OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Intuitive, Interactive Beard and Hair Synthesis With Generative Models
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We present an interactive approach to synthesizing realistic variations in facial hair in images, ranging from subtle edits to existing hair to the addition of complex and challenging hair in images of clean-shaven subjects. To circumvent the tedious and computationally expensive tasks of modeling, rendering and compositing the 3D geometry of the target hairstyle using the traditional graphics pipeline, we employ a neural network pipeline that synthesizes realistic and detailed images of facial hair directly in the target image in under one second. The synthesis is controlled by simple and sparse guide strokes from the user defining the general structural and color properties of the target hairstyle. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate our chosen method compared to several alternative approaches. We show compelling interactive editing results with a prototype user interface that allows novice users to progressively refine the generated image to match their desired hairstyle, and demonstrate that our approach also allows for flexible and high-fidelity scalp hair synthesis.
SQE: a Self Quality Evaluation Metric for Parameters Optimization in Multi-Object Tracking
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We present a novel self quality evaluation metric SQE for parameters optimization in the challenging yet critical multi-object tracking task. Current evaluation metrics all require annotated ground truth, thus will fail in the test environment and realistic circumstances prohibiting further optimization after training. By contrast, our metric reflects the internal characteristics of trajectory hypotheses and measures tracking performance without ground truth. We demonstrate that trajectories with different qualities exhibit different single or multiple peaks over feature distance distribution, inspiring us to design a simple yet effective method to assess the quality of trajectories using a two-class Gaussian mixture model. Experiments mainly on MOT16 Challenge data sets verify the effectiveness of our method in both correlating with existing metrics and enabling parameters self-optimization to achieve better performance. We believe that our conclusions and method are inspiring for future multi-object tracking in practice.
PointASNL: Robust Point Clouds Processing Using Nonlocal Neural Networks With Adaptive Sampling
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Raw point clouds data inevitably contains outliers or noise through acquisition from 3D sensors or reconstruction algorithms. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end network for robust point clouds processing, named PointASNL, which can deal with point clouds with noise effectively. The key component in our approach is the adaptive sampling (AS) module. It first re-weights the neighbors around the initial sampled points from farthest point sampling (FPS), and then adaptively adjusts the sampled points beyond the entire point cloud. Our AS module can not only benefit the feature learning of point clouds, but also ease the biased effect of outliers. To further capture the neighbor and long-range dependencies of the sampled point, we proposed a local-nonlocal (L-NL) module inspired by the nonlocal operation. Such L-NL module enables the learning process insensitive to noise. Extensive experiments verify the robustness and superiority of our approach in point clouds processing tasks regardless of synthesis data, indoor data, and outdoor data with or without noise. Specifically, PointASNL achieves state-of-the-art robust performance for classification and segmentation tasks on all datasets, and significantly outperforms previous methods on real-world outdoor SemanticKITTI dataset with considerate noise. Our code is released through https://github.com/yanx27/PointASNL.
Unsupervised Learning of Intrinsic Structural Representation Points
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Learning structures of 3D shapes is a fundamental problem in the field of computer graphics and geometry processing. We present a simple yet interpretable unsupervised method for learning a new structural representation in the form of 3D structure points. The 3D structure points produced by our method encode the shape structure intrinsically and exhibit semantic consistency across all the shape instances with similar structures. This is a challenging goal that has not fully been achieved by other methods. Specifically, our method takes a 3D point cloud as input and encodes it as a set of local features. The local features are then passed through a novel point integration module to produce a set of 3D structure points. The chamfer distance is used as reconstruction loss to ensure the structure points lie close to the input point cloud. Extensive experiments have shown that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the semantic shape correspondence task and achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art on the segmentation label transfer task. Moreover, the PCA based shape embedding built upon consistent structure points demonstrates good performance in preserving the shape structures. Code is available at https://github.com/NolenChen/3DStructurePoints
Deep Active Learning for Biased Datasets via Fisher Kernel Self-Supervision
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Active learning (AL) aims to minimize labeling efforts for data-demanding deep neural networks (DNNs) by selecting the most representative data points for annotation. However, currently used methods are ill-equipped to deal with biased data. The main motivation of this paper is to consider a realistic setting for pool-based semi-supervised AL, where the unlabeled collection of train data is biased. We theoretically derive an optimal acquisition function for AL in this setting. It can be formulated as distribution shift minimization between unlabeled train data and weakly-labeled validation dataset. To implement such acquisition function, we propose a low-complexity method for feature density matching using self-supervised Fisher kernel (FK) as well as several novel pseudo-label estimators. Our FK-based method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on MNIST, SVHN, and ImageNet classification while requiring only 1/10th of processing. The conducted experiments show at least 40% drop in labeling efforts for the biased class-imbalanced data compared to existing methods.
FGN: Fully Guided Network for Few-Shot Instance Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Few-shot instance segmentation (FSIS) conjoins the few-shot learning paradigm with general instance segmentation, which provides a possible way of tackling instance segmentation in the lack of abundant labeled data for training. This paper presents a Fully Guided Network (FGN) for few-shot instance segmentation. FGN perceives FSIS as a guided model where a so-called support set is encoded and utilized to guide the predictions of a base instance segmentation network (i.e., Mask R-CNN), critical to which is the guidance mechanism. In this view, FGN introduces different guidance mechanisms into the various key components in Mask R-CNN, including Attention-Guided RPN, Relation-Guided Detector, and Attention-Guided FCN, in order to make full use of the guidance effect from the support set and adapt better to the inter-class generalization. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our proposed FGN can outperform the state-of-the-art methods.
DualConvMesh-Net: Joint Geodesic and Euclidean Convolutions on 3D Meshes
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We propose DualConvMesh-Nets (DCM-Net) a family of deep hierarchical convolutional networks over 3D geometric data that combines two types of convolutions. The first type, geodesic convolutions, defines the kernel weights over mesh surfaces or graphs. That is, the convolutional kernel weights are mapped to the local surface of a given mesh. The second type, Euclidean convolutions, is independent of any underlying mesh structure. The convolutional kernel is applied on a neighborhood obtained from a local affinity representation based on the Euclidean distance between 3D points. Intuitively, geodesic convolutions can easily separate objects that are spatially close but have disconnected surfaces, while Euclidean convolutions can represent interactions between nearby objects better, as they are oblivious to object surfaces. To realize a multi-resolution architecture, we borrow well-established mesh simplification methods from the geometry processing domain and adapt them to define mesh-preserving pooling and unpooling operations. We experimentally show that combining both types of convolutions in our architecture leads to significant performance gains for 3D semantic segmentation, and we report competitive results on three scene segmentation benchmarks. Our models and code are publicly available.
Noise Modeling, Synthesis and Classification for Generic Object Anti-Spoofing
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Using printed photograph and replaying videos of biometric modalities, such as iris, fingerprint and face, are common attacks to fool the recognition systems for granting access as the genuine user. With the growing online person-to-person shopping (e.g., Ebay and Craigslist), such attacks also threaten those services, where the online photo illustration might not be captured from real items but from paper or digital screen. Thus, the study of anti-spoofing should be extended from modality-specific solutions to generic-object-based ones. In this work, we define and tackle the problem of Generic Object Anti-Spoofing (GOAS) for the first time. One significant cue to detect these attacks is the noise patterns introduced by the capture sensors and spoof mediums. Different sensor/medium combinations can result in diverse noise patterns. We propose a GAN-based architecture to synthesize and identify the noise patterns from seen and unseen medium/sensor combinations. We show that the procedure of synthesis and identification are mutually beneficial. We further demonstrate the learned GOAS models can directly contribute to modality-specific anti-spoofing without domain transfer. The code and GOSet dataset are available at cvlab.cse.msu.edu/project-goas.html.
An Investigation Into the Stochasticity of Batch Whitening
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Batch Normalization (BN) is extensively employed in various network architectures by performing standardization within mini-batches. A full understanding of the process has been a central target in the deep learning communities. Unlike existing works, which usually only analyze the standardization operation, this paper investigates the more general Batch Whitening (BW). Our work originates from the observation that while various whitening transformations equivalently improve the conditioning, they show significantly different behaviors in discriminative scenarios and training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We attribute this phenomenon to the stochasticity that BW introduces. We quantitatively investigate the stochasticity of different whitening transformations and show that it correlates well with the optimization behaviors during training. We also investigate how stochasticity relates to the estimation of population statistics during inference. Based on our analysis, we provide a framework for designing and comparing BW algorithms in different scenarios. Our proposed BW algorithm improves the residual networks by a significant margin on ImageNet classification. Besides, we show that the stochasticity of BW can improve the GAN's performance with, however, the sacrifice of the training stability.
VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Human motion is fundamental to understanding behavior. Despite progress on single-image 3D pose and shape estimation, existing video-based state-of-the-art methods fail to produce accurate and natural motion sequences due to a lack of ground-truth 3D motion data for training. To address this problem, we propose Video Inference for Body Pose and Shape Estimation (VIBE), which makes use of an existing large-scale motion capture dataset (AMASS) together with unpaired, in-the-wild, 2D keypoint annotations. Our key novelty is an adversarial learning framework that leverages AMASS to discriminate between real human motions and those produced by our temporal pose and shape regression networks. We define a temporal network architecture and show that adversarial training, at the sequence level, produces kinematically plausible motion sequences without in-the-wild ground-truth 3D labels. We perform extensive experimentation to analyze the importance of motion and demonstrate the effectiveness of VIBE on challenging 3D pose estimation datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/mkocabas/VIBE.
FroDO: From Detections to 3D Objects
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Object-oriented maps are important for scene understanding since they jointly capture geometry and semantics, allow individual instantiation and meaningful reasoning about objects. We introduce FroDO, a method for accurate 3D reconstruction of object instances from RGB video that infers object location, pose and shape in a coarse-to-fine manner. Key to FroDO is to embed object shapes in a novel learnt space that allows seamless switching between sparse point cloud and dense DeepSDF decoding. Given an input sequence of localized RGB frames, FroDO first aggregates 2D detections to instantiate a category-aware 3D bounding box per object. A shape code is regressed using an encoder network before optimizing shape and pose further under the learnt shape priors using sparse and dense shape representations. The optimization uses multi-view geometric, photometric and silhouette losses. We evaluate on real-world datasets, including Pix3D, Redwood-OS, and ScanNet, for single-view, multi-view, and multi-object reconstruction.
KeypointNet: A Large-Scale 3D Keypoint Dataset Aggregated From Numerous Human Annotations
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Detecting 3D objects keypoints is of great interest to the areas of both graphics and computer vision. There have been several 2D and 3D keypoint datasets aiming to address this problem in a data-driven way. These datasets, however, either lack scalability or bring ambiguity to the definition of keypoints. Therefore, we present KeypointNet: the first large-scale and diverse 3D keypoint dataset that contains 103,450 keypoints and 8,234 3D models from 16 object categories, by leveraging numerous human annotations. To handle the inconsistency between annotations from different people, we propose a novel method to aggregate these keypoints automatically, through minimization of a fidelity loss. Finally, ten state-of-the-art methods are benchmarked on our proposed dataset. Our code and data are available on https://github.com/qq456cvb/KeypointNet.
Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-Based and Anchor-Free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Object detection has been dominated by anchor-based detectors for several years. Recently, anchor-free detectors have become popular due to the proposal of FPN and Focal Loss. In this paper, we first point out that the essential difference between anchor-based and anchor-free detection is actually how to define positive and negative training samples, which leads to the performance gap between them. If they adopt the same definition of positive and negative samples during training, there is no obvious difference in the final performance, no matter regressing from a box or a point. This shows that how to select positive and negative training samples is important for current object detectors. Then, we propose an Adaptive Training Sample Selection (ATSS) to automatically select positive and negative samples according to statistical characteristics of object. It significantly improves the performance of anchor-based and anchor-free detectors and bridges the gap between them. Finally, we discuss the necessity of tiling multiple anchors per location on the image to detect objects. Extensive experiments conducted on MS COCO support our aforementioned analysis and conclusions. With the newly introduced ATSS, we improve state-of-the-art detectors by a large margin to $50.7\%$ AP without introducing any overhead. The code is available at https://github.com/sfzhang15/ATSS
MINA: Convex Mixed-Integer Programming for Non-Rigid Shape Alignment
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We present a convex mixed-integer programming formulation for non-rigid shape matching. To this end, we propose a novel shape deformation model based on an efficient low-dimensional discrete model, so that finding a globally optimal solution is tractable in (most) practical cases. Our approach combines several favourable properties: it is independent of the initialisation, it is much more efficient to solve to global optimality compared to analogous quadratic assignment problem formulations, and it is highly flexible in terms of the variants of matching problems it can handle. Experimentally we demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods for sparse shape matching, that it can be used for initialising dense shape matching methods, and we showcase its flexibility on several examples.
A Local-to-Global Approach to Multi-Modal Movie Scene Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Scene, as the crucial unit of storytelling in movies, contains complex activities of actors and their interactions in a physical environment. Identifying the composition of scenes serves as a critical step towards semantic understanding of movies. This is very challenging -- compared to the videos studied in conventional vision problems, e.g. action recognition, as scenes in movies usually contain much richer temporal structures and more complex semantic information. Towards this goal, we scale up the scene segmentation task by building a large-scale video dataset MovieScenes, which contains 21K annotated scene segments from 150 movies. We further propose a local-to-global scene segmentation framework, which integrates multi-modal information across three levels, i.e. clip, segment, and movie. This framework is able to distill complex semantics from hierarchical temporal structures over a long movie, providing top-down guidance for scene segmentation. Our experiments show that the proposed network is able to segment a movie into scenes with high accuracy, consistently outperforming previous methods. We also found that pretraining on our MovieScenes can bring significant improvements to the existing approaches.
Dynamic Traffic Modeling From Overhead Imagery
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Our goal is to use overhead imagery to understand patterns in traffic flow, for instance answering questions such as how fast could you traverse Times Square at 3am on a Sunday. A traditional approach for solving this problem would be to model the speed of each road segment as a function of time. However, this strategy is limited in that a significant amount of data must first be collected before a model can be used and it fails to generalize to new areas. Instead, we propose an automatic approach for generating dynamic maps of traffic speeds using convolutional neural networks. Our method operates on overhead imagery, is conditioned on location and time, and outputs a local motion model that captures likely directions of travel and corresponding travel speeds. To train our model, we take advantage of historical traffic data collected from New York City. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can be applied to generate accurate city-scale traffic models.
In Defense of Grid Features for Visual Question Answering
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Popularized as 'bottom-up' attention, bounding box (or region) based visual features have recently surpassed vanilla grid-based convolutional features as the de facto standard for vision and language tasks like visual question answering (VQA). However, it is not clear whether the advantages of regions (e.g. better localization) are the key reasons for the success of bottom-up attention. In this paper, we revisit grid features for VQA, and find they can work surprisingly well - running more than an order of magnitude faster with the same accuracy (e.g. if pre-trained in a similar fashion). Through extensive experiments, we verify that this observation holds true across different VQA models (reporting a state-of-the-art accuracy on VQA 2.0 test-std, 72.71), datasets, and generalizes well to other tasks like image captioning. As grid features make the model design and training process much simpler, this enables us to train them end-to-end and also use a more flexible network design. We learn VQA models end-to-end, from pixels directly to answers, and show that strong performance is achievable without using any region annotations in pre-training. We hope our findings help further improve the scientific understanding and the practical application of VQA. Code and features will be made available.
Rethinking the Route Towards Weakly Supervised Object Localization
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects with only image-level labels. Previous methods often try to utilize feature maps and classification weights to localize objects using image level annotations indirectly. In this paper, we demonstrate that weakly supervised object localization should be divided into two parts: class-agnostic object localization and object classification. For class-agnostic object localization, we should use class-agnostic methods to generate noisy pseudo annotations and then perform bounding box regression on them without class labels. We propose the pseudo supervised object localization (PSOL) method as a new way to solve WSOL. Our PSOL models have good transferability across different datasets without fine-tuning. With generated pseudo bounding boxes, we achieve 58.00% localization accuracy on ImageNet and 74.97% localization accuracy on CUB-200, which have a large edge over previous models.
Violin: A Large-Scale Dataset for Video-and-Language Inference
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce a new task, Video-and-Language Inference, for joint multimodal understanding of video and text. Given a video clip with aligned subtitles as premise, paired with a natural language hypothesis based on the video content, a model needs to infer whether the hypothesis is entailed or contradicted by the given video clip. A new large-scale dataset, named Violin (VIdeO-and-Language INference), is introduced for this task, which consists of 95,322 video-hypothesis pairs from 15,887 video clips, spanning over 582 hours of video. These video clips contain rich content with diverse temporal dynamics, event shifts, and people interactions, collected from two sources: (i) popular TV shows, and (ii) movie clips from YouTube channels. In order to address our new multimodal inference task, a model is required to possess sophisticated reasoning skills, from surface-level grounding (e.g., identifying objects and characters in the video) to in-depth commonsense reasoning (e.g., inferring causal relations of events in the video). We present a detailed analysis of the dataset and an extensive evaluation over many strong baselines, providing valuable insights on the challenges of this new task.