OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
HoughNet: Integrating near and long-range evidence for bottom-up object detection
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents HoughNet, a one-stage, anchor-free, voting-based, bottom-up object detection method. Inspired by the Generalized Hough Transform, HoughNet determines the presence of an object at a certain location by the sum of the votes cast on that location. Votes are collected from both near and long-distance locations based on a log-polar vote field. Thanks to this voting mechanism, HoughNet is able to integrate both near and long-range, class-conditional evidence for visual recognition, thereby generalizing and enhancing current object detection methodology, which typically relies on only local evidence. On the COCO dataset, HoughNet's best model achieves 46.4 $AP$ (and 65.1 $AP_{50}$), performing on par with the state-of-the-art in bottom-up object detection and outperforming most major one-stage and two-stage methods. We further validate the effectiveness of our proposal in another task, namely, "labels to photo" image generation by integrating the voting module of HoughNet to two different GAN models and showing that the accuracy is significantly improved in both cases. Code is available at https://github.com/nerminsamet/houghnet.
Graph Wasserstein Correlation Analysis for Movie Retrieval
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Movie graphs play an important role to bridge heterogenous modalities of videos and texts in human-centric retrieval. In this work, we propose Graph Wasserstein Correlation Analysis (GWCA) to deal with the core issue therein, i.e, cross heterogeneous graph comparison. Spectral graph filtering is introduced to encode graph signals, which are then embedded as probability distributions in a Wasserstein space, called graph Wasserstein metric learning. Such a seamless integration of graph signal filtering together with metric learning results in a surprise consistency on both learning processes, in which the goal of metric learning is just to optimize signal filters or vice versa. Further, we derive the solution of the graph comparison model as a classic generalized eigenvalue decomposition problem, which has an exactly closed-form solution. Finally, GWCA together with movie/text graphs generation are unified into the framework of movie retrieval to evaluate our proposed method. Extensive experiments on MovieGrpahs dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our GWCA as well as the entire framework.
Context-Aware RCNN: A Baseline for Action Detection in Videos
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Video action detection approaches usually conduct actor-centric action recognition over RoI-pooled features following the standard pipeline of Faster-RCNN. In this work, we first empirically find the recognition accuracy is highly correlated with the bounding box size of an actor, and thus higher resolution of actors contributes to better performance. However, video models require dense sampling in time to achieve accurate recognition. To fit in GPU memory, the frames to backbone network must be kept low-resolution, resulting in a coarse feature map in RoI-Pooling layer. Thus, we revisit RCNN for actor-centric action recognition via cropping and resizing image patches around actors before feature extraction with I3D deep network. Moreover, we found that expanding actor bounding boxes slightly and fusing the context features can further boost the performance. Consequently, we develop a surpringly effective baseline (Context-Aware RCNN) and it achieves new state-of-the-art results on two challenging action detection benchmarks of AVA and JHMDB. Our observations challenge the conventional wisdom of RoI-Pooling based pipeline and encourage researchers rethink the importance of resolution in actor-centric action recognition. Our approach can serve as a strong baseline for video action detection and is expected to inspire new ideas for this filed. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/MCG-NJU/CRCNN-Action}.
Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

With the goal of recovering high-quality image content from its degraded version, image restoration enjoys numerous applications, such as in surveillance, computational photography, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved dramatic improvements over conventional approaches for image restoration task. Existing CNN-based methods typically operate either on full-resolution or on progressively low-resolution representations. In the former case, spatially precise but contextually less robust results are achieved, while in the latter case, semantically reliable but spatially less accurate outputs are generated. In this paper, we present a novel architecture with the collective goals of maintaining spatially-precise high-resolution representations through the entire network and receiving strong contextual information from the low-resolution representations. The core of our approach is a multi-scale residual block containing several key elements: (a) parallel multi-resolution convolution streams for extracting multi-scale features, (b) information exchange across the multi-resolution streams, (c) spatial and channel attention mechanisms for capturing contextual information, and (d) attention based multi-scale feature aggregation. In a nutshell, our approach learns an enriched set of features that combines contextual information from multiple scales, while simultaneously preserving the high-resolution spatial details. Extensive experiments on five real image benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method, named as MIRNet, achieves state-of-the-art results for a variety of image processing tasks, including image denoising, super-resolution, and image enhancement. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MIRNet.
Detail Preserved Point Cloud Completion via Separated Feature Aggregation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Point cloud shape completion is a challenging problem in 3D vision and robotics. Existing learning-based frameworks leverage encoder-decoder architectures to recover the complete shape from a highly encoded global feature vector. Though the global feature can approximately represent the overall shape of 3D objects, it would lead to the loss of shape details during the completion process. In this work, instead of using a global feature to recover the whole complete surface, we explore the functionality of multi-level features and aggregate different features to represent the known part and the missing part separately. We propose two different feature aggregation strategies, named global \& local feature aggregation(GLFA) and residual feature aggregation(RFA), to express the two kinds of features and reconstruct coordinates from their combination. In addition, we also design a refinement component to prevent the generated point cloud from non-uniform distribution and outliers. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the ShapeNet dataset. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed network outperforms current state-of-the art methods especially on detail preservation.
LabelEnc: A New Intermediate Supervision Method for Object Detection
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we propose a new intermediate supervision method, named LabelEnc, to boost the training of object detection systems. The key idea is to introduce a novel label encoding function, mapping the ground-truth labels into latent embedding, acting as an auxiliary intermediate supervision to the detection backbone during training. Our approach mainly involves a two-step training procedure. First, we optimize the label encoding function via an AutoEncoder defined in the label space, approximating the "desired" intermediate representations for the target object detector. Second, taking advantage of the learned label encoding function, we introduce a new auxiliary loss attached to the detection backbones, thus benefiting the performance of the derived detector. Experiments show our method improves a variety of detection systems by around 2% on COCO dataset, no matter one-stage or two-stage frameworks. Moreover, the auxiliary structures only exist during training, i.e. it is completely cost-free in inference time. Code is available at: https://github.com/megvii-model/LabelEnc
SSN: Shape Signature Networks for Multi-class Object Detection from Point Clouds
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Multi-class 3D object detection aims to localize and classify objects of multiple categories from point clouds. Due to the nature of point clouds, i.e. unstructured, sparse and noisy, some features benefit-ting multi-class discrimination are underexploited, such as shape information. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D shape signature to explore the shape information from point clouds. By incorporating operations of symmetry, convex hull and chebyshev fitting, the proposed shape sig-nature is not only compact and effective but also robust to the noise, which serves as a soft constraint to improve the feature capability of multi-class discrimination. Based on the proposed shape signature, we develop the shape signature networks (SSN) for 3D object detection, which consist of pyramid feature encoding part, shape-aware grouping heads and explicit shape encoding objective. Experiments show that the proposed method performs remarkably better than existing methods on two large-scale datasets. Furthermore, our shape signature can act as a plug-and-play component and ablation study shows its effectiveness and good scalability
Few-Shot Single-View 3-D Object Reconstruction with Compositional Priors
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

The impressive performance of deep convolutional neural networks in single-view 3D reconstruction suggests that these models perform non-trivial reasoning about the 3D structure of the output space. However, recent work has challenged this belief, showing that complex encoder-decoder architectures perform similarly to nearest-neighbor baselines or simple linear decoder models that exploit large amounts of per category data in standard benchmarks. On the other hand settings where 3D shape must be inferred for new categories with few examples are more natural and require models that generalize about shapes. In this work we demonstrate experimentally that naive baselines do not apply when the goal is to learn to reconstruct novel objects using very few examples, and that in a \emph{few-shot} learning setting, the network must learn concepts that can be applied to new categories, avoiding rote memorization. To address deficiencies in existing approaches to this problem, we propose three approaches that efficiently integrate a class prior into a 3D reconstruction model, allowing to account for intra-class variability and imposing an implicit compositional structure that the model should learn. Experiments on the popular ShapeNet database demonstrate that our method significantly outperform existing baselines on this task in the few-shot setting.
SumGraph: Video Summarization via Recursive Graph Modeling
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

The goal of video summarization is to select keyframes that are visually diverse and can represent a whole story of an input video. State-of-the-art approaches for video summarization have mostly regarded the task as a frame-wise keyframe selection problem by aggregating all frames with equal weight. However, to find informative parts of the video, it is necessary to consider how all the frames of the video are related to each other. To this end, we cast video summarization as a graph modeling problem. We propose recursive graph modeling networks for video summarization, termed SumGraph, to represent a relation graph, where frames are regarded as nodes and nodes are connected by semantic relationships among frames. Our networks accomplish this through a recursive approach to refine an initially estimated graph to correctly classify each node as a keyframe by reasoning the graph representation via graph convolutional networks. To leverage SumGraph in a more practical environment, we also present a way to adapt our graph modeling in an unsupervised fashion. With SumGraph, we achieved state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks for video summarization in both supervised and unsupervised manners.
A Metric Learning Reality Check
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Deep metric learning papers from the past four years have consistently claimed great advances in accuracy, often more than doubling the performance of decade-old methods. In this paper, we take a closer look at the field to see if this is actually true. We find flaws in the experimental methodology of numerous metric learning papers, and show that the actual improvements over time have been marginal at best.
XingGAN for Person Image Generation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a novel Generative Adversarial Network (XingGAN or CrossingGAN) for person image generation tasks, i.e., translating the pose of a given person to a desired one. The proposed Xing generator consists of two generation branches that model the person's appearance and shape information, respectively. Moreover, we propose two novel blocks to effectively transfer and update the person's shape and appearance embeddings in a crossing way to mutually improve each other, which has not been considered by any other existing GAN-based image generation work. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets, i.e., Market-1501 and DeepFashion, demonstrate that the proposed XingGAN advances the state-of-the-art performance both in terms of objective quantitative scores and subjective visual realness. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/XingGAN.
GATCluster: Self-Supervised Gaussian-Attention Network for Image Clustering
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a self-supervised Gaussian ATtention network for image Clustering (GATCluster). Rather than extracting intermediate features first and then performing the traditional clustering algorithm, GATCluster directly outputs semantic cluster labels without further post-processing. Theoretically, we give a Label Feature Theorem to guarantee the learned features are one-hot encoded vectors, and the trivial solutions are avoided. To train the GATCluster in a completely unsupervised manner, we design four self-learning tasks with the constraints of transformation invariance, separability maximization, entropy analysis, and attention mapping. Specifically, the transformation invariance and separability maximization tasks learn the relationships between sample pairs. The entropy analysis task aims to avoid trivial solutions. To capture the object-oriented semantics, we design a self-supervised attention mechanism that includes a parameterized attention module and a soft-attention loss. All the guiding signals for clustering are self-generated during the training process. Moreover, we develop a two-step learning algorithm that is memory-efficient for clustering large-size images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in comparison with the state-of-the-art image clustering benchmarks. Our code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/niuchuangnn/GATCluster.
VCNet: A Robust Approach to Blind Image Inpainting
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Blind inpainting is a task to automatically complete visual contents without specifying masks for missing areas in an image. Previous works assume missing region patterns are known, limiting its application scope. In this paper, we relax the assumption by defining a new blind inpainting setting, making training a blind inpainting neural system robust against various unknown missing region patterns. Specifically, we propose a two-stage visual consistency network (VCN), meant to estimate where to fill (via masks) and generate what to fill. In this procedure, the unavoidable potential mask prediction errors lead to severe artifacts in the subsequent repairing. To address it, our VCN predicts semantically inconsistent regions first, making mask prediction more tractable. Then it repairs these estimated missing regions using a new spatial normalization, enabling VCN to be robust to the mask prediction errors. In this way, semantically convincing and visually compelling content is thus generated. Extensive experiments are conducted, showing our method is effective and robust in blind image inpainting. And our VCN allows for a wide spectrum of applications.
Learning to Predict Context-adaptive Convolution for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Long-range contextual information is essential for achieving high-performance semantic segmentation. Previous feature re-weighting methods demonstrate that using global context for re-weighting feature channels can effectively improve the accuracy of semantic segmentation. However, the globally-sharing feature re-weighting vector might not be optimal for regions of different classes in the input image. In this paper, we propose a Context-adaptive Convolution Network (CaC-Net) to predict a spatially-varying feature weighting vector for each spatial location of the semantic feature maps. In CaC-Net, a set of context-adaptive convolution kernels are predicted from the global contextual information in a parameter-efficient manner. When used for convolution with the semantic feature maps, the predicted convolutional kernels can generate the spatially-varying feature weighting factors capturing both global and local contextual information. Comprehensive experimental results show that our CaC-Net achieves superior segmentation performance on three public datasets, PASCAL Context, PASCAL VOC 2012 and ADE20K.
EfficientFCN: Holistically-guided Decoding for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Both performance and efficiency are important to semantic segmentation. State-of-the-art semantic segmentation algorithms are mostly based on dilated Fully Convolutional Networks (dilatedFCN), which adopt dilated convolutions in the backbone networks to extract high-resolution feature maps for achieving high-performance segmentation performance. However, due to many convolution operations are conducted on the high-resolution feature maps, such dilatedFCN-based methods result in large computational complexity and memory consumption. To balance the performance and efficiency, there also exist encoder-decoder structures that gradually recover the spatial information by combining multi-level feature maps from the encoder. However, the performances of existing encoder-decoder methods are far from comparable with the dilatedFCN-based methods. In this paper, we propose the EfficientFCN, whose backbone is a common ImageNet pre-trained network without any dilated convolution. A holistically-guided decoder is introduced to obtain the high-resolution semantic-rich feature maps via the multi-scale features from the encoder. The decoding task is converted to novel codebook generation and codeword assembly task, which takes advantages of the high-level and low-level features from the encoder. Such a framework achieves comparable or even better performance than state-of-the-art methods with only 1/3 of the computational cost. Extensive experiments on PASCAL Context, PASCAL VOC, ADE20K validate the effectiveness of the proposed EfficientFCN.
GroSS: Group-Size Series Decomposition for Grouped Architecture Search
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

We present a novel approach which is able to explore the configuration of grouped convolutions within neural networks. Group-size Series (GroSS) decomposition is a mathematical formulation of tensor factorisation into a series of approximations of increasing rank terms. GroSS allows for dynamic and differentiable selection of factorisation rank, which is analogous to a grouped convolution. Therefore, to the best of our knowledge, GroSS is the first method to enable simultaneous training of differing numbers of groups within a single layer, as well as all possible combinations between layers. In doing so, GroSS is able to train an entire grouped convolution architecture search-space concurrently. We demonstrate this through architecture searches with performance objectives on multiple datasets and networks. GroSS enables more effective and efficient search for grouped convolutional architectures.
Efficient Adversarial Attacks for Visual Object Tracking
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Visual object tracking is an important task that requires the tracker to find the objects quickly and accurately. The existing state-ofthe-art object trackers, i.e., Siamese based trackers, use DNNs to attain high accuracy. However, the robustness of visual tracking models is seldom explored. In this paper, we analyze the weakness of object trackers based on the Siamese network and then extend adversarial examples to visual object tracking. We present an end-to-end network FAN (Fast Attack Network) that uses a novel drift loss combined with the embedded feature loss to attack the Siamese network based trackers. Under a single GPU, FAN is efficient in the training speed and has a strong attack performance. The FAN can generate an adversarial example at 10ms, achieve effective targeted attack (at least 40% drop rate on OTB) and untargeted attack (at least 70% drop rate on OTB).
What makes fake images detectable? Understanding properties that generalize
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

The quality of image generation and manipulation is reaching impressive levels, making it increasingly difficult for a human to distinguish between what is real and what is fake. However, deep networks can still pick up on the subtle artifacts in these doctored images. We seek to understand what properties of fake images make them detectable and identify what generalizes across different model architectures, datasets, and variations in training. We use a patch-based classifier with limited receptive fields to visualize which regions of fake images are more easily detectable. We further show a technique to exaggerate these detectable properties and demonstrate that, even when the image generator is adversarially finetuned against a fake image classifier, it is still imperfect and leaves detectable artifacts in certain image patches. Code is available at https://chail.github.io/patch-forensics/.
Embedding Propagation: Smoother Manifold for Few-Shot Classification
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Few-shot classification is challenging because the data distribution of the training set can be widely different to the test set as their classes are disjoint. This distribution shift often results in poor generalization. Manifold smoothing has been shown to address the distribution shift problem by extending the decision boundaries and reducing the noise of the class representations. Moreover, manifold smoothness is a key factor for semi-supervised learning and transductive learning algorithms. In this work, we propose to use embedding propagation as an unsupervised non-parametric regularizer for manifold smoothing in few-shot classification. Embedding propagation leverages interpolations between the extracted features of a neural network based on a similarity graph. We empirically show that embedding propagation yields a smoother embedding manifold. We also show that applying embedding propagation to a transductive classifier achieves new state-of-the-art results in mini-Imagenet, tiered-Imagenet, Imagenet-FS, and CUB. Furthermore, we show that embedding propagation consistently improves the accuracy of the models in multiple semi-supervised learning scenarios by up to 16\% points. The proposed embedding propagation operation can be easily integrated as a non-parametric layer into a neural network. We provide the training code and usage examples at https://github.com/ElementAI/embedding-propagation.