OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep Relational Reasoning Graph Network for Arbitrary Shape Text Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Arbitrary shape text detection is a challenging task due to the high variety and complexity of scenes texts. In this paper, we propose a novel unified relational reasoning graph network for arbitrary shape text detection. In our method, an innovative local graph bridges a text proposal model via Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a deep relational reasoning network via Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), making our network end-to-end trainable. To be concrete, every text instance will be divided into a series of small rectangular components, and the geometry attributes (e.g., height, width, and orientation) of the small components will be estimated by our text proposal model. Given the geometry attributes, the local graph construction model can roughly establish linkages between different text components. For further reasoning and deducing the likelihood of linkages between the component and its neighbors, we adopt a graph-based network to perform deep relational reasoning on local graphs. Experiments on public available datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.
Basis Prediction Networks for Effective Burst Denoising With Large Kernels
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Bursts of images exhibit significant self-similarity across both time and space. This motivates a representation of the kernels as linear combinations of a small set of basis elements. To this end, we introduce a novel basis prediction network that, given an input burst, predicts a set of global basis kernels -- shared within the image -- and the corresponding mixing coefficients -- which are specific to individual pixels. Compared to state-of-the-art techniques that output a large tensor of per-pixel spatiotemporal kernels, our formulation substantially reduces the dimensionality of the network output. This allows us to effectively exploit comparatively larger denoising kernels, achieving both significant quality improvements (over 1dB PSNR) and faster run-times over state-of-the-art methods.
Real-World Person Re-Identification via Degradation Invariance Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Person re-identification (Re-ID) in real-world scenarios usually suffers from various degradation factors, e.g., low-resolution, weak illumination, blurring and adverse weather. On the one hand, these degradations lead to severe discriminative information loss, which significantly obstructs identity representation learning; on the other hand, the feature mismatch problem caused by low-level visual variations greatly reduces retrieval performance. An intuitive solution to this problem is to utilize low-level image restoration methods to improve the image quality. However, existing restoration methods cannot directly serve to real-world Re-ID due to various limitations, e.g., the requirements of reference samples, domain gap between synthesis and reality, and incompatibility between low-level and high-level methods. In this paper, to solve the above problem, we propose a degradation invariance learning framework for real-world person Re-ID. By introducing a self-supervised disentangled representation learning strategy, our method is able to simultaneously extract identity-related robust features and remove real-world degradations without extra supervision. We use low-resolution images as the main demonstration, and experiments show that our approach is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on several Re-ID benchmarks. In addition, our framework can be easily extended to other real-world degradation factors, such as weak illumination, with only a few modifications.
Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We present Momentum Contrast (MoCo) for unsupervised visual representation learning. From a perspective on contrastive learning as dictionary look-up, we build a dynamic dictionary with a queue and a moving-averaged encoder. This enables building a large and consistent dictionary on-the-fly that facilitates contrastive unsupervised learning. MoCo provides competitive results under the common linear protocol on ImageNet classification. More importantly, the representations learned by MoCo transfer well to downstream tasks. MoCo can outperform its supervised pre-training counterpart in 7 detection/segmentation tasks on PASCAL VOC, COCO, and other datasets, sometimes surpassing it by large margins. This suggests that the gap between unsupervised and supervised representation learning has been largely closed in many vision tasks.
Unsupervised Multi-Modal Image Registration via Geometry Preserving Image-to-Image Translation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Many applications, such as autonomous driving, heavily rely on multi-modal data where spatial alignment between the modalities is required. Most multi-modal registration methods struggle computing the spatial correspondence between the images using prevalent cross-modality similarity measures. In this work, we bypass the difficulties of developing cross-modality similarity measures, by training an image-to-image translation network on the two input modalities. This learned translation allows training the registration network using simple and reliable mono-modality metrics. We perform multi-modal registration using two networks - a spatial transformation network and a translation network. We show that by encouraging our translation network to be geometry preserving, we manage to train an accurate spatial transformation network. Compared to state-of-the-art multi-modal methods our presented method is unsupervised, requiring no pairs of aligned modalities for training, and can be adapted to any pair of modalities. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively on commercial datasets, showing that it performs well on several modalities and achieves accurate alignment.
SCATTER: Selective Context Attentional Scene Text Recognizer
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Scene Text Recognition (STR), the task of recognizing text against complex image backgrounds, is an active area of research. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods still struggle to recognize text written in arbitrary shapes. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture for STR, named Selective Context ATtentional Text Recognizer (SCATTER). SCATTER utilizes a stacked block architecture with intermediate supervision during training, that paves the way to successfully train a deep BiLSTM encoder, thus improving the encoding of contextual dependencies. Decoding is done using a two-step 1D attention mechanism. The first attention step re-weights visual features from a CNN backbone together with contextual features computed by a BiLSTM layer. The second attention step, similar to previous papers, treats the features as a sequence and attends to the intra-sequence relationships. Experiments show that the proposed approach surpasses SOTA performance on irregular text recognition benchmarks by 3.7\% on average.
Incremental Few-Shot Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Most existing object detection methods rely on the availability of abundant labelled training samples per class and offline model training in a batch mode. These requirements substantially limit their scalability to open-ended accommodation of novel classes with limited labelled training data. We present a study aiming to go beyond these limitations by considering the Incremental Few-Shot Detection (iFSD) problem setting, where new classes must be registered incrementally (without revisiting base classes) and with few examples. To this end we propose OpeN-ended Centre nEt (ONCE), a detector designed for incrementally learning to detect novel class objects with few examples. This is achieved by an elegant adaptation of the CentreNet detector to the few-shot learning scenario, and meta-learning a class-specific code generator model for registering novel classes. ONCE fully respects the incremental learning paradigm, with novel class registration requiring only a single forward pass of few-shot training samples, and no access to base classes -- thus making it suitable for deployment on embedded devices. Extensive experiments conducted on both the standard object detection and fashion landmark detection tasks show the feasibility of iFSD for the first time, opening an interesting and very important line of research.
Cloth in the Wind: A Case Study of Physical Measurement Through Simulation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

For many of the physical phenomena around us, we have developed sophisticated models explaining their behavior. Nevertheless, measuring physical properties from visual observations is challenging due to the high number of causally underlying physical parameters -- including material properties and external forces. In this paper, we propose to measure latent physical properties for cloth in the wind without ever having seen a real example before. Our solution is an iterative refinement procedure with simulation at its core. The algorithm gradually updates the physical model parameters by running a simulation of the observed phenomenon and comparing the current simulation to a real-world observation. The correspondence is measured using an embedding function that maps physically similar examples to nearby points. We consider a case study of cloth in the wind, with curling flags as our leading example -- a seemingly simple phenomena but physically highly involved. Based on the physics of cloth and its visual manifestation, we propose an instantiation of the embedding function. For this mapping, modeled as a deep network, we introduce a spectral layer that decomposes a video volume into its temporal spectral power and corresponding frequencies. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method compares favorably to prior work on the task of measuring cloth material properties and external wind force from a real-world video.
Generalized Zero-Shot Learning via Over-Complete Distribution
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

A well trained and generalized deep neural network (DNN) should be robust to both seen and unseen classes. However, the performance of most of the existing supervised DNN algorithms degrade for classes which are unseen in the training set. To learn a discriminative classifier which yields good performance in Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) settings, we propose to generate an Over-Complete Distribution (OCD) using Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) of both seen and unseen classes. In order to enforce the separability between classes and reduce the class scatter, we propose the use of Online Batch Triplet Loss (OBTL) and Center Loss (CL) on the generated OCD. The effectiveness of the framework is evaluated using both Zero-Shot Learning and Generalized Zero-Shot Learning protocols on three publicly available benchmark databases, SUN, CUB and AWA2. The results show that generating over-complete distributions and enforcing the classifier to learn a transform function from overlapping to non-overlapping distributions can improve the performance on both seen and unseen classes.
On the General Value of Evidence, and Bilingual Scene-Text Visual Question Answering
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Visual Question Answering (VQA) methods have made incredible progress, but suffer from a failure to generalize. This is visible in the fact that they are vulnerable to learning coincidental correlations in the data rather than deeper relations between image content and ideas expressed in language. We present a dataset that takes a step towards addressing this problem in that it contains questions expressed in two languages, and an evaluation process that co-opts a well understood image-based metric to reflect the method's ability to reason. Measuring reasoning directly encourages generalization by penalizing answers that are coincidentally correct. The dataset reflects the scene-text version of the VQA problem, and the reasoning evaluation can be seen as a text-based version of a referring expression challenge. Experiments and analysis are provided that show the value of the dataset.
Designing Network Design Spaces
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, we present a new network design paradigm. Our goal is to help advance the understanding of network design and discover design principles that generalize across settings. Instead of focusing on designing individual network instances, we design network design spaces that parametrize populations of networks. The overall process is analogous to classic manual design of networks, but elevated to the design space level. Using our methodology we explore the structure aspect of network design and arrive at a low-dimensional design space consisting of simple, regular networks that we call RegNet. The core insight of the RegNet parametrization is surprisingly simple: widths and depths of good networks can be explained by a quantized linear function. We analyze the RegNet design space and arrive at interesting findings that do not match the current practice of network design. The RegNet design space provides simple and fast networks that work well across a wide range of flop regimes. Under comparable training settings and flops, the RegNet models outperform the popular EfficientNet models while being up to 5x faster on GPUs.
Regularizing CNN Transfer Learning With Randomised Regression
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

This paper is about regularizing deep convolutional networks (CNNs) based on an adaptive framework for transfer learning with limited training data in the target domain. Recent advances of CNN regularization in this context are commonly due to the use of additional regularization objectives. They guide the training away from the target task using some forms of concrete tasks. Unlike those related approaches, we suggest that an objective without a concrete goal can still serve well as a regularized. In particular, we demonstrate Pseudo-task Regularization (PtR) which dynamically regularizes a network by simply attempting to regress image representations to pseudo-regression targets during fine-tuning. That is, a CNN is efficiently regularized without additional resources of data or prior domain expertise. In sum, the proposed PtR provides: a) an alternative for network regularization without dependence on the design of concrete regularization objectives or extra annotations; b) a dynamically adjusted and maintained strength of regularization effect by balancing the gradient norms between objectives on-line. Through numerous experiments, surprisingly, the improvements on classification accuracy by PtR are shown greater or on a par to the recent state-of-the-art methods.
PVN3D: A Deep Point-Wise 3D Keypoints Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, we present a novel data-driven method for robust 6DoF object pose estimation from a single RGBD image. Unlike previous methods that directly regressing pose parameters, we tackle this challenging task with a keypoint-based approach. Specifically, we propose a deep Hough voting network to detect 3D keypoints of objects and then estimate the 6D pose parameters within a least-squares fitting manner. Our method is a natural extension of 2D-keypoint approaches that successfully work on RGB based 6DoF estimation. It allows us to fully utilize the geometric constraint of rigid objects with the extra depth information and is easy for a network to learn and optimize. Extensive experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of 3D-keypoint detection in the 6D pose estimation task. Experimental results also show our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by large margins on several benchmarks. Code and video are available at https://github.com/ethnhe/PVN3D.git.
Domain-Aware Visual Bias Eliminating for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Recent methods focus on learning a unified semantic-aligned visual representation to transfer knowledge between two domains, while ignoring the effect of semantic-free visual representation in alleviating the biased recognition problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Domain-aware Visual Bias Eliminating (DVBE) network that constructs two complementary visual representations, i.e., semantic-free and semantic-aligned, to treat seen and unseen domains separately. Specifically, we explore cross-attentive second-order visual statistics to compact the semantic-free representation, and design an adaptive margin Softmax to maximize inter-class divergences. Thus, the semantic-free representation becomes discriminative enough to not only predict seen class accurately but also filter out unseen images, i.e., domain detection, based on the predicted class entropy. For unseen images, we automatically search an optimal semantic-visual alignment architecture, rather than manual designs, to predict unseen classes. With accurate domain detection, the biased recognition problem towards the seen domain is significantly reduced. Experiments on five benchmarks for classification and segmentation show that DVBE outperforms existing methods by averaged 5.7% improvement.
VSGNet: Spatial Attention Network for Detecting Human Object Interactions Using Graph Convolutions
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Comprehensive visual understanding requires detection frameworks that can effectively learn and utilize object interactions while analyzing objects individually. This is the main objective in Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection task. In particular, relative spatial reasoning and structural connections between objects are essential cues for analyzing interactions, which is addressed by the proposed Visual-Spatial-Graph Network (VSGNet) architecture. VSGNet extracts visual features from the human-object pairs, refines the features with spatial configurations of the pair, and utilizes the structural connections between the pair via graph convolutions. The performance of VSGNet is thoroughly evaluated using the Verbs in COCO (V-COCO) and HICO-DET datasets. Experimental results indicate that VSGNet outperforms state-of-the-art solutions by 8% or 4 mAP in V-COCO and 16% or 3 mAP in HICO-DET.
HRank: Filter Pruning Using High-Rank Feature Map
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Neural network pruning offers a promising prospect to facilitate deploying deep neural networks on resource-limited devices. However, existing methods are still challenged by the training inefficiency and labor cost in pruning designs, due to missing theoretical guidance of non-salient network components. In this paper, we propose a novel filter pruning method by exploring the High Rank of feature maps (HRank). Our HRank is inspired by the discovery that the average rank of multiple feature maps generated by a single filter is always the same, regardless of the number of image batches CNNs receive. Based on HRank, we develop a method that is mathematically formulated to prune filters with low-rank feature maps. The principle behind our pruning is that low-rank feature maps contain less information, and thus pruned results can be easily reproduced. Besides, we experimentally show that weights with high-rank feature maps contain more important information, such that even when a portion is not updated, very little damage would be done to the model performance. Without introducing any additional constraints, HRank leads to significant improvements over the state-of-the-arts in terms of FLOPs and parameters reduction, with similar accuracies. For example, with ResNet-110, we achieve a 58.2%-FLOPs reduction by removing 59.2% of the parameters, with only a small loss of 0.14% in top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10. With Res-50, we achieve a 43.8%-FLOPs reduction by removing 36.7% of the parameters, with only a loss of 1.17% in the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. The codes can be available at https://github.com/lmbxmu/HRank.
Density-Aware Graph for Deep Semi-Supervised Visual Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been extensively studied to improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks for visual recognition. To involve the unlabelled data, most existing SSL methods are based on common density-based cluster assumption: samples lying in the same high-density region are likely to belong to the same class, including the methods performing consistency regularization or generating pseudo-labels for the unlabelled images. Despite their impressive performance, we argue three limitations exist: 1) Though the density information is demonstrated to be an important clue, they all use it in an implicit way and have not exploited it in depth. 2) For feature learning, they often learn the feature embedding based on the single data sample and ignore the neighborhood information. 3) For label-propagation based pseudo-label generation, it is often done offline and difficult to be end-to-end trained with feature learning. Motivated by these limitations, this paper proposes to solve the SSL problem by building a novel density-aware graph, based on which the neighborhood information can be easily leveraged and the feature learning and label propagation can also be trained in an end-to-end way. Specifically, we first propose a new Density-aware Neighborhood Aggregation(DNA) module to learn more discriminative features by incorporating the neighborhood information in a density-aware manner. Then a novel Density-ascending Path based Label Propagation(DPLP) module is proposed to generate the pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples more efficiently according to the feature distribution characterized by density. Finally, the DNA module and DPLP module evolve and improve each other end-to-end.
REVERIE: Remote Embodied Visual Referring Expression in Real Indoor Environments
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

One of the long-term challenges of robotics is to enable robots to interact with humans in the visual world via natural language, as humans are visual animals that communicate through language. Overcoming this challenge requires the ability to perform a wide variety of complex tasks in response to multifarious instructions from humans. In the hope that it might drive progress towards more flexible and powerful human interactions with robots, we propose a dataset of varied and complex robot tasks, described in natural language, in terms of objects visible in a large set of real images. Given an instruction, success requires navigating through a previously-unseen environment to identify an object. This represents a practical challenge, but one that closely reflects one of the core visual problems in robotics. Several state-of-the-art vision-and-language navigation, and referring-expression models are tested to verify the difficulty of this new task, but none of them show promising results because there are many fundamental differences between our task and previous ones. A novel Interactive Navigator-Pointer model is also proposed that provides a strong baseline on the task. The proposed model especially achieves the best performance on the unseen test split, but still leaves substantial room for improvement compared to the human performance.