DeepNLP/CVPR-2021-Accepted-Papers huggingface dataset:
From Rain Generation to Rain Removal
Authors: Hong Wang, Zongsheng Yue, Qi Xie, Qian Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Deyu Meng

Abstract: For the single image rain removal (SIRR) task, the performance of deep learning (DL)-based methods is mainly affected by the designed deraining models and training datasets. Most of current state-of-the-art focus on constructing powerful deep models to obtain better deraining results. In this paper, to further improve the deraining performance, we novelly attempt to handle the SIRR task from the perspective of training datasets by exploring a more efficient way to synthesize rainy images. Specifically, we build a full Bayesian generative model for rainy image where the rain layer is parameterized as a generator with the input as some latent variables representing the physical structural rain factors, e.g., direction, scale, and thickness. To solve this model, we employ the variational inference framework to approximate the expected statistical distribution of rainy image in a data-driven manner. With the learned generator, we can automatically and sufficiently generate diverse and non-repetitive training pairs so as to efficiently enrich and augment the existing benchmark datasets. User study qualitatively and quantitatively evaluates the realism of generated rainy images. Comprehensive experiments substantiate that the proposed model can faithfully extract the complex rain distribution that not only helps significantly improve the deraining performance of current deep single image derainers, but also largely loosens the requirement of large training sample pre-collection for the SIRR task. Code is available in https://github.com/hongwang01/VRGNet.
Few-Shot Classification With Feature Map Reconstruction Networks
Authors: Davis Wertheimer, Luming Tang, Bharath Hariharan

Abstract: In this paper we reformulate few-shot classification as a reconstruction problem in latent space. The ability of the network to reconstruct a query feature map from support features of a given class predicts membership of the query in that class. We introduce a novel mechanism for few-shot classification by regressing directly from support features to query features in closed form, without introducing any new modules or large-scale learnable parameters. The resulting Feature Map Reconstruction Networks are both more performant and computationally efficient than previous approaches. We demonstrate consistent and substantial accuracy gains on four fine-grained benchmarks with varying neural architectures. Our model is also competitive on the non-fine-grained mini-ImageNet and tiered-ImageNet benchmarks with minimal bells and whistles.
Object Classification From Randomized EEG Trials
Authors: Hamad Ahmed, Ronnie B. Wilbur, Hari M. Bharadwaj, Jeffrey Mark Siskind

Abstract: New results suggest strong limits to the feasibility of object classification from human brain activity evoked by image stimuli, as measured through EEG. Considerable prior work suffers from a confound between the stimulus class and the time since the start of the experiment. A prior attempt to avoid this confound using randomized trials was unable to achieve results above chance in a statistically significant fashion when the data sets were of the same size as the original experiments. Here, we attempt object classification from EEG using an array of methods that are representative of the state-of-the-art, with a far larger (20x) dataset of randomized EEG trials, 1,000 stimulus presentations of each of forty classes, all from a single subject. To our knowledge, this is the largest such EEG data-collection effort from a single subject and is at the bounds of feasibility. We obtain classification accuracy that is marginally above chance and above chance in a statistically significant fashion, and further assess how accuracy depends on the classifier used, the amount of training data used, and the number of classes. Reaching the limits of data collection with only marginally above-chance performance suggests that the prevailing literature substantially exaggerates the feasibility of object classification from EEG.
Learning Monocular 3D Reconstruction of Articulated Categories From Motion
Authors: Filippos Kokkinos, Iasonas Kokkinos

Abstract: Monocular 3D reconstruction of articulated object categories is challenging due to the lack of training data and the inherent ill-posedness of the problem. In this work we use video self-supervision, forcing the consistency of consecutive 3D reconstructions by a motion-based cycle loss. This largely improves both optimization-based and learning-based 3D mesh reconstruction. We further introduce an interpretable model of 3D template deformations that controls a 3D surface through the displacement of a small number of local, learnable handles. We formulate this operation as a structured layer relying on mesh-laplacian regularization and show that it can be trained in an end-to-end manner. We finally introduce a per-sample numerical optimisation approach that jointly optimises over mesh displacements and cameras within a video, boosting accuracy both for training and also as test time post-processing. While relying exclusively on a small set of videos collected per category for supervision, we obtain state-of-the-art reconstructions with diverse shapes, viewpoints and textures for multiple articulated object categories.
De-Rendering the World's Revolutionary Artefacts
Authors: Shangzhe Wu, Ameesh Makadia, Jiajun Wu, Noah Snavely, Richard Tucker, Angjoo Kanazawa

Abstract: Recent works have shown exciting results in unsupervised image de-rendering--learning to decompose 3D shape, appearance, and lighting from single-image collections without explicit supervision. However, many of these assume simplistic material and lighting models. We propose a method, termed RADAR, that can recover environment illumination and surface materials from real single-image collections, relying neither on explicit 3D supervision, nor on multi-view or multi-light images. Specifically, we focus on rotationally symmetric artefacts that exhibit challenging surface properties including specular reflections, such as vases. We introduce a novel self-supervised albedo discriminator, which allows the model to recover plausible albedo without requiring any ground-truth during training. In conjunction with a shape reconstruction module exploiting rotational symmetry, we present an end-to-end learning framework that is able to de-render the world's revolutionary artefacts. We conduct experiments on a real vase dataset and demonstrate compelling decomposition results, allowing for applications including free-viewpoint rendering and relighting. More results and code at: https://sorderender.github.io/.
Progressively Complementary Network for Fisheye Image Rectification Using Appearance Flow
Authors: Shangrong Yang, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Chunjie Zhang, Yao Zhao

Abstract: Distortion rectification is often required for fisheye images. The generation-based method is one mainstream solution due to its label-free property, but its naive skip-connection and overburdened decoder will cause blur and incomplete correction. First, the skip-connection directly transfers the image features, which may introduce distortion and cause incomplete correction. Second, the decoder is overburdened during simultaneously reconstructing the content and structure of the image, resulting in vague performance. To solve these two problems, in this paper, we focus on the interpretable correction mechanism of the distortion rectification network and propose a feature-level correction scheme. We embed a correction layer in skip-connection and leverage the appearance flows in different layers to pre-correct the image features. Consequently, the decoder can easily reconstruct a plausible result with the remaining distortion-less information. In addition, we propose a parallel complementary structure. It effectively reduces the burden of the decoder by separating content reconstruction and structure correction. Subjective and objective experiment results on different datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.
DECOR-GAN: 3D Shape Detailization by Conditional Refinement
Authors: Zhiqin Chen, Vladimir G. Kim, Matthew Fisher, Noam Aigerman, Hao Zhang, Siddhartha Chaudhuri

Abstract: We introduce a deep generative network for 3D shape detailization, akin to stylization with the style being geometric details. We address the challenge of creating large varieties of high-resolution and detailed 3D geometry from a small set of exemplars by treating the problem as that of geometric detail transfer. Given a low-resolution coarse voxel shape, our network refines it, via voxel upsampling, into a higher-resolution shape enriched with geometric details. The output shape preserves the overall structure (or content) of the input, while its detail generation is conditioned on an input "style code" corresponding to a detailed exemplar. Our 3D detailization via conditional refinement is realized by a generative adversarial network, coined DECOR-GAN. The network utilizes a 3D CNN generator for upsampling coarse voxels and a 3D PatchGAN discriminator to enforce local patches of the generated model to be similar to those in the training detailed shapes. During testing, a style code is fed into the generator to condition the refinement. We demonstrate that our method can refine a coarse shape into a variety of detailed shapes with different styles. The generated results are evaluated in terms of content preservation, plausibility, and diversity. Comprehensive ablation studies are conducted to validate our network designs. Code is available at https://github.com/czq142857/DECOR-GAN.
Model-Aware Gesture-to-Gesture Translation
Authors: Hezhen Hu, Weilun Wang, Wengang Zhou, Weichao Zhao, Houqiang Li

Abstract: Hand gesture-to-gesture translation is a significant and interesting problem, which serves as a key role in many applications, such as sign language production. This task involves fine-grained structure understanding of the mapping between the source and target gestures. Current works follow a data-driven paradigm based on sparse 2D joint representation. However, given the insufficient representation capability of 2D joints, this paradigm easily leads to blurry generation results with incorrect structure. In this paper, we propose a novel model-aware gesture-to-gesture translation framework, which introduces hand prior with hand meshes as the intermediate representation. To take full advantage of the structured hand model, we first build a dense topology map aligning the image plane with the encoded embedding of the visible hand mesh. Then, a transformation flow is calculated based on the correspondence of the source and target topology map. During the generation stage, we inject the topology information into generation streams by modulating the activations in a spatially-adaptive manner. Further, we incorporate the source local characteristic to enhance the translated gesture image according to the transformation flow. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets have demonstrated that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
Spatio-temporal Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Action Recognition
Authors: Xiaolin Song, Sicheng Zhao, Jingyu Yang, Huanjing Yue, Pengfei Xu, Runbo Hu, Hua Chai

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for human action recognition is a practical and challenging problem. Compared with image-based UDA, video-based UDA is comprehensive to bridge the domain shift on both spatial representation and temporal dynamics. Most previous works focus on short-term modeling and alignment with frame-level or clip-level features, which is not discriminative sufficiently for video-based UDA tasks. To address these problems, in this paper we propose to establish the cross-modal domain alignment via self-supervised contrastive framework, i.e., spatio-temporal contrastive domain adaptation (STCDA), to learn the joint clip-level and video-level representation alignment. Since the effective representation is modeled from unlabeled data by self-supervised learning (SSL), spatio-temporal contrastive learning (STCL) is proposed to explore the useful long-term feature representation for classification, using self-supervision setting trained from the contrastive clip/video pairs with positive or negative properties. Besides, we involve a novel domain metric scheme, i.e., video-based contrastive alignment (VCA), to optimize the category-aware video-level alignment and generalization between source and target. The proposed STCDA achieves stat-of-the-art results on several UDA benchmarks for action recognition.
Exploiting Semantic Embedding and Visual Feature for Facial Action Unit Detection
Authors: Huiyuan Yang, Lijun Yin, Yi Zhou, Jiuxiang Gu

Abstract: Recent study on detecting facial action units (AU) has utilized auxiliary information (i.e., facial landmarks, relationship among AUs and expressions, web facial images, etc.), in order to improve the AU detection performance. As of now, no semantic information of AUs has yet been explored for such a task. As a matter of fact, AU semantic descriptions provide much more information than the binary AU labels alone, thus we propose to exploit the Semantic Embedding and Visual feature (SEV-Net) for AU detection. More specifically, AU semantic embeddings are obtained through both Intra-AU and Inter-AU attention modules, where the Intra-AU attention module captures the relation among words within each sentence that describes individual AU, and the Inter-AU attention module focuses on the relation among those sentences. The learned AU semantic embeddings are then used as guidance for the generation of attention maps through a cross-modality attention network. The generated cross-modality attention maps are further used as weights for the aggregated feature. Our proposed method is unique in that the semantic features are exploited as the first of this kind. The approach has been evaluated on three public AU-coded facial expression databases, and has achieved a superior performance than the state-of-the-art peer methods.
Categorical Depth Distribution Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection
Authors: Cody Reading, Ali Harakeh, Julia Chae, Steven L. Waslander

Abstract: Monocular 3D object detection is a key problem for autonomous vehicles, as it provides a solution with simple configuration compared to typical multi-sensor systems. The main challenge in monocular 3D detection lies in accurately predicting object depth, which must be inferred from object and scene cues due to the lack of direct range measurement. Many methods attempt to directly estimate depth to assist in 3D detection, but show limited performance as a result of depth inaccuracy. Our proposed solution, Categorical Depth Distribution Network (CaDDN), uses a predicted categorical depth distribution for each pixel to project rich contextual feature information to the appropriate depth interval in 3D space. We then use the computationally efficient bird's-eye-view projection and single-stage detector to produce the final output bounding boxes. We design CaDDN as a fully differentiable end-to-end approach for joint depth estimation and object detection. We validate our approach on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark, where we rank 1st among published monocular methods. We also provide the first monocular 3D detection results on the newly released Waymo Open Dataset. We provide a code release for CaDDN which will be made publicly available.
Learning From the Master: Distilling Cross-Modal Advanced Knowledge for Lip Reading
Authors: Sucheng Ren, Yong Du, Jianming Lv, Guoqiang Han, Shengfeng He

Abstract: Lip reading aims to predict the spoken sentences from silent lip videos. Due to the fact that such a vision task usually performs worse than its counterpart speech recognition, one potential scheme is to distill knowledge from a teacher pretrained by audio signals. However, the latent domain gap between the cross-modal data could lead to an learning ambiguity and thus limits the performance of lip reading. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative framework for lip reading, and two aspects of issues are considered: 1) the teacher should understand bi-modal knowledge to possibly bridge the inherent cross-modal gap; 2) the teacher should adjust teaching contents adaptively with the evolution of the student. To these ends, we introduce a trainable "master" network which ingests both audio signals and silent lip videos instead of a pretrained teacher. The master produces logits from three modalities of features: audio modality, video modality, and their combination. To further provide an interactive strategy to fuse these knowledge organically, we regularize the master with the task-specific feedback from the student, in which the requirement of the student is implicitly embedded. Meanwhile we involve a couple of "tutor" networks into our system as guidance for emphasizing the fruitful knowledge flexibly. In addition, we incorporate a curriculum learning design to ensure a better convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks, including in both word-level and sentence-level scenarios.
Spatially-Varying Outdoor Lighting Estimation From Intrinsics
Authors: Yongjie Zhu, Yinda Zhang, Si Li, Boxin Shi

Abstract: We present SOLID-Net, a neural network for spatially-varying outdoor lighting estimation from a single outdoor image for any 2D pixel location. Previous work has used a unified sky environment map to represent outdoor lighting. Instead, we generate spatially-varying local lighting environment maps by combining global sky environment map with warped image information according to geometric information estimated from intrinsics. As no outdoor dataset with image and local lighting ground truth is readily available, we introduce SOLID-Img dataset with physically-based rendered images and their corresponding intrinsic and lighting information. We train a deep neural network to regress intrinsic cues with physically-based constrains and use them to conduct global and local lightings estimation. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that SOLID-Net significantly outperforms previous methods.
VITON-HD: High-Resolution Virtual Try-On via Misalignment-Aware Normalization
Authors: Seunghwan Choi, Sunghyun Park, Minsoo Lee, Jaegul Choo

Abstract: The task of image-based virtual try-on aims to transfer a target clothing item onto the corresponding region of a person, which is commonly tackled by fitting the item to the desired body part and fusing the warped item with the person. While an increasing number of studies have been conducted, the resolution of synthesized images is still limited to low (e.g., 256x192), which acts as the critical limitation against satisfying online consumers. We argue that the limitation stems from several challenges: as the resolution increases, the artifacts in the misaligned areas between the warped clothes and the desired clothing regions become noticeable in the final results; the architectures used in existing methods have low performance in generating high-quality body parts and maintaining the texture sharpness of the clothes. To address the challenges, we propose a novel virtual try-on method called VITON-HD that successfully synthesizes 1024x768 virtual try-on images. Specifically, we first prepare the segmentation map to guide our virtual try-on synthesis, and then roughly fit the target clothing item to a given person's body. Next, we propose ALIgnment-Aware Segment (ALIAS) normalization and ALIAS generator to handle the misaligned areas and preserve the details of 1024x768 inputs. Through rigorous comparison with existing methods, we demonstrate that VITON-HD highly surpasses the baselines in terms of synthesized image quality both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Ultra-High-Definition Image Dehazing via Multi-Guided Bilateral Learning
Authors: Zhuoran Zheng, Wenqi Ren, Xiaochun Cao, Xiaobin Hu, Tao Wang, Fenglong Song, Xiuyi Jia

Abstract: During the last couple of years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved significant success in the single image dehazing task. Unfortunately, most existing deep dehazing models have high computational complexity, which hinders their application to high-resolution images, especially for UHD (ultra-high-definition) or 4K resolution images. To address the problem, we propose a novel network capable of real-time dehazing of 4K images on a single GPU, which consists of three deep CNNs. The first CNN extracts haze-relevant features at a reduced resolution of the hazy input and then fits locally-affine models in the bilateral space. Another CNN is used to learn multiple full-resolution guidance maps corresponding to the learned bilateral model. As a result, the feature maps with high-frequency can be reconstructed by multi-guided bilateral upsampling. Finally, the third CNN fuses the high-quality feature maps into a dehazed image. In addition, we create a large-scale 4K image dehazing dataset to support the training and testing of compared models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art dehazing approaches on various benchmarks.
RankDetNet: Delving Into Ranking Constraints for Object Detection
Authors: Ji Liu, Dong Li, Rongzhang Zheng, Lu Tian, Yi Shan

Abstract: Modern object detection approaches cast detecting objects as optimizing two subtasks of classification and localization simultaneously. Existing methods often learn the classification task by optimizing each proposal separately and neglect the relationship among different proposals. Such detection paradigm also encounters the mismatch between classification and localization due to the inherent discrepancy of their optimization targets. In this work, we propose a ranking-based optimization algorithm for harmoniously learning to rank and localize proposals in lieu of the classification task. To this end, we comprehensively investigate three types of ranking constraints, i.e., global ranking, class-specific ranking and IoU-guided ranking losses. The global ranking loss encourages foreground samples to rank higher than background. The class-specific ranking loss ensures that positive samples rank higher than negative ones for each specific class. The IoU-guided ranking loss aims to align each pair of confidence scores with the associated pair of IoU overlap between two positive samples of a specific class. Our ranking constraints can sufficiently explore the relationships between samples from three different perspectives. They are easy-to-implement, compatible with mainstream detection frameworks and computation-free for inference. Experiments demonstrate that our RankDetNet consistently surpasses prior anchor-based and anchor-free baselines, e.g., improving RetinaNet baseline by 2.5% AP on the COCO test-dev set without bells and whistles. We also apply the proposed ranking constraints for 3D object detection and achieve improved performance, which further validates the superiority and generality of our method.