GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
RobustScanner: Dynamically Enhancing Positional Clues for Robust Text Recognition
Authors: Xiaoyu Yue; Zhanghui Kuang; Chenhao Lin; Hongbin Sun; Wayne Zhang
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: The attention-based encoder-decoder framework has recently achieved impressive results for scene text recognition, and many variants have emerged with improvements in recognition quality. However, it performs poorly on contextless texts (e.g., random character sequences) which is unacceptable in most of real application scenarios. In this paper, we first deeply investigate the decoding process of the decoder. We empirically find that a representative character-level sequence decoder utilizes not only context information but also positional information. Contextual information, which the existing approaches heavily rely on, causes the problem of attention drift. To suppress such side-effect, we propose a novel position enhancement branch, and dynamically fuse its outputs with those of the decoder attention module for scene text recognition. Specifically, it contains a position aware module to enable the encoder to output feature vectors encoding their own spatial positions, and an attention module to estimate glimpses using the positional clue (i.e., the current decoding time step) only. The dynamic fusion is conducted for more robust feature via an element-wise gate mechanism. Theoretically, our proposed method, dubbed RobustScanner, decodes individual characters with dynamic ratio between context and positional clues, and utilizes more positional ones when the decoding sequences with scarce context, and thus is robust and practical. Empirically, it has achieved new state-of-the-art results on popular regular and irregular text recognition benchmarks while without much performance drop on contextless benchmarks, validating its robustness in both contextual and contextless application scenarios."
Towards Fast, Accurate and Stable 3D Dense Face Alignment
Authors: Jianzhu Guo; Xiangyu Zhu; Yang Yang; Fan Yang; Zhen Lei; Stan Z. Li
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: Accurate and Stable 3D Dense Face Alignment","Existing methods of 3D dense face alignment mainly concentrate on accuracy, thus limiting the scope of their practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel regression framework which makes a balance among speed, accuracy and stability. Firstly, on the basis of a lightweight backbone, we propose a meta-joint optimization strategy to dynamically regress a small set of 3DMM parameters, which greatly enhances speed and accuracy simultaneously. To further improve the stability on videos, we present a virtual synthesis method to transform one still image to a short-video which incorporates in-plane and out-of-plane face moving. On the premise of high accuracy and stability, our model runs at over 50fps on a single CPU core and outperforms other state-of-the-art heavy models simultaneously. Experiments on several challenging datasets validate the efficiency of our method. The code and models will be available at \url{https://github.com/cleardusk/3DDFA_V2}."
Iterative Feature Transformation for Fast and Versatile Universal Style Transfer
Authors: Tai-Yin Chiu; Danna Gurari
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: The general framework for fast universal style transfer consists of an autoencoder and a feature transformation at the bottleneck. We propose a new transformation that iteratively stylizes features with analytical gradient descent. Experiments show this transformation is advantageous in part because it is fast. With control knobs to balance content preservation and style effect transferal, we also show this method can switch between artistic and photo-realistic style transfers and reduce distortion and artifacts. Finally, we show it can be used for applications requiring spatial control and multiple-style transfer. "
CATCH: Context-based Meta Reinforcement Learning for Transferrable Architecture Search
Authors: Xin Chen; Yawen Duan; Zewei Chen; Hang Xu; Zihao Chen; Xiaodan Liang; Tong Zhang; Zhenguo Li
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: Neural Architecture Search (NAS) achieved many breakthroughs in recent years. In spite of its remarkable progress, many algorithms are restricted to particular search spaces. They also lack efficient mechanisms to reuse knowledge when confronting multiple tasks. These challenges preclude their applicability, and motivate our proposal of CATCH, a novel Context-bAsed meTa reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for transferrable arChitecture searcH. The combination of meta-learning and RL allows CATCH to efficiently adapt to new tasks while being agnostic to search spaces. CATCH utilizes a probabilistic encoder to encode task properties into latent context variables, which then guide CATCH' s controller to quickly ""catch"" top-performing networks. The contexts also assist a network evaluator in filtering inferior candidates and speed up learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate CATCH' s universality and search efficiency over many other widely-recognized algorithms. It is also capable of handling cross-domain architecture search as competitive networks on ImageNet, COCO, and Cityscapes are identified. This is the first work to our knowledge that proposes an efficient transferrable NAS solution while maintaining robustness across various settings."
Toward Faster and Simpler Matrix Normalization via Rank-1 Update
Authors: Tan Yu; Yunfeng Cai; Ping Li
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: Bilinear pooling has achieved an impressive improvement in many computer vision tasks. Recent studies discover that matrix normalization is vital for improving the performance of bilinear pooling. Nevertheless, traditional matrix square-root or logarithm normalization methods need singular value decomposition (SVD), which is not well suited in the GPU platform, limiting its efficiency in training and inference. To boost the efficiency in the GPU platform, recent methods rely on Newton-Schulz (NS) iteration to approximate the matrix square-root. Despite NS iteration is GPU-friendly, it takes several times matrix-matrix multiplications, which is still expensive in computation. Besides, the proposed RUN is much simpler than NS iteration and thus much easier for implementation in practice. Meanwhile, NS iteration can not well support the compact bilinear feature obtained from tensor sketch or random projection. To overcome these limitations, we propose a rank-1 update normalization (RUN), which only needs matrix-vector multiplications and thus is significantly more efficient than NS iteration using matrix-matrix multiplications. Moreover, our RUN readily supports the normalization on compact bilinear features, making it more flexible to be deployed compared with NS iteration. The proposed RUN is differentiable and can be plugged in a neural network for an end-to-end training. Comprehensive experiments on four public benchmarks show that, for the full bilinear pooling, the proposed RUN achieves comparable accuracies with a $330 imes$ speedup over NS iteration. For the compact bilinear pooling, our RUN achieves comparable accuracies with a $5400 imes$ speedup over SVD-based normalization."
Accurate Polarimetric BRDF for Real Polarization Scene Rendering
Authors: Yuhi Kondo; Taishi Ono; Legong Sun; Yasutaka Hirasawa; Jun Murayama
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: Polarization has been used to solve a lot of computer vision tasks such as Shape from Polarization (SfP). But existing methods suffer from ambiguity problems of polarization. To overcome such problems, some research works have suggested to use Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). But acquiring large scale dataset with polarization information is a very difficult task. If there is an accurate model which can describe a complicated phenomenon of polarization, we can easily produce synthetic polarized images with various situations to train CNN. In this paper, we propose a new polarimetric BRDF (pBRDF) model. We prove its accuracy by fitting our model to measured data with variety of light and camera conditions. We render polarized images using this model and use them to estimate surface normal. Experiments show that the CNN trained by our polarized images has more accuracy than one trained by RGB only."
Lensless Imaging with Focusing Sparse URA Masks in Long-Wave Infrared and its Application for Human Detection
Authors: Ilya Reshetouski; Hideki Oyaizu; Kenichiro Nakamura; Ryuta Satoh; Suguru Ushiki; Ryuichi Tadano; Atsushi Ito; Jun Murayama
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: We introduce a lensless imaging framework for contemporary computer vision applications in long-wavelength infrared (LWIR). The framework consists of two parts: a novel lensless imaging method that utilizes the idea of local directional focusing for optimal binary sparse coding, and lensless imaging simulator based on Fresnel-Kirchhoff diffraction approximation. Our lensless imaging approach, besides being computationally efficient, is calibration-free and allows for wide FOV imaging. We employ our lensless imaging simulation software for optimizing reconstruction parameters and for synthetic images generation for CNN training. We demonstrate the advantages of our framework on a dual-camera system (RGB-LWIR lensless), where we perform CNN-based human detection using the fused RGB-LWIR data."
Topology-Preserving Class-Incremental Learning
Authors: Xiaoyu Tao; Xinyuan Chang; Xiaopeng Hong; Xing Wei; Yihong Gong
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: A well-known issue for class-incremental learning is the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon, where the network's recognition performance on old classes degrades severely when incrementally learning new classes. To alleviate forgetting, we put forward to preserve the old class knowledge by maintaining the topology of the network's feature space. On this basis, we propose a novel topology-preserving class-incremental learning (TPCIL) framework. TPCIL uses an elastic Hebbian graph (EHG) to model the feature space topology, which is constructed with the competitive Hebbian learning rule. To maintain the topology, we develop the topology-preserving loss (TPL) that penalizes the changes of EHG's neighborhood relationships during incremental learning phases. Comprehensive experiments on CIFAR100, ImageNet, and subImageNet datasets demonstrate the power of the TPCIL for continuously learning new classes with less forgetting. The code will be released."
Inter-Image Communication for Weakly Supervised Localization
Authors: Xiaolin Zhang; Yunchao Wei; Yi Yang
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: Weakly supervised localization aims at finding target object regions using only image-level supervision. However, localization maps extracted from classification networks are often not accurate due to the lack of fine pixel-level supervision. In this paper, we propose to leverage pixel-level similarities across different objects for learning more accurate object locations in a complementary way. Particularly, two kinds of constraints are proposed to prompt the consistency of object features within the same categories. The first constraint is to learn the stochastic feature consistency among discriminative pixels that are randomly sampled from different images within a batch. The discriminative information embedded in one image can be leveraged to benefit its counterpart with inter-image communication. The second constraint is to learn the global consistency of object features throughout the entire dataset. We learn a feature center for each category and realize the global feature consistency by forcing the object features to approach class-specific centers. The global centers are actively updated with the training process. The two constraints can benefit each other to learn consistent pixel-level features within the same categories, and finally improve the quality of localization maps. We conduct extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks, i.e., ILSVRC and CUB-200-2011. Our method achieves the Top-1 localization error rate of 45.17% on the ILSVRC validation set, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by a large margin. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaomengyc/I2C."
UFO²: A Unified Framework towards Omni-supervised Object Detection
Authors: Zhongzheng Ren; Zhiding Yu; Xiaodong Yang; Ming-Yu Liu; Alexander G. Schwing; Jan Kautz
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: Existing work on object detection often relies on a single form of annotation: the model is trained using either accurate yet costly bounding boxes or cheaper but less expressive image-level tags. However, real-world annotations are often diverse in form, which challenges these existing works. In this paper, we present UFO$^2$, a unified object detection framework that can handle different forms of supervision simultaneously. Specifically, UFO$^2$ incorporates strong supervision (e.g., boxes), various forms of partial supervision (e.g., class tags, points, and scribbles), and unlabeled data. Through rigorous evaluations, we demonstrate that each form of label can be utilized to either train a model from scratch or to further improve a pre-trained model. We also use UFO$^2$ to investigate budget-aware omni-supervised learning, i.e., various annotation policies are studied under a fixed annotation budget: we show that competitive performance needs no strong labels for all data. Finally, we demonstrate the generalization of UFO$^2$, detecting more than 1,000 different objects without bounding box annotations. Code, models, and more details are available on the project page: https://github.com/NVlabs/wetectron."
iCaps: An Interpretable Classifier via Disentangled Capsule Networks
Authors: Dahuin Jung; Jonghyun Lee; Jihun Yi; Sungroh Yoon
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: We propose an interpretable Capsule Network, iCaps, for image classification. A capsule is a group of neurons nested inside each layer, and the one in the last layer is called a class capsule, which is a vector whose norm indicates a predicted probability for the class. Using the class capsule, existing Capsule Networks already provide some level of interpretability. However, there are two limitations which degrade its interpretability: 1) the class capsule also includes classification-irrelevant information, and 2) entities represented by the class capsule overlap. In this work, we address these two limitations using a novel class-supervised disentanglement algorithm and an additional regularizer, respectively. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations on three datasets, we demonstrate that the resulting classifier, iCaps, provides a prediction along with clear rationales behind it with no performance degradation."
Detecting Natural Disasters, Damage, and Incidents in the Wild
Authors: Ethan Weber; Nuria Marzo; Dim P. Papadopoulos; Aritro Biswas; Agata Lapedriza; Ferda Ofli; Muhammad Imran; Antonio Torralba
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: damage, and incidents in the wild","Responding to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, and wildfires, is a laborious task performed by on-the-ground emergency responders and analysts. Social media has emerged as a low-latency data source to quickly understand disaster situations. While most studies on social media are limited to text, images offer more information for understanding disaster and incident scenes. However, no large-scale image datasets for incident detection exists. In this work, we present the Incidents Dataset, which contains 446,684 images annotated by humans that cover 43 incidents across a variety of scenes. We employ a baseline classification model that mitigates false-positive errors and we perform image filtering experiments on millions of social media images from Flickr and Twitter. Through these experiments, we show how the Incidents Dataset can be used to detect images with incidents in the wild. Code, data, and models are available online at http://incidentsdataset.csail.mit.edu."
Dynamic ReLU
Authors: Yinpeng Chen; Xiyang Dai; Mengchen Liu; Dongdong Chen; Lu Yuan; Zicheng Liu
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: Rectified linear units (ReLU) are commonly used in deep neural networks. So far ReLU and its generalizations (non-parametric or parametric) are static, performing identically for all input samples. In this paper, we propose dynamic ReLU (DY-ReLU), a dynamic rectifier of which parameters are generated by a hyper function over all in-put elements. The key insight is that DY-ReLU encodes the global context into the hyper function, and adapts the piecewise linear activation function accordingly. Compared to its static counterpart, DY-ReLU has negligible extra computational cost, but significantly more representation capability, especially for light-weight neural networks. By simply using DY-ReLU for MobileNetV2, the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet classification is boosted from 72.0% to 76.2% with only 5% additional FLOPs."
Acquiring Dynamic Light Fields through Coded Aperture Camera
Authors: Kohei Sakai; Keita Takahashi; Toshiaki Fujii; Hajime Nagahara
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: We investigate the problem of compressive acquisition of a dynamic light field. A promising solution for compressive light field acquisition is to use a coded aperture camera, with which an entire light field can be computationally reconstructed from several images captured through differently-coded aperture patterns. With this method, it was assumed that the scene should not move throughout the complete acquisition process, which restricted real applications. In this study, however, we assume that the target scene may change over time, and propose a method for acquiring a dynamic light field (a moving scene) using a coded aperture camera and a convolutional neural network (CNN). To successfully handle scene motions, we develop a new configuration of image observation, called V-shape observation, and train the CNN using a dynamic-light-field dataset with pseudo motions. Our method is validated through experiments using both a computer-generated scene and a real camera."
Gait Recognition from a Single Image using a Phase-Aware Gait Cycle Reconstruction Network
Authors: Chi Xu; Yasushi Makihara; Xiang Li; Yasushi Yagi; Jianfeng Lu
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: We propose a method of gait recognition just from a single image for the first time, which enables latency-free gait recognition. To mitigate large intra-subject variations caused by a phase (gait pose) difference between a matching pair of input single images, we first reconstruct full gait cycles of image sequences from the single images using an auto-encoder framework, and then feed them into a state-of-the-art gait recognition network for matching. Specifically, a phase estimation network is introduced for the input single image, and the gait cycle reconstruction network exploits the estimated phase to mitigate the dependence of an encoded feature on the phase of that single image. This is called phase-aware gait cycle reconstructor (PA-GCR). In the training phase, the PA-GCR and recognition network are simultaneously optimized to achieve a good trade-off between reconstruction and recognition accuracies. Experiments on three gait datasets demonstrate the significant performance improvement of this method."
Informative Sample Mining Network for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Jie Cao; Huaibo Huang; Yi Li; Ran He; Zhenan Sun
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: The performance of multi-domain image-to-image translation has been significantly improved by recent progress in deep generative models. Existing approaches can use a unified model to achieve translations between all the visual domains. However, their outcomes are far from satisfying when there are large domain variations. In this paper, we reveal that improving the sample selection strategy is an effective solution. To select informative samples, we dynamically estimate sample importance during the training of Generative Adversarial Networks, presenting Informative Sample Mining Network. We theoretically analyze the relationship between the sample importance and the prediction of the global optimal discriminator. Then a practical importance estimation function for general conditions is derived. In addition, we propose a novel multi-stage sample training scheme to reduce sample hardness while preserving sample informativeness. Extensive experiments on a wide range of specific image-to-image translation tasks are conducted, and the results demonstrate our superiority over current state-of-the-art methods."
Spherical Feature Transform for Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Yuke Zhu; Yan Bai; Yichen Wei
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: Data augmentation in feature space is effective to increase data diversity. Previous methods assume that different classes have the same covariance in their feature distributions. Thus, feature transform between different classes is performed via translation. However, this approach is no longer valid for recent deep metric learning scenarios, where feature normalization is widely adopted and all features lie on a hypersphere. This work proposes a novel spherical feature transform approach. It relaxes the assumption of identical covariance between classes to an assumption of similar covariances of different classes on a hypersphere. Consequently, the feature transform is performed by a rotation that respects the spherical data distributions. We provide a simple and effective training method, and in depth analysis on the relation between the two different transforms. Comprehensive experiments on various deep metric learning benchmarks and different baselines verify that our method achieves consistent performance improvement and state-of-the-art results."
Semantic Equivalent Adversarial Data Augmentation for Visual Question Answering
Authors: Ruixue Tang; Chao Ma; Wei Emma Zhang; Qi Wu; Xiaokang Yang
Venue: ECCV 2020 (main)

Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) has achieved great success thanks to the fast development of deep neural networks (DNN). On the other hand, the data augmentation, as one of the major tricks for DNN, has been widely used in many computer vision tasks. However, there are few works studying the data augmentation problem for VQA and none of the existing image based augmentation schemes (such as rotation and flipping) can be directly applied to VQA due to its semantic structure -- an $\langle image, question, answer
angle$ triplet needs to be maintained correctly. For example, a direction related Question-Answer (QA) pair may not be true if the associated image is rotated or flipped. In this paper, instead of directly manipulating images and questions, we use generated adversarial examples for both images and questions as the augmented data. The augmented examples do not change the visual properties presented in the image as well as the extbf{semantic} meaning of the question, the correctness of the $\langle image, question, answer
angle$ is thus still maintained. We then use adversarial learning to train a classic VQA model (BUTD) with our augmented data. We find that we not only improve the overall performance on VQAv2, but also can withstand adversarial attack effectively, compared to the baseline model. The source code is available at https://github.com/zaynmi/seada-vqa."