Meng

Abstract: Owing to its significant success, the prior imposed on gradient maps has consistently been a subject of great interest in the field of image processing. Total variation (TV), one of the most representative regularizers, is known for its ability to capture the sparsity of gradient maps. Nonetheless, TV and its variants often underestimate the gradient maps, leading to the weakening of edges and details whose gradients should not be zero in the original image. Recently, total deep variation (TDV) has been introduced, assuming the sparsity of feature maps, which provides a flexible regularization learned from large-scale datasets for a specific task. However, TDV requires retraining when the image or task changes, limiting its versatility. In this paper, we propose a neural gradient regularizer (NGR) that expresses the gradient map as the output of a neural network. Unlike existing methods, NGR does not rely on the sparsity assumption, thereby avoiding the underestimation of gradient maps. NGR is applicable to various image types and different image processing tasks, functioning in a zero-shot learning fashion, making it a versatile and plug-and-play regularizer. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of NGR over state-of-the-art counterparts for a range of different tasks, further validating its effectiveness and versatility.

Authors:Changli Wu, Yiwei Ma, Qi Chen, Haowei Wang, Gen Luo, Jiayi Ji, Xiaoshuai Sun

Abstract: In 3D Referring Expression Segmentation (3D-RES), the earlier approach adopts a two-stage paradigm, extracting segmentation proposals and then matching them with referring expressions. However, this conventional paradigm encounters significant challenges, most notably in terms of the generation of lackluster initial proposals and a pronounced deceleration in inference speed. Recognizing these limitations, we introduce an innovative end-to-end Superpoint-Text Matching Network (3D-STMN) that is enriched by dependency-driven insights. One of the keystones of our model is the Superpoint-Text Matching (STM) mechanism. Unlike traditional methods that navigate through instance proposals, STM directly correlates linguistic indications with their respective superpoints, clusters of semantically related points. This architectural decision empowers our model to efficiently harness cross-modal semantic relationships, primarily leveraging densely annotated superpoint-text pairs, as opposed to the more sparse instance-text pairs. In pursuit of enhancing the role of text in guiding the segmentation process, we further incorporate the Dependency-Driven Interaction (DDI) module to deepen the network's semantic comprehension of referring expressions. Using the dependency trees as a beacon, this module discerns the intricate relationships between primary terms and their associated descriptors in expressions, thereby elevating both the localization and segmentation capacities of our model. Comprehensive experiments on the ScanRefer benchmark reveal that our model not only set new performance standards, registering an mIoU gain of 11.7 points but also achieve a staggering enhancement in inference speed, surpassing traditional methods by 95.7 times. The code and models are available at https://github.com/sosppxo/3D-STMN.

Authors:Chenwei Wang, Xiaoyu Liu, Yulin Huang, Siyi Luo, Jifang Pei, Jianyu Yang, Deqing Mao

Abstract: Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved high performance in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) automatic target recognition (ATR). However, the performance of CNNs depends heavily on a large amount of training data. The insufficiency of labeled training SAR images limits the recognition performance and even invalidates some ATR methods. Furthermore, under few labeled training data, many existing CNNs are even ineffective. To address these challenges, we propose a Semi-supervised SAR ATR Framework with transductive Auxiliary Segmentation (SFAS). The proposed framework focuses on exploiting the transductive generalization on available unlabeled samples with an auxiliary loss serving as a regularizer. Through auxiliary segmentation of unlabeled SAR samples and information residue loss (IRL) in training, the framework can employ the proposed training loop process and gradually exploit the information compilation of recognition and segmentation to construct a helpful inductive bias and achieve high performance. Experiments conducted on the MSTAR dataset have shown the effectiveness of our proposed SFAS for few-shot learning. The recognition performance of 94.18\% can be achieved under 20 training samples in each class with simultaneous accurate segmentation results. Facing variances of EOCs, the recognition ratios are higher than 88.00\% when 10 training samples each class.

Authors:Jin Liu, Xi Wang, Xiaomeng Fu, Yesheng Chai, Cai Yu, Jiao Dai, Jizhong Han

Abstract: Face-to-face communication is a common scenario including roles of speakers and listeners. Most existing research methods focus on producing speaker videos, while the generation of listener heads remains largely overlooked. Responsive listening head generation is an important task that aims to model face-to-face communication scenarios by generating a listener head video given a speaker video and a listener head image. An ideal generated responsive listening video should respond to the speaker with attitude or viewpoint expressing while maintaining diversity in interaction patterns and accuracy in listener identity information. To achieve this goal, we propose the \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{F}aceted \textbf{R}esponsive Listening Head Generation Network (MFR-Net). Specifically, MFR-Net employs the probabilistic denoising diffusion model to predict diverse head pose and expression features. In order to perform multi-faceted response to the speaker video, while maintaining accurate listener identity preservation, we design the Feature Aggregation Module to boost listener identity features and fuse them with other speaker-related features. Finally, a renderer finetuned with identity consistency loss produces the final listening head videos. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that MFR-Net not only achieves multi-faceted responses in diversity and speaker identity information but also in attitude and viewpoint expression.

Authors:Daniel Siegismund, Mario Wieser, Stephan Heyse, Stephan Steigele

Abstract: Uncovering novel drug candidates for treating complex diseases remain one of the most challenging tasks in early discovery research. To tackle this challenge, biopharma research established a standardized high content imaging protocol that tags different cellular compartments per image channel. In order to judge the experimental outcome, the scientist requires knowledge about the channel importance with respect to a certain phenotype for decoding the underlying biology. In contrast to traditional image analysis approaches, such experiments are nowadays preferably analyzed by deep learning based approaches which, however, lack crucial information about the channel importance. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel approach which utilizes multi-spectral information of high content images to interpret a certain aspect of cellular biology. To this end, we base our method on image blending concepts with alpha compositing for an arbitrary number of channels. More specifically, we introduce DCMIX, a lightweight, scaleable and end-to-end trainable mixing layer which enables interpretable predictions in high content imaging while retaining the benefits of deep learning based methods. We employ an extensive set of experiments on both MNIST and RXRX1 datasets, demonstrating that DCMIX learns the biologically relevant channel importance without scarifying prediction performance.

Authors:Miguel Espinosa, Elliot J. Crowley

Abstract: Despite recent advancements in image generation, diffusion models still remain largely underexplored in Earth Observation. In this paper we show that state-of-the-art pretrained diffusion models can be conditioned on cartographic data to generate realistic satellite images. We provide two large datasets of paired OpenStreetMap images and satellite views over the region of Mainland Scotland and the Central Belt. We train a ControlNet model and qualitatively evaluate the results, demonstrating that both image quality and map fidelity are possible. Finally, we provide some insights on the opportunities and challenges of applying these models for remote sensing. Our model weights and code for creating the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/miquel-espinosa/map-sat.

Authors:Prateksha Udhayanan, Srikrishna Karanam, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan

Abstract: We consider the problem of composed image retrieval that takes an input query consisting of an image and a modification text indicating the desired changes to be made on the image and retrieves images that match these changes. Current state-of-the-art techniques that address this problem use global features for the retrieval, resulting in incorrect localization of the regions of interest to be modified because of the global nature of the features, more so in cases of real-world, in-the-wild images. Since modifier texts usually correspond to specific local changes in an image, it is critical that models learn local features to be able to both localize and retrieve better. To this end, our key novelty is a new gradient-attention-based learning objective that explicitly forces the model to focus on the local regions of interest being modified in each retrieval step. We achieve this by first proposing a new visual image attention computation technique, which we call multi-modal gradient attention (MMGrad) that is explicitly conditioned on the modifier text. We next demonstrate how MMGrad can be incorporated into an end-to-end model training strategy with a new learning objective that explicitly forces these MMGrad attention maps to highlight the correct local regions corresponding to the modifier text. By training retrieval models with this new loss function, we show improved grounding by means of better visual attention maps, leading to better explainability of the models as well as competitive quantitative retrieval performance on standard benchmark datasets.

Authors:Gal Shitrit, Ishay Be'ery, Ido Yerhushalmy

Abstract: The SoccerNet 2023 tracking challenge requires the detection and tracking of soccer players and the ball. In this work, we present our approach to tackle these tasks separately. We employ a state-of-the-art online multi-object tracker and a contemporary object detector for player tracking. To overcome the limitations of our online approach, we incorporate a post-processing stage using interpolation and appearance-free track merging. Additionally, an appearance-based track merging technique is used to handle the termination and creation of tracks far from the image boundaries. Ball tracking is formulated as single object detection, and a fine-tuned YOLOv8l detector with proprietary filtering improves the detection precision. Our method achieves 3rd place on the SoccerNet 2023 tracking challenge with a HOTA score of 66.27.

Authors:Tom Van Wouwe, Seunghwan Lee, Antoine Falisse, Scott Delp, C. Karen Liu

Abstract: Motion capture from a limited number of inertial measurement units (IMUs) has important applications in health, human performance, and virtual reality. Real-world limitations and application-specific goals dictate different IMU configurations (i.e., number of IMUs and chosen attachment body segments), trading off accuracy and practicality. Although recent works were successful in accurately reconstructing whole-body motion from six IMUs, these systems only work with a specific IMU configuration. Here we propose a single diffusion generative model, Diffusion Inertial Poser (DiffIP), which reconstructs human motion in real-time from arbitrary IMU configurations. We show that DiffIP has the benefit of flexibility with respect to the IMU configuration while being as accurate as the state-of-the-art for the commonly used six IMU configuration. Our system enables selecting an optimal configuration for different applications without retraining the model. For example, when only four IMUs are available, DiffIP found that the configuration that minimizes errors in joint kinematics instruments the thighs and forearms. However, global translation reconstruction is better when instrumenting the feet instead of the thighs. Although our approach is agnostic to the underlying model, we built DiffIP based on physiologically realistic musculoskeletal models to enable use in biomedical research and health applications.

Authors:Weihan Wang, Zhen Yang, Bin Xu, Juanzi Li, Yankui Sun

Abstract: Vision-language pre-training (VLP) methods are blossoming recently, and its crucial goal is to jointly learn visual and textual features via a transformer-based architecture, demonstrating promising improvements on a variety of vision-language tasks. Prior arts usually focus on how to align visual and textual features, but strategies for improving the robustness of model and speeding up model convergence are left insufficiently explored. In this paper, we propose a novel method ViLTA, comprising of two components to further facilitate the model to learn fine-grained representations among image-text pairs. For Masked Language Modeling (MLM), we propose a cross-distillation method to generate soft labels to enhance the robustness of model, which alleviates the problem of treating synonyms of masked words as negative samples in one-hot labels. For Image-Text Matching (ITM), we leverage the current language encoder to synthesize hard negatives based on the context of language input, encouraging the model to learn high-quality representations by increasing the difficulty of the ITM task. By leveraging the above techniques, our ViLTA can achieve better performance on various vision-language tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the effectiveness of ViLTA and its promising potential for vision-language pre-training.

Authors:Si Liu, Chen Gao, Yuan Chen, Xingyu Peng, Xianghao Kong, Kun Wang, Runsheng Xu, Wentao Jiang, Hao Xiang, Jiaqi Ma, Miao Wang

Abstract: Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) autonomous driving opens up a promising direction for developing a new generation of intelligent transportation systems. Collaborative perception (CP) as an essential component to achieve V2X can overcome the inherent limitations of individual perception, including occlusion and long-range perception. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of CP methods for V2X scenarios, bringing a profound and in-depth understanding to the community. Specifically, we first introduce the architecture and workflow of typical V2X systems, which affords a broader perspective to understand the entire V2X system and the role of CP within it. Then, we thoroughly summarize and analyze existing V2X perception datasets and CP methods. Particularly, we introduce numerous CP methods from various crucial perspectives, including collaboration stages, roadside sensors placement, latency compensation, performance-bandwidth trade-off, attack/defense, pose alignment, etc. Moreover, we conduct extensive experimental analyses to compare and examine current CP methods, revealing some essential and unexplored insights. Specifically, we analyze the performance changes of different methods under different bandwidths, providing a deep insight into the performance-bandwidth trade-off issue. Also, we examine methods under different LiDAR ranges. To study the model robustness, we further investigate the effects of various simulated real-world noises on the performance of different CP methods, covering communication latency, lossy communication, localization errors, and mixed noises. In addition, we look into the sim-to-real generalization ability of existing CP methods. At last, we thoroughly discuss issues and challenges, highlighting promising directions for future efforts. Our codes for experimental analysis will be public at https://github.com/memberRE/Collaborative-Perception.

Authors:Zexin Hu, Kun Hu, Clinton Mo, Lei Pan, Zhiyong Wang

Abstract: Sketch-based terrain generation seeks to create realistic landscapes for virtual environments in various applications such as computer games, animation and virtual reality. Recently, deep learning based terrain generation has emerged, notably the ones based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). However, these methods often struggle to fulfill the requirements of flexible user control and maintain generative diversity for realistic terrain. Therefore, we propose a novel diffusion-based method, namely terrain diffusion network (TDN), which actively incorporates user guidance for enhanced controllability, taking into account terrain features like rivers, ridges, basins, and peaks. Instead of adhering to a conventional monolithic denoising process, which often compromises the fidelity of terrain details or the alignment with user control, a multi-level denoising scheme is proposed to generate more realistic terrains by taking into account fine-grained details, particularly those related to climatic patterns influenced by erosion and tectonic activities. Specifically, three terrain synthesisers are designed for structural, intermediate, and fine-grained level denoising purposes, which allow each synthesiser concentrate on a distinct terrain aspect. Moreover, to maximise the efficiency of our TDN, we further introduce terrain and sketch latent spaces for the synthesizers with pre-trained terrain autoencoders. Comprehensive experiments on a new dataset constructed from NASA Topology Images clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.

Authors:Felix Wagner, Zeju Li, Pramit Saha, Konstantinos Kamnitsas

Abstract: Deployment of Deep Neural Networks in medical imaging is hindered by distribution shift between training data and data processed after deployment, causing performance degradation. Post-Deployment Adaptation (PDA) addresses this by tailoring a pre-trained, deployed model to the target data distribution using limited labelled or entirely unlabelled target data, while assuming no access to source training data as they cannot be deployed with the model due to privacy concerns and their large size. This makes reliable adaptation challenging due to limited learning signal. This paper challenges this assumption and introduces FedPDA, a novel adaptation framework that brings the utility of learning from remote data from Federated Learning into PDA. FedPDA enables a deployed model to obtain information from source data via remote gradient exchange, while aiming to optimize the model specifically for the target domain. Tailored for FedPDA, we introduce a novel optimization method StarAlign (Source-Target Remote Gradient Alignment) that aligns gradients between source-target domain pairs by maximizing their inner product, to facilitate learning a target-specific model. We demonstrate the method's effectiveness using multi-center databases for the tasks of cancer metastases detection and skin lesion classification, where our method compares favourably to previous work. Code is available at: https://github.com/FelixWag/StarAlign

Authors:Jinkai Zheng, Xinchen Liu, Shuai Wang, Lihao Wang, Chenggang Yan, Wu Liu

Abstract: Binary silhouettes and keypoint-based skeletons have dominated human gait recognition studies for decades since they are easy to extract from video frames. Despite their success in gait recognition for in-the-lab environments, they usually fail in real-world scenarios due to their low information entropy for gait representations. To achieve accurate gait recognition in the wild, this paper presents a novel gait representation, named Gait Parsing Sequence (GPS). GPSs are sequences of fine-grained human segmentation, i.e., human parsing, extracted from video frames, so they have much higher information entropy to encode the shapes and dynamics of fine-grained human parts during walking. Moreover, to effectively explore the capability of the GPS representation, we propose a novel human parsing-based gait recognition framework, named ParsingGait. ParsingGait contains a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based backbone and two light-weighted heads. The first head extracts global semantic features from GPSs, while the other one learns mutual information of part-level features through Graph Convolutional Networks to model the detailed dynamics of human walking. Furthermore, due to the lack of suitable datasets, we build the first parsing-based dataset for gait recognition in the wild, named Gait3D-Parsing, by extending the large-scale and challenging Gait3D dataset. Based on Gait3D-Parsing, we comprehensively evaluate our method and existing gait recognition methods. The experimental results show a significant improvement in accuracy brought by the GPS representation and the superiority of ParsingGait. The code and dataset are available at https://gait3d.github.io/gait3d-parsing-hp .

Authors:Cuican Yu, Guansong Lu, Yihan Zeng, Jian Sun, Xiaodan Liang, Huibin Li, Zongben Xu, Songcen Xu, Wei Zhang, Hang Xu

Abstract: Generating 3D faces from textual descriptions has a multitude of applications, such as gaming, movie, and robotics. Recent progresses have demonstrated the success of unconditional 3D face generation and text-to-3D shape generation. However, due to the limited text-3D face data pairs, text-driven 3D face generation remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a text-guided 3D faces generation method, refer as TG-3DFace, for generating realistic 3D faces using text guidance. Specifically, we adopt an unconditional 3D face generation framework and equip it with text conditions, which learns the text-guided 3D face generation with only text-2D face data. On top of that, we propose two text-to-face cross-modal alignment techniques, including the global contrastive learning and the fine-grained alignment module, to facilitate high semantic consistency between generated 3D faces and input texts. Besides, we present directional classifier guidance during the inference process, which encourages creativity for out-of-domain generations. Compared to the existing methods, TG-3DFace creates more realistic and aesthetically pleasing 3D faces, boosting 9% multi-view consistency (MVIC) over Latent3D. The rendered face images generated by TG-3DFace achieve higher FID and CLIP score than text-to-2D face/image generation models, demonstrating our superiority in generating realistic and semantic-consistent textures.

Authors:Minheng Ni, Yabo Zhang, Kailai Feng, Xiaoming Li, Yiwen Guo, Wangmeng Zuo

Abstract: Zero-shot referring image segmentation is a challenging task because it aims to find an instance segmentation mask based on the given referring descriptions, without training on this type of paired data. Current zero-shot methods mainly focus on using pre-trained discriminative models (e.g., CLIP). However, we have observed that generative models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) have potentially understood the relationships between various visual elements and text descriptions, which are rarely investigated in this task. In this work, we introduce a novel Referring Diffusional segmentor (Ref-Diff) for this task, which leverages the fine-grained multi-modal information from generative models. We demonstrate that without a proposal generator, a generative model alone can achieve comparable performance to existing SOTA weakly-supervised models. When we combine both generative and discriminative models, our Ref-Diff outperforms these competing methods by a significant margin. This indicates that generative models are also beneficial for this task and can complement discriminative models for better referring segmentation. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/kodenii/Ref-Diff.

Authors:Mohsen Zand, Ali Etemad, Michael Greenspan

Abstract: A new method is proposed for human motion prediction by learning temporal and spatial dependencies. Recently, multiscale graphs have been developed to model the human body at higher abstraction levels, resulting in more stable motion prediction. Current methods however predetermine scale levels and combine spatially proximal joints to generate coarser scales based on human priors, even though movement patterns in different motion sequences vary and do not fully comply with a fixed graph of spatially connected joints. Another problem with graph convolutional methods is mode collapse, in which predicted poses converge around a mean pose with no discernible movements, particularly in long-term predictions. To tackle these issues, we propose ResChunk, an end-to-end network which explores dynamically correlated body components based on the pairwise relationships between all joints in individual sequences. ResChunk is trained to learn the residuals between target sequence chunks in an autoregressive manner to enforce the temporal connectivities between consecutive chunks. It is hence a sequence-to-sequence prediction network which considers dynamic spatio-temporal features of sequences at multiple levels. Our experiments on two challenging benchmark datasets, CMU Mocap and Human3.6M, demonstrate that our proposed method is able to effectively model the sequence information for motion prediction and outperform other techniques to set a new state-of-the-art. Our code is available at https://github.com/MohsenZand/ResChunk.

Authors:Johannes Künzel, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert

Abstract: Semantic image segmentation is a critical component in many computer vision systems, such as autonomous driving. In such applications, adverse conditions (heavy rain, night time, snow, extreme lighting) on the one hand pose specific challenges, yet are typically underrepresented in the available datasets. Generating more training data is cumbersome and expensive, and the process itself is error-prone due to the inherent aleatoric uncertainty. To address this challenging problem, we propose BTSeg, which exploits image-level correspondences as weak supervision signal to learn a segmentation model that is agnostic to adverse conditions. To this end, our approach uses the Barlow twins loss from the field of unsupervised learning and treats images taken at the same location but under different adverse conditions as "augmentations" of the same unknown underlying base image. This allows the training of a segmentation model that is robust to appearance changes introduced by different adverse conditions. We evaluate our approach on ACDC and the new challenging ACG benchmark to demonstrate its robustness and generalization capabilities. Our approach performs favorably when compared to the current state-of-the-art methods, while also being simpler to implement and train. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Authors:Jianxiong Gao, Xuelin Qian, Yikai Wang, Tianjun Xiao, Tong He, Zheng Zhang, Yanwei Fu

Abstract: Amodal object segmentation is a challenging task that involves segmenting both visible and occluded parts of an object. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called Coarse-to-Fine Segmentation (C2F-Seg), that addresses this problem by progressively modeling the amodal segmentation. C2F-Seg initially reduces the learning space from the pixel-level image space to the vector-quantized latent space. This enables us to better handle long-range dependencies and learn a coarse-grained amodal segment from visual features and visible segments. However, this latent space lacks detailed information about the object, which makes it difficult to provide a precise segmentation directly. To address this issue, we propose a convolution refine module to inject fine-grained information and provide a more precise amodal object segmentation based on visual features and coarse-predicted segmentation. To help the studies of amodal object segmentation, we create a synthetic amodal dataset, named as MOViD-Amodal (MOViD-A), which can be used for both image and video amodal object segmentation. We extensively evaluate our model on two benchmark datasets: KINS and COCO-A. Our empirical results demonstrate the superiority of C2F-Seg. Moreover, we exhibit the potential of our approach for video amodal object segmentation tasks on FISHBOWL and our proposed MOViD-A. Project page at: http://jianxgao.github.io/C2F-Seg.

Authors:Alexandre Tuel, Thomas Kerdreux, Claudia Hulbert, Bertrand Rouet-Leduc

Abstract: Probabilistic Diffusion Models (PDMs) have recently emerged as a very promising class of generative models, achieving high performance in natural image generation. However, their performance relative to non-natural images, like radar-based satellite data, remains largely unknown. Generating large amounts of synthetic (and especially labelled) satellite data is crucial to implement deep-learning approaches for the processing and analysis of (interferometric) satellite aperture radar data. Here, we leverage PDMs to generate several radar-based satellite image datasets. We show that PDMs succeed in generating images with complex and realistic structures, but that sampling time remains an issue. Indeed, accelerated sampling strategies, which work well on simple image datasets like MNIST, fail on our radar datasets. We provide a simple and versatile open-source https://github.com/thomaskerdreux/PDM_SAR_InSAR_generation to train, sample and evaluate PDMs using any dataset on a single GPU.

Authors:Neil D. Dizon, Jeffrey A. Hogan

Abstract: We investigate the applicability of quaternion-valued wavelets on the plane to holistic colour image processing. We present a methodology for decomposing and reconstructing colour images using quaternionic wavelet filters associated to recently developed quaternion-valued wavelets on the plane. We consider compression, enhancement, segmentation, and denoising techniques to demonstrate quaternion-valued wavelets as a promising tool for holistic colour image processing.

Authors:Jiaben Chen, Huaizu Jiang

Abstract: Human-centric video frame interpolation has great potential for improving people's entertainment experiences and finding commercial applications in the sports analysis industry, e.g., synthesizing slow-motion videos. Although there are multiple benchmark datasets available in the community, none of them is dedicated for human-centric scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce SportsSloMo, a benchmark consisting of more than 130K video clips and 1M video frames of high-resolution ($\geq$720p) slow-motion sports videos crawled from YouTube. We re-train several state-of-the-art methods on our benchmark, and the results show a decrease in their accuracy compared to other datasets. It highlights the difficulty of our benchmark and suggests that it poses significant challenges even for the best-performing methods, as human bodies are highly deformable and occlusions are frequent in sports videos. To improve the accuracy, we introduce two loss terms considering the human-aware priors, where we add auxiliary supervision to panoptic segmentation and human keypoints detection, respectively. The loss terms are model agnostic and can be easily plugged into any video frame interpolation approaches. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed loss terms, leading to consistent performance improvement over 5 existing models, which establish strong baseline models on our benchmark. The dataset and code can be found at: https://neu-vi.github.io/SportsSlomo/.

Authors:Inwoo Hwang, Hyeonwoo Kim, Young Min Kim

Abstract: We propose Text2Scene, a method to automatically create realistic textures for virtual scenes composed of multiple objects. Guided by a reference image and text descriptions, our pipeline adds detailed texture on labeled 3D geometries in the room such that the generated colors respect the hierarchical structure or semantic parts that are often composed of similar materials. Instead of applying flat stylization on the entire scene at a single step, we obtain weak semantic cues from geometric segmentation, which are further clarified by assigning initial colors to segmented parts. Then we add texture details for individual objects such that their projections on image space exhibit feature embedding aligned with the embedding of the input. The decomposition makes the entire pipeline tractable to a moderate amount of computation resources and memory. As our framework utilizes the existing resources of image and text embedding, it does not require dedicated datasets with high-quality textures designed by skillful artists. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first practical and scalable approach that can create detailed and realistic textures of the desired style that maintain structural context for scenes with multiple objects.

Authors:Shuai Bai, Shusheng Yang, Jinze Bai, Peng Wang, Xingxuan Zhang, Junyang Lin, Xinggang Wang, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou

Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently witnessed rapid advancements, exhibiting a remarkable capacity for perceiving, understanding, and processing visual information by connecting visual receptor with large language models (LLMs). However, current assessments mainly focus on recognizing and reasoning abilities, lacking direct evaluation of conversational skills and neglecting visual storytelling abilities. In this paper, we propose an evaluation method that uses strong LLMs as judges to comprehensively evaluate the various abilities of LVLMs. Firstly, we construct a comprehensive visual dialogue dataset TouchStone, consisting of open-world images and questions, covering five major categories of abilities and 27 subtasks. This dataset not only covers fundamental recognition and comprehension but also extends to literary creation. Secondly, by integrating detailed image annotations we effectively transform the multimodal input content into a form understandable by LLMs. This enables us to employ advanced LLMs for directly evaluating the quality of the multimodal dialogue without requiring human intervention. Through validation, we demonstrate that powerful LVLMs, such as GPT-4, can effectively score dialogue quality by leveraging their textual capabilities alone, aligning with human preferences. We hope our work can serve as a touchstone for LVLMs' evaluation and pave the way for building stronger LVLMs. The evaluation code is available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/TouchStone.

Authors:Manuel Kaufmann, Jie Song, Chen Guo, Kaiyue Shen, Tianjian Jiang, Chengcheng Tang, Juan Zarate, Otmar Hilliges

Abstract: We present EMDB, the Electromagnetic Database of Global 3D Human Pose and Shape in the Wild. EMDB is a novel dataset that contains high-quality 3D SMPL pose and shape parameters with global body and camera trajectories for in-the-wild videos. We use body-worn, wireless electromagnetic (EM) sensors and a hand-held iPhone to record a total of 58 minutes of motion data, distributed over 81 indoor and outdoor sequences and 10 participants. Together with accurate body poses and shapes, we also provide global camera poses and body root trajectories. To construct EMDB, we propose a multi-stage optimization procedure, which first fits SMPL to the 6-DoF EM measurements and then refines the poses via image observations. To achieve high-quality results, we leverage a neural implicit avatar model to reconstruct detailed human surface geometry and appearance, which allows for improved alignment and smoothness via a dense pixel-level objective. Our evaluations, conducted with a multi-view volumetric capture system, indicate that EMDB has an expected accuracy of 2.3 cm positional and 10.6 degrees angular error, surpassing the accuracy of previous in-the-wild datasets. We evaluate existing state-of-the-art monocular RGB methods for camera-relative and global pose estimation on EMDB. EMDB is publicly available under https://ait.ethz.ch/emdb

Authors:Sicheng Zuo, Wenzhao Zheng, Yuanhui Huang, Jie Zhou, Jiwen Lu

Abstract: Semantic segmentation in autonomous driving has been undergoing an evolution from sparse point segmentation to dense voxel segmentation, where the objective is to predict the semantic occupancy of each voxel in the concerned 3D space. The dense nature of the prediction space has rendered existing efficient 2D-projection-based methods (e.g., bird's eye view, range view, etc.) ineffective, as they can only describe a subspace of the 3D scene. To address this, we propose a cylindrical tri-perspective view to represent point clouds effectively and comprehensively and a PointOcc model to process them efficiently. Considering the distance distribution of LiDAR point clouds, we construct the tri-perspective view in the cylindrical coordinate system for more fine-grained modeling of nearer areas. We employ spatial group pooling to maintain structural details during projection and adopt 2D backbones to efficiently process each TPV plane. Finally, we obtain the features of each point by aggregating its projected features on each of the processed TPV planes without the need for any post-processing. Extensive experiments on both 3D occupancy prediction and LiDAR segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed PointOcc achieves state-of-the-art performance with much faster speed. Specifically, despite only using LiDAR, PointOcc significantly outperforms all other methods, including multi-modal methods, with a large margin on the OpenOccupancy benchmark. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/PointOcc.

Authors:Sirui Xu, Zhengyuan Li, Yu-Xiong Wang, Liang-Yan Gui

Abstract: This paper addresses a novel task of anticipating 3D human-object interactions (HOIs). Most existing research on HOI synthesis lacks comprehensive whole-body interactions with dynamic objects, e.g., often limited to manipulating small or static objects. Our task is significantly more challenging, as it requires modeling dynamic objects with various shapes, capturing whole-body motion, and ensuring physically valid interactions. To this end, we propose InterDiff, a framework comprising two key steps: (i) interaction diffusion, where we leverage a diffusion model to encode the distribution of future human-object interactions; (ii) interaction correction, where we introduce a physics-informed predictor to correct denoised HOIs in a diffusion step. Our key insight is to inject prior knowledge that the interactions under reference with respect to contact points follow a simple pattern and are easily predictable. Experiments on multiple human-object interaction datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for this task, capable of producing realistic, vivid, and remarkably long-term 3D HOI predictions.

Authors:Xiaolong Wang, Runsen Xu, Zuofan Cui, Zeyu Wan, Yu Zhang

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to fine-grained cross-view geo-localization. Our method aligns a warped ground image with a corresponding GPS-tagged satellite image covering the same area using homography estimation. We first employ a differentiable spherical transform, adhering to geometric principles, to accurately align the perspective of the ground image with the satellite map. This transformation effectively places ground and aerial images in the same view and on the same plane, reducing the task to an image alignment problem. To address challenges such as occlusion, small overlapping range, and seasonal variations, we propose a robust correlation-aware homography estimator to align similar parts of the transformed ground image with the satellite image. Our method achieves sub-pixel resolution and meter-level GPS accuracy by mapping the center point of the transformed ground image to the satellite image using a homography matrix and determining the orientation of the ground camera using a point above the central axis. Operating at a speed of 30 FPS, our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, reducing the mean metric localization error by 21.3% and 32.4% in same-area and cross-area generalization tasks on the VIGOR benchmark, respectively, and by 34.4% on the KITTI benchmark in same-area evaluation.

Authors:Yuhan Wang, Liming Jiang, Chen Change Loy

Abstract: Unconditional video generation is a challenging task that involves synthesizing high-quality videos that are both coherent and of extended duration. To address this challenge, researchers have used pretrained StyleGAN image generators for high-quality frame synthesis and focused on motion generator design. The motion generator is trained in an autoregressive manner using heavy 3D convolutional discriminators to ensure motion coherence during video generation. In this paper, we introduce a novel motion generator design that uses a learning-based inversion network for GAN. The encoder in our method captures rich and smooth priors from encoding images to latents, and given the latent of an initially generated frame as guidance, our method can generate smooth future latent by modulating the inversion encoder temporally. Our method enjoys the advantage of sparse training and naturally constrains the generation space of our motion generator with the inversion network guided by the initial frame, eliminating the need for heavy discriminators. Moreover, our method supports style transfer with simple fine-tuning when the encoder is paired with a pretrained StyleGAN generator. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method in generating long and high-resolution videos with decent single-frame quality and temporal consistency.

Authors:Runsen Xu, Xiaolong Wang, Tai Wang, Yilun Chen, Jiangmiao Pang, Dahua Lin

Abstract: The unprecedented advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have created a profound impact on natural language processing but are yet to fully embrace the realm of 3D understanding. This paper introduces PointLLM, a preliminary effort to fill this gap, thereby enabling LLMs to understand point clouds and offering a new avenue beyond 2D visual data. PointLLM processes colored object point clouds with human instructions and generates contextually appropriate responses, illustrating its grasp of point clouds and common sense. Specifically, it leverages a point cloud encoder with a powerful LLM to effectively fuse geometric, appearance, and linguistic information. We collect a novel dataset comprising 660K simple and 70K complex point-text instruction pairs to enable a two-stage training strategy: initially aligning latent spaces and subsequently instruction-tuning the unified model. To rigorously evaluate our model's perceptual abilities and its generalization capabilities, we establish two benchmarks: Generative 3D Object Classification and 3D Object Captioning, assessed through three different methods, including human evaluation, GPT-4/ChatGPT evaluation, and traditional metrics. Experiment results show that PointLLM demonstrates superior performance over existing 2D baselines. Remarkably, in human-evaluated object captioning tasks, PointLLM outperforms human annotators in over 50% of the samples. Codes, datasets, and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/PointLLM .

Authors:Yeongwoong Kim, Suyong Bahk, Seungeon Kim, Won Hee Lee, Dokwan Oh, Hui Yong Kim

Abstract: Neural video compression (NVC) is a rapidly evolving video coding research area, with some models achieving superior coding efficiency compared to the latest video coding standard Versatile Video Coding (VVC). In conventional video coding standards, the hierarchical B-frame coding, which utilizes a bidirectional prediction structure for higher compression, had been well-studied and exploited. In NVC, however, limited research has investigated the hierarchical B scheme. In this paper, we propose an NVC model exploiting hierarchical B-frame coding with temporal layer-adaptive optimization. We first extend an existing unidirectional NVC model to a bidirectional model, which achieves -21.13% BD-rate gain over the unidirectional baseline model. However, this model faces challenges when applied to sequences with complex or large motions, leading to performance degradation. To address this, we introduce temporal layer-adaptive optimization, incorporating methods such as temporal layer-adaptive quality scaling (TAQS) and temporal layer-adaptive latent scaling (TALS). The final model with the proposed methods achieves an impressive BD-rate gain of -39.86% against the baseline. It also resolves the challenges in sequences with large or complex motions with up to -49.13% more BD-rate gains than the simple bidirectional extension. This improvement is attributed to the allocation of more bits to lower temporal layers, thereby enhancing overall reconstruction quality with smaller bits. Since our method has little dependency on a specific NVC model architecture, it can serve as a general tool for extending unidirectional NVC models to the ones with hierarchical B-frame coding.

Authors:Yukun Su, Ruizhou Sun, Xin Shu, Yu Zhang, Qingyao Wu

Abstract: Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) is a crucial computer vision task that aims to predict the bounding boxes and identities of objects simultaneously. While state-of-the-art methods have made remarkable progress by jointly optimizing the multi-task problems of detection and Re-ID feature learning, yet, few approaches explore to tackle the occlusion issue, which is a long-standing challenge in the MOT field. Generally, occluded objects may hinder the detector from estimating the bounding boxes, resulting in fragmented trajectories. And the learned occluded Re-ID embeddings are less distinct since they contain interferer. To this end, we propose an occlusion-aware detection and Re-ID calibrated network for multi-object tracking, termed as ORCTrack. Specifically, we propose an Occlusion-Aware Attention (OAA) module in the detector that highlights the object features while suppressing the occluded background regions. OAA can serve as a modulator that enhances the detector for some potentially occluded objects. Furthermore, we design a Re-ID embedding matching block based on the optimal transport problem, which focuses on enhancing and calibrating the Re-ID representations through different adjacent frames complementarily. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging VisDrone2021-MOT and KITTI benchmarks. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our approach, which can achieve new state-of-the-art performance and enjoy high run-time efficiency.

Authors:Basit Alawode, Fayaz Ali Dharejo, Mehnaz Ummar, Yuhang Guo, Arif Mahmood, Naoufel Werghi, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Sajid Javed

Abstract: This paper presents a new dataset and general tracker enhancement method for Underwater Visual Object Tracking (UVOT). Despite its significance, underwater tracking has remained unexplored due to data inaccessibility. It poses distinct challenges; the underwater environment exhibits non-uniform lighting conditions, low visibility, lack of sharpness, low contrast, camouflage, and reflections from suspended particles. Performance of traditional tracking methods designed primarily for terrestrial or open-air scenarios drops in such conditions. We address the problem by proposing a novel underwater image enhancement algorithm designed specifically to boost tracking quality. The method has resulted in a significant performance improvement, of up to 5.0% AUC, of state-of-the-art (SOTA) visual trackers. To develop robust and accurate UVOT methods, large-scale datasets are required. To this end, we introduce a large-scale UVOT benchmark dataset consisting of 400 video segments and 275,000 manually annotated frames enabling underwater training and evaluation of deep trackers. The videos are labelled with several underwater-specific tracking attributes including watercolor variation, target distractors, camouflage, target relative size, and low visibility conditions. The UVOT400 dataset, tracking results, and the code are publicly available on: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/UWVOT400.

Authors:Muhammad Gul Zain Ali Khan, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Luc Van Gool, Didier Stricker, Federico Tombari, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal

Abstract: Continual Learning aims to learn a single model on a sequence of tasks without having access to data from previous tasks. The biggest challenge in the domain still remains catastrophic forgetting: a loss in performance on seen classes of earlier tasks. Some existing methods rely on an expensive replay buffer to store a chunk of data from previous tasks. This, while promising, becomes expensive when the number of tasks becomes large or data can not be stored for privacy reasons. As an alternative, prompt-based methods have been proposed that store the task information in a learnable prompt pool. This prompt pool instructs a frozen image encoder on how to solve each task. While the model faces a disjoint set of classes in each task in this setting, we argue that these classes can be encoded to the same embedding space of a pre-trained language encoder. In this work, we propose Language Guidance for Prompt-based Continual Learning (LGCL) as a plug-in for prompt-based methods. LGCL is model agnostic and introduces language guidance at the task level in the prompt pool and at the class level on the output feature of the vision encoder. We show with extensive experimentation that LGCL consistently improves the performance of prompt-based continual learning methods to set a new state-of-the art. LGCL achieves these performance improvements without needing any additional learnable parameters.

Authors:Wadii Boulila, Ayyub Alzahem, Anis Koubaa, Bilel Benjdira, Adel Ammar

Abstract: The Red Palm Weevil (RPW), also known as the palm weevil, is considered among the world's most damaging insect pests of palms. Current detection techniques include the detection of symptoms of RPW using visual or sound inspection and chemical detection of volatile signatures generated by infested palm trees. However, efficient detection of RPW diseases at an early stage is considered one of the most challenging issues for cultivating date palms. In this paper, an efficient approach to the early detection of RPW is proposed. The proposed approach is based on RPW sound activities being recorded and analyzed. The first step involves the conversion of sound data into images based on a selected set of features. The second step involves the combination of images from the same sound file but computed by different features into a single image. The third step involves the application of different Deep Learning (DL) techniques to classify resulting images into two classes: infested and not infested. Experimental results show good performances of the proposed approach for RPW detection using different DL techniques, namely MobileNetV2, ResNet50V2, ResNet152V2, VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, DenseNet201, Xception, and InceptionV3. The proposed approach outperformed existing techniques for public datasets.

Authors:Myungjin Shin, Dohae Lee, In-Kwon Lee

Abstract: The most popular type of devices used to track a user's posture in a virtual reality experience consists of a head-mounted display and two controllers held in both hands. However, due to the limited number of tracking sensors (three in total), faithfully recovering the user in full-body is challenging, limiting the potential for interactions among simulated user avatars within the virtual world. Therefore, recent studies have attempted to reconstruct full-body poses using neural networks that utilize previously learned human poses or accept a series of past poses over a short period. In this paper, we propose a method that utilizes information from a neural motion prior to improve the accuracy of reconstructed user's motions. Our approach aims to reconstruct user's full-body poses by predicting the latent representation of the user's overall motion from limited input signals and integrating this information with tracking sensor inputs. This is based on the premise that the ultimate goal of pose reconstruction is to reconstruct the motion, which is a series of poses. Our results show that this integration enables more accurate reconstruction of the user's full-body motion, particularly enhancing the robustness of lower body motion reconstruction from impoverished signals. Web: https://https://mjsh34.github.io/mp-sspe/

Authors:Buzhen Huang, Jingyi Ju, Zhihao Li, Yangang Wang

Abstract: Due to the mutual occlusion, severe scale variation, and complex spatial distribution, the current multi-person mesh recovery methods cannot produce accurate absolute body poses and shapes in large-scale crowded scenes. To address the obstacles, we fully exploit crowd features for reconstructing groups of people from a monocular image. A novel hypergraph relational reasoning network is proposed to formulate the complex and high-order relation correlations among individuals and groups in the crowd. We first extract compact human features and location information from the original high-resolution image. By conducting the relational reasoning on the extracted individual features, the underlying crowd collectiveness and interaction relationship can provide additional group information for the reconstruction. Finally, the updated individual features and the localization information are used to regress human meshes in camera coordinates. To facilitate the network training, we further build pseudo ground-truth on two crowd datasets, which may also promote future research on pose estimation and human behavior understanding in crowded scenes. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms other baseline methods both in crowded and common scenarios. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/boycehbz/GroupRec.

Authors:Yifan Xu, Mengdan Zhang, Xiaoshan Yang, Changsheng Xu

Abstract: In this paper, we for the first time explore helpful multi-modal contextual knowledge to understand novel categories for open-vocabulary object detection (OVD). The multi-modal contextual knowledge stands for the joint relationship across regions and words. However, it is challenging to incorporate such multi-modal contextual knowledge into OVD. The reason is that previous detection frameworks fail to jointly model multi-modal contextual knowledge, as object detectors only support vision inputs and no caption description is provided at test time. To this end, we propose a multi-modal contextual knowledge distillation framework, MMC-Det, to transfer the learned contextual knowledge from a teacher fusion transformer with diverse multi-modal masked language modeling (D-MLM) to a student detector. The diverse multi-modal masked language modeling is realized by an object divergence constraint upon traditional multi-modal masked language modeling (MLM), in order to extract fine-grained region-level visual contexts, which are vital to object detection. Extensive experiments performed upon various detection datasets show the effectiveness of our multi-modal context learning strategy, where our approach well outperforms the recent state-of-the-art methods.

Authors:Zhanbo Feng, Zenan Ling, Ci Gong, Feng Zhou, Jie Li, Robert C. Qiu

Abstract: Denoising diffusion models have shown outstanding performance in image editing. Existing works tend to use either image-guided methods, which provide a visual reference but lack control over semantic coherence, or text-guided methods, which ensure faithfulness to text guidance but lack visual quality. To address the problem, we propose the Zero-shot Inversion Process (ZIP), a framework that injects a fusion of generated visual reference and text guidance into the semantic latent space of a \textit{frozen} pre-trained diffusion model. Only using a tiny neural network, the proposed ZIP produces diverse content and attributes under the intuitive control of the text prompt. Moreover, ZIP shows remarkable robustness for both in-domain and out-of-domain attribute manipulation on real images. We perform detailed experiments on various benchmark datasets. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, ZIP produces images of equivalent quality while providing a realistic editing effect.

Authors:Weifu Fu, Qiang Nie, Jialin Li, Yuhuan Lin, Kai Wu, Yong Liu, Chengjie Wang

Abstract: Despite recent advances in semantic segmentation, an inevitable challenge is the performance degradation caused by the domain shift in real application. Current dominant approach to solve this problem is unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). However, the absence of labeled target data in UDA is overly restrictive and limits performance. To overcome this limitation, a more practical scenario called semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) has been proposed. Existing SSDA methods are derived from the UDA paradigm and primarily focus on leveraging the unlabeled target data and source data. In this paper, we highlight the significance of exploiting the intra-domain information between the limited labeled target data and unlabeled target data, as it greatly benefits domain adaptation. Instead of solely using the scarce labeled data for supervision, we propose a novel SSDA framework that incorporates both inter-domain mixing and intra-domain mixing, where inter-domain mixing mitigates the source-target domain gap and intra-domain mixing enriches the available target domain information. By simultaneously learning from inter-domain mixing and intra-domain mixing, the network can capture more domain-invariant features and promote its performance on the target domain. We also explore different domain mixing operations to better exploit the target domain information. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the GTA5toCityscapes and SYNTHIA2Cityscapes benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, surpassing previous methods by a large margin.

Authors:Muhammad Hamza Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Ammar Hawbani Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Sami Ul Rehman Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Xingfu Wang Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Liang Zhao School of Computer Science, Shenyang Aerospace University

Abstract: Underwater image processing and analysis have been a hotspot of study in recent years, as more emphasis has been focused to underwater monitoring and usage of marine resources. Compared with the open environment, underwater image encountered with more complicated conditions such as light abortion, scattering, turbulence, nonuniform illumination and color diffusion. Although considerable advances and enhancement techniques achieved in resolving these issues, they treat low-frequency information equally across the entire channel, which results in limiting the network's representativeness. We propose a deep learning and feature-attention-based end-to-end network (FA-Net) to solve this problem. In particular, we propose a Residual Feature Attention Block (RFAB), containing the channel attention, pixel attention, and residual learning mechanism with long and short skip connections. RFAB allows the network to focus on learning high-frequency information while skipping low-frequency information on multi-hop connections. The channel and pixel attention mechanism considers each channel's different features and the uneven distribution of haze over different pixels in the image. The experimental results shows that the FA-Net propose by us provides higher accuracy, quantitatively and qualitatively and superiority to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Authors:Zhuo-Xu Cui, Congcong Liu, Xiaohong Fan, Chentao Cao, Jing Cheng, Qingyong Zhu, Yuanyuan Liu, Sen Jia, Yihang Zhou, Haifeng Wang, Yanjie Zhu, Jianping Zhang, Qiegen Liu, Dong Liang

Abstract: In the field of parallel imaging (PI), alongside image-domain regularization methods, substantial research has been dedicated to exploring $k$-space interpolation. However, the interpretability of these methods remains an unresolved issue. Furthermore, these approaches currently face acceleration limitations that are comparable to those experienced by image-domain methods. In order to enhance interpretability and overcome the acceleration limitations, this paper introduces an interpretable framework that unifies both $k$-space interpolation techniques and image-domain methods, grounded in the physical principles of heat diffusion equations. Building upon this foundational framework, a novel $k$-space interpolation method is proposed. Specifically, we model the process of high-frequency information attenuation in $k$-space as a heat diffusion equation, while the effort to reconstruct high-frequency information from low-frequency regions can be conceptualized as a reverse heat equation. However, solving the reverse heat equation poses a challenging inverse problem. To tackle this challenge, we modify the heat equation to align with the principles of magnetic resonance PI physics and employ the score-based generative method to precisely execute the modified reverse heat diffusion. Finally, experimental validation conducted on publicly available datasets demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach over traditional $k$-space interpolation methods, deep learning-based $k$-space interpolation methods, and conventional diffusion models in terms of reconstruction accuracy, particularly in high-frequency regions.

Authors:Hanqiu Deng, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Jinan Bao, Xingyu Li

Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models have shown promising performance on zero-shot visual recognition tasks by learning visual representations under natural language supervision. Recent studies attempt the use of CLIP to tackle zero-shot anomaly detection by matching images with normal and abnormal state prompts. However, since CLIP focuses on building correspondence between paired text prompts and global image-level representations, the lack of patch-level vision to text alignment limits its capability on precise visual anomaly localization. In this work, we introduce a training-free adaptation (TFA) framework of CLIP for zero-shot anomaly localization. In the visual encoder, we innovate a training-free value-wise attention mechanism to extract intrinsic local tokens of CLIP for patch-level local description. From the perspective of text supervision, we particularly design a unified domain-aware contrastive state prompting template. On top of the proposed TFA, we further introduce a test-time adaptation (TTA) mechanism to refine anomaly localization results, where a layer of trainable parameters in the adapter is optimized using TFA's pseudo-labels and synthetic noise-corrupted tokens. With both TFA and TTA adaptation, we significantly exploit the potential of CLIP for zero-shot anomaly localization and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods on various datasets.

Authors:Yizeng Han, Zeyu Liu, Zhihang Yuan, Yifan Pu, Chaofei Wang, Shiji Song, Gao Huang

Abstract: Dynamic computation has emerged as a promising avenue to enhance the inference efficiency of deep networks. It allows selective activation of computational units, leading to a reduction in unnecessary computations for each input sample. However, the actual efficiency of these dynamic models can deviate from theoretical predictions. This mismatch arises from: 1) the lack of a unified approach due to fragmented research; 2) the focus on algorithm design over critical scheduling strategies, especially in CUDA-enabled GPU contexts; and 3) challenges in measuring practical latency, given that most libraries cater to static operations. Addressing these issues, we unveil the Latency-Aware Unified Dynamic Networks (LAUDNet), a framework that integrates three primary dynamic paradigms-spatially adaptive computation, dynamic layer skipping, and dynamic channel skipping. To bridge the theoretical and practical efficiency gap, LAUDNet merges algorithmic design with scheduling optimization, guided by a latency predictor that accurately gauges dynamic operator latency. We've tested LAUDNet across multiple vision tasks, demonstrating its capacity to notably reduce the latency of models like ResNet-101 by over 50% on platforms such as V100, RTX3090, and TX2 GPUs. Notably, LAUDNet stands out in balancing accuracy and efficiency. Code is available at: https://www.github.com/LeapLabTHU/LAUDNet.

Authors:Harshith Mohan Kumar, Sean Lawrence

Abstract: Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have made significant strides, capitalizing on computer vision to enhance perception and decision-making capabilities. Nonetheless, the adaptation of these systems to diverse traffic scenarios poses challenges due to shifts in data distribution stemming from factors such as location, weather, and road infrastructure. To tackle this, we introduce a weakly-supervised label unification pipeline that amalgamates pseudo labels from a multitude of object detection models trained on heterogeneous datasets. Our pipeline engenders a unified label space through the amalgamation of labels from disparate datasets, rectifying bias and enhancing generalization. We fine-tune multiple object detection models on individual datasets, subsequently crafting a unified dataset featuring pseudo labels, meticulously validated for precision. Following this, we retrain a solitary object detection model using the merged label space, culminating in a resilient model proficient in dynamic traffic scenarios. We put forth a comprehensive evaluation of our approach, employing diverse datasets originating from varied Asian countries, effectively demonstrating its efficacy in challenging road conditions. Notably, our method yields substantial enhancements in object detection performance, culminating in a model with heightened resistance against domain shifts.

Authors:Francesco Dalla Serra, Chaoyang Wang, Fani Deligianni, Jeffrey Dalton, Alison Q. O'Neil

Abstract: The task of radiology reporting comprises describing and interpreting the medical findings in radiographic images, including description of their location and appearance. Automated approaches to radiology reporting require the image to be encoded into a suitable token representation for input to the language model. Previous methods commonly use convolutional neural networks to encode an image into a series of image-level feature map representations. However, the generated reports often exhibit realistic style but imperfect accuracy. Inspired by recent works for image captioning in the general domain in which each visual token corresponds to an object detected in an image, we investigate whether using local tokens corresponding to anatomical structures can improve the quality of the generated reports. We introduce a novel adaptation of Faster R-CNN in which finding detection is performed for the candidate bounding boxes extracted during anatomical structure localisation. We use the resulting bounding box feature representations as our set of finding-aware anatomical tokens. This encourages the extracted anatomical tokens to be informative about the findings they contain (required for the final task of radiology reporting). Evaluating on the MIMIC-CXR dataset of chest X-Ray images, we show that task-aware anatomical tokens give state-of-the-art performance when integrated into an automated reporting pipeline, yielding generated reports with improved clinical accuracy.

Authors:Dimitrios Mallis, Sk Aziz Ali, Elona Dupont, Kseniya Cherenkova, Ahmet Serdar Karadeniz, Mohammad Sadil Khan, Anis Kacem, Gleb Gusev, Djamila Aouada

Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in geometric Deep Learning (DL) and the availability of large Computer-Aided Design (CAD) datasets have advanced the research on learning CAD modeling processes and relating them to real objects. In this context, 3D reverse engineering of CAD models from 3D scans is considered to be one of the most sought-after goals for the CAD industry. However, recent efforts assume multiple simplifications limiting the applications in real-world settings. The SHARP Challenge 2023 aims at pushing the research a step closer to the real-world scenario of CAD reverse engineering through dedicated datasets and tracks. In this paper, we define the proposed SHARP 2023 tracks, describe the provided datasets, and propose a set of baseline methods along with suitable evaluation metrics to assess the performance of the track solutions. All proposed datasets along with useful routines and the evaluation metrics are publicly available.

Authors:Lucas Brynte, José Pedro Iglesias, Carl Olsson, Fredrik Kahl

Abstract: In this paper we tackle the problem of learning Structure-from-Motion (SfM) through the use of graph attention networks. SfM is a classic computer vision problem that is solved though iterative minimization of reprojection errors, referred to as Bundle Adjustment (BA), starting from a good initialization. In order to obtain a good enough initialization to BA, conventional methods rely on a sequence of sub-problems (such as pairwise pose estimation, pose averaging or triangulation) which provides an initial solution that can then be refined using BA. In this work we replace these sub-problems by learning a model that takes as input the 2D keypoints detected across multiple views, and outputs the corresponding camera poses and 3D keypoint coordinates. Our model takes advantage of graph neural networks to learn SfM-specific primitives, and we show that it can be used for fast inference of the reconstruction for new and unseen sequences. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms competing learning-based methods, and challenges COLMAP while having lower runtime.

Authors:Dian Zheng, Xiao-Ming Wu, Zuhao Liu, Jingke Meng, Wei-shi Zheng

Abstract: Stereo matching is a significant part in many computer vision tasks and driving-based applications. Recently cost volume-based methods have achieved great success benefiting from the rich geometry information in paired images. However, the redundancy of cost volume also interferes with the model training and limits the performance. To construct a more precise cost volume, we pioneeringly apply the diffusion model to stereo matching. Our method, termed DiffuVolume, considers the diffusion model as a cost volume filter, which will recurrently remove the redundant information from the cost volume. Two main designs make our method not trivial. Firstly, to make the diffusion model more adaptive to stereo matching, we eschew the traditional manner of directly adding noise into the image but embed the diffusion model into a task-specific module. In this way, we outperform the traditional diffusion stereo matching method by 22% EPE improvement and 240 times inference acceleration. Secondly, DiffuVolume can be easily embedded into any volume-based stereo matching network with boost performance but slight parameters rise (only 2%). By adding the DiffuVolume into well-performed methods, we outperform all the published methods on Scene Flow, KITTI2012, KITTI2015 benchmarks and zero-shot generalization setting. It is worth mentioning that the proposed model ranks 1st on KITTI 2012 leader board, 2nd on KITTI 2015 leader board since 15, July 2023.

Authors:Masato Fujitake

Abstract: Typical text recognition methods rely on an encoder-decoder structure, in which the encoder extracts features from an image, and the decoder produces recognized text from these features. In this study, we propose a simpler and more effective method for text recognition, known as the Decoder-only Transformer for Optical Character Recognition (DTrOCR). This method uses a decoder-only Transformer to take advantage of a generative language model that is pre-trained on a large corpus. We examined whether a generative language model that has been successful in natural language processing can also be effective for text recognition in computer vision. Our experiments demonstrated that DTrOCR outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in the recognition of printed, handwritten, and scene text in both English and Chinese.

Authors:Shaojie Zhang, Jianqin Yin, Yonghao Dang, Jiajun Fu

Abstract: Graph convolution networks (GCNs) have achieved remarkable performance in skeleton-based action recognition. However, existing previous GCN-based methods have relied excessively on elaborate human body priors and constructed complex feature aggregation mechanisms, which limits the generalizability of networks. To solve these problems, we propose a novel Spatial Topology Gating Unit (STGU), which is an MLP-based variant without extra priors, to capture the co-occurrence topology features that encode the spatial dependency across all joints. In STGU, to model the sample-specific and completely independent point-wise topology attention, a new gate-based feature interaction mechanism is introduced to activate the features point-to-point by the attention map generated from the input. Based on the STGU, in this work, we propose the first topology-aware MLP-based model, Ta-MLP, for skeleton-based action recognition. In comparison with existing previous methods on three large-scale datasets, Ta-MLP achieves competitive performance. In addition, Ta-MLP reduces the parameters by up to 62.5% with favorable results. Compared with previous state-of-the-art (SOAT) approaches, Ta-MLP pushes the frontier of real-time action recognition. The code will be available at https://github.com/BUPTSJZhang/Ta-MLP.

Authors:Shreyank N Gowda, Dheeraj Pandey, Shashank Narayana Gowda

Abstract: Recent advancements in deep learning and computer vision have led to a surge of interest in generating realistic talking heads. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art methods for talking head generation. We systematically categorises them into four main approaches: image-driven, audio-driven, video-driven and others (including neural radiance fields (NeRF), and 3D-based methods). We provide an in-depth analysis of each method, highlighting their unique contributions, strengths, and limitations. Furthermore, we thoroughly compare publicly available models, evaluating them on key aspects such as inference time and human-rated quality of the generated outputs. Our aim is to provide a clear and concise overview of the current landscape in talking head generation, elucidating the relationships between different approaches and identifying promising directions for future research. This survey will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners interested in this rapidly evolving field.

Authors:Tomaso Fontanini, Claudio Ferrari, Giuseppe Lisanti, Massimo Bertozzi, Andrea Prati

Abstract: In semantic image synthesis, the state of the art is dominated by methods that use spatially-adaptive normalization layers, which allow for excellent visual generation quality and editing versatility. Granted their efficacy, recent research efforts have focused toward finer-grained local style control and multi-modal generation. By construction though, such layers tend to overlook global image statistics leading to unconvincing local style editing and causing global inconsistencies such as color or illumination distribution shifts. Also, the semantic layout is required for mapping styles in the generator, putting a strict alignment constraint over the features. In response, we designed a novel architecture where cross-attention layers are used in place of de-normalization ones for conditioning the image generation. Our model inherits the advantages of both solutions, retaining state-of-the-art reconstruction quality, as well as improved global and local style transfer. Code and models available at https://github.com/TFonta/CA2SIS.

Authors:Sen Fang, Chunyu Sui, Xuedong Zhang, Yapeng Tian

Abstract: The field of Sign Language Production (SLP) lacked a large-scale, pre-trained model based on deep learning for continuous American Sign Language (ASL) production in the past decade. This limitation hampers communication for all individuals with disabilities relying on ASL. To address this issue, we undertook the secondary development and utilization of How2Sign, one of the largest publicly available ASL datasets. Despite its significance, prior researchers in the field of sign language have not effectively employed this corpus due to the intricacies involved in American Sign Language Production (ASLP). To conduct large-scale ASLP, we propose SignDiff based on the latest work in related fields, which is a dual-condition diffusion pre-training model that can generate human sign language speakers from a skeleton pose. SignDiff has a novel Frame Reinforcement Network called FR-Net, similar to dense human pose estimation work, which enhances the correspondence between text lexical symbols and sign language dense pose frames reduce the occurrence of multiple fingers in the diffusion model. In addition, our ASLP method proposes two new improved modules and a new loss function to improve the accuracy and quality of sign language skeletal posture and enhance the ability of the model to train on large-scale data. We propose the first baseline for ASL production and report the scores of 17.19 and 12.85 on BLEU-4 on the How2Sign dev/test sets. We also evaluated our model on the previous mainstream dataset called PHOENIX14T, and the main experiments achieved the results of SOTA. In addition, our image quality far exceeds all previous results by 10 percentage points on the SSIM indicator. Finally, we conducted ablation studies and qualitative evaluations for discussion.

Authors:Man Zhou, Jie Huang, Naishan Zheng, Chongyi Li

Abstract: The success of deep neural networks for pan-sharpening is commonly in a form of black box, lacking transparency and interpretability. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel model-driven deep unfolding framework with image reasoning prior tailored for the pan-sharpening task. Different from existing unfolding solutions that deliver the proximal operator networks as the uncertain and vague priors, our framework is motivated by the content reasoning ability of masked autoencoders (MAE) with insightful designs. Specifically, the pre-trained MAE with spatial masking strategy, acting as intrinsic reasoning prior, is embedded into unfolding architecture. Meanwhile, the pre-trained MAE with spatial-spectral masking strategy is treated as the regularization term within loss function to constrain the spatial-spectral consistency. Such designs penetrate the image reasoning prior into deep unfolding networks while improving its interpretability and representation capability. The uniqueness of our framework is that the holistic learning process is explicitly integrated with the inherent physical mechanism underlying the pan-sharpening task. Extensive experiments on multiple satellite datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over the existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code will be released at \url{https://manman1995.github.io/}.

Authors:Mengping Yang, Zhe Wang, Wenyi Feng, Qian Zhang, Ting Xiao

Abstract: Few-shot image generation, which aims to produce plausible and diverse images for one category given a few images from this category, has drawn extensive attention. Existing approaches either globally interpolate different images or fuse local representations with pre-defined coefficients. However, such an intuitive combination of images/features only exploits the most relevant information for generation, leading to poor diversity and coarse-grained semantic fusion. To remedy this, this paper proposes a novel textural modulation (TexMod) mechanism to inject external semantic signals into internal local representations. Parameterized by the feedback from the discriminator, our TexMod enables more fined-grained semantic injection while maintaining the synthesis fidelity. Moreover, a global structural discriminator (StructD) is developed to explicitly guide the model to generate images with reasonable layout and outline. Furthermore, the frequency awareness of the model is reinforced by encouraging the model to distinguish frequency signals. Together with these techniques, we build a novel and effective model for few-shot image generation. The effectiveness of our model is identified by extensive experiments on three popular datasets and various settings. Besides achieving state-of-the-art synthesis performance on these datasets, our proposed techniques could be seamlessly integrated into existing models for a further performance boost.

Authors:Karl Audun Kagnes Borgersen, Morten Goodwin, Jivitesh Sharma, Tobias Aasmoe, Mari Leonhardsen, Gro Herredsvela Rørvik

Abstract: Detecting visually similar images is a particularly useful attribute to look to when calculating product recommendations. Embedding similarity, which utilizes pre-trained computer vision models to extract high-level image features, has demonstrated remarkable efficacy in identifying images with similar compositions. However, there is a lack of methods for evaluating the embeddings generated by these models, as conventional loss and performance metrics do not adequately capture their performance in image similarity search tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the viability of the image embeddings from numerous pre-trained computer vision models using a novel approach named CorrEmbed. Our approach computes the correlation between distances in image embeddings and distances in human-generated tag vectors. We extensively evaluate numerous pre-trained Torchvision models using this metric, revealing an intuitive relationship of linear scaling between ImageNet1k accuracy scores and tag-correlation scores. Importantly, our method also identifies deviations from this pattern, providing insights into how different models capture high-level image features. By offering a robust performance evaluation of these pre-trained models, CorrEmbed serves as a valuable tool for researchers and practitioners seeking to develop effective, data-driven approaches to similar item recommendations in fashion retail.

Authors:Jianning Li, Antonio Pepe, Christina Gsaxner, Gijs Luijten, Yuan Jin, Narmada Ambigapathy, Enrico Nasca, Naida Solak, Gian Marco Melito, Afaque R. Memon, Xiaojun Chen, Jan Stefan Kirschke, Ezequiel de la Rosa, Patrich Ferndinand Christ, Hongwei Bran Li, David G. Ellis, Michele R. Aizenberg, Sergios Gatidis, Thomas Kuestner, Nadya Shusharina, Nicholas Heller, Vincent Andrearczyk, Adrien Depeursinge, Mathieu Hatt, Anjany Sekuboyina, Maximilian Loeffler, Hans Liebl, Reuben Dorent, Tom Vercauteren, Jonathan Shapey, Aaron Kujawa, Stefan Cornelissen, Patrick Langenhuizen, Achraf Ben-Hamadou, Ahmed Rekik, Sergi Pujades, Edmond Boyer, Federico Bolelli, Costantino Grana, Luca Lumetti, Hamidreza Salehi, Jun Ma, Yao Zhang, Ramtin Gharleghi, Susann Beier, Eduardo A. Garza-Villarreal, Thania Balducci, Diego Angeles-Valdez, Roberto Souza, Leticia Rittner, Richard Frayne, Yuanfeng Ji, Soumick Chatterjee, Andreas Nuernberger, Joao Pedrosa, Carlos Ferreira, Guilherme Aresta, Antonio Cunha, Aurelio Campilho, Yannick Suter, Jose Garcia, Alain Lalande, Emmanuel Audenaert, Claudia Krebs, Timo Van Leeuwen, Evie Vereecke, Rainer Roehrig, Frank Hoelzle, Vahid Badeli, Kathrin Krieger, Matthias Gunzer, Jianxu Chen, Amin Dada, Miriam Balzer, Jana Fragemann, Frederic Jonske, Moritz Rempe, Stanislav Malorodov, Fin H. Bahnsen, Constantin Seibold, Alexander Jaus, Ana Sofia Santos, Mariana Lindo, Andre Ferreira, Victor Alves, Michael Kamp, Amr Abourayya, Felix Nensa, Fabian Hoerst, Alexander Brehmer, Lukas Heine, Lars E. Podleska, Matthias A. Fink, Julius Keyl, Konstantinos Tserpes, Moon-Sung Kim, Shireen Elhabian, Hans Lamecker, Dzenan Zukic, Beatriz Paniagua, Christian Wachinger, Martin Urschler, Luc Duong, Jakob Wasserthal, Peter F. Hoyer, Oliver Basu, Thomas Maal, Max J. H. Witjes, Ping Luo, Bjoern Menze, Mauricio Reyes, Christos Davatzikos, Behrus Puladi, Jens Kleesiek, Jan Egger

Abstract: We present MedShapeNet, a large collection of anatomical shapes (e.g., bones, organs, vessels) and 3D surgical instrument models. Prior to the deep learning era, the broad application of statistical shape models (SSMs) in medical image analysis is evidence that shapes have been commonly used to describe medical data. Nowadays, however, state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning algorithms in medical imaging are predominantly voxel-based. In computer vision, on the contrary, shapes (including, voxel occupancy grids, meshes, point clouds and implicit surface models) are preferred data representations in 3D, as seen from the numerous shape-related publications in premier vision conferences, such as the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), as well as the increasing popularity of ShapeNet (about 51,300 models) and Princeton ModelNet (127,915 models) in computer vision research. MedShapeNet is created as an alternative to these commonly used shape benchmarks to facilitate the translation of data-driven vision algorithms to medical applications, and it extends the opportunities to adapt SOTA vision algorithms to solve critical medical problems. Besides, the majority of the medical shapes in MedShapeNet are modeled directly on the imaging data of real patients, and therefore it complements well existing shape benchmarks comprising of computer-aided design (CAD) models. MedShapeNet currently includes more than 100,000 medical shapes, and provides annotations in the form of paired data. It is therefore also a freely available repository of 3D models for extended reality (virtual reality - VR, augmented reality - AR, mixed reality - MR) and medical 3D printing. This white paper describes in detail the motivations behind MedShapeNet, the shape acquisition procedures, the use cases, as well as the usage of the online shape search portal: https://medshapenet.ikim.nrw/

Authors:Hengxu Zhang, Pengpeng Liang, Zhiyong Sun, Bo Song, Erkang Cheng

Abstract: Both CNN-based and Transformer-based object detection with bounding box representation have been extensively studied in computer vision and medical image analysis, but circular object detection in medical images is still underexplored. Inspired by the recent anchor free CNN-based circular object detection method (CircleNet) for ball-shape glomeruli detection in renal pathology, in this paper, we present CircleFormer, a Transformer-based circular medical object detection with dynamic anchor circles. Specifically, queries with circle representation in Transformer decoder iteratively refine the circular object detection results, and a circle cross attention module is introduced to compute the similarity between circular queries and image features. A generalized circle IoU (gCIoU) is proposed to serve as a new regression loss of circular object detection as well. Moreover, our approach is easy to generalize to the segmentation task by adding a simple segmentation branch to CircleFormer. We evaluate our method in circular nuclei detection and segmentation on the public MoNuSeg dataset, and the experimental results show that our method achieves promising performance compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. The effectiveness of each component is validated via ablation studies as well. Our code is released at: \url{https://github.com/zhanghx-iim-ahu/CircleFormer}.

Authors:Yiqi Zhong, Luming Liang, Ilya Zharkov, Ulrich Neumann

Abstract: A central challenge of video prediction lies where the system has to reason the objects' future motions from image frames while simultaneously maintaining the consistency of their appearances across frames. This work introduces an end-to-end trainable two-stream video prediction framework, Motion-Matrix-based Video Prediction (MMVP), to tackle this challenge. Unlike previous methods that usually handle motion prediction and appearance maintenance within the same set of modules, MMVP decouples motion and appearance information by constructing appearance-agnostic motion matrices. The motion matrices represent the temporal similarity of each and every pair of feature patches in the input frames, and are the sole input of the motion prediction module in MMVP. This design improves video prediction in both accuracy and efficiency, and reduces the model size. Results of extensive experiments demonstrate that MMVP outperforms state-of-the-art systems on public data sets by non-negligible large margins (about 1 db in PSNR, UCF Sports) in significantly smaller model sizes (84% the size or smaller). Please refer to https://github.com/Kay1794/MMVP-motion-matrix-based-video-prediction for the official code and the datasets used in this paper.

Authors:Shuting He, Henghui Ding, Chang Liu, Xudong Jiang

Abstract: The objective of Classic Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is to produce a bounding box corresponding to the object mentioned in a given textual description. Commonly, existing datasets and techniques in classic REC are tailored for expressions that pertain to a single target, meaning a sole expression is linked to one specific object. Expressions that refer to multiple targets or involve no specific target have not been taken into account. This constraint hinders the practical applicability of REC. This study introduces a new benchmark termed as Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension (GREC). This benchmark extends the classic REC by permitting expressions to describe any number of target objects. To achieve this goal, we have built the first large-scale GREC dataset named gRefCOCO. This dataset encompasses a range of expressions: those referring to multiple targets, expressions with no specific target, and the single-target expressions. The design of GREC and gRefCOCO ensures smooth compatibility with classic REC. The proposed gRefCOCO dataset, a GREC method implementation code, and GREC evaluation code are available at https://github.com/henghuiding/gRefCOCO.

Authors:Junlong Cheng, Jin Ye, Zhongying Deng, Jianpin Chen, Tianbin Li, Haoyu Wang, Yanzhou Su, Ziyan Huang, Jilong Chen, Lei Jiang, Hui Sun, Junjun He, Shaoting Zhang, Min Zhu, Yu Qiao

Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) represents a state-of-the-art research advancement in natural image segmentation, achieving impressive results with input prompts such as points and bounding boxes. However, our evaluation and recent research indicate that directly applying the pretrained SAM to medical image segmentation does not yield satisfactory performance. This limitation primarily arises from significant domain gap between natural images and medical images. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAM-Med2D, the most comprehensive studies on applying SAM to medical 2D images. Specifically, we first collect and curate approximately 4.6M images and 19.7M masks from public and private datasets, constructing a large-scale medical image segmentation dataset encompassing various modalities and objects. Then, we comprehensively fine-tune SAM on this dataset and turn it into SAM-Med2D. Unlike previous methods that only adopt bounding box or point prompts as interactive segmentation approach, we adapt SAM to medical image segmentation through more comprehensive prompts involving bounding boxes, points, and masks. We additionally fine-tune the encoder and decoder of the original SAM to obtain a well-performed SAM-Med2D, leading to the most comprehensive fine-tuning strategies to date. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation and analysis to investigate the performance of SAM-Med2D in medical image segmentation across various modalities, anatomical structures, and organs. Concurrently, we validated the generalization capability of SAM-Med2D on 9 datasets from MICCAI 2023 challenge. Overall, our approach demonstrated significantly superior performance and generalization capability compared to SAM.

Authors:Shaokai Wu, Fengyu Yang

Abstract: Detection-based methods have been viewed unfavorably in crowd analysis due to their poor performance in dense crowds. However, we argue that the potential of these methods has been underestimated, as they offer crucial information for crowd analysis that is often ignored. Specifically, the area size and confidence score of output proposals and bounding boxes provide insight into the scale and density of the crowd. To leverage these underutilized features, we propose Crowd Hat, a plug-and-play module that can be easily integrated with existing detection models. This module uses a mixed 2D-1D compression technique to refine the output features and obtain the spatial and numerical distribution of crowd-specific information. Based on these features, we further propose region-adaptive NMS thresholds and a decouple-then-align paradigm that address the major limitations of detection-based methods. Our extensive evaluations on various crowd analysis tasks, including crowd counting, localization, and detection, demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing output features and the potential of detection-based methods in crowd analysis.

Authors:Debapriya Tula, Sujoy Paul, Gagan Madan, Peter Garst, Reeve Ingle, Gaurav Aggarwal

Abstract: Recognizing text lines from images is a challenging problem, especially for handwritten documents due to large variations in writing styles. While text line recognition models are generally trained on large corpora of real and synthetic data, such models can still make frequent mistakes if the handwriting is inscrutable or the image acquisition process adds corruptions, such as noise, blur, compression, etc. Writing style is generally quite consistent for an individual, which can be leveraged to correct mistakes made by such models. Motivated by this, we introduce the problem of adapting text line recognition models during test time. We focus on a challenging and realistic setting where, given only a single test image consisting of multiple text lines, the task is to adapt the model such that it performs better on the image, without any labels. We propose an iterative self-training approach that uses feedback from the language model to update the optical model, with confident self-labels in each iteration. The confidence measure is based on an augmentation mechanism that evaluates the divergence of the prediction of the model in a local region. We perform rigorous evaluation of our method on several benchmark datasets as well as their corrupted versions. Experimental results on multiple datasets spanning multiple scripts show that the proposed adaptation method offers an absolute improvement of up to 8% in character error rate with just a few iterations of self-training at test time.

Authors:Jiahui Zhang, Fangneng Zhan, Yingchen Yu, Kunhao Liu, Rongliang Wu, Xiaoqin Zhang, Ling Shao, Shijian Lu

Abstract: Pose-free neural radiance fields (NeRF) aim to train NeRF with unposed multi-view images and it has achieved very impressive success in recent years. Most existing works share the pipeline of training a coarse pose estimator with rendered images at first, followed by a joint optimization of estimated poses and neural radiance field. However, as the pose estimator is trained with only rendered images, the pose estimation is usually biased or inaccurate for real images due to the domain gap between real images and rendered images, leading to poor robustness for the pose estimation of real images and further local minima in joint optimization. We design IR-NeRF, an innovative pose-free NeRF that introduces implicit pose regularization to refine pose estimator with unposed real images and improve the robustness of the pose estimation for real images. With a collection of 2D images of a specific scene, IR-NeRF constructs a scene codebook that stores scene features and captures the scene-specific pose distribution implicitly as priors. Thus, the robustness of pose estimation can be promoted with the scene priors according to the rationale that a 2D real image can be well reconstructed from the scene codebook only when its estimated pose lies within the pose distribution. Extensive experiments show that IR-NeRF achieves superior novel view synthesis and outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently across multiple synthetic and real datasets.

Authors:Taotao Jing, Lichen Wang, Naji Khosravan, Zhiqiang Wan, Zachary Bessinger, Zhengming Ding, Sing Bing Kang

Abstract: Room layout estimation predicts layouts from a single panorama. It requires datasets with large-scale and diverse room shapes to train the models. However, there are significant imbalances in real-world datasets including the dimensions of layout complexity, camera locations, and variation in scene appearance. These issues considerably influence the model training performance. In this work, we propose the imBalance-Aware Room Layout Estimation (iBARLE) framework to address these issues. iBARLE consists of (1) Appearance Variation Generation (AVG) module, which promotes visual appearance domain generalization, (2) Complex Structure Mix-up (CSMix) module, which enhances generalizability w.r.t. room structure, and (3) a gradient-based layout objective function, which allows more effective accounting for occlusions in complex layouts. All modules are jointly trained and help each other to achieve the best performance. Experiments and ablation studies based on ZInD~\cite{cruz2021zillow} dataset illustrate that iBARLE has state-of-the-art performance compared with other layout estimation baselines.

Authors:Yuying Jiang, Fan Bai, Zicheng Zhang, Xiaochen Ye, Zheng Liu, Zhiping Shi, Jianwei Yao, Xiaojun Liu, Fangkun Zhu, Junling Li Qian Guo, Xiaoan Wang, Junwen Luo

Abstract: Objective.Visual-Brain Machine Interface(V-BMI) has provide a novel interaction technique for Augmented Reality (AR) industries. Several state-of-arts work has demonstates its high accuracy and real-time interaction capbilities. However, most of the studies employ EEGs devices that are rigid and difficult to apply in real-life AR glasseses application sceniraros. Here we develop a consumer-tier Visual-Brain Machine Inteface(V-BMI) system specialized for Augmented Reality(AR) glasses interactions. Approach. The developed system consists of a wearable hardware which takes advantages of fast set-up, reliable recording and comfortable wearable experience that specificized for AR glasses applications. Complementing this hardware, we have devised a software framework that facilitates real-time interactions within the system while accommodating a modular configuration to enhance scalability. Main results. The developed hardware is only 110g and 120x85x23 mm, which with 1 Tohm and peak to peak voltage is less than 1.5 uV, and a V-BMI based angry bird game and an Internet of Thing (IoT) AR applications are deisgned, we demonstrated such technology merits of intuitive experience and efficiency interaction. The real-time interaction accuracy is between 85 and 96 percentages in a commercial AR glasses (DTI is 2.24s and ITR 65 bits-min ). Significance. Our study indicates the developed system can provide an essential hardware-software framework for consumer based V-BMI AR glasses. Also, we derive several pivotal design factors for a consumer-grade V-BMI-based AR system: 1) Dynamic adaptation of stimulation patterns-classification methods via computer vision algorithms is necessary for AR glasses applications; and 2) Algorithmic localization to foster system stability and latency reduction.

Authors:Haichao Shi, Mandi Luo, Xiao-Yu Zhang, Ran He

Abstract: Visible-Infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is an important and challenging task in intelligent video surveillance. Existing methods mainly focus on learning a shared feature space to reduce the modality discrepancy between visible and infrared modalities, which still leave two problems underexplored: information redundancy and modality complementarity. To this end, properly eliminating the identity-irrelevant information as well as making up for the modality-specific information are critical and remains a challenging endeavor. To tackle the above problems, we present a novel mutual information and modality consensus network, namely CMInfoNet, to extract modality-invariant identity features with the most representative information and reduce the redundancies. The key insight of our method is to find an optimal representation to capture more identity-relevant information and compress the irrelevant parts by optimizing a mutual information bottleneck trade-off. Besides, we propose an automatically search strategy to find the most prominent parts that identify the pedestrians. To eliminate the cross- and intra-modality variations, we also devise a modality consensus module to align the visible and infrared modalities for task-specific guidance. Moreover, the global-local feature representations can also be acquired for key parts discrimination. Experimental results on four benchmarks, i.e., SYSU-MM01, RegDB, Occluded-DukeMTMC, Occluded-REID, Partial-REID and Partial\_iLIDS dataset, have demonstrated the effectiveness of CMInfoNet.

Authors:Xinqi Lin, Jingwen He, Ziyan Chen, Zhaoyang Lyu, Ben Fei, Bo Dai, Wanli Ouyang, Yu Qiao, Chao Dong

Abstract: We present DiffBIR, which leverages pretrained text-to-image diffusion models for blind image restoration problem. Our framework adopts a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we pretrain a restoration module across diversified degradations to improve generalization capability in real-world scenarios. The second stage leverages the generative ability of latent diffusion models, to achieve realistic image restoration. Specifically, we introduce an injective modulation sub-network -- LAControlNet for finetuning, while the pre-trained Stable Diffusion is to maintain its generative ability. Finally, we introduce a controllable module that allows users to balance quality and fidelity by introducing the latent image guidance in the denoising process during inference. Extensive experiments have demonstrated its superiority over state-of-the-art approaches for both blind image super-resolution and blind face restoration tasks on synthetic and real-world datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/XPixelGroup/DiffBIR.

Authors:Xiaotong Li, Zixuan Hu, Yixiao Ge, Ying Shan, Ling-Yu Duan

Abstract: Transfer learning has become crucial in computer vision tasks due to the vast availability of pre-trained deep learning models. However, selecting the optimal pre-trained model from a diverse pool for a specific downstream task remains a challenge. Existing methods for measuring the transferability of pre-trained models rely on statistical correlations between encoded static features and task labels, but they overlook the impact of underlying representation dynamics during fine-tuning, leading to unreliable results, especially for self-supervised models. In this paper, we present an insightful physics-inspired approach named PED to address these challenges. We reframe the challenge of model selection through the lens of potential energy and directly model the interaction forces that influence fine-tuning dynamics. By capturing the motion of dynamic representations to decline the potential energy within a force-driven physical model, we can acquire an enhanced and more stable observation for estimating transferability. The experimental results on 10 downstream tasks and 12 self-supervised models demonstrate that our approach can seamlessly integrate into existing ranking techniques and enhance their performances, revealing its effectiveness for the model selection task and its potential for understanding the mechanism in transfer learning. Code will be available at https://github.com/lixiaotong97/PED.

Authors:Hengwei Zhao, Xinyu Wang, Jingtao Li, Yanfei Zhong

Abstract: Positive-unlabeled learning (PU learning) in hyperspectral remote sensing imagery (HSI) is aimed at learning a binary classifier from positive and unlabeled data, which has broad prospects in various earth vision applications. However, when PU learning meets limited labeled HSI, the unlabeled data may dominate the optimization process, which makes the neural networks overfit the unlabeled data. In this paper, a Taylor variational loss is proposed for HSI PU learning, which reduces the weight of the gradient of the unlabeled data by Taylor series expansion to enable the network to find a balance between overfitting and underfitting. In addition, the self-calibrated optimization strategy is designed to stabilize the training process. Experiments on 7 benchmark datasets (21 tasks in total) validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is at: https://github.com/Hengwei-Zhao96/T-HOneCls.

Authors:Wenze Liu, Hao Lu, Hongtao Fu, Zhiguo Cao

Abstract: We present DySample, an ultra-lightweight and effective dynamic upsampler. While impressive performance gains have been witnessed from recent kernel-based dynamic upsamplers such as CARAFE, FADE, and SAPA, they introduce much workload, mostly due to the time-consuming dynamic convolution and the additional sub-network used to generate dynamic kernels. Further, the need for high-res feature guidance of FADE and SAPA somehow limits their application scenarios. To address these concerns, we bypass dynamic convolution and formulate upsampling from the perspective of point sampling, which is more resource-efficient and can be easily implemented with the standard built-in function in PyTorch. We first showcase a naive design, and then demonstrate how to strengthen its upsampling behavior step by step towards our new upsampler, DySample. Compared with former kernel-based dynamic upsamplers, DySample requires no customized CUDA package and has much fewer parameters, FLOPs, GPU memory, and latency. Besides the light-weight characteristics, DySample outperforms other upsamplers across five dense prediction tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/dysample.

Authors:Paul Melki IMS, Lionel Bombrun IMS, Boubacar Diallo IMS, Jérôme Dias IMS, Jean-Pierre da Costa IMS

Abstract: As deep learning predictive models become an integral part of a large spectrum of precision agricultural systems, a barrier to the adoption of such automated solutions is the lack of user trust in these highly complex, opaque and uncertain models. Indeed, deep neural networks are not equipped with any explicit guarantees that can be used to certify the system's performance, especially in highly varying uncontrolled environments such as the ones typically faced in computer vision for agriculture.Fortunately, certain methods developed in other communities can prove to be important for agricultural applications. This article presents the conformal prediction framework that provides valid statistical guarantees on the predictive performance of any black box prediction machine, with almost no assumptions, applied to the problem of deep visual classification of weeds and crops in real-world conditions. The framework is exposed with a focus on its practical aspects and special attention accorded to the Adaptive Prediction Sets (APS) approach that delivers marginal guarantees on the model's coverage. Marginal results are then shown to be insufficient to guarantee performance on all groups of individuals in the population as characterized by their environmental and pedo-climatic auxiliary data gathered during image acquisition.To tackle this shortcoming, group-conditional conformal approaches are presented: the ''classical'' method that consists of iteratively applying the APS procedure on all groups, and a proposed elegant reformulation and implementation of the procedure using quantile regression on group membership indicators. Empirical results showing the validity of the proposed approach are presented and compared to the marginal APS then discussed.

Authors:Henghao Zhao, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Rui Yan, Zechao Li

Abstract: Video moment retrieval is a fundamental visual-language task that aims to retrieve target moments from an untrimmed video based on a language query. Existing methods typically generate numerous proposals manually or via generative networks in advance as the support set for retrieval, which is not only inflexible but also time-consuming. Inspired by the success of diffusion models on object detection, this work aims at reformulating video moment retrieval as a denoising generation process to get rid of the inflexible and time-consuming proposal generation. To this end, we propose a novel proposal-free framework, namely DiffusionVMR, which directly samples random spans from noise as candidates and introduces denoising learning to ground target moments. During training, Gaussian noise is added to the real moments, and the model is trained to learn how to reverse this process. In inference, a set of time spans is progressively refined from the initial noise to the final output. Notably, the training and inference of DiffusionVMR are decoupled, and an arbitrary number of random spans can be used in inference without being consistent with the training phase. Extensive experiments conducted on three widely-used benchmarks (i.e., QVHighlight, Charades-STA, and TACoS) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DiffusionVMR by comparing it with state-of-the-art methods.

Authors:Yuhan Song, Armagan Elibol, Nak Young Chong

Abstract: As recent advances in AI are causing the decline of conventional diagnostic methods, the realization of end-to-end diagnosis is fast approaching. Ultrasound image segmentation is an important step in the diagnostic process. An accurate and robust segmentation model accelerates the process and reduces the burden of sonographers. In contrast to previous research, we take two inherent features of ultrasound images into consideration: (1) different organs and tissues vary in spatial sizes, (2) the anatomical structures inside human body form a relatively constant spatial relationship. Based on those two ideas, we propose a new image segmentation model combining Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and Spatial Recurrent Neural Network (SRNN). We discuss why we use FPN to extract anatomical structures of different scales and how SRNN is implemented to extract the spatial context features in abdominal ultrasound images.

Authors:Shuxiao Ma, Linyuan Wang, Bin Yan

Abstract: Biological research has revealed that the verbal semantic information in the brain cortex, as an additional source, participates in nonverbal semantic tasks, such as visual encoding. However, previous visual encoding models did not incorporate verbal semantic information, contradicting this biological finding. This paper proposes a multimodal visual information encoding network model based on stimulus images and associated textual information in response to this issue. Our visual information encoding network model takes stimulus images as input and leverages textual information generated by a text-image generation model as verbal semantic information. This approach injects new information into the visual encoding model. Subsequently, a Transformer network aligns image and text feature information, creating a multimodal feature space. A convolutional network then maps from this multimodal feature space to voxel space, constructing the multimodal visual information encoding network model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multimodal visual information encoding network model outperforms previous models under the exact training cost. In voxel prediction of the left hemisphere of subject 1's brain, the performance improves by approximately 15.87%, while in the right hemisphere, the performance improves by about 4.6%. The multimodal visual encoding network model exhibits superior encoding performance. Additionally, ablation experiments indicate that our proposed model better simulates the brain's visual information processing.

Authors:Zhuo Zhou, Wenxuan Liu, Danni Xu, Zheng Wang, Jian Zhao

Abstract: This paper introduces a new and challenging Hidden Intention Discovery (HID) task. Unlike existing intention recognition tasks, which are based on obvious visual representations to identify common intentions for normal behavior, HID focuses on discovering hidden intentions when humans try to hide their intentions for abnormal behavior. HID presents a unique challenge in that hidden intentions lack the obvious visual representations to distinguish them from normal intentions. Fortunately, from a sociological and psychological perspective, we find that the difference between hidden and normal intentions can be reasoned from multiple micro-behaviors, such as gaze, attention, and facial expressions. Therefore, we first discover the relationship between micro-behavior and hidden intentions and use graph structure to reason about hidden intentions. To facilitate research in the field of HID, we also constructed a seminal dataset containing a hidden intention annotation of a typical theft scenario for HID. Extensive experiments show that the proposed network improves performance on the HID task by 9.9\% over the state-of-the-art method SBP.

Authors:Shubhajit Basak, Sathish Mangapuram, Gabriel Costache, Rachel McDonnell, Michael Schukat

Abstract: The incorporation of 3D data in facial analysis tasks has gained popularity in recent years. Though it provides a more accurate and detailed representation of the human face, accruing 3D face data is more complex and expensive than 2D face images. Either one has to rely on expensive 3D scanners or depth sensors which are prone to noise. An alternative option is the reconstruction of 3D faces from uncalibrated 2D images in an unsupervised way without any ground truth 3D data. However, such approaches are computationally expensive and the learned model size is not suitable for mobile or other edge device applications. Predicting dense 3D landmarks over the whole face can overcome this issue. As there is no public dataset available containing dense landmarks, we propose a pipeline to create a dense keypoint training dataset containing 520 key points across the whole face from an existing facial position map data. We train a lightweight MobileNet-based regressor model with the generated data. As we do not have access to any evaluation dataset with dense landmarks in it we evaluate our model against the 68 keypoint detection task. Experimental results show that our trained model outperforms many of the existing methods in spite of its lower model size and minimal computational cost. Also, the qualitative evaluation shows the efficiency of our trained models in extreme head pose angles as well as other facial variations and occlusions.

Authors:Yicheng Chen, Shengxiang Ji, Yuelin Xin, Kun Han, Xiaohui Xie

Abstract: Previously, in the field of medical image registration, there are primarily two paradigms, the traditional optimization-based methods, and the deep-learning-based methods. Each of these paradigms has its advantages, and in this work, we aim to take the best of both worlds. Instead of developing a new deep learning model, we designed a robust training architecture that is simple and generalizable. We present Optron, a general training architecture incorporating the idea of training-in-the-loop. By iteratively optimizing the prediction result of a deep learning model through a plug-and-play optimizer module in the training loop, Optron introduces pseudo ground truth to an unsupervised training process. And by bringing the training process closer to that of supervised training, Optron can consistently improve the models' performance and convergence speed. We evaluated our method on various combinations of models and datasets, and we have achieved state-of-the-art performance on the IXI dataset, improving the previous state-of-the-art method TransMorph by a significant margin of +1.6% DSC. Moreover, Optron also consistently achieved positive results with other models and datasets. It increases the validation DSC for VoxelMorph and ViT-V-Net by +2.3% and +2.2% respectively on IXI, demonstrating our method's generalizability. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/miraclefactory/optron

Authors:Devaansh Gupta, Siddhant Kharbanda, Jiawei Zhou, Wanhua Li, Hanspeter Pfister, Donglai Wei

Abstract: There has been a growing interest in developing multimodal machine translation (MMT) systems that enhance neural machine translation (NMT) with visual knowledge. This problem setup involves using images as auxiliary information during training, and more recently, eliminating their use during inference. Towards this end, previous works face a challenge in training powerful MMT models from scratch due to the scarcity of annotated multilingual vision-language data, especially for low-resource languages. Simultaneously, there has been an influx of multilingual pre-trained models for NMT and multimodal pre-trained models for vision-language tasks, primarily in English, which have shown exceptional generalisation ability. However, these are not directly applicable to MMT since they do not provide aligned multimodal multilingual features for generative tasks. To alleviate this issue, instead of designing complex modules for MMT, we propose CLIPTrans, which simply adapts the independently pre-trained multimodal M-CLIP and the multilingual mBART. In order to align their embedding spaces, mBART is conditioned on the M-CLIP features by a prefix sequence generated through a lightweight mapping network. We train this in a two-stage pipeline which warms up the model with image captioning before the actual translation task. Through experiments, we demonstrate the merits of this framework and consequently push forward the state-of-the-art across standard benchmarks by an average of +2.67 BLEU. The code can be found at www.github.com/devaansh100/CLIPTrans.

Authors:Xiuwei Chen, Xiaobin Chang

Abstract: Class incremental learning (CIL) aims to recognize both the old and new classes along the increment tasks. Deep neural networks in CIL suffer from catastrophic forgetting and some approaches rely on saving exemplars from previous tasks, known as the exemplar-based setting, to alleviate this problem. On the contrary, this paper focuses on the Exemplar-Free setting with no old class sample preserved. Balancing the plasticity and stability in deep feature learning with only supervision from new classes is more challenging. Most existing Exemplar-Free CIL methods report the overall performance only and lack further analysis. In this work, different methods are examined with complementary metrics in greater detail. Moreover, we propose a simple CIL method, Rotation Augmented Distillation (RAD), which achieves one of the top-tier performances under the Exemplar-Free setting. Detailed analysis shows our RAD benefits from the superior balance between plasticity and stability. Finally, more challenging exemplar-free settings with fewer initial classes are undertaken for further demonstrations and comparisons among the state-of-the-art methods.

Authors:Yung-Hsin Chen, Yuli Zhou

Abstract: The study investigates the potential of post-OCR models to overcome limitations in OCR models and explores the impact of incorporating glyph embedding on post-OCR correction performance. In this study, we have developed our own post-OCR correction model. The novelty of our approach lies in embedding the OCR output using CharBERT and our unique embedding technique, capturing the visual characteristics of characters. Our findings show that post-OCR correction effectively addresses deficiencies in inferior OCR models, and glyph embedding enables the model to achieve superior results, including the ability to correct individual words.

Authors:Tim Meinhardt, Matt Feiszli, Yuchen Fan, Laura Leal-Taixe, Rakesh Ranjan

Abstract: Until recently, the Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) community operated under the common belief that offline methods are generally superior to a frame by frame online processing. However, the recent success of online methods questions this belief, in particular, for challenging and long video sequences. We understand this work as a rebuttal of those recent observations and an appeal to the community to focus on dedicated near-online VIS approaches. To support our argument, we present a detailed analysis on different processing paradigms and the new end-to-end trainable NOVIS (Near-Online Video Instance Segmentation) method. Our transformer-based model directly predicts spatio-temporal mask volumes for clips of frames and performs instance tracking between clips via overlap embeddings. NOVIS represents the first near-online VIS approach which avoids any handcrafted tracking heuristics. We outperform all existing VIS methods by large margins and provide new state-of-the-art results on both YouTube-VIS (2019/2021) and the OVIS benchmarks.

Authors:Seongha Eom, Namgyu Ho, Jaehoon Oh, Se-Young Yun

Abstract: Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot classification ability, namely image classification using novel text labels. Existing works have attempted to enhance CLIP by fine-tuning on downstream tasks, but these have inadvertently led to performance degradation on unseen classes, thus harming zero-shot generalization. This paper aims to address this challenge by leveraging readily available image-text pairs from an external dataset for cross-modal guidance during inference. To this end, we propose X-MoRe, a novel inference method comprising two key steps: (1) cross-modal retrieval and (2) modal-confidence-based ensemble. Given a query image, we harness the power of CLIP's cross-modal representations to retrieve relevant textual information from an external image-text pair dataset. Then, we assign higher weights to the more reliable modality between the original query image and retrieved text, contributing to the final prediction. X-MoRe demonstrates robust performance across a diverse set of tasks without the need for additional training, showcasing the effectiveness of utilizing cross-modal features to maximize CLIP's zero-shot ability.

Authors:Yiming Huang, Guole Liu, Yaoru Luo, Ge Yang

Abstract: The scarcity of annotated data, particularly for rare diseases, limits the variability of training data and the range of detectable lesions, presenting a significant challenge for supervised anomaly detection in medical imaging. To solve this problem, we propose a novel unsupervised method for medical image anomaly detection: Attention-Augmented Differentiable top-k Feature Adaptation (ADFA). The method utilizes Wide-ResNet50-2 (WR50) network pre-trained on ImageNet to extract initial feature representations. To reduce the channel dimensionality while preserving relevant channel information, we employ an attention-augmented patch descriptor on the extracted features. We then apply differentiable top-k feature adaptation to train the patch descriptor, mapping the extracted feature representations to a new vector space, enabling effective detection of anomalies. Experiments show that ADFA outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on multiple challenging medical image datasets, confirming its effectiveness in medical anomaly detection.

Authors:Javier Fumanal-Idocin, Javier Andreu-Perez, Oscar Cordón, Hani Hagras, Humberto Bustince

Abstract: Automatic art analysis employs different image processing techniques to classify and categorize works of art. When working with artistic images, we need to take into account further considerations compared to classical image processing. This is because such artistic paintings change drastically depending on the author, the scene depicted, and their artistic style. This can result in features that perform very well in a given task but do not grasp the whole of the visual and symbolic information contained in a painting. In this paper, we show how the features obtained from different tasks in artistic image classification are suitable to solve other ones of similar nature. We present different methods to improve the generalization capabilities and performance of artistic classification systems. Furthermore, we propose an explainable artificial intelligence method to map known visual traits of an image with the features used by the deep learning model considering fuzzy rules. These rules show the patterns and variables that are relevant to solve each task and how effective is each of the patterns found. Our results show that our proposed context-aware features can achieve up to $6\%$ and $26\%$ more accurate results than other context- and non-context-aware solutions, respectively, depending on the specific task. We also show that some of the features used by these models can be more clearly correlated to visual traits in the original image than others.

Authors:Yixuan Zhou, Xing Xu, Jingkuan Song, Fumin Shen, Heng Tao Shen

Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) attracts a lot of research interest and drives widespread applications, where only anomaly-free samples are available for training. Some UAD applications intend to further locate the anomalous regions without any anomaly information. Although the absence of anomalous samples and annotations deteriorates the UAD performance, an inconspicuous yet powerful statistics model, the normalizing flows, is appropriate for anomaly detection and localization in an unsupervised fashion. The flow-based probabilistic models, only trained on anomaly-free data, can efficiently distinguish unpredictable anomalies by assigning them much lower likelihoods than normal data. Nevertheless, the size variation of unpredictable anomalies introduces another inconvenience to the flow-based methods for high-precision anomaly detection and localization. To generalize the anomaly size variation, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Flow-based framework dubbed MSFlow composed of asymmetrical parallel flows followed by a fusion flow to exchange multi-scale perceptions. Moreover, different multi-scale aggregation strategies are adopted for image-wise anomaly detection and pixel-wise anomaly localization according to the discrepancy between them. The proposed MSFlow is evaluated on three anomaly detection datasets, significantly outperforming existing methods. Notably, on the challenging MVTec AD benchmark, our MSFlow achieves a new state-of-the-art with a detection AUORC score of up to 99.7%, localization AUCROC score of 98.8%, and PRO score of 97.1%. The reproducible code is available at https://github.com/cool-xuan/msflow.

Authors:Tanvir Hassan, A. Ben Hamza

Abstract: Graph convolutional networks and their variants have shown significant promise in 3D human pose estimation. Despite their success, most of these methods only consider spatial correlations between body joints and do not take into account temporal correlations, thereby limiting their ability to capture relationships in the presence of occlusions and inherent ambiguity. To address this potential weakness, we propose a spatio-temporal network architecture composed of a joint-mixing multi-layer perceptron block that facilitates communication among different joints and a graph weighted Jacobi network block that enables communication among various feature channels. The major novelty of our approach lies in a new weighted Jacobi feature propagation rule obtained through graph filtering with implicit fairing. We leverage temporal information from the 2D pose sequences, and integrate weight modulation into the model to enable untangling of the feature transformations of distinct nodes. We also employ adjacency modulation with the aim of learning meaningful correlations beyond defined linkages between body joints by altering the graph topology through a learnable modulation matrix. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, outperforming recent state-of-the-art methods for 3D human pose estimation.

Authors:Urs Waldmann, Alex Hoi Hang Chan, Hemal Naik, Máté Nagy, Iain D. Couzin, Oliver Deussen, Bastian Goldluecke, Fumihiro Kano

Abstract: Markerless methods for animal posture tracking have been developing recently, but frameworks and benchmarks for tracking large animal groups in 3D are still lacking. To overcome this gap in the literature, we present 3D-MuPPET, a framework to estimate and track 3D poses of up to 10 pigeons at interactive speed using multiple-views. We train a pose estimator to infer 2D keypoints and bounding boxes of multiple pigeons, then triangulate the keypoints to 3D. For correspondence matching, we first dynamically match 2D detections to global identities in the first frame, then use a 2D tracker to maintain correspondences accross views in subsequent frames. We achieve comparable accuracy to a state of the art 3D pose estimator for Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Percentage of Correct Keypoints (PCK). We also showcase a novel use case where our model trained with data of single pigeons provides comparable results on data containing multiple pigeons. This can simplify the domain shift to new species because annotating single animal data is less labour intensive than multi-animal data. Additionally, we benchmark the inference speed of 3D-MuPPET, with up to 10 fps in 2D and 1.5 fps in 3D, and perform quantitative tracking evaluation, which yields encouraging results. Finally, we show that 3D-MuPPET also works in natural environments without model fine-tuning on additional annotations. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a framework for 2D/3D posture and trajectory tracking that works in both indoor and outdoor environments.

Authors:Weihua Liu, Chaochao Lin, Haoping Yu, Said Boumaraf, Zhaoqiong Pi

Abstract: Face parsing infers a pixel-wise label map for each semantic facial component. Previous methods generally work well for uncovered faces, however overlook the facial occlusion and ignore some contextual area outside a single face, especially when facial occlusion has become a common situation during the COVID-19 epidemic. Inspired by the illumination theory of image, we propose a novel homogeneous tanh-transforms for image preprocessing, which made up of four tanh-transforms, that fuse the central vision and the peripheral vision together. Our proposed method addresses the dilemma of face parsing under occlusion and compresses more information of surrounding context. Based on homogeneous tanh-transforms, we propose an occlusion-aware convolutional neural network for occluded face parsing. It combines the information both in Tanh-polar space and Tanh-Cartesian space, capable of enhancing receptive fields. Furthermore, we introduce an occlusion-aware loss to focus on the boundaries of occluded regions. The network is simple and flexible, and can be trained end-to-end. To facilitate future research of occluded face parsing, we also contribute a new cleaned face parsing dataset, which is manually purified from several academic or industrial datasets, including CelebAMask-HQ, Short-video Face Parsing as well as Helen dataset and will make it public. Experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-art methods of face parsing under occlusion.

Authors:Jingbo Zeng

Abstract: Technologies of human action recognition in the dark are gaining more and more attention as huge demand in surveillance, motion control and human-computer interaction. However, because of limitation in image enhancement method and low-lighting video datasets, e.g. labeling cost, existing methods meet some problems. Some video-based approached are effect and efficient in specific datasets but cannot generalize to most cases while others methods using multiple sensors rely heavily to prior knowledge to deal with noisy nature from video stream. In this paper, we proposes action recognition method using deep multi-input network. Furthermore, we proposed a Independent Gamma Intensity Corretion (Ind-GIC) to enhance poor-illumination video, generating one gamma for one frame to increase enhancement performance. To prove our method is effective, there is some evaluation and comparison between our method and existing methods. Experimental results show that our model achieves high accuracy in on ARID dataset.

Authors:Weihua Liu, Chaochao Lin, Yu Yan

Abstract: Face anti-spoofing (FAS) is crucial for securing face recognition systems. However, existing FAS methods with handcrafted binary or pixel-wise labels have limitations due to diverse presentation attacks (PAs). In this paper, we propose an attack type robust face anti-spoofing framework under light flash, called ATR-FAS. Due to imaging differences caused by various attack types, traditional FAS methods based on single binary classification network may result in excessive intra-class distance of spoof faces, leading to a challenge of decision boundary learning. Therefore, we employed multiple networks to reconstruct multi-frame depth maps as auxiliary supervision, and each network experts in one type of attack. A dual gate module (DGM) consisting of a type gate and a frame-attention gate is introduced, which perform attack type recognition and multi-frame attention generation, respectively. The outputs of DGM are utilized as weight to mix the result of multiple expert networks. The multi-experts mixture enables ATR-FAS to generate spoof-differentiated depth maps, and stably detects spoof faces without being affected by different types of PAs. Moreover, we design a differential normalization procedure to convert original flash frames into differential frames. This simple but effective processing enhances the details in flash frames, aiding in the generation of depth maps. To verify the effectiveness of our framework, we collected a large-scale dataset containing 12,660 live and spoof videos with diverse PAs under dynamic flash from the smartphone screen. Extensive experiments illustrate that the proposed ATR-FAS significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/Chaochao-Lin/ATR-FAS.

Authors:Mohamed L. Mekhalfi, Davide Boscaini, Fabio Poiesi

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) plays a crucial role in object detection when adapting a source-trained detector to a target domain without annotated data. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective four-step UDA approach that leverages self-supervision and trains source and target data concurrently. We harness self-supervised learning to mitigate the lack of ground truth in the target domain. Our method consists of the following steps: (1) identify the region with the highest-confidence set of detections in each target image, which serve as our pseudo-labels; (2) crop the identified region and generate a collection of its augmented versions; (3) combine these latter into a composite image; (4) adapt the network to the target domain using the composed image. Through extensive experiments under cross-camera, cross-weather, and synthetic-to-real scenarios, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving upon the nearest competitor by more than 2% in terms of mean Average Precision (mAP). The code is available at https://github.com/MohamedTEV/DACA.

Authors:Zhaopeng Gu, Bingke Zhu, Guibo Zhu, Yingying Chen, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) such as MiniGPT-4 and LLaVA have demonstrated the capability of understanding images and achieved remarkable performance in various visual tasks. Despite their strong abilities in recognizing common objects due to extensive training datasets, they lack specific domain knowledge and have a weaker understanding of localized details within objects, which hinders their effectiveness in the Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) task. On the other hand, most existing IAD methods only provide anomaly scores and necessitate the manual setting of thresholds to distinguish between normal and abnormal samples, which restricts their practical implementation. In this paper, we explore the utilization of LVLM to address the IAD problem and propose AnomalyGPT, a novel IAD approach based on LVLM. We generate training data by simulating anomalous images and producing corresponding textual descriptions for each image. We also employ an image decoder to provide fine-grained semantic and design a prompt learner to fine-tune the LVLM using prompt embeddings. Our AnomalyGPT eliminates the need for manual threshold adjustments, thus directly assesses the presence and locations of anomalies. Additionally, AnomalyGPT supports multi-turn dialogues and exhibits impressive few-shot in-context learning capabilities. With only one normal shot, AnomalyGPT achieves the state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of 86.1%, an image-level AUC of 94.1%, and a pixel-level AUC of 95.3% on the MVTec-AD dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/AnomalyGPT.

Authors:Fu-En Yang, Chien-Yi Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang

Abstract: Federated learning (FL) emerges as a decentralized learning framework which trains models from multiple distributed clients without sharing their data to preserve privacy. Recently, large-scale pre-trained models (e.g., Vision Transformer) have shown a strong capability of deriving robust representations. However, the data heterogeneity among clients, the limited computation resources, and the communication bandwidth restrict the deployment of large-scale models in FL frameworks. To leverage robust representations from large-scale models while enabling efficient model personalization for heterogeneous clients, we propose a novel personalized FL framework of client-specific Prompt Generation (pFedPG), which learns to deploy a personalized prompt generator at the server for producing client-specific visual prompts that efficiently adapts frozen backbones to local data distributions. Our proposed framework jointly optimizes the stages of personalized prompt adaptation locally and personalized prompt generation globally. The former aims to train visual prompts that adapt foundation models to each client, while the latter observes local optimization directions to generate personalized prompts for all clients. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we show that our pFedPG is favorable against state-of-the-art personalized FL methods under various types of data heterogeneity, allowing computation and communication efficient model personalization.

Authors:Haodong He, Jian Ding, Gui-Song Xia

Abstract: The robustness of object detection models is a major concern when applied to real-world scenarios. However, the performance of most object detection models degrades when applied to images subjected to corruptions, since they are usually trained and evaluated on clean datasets. Enhancing the robustness of object detection models is of utmost importance, especially for those designed for aerial images, which feature complex backgrounds, substantial variations in scales and orientations of objects. This paper addresses the challenge of assessing the robustness of object detection models in aerial images, with a specific emphasis on scenarios where images are affected by clouds. In this study, we introduce two novel benchmarks based on DOTA-v1.0. The first benchmark encompasses 19 prevalent corruptions, while the second focuses on cloud-corrupted images-a phenomenon uncommon in natural pictures yet frequent in aerial photography. We systematically evaluate the robustness of mainstream object detection models and perform numerous ablation experiments. Through our investigations, we find that enhanced model architectures, larger networks, well-crafted modules, and judicious data augmentation strategies collectively enhance the robustness of aerial object detection models. The benchmarks we propose and our comprehensive experimental analyses can facilitate research on robust object detection in aerial images. Codes and datasets are available at: (https://github.com/hehaodong530/DOTA-C)

Authors:Pakizar Shamoi, Atsushi Inoue, Hiroharu Kawanaka

Abstract: Color is the most important intrinsic sensory feature that has a powerful impact on product sales. Color is even responsible for raising the aesthetic senses in our brains. Account for individual differences is crucial in color aesthetics. It requires user-driven mechanisms for various e-commerce applications. We propose a method for quantitative evaluation of all types of perceptual responses to color(s): distinct color preference, color harmony, and color combination preference. Preference for color schemes can be predicted by combining preferences for the basic colors and ratings of color harmony. Harmonious pallets are extracted from big data set using comparison algorithms based on fuzzy similarity and grouping. The proposed model results in useful predictions of harmony and preference of multicolored images. For example, in the context of apparel coordination, it allows predicting a preference for a look based on clothing colors. Our approach differs from standard aesthetic models, since in accounts for a personal variation. In addition, it can process not only lower-order color pairs, but also groups of several colors.

Authors:Eric Lei, Muhammad Asad Lodhi, Jiahao Pang, Junghyun Ahn, Dong Tian

Abstract: There have been recent efforts to learn more meaningful representations via fixed length codewords from mesh data, since a mesh serves as a complete model of underlying 3D shape compared to a point cloud. However, the mesh connectivity presents new difficulties when constructing a deep learning pipeline for meshes. Previous mesh unsupervised learning approaches typically assume category-specific templates, e.g., human face/body templates. It restricts the learned latent codes to only be meaningful for objects in a specific category, so the learned latent spaces are unable to be used across different types of objects. In this work, we present WrappingNet, the first mesh autoencoder enabling general mesh unsupervised learning over heterogeneous objects. It introduces a novel base graph in the bottleneck dedicated to representing mesh connectivity, which is shown to facilitate learning a shared latent space representing object shape. The superiority of WrappingNet mesh learning is further demonstrated via improved reconstruction quality and competitive classification compared to point cloud learning, as well as latent interpolation between meshes of different categories.

Authors:Wenjie Gao, Jiawei Fu, Haodong Jing, Nanning Zheng

Abstract: High-Definition (HD) maps play a crucial role in autonomous driving systems. Recent methods have attempted to construct HD maps in real-time based on information obtained from vehicle onboard sensors. However, the performance of these methods is significantly susceptible to the environment surrounding the vehicle due to the inherent limitation of onboard sensors, such as weak capacity for long-range detection. In this study, we demonstrate that supplementing onboard sensors with satellite maps can enhance the performance of HD map construction methods, leveraging the broad coverage capability of satellite maps. For the purpose of further research, we release the satellite map tiles as a complementary dataset of nuScenes dataset. Meanwhile, we propose a hierarchical fusion module that enables better fusion of satellite maps information with existing methods. Specifically, we design an attention mask based on segmentation and distance, applying the cross-attention mechanism to fuse onboard Bird's Eye View (BEV) features and satellite features in feature-level fusion. An alignment module is introduced before concatenation in BEV-level fusion to mitigate the impact of misalignment between the two features. The experimental results on the augmented nuScenes dataset showcase the seamless integration of our module into three existing HD map construction methods. It notably enhances their performance in both HD map semantic segmentation and instance detection tasks.

Authors:Tendai Mapungwana Chikake, Boris Goldengorin, Alexey Samosyuk

Abstract: We introduce a deterministic approach to edge detection and image segmentation by formulating pseudo-Boolean polynomials on image patches. The approach works by applying a binary classification of blob and edge regions in an image based on the degrees of pseudo-Boolean polynomials calculated on patches extracted from the provided image. We test our method on simple images containing primitive shapes of constant and contrasting colour and establish the feasibility before applying it to complex instances like aerial landscape images. The proposed method is based on the exploitation of the reduction, polynomial degree, and equivalence properties of penalty-based pseudo-Boolean polynomials.

Authors:Brent Yi, Weijia Zeng, Sam Buchanan, Yi Ma

Abstract: Factored feature volumes offer a simple way to build more compact, efficient, and intepretable neural fields, but also introduce biases that are not necessarily beneficial for real-world data. In this work, we (1) characterize the undesirable biases that these architectures have for axis-aligned signals -- they can lead to radiance field reconstruction differences of as high as 2 PSNR -- and (2) explore how learning a set of canonicalizing transformations can improve representations by removing these biases. We prove in a two-dimensional model problem that simultaneously learning these transformations together with scene appearance succeeds with drastically improved efficiency. We validate the resulting architectures, which we call TILTED, using image, signed distance, and radiance field reconstruction tasks, where we observe improvements across quality, robustness, compactness, and runtime. Results demonstrate that TILTED can enable capabilities comparable to baselines that are 2x larger, while highlighting weaknesses of neural field evaluation procedures.

Authors:Yazhou Xing, Amrita Mazumdar, Anjul Patney, Chao Liu, Hongxu Yin, Qifeng Chen, Jan Kautz, Iuri Frosio

Abstract: Low dynamic range (LDR) cameras cannot deal with wide dynamic range inputs, frequently leading to local overexposure issues. We present a learning-based system to reduce these artifacts without resorting to complex acquisition mechanisms like alternating exposures or costly processing that are typical of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. We propose a transformer-based deep neural network (DNN) to infer the missing HDR details. In an ablation study, we show the importance of using a multiscale DNN and train it with the proper cost function to achieve state-of-the-art quality. To aid the reconstruction of the overexposed areas, our DNN takes a reference frame from the past as an additional input. This leverages the commonly occurring temporal instabilities of autoexposure to our advantage: since well-exposed details in the current frame may be overexposed in the future, we use reinforcement learning to train a reference frame selection DNN that decides whether to adopt the current frame as a future reference. Without resorting to alternating exposures, we obtain therefore a causal, HDR hallucination algorithm with potential application in common video acquisition settings. Our demo video can be found at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-r12BKImLOYCLUoPzdebnMyNjJ4Rk360/view

Authors:Weichen Huang

Abstract: Alongside neuroimaging such as MRI scans and PET, Alzheimer's disease (AD) datasets contain valuable tabular data including AD biomarkers and clinical assessments. Existing computer vision approaches struggle to utilize this additional information. To address these needs, we propose a generalizable framework for multimodal contrastive learning of image data and tabular data, a novel tabular attention module for amplifying and ranking salient features in tables, and the application of these techniques onto Alzheimer's disease prediction. Experimental evaulations demonstrate the strength of our framework by detecting Alzheimer's disease (AD) from over 882 MR image slices from the ADNI database. We take advantage of the high interpretability of tabular data and our novel tabular attention approach and through attribution of the attention scores for each row of the table, we note and rank the most predominant features. Results show that the model is capable of an accuracy of over 83.8%, almost a 10% increase from previous state of the art.

Authors:Ceyuan Yang, Qihang Zhang, Yinghao Xu, Jiapeng Zhu, Yujun Shen, Bo Dai

Abstract: The success of style-based generators largely benefits from style modulation, which helps take care of the cross-instance variation within data. However, the instance-wise stochasticity is typically introduced via regular convolution, where kernels interact with features at some fixed locations, limiting its capacity for modeling geometric variation. To alleviate this problem, we equip the generator in generative adversarial networks (GANs) with a plug-and-play module, termed as modulated transformation module (MTM). This module predicts spatial offsets under the control of latent codes, based on which the convolution operation can be applied at variable locations for different instances, and hence offers the model an additional degree of freedom to handle geometry deformation. Extensive experiments suggest that our approach can be faithfully generalized to various generative tasks, including image generation, 3D-aware image synthesis, and video generation, and get compatible with state-of-the-art frameworks without any hyper-parameter tuning. It is noteworthy that, towards human generation on the challenging TaiChi dataset, we improve the FID of StyleGAN3 from 21.36 to 13.60, demonstrating the efficacy of learning modulated geometry transformation.

Authors:Richard J. Chen, Tong Ding, Ming Y. Lu, Drew F. K. Williamson, Guillaume Jaume, Bowen Chen, Andrew Zhang, Daniel Shao, Andrew H. Song, Muhammad Shaban, Mane Williams, Anurag Vaidya, Sharifa Sahai, Lukas Oldenburg, Luca L. Weishaupt, Judy J. Wang, Walt Williams, Long Phi Le, Georg Gerber, Faisal Mahmood

Abstract: Tissue phenotyping is a fundamental computational pathology (CPath) task in learning objective characterizations of histopathologic biomarkers in anatomic pathology. However, whole-slide imaging (WSI) poses a complex computer vision problem in which the large-scale image resolutions of WSIs and the enormous diversity of morphological phenotypes preclude large-scale data annotation. Current efforts have proposed using pretrained image encoders with either transfer learning from natural image datasets or self-supervised pretraining on publicly-available histopathology datasets, but have not been extensively developed and evaluated across diverse tissue types at scale. We introduce UNI, a general-purpose self-supervised model for pathology, pretrained using over 100 million tissue patches from over 100,000 diagnostic haematoxylin and eosin-stained WSIs across 20 major tissue types, and evaluated on 33 representative CPath clinical tasks in CPath of varying diagnostic difficulties. In addition to outperforming previous state-of-the-art models, we demonstrate new modeling capabilities in CPath such as resolution-agnostic tissue classification, slide classification using few-shot class prototypes, and disease subtyping generalization in classifying up to 108 cancer types in the OncoTree code classification system. UNI advances unsupervised representation learning at scale in CPath in terms of both pretraining data and downstream evaluation, enabling data-efficient AI models that can generalize and transfer to a gamut of diagnostically-challenging tasks and clinical workflows in anatomic pathology.

Authors:Alexander Lehner, Stefano Gasperini, Alvaro Marcos-Ramiro, Michael Schmidt, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam, Federico Tombari

Abstract: Since real-world training datasets cannot properly sample the long tail of the underlying data distribution, corner cases and rare out-of-domain samples can severely hinder the performance of state-of-the-art models. This problem becomes even more severe for dense tasks, such as 3D semantic segmentation, where points of non-standard objects can be confidently associated to the wrong class. In this work, we focus on improving the generalization to out-of-domain data. We achieve this by augmenting the training set with adversarial examples. First, we learn a set of vectors that deform the objects in an adversarial fashion. To prevent the adversarial examples from being too far from the existing data distribution, we preserve their plausibility through a series of constraints, ensuring sensor-awareness and shapes smoothness. Then, we perform adversarial augmentation by applying the learned sample-independent vectors to the available objects when training a model. We conduct extensive experiments across a variety of scenarios on data from KITTI, Waymo, and CrashD for 3D object detection, and on data from SemanticKITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes for 3D semantic segmentation. Despite training on a standard single dataset, our approach substantially improves the robustness and generalization of both 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation methods to out-of-domain data.

Authors:Yanyu Ye, Zhengxi Zhang, Chunna Tianb, Wei wei

Abstract: Domain shift is a commonly encountered issue in medical imaging solutions, primarily caused by variations in imaging devices and data sources. To mitigate this problem, unsupervised domain adaptation techniques have been employed. However, concerns regarding patient privacy and potential degradation of image quality have led to an increased focus on source-free domain adaptation. In this study, we address the issue of false labels in self-training based source-free domain adaptive medical image segmentation methods. To correct erroneous pseudo-labels, we propose a novel approach called the local-global pseudo-label correction (LGDA) method for source-free domain adaptive medical image segmentation. Our method consists of two components: An offline local context-based pseudo-label correction method that utilizes local context similarity in image space. And an online global pseudo-label correction method based on class prototypes, which corrects erroneously predicted pseudo-labels by considering the relative distance between pixel-wise feature vectors and prototype vectors. We evaluate the performance of our method on three benchmark fundus image datasets for optic disc and cup segmentation. Our method achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, even without using of any source data.

Authors:Haiwen Diao, Bo Wan, Ying Zhang, Xu Jia, Huchuan Lu, Long Chen

Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained models has emerged as a powerful technique in numerous domains, owing to its ability to leverage enormous pre-existing knowledge and achieve remarkable performance on downstream tasks. However, updating the parameters of entire networks is computationally intensive. Although state-of-the-art parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods significantly reduce the trainable parameters and storage demand, almost all of them still need to back-propagate the gradients through large pre-trained networks. This memory-extensive characteristic extremely limits the applicability of PETL methods in real-world scenarios. To this end, we propose a new memory-efficient PETL strategy, dubbed Universal Parallel Tuning (UniPT). Specifically, we facilitate the transfer process via a lightweight learnable parallel network, which consists of two modules: 1) A parallel interaction module that decouples the inherently sequential connections and processes the intermediate activations detachedly of the pre-trained network. 2) A confidence aggregation module that learns optimal strategies adaptively for integrating cross-layer features. We evaluate UniPT with different backbones (e.g., VSE$\infty$, CLIP4Clip, Clip-ViL, and MDETR) on five challenging vision-and-language tasks (i.e., image-text retrieval, video-text retrieval, visual question answering, compositional question answering, and visual grounding). Extensive ablations on ten datasets have validated that our UniPT can not only dramatically reduce memory consumption and outperform the best memory-efficient competitor, but also achieve higher performance than existing PETL methods in a low-memory scenario on different architectures. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/UniPT.

Authors:Pengcheng Dong, Xiaojin Mao, Lixia Fan, Wenbo Wan, Jiande Sun

Abstract: In recent years, the assessment of fundamental movement skills integrated with physical education has focused on both teaching practice and the feasibility of assessment. The object of assessment has shifted from multiple ages to subdivided ages, while the content of assessment has changed from complex and time-consuming to concise and efficient. Therefore, we apply deep learning to physical fitness evaluation, we propose a system based on the Canadian Agility and Movement Skill Assessment (CAMSA) Physical Fitness Evaluation System (CPFES), which evaluates children's physical fitness based on CAMSA, and gives recommendations based on the scores obtained by CPFES to help children grow. We have designed a landmark detection module and a pose estimation module, and we have also designed a pose evaluation module for the CAMSA criteria that can effectively evaluate the actions of the child being tested. Our experimental results demonstrate the high accuracy of the proposed system.

Authors:Guanqun Ding, Nevrez Imamoglu, Ali Caglayan, Masahiro Murakawa, Ryosuke Nakamura

Abstract: LiDAR odometry estimation and 3D semantic segmentation are crucial for autonomous driving, which has achieved remarkable advances recently. However, these tasks are challenging due to the imbalance of points in different semantic categories for 3D semantic segmentation and the influence of dynamic objects for LiDAR odometry estimation, which increases the importance of using representative/salient landmarks as reference points for robust feature learning. To address these challenges, we propose a saliency-guided approach that leverages attention information to improve the performance of LiDAR odometry estimation and semantic segmentation models. Unlike in the image domain, only a few studies have addressed point cloud saliency information due to the lack of annotated training data. To alleviate this, we first present a universal framework to transfer saliency distribution knowledge from color images to point clouds, and use this to construct a pseudo-saliency dataset (i.e. FordSaliency) for point clouds. Then, we adopt point cloud-based backbones to learn saliency distribution from pseudo-saliency labels, which is followed by our proposed SalLiDAR module. SalLiDAR is a saliency-guided 3D semantic segmentation model that integrates saliency information to improve segmentation performance. Finally, we introduce SalLONet, a self-supervised saliency-guided LiDAR odometry network that uses the semantic and saliency predictions of SalLiDAR to achieve better odometry estimation. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SalLiDAR and SalLONet models achieve state-of-the-art performance against existing methods, highlighting the effectiveness of image-to-LiDAR saliency knowledge transfer. Source code will be available at https://github.com/nevrez/SalLONet.

Authors:Youngrae Kim, Younggeol Cho, Thanh-Tung Nguyen, Dongman Lee

Abstract: Real-world vision tasks frequently suffer from the appearance of adverse weather conditions including rain, fog, snow, and raindrops in captured images. Recently, several generic methods for restoring weather-degraded images have been proposed, aiming to remove multiple types of adverse weather effects present in the images. However, these methods have considered weather as discrete and mutually exclusive variables, leading to failure in generalizing to unforeseen weather conditions beyond the scope of the training data, such as the co-occurrence of rain, fog, and raindrops. To this end, weather-degraded image restoration models should have flexible adaptability to the current unknown weather condition to ensure reliable and optimal performance. The adaptation method should also be able to cope with data scarcity for real-world adaptation. This paper proposes MetaWeather, a few-shot weather-degraded image restoration method for arbitrary weather conditions. For this, we devise the core piece of MetaWeather, coined Degradation Pattern Matching Module (DPMM), which leverages representations from a few-shot support set by matching features between input and sample images under new weather conditions. In addition, we build meta-knowledge with episodic meta-learning on top of our MetaWeather architecture to provide flexible adaptability. In the meta-testing phase, we adopt a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method to preserve the prebuilt knowledge and avoid the overfitting problem. Experiments on the BID Task II.A dataset show our method achieves the best performance on PSNR and SSIM compared to state-of-the-art image restoration methods. Code is available at (TBA).

Authors:Hui Tian, Chenyang Zhu, Yifei Shi, Kai Xu

Abstract: Learning-based surface reconstruction based on unsigned distance functions (UDF) has many advantages such as handling open surfaces. We propose SuperUDF, a self-supervised UDF learning which exploits a learned geometry prior for efficient training and a novel regularization for robustness to sparse sampling. The core idea of SuperUDF draws inspiration from the classical surface approximation operator of locally optimal projection (LOP). The key insight is that if the UDF is estimated correctly, the 3D points should be locally projected onto the underlying surface following the gradient of the UDF. Based on that, a number of inductive biases on UDF geometry and a pre-learned geometry prior are devised to learn UDF estimation efficiently. A novel regularization loss is proposed to make SuperUDF robust to sparse sampling. Furthermore, we also contribute a learning-based mesh extraction from the estimated UDFs. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SuperUDF outperforms the state of the arts on several public datasets in terms of both quality and efficiency. Code will be released after accteptance.

Authors:Ruijie Yao, Sheng Jin, Lumin Xu, Wang Zeng, Wentao Liu, Chen Qian, Ping Luo, Ji Wu

Abstract: Multi-Label Image Recognition (MLIR) is a challenging task that aims to predict multiple object labels in a single image while modeling the complex relationships between labels and image regions. Although convolutional neural networks and vision transformers have succeeded in processing images as regular grids of pixels or patches, these representations are sub-optimal for capturing irregular and discontinuous regions of interest. In this work, we present the first fully graph convolutional model, Group K-nearest neighbor based Graph convolutional Network (GKGNet), which models the connections between semantic label embeddings and image patches in a flexible and unified graph structure. To address the scale variance of different objects and to capture information from multiple perspectives, we propose the Group KGCN module for dynamic graph construction and message passing. Our experiments demonstrate that GKGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly lower computational costs on the challenging multi-label datasets, \ie MS-COCO and VOC2007 datasets. We will release the code and models to facilitate future research in this area.

Authors:Xinyang Liu, Yijin Li, Yanbin Teng, Hujun Bao, Guofeng Zhang, Yinda Zhang, Zhaopeng Cui

Abstract: Light-weight time-of-flight (ToF) depth sensors are compact and cost-efficient, and thus widely used on mobile devices for tasks such as autofocus and obstacle detection. However, due to the sparse and noisy depth measurements, these sensors have rarely been considered for dense geometry reconstruction. In this work, we present the first dense SLAM system with a monocular camera and a light-weight ToF sensor. Specifically, we propose a multi-modal implicit scene representation that supports rendering both the signals from the RGB camera and light-weight ToF sensor which drives the optimization by comparing with the raw sensor inputs. Moreover, in order to guarantee successful pose tracking and reconstruction, we exploit a predicted depth as an intermediate supervision and develop a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy for efficient learning of the implicit representation. At last, the temporal information is explicitly exploited to deal with the noisy signals from light-weight ToF sensors to improve the accuracy and robustness of the system. Experiments demonstrate that our system well exploits the signals of light-weight ToF sensors and achieves competitive results both on camera tracking and dense scene reconstruction. Project page: \url{https://zju3dv.github.io/tof_slam/}.

Authors:Prateek Chhikara, Dhiraj Chaurasia, Yifan Jiang, Omkar Masur, Filip Ilievski

Abstract: Food computing has emerged as a prominent multidisciplinary field of research in recent years. An ambitious goal of food computing is to develop end-to-end intelligent systems capable of autonomously producing recipe information for a food image. Current image-to-recipe methods are retrieval-based and their success depends heavily on the dataset size and diversity, as well as the quality of learned embeddings. Meanwhile, the emergence of powerful attention-based vision and language models presents a promising avenue for accurate and generalizable recipe generation, which has yet to be extensively explored. This paper proposes FIRE, a novel multimodal methodology tailored to recipe generation in the food computing domain, which generates the food title, ingredients, and cooking instructions based on input food images. FIRE leverages the BLIP model to generate titles, utilizes a Vision Transformer with a decoder for ingredient extraction, and employs the T5 model to generate recipes incorporating titles and ingredients as inputs. We showcase two practical applications that can benefit from integrating FIRE with large language model prompting: recipe customization to fit recipes to user preferences and recipe-to-code transformation to enable automated cooking processes. Our experimental findings validate the efficacy of our proposed approach, underscoring its potential for future advancements and widespread adoption in food computing.

Authors:Tao Zhang, Xingye Tian, Yikang Zhou, Yu Wu, Shunping Ji, Cilin Yan, Xuebo Wang, Xin Tao, Yuan Zhang, Pengfei Wan

Abstract: Video instance segmentation is a challenging task that serves as the cornerstone of numerous downstream applications, including video editing and autonomous driving. In this report, we present further improvements to the SOTA VIS method, DVIS. First, we introduce a denoising training strategy for the trainable tracker, allowing it to achieve more stable and accurate object tracking in complex and long videos. Additionally, we explore the role of visual foundation models in video instance segmentation. By utilizing a frozen VIT-L model pre-trained by DINO v2, DVIS demonstrates remarkable performance improvements. With these enhancements, our method achieves 57.9 AP and 56.0 AP in the development and test phases, respectively, and ultimately ranked 1st in the VIS track of the 5th LSVOS Challenge. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS.

Authors:U Mong Sain Chak, Md. Asib Rahman

Abstract: In this research paper, we present an innovative system designed for the purpose of segmenting the layout of Bangla documents. Our methodology involves utilizing a sophisticated collection of YOLOv8 models, meticulously adapted for the DL Sprint 2.0 - BUET CSE Fest 2023 Competition that centers around Bangla document layout segmentation. Our primary focus lies in elevating various elements of the task, including techniques like image augmentation, model architecture, and the use of model ensembles. We intentionally lower the quality of a subset of document images to enhance the resilience of model training, consequently leading to an improvement in our cross-validation score. Employing Bayesian optimization, we determine the optimal confidence and IoU thresholds for our model ensemble. Through our approach, we successfully showcase the effectiveness of amalgamating anchor-free models to achieve robust layout segmentation in Bangla documents.

Authors:Md Awsafur Rahman, Shaikh Anowarul Fattah

Abstract: In computer vision, depth estimation is crucial for domains like robotics, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Integrating semantics with depth enhances scene understanding through reciprocal information sharing. However, the scarcity of semantic information in datasets poses challenges. Existing convolutional approaches with limited local receptive fields hinder the full utilization of the symbiotic potential between depth and semantics. This paper introduces a dataset-invariant semi-supervised strategy to address the scarcity of semantic information. It proposes the Depth Semantics Symbiosis module, leveraging the Symbiotic Transformer for achieving comprehensive mutual awareness by information exchange within both local and global contexts. Additionally, a novel augmentation, NearFarMix is introduced to combat overfitting and compensate both depth-semantic tasks by strategically merging regions from two images, generating diverse and structurally consistent samples with enhanced control. Extensive experiments on NYU-Depth-V2 and KITTI datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed techniques in indoor and outdoor environments.

Authors:Riccardo Barbano, Alexander Denker, Hyungjin Chung, Tae Hoon Roh, Simon Arrdige, Peter Maass, Bangti Jin, Jong Chul Ye

Abstract: Denoising diffusion models have emerged as the go-to framework for solving inverse problems in imaging. A critical concern regarding these models is their performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks, which remains an under-explored challenge. Realistic reconstructions inconsistent with the measured data can be generated, hallucinating image features that are uniquely present in the training dataset. To simultaneously enforce data-consistency and leverage data-driven priors, we introduce a novel sampling framework called Steerable Conditional Diffusion. This framework adapts the denoising network specifically to the available measured data. Utilising our proposed method, we achieve substantial enhancements in OOD performance across diverse imaging modalities, advancing the robust deployment of denoising diffusion models in real-world applications.

Authors:Shuyi Zhou, Shuxiang Xie, Ryoichi Ishikawa, Ken Sakurada, Masaki Onishi, Takeshi Oishi

Abstract: Sensor fusion has become a popular topic in robotics. However, conventional fusion methods encounter many difficulties, such as data representation differences, sensor variations, and extrinsic calibration. For example, the calibration methods used for LiDAR-camera fusion often require manual operation and auxiliary calibration targets. Implicit neural representations (INRs) have been developed for 3D scenes, and the volume density distribution involved in an INR unifies the scene information obtained by different types of sensors. Therefore, we propose implicit neural fusion (INF) for LiDAR and camera. INF first trains a neural density field of the target scene using LiDAR frames. Then, a separate neural color field is trained using camera images and the trained neural density field. Along with the training process, INF both estimates LiDAR poses and optimizes extrinsic parameters. Our experiments demonstrate the high accuracy and stable performance of the proposed method.

Authors:Aristotelis Ballas, Christos Diou

Abstract: During the past decade, deep neural networks have led to fast-paced progress and significant achievements in computer vision problems, for both academia and industry. Yet despite their success, state-of-the-art image classification approaches fail to generalize well in previously unseen visual contexts, as required by many real-world applications. In this paper, we focus on this domain generalization (DG) problem and argue that the generalization ability of deep convolutional neural networks can be improved by taking advantage of multi-layer and multi-scaled representations of the network. We introduce a framework that aims at improving domain generalization of image classifiers by combining both low-level and high-level features at multiple scales, enabling the network to implicitly disentangle representations in its latent space and learn domain-invariant attributes of the depicted objects. Additionally, to further facilitate robust representation learning, we propose a novel objective function, inspired by contrastive learning, which aims at constraining the extracted representations to remain invariant under distribution shifts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by evaluating on the domain generalization datasets of PACS, VLCS, Office-Home and NICO. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our model is able to surpass the performance of previous DG methods and consistently produce competitive and state-of-the-art results in all datasets.

Authors:Yijin Li, Han Zhou, Bangbang Yang, Ye Zhang, Zhaopeng Cui, Hujun Bao, Guofeng Zhang

Abstract: Different from traditional video cameras, event cameras capture asynchronous events stream in which each event encodes pixel location, trigger time, and the polarity of the brightness changes. In this paper, we introduce a novel graph-based framework for event cameras, namely SlideGCN. Unlike some recent graph-based methods that use groups of events as input, our approach can efficiently process data event-by-event, unlock the low latency nature of events data while still maintaining the graph's structure internally. For fast graph construction, we develop a radius search algorithm, which better exploits the partial regular structure of event cloud against k-d tree based generic methods. Experiments show that our method reduces the computational complexity up to 100 times with respect to current graph-based methods while keeping state-of-the-art performance on object recognition. Moreover, we verify the superiority of event-wise processing with our method. When the state becomes stable, we can give a prediction with high confidence, thus making an early recognition. Project page: \url{https://zju3dv.github.io/slide_gcn/}.

Authors:Weiwen Wu, Yanyang Wang

Abstract: Score-based generative models (SGMs) have gained prominence in sparse-view CT reconstruction for their precise sampling of complex distributions. In SGM-based reconstruction, data consistency in the score-based diffusion model ensures close adherence of generated samples to observed data distribution, crucial for improving image quality. Shortcomings in data consistency characterization manifest in three aspects. Firstly, data from the optimization process can lead to artifacts in reconstructed images. Secondly, it often neglects that the generation model and original data constraints are independently completed, fragmenting unity. Thirdly, it predominantly focuses on constraining intermediate results in the inverse sampling process, rather than ideal real images. Thus, we propose an iterative optimization data scoring model. This paper introduces the data-iterative optimization score-based model (DOSM), integrating innovative data consistency into the Stochastic Differential Equation, a valuable constraint for ultra-sparse-view CT reconstruction. The novelty of this data consistency element lies in its sole reliance on original measurement data to confine generation outcomes, effectively balancing measurement data and generative model constraints. Additionally, we pioneer an inference strategy that traces back from current iteration results to ideal truth, enhancing reconstruction stability. We leverage conventional iteration techniques to optimize DOSM updates. Quantitative and qualitative results from 23 views of numerical and clinical cardiac datasets demonstrate DOSM's superiority over other methods. Remarkably, even with 10 views, our method achieves excellent performance.

Authors:Yicheng Zhong, Huawei Wei, Peiji Yang, Zhisheng Wang

Abstract: The objective of stylized speech-driven facial animation is to create animations that encapsulate specific emotional expressions. Existing methods often depend on pre-established emotional labels or facial expression templates, which may limit the necessary flexibility for accurately conveying user intent. In this research, we introduce a technique that enables the control of arbitrary styles by leveraging natural language as emotion prompts. This technique presents benefits in terms of both flexibility and user-friendliness. To realize this objective, we initially construct a Text-Expression Alignment Dataset (TEAD), wherein each facial expression is paired with several prompt-like descriptions.We propose an innovative automatic annotation method, supported by Large Language Models (LLMs), to expedite the dataset construction, thereby eliminating the substantial expense of manual annotation. Following this, we utilize TEAD to train a CLIP-based model, termed ExpCLIP, which encodes text and facial expressions into semantically aligned style embeddings. The embeddings are subsequently integrated into the facial animation generator to yield expressive and controllable facial animations. Given the limited diversity of facial emotions in existing speech-driven facial animation training data, we further introduce an effective Expression Prompt Augmentation (EPA) mechanism to enable the animation generator to support unprecedented richness in style control. Comprehensive experiments illustrate that our method accomplishes expressive facial animation generation and offers enhanced flexibility in effectively conveying the desired style.

Authors:Leo Fillioux, Emilie Gontran, Jérôme Cartry, Jacques RR Mathieu, Sabrina Bedja, Alice Boilève, Paul-Henry Cournède, Fanny Jaulin, Stergios Christodoulidis, Maria Vakalopoulou

Abstract: Over the last ten years, Patient-Derived Organoids (PDOs) emerged as the most reliable technology to generate ex-vivo tumor avatars. PDOs retain the main characteristics of their original tumor, making them a system of choice for pre-clinical and clinical studies. In particular, PDOs are attracting interest in the field of Functional Precision Medicine (FPM), which is based upon an ex-vivo drug test in which living tumor cells (such as PDOs) from a specific patient are exposed to a panel of anti-cancer drugs. Currently, the Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) based cell viability assay is the gold standard test to assess the sensitivity of PDOs to drugs. The readout is measured at the end of the assay from a global PDO population and therefore does not capture single PDO responses and does not provide time resolution of drug effect. To this end, in this study, we explore for the first time the use of powerful large foundation models for the automatic processing of PDO data. In particular, we propose a novel imaging-based high-throughput screening method to assess real-time drug efficacy from a time-lapse microscopy video of PDOs. The recently proposed SAM algorithm for segmentation and DINOv2 model are adapted in a comprehensive pipeline for processing PDO microscopy frames. Moreover, an attention mechanism is proposed for fusing temporal and spatial features in a multiple instance learning setting to predict ATP. We report better results than other non-time-resolved methods, indicating that the temporality of data is an important factor for the prediction of ATP. Extensive ablations shed light on optimizing the experimental setting and automating the prediction both in real-time and for forecasting.

Authors:Heewon Lee, Sangtae Ahn

Abstract: Object detection is a task that performs position identification and label classification of objects in images or videos. The information obtained through this process plays an essential role in various tasks in the field of computer vision. In object detection, the data utilized for training and validation typically originate from public datasets that are well-balanced in terms of the number of objects ascribed to each class in an image. However, in real-world scenarios, handling datasets with much greater class imbalance, i.e., very different numbers of objects for each class , is much more common, and this imbalance may reduce the performance of object detection when predicting unseen test images. In our study, thus, we propose a method that evenly distributes the classes in an image for training and validation, solving the class imbalance problem in object detection. Our proposed method aims to maintain a uniform class distribution through multi-label stratification. We tested our proposed method not only on public datasets that typically exhibit balanced class distribution but also on custom datasets that may have imbalanced class distribution. We found that our proposed method was more effective on datasets containing severe imbalance and less data. Our findings indicate that the proposed method can be effectively used on datasets with substantially imbalanced class distribution.

Authors:Tao Yang, Peiran Ren, Xuansong Xie, Lei Zhang

Abstract: Realistic image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims to reproduce perceptually realistic image details from a low-quality input. The commonly used adversarial training based Real-ISR methods often introduce unnatural visual artifacts and fail to generate realistic textures for natural scene images. The recently developed generative stable diffusion models provide a potential solution to Real-ISR with pre-learned strong image priors. However, the existing methods along this line either fail to keep faithful pixel-wise image structures or resort to extra skipped connections to reproduce details, which requires additional training in image space and limits their extension to other related tasks in latent space such as image stylization. In this work, we propose a pixel-aware stable diffusion (PASD) network to achieve robust Real-ISR as well as personalized stylization. In specific, a pixel-aware cross attention module is introduced to enable diffusion models perceiving image local structures in pixel-wise level, while a degradation removal module is used to extract degradation insensitive features to guide the diffusion process together with image high level information. By simply replacing the base diffusion model with a personalized one, our method can generate diverse stylized images without the need to collect pairwise training data. PASD can be easily integrated into existing diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion. Experiments on Real-ISR and personalized stylization demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The source code and models can be found at \url{https://github.com/yangxy/PASD}.

Authors:Zhuoqi Cheng, Simon Lyck Bjært Sørensen, Mikkel Werge Olsen, René Lynge Eriksen, Thiusius Rajeeth Savarimuthu

Abstract: Deep needle insertion to a target often poses a huge challenge, requiring a combination of specialized skills, assistive technology, and extensive training. One of the frequently encountered medical scenarios demanding such expertise includes the needle insertion into a femoral vessel in the groin. After the access to the femoral vessel, various medical procedures, such as cardiac catheterization and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) can be performed. However, even with the aid of Ultrasound imaging, achieving successful insertion can necessitate multiple attempts due to the complexities of anatomy and tissue deformation. To address this challenge, this paper presents an innovative technology for needle tip real-time tracking, aiming for enhanced needle insertion guidance. Specifically, our approach revolves around the creation of scattering imaging using an optical fiber-equipped needle, and uses Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based algorithms to enable real-time estimation of the needle tip's position and orientation during insertion procedures. The efficacy of the proposed technology was rigorously evaluated through three experiments. The first two experiments involved rubber and bacon phantoms to simulate groin anatomy. The positional errors averaging 2.3+1.5mm and 2.0+1.2mm, and the orientation errors averaging 0.2+0.11rad and 0.16+0.1rad. Furthermore, the system's capabilities were validated through experiments conducted on fresh porcine phantom mimicking more complex anatomical structures, yielding positional accuracy results of 3.2+3.1mm and orientational accuracy of 0.19+0.1rad. Given the average femoral arterial radius of 4 to 5mm, the proposed system is demonstrated with a great potential for precise needle guidance in femoral artery insertion procedures. In addition, the findings highlight the broader potential applications of the system in the medical field.

Authors:Hanyang Kong, Kehong Gong, Dongze Lian, Michael Bi Mi, Xinchao Wang

Abstract: Text-to-motion generation is a formidable task, aiming to produce human motions that align with the input text while also adhering to human capabilities and physical laws. While there have been advancements in diffusion models, their application in discrete spaces remains underexplored. Current methods often overlook the varying significance of different motions, treating them uniformly. It is essential to recognize that not all motions hold the same relevance to a particular textual description. Some motions, being more salient and informative, should be given precedence during generation. In response, we introduce a Priority-Centric Motion Discrete Diffusion Model (M2DM), which utilizes a Transformer-based VQ-VAE to derive a concise, discrete motion representation, incorporating a global self-attention mechanism and a regularization term to counteract code collapse. We also present a motion discrete diffusion model that employs an innovative noise schedule, determined by the significance of each motion token within the entire motion sequence. This approach retains the most salient motions during the reverse diffusion process, leading to more semantically rich and varied motions. Additionally, we formulate two strategies to gauge the importance of motion tokens, drawing from both textual and visual indicators. Comprehensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets confirm that our model surpasses existing techniques in fidelity and diversity, particularly for intricate textual descriptions.

Authors:Zhongang Cai, Liang Pan, Chen Wei, Wanqi Yin, Fangzhou Hong, Mingyuan Zhang, Chen Change Loy, Lei Yang, Ziwei Liu

Abstract: Human pose and shape estimation (HPS) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. While most existing studies focus on HPS from 2D images or videos with inherent depth ambiguity, there are surging need to investigate HPS from 3D point clouds as depth sensors have been frequently employed in commercial devices. However, real-world sensory 3D points are usually noisy and incomplete, and also human bodies could have different poses of high diversity. To tackle these challenges, we propose a principled framework, PointHPS, for accurate 3D HPS from point clouds captured in real-world settings, which iteratively refines point features through a cascaded architecture. Specifically, each stage of PointHPS performs a series of downsampling and upsampling operations to extract and collate both local and global cues, which are further enhanced by two novel modules: 1) Cross-stage Feature Fusion (CFF) for multi-scale feature propagation that allows information to flow effectively through the stages, and 2) Intermediate Feature Enhancement (IFE) for body-aware feature aggregation that improves feature quality after each stage. To facilitate a comprehensive study under various scenarios, we conduct our experiments on two large-scale benchmarks, comprising i) a dataset that features diverse subjects and actions captured by real commercial sensors in a laboratory environment, and ii) controlled synthetic data generated with realistic considerations such as clothed humans in crowded outdoor scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointHPS, with its powerful point feature extraction and processing scheme, outperforms State-of-the-Art methods by significant margins across the board. Homepage: https://caizhongang.github.io/projects/PointHPS/.

Authors:Di Yang, Yaohui Wang, Antitza Dantcheva, Quan Kong, Lorenzo Garattoni, Gianpiero Francesca, Francois Bremond

Abstract: Skeleton-based action segmentation requires recognizing composable actions in untrimmed videos. Current approaches decouple this problem by first extracting local visual features from skeleton sequences and then processing them by a temporal model to classify frame-wise actions. However, their performances remain limited as the visual features cannot sufficiently express composable actions. In this context, we propose Latent Action Composition (LAC), a novel self-supervised framework aiming at learning from synthesized composable motions for skeleton-based action segmentation. LAC is composed of a novel generation module towards synthesizing new sequences. Specifically, we design a linear latent space in the generator to represent primitive motion. New composed motions can be synthesized by simply performing arithmetic operations on latent representations of multiple input skeleton sequences. LAC leverages such synthesized sequences, which have large diversity and complexity, for learning visual representations of skeletons in both sequence and frame spaces via contrastive learning. The resulting visual encoder has a high expressive power and can be effectively transferred onto action segmentation tasks by end-to-end fine-tuning without the need for additional temporal models. We conduct a study focusing on transfer-learning and we show that representations learned from pre-trained LAC outperform the state-of-the-art by a large margin on TSU, Charades, PKU-MMD datasets.

Authors:Junyu Zhu, Lina Liu, Yu Tang, Feng Wen, Wanlong Li, Yong Liu

Abstract: Visual bird's eye view (BEV) semantic segmentation helps autonomous vehicles understand the surrounding environment only from images, including static elements (e.g., roads) and dynamic elements (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians). However, the high cost of annotation procedures of full-supervised methods limits the capability of the visual BEV semantic segmentation, which usually needs HD maps, 3D object bounding boxes, and camera extrinsic matrixes. In this paper, we present a novel semi-supervised framework for visual BEV semantic segmentation to boost performance by exploiting unlabeled images during the training. A consistency loss that makes full use of unlabeled data is then proposed to constrain the model on not only semantic prediction but also the BEV feature. Furthermore, we propose a novel and effective data augmentation method named conjoint rotation which reasonably augments the dataset while maintaining the geometric relationship between the front-view images and the BEV semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Argoverse datasets show that our semi-supervised framework can effectively improve prediction accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explores improving visual BEV semantic segmentation performance using unlabeled data. The code will be publicly available.

Authors:Meiling Fang, Naser Damer

Abstract: Recent face presentation attack detection (PAD) leverages domain adaptation (DA) and domain generalization (DG) techniques to address performance degradation on unknown domains. However, DA-based PAD methods require access to unlabeled target data, while most DG-based PAD solutions rely on a priori, i.e., known domain labels. Moreover, most DA-/DG-based methods are computationally intensive, demanding complex model architectures and/or multi-stage training processes. This paper proposes to model face PAD as a compound DG task from a causal perspective, linking it to model optimization. We excavate the causal factors hidden in the high-level representation via counterfactual intervention. Moreover, we introduce a class-guided MixStyle to enrich feature-level data distribution within classes instead of focusing on domain information. Both class-guided MixStyle and counterfactual intervention components introduce no extra trainable parameters and negligible computational resources. Extensive cross-dataset and analytic experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method compared to state-of-the-art PADs. The implementation and the trained weights are publicly available.

Authors:Haonan Guo, Xin Su, Chen Wu, Bo Du, Liangpei Zhang

Abstract: Change detection (CD) is a fundamental and important task for monitoring the land surface dynamics in the earth observation field. Existing deep learning-based CD methods typically extract bi-temporal image features using a weight-sharing Siamese encoder network and identify change regions using a decoder network. These CD methods, however, still perform far from satisfactorily as we observe that 1) deep encoder layers focus on irrelevant background regions and 2) the models' confidence in the change regions is inconsistent at different decoder stages. The first problem is because deep encoder layers cannot effectively learn from imbalanced change categories using the sole output supervision, while the second problem is attributed to the lack of explicit semantic consistency preservation. To address these issues, we design a novel similarity-aware attention flow network (SAAN). SAAN incorporates a similarity-guided attention flow module with deeply supervised similarity optimization to achieve effective change detection. Specifically, we counter the first issue by explicitly guiding deep encoder layers to discover semantic relations from bi-temporal input images using deeply supervised similarity optimization. The extracted features are optimized to be semantically similar in the unchanged regions and dissimilar in the changing regions. The second drawback can be alleviated by the proposed similarity-guided attention flow module, which incorporates similarity-guided attention modules and attention flow mechanisms to guide the model to focus on discriminative channels and regions. We evaluated the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method by conducting experiments on a wide range of CD tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance on several CD tasks, with discriminative features and semantic consistency preserved.

Authors:Fang Liu, Yuhao Liu, Yuqiu Kong, Ke Xu, Lihe Zhang, Baocai Yin, Gerhard Hancke, Rynson Lau

Abstract: Existing Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) methods typically require expensive pixel-level or box-level annotations for supervision. In this paper, we observe that the referring texts used in RIS already provide sufficient information to localize the target object. Hence, we propose a novel weakly-supervised RIS framework to formulate the target localization problem as a classification process to differentiate between positive and negative text expressions. While the referring text expressions for an image are used as positive expressions, the referring text expressions from other images can be used as negative expressions for this image. Our framework has three main novelties. First, we propose a bilateral prompt method to facilitate the classification process, by harmonizing the domain discrepancy between visual and linguistic features. Second, we propose a calibration method to reduce noisy background information and improve the correctness of the response maps for target object localization. Third, we propose a positive response map selection strategy to generate high-quality pseudo-labels from the enhanced response maps, for training a segmentation network for RIS inference. For evaluation, we propose a new metric to measure localization accuracy. Experiments on four benchmarks show that our framework achieves promising performances to existing fully-supervised RIS methods while outperforming state-of-the-art weakly-supervised methods adapted from related areas. Code is available at https://github.com/fawnliu/TRIS.

Authors:Juan Leon-Alcazar, Yazeed Alnumay, Cheng Zheng, Hassane Trigui, Sahejad Patel, Bernard Ghanem

Abstract: Manually reading and logging gauge data is time inefficient, and the effort increases according to the number of gauges available. We present a computer vision pipeline that automates the reading of analog gauges. We propose a two-stage CNN pipeline that identifies the key structural components of an analog gauge and outputs an angular reading. To facilitate the training of our approach, a synthetic dataset is generated thus obtaining a set of realistic analog gauges with their corresponding annotation. To validate our proposal, an additional real-world dataset was collected with 4.813 manually curated images. When compared against state-of-the-art methodologies, our method shows a significant improvement of 4.55 in the average error, which is a 52% relative improvement. The resources for this project will be made available at: https://github.com/fuankarion/automatic-gauge-reading.

Authors:YeongHyeon Park, Sungho Kang, Myung Jin Kim, Hyeonho Jeong, Hyunkyu Park, Hyeong Seok Kim, Juneho Yi

Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) is a widely adopted approach in industry due to rare anomaly occurrences and data imbalance. A desirable characteristic of an UAD model is contained generalization ability which excels in the reconstruction of seen normal patterns but struggles with unseen anomalies. Recent studies have pursued to contain the generalization capability of their UAD models in reconstruction from different perspectives, such as design of neural network (NN) structure and training strategy. In contrast, we note that containing of generalization ability in reconstruction can also be obtained simply from steep-shaped loss landscape. Motivated by this, we propose a loss landscape sharpening method by amplifying the reconstruction loss, dubbed Loss AMPlification (LAMP). LAMP deforms the loss landscape into a steep shape so the reconstruction error on unseen anomalies becomes greater. Accordingly, the anomaly detection performance is improved without any change of the NN architecture. Our findings suggest that LAMP can be easily applied to any reconstruction error metrics in UAD settings where the reconstruction model is trained with anomaly-free samples only.

Authors:Ran Liu, Sahil Khose, Jingyun Xiao, Lakshmi Sathidevi, Keerthan Ramnath, Zsolt Kira, Eva L. Dyer

Abstract: Despite significant advances in deep learning, models often struggle to generalize well to new, unseen domains, especially when training data is limited. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach for distribution-aware latent augmentation that leverages the relationships across samples to guide the augmentation procedure. Our approach first degrades the samples stochastically in the latent space, mapping them to augmented labels, and then restores the samples from their corrupted versions during training. This process confuses the classifier in the degradation step and restores the overall class distribution of the original samples, promoting diverse intra-class/cross-domain variability. We extensively evaluate our approach on a diverse set of datasets and tasks, including domain generalization benchmarks and medical imaging datasets with strong domain shift, where we show our approach achieves significant improvements over existing methods for latent space augmentation. We further show that our method can be flexibly adapted to long-tail recognition tasks, demonstrating its versatility in building more generalizable models. Code is available at https://github.com/nerdslab/LatentDR.

Authors:Nathan Inkawhich, Gwendolyn McDonald, Ryan Luley

Abstract: Rapid progress is being made in developing large, pretrained, task-agnostic foundational vision models such as CLIP, ALIGN, DINOv2, etc. In fact, we are approaching the point where these models do not have to be finetuned downstream, and can simply be used in zero-shot or with a lightweight probing head. Critically, given the complexity of working at this scale, there is a bottleneck where relatively few organizations in the world are executing the training then sharing the models on centralized platforms such as HuggingFace and torch.hub. The goal of this work is to identify several key adversarial vulnerabilities of these models in an effort to make future designs more robust. Intuitively, our attacks manipulate deep feature representations to fool an out-of-distribution (OOD) detector which will be required when using these open-world-aware models to solve closed-set downstream tasks. Our methods reliably make in-distribution (ID) images (w.r.t. a downstream task) be predicted as OOD and vice versa while existing in extremely low-knowledge-assumption threat models. We show our attacks to be potent in whitebox and blackbox settings, as well as when transferred across foundational model types (e.g., attack DINOv2 with CLIP)! This work is only just the beginning of a long journey towards adversarially robust foundational vision models.

Authors:Emanuele Santellani, Christian Sormann, Mattia Rossi, Andreas Kuhn, Friedrich Fraundorfer

Abstract: In this work we introduce S-TREK, a novel local feature extractor that combines a deep keypoint detector, which is both translation and rotation equivariant by design, with a lightweight deep descriptor extractor. We train the S-TREK keypoint detector within a framework inspired by reinforcement learning, where we leverage a sequential procedure to maximize a reward directly related to keypoint repeatability. Our descriptor network is trained following a "detect, then describe" approach, where the descriptor loss is evaluated only at those locations where keypoints have been selected by the already trained detector. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method, with S-TREK often outperforming other state-of-the-art methods in terms of repeatability and quality of the recovered poses, especially when dealing with in-plane rotations.

Authors:Zelin Peng, Zhengqin Xu, Zhilin Zeng, Xiaokang Yang, Wei Shen

Abstract: Segment Anything Model (SAM) has received remarkable attention as it offers a powerful and versatile solution for object segmentation in images. However, fine-tuning SAM for downstream segmentation tasks under different scenarios remains a challenge, as the varied characteristics of different scenarios naturally requires diverse model parameter spaces. Most existing fine-tuning methods attempt to bridge the gaps among different scenarios by introducing a set of new parameters to modify SAM's original parameter space. Unlike these works, in this paper, we propose fine-tuning SAM efficiently by parameter space reconstruction (SAM-PARSER), which introduce nearly zero trainable parameters during fine-tuning. In SAM-PARSER, we assume that SAM's original parameter space is relatively complete, so that its bases are able to reconstruct the parameter space of a new scenario. We obtain the bases by matrix decomposition, and fine-tuning the coefficients to reconstruct the parameter space tailored to the new scenario by an optimal linear combination of the bases. Experimental results show that SAM-PARSER exhibits superior segmentation performance across various scenarios, while reducing the number of trainable parameters by $\approx 290$ times compared with current parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods.

Authors:Brad Larson, Bishal Upadhyaya, Luke McDermott, Siddha Ganju

Abstract: Deep learning harnesses massive parallel floating-point processing to train and evaluate large neural networks. Trends indicate that deeper and larger neural networks with an increasing number of parameters achieve higher accuracy than smaller neural networks. This performance improvement, which often requires heavy compute for both training and evaluation, eventually needs to translate well to resource-constrained hardware for practical value. Structured pruning asserts that while large networks enable us to find solutions to complex computer vision problems, a smaller, computationally efficient sub-network can be derived from the large neural network that retains model accuracy but significantly improves computational efficiency. We generalize structured pruning with algorithms for network augmentation, pruning, sub-network collapse and removal. In addition, we demonstrate efficient and stable convergence up to 93% sparsity and 95% FLOPs reduction without loss of inference accuracy using with continuous relaxation matching or exceeding the state of the art for all structured pruning methods. The resulting CNN executes efficiently on GPU hardware without computationally expensive sparse matrix operations. We achieve this with routine automatable operations on classification and segmentation problems using CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and CityScapes datasets with the ResNet and U-NET network architectures.

Authors:Bingying Yue, Jianhao Li, Hao Shi, Yupei Wang, Honghu Zhong

Abstract: Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging technology is commonly used to provide 24-hour all-weather earth observation. However, it still has some drawbacks in SAR target classification, especially in fine-grained classification of aircraft: aircrafts in SAR images have large intra-class diversity and inter-class similarity; the number of effective samples is insufficient and it's hard to annotate. To address these issues, this article proposes a novel multi-modal self-supervised network (MS-Net) for fine-grained classification of aircraft. Firstly, in order to entirely exploit the potential of multi-modal information, a two-sided path feature extraction network (TSFE-N) is constructed to enhance the image feature of the target and obtain the domain knowledge feature of text mode. Secondly, a contrastive self-supervised learning (CSSL) framework is employed to effectively learn useful label-independent feature from unbalanced data, a similarity per-ception loss (SPloss) is proposed to avoid network overfitting. Finally, TSFE-N is used as the encoder of CSSL to obtain the classification results. Through a large number of experiments, our MS-Net can effectively reduce the difficulty of classifying similar types of aircrafts. In the case of no label, the proposed algorithm achieves an accuracy of 88.46% for 17 types of air-craft classification task, which has pioneering significance in the field of fine-grained classification of aircraft in SAR images.

Authors:Nissim Maruani, Roman Klokov, Maks Ovsjanikov, Pierre Alliez, Mathieu Desbrun

Abstract: In stark contrast to the case of images, finding a concise, learnable discrete representation of 3D surfaces remains a challenge. In particular, while polygon meshes are arguably the most common surface representation used in geometry processing, their irregular and combinatorial structure often make them unsuitable for learning-based applications. In this work, we present VoroMesh, a novel and differentiable Voronoi-based representation of watertight 3D shape surfaces. From a set of 3D points (called generators) and their associated occupancy, we define our boundary representation through the Voronoi diagram of the generators as the subset of Voronoi faces whose two associated (equidistant) generators are of opposite occupancy: the resulting polygon mesh forms a watertight approximation of the target shape's boundary. To learn the position of the generators, we propose a novel loss function, dubbed VoroLoss, that minimizes the distance from ground truth surface samples to the closest faces of the Voronoi diagram which does not require an explicit construction of the entire Voronoi diagram. A direct optimization of the Voroloss to obtain generators on the Thingi32 dataset demonstrates the geometric efficiency of our representation compared to axiomatic meshing algorithms and recent learning-based mesh representations. We further use VoroMesh in a learning-based mesh prediction task from input SDF grids on the ABC dataset, and show comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while guaranteeing closed output surfaces free of self-intersections.

Authors:Cristiano Saltori, Fabio Galasso, Giuseppe Fiameni, Nicu Sebe, Fabio Poiesi, Elisa Ricci

Abstract: Deep-learning models for 3D point cloud semantic segmentation exhibit limited generalization capabilities when trained and tested on data captured with different sensors or in varying environments due to domain shift. Domain adaptation methods can be employed to mitigate this domain shift, for instance, by simulating sensor noise, developing domain-agnostic generators, or training point cloud completion networks. Often, these methods are tailored for range view maps or necessitate multi-modal input. In contrast, domain adaptation in the image domain can be executed through sample mixing, which emphasizes input data manipulation rather than employing distinct adaptation modules. In this study, we introduce compositional semantic mixing for point cloud domain adaptation, representing the first unsupervised domain adaptation technique for point cloud segmentation based on semantic and geometric sample mixing. We present a two-branch symmetric network architecture capable of concurrently processing point clouds from a source domain (e.g. synthetic) and point clouds from a target domain (e.g. real-world). Each branch operates within one domain by integrating selected data fragments from the other domain and utilizing semantic information derived from source labels and target (pseudo) labels. Additionally, our method can leverage a limited number of human point-level annotations (semi-supervised) to further enhance performance. We assess our approach in both synthetic-to-real and real-to-real scenarios using LiDAR datasets and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings.

Authors:Yemin li, Zhongcheng Liu, Xiaoying Lou, Mirigual Kurban, Miao Li, Jie Yang, Kaiwei Che, Jiankun Wang, Max Q. -H Meng, Yan Huang, Qin Guo, Pinjin Hu

Abstract: BACKGROUND & AIMS: Histological remission (HR) is advocated and considered as a new therapeutic target in ulcerative colitis (UC). Diagnosis of histologic remission currently relies on biopsy; during this process, patients are at risk for bleeding, infection, and post-biopsy fibrosis. In addition, histologic response scoring is complex and time-consuming, and there is heterogeneity among pathologists. Endocytoscopy (EC) is a novel ultra-high magnification endoscopic technique that can provide excellent in vivo assessment of glands. Based on the EC technique, we propose a neural network model that can assess histological disease activity in UC using EC images to address the above issues. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method can assist patients in precise treatment and prognostic assessment. METHODS: We construct a neural network model for UC evaluation. A total of 5105 images of 154 intestinal segments from 87 patients undergoing EC treatment at a center in China between March 2022 and March 2023 are scored according to the Geboes score. Subsequently, 103 intestinal segments are used as the training set, 16 intestinal segments are used as the validation set for neural network training, and the remaining 35 intestinal segments are used as the test set to measure the model performance together with the validation set. RESULTS: By treating HR as a negative category and histologic activity as a positive category, the proposed neural network model can achieve an accuracy of 0.9, a specificity of 0.95, a sensitivity of 0.75, and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.81. CONCLUSION: We develop a specific neural network model that can distinguish histologic remission/activity in EC images of UC, which helps to accelerate clinical histological diagnosis. keywords: ulcerative colitis; Endocytoscopy; Geboes score; neural network.

Authors:Gabriela T. Acevedo Trebbau, Andrea Bandini, Diego L. Guarin

Abstract: There is a growing interest in using pose estimation algorithms for video-based assessment of Bradykinesia in Parkinson's Disease (PD) to facilitate remote disease assessment and monitoring. However, the accuracy of pose estimation algorithms in videos from video streaming services during Telehealth appointments has not been studied. In this study, we used seven off-the-shelf hand pose estimation models to estimate the movement of the thumb and index fingers in videos of the finger-tapping (FT) test recorded from Healthy Controls (HC) and participants with PD and under two different conditions: streaming (videos recorded during a live Zoom meeting) and on-device (videos recorded locally with high-quality cameras). The accuracy and reliability of the models were estimated by comparing the models' output with manual results. Three of the seven models demonstrated good accuracy for on-device recordings, and the accuracy decreased significantly for streaming recordings. We observed a negative correlation between movement speed and the model's accuracy for the streaming recordings. Additionally, we evaluated the reliability of ten movement features related to bradykinesia extracted from video recordings of PD patients performing the FT test. While most of the features demonstrated excellent reliability for on-device recordings, most of the features demonstrated poor to moderate reliability for streaming recordings. Our findings highlight the limitations of pose estimation algorithms when applied to video recordings obtained during Telehealth visits, and demonstrate that on-device recordings can be used for automatic video-assessment of bradykinesia in PD.

Authors:Jionghao Wang, Ziyu Chen, Jun Ling, Rong Xie, Li Song

Abstract: 360$^\circ$ panoramas are extensively utilized as environmental light sources in computer graphics. However, capturing a 360$^\circ$ $\times$ 180$^\circ$ panorama poses challenges due to the necessity of specialized and costly equipment, and additional human resources. Prior studies develop various learning-based generative methods to synthesize panoramas from a single Narrow Field-of-View (NFoV) image, but they are limited in alterable input patterns, generation quality, and controllability. To address these issues, we propose a novel pipeline called PanoDiff, which efficiently generates complete 360$^\circ$ panoramas using one or more unregistered NFoV images captured from arbitrary angles. Our approach has two primary components to overcome the limitations. Firstly, a two-stage angle prediction module to handle various numbers of NFoV inputs. Secondly, a novel latent diffusion-based panorama generation model uses incomplete panorama and text prompts as control signals and utilizes several geometric augmentation schemes to ensure geometric properties in generated panoramas. Experiments show that PanoDiff achieves state-of-the-art panoramic generation quality and high controllability, making it suitable for applications such as content editing.

Authors:Xudong Wang, Ishan Misra, Ziyun Zeng, Rohit Girdhar, Trevor Darrell

Abstract: Existing approaches to unsupervised video instance segmentation typically rely on motion estimates and experience difficulties tracking small or divergent motions. We present VideoCutLER, a simple method for unsupervised multi-instance video segmentation without using motion-based learning signals like optical flow or training on natural videos. Our key insight is that using high-quality pseudo masks and a simple video synthesis method for model training is surprisingly sufficient to enable the resulting video model to effectively segment and track multiple instances across video frames. We show the first competitive unsupervised learning results on the challenging YouTubeVIS-2019 benchmark, achieving 50.7% APvideo^50 , surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. VideoCutLER can also serve as a strong pretrained model for supervised video instance segmentation tasks, exceeding DINO by 15.9% on YouTubeVIS-2019 in terms of APvideo.

Authors:Aron Schmied, Tobias Fischer, Martin Danelljan, Marc Pollefeys, Fisher Yu

Abstract: Dense 3D reconstruction and ego-motion estimation are key challenges in autonomous driving and robotics. Compared to the complex, multi-modal systems deployed today, multi-camera systems provide a simpler, low-cost alternative. However, camera-based 3D reconstruction of complex dynamic scenes has proven extremely difficult, as existing solutions often produce incomplete or incoherent results. We propose R3D3, a multi-camera system for dense 3D reconstruction and ego-motion estimation. Our approach iterates between geometric estimation that exploits spatial-temporal information from multiple cameras, and monocular depth refinement. We integrate multi-camera feature correlation and dense bundle adjustment operators that yield robust geometric depth and pose estimates. To improve reconstruction where geometric depth is unreliable, e.g. for moving objects or low-textured regions, we introduce learnable scene priors via a depth refinement network. We show that this design enables a dense, consistent 3D reconstruction of challenging, dynamic outdoor environments. Consequently, we achieve state-of-the-art dense depth prediction on the DDAD and NuScenes benchmarks.

Authors:Zhixin Ling, Zhen Xing, Xiangdong Zhou, Manliang Cao, Guichun Zhou

Abstract: In panorama understanding, the widely used equirectangular projection (ERP) entails boundary discontinuity and spatial distortion. It severely deteriorates the conventional CNNs and vision Transformers on panoramas. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective architecture named PanoSwin to learn panorama representations with ERP. To deal with the challenges brought by equirectangular projection, we explore a pano-style shift windowing scheme and novel pitch attention to address the boundary discontinuity and the spatial distortion, respectively. Besides, based on spherical distance and Cartesian coordinates, we adapt absolute positional embeddings and relative positional biases for panoramas to enhance panoramic geometry information. Realizing that planar image understanding might share some common knowledge with panorama understanding, we devise a novel two-stage learning framework to facilitate knowledge transfer from the planar images to panoramas. We conduct experiments against the state-of-the-art on various panoramic tasks, i.e., panoramic object detection, panoramic classification, and panoramic layout estimation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PanoSwin in panorama understanding.

Authors:Leonid Keselman, Martial Hebert

Abstract: Fast, reliable shape reconstruction is an essential ingredient in many computer vision applications. Neural Radiance Fields demonstrated that photorealistic novel view synthesis is within reach, but was gated by performance requirements for fast reconstruction of real scenes and objects. Several recent approaches have built on alternative shape representations, in particular, 3D Gaussians. We develop extensions to these renderers, such as integrating differentiable optical flow, exporting watertight meshes and rendering per-ray normals. Additionally, we show how two of the recent methods are interoperable with each other. These reconstructions are quick, robust, and easily performed on GPU or CPU. For code and visual examples, see https://leonidk.github.io/fmb-plus

Authors:Bowei Chen, Brian Curless, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Steve Seitz

Abstract: We present a method to generate full-body selfies -- photos that you take of yourself, but capturing your whole body as if someone else took the photo of you from a few feet away. Our approach takes as input a pre-captured video of your body, a target pose photo, and a selfie + background pair for each location. We introduce a novel diffusion-based approach to combine all of this information into high quality, well-composed photos of you with the desired pose and background.

Authors:Lucas Ventura, Antoine Yang, Cordelia Schmid, Gül Varol

Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CoIR) has recently gained popularity as a task that considers both text and image queries together, to search for relevant images in a database. Most CoIR approaches require manually annotated datasets, comprising image-text-image triplets, where the text describes a modification from the query image to the target image. However, manual curation of CoIR triplets is expensive and prevents scalability. In this work, we instead propose a scalable automatic dataset creation methodology that generates triplets given video-caption pairs, while also expanding the scope of the task to include composed video retrieval (CoVR). To this end, we mine paired videos with a similar caption from a large database, and leverage a large language model to generate the corresponding modification text. Applying this methodology to the extensive WebVid2M collection, we automatically construct our WebVid-CoVR dataset, resulting in 1.6 million triplets. Moreover, we introduce a new benchmark for CoVR with a manually annotated evaluation set, along with baseline results. Our experiments further demonstrate that training a CoVR model on our dataset effectively transfers to CoIR, leading to improved state-of-the-art performance in the zero-shot setup on both the CIRR and FashionIQ benchmarks. Our code, datasets, and models are publicly available at https://imagine.enpc.fr/~ventural/covr.

Authors:Jun Hao Liew, Hanshu Yan, Jianfeng Zhang, Zhongcong Xu, Jiashi Feng

Abstract: In this report, we present MagicEdit, a surprisingly simple yet effective solution to the text-guided video editing task. We found that high-fidelity and temporally coherent video-to-video translation can be achieved by explicitly disentangling the learning of content, structure and motion signals during training. This is in contradict to most existing methods which attempt to jointly model both the appearance and temporal representation within a single framework, which we argue, would lead to degradation in per-frame quality. Despite its simplicity, we show that MagicEdit supports various downstream video editing tasks, including video stylization, local editing, video-MagicMix and video outpainting.

Authors:Oren Barkan, Tal Reiss, Jonathan Weill, Ori Katz, Roy Hirsch, Itzik Malkiel, Noam Koenigstein

Abstract: Visual similarities discovery (VSD) is an important task with broad e-commerce applications. Given an image of a certain object, the goal of VSD is to retrieve images of different objects with high perceptual visual similarity. Although being a highly addressed problem, the evaluation of proposed methods for VSD is often based on a proxy of an identification-retrieval task, evaluating the ability of a model to retrieve different images of the same object. We posit that evaluating VSD methods based on identification tasks is limited, and faithful evaluation must rely on expert annotations. In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale fashion visual similarity benchmark dataset, consisting of more than 110K expert-annotated image pairs. Besides this major contribution, we share insight from the challenges we faced while curating this dataset. Based on these insights, we propose a novel and efficient labeling procedure that can be applied to any dataset. Our analysis examines its limitations and inductive biases, and based on these findings, we propose metrics to mitigate those limitations. Though our primary focus lies on visual similarity, the methodologies we present have broader applications for discovering and evaluating perceptual similarity across various domains.

Authors:Yibo Wang, Yunhu Ye, Yuanpeng Mao, Yanwei Yu, Yuanping Song

Abstract: Text segmentation tasks have a very wide range of application values, such as image editing, style transfer, watermark removal, etc.However, existing public datasets are of poor quality of pixel-level labels that have been shown to be notoriously costly to acquire, both in terms of money and time. At the same time, when pretraining is performed on synthetic datasets, the data distribution of the synthetic datasets is far from the data distribution in the real scene. These all pose a huge challenge to the current pixel-level text segmentation algorithms.To alleviate the above problems, we propose a self-supervised scene text segmentation algorithm with layered decoupling of representations derived from the object-centric manner to segment images into texts and background. In our method, we propose two novel designs which include Region Query Module and Representation Consistency Constraints adapting to the unique properties of text as complements to Auto Encoder, which improves the network's sensitivity to texts.For this unique design, we treat the polygon-level masks predicted by the text localization model as extra input information, and neither utilize any pixel-level mask annotations for training stage nor pretrain on synthetic datasets.Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of the method proposed. On several public scene text datasets, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised segmentation algorithms.

Authors:Shikha Dubey, Tushar Kataria, Beatrice Knudsen, Shireen Y. Elhabian

Abstract: With the advent of digital scanners and deep learning, diagnostic operations may move from a microscope to a desktop. Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining is one of the most frequently used stains for disease analysis, diagnosis, and grading, but pathologists do need different immunohistochemical (IHC) stains to analyze specific structures or cells. Obtaining all of these stains (H&E and different IHCs) on a single specimen is a tedious and time-consuming task. Consequently, virtual staining has emerged as an essential research direction. Here, we propose a novel generative model, Structural Cycle-GAN (SC-GAN), for synthesizing IHC stains from H&E images, and vice versa. Our method expressly incorporates structural information in the form of edges (in addition to color data) and employs attention modules exclusively in the decoder of the proposed generator model. This integration enhances feature localization and preserves contextual information during the generation process. In addition, a structural loss is incorporated to ensure accurate structure alignment between the generated and input markers. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model, experiments are conducted with two IHC markers emphasizing distinct structures of glands in the colon: the nucleus of epithelial cells (CDX2) and the cytoplasm (CK818). Quantitative metrics such as FID and SSIM are frequently used for the analysis of generative models, but they do not correlate explicitly with higher-quality virtual staining results. Therefore, we propose two new quantitative metrics that correlate directly with the virtual staining specificity of IHC markers.

Authors:Cristina González, Nicolás Ayobi, Felipe Escallón, Laura Baldovino-Chiquillo, Maria Wilches-Mogollón, Donny Pasos, Nicole Ramírez, Jose Pinzón, Olga Sarmiento, D Alex Quistberg, Pablo Arbeláez

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel benchmark to study the impact and relationship of built environment elements on pedestrian collision prediction, intending to enhance environmental awareness in autonomous driving systems to prevent pedestrian injuries actively. We introduce a built environment detection task in large-scale panoramic images and a detection-based pedestrian collision frequency prediction task. We propose a baseline method that incorporates a collision prediction module into a state-of-the-art detection model to tackle both tasks simultaneously. Our experiments demonstrate a significant correlation between object detection of built environment elements and pedestrian collision frequency prediction. Our results are a stepping stone towards understanding the interdependencies between built environment conditions and pedestrian safety.

Authors:Shreyas Goyal, Jagath C. Rajapakse

Abstract: Hotspot detection using thermal imaging has recently become essential in several industrial applications, such as security applications, health applications, and equipment monitoring applications. Hotspot detection is of utmost importance in industrial safety where equipment can develop anomalies. Hotspots are early indicators of such anomalies. We address the problem of hotspot detection in thermal images by proposing a self-supervised learning approach. Self-supervised learning has shown potential as a competitive alternative to their supervised learning counterparts but their application to thermography has been limited. This has been due to lack of diverse data availability, domain specific pre-trained models, standardized benchmarks, etc. We propose a self-supervised representation learning approach followed by fine-tuning that improves detection of hotspots by classification. The SimSiam network based ensemble classifier decides whether an image contains hotspots or not. Detection of hotspots is followed by precise hotspot isolation. By doing so, we are able to provide a highly accurate and precise hotspot identification, applicable to a wide range of applications. We created a novel large thermal image dataset to address the issue of paucity of easily accessible thermal images. Our experiments with the dataset created by us and a publicly available segmentation dataset show the potential of our approach for hotspot detection and its ability to isolate hotspots with high accuracy. We achieve a Dice Coefficient of 0.736, the highest when compared with existing hotspot identification techniques. Our experiments also show self-supervised learning as a strong contender of supervised learning, providing competitive metrics for hotspot detection, with the highest accuracy of our approach being 97%.

Authors:Masoud Mokhtari, Neda Ahmadi, Teresa S. M. Tsang, Purang Abolmaesumi, Renjie Liao

Abstract: Echocardiography (echo) is an ultrasound imaging modality that is widely used for various cardiovascular diagnosis tasks. Due to inter-observer variability in echo-based diagnosis, which arises from the variability in echo image acquisition and the interpretation of echo images based on clinical experience, vision-based machine learning (ML) methods have gained popularity to act as secondary layers of verification. For such safety-critical applications, it is essential for any proposed ML method to present a level of explainability along with good accuracy. In addition, such methods must be able to process several echo videos obtained from various heart views and the interactions among them to properly produce predictions for a variety of cardiovascular measurements or interpretation tasks. Prior work lacks explainability or is limited in scope by focusing on a single cardiovascular task. To remedy this, we propose a General, Echo-based, Multi-Level Transformer (GEMTrans) framework that provides explainability, while simultaneously enabling multi-video training where the inter-play among echo image patches in the same frame, all frames in the same video, and inter-video relationships are captured based on a downstream task. We show the flexibility of our framework by considering two critical tasks including ejection fraction (EF) and aortic stenosis (AS) severity detection. Our model achieves mean absolute errors of 4.15 and 4.84 for single and dual-video EF estimation and an accuracy of 96.5 % for AS detection, while providing informative task-specific attention maps and prototypical explainability.

Authors:Bang Yang, Fenglin Liu, Xian Wu, Yaowei Wang, Xu Sun, Yuexian Zou

Abstract: Supervised visual captioning models typically require a large scale of images or videos paired with descriptions in a specific language (i.e., the vision-caption pairs) for training. However, collecting and labeling large-scale datasets is time-consuming and expensive for many scenarios and languages. Therefore, sufficient labeled pairs are usually not available. To deal with the label shortage problem, we present a simple yet effective zero-shot approach MultiCapCLIP that can generate visual captions for different scenarios and languages without any labeled vision-caption pairs of downstream datasets. In the training stage, MultiCapCLIP only requires text data for input. Then it conducts two main steps: 1) retrieving concept prompts that preserve the corresponding domain knowledge of new scenarios; 2) auto-encoding the prompts to learn writing styles to output captions in a desired language. In the testing stage, MultiCapCLIP instead takes visual data as input directly to retrieve the concept prompts to generate the final visual descriptions. The extensive experiments on image and video captioning across four benchmarks and four languages (i.e., English, Chinese, German, and French) confirm the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with state-of-the-art zero-shot and weakly-supervised methods, our method achieves 4.8% and 21.5% absolute improvements in terms of BLEU@4 and CIDEr metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/yangbang18/MultiCapCLIP.

Authors:Minda Zhao, Chaoyi Zhao, Xinyue Liang, Lincheng Li, Zeng Zhao, Zhipeng Hu, Changjie Fan, Xin Yu

Abstract: While the image diffusion model has made significant strides in text-driven 3D content creation, it often falls short in accurately capturing the intended meaning of the text prompt, particularly with respect to direction information. This shortcoming gives rise to the Janus problem, where multi-faced 3D models are produced with the guidance of such diffusion models. In this paper, we present a robust pipeline for generating high-fidelity 3D content with orthogonal-view image guidance. Specifically, we introduce a novel 2D diffusion model that generates an image consisting of four orthogonal-view sub-images for the given text prompt. The 3D content is then created with this diffusion model, which enhances 3D consistency and provides strong structured semantic priors. This addresses the infamous Janus problem and significantly promotes generation efficiency. Additionally, we employ a progressive 3D synthesis strategy that results in substantial improvement in the quality of the created 3D contents. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method demonstrates a significant improvement over previous text-to-3D techniques.

Authors:Qingyao Shuai, Chi Zhang, Kaizhi Yang, Xuejin Chen

Abstract: Unsupervised methods for reconstructing structures face significant challenges in capturing the geometric details with consistent structures among diverse shapes of the same category. To address this issue, we present a novel unsupervised structural reconstruction method, named DPF-Net, based on a new Deformable Primitive Field (DPF) representation, which allows for high-quality shape reconstruction using parameterized geometric primitives. We design a two-stage shape reconstruction pipeline which consists of a primitive generation module and a primitive deformation module to approximate the target shape of each part progressively. The primitive generation module estimates the explicit orientation, position, and size parameters of parameterized geometric primitives, while the primitive deformation module predicts a dense deformation field based on a parameterized primitive field to recover shape details. The strong shape prior encoded in parameterized geometric primitives enables our DPF-Net to extract high-level structures and recover fine-grained shape details consistently. The experimental results on three categories of objects in diverse shapes demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our DPF-Net on structural reconstruction and shape segmentation.

Authors:Cheng-Che Cheng, Min-Xuan Qiu, Chen-Kuo Chiang, Shang-Hong Lai

Abstract: Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking (MC-MOT) utilizes information from multiple views to better handle problems with occlusion and crowded scenes. Recently, the use of graph-based approaches to solve tracking problems has become very popular. However, many current graph-based methods do not effectively utilize information regarding spatial and temporal consistency. Instead, they rely on single-camera trackers as input, which are prone to fragmentation and ID switch errors. In this paper, we propose a novel reconfigurable graph model that first associates all detected objects across cameras spatially before reconfiguring it into a temporal graph for Temporal Association. This two-stage association approach enables us to extract robust spatial and temporal-aware features and address the problem with fragmented tracklets. Furthermore, our model is designed for online tracking, making it suitable for real-world applications. Experimental results show that the proposed graph model is able to extract more discriminating features for object tracking, and our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets.

Authors:Jingyi Zhang, Jiaxing Huang, Xueying Jiang, Shijian Lu

Abstract: Black-box unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) learns with source predictions of target data without accessing either source data or source models during training, and it has clear superiority in data privacy and flexibility in target network selection. However, the source predictions of target data are often noisy and training with them is prone to learning collapses. We propose BiMem, a bi-directional memorization mechanism that learns to remember useful and representative information to correct noisy pseudo labels on the fly, leading to robust black-box UDA that can generalize across different visual recognition tasks. BiMem constructs three types of memory, including sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory, which interact in a bi-directional manner for comprehensive and robust memorization of learnt features. It includes a forward memorization flow that identifies and stores useful features and a backward calibration flow that rectifies features' pseudo labels progressively. Extensive experiments show that BiMem achieves superior domain adaptation performance consistently across various visual recognition tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection.

Authors:Zhenfeng Fan, Zhiheng Zhang, Shuang Yang, Chongyang Zhong, Min Cao, Shihong Xia

Abstract: While impressive progress has recently been made in image-oriented facial attribute translation, shape-oriented 3D facial attribute translation remains an unsolved issue. This is primarily limited by the lack of 3D generative models and ineffective usage of 3D facial data. We propose a learning framework for 3D facial attribute translation to relieve these limitations. Firstly, we customize a novel geometric map for 3D shape representation and embed it in an end-to-end generative adversarial network. The geometric map represents 3D shapes symmetrically on a square image grid, while preserving the neighboring relationship of 3D vertices in a local least-square sense. This enables effective learning for the latent representation of data with different attributes. Secondly, we employ a unified and unpaired learning framework for multi-domain attribute translation. It not only makes effective usage of data correlation from multiple domains, but also mitigates the constraint for hardly accessible paired data. Finally, we propose a hierarchical architecture for the discriminator to guarantee robust results against both global and local artifacts. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed framework over the state-of-the-art in generating high-fidelity facial shapes. Given an input 3D facial shape, the proposed framework is able to synthesize novel shapes of different attributes, which covers some downstream applications, such as expression transfer, gender translation, and aging. Code at https://github.com/NaughtyZZ/3D_facial_shape_attribute_translation_ssgmap.

Authors:Yuanyou Xu, Zongxin Yang, Yi Yang

Abstract: Tracking any given object(s) spatially and temporally is a common purpose in Visual Object Tracking (VOT) and Video Object Segmentation (VOS). Joint tracking and segmentation have been attempted in some studies but they often lack full compatibility of both box and mask in initialization and prediction, and mainly focus on single-object scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Multi-object Mask-box Integrated framework for unified Tracking and Segmentation, dubbed MITS. Firstly, the unified identification module is proposed to support both box and mask reference for initialization, where detailed object information is inferred from boxes or directly retained from masks. Additionally, a novel pinpoint box predictor is proposed for accurate multi-object box prediction, facilitating target-oriented representation learning. All target objects are processed simultaneously from encoding to propagation and decoding, as a unified pipeline for VOT and VOS. Experimental results show MITS achieves state-of-the-art performance on both VOT and VOS benchmarks. Notably, MITS surpasses the best prior VOT competitor by around 6% on the GOT-10k test set, and significantly improves the performance of box initialization on VOS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/yoxu515/MITS.

Authors:Amir Belder, Refael Vivanti, Ayellet Tal

Abstract: Bundle adjustment is the common way to solve localization and mapping. It is an iterative process in which a system of non-linear equations is solved using two optimization methods, weighted by a damping factor. In the classic approach, the latter is chosen heuristically by the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm on each iteration. This might take many iterations, making the process computationally expensive, which might be harmful to real-time applications. We propose to replace this heuristic by viewing the problem in a holistic manner, as a game, and formulating it as a reinforcement-learning task. We set an environment which solves the non-linear equations and train an agent to choose the damping factor in a learned manner. We demonstrate that our approach considerably reduces the number of iterations required to reach the bundle adjustment's convergence, on both synthetic and real-life scenarios. We show that this reduction benefits the classic approach and can be integrated with other bundle adjustment acceleration methods.

Authors:Jiaming Shen, Kun Hu, Wei Bao, Chang Wen Chen, Zhiyong Wang

Abstract: The 2D animation workflow is typically initiated with the creation of keyframes using sketch-based drawing. Subsequent inbetweens (i.e., intermediate sketch frames) are crafted through manual interpolation for smooth animations, which is a labor-intensive process. Thus, the prospect of automatic animation sketch interpolation has become highly appealing. However, existing video interpolation methods are generally hindered by two key issues for sketch inbetweening: 1) limited texture and colour details in sketches, and 2) exaggerated alterations between two sketch keyframes. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel deep learning method, namely Fine-to-Coarse Sketch Interpolation Network (FC-SIN). This approach incorporates multi-level guidance that formulates region-level correspondence, sketch-level correspondence and pixel-level dynamics. A multi-stream U-Transformer is then devised to characterize sketch inbewteening patterns using these multi-level guides through the integration of both self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms. Additionally, to facilitate future research on animation sketch inbetweening, we constructed a large-scale dataset - STD-12K, comprising 30 sketch animation series in diverse artistic styles. Comprehensive experiments on this dataset convincingly show that our proposed FC-SIN surpasses the state-of-the-art interpolation methods. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.