OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning To Filter: Siamese Relation Network for Robust Tracking
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Despite the great success of Siamese-based trackers, their performance under complicated scenarios is still not satisfying, especially when there are distractors. To this end, we propose a novel Siamese relation network, which introduces two efficient modules, i.e. Relation Detector (RD) and Refinement Module (RM). RD performs in a meta-learning way to obtain a learning ability to filter the distractors from the background while RM aims to effectively integrate the proposed RD into the Siamese framework to generate accurate tracking result. Moreover, to further improve the discriminability and robustness of the tracker, we introduce a contrastive training strategy that attempts not only to learn matching the same target but also to learn how to distinguish the different objects. Therefore, our tracker can achieve accurate tracking results when facing background clutters, fast motion, and occlusion. Experimental results on five popular benchmarks, including VOT2018, VOT2019, OTB100, LaSOT, and UAV123, show that the proposed method is effective and can achieve state-of-the-art results. The code will be available at https://github.com/hqucv/siamrn
Learning Dynamic Alignment via Meta-Filter for Few-Shot Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Few-shot learning (FSL), which aims to recognise new classes by adapting the learned knowledge with extremely limited few-shot (support) examples, remains an important open problem in computer vision. Most of the existing methods for feature alignment in few-shot learning only consider image-level or spatial-level alignment while omitting the channel disparity. Our insight is that these methods would lead to poor adaptation with redundant matching, and leveraging channel-wise adjustment is the key to well adapting the learned knowledge to new classes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to learn a dynamic alignment, which can effectively highlight both query regions and channels according to different local support information. Specifically, this is achieved by first dynamically sampling the neighbourhood of the feature position conditioned on the input few shot, based on which we further predict a both position-dependent and channel-dependent Dynamic Meta-filter. The filter is used to align the query feature with position-specific and channel-specific knowledge. Moreover, we adopt Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) to enable a more accurate control of the alignment. In such a sense our model is able to better capture fine-grained semantic context of the few-shot example and thus facilitates dynamical knowledge adaptation for few-shot learning. The resulting framework establishes the new state-of-the-arts on major few-shot visual recognition benchmarks, including miniImageNet and tieredImageNet.
Unsupervised Learning of 3D Object Categories From Videos in the Wild
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Our goal is to learn a deep network that, given a small number of images of an object of a given category, reconstructs it in 3D. While several recent works have obtained analogous results using synthetic data or assuming the availability of 2D primitives such as keypoints, we are interested in working with challenging real data and with no manual annotations. We thus focus on learning a model from multiple views of a large collection of object instances. We contribute with a new large dataset of object centric videos suitable for training and benchmarking this class of models. We show that existing techniques leveraging meshes, voxels, or implicit surfaces, which work well for reconstructing isolated objects, fail on this challenging data. Finally, we propose a new neural network design, called warp-conditioned ray embedding (WCR), which significantly improves reconstruction while obtaining a detailed implicit representation of the object surface and texture, also compensating for the noise in the initial SfM reconstruction that bootstrapped the learning process. Our evaluation demonstrates performance improvements over several deep monocular reconstruction baselines on existing benchmarks and on our novel dataset.
Dogfight: Detecting Drones From Drones Videos
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

As airborne vehicles are becoming more autonomous and ubiquitous, it has become vital to develop the capability to detect the objects in their surroundings. This paper attempts to address the problem of drones detection from other flying drones. The erratic movement of the source and target drones, small size, arbitrary shape, large intensity variations, and occlusion make this problem quite challenging. In this scenario, region-proposal based methods are not able to capture sufficient discriminative foreground-background information. Also, due to the extremely small size and complex motion of the source and target drones, feature aggregation based methods are unable to perform well. To handle this, instead of using region-proposal based methods, we propose to use a two-stage segmentation-based approach employing spatio-temporal attention cues. During the first stage, given the overlapping frame regions, detailed contextual information is captured over convolution feature maps using pyramid pooling. After that pixel and channel-wise attention is enforced on the feature maps to ensure accurate drone localization. In the second stage, first stage detections are verified and new probable drone locations are explored. To discover new drone locations, motion boundaries are used. This is followed by tracking candidate drone detections for a few frames, cuboid formation, extraction of the 3D convolution feature map, and drones detection within each cuboid. The proposed approach is evaluated on two publicly available drone detection datasets and outperforms several competitive baselines.
Monocular Real-Time Full Body Capture With Inter-Part Correlations
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

We present the first method for real-time full body capture that estimates shape and motion of body and hands together with a dynamic 3D face model from a single color image. Our approach uses a new neural network architecture that exploits correlations between body and hands at high computational efficiency. Unlike previous works, our approach is jointly trained on multiple datasets focusing on hand, body or face separately, without requiring data where all the parts are annotated at the same time, which is much more difficult to create at sufficient variety. The possibility of such multi-dataset training enables superior generalization ability. In contrast to earlier monocular full body methods, our approach captures more expressive 3D face geometry and color by estimating the shape, expression, albedo and illumination parameters of a statistical face model. Our method achieves competitive accuracy on public benchmarks, while being significantly faster and providing more complete face reconstructions.
Adaptive Weighted Discriminator for Training Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Generative adversarial network (GAN) has become one of the most important neural network models for classical unsupervised machine learning. A variety of discriminator loss functions have been developed to train GAN's discriminators and they all have a common structure: a sum of real and fake losses that only depends on the actual and generated data respectively. One challenge associated with an equally weighted sum of two losses is that the training may benefit one loss but harm the other, which we show causes instability and mode collapse. In this paper, we introduce a new family of discriminator loss functions that adopts a weighted sum of real and fake parts, which we call adaptive weighted loss functions or aw-loss functions. Using the gradients of the real and fake parts of the loss, we can adaptively choose weights to train a discriminator in the direction that benefits the GAN's stability. Our method can be potentially applied to any discriminator model with a loss that is a sum of the real and fake parts. Experiments validated the effectiveness of our loss functions on an unconditional image generation task, improving the baseline results by a significant margin on CIFAR-10, STL-10, and CIFAR-100 datasets in Inception Scores and FID.
Transformation Driven Visual Reasoning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

This paper defines a new visual reasoning paradigm by introducing an important factor, i.e.~transformation. The motivation comes from the fact that most existing visual reasoning tasks, such as CLEVR in VQA, are solely defined to test how well the machine understands the concepts and relations within static settings, like one image. We argue that this kind of \textbf{state driven visual reasoning} approach has limitations in reflecting whether the machine has the ability to infer the dynamics between different states, which has been shown as important as state-level reasoning for human cognition in Piaget's theory. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel \textbf{transformation driven visual reasoning} task. Given both the initial and final states, the target is to infer the corresponding single-step or multi-step transformation, represented as a triplet (object, attribute, value) or a sequence of triplets, respectively. Following this definition, a new dataset namely TRANCE is constructed on the basis of CLEVR, including three levels of settings, i.e.~Basic (single-step transformation), Event (multi-step transformation), and View (multi-step transformation with variant views). Experimental results show that the state-of-the-art visual reasoning models perform well on Basic, but are still far from human-level intelligence on Event and View. We believe the proposed new paradigm will boost the development of machine visual reasoning. More advanced methods and real data need to be investigated in this direction. The resource of TVR is available at https://hongxin2019.github.io/TVR.
Towards Semantic Segmentation of Urban-Scale 3D Point Clouds: A Dataset, Benchmarks and Challenges
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

An essential prerequisite for unleashing the potential of supervised deep learning algorithms in the area of 3D scene understanding is the availability of large-scale and richly annotated datasets. However, publicly available datasets are either in relative small spatial scales or have limited semantic annotations due to the expensive cost of data acquisition and data annotation, which severely limits the development of fine-grained semantic understanding in the context of 3D point clouds. In this paper, we present an urban-scale photogrammetric point cloud dataset with nearly three billion richly annotated points, which is three times the number of labeled points than the existing largest photogrammetric point cloud dataset. Our dataset consists of large areas from three UK cities, covering about 7.6 km^2 of the city landscape. In the dataset, each 3D point is labeled as one of 13 semantic classes. We extensively evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms on our dataset and provide a comprehensive analysis of the results. In particular, we identify several key challenges towards urban-scale point cloud understanding. The dataset is available at https://github.com/QingyongHu/SensatUrban.
Towards Open World Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
Repurposing GANs for One-Shot Semantic Part Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

While GANs have shown success in realistic image generation, the idea of using GANs for other tasks unrelated to synthesis is underexplored. Do GANs learn meaningful structural parts of objects during their attempt to reproduce those objects? In this work, we test this hypothesis and propose a simple and effective approach based on GANs for semantic part segmentation that requires as few as one label example along with an unlabeled dataset. Our key idea is to leverage a trained GAN to extract pixel-wise representation from the input image and use it as feature vectors for a segmentation network. Our experiments demonstrate that GANs representation is "readily discriminative" and produces surprisingly good results that are comparable to those from supervised baselines trained with significantly more labels. We believe this novel repurposing of GANs underlies a new class of unsupervised representation learning that is applicable to many other tasks. More results are available at https://repurposegans.github.io/.
T2VLAD: Global-Local Sequence Alignment for Text-Video Retrieval
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Text-video retrieval is a challenging task that aims to search relevant video contents based on natural language descriptions. The key to this problem is to measure text-video similarities in a joint embedding space. However, most existing methods only consider the global cross-modal similarity and overlook the local details. Some works incorporate the local comparisons through cross-modal local matching and reasoning. These complex operations introduce tremendous computation. In this paper, we design an efficient global-local alignment method. The multi-modal video sequences and text features are adaptively aggregated with a set of shared semantic centers. The local cross-modal similarities are computed between the video feature and text feature within the same center. This design enables the meticulous local comparison and reduces the computational cost of the interaction between each text-video pair. Moreover, a global alignment method is proposed to provide a global cross-modal measurement that is complementary to the local perspective. The global aggregated visual features also provide additional supervision, which is indispensable to the optimization of the learnable semantic centers. We achieve consistent improvements on three standard text-video retrieval benchmarks and outperform the state-of-the-art by a clear margin.
Embedding Transfer With Label Relaxation for Improved Metric Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a novel method for embedding transfer, a task of transferring knowledge of a learned embedding model to another. Our method exploits pairwise similarities between samples in the source embedding space as the knowledge, and transfers them through a loss used for learning target embedding models. To this end, we design a new loss called relaxed contrastive loss, which employs the pairwise similarities as relaxed labels for inter-sample relations. Our loss provides a rich supervisory signal beyond class equivalence, enables more important pairs to contribute more to training, and imposes no restriction on manifolds of target embedding spaces. Experiments on metric learning benchmarks demonstrate that our method largely improves performance, or reduces sizes and output dimensions of target models effectively. We further show that it can be also used to enhance quality of self-supervised representation and performance of classification models. In all the experiments, our method clearly outperforms existing embedding transfer techniques.
Cloud2Curve: Generation and Vectorization of Parametric Sketches
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Analysis of human sketches in deep learning has advanced immensely through the use of waypoint-sequences rather than raster-graphic representations. We further aim to model sketches as a sequence of low-dimensional parametric curves. To this end, we propose an inverse graphics framework capable of approximating a raster or waypoint based stroke encoded as a point-cloud with a variable-degree Bézier curve. Building on this module, we present Cloud2Curve, a generative model for scalable high-resolution vector sketches that can be trained end-to-end using point-cloud data alone. As a consequence, our model is also capable of deterministic vectorization which can map novel raster or waypoint based sketches to their corresponding high-resolution scalable Bézier equivalent. We evaluate the generation and vectorization capabilities of our model on Quick, Draw! and K-MNIST datasets.
Simple Copy-Paste Is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Building instance segmentation models that are data-efficient and can handle rare object categories is an important challenge in computer vision. Leveraging data augmentations is a promising direction towards addressing this challenge. Here, we perform a systematic study of the Copy-Paste augmentation ([13, 12]) for instance segmentation where we randomly paste objects onto an image. Prior studies on Copy-Paste relied on modeling the surrounding visual context for pasting the objects. However, we find that the simple mechanism of pasting objects randomly is good enough and can provide solid gains on top of strong baselines. Furthermore, we show Copy-Paste is additive with semi-supervised methods that leverage extra data through pseudo labeling (e.g. self-training). On COCO instance segmentation, we achieve 49.1 mask AP and 57.3 box AP, an improvement of +0.6 mask AP and +1.5 box AP over the previous state-of-the-art. We further demonstrate that Copy-Paste can lead to significant improvements on the LVIS benchmark. Our baseline model outperforms the LVIS 2020 Challenge winning entry by +3.6 mask AP on rare categories.
MobileDets: Searching for Object Detection Architectures for Mobile Accelerators
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Inverted bottleneck layers, which are built upon depthwise convolutions, have been the predominant building blocks in state-of-the-art object detection models on mobile devices. In this work, we investigate the optimality of this design pattern over a broad range of mobile accelerators by revisiting the usefulness of regular convolutions. We discover that regular convolutions are a potent component to boost the latency-accuracy trade-off for object detection on accelerators, provided that they are placed strategically in the network via neural architecture search. By incorporating regular convolutions in the search space and directly optimizing the network architectures for object detection, we obtain a family of object detection models, MobileDets, that achieve state-of-the-art results across mobile accelerators. On the COCO object detection task, MobileDets outperform MobileNetV3+SSDLite by 1.7 mAP at comparable mobile CPU inference latencies. MobileDets also outperform MobileNetV2+SSDLite by 1.9 mAP on mobile CPUs, 3.7 mAP on Google EdgeTPU, 3.4 mAP on Qualcomm Hexagon DSP and 2.7 mAP on Nvidia Jetson GPU without increasing latency. Moreover, MobileDets are comparable with the state-of-the-art MnasFPN on mobile CPUs even without using the feature pyramid, and achieve better mAP scores on both EdgeTPUs and DSPs with up to 2x speedup. Code and models are available in the TensorFlow Object Detection API: https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/object_detection.
Open World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Compositional Zero-Shot learning (CZSL) requires to recognize state-object compositions unseen during training. In this work, instead of assuming prior knowledge about the unseen compositions, we operate in the open world setting, where the search space includes a large number of unseen compositions some of which might be unfeasible. In this setting, we start from the cosine similarity between visual features and compositional embeddings. After estimating the feasibility score of each composition, we use these scores to either directly mask the output space or as a margin for the cosine similarity between visual features and compositional embeddings during training. Our experiments on two standard CZSL benchmarks show that all the methods suffer severe performance degradation when applied in the open world setting. While our simple CZSL model achieves state-of-the-art performances in the closed world scenario, our feasibility scores boost the performance of our approach in the open world setting, clearly outperforming the previous state of the art.
BasicVSR: The Search for Essential Components in Video Super-Resolution and Beyond
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Video super-resolution (VSR) approaches tend to have more components than the image counterparts as they need to exploit the additional temporal dimension. Complex designs are not uncommon. In this study, we wish to untangle the knots and reconsider some most essential components for VSR guided by four basic functionalities, i.e., Propagation, Alignment, Aggregation, and Upsampling. By reusing some existing components added with minimal redesigns, we show a succinct pipeline, BasicVSR, that achieves appealing improvements in terms of speed and restoration quality in comparison to many state-of-the-art algorithms. We conduct systematic analysis to explain how such gain can be obtained and discuss the pitfalls. We further show the extensibility of BasicVSR by presenting an information-refill mechanism and a coupled propagation scheme to facilitate information aggregation. The BasicVSR and its extension, IconVSR, can serve as strong baselines for future VSR approaches.
3D-to-2D Distillation for Indoor Scene Parsing
Venue: Conference CVPR 2021
Year: 2021

Indoor scene semantic parsing from RGB images is very challenging due to occlusions, object distortion, and viewpoint variations. Going beyond prior works that leverage geometry information, typically paired depth maps, we present a new approach, a 3D-to-2D distillation framework, that enables us to leverage 3D features extracted from large-scale 3D data repository (e.g., ScanNet-v2) to enhance 2D features extracted from RGB images. Our work has three novel contributions. First, we distill 3D knowledge from a pretrained 3D network to supervise a 2D network to learn simulated 3D features from 2D features during the training, so the 2D network can infer without requiring 3D data. Second, we design a two-stage dimension normalization scheme to calibrate the 2D and 3D features for better integration. Third, we design a semantic-aware adversarial training model to extend our framework for training with unpaired 3D data. Extensive experiments on various datasets, ScanNet-V2, S3DIS, and NYU-v2, demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Also, experimental results show that our 3D-to-2D distillation improves the model generalization.