OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep Image Clustering with Category-Style Representation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Deep clustering which adopts deep neural networks to obtain optimal representations for clustering has been widely studied recently. In this paper, we propose a novel deep image clustering framework to learn a category-style latent representation in which the category information is disentangled from image style and can be directly used as the cluster assignment. To achieve this goal, mutual information maximization is applied to embed relevant information in the latent representation. Moreover, augmentation-invariant loss is employed to disentangle the representation into category part and style part. Last but not least, a prior distribution is imposed on the latent representation to ensure the elements of the category vector can be used as the probabilities over clusters. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly on five public datasets.
Improving Monocular Depth Estimation by Leveraging Structural Awareness and Complementary Datasets
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Monocular depth estimation plays a crucial role in 3D recognition and understanding. One key limitation of existing approaches lies in their lack of structural information exploitation, which leads to inaccurate spatial layout, discontinuous surface, and ambiguous boundaries. In this paper, we tackle this problem in three aspects. First, to exploit the spatial relationship of visual features, we propose a structure-aware neural network with spatial attention blocks. These blocks guide the network attention to global structures or local details across different feature layers. Second, we introduce a global focal relative loss for uniform point pairs to enhance spatial constraint in the prediction, and explicitly increase the penalty on errors in depth-wise discontinuous regions, which helps preserve the sharpness of estimation results. Finally, based on analysis of failure cases for prior methods, we collect a new Hard Case (HC) Depth dataset of challenging scenes, such as special lighting conditions, dynamic objects, and tilted camera angles. The new dataset is leveraged by an informed learning curriculum that mixes training examples incrementally to handle diverse data distributions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin in terms of both prediction accuracy on NYUDv2 dataset and generalization performance on unseen datasets.
BMBC: Bilateral Motion Estimation with Bilateral Cost Volume for Video Interpolation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Video interpolation increases the temporal resolution of a video sequence by synthesizing intermediate frames between two consecutive frames. We propose a novel deep-learning-based video interpolation algorithm based on bilateral motion estimation. First, we develop the bilateral motion network with the bilateral cost volume to estimate bilateral motions accurately. Then, we approximate bi-directional motions to predict a different kind of bilateral motions. We then warp the two input frames using the estimated bilateral motions. Next, we develop the dynamic filter generation network to yield dynamic blending filters. Finally, we combine the warped frames using the dynamic blending filters to generate intermediate frames. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art video interpolation algorithms on several benchmark datasets.
ReActNet: Towards Precise Binary Neural Network with Generalized Activation Functions
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose several ideas for enhancing a binary network to close its accuracy gap from real-valued networks without incurring any additional computational cost. We first construct a baseline network by modifying and binarizing a compact real-valued network with parameter-free shortcuts, bypassing all the intermediate convolutional layers including the downsampling layers. This baseline network strikes a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, achieving superior performance than most of existing binary networks at approximately half of the computational cost. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we observed that the performance of binary networks is sensitive to activation distribution variations. Based on this important observation, we propose to generalize the traditional Sign and PReLU functions, denoted as RSign and RPReLU for the respective generalized functions, to enable explicit learning of the distribution reshape and shift at near-zero extra cost. Lastly, we adopt a distributional loss to further enforce the binary network to learn similar output distributions as those of a real-valued network. We show that after incorporating all these ideas, the proposed ReActNet outperforms all the state-of-the-arts by a large margin. Specifically, it outperforms Real-to-Binary Net and MeliusNet29 by 4.0% and 3.6% respectively for the top-1 accuracy and also reduces the gap to its real-valued counterpart to within 3.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet dataset. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/liuzechun/ReActNet.
Object Detection with a Unified Label Space from Multiple Datasets
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Given multiple datasets with different label spaces, the goal of this work is to train a single object detector predicting over the union of all the label spaces. The practical benefits of such an object detector are obvious and significant application-relevant categories can be picked and merged form arbitrary existing datasets. However, naive merging of datasets is not possible in this case, due to inconsistent object annotations. Consider an object category like faces that is annotated in one dataset, but is not annotated in another dataset, although the object itself appears in the latter images. Some categories, like face here, would thus be considered foreground in one dataset, but background in another. To address this challenge, we design a framework which works with such partial annotations, and we exploit a pseudo labeling approach that we adapt for our specific case. We propose loss functions that carefully integrate partial but correct annotations with complementary but noisy pseudo labels. Evaluation in the proposed novel setting requires full annotation on the test set. We collect the required annotations and define a new challenging experimental setup for this task based one existing public datasets. We show improved performances compared to competitive baselines and appropriate adaptations of existing work.
Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images from Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

The goal of perception for autonomous vehicles is to extract semantic representations from multiple sensors and fuse these representations into a single "bird's-eye-view" coordinate frame for consumption by motion planning. We propose a new end-to-end architecture that directly extracts a bird's-eye-view representation of a scene given image data from an arbitrary number of cameras. The core idea behind our approach is to "lift" each image individually into a frustum of features for each camera, then "splat" all frustums into a rasterized bird's-eye-view grid. By training on the entire camera rig, we provide evidence that our model is able to learn not only how to represent images but how to fuse predictions from all cameras into a single cohesive representation of the scene while being robust to calibration error. On standard bird's-eye-view tasks such as object segmentation and map segmentation, our model outperforms all baselines and prior work. In pursuit of the goal of learning dense representations for motion planning, we show that the representations inferred by our model enable interpretable end-to-end motion planning by "shooting" template trajectories into a bird's-eye-view cost map output by our network. We benchmark our approach against models that use oracle depth from lidar. Project page with code: https://nv-tlabs.github.io/lift-splat-shoot .
Comprehensive Image Captioning via Scene Graph Decomposition
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

We address the challenging problem of image captioning by revisiting the representation of image scene graph. At the core of our method lies the decomposition of a scene graph into a set of sub-graphs, with each sub-graph capturing a semantic component of the input image. We design a deep model to select important sub-graphs, and to decode each selected sub-graph into a single target sentence. By using sub-graphs, our model is able to attend to different components of the image. Our method thus accounts for accurate, diverse, grounded and controllable captioning at the same time. We present extensive experiments to demonstrate the benefits of our comprehensive captioning model. Our method establishes new state-of-the-art results in caption diversity, grounding, and controllability, and compares favourably to latest methods in caption quality. Our project website can be found at http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~yiwuzhong/Sub-GC.html.
Symbiotic Adversarial Learning for Attribute-based Person Search
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Attribute-based person search is in significant demand for applications where no detected query images are available, such as identifying a criminal from witness. However, the task itself is quite challenging because there is a huge modality gap between images and physical descriptions of attributes. Often, there may also be a large number of unseen categories (attribute combinations). The current state-of-the-art methods either focus on learning better cross-modal embeddings by mining only seen data, or they explicitly use generative adversarial networks (GANs) to synthesize unseen features. The former tends to produce poor embeddings due to insufficient data, while the latter does not preserve intra-class compactness during generation. In this paper, we present a symbiotic adversarial learning framework, called SAL.Two GANs sit at the base of the framework in a symbiotic learning scheme: one synthesizes features of unseen classes/categories, while the other optimizes the embedding and performs the cross-modal alignment on the common embedding space .Specifically, two different types of generative adversarial networks learn collaboratively throughout the training process and the interactions between the two mutually benefit each other. Extensive evaluations show SAL's superiority over nine state-of-the-art methods with two challenging pedestrian benchmarks, PETA and Market-1501. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/ycao5602/SAL .
Rethinking Few-shot Image Classification: A Good Embedding is All You Need?
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

The focus of recent meta-learning research has been on the development of learning algorithms that can quickly adapt to test time tasks with limited data and low computational cost. Few-shot learning is widely used as one of the standard benchmarks in meta-learning. In this work, we show that a simple baseline: learning a supervised or self-supervised representation on the meta-training set, followed by training a linear classifier on top of this representation, outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods. An additional boost can be achieved through the use of self-distillation. This demonstrates that using a good learned embedding model can be more effective than sophisticated meta-learning algorithms. We believe that our findings motivate a rethinking of few-shot image classification benchmarks and the associated role of meta-learning algorithms. Code is available at: http://github.com/WangYueFt/rfs/.
Adversarial Background-Aware Loss for Weakly-supervised Temporal Activity Localization
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Temporally localizing activities within untrimmed videos has been extensively studied in recent years. Despite recent advances, existing methods for weakly-supervised temporal activity localization struggle to recognize when an activity is not occurring. To address this issue, we propose a novel method named A2CL-PT. Two triplets of the feature space are considered in our approach: one triplet is used to learn discriminative features for each activity class, and the other one is used to distinguish the features where no activity occurs (i.e. background features) from activity-related features for each video. To further improve the performance, we build our network using two parallel branches which operate in an adversarial way: the first branch localizes the most salient activities of a video and the second one finds other supplementary activities from non-localized parts of the video. Extensive experiments performed on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is effective. Specifically, the average mAP of IoU thresholds from 0.1 to 0.9 on the THUMOS14 dataset is significantly improved from 27.9% to 30.0%.
Action Localization through Continual Predictive Learning
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

The problem of action recognition involves locating the action in the video, both over time and spatially in the image. The dominant current approaches use supervised learning to solve this problem, and require large amounts of annotated training data, in the form of frame-level bounding box annotations around the region of interest. In this paper, we present a new approach based on continual learning that uses feature-level predictions for self-supervision. It does not require any training annotations in terms of frame-level bounding boxes. The approach is inspired by cognitive models of visual event perception that propose a prediction-based approach to event understanding. We use a stack of LSTMs coupled with CNN encoder, along with novel attention mechanisms, to model the events in the video and use this model to predict high-level features for the future frames. The prediction errors are used to continuously learn the parameters of the models. This self-supervised framework is not complicated as other approaches but is very effective in learning robust visual representations for both labeling and localization. It should be noted that the approach outputs in a streaming fashion, requiring only a single pass through the video, making it amenable for real-time processing. We demonstrate this on three datasets - UCF Sports, JHMDB, and THUMOS'13 and show that the proposed approach outperforms weakly-supervised and unsupervised baselines and obtains competitive performance compared to fully supervised baselines. Finally, we show that the proposed framework can generalize to egocentric videos and obtain state-of-the-art results in unsupervised gaze prediction.
3D Human Shape Reconstruction from a Polarization Image
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper tackles the problem of estimating 3D body shape of clothed humans from single polarized 2D images, i.e. polarization images. Polarization images are known to be able to capture polarized reflected lights that preserve rich geometric cues of an object, which has motivated its recent applications in reconstructing surface normal of the objects of interest. Inspired by the recent advances in human shape estimation from single color images, in this paper, we attempt at estimating human body shapes by leveraging the geometric cues from single polarization images. A dedicated two-stage deep learning approach, SfP, is proposed: given a polarization image, stage one aims at inferring the fined-detailed body surface normal; stage two gears to reconstruct the 3D body shape of clothing details. Empirical evaluations on a synthetic dataset (SURREAL) as well as a real-world dataset (PHSPD) demonstrate the qualitative and quantitative performance of our approach in estimating human poses and shapes. This indicates polarization camera is a promising alternative to the more conventional color or depth imaging for human shape estimation. Further, normal maps inferred from polarization imaging play a significant role in accurately recovering the body shapes of clothed people.
The Devil is in the Details: Self-Supervised Attention for Vehicle Re-Identification
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, the research community has approached the problem of vehicle re-identification (re-id) with attention-based models, specifically focusing on regions of a vehicle containing discriminative information. These re-id methods rely on expensive key-point labels, part annotations, and additional attributes including vehicle make, model, and color. Given the large number of vehicle re-id datasets with various levels of annotations, strongly-supervised methods are unable to scale across different domains. In this paper, we present Self-supervised Attention for Vehicle Re-identification (SAVER), a novel approach to effectively learn vehicle-specific discriminative features. Through extensive experimentation, we show that SAVER improves upon the state-of-the-art on challenging VeRi, VehicleID, Vehicle-1M and VERI-Wild datasets.
Improving One-stage Visual Grounding by Recursive Sub-query Construction
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

We improve one-stage visual grounding by addressing current limitations on grounding long and complex queries. Existing one-stage methods encode the entire language query as a single sentence embedding vector, e.g., taking the embedding from BERT or the hidden state from LSTM. This single vector representation is prone to overlooking the detailed descriptions in the query. To address this query modeling deficiency, we propose a recursive sub-query construction framework, which reasons between image and query for multiple rounds and reduces the referring ambiguity step by step. We show our new one-stage method obtains 5.0%, 4.5%, 7.5%, 12.8% absolute improvements over the state-of-the-art one-stage baseline on ReferItGame, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, respectively. In particular, superior performances on longer and more complex queries validates the effectiveness of our query modeling.
History Repeats Itself: Human Motion Prediction via Motion Attention
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Human motion prediction aims to forecast future human poses given a past motion. Whether based on recurrent or feed-forward neural networks, existing methods fail to model the observation that human motion tends to repeat itself, even for complex sports actions and cooking activities. Here, we introduce an attention-based feed-forward network that explicitly leverages this observation. In particular, instead of modeling frame-wise attention via pose similarity, we propose to extract motion attention to capture the similarity between the current motion context and the historical motion sub-sequences. Aggregating the relevant past motions and processing the result with a graph convolutional network allows us to effectively exploit motion patterns from the long-term history to predict the future poses. Our experiments on Human3.6M, AMASS and 3DPW evidence the benefits of our approach for both periodical and non-periodical actions. Thanks to our attention model, it yields state-of-the-art results on all three datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/wei-mao-2019/HisRepItself.
SRNet: Improving Generalization in 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Split-and-Recombine Approach
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Human poses that are rare or unseen in a training set are challenging for a network to predict. Similar to the long-tailed distribution problem in visual recognition, the small number of examples for such poses limits the ability of networks to model them. Interestingly, local pose distributions suffer less from the long-tail problem, i.e., local joint configurations within a rare pose may appear within other poses in the training set, making them less rare. We propose to take advantage of this fact for better generalization to rare and unseen poses. To be specific, our method splits the body into local regions and processes them in separate network branches, utilizing the property that a joint position depends mainly on the joints within its local body region. Global coherence is maintained by recombining the global context from the rest of the body into each branch as a low-dimensional vector. With the reduced dimensionality of less relevant body areas, the training set distribution within network branches more closely reflects the statistics of local poses instead of global body poses, without sacrificing information important for joint inference. The proposed split-and-recombine approach, called SRNet, can be easily adapted to both single-image and temporal models, and it leads to appreciable improvements in the prediction of rare and unseen poses.
CAFE-GAN: Arbitrary Face Attribute Editing with Complementary Attention Feature
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

The goal of face attribute editing is altering a facial image according to given target attributes such as hair color, mustache, gender, etc. It belongs to the image-to-image domain transfer problem with a set of attributes considered as a distinctive domain. There have been some works in multi-domain transfer problem focusing on facial attribute editing employing Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). These methods have reported some successes but they also result in unintended changes in facial regions - meaning the generator alters regions unrelated to the specified attributes. To address this unintended altering problem, we propose a novel GAN model which is designed to edit only the parts of a face pertinent to the target attributes by the concept of Complementary Attention Feature (CAFE). CAFE identifies the facial regions to be transformed by considering both target attributes as well as complementary attributes, which we define as those attributes absent in the input facial image. In addition, we introduce a complementary feature matching to help in training the generator for utilizing the spatial information of attributes. Effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by analysis and comparison study with state-of-the-art methods.
MimicDet: Bridging the Gap Between One-Stage and Two-Stage Object Detection
Venue: Conference ECCV 2020
Year: 2020

Modern object detection methods can be divided into one-stage approaches and two-stage ones. One-stage detectors are more efficient owing to straightforward architectures, but the two-stage detectors still take the lead in accuracy. Although recent work try to improve the one-stage detectors by imitating the structural design of the two-stage ones, the accuracy gap is still significant. In this paper, we propose MimicDet, a novel and efficient framework to train a one-stage detector by directly mimic the two-stage features, aiming to bridge the accuracy gap between one-stage and two-stage detectors. Unlike conventional mimic methods, MimicDet has a shared backbone for one-stage and two-stage detectors, then it branches into two heads which are well designed to have compatible features for mimicking. Thus MimicDet can be end-to-end trained without the pre-train of the teacher network. And the cost does not increase much, which makes it practical to adopt large networks as backbones. We also make several specialized designs such as dual-path mimicking and staggered feature pyramid to facilitate the mimicking process. Experiments on the challenging COCO detection benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of MimicDet. It achieves 46.1 mAP with ResNeXt-101 backbone on the COCO test-dev set, which significantly surpasses current state-of-the-art methods.