OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Granularity-Aware Adaptation for Image Retrieval over Multiple Tasks
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Strong image search models can be learned for a specific domain, ie. set of labels, provided that some labeled images of that domain are available. A practical visual search model, however, should be versatile enough to solve multiple retrieval tasks simultaneously, even if those cover very different specialized domains. Additionally, it should be able to benefit from even unlabeled images from these various retrieval tasks. This is the more practical scenario that we consider in this paper. We address it with the proposed Grappa, an approach that starts from a strong pretrained model, and adapts it to tackle multiple retrieval tasks concurrently, using only unlabeled images from the different task domains. We extend the pretrained model with multiple independently trained sets of adaptors that use pseudo-label sets of different sizes, effectively mimicking different pseudo-granularities. We reconcile all adaptor sets into a single unified model suited for all retrieval tasks by learning fusion layers that we guide by propagating pseudo-granularity attentions across neighbors in the feature space. Results on a benchmark composed of six heterogeneous retrieval tasks show that the unsupervised Grappa model improves the zero-shot performance of a state-of-the-art self-supervised learning model, and in some places reaches or improves over a task label-aware oracle that selects the most fitting pseudo-granularity per task.
Learning Audio-Video Modalities from Image Captions
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

A major challenge in text-video and text-audio retrieval is the lack of large-scale training data. This is unlike image-captioning, where datasets are in the order of millions of samples. To close this gap we propose a new video mining pipeline which involves transferring captions from image captioning datasets to video clips with no additional manual effort. Using this pipeline, we create a new large-scale, weakly labelled audio-video captioning dataset consisting of millions of paired clips and captions. We show that training a multimodal transformed based model on this data achieves competitive performance on video retrieval and video captioning, matching or even outperforming HowTo100M pretraining with 20x fewer clips. We also show that our mined clips are suitable for text-audio pretraining, and achieve state of the art results for the task of audio retrieval.
RVSL: Robust Vehicle Similarity Learning in Real Hazy Scenes Based on Semi-Supervised Learning
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, vehicle similarity learning, also called re-identification (ReID), has attracted significant attention in computer vision. Several algorithms have been developed and obtained considerable success. However, most existing methods have unpleasant performance in the hazy scenario due to poor visibility. Though some strategies are possible to resolve this problem, they still have room to be improved due to the limited performance in real-world scenarios and the lack of real-world clear ground truth. Thus, to resolve this problem, inspired by CycleGAN, we construct a training paradigm called \textbf{RVSL} which integrates ReID and domain transformation techniques. The network is trained on semi-supervised fashion and does not require to employ the ID labels and the corresponding clear ground truths to learn hazy vehicle ReID mission in the real-world haze scenes. To further constrain the unsupervised learning process effectively, several losses are developed. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets indicate that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on hazy vehicle ReID problems. It is worth mentioning that although the proposed method is trained without real-world label information, it can achieve competitive performance compared to existing supervised methods trained on complete label information.
Lightweight Attentional Feature Fusion: A New Baseline for Text-to-Video Retrieval
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we revisit feature fusion, an old-fashioned topic, in the new context of text-to-video retrieval. Different from previous research that considers feature fusion only at one end, let it be video or text, we aim for feature fusion for both ends within a unified framework. We hypothesize that optimizing the convex combination of the features is preferred to modeling their correlations by computationally heavy multi-head self attention. We propose Lightweight Attentional Feature Fusion (LAFF). LAFF performs feature fusion at both early and late stages and at both video and text ends, making it a powerful method for exploiting diverse (off-the-shelf) features. The interpretability of LAFF can be used for feature selection. Extensive experiments on five public benchmark sets (MSR-VTT, MSVD, TGIF, VATEX and TRECVID AVS 2016-2020) justify LAFF as a new baseline for text-to-video retrieval.
Connecting Compression Spaces with Transformer for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a generic feature compression method for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) problems, which speeds up existing ANNS methods in a plug-and-play manner. Specifically, based on transformer, we propose a new network structure to compress the feature into a low dimensional space, and an inhomogeneous neighborhood relationship preserving (INRP) loss that aims to maintain high search accuracy. Specifically, we use multiple compression projections to cast the feature into many low dimensional spaces, and then use transformer to globally optimize these projections such that the features are well compressed following the guidance from our loss function. The loss function is designed to assign high weights on point pairs that are close in original feature space, and keep their distances in projected space. Keeping these distances helps maintain the eventual top-k retrieval accuracy, and down weighting others creates room for feature compression. In experiments, we run our compression method on public datasets, and use the compressed features in graph based, product quantization and scalar quantization based ANNS solutions. Experimental results show that our compression method can significantly improve the efficiency of these methods while preserves or even improves search accuracy, suggesting its broad potential impact on real world applications.
SEMICON: A Learning-to-Hash Solution for Large-Scale Fine-Grained Image Retrieval
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose Suppression-Enhancing Mask based attention and Interactive Channel transformatiON (SEMICON) to learn binary hash codes for dealing with large-scale fine-grained image retrieval tasks. In SEMICON, we first develop a suppression-enhancing mask (SEM) based attention to dynamically localize discriminative image regions. More importantly, different from existing attention mechanism simply erasing previous discriminative regions, our SEM is developed to restrain such regions and then discover other complementary regions by considering the relation between activated regions in a stage-by-stage fashion. In each stage, the interactive channel transformation (ICON) module is afterwards designed to exploit correlations across channels of attended activation tensors. Since channels could generally correspond to the parts of fine-grained objects, the part correlation can be also modeled accordingly, which further improves fine-grained retrieval accuracy. Moreover, to be computational economy, ICON is realized by an efficient two-step process. Finally, the hash learning of our SEMICON consists of both global- and local-level branches for better representing fine-grained objects and then generating binary hash codes explicitly corresponding to multiple levels. Experiments on five benchmark fine-grained datasets show our superiority over competing methods.
Reliability-Aware Prediction via Uncertainty Learning for Person Image Retrieval
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Current person image retrieval methods have achieved great improvements in accuracy metrics. However, they rarely describe the reliability of the prediction. In this paper, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Learning (UAL) method to remedy this issue. UAL aims at providing reliability-aware predictions by considering data uncertainty and model uncertainty simultaneously. Data uncertainty captures the ``noise" inherent in the sample, while model uncertainty depicts the model's confidence in the sample's prediction. Specifically, in UAL, (1) we propose a sampling-free data uncertainty learning method to adaptively assign weights to different samples during training, down-weighting the low-quality ambiguous samples. (2) we leverage the Bayesian framework to model the model uncertainty by assuming the parameters of the network follow a Bernoulli distribution. (3) the data uncertainty and the model uncertainty are jointly learned in a unified network, and they serve as two fundamental criteria for the reliability assessment: if a probe is high-quality (low data uncertainty) and the model is confident in the prediction of the probe (low model uncertainty), the final ranking will be assessed as reliable. Experiments under the risk-controlled settings and the multi-query settings show the proposed reliability assessment is effective. Our method also shows superior performance on three challenging benchmarks under the vanilla single query settings.
Relighting4D: Neural Relightable Human from Videos
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Human relighting is a highly desirable yet challenging task. Existing works either require expensive one-light-at-a-time (OLAT) captured data using light stage or cannot freely change the viewpoints of the rendered body. In this work, we propose a principled framework, Relighting4D, that enables free-viewpoints relighting from only human videos under unknown illuminations. Our key insight is that the space-time varying geometry and reflectance of the human body can be decomposed as a set of neural fields of normal, occlusion, diffuse, and specular maps. These neural fields are further integrated into reflectance-aware physically based rendering, where each vertex in the neural field absorbs and reflects the light from the environment. The whole framework can be learned from videos in a self-supervised manner, with physically informed priors designed for regularization. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our framework is capable of relighting dynamic human actors with free-viewpoints.
Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Real-time video frame interpolation (VFI) is very useful in video processing, media players, and display devices. We propose RIFE, a Real-time Intermediate Flow Estimation algorithm for VFI. To realize a high-quality flow-based VFI method, RIFE uses a neural network named IFNet that can estimate the intermediate flows end-to-end with much faster speed. A privileged distillation scheme is designed for stable IFNet training and improve the overall performance. RIFE does not rely on pre-trained optical flow models and can support arbitrary-timestep frame interpolation with the temporal encoding input. Experiments demonstrate that RIFE achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public benchmarks. Compared with the popular SuperSlomo and DAIN methods, RIFE is 4--27 times faster and produces better results. Furthermore, RIFE can be extended to wider applications thanks to temporal encoding. The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/ECCV2022-RIFE.
PixelFolder: An Efficient Progressive Pixel Synthesis Network for Image Generation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Pixel synthesis is a promising research paradigm for image generation, which can well exploit pixel-wise prior knowledge for generation. However, existing methods still suffer from excessive memory footprint and computation overhead. In this paper, we propose a progressive pixel synthesis network towards efficient image generation, coined as PixelFolder. Specifically, PixelFolder formulates image generation as a progressive pixel regression problem and synthesizes images via a multi-stage structure, which can greatly reduce the overhead caused by large tensor transformations. In addition, we introduce novel pixel folding operations to further improve model efficiency while maintaining pixel-wise prior knowledge for end-to-end regression. With these innovative designs, we greatly reduce the expenditure of pixel synthesis, e.g., reducing 89% computation and 53% parameters compared with the latest pixel synthesis method CIPS. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, namely FFHQ and LSUN Church. The experimental results show that with much less expenditure, PixelFolder obtains new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on two benchmark datasets, i.e., 3.77 FID and 2.45 FID on FFHQ and LSUN Church, respectively.Meanwhile, PixelFolder is also more efficient than the SOTA methods like StyleGAN2, reducing about 72% computation and 31% parameters, respectively. These results greatly validate the effectiveness of the proposed PixelFolder.
StyleSwap: Style-Based Generator Empowers Robust Face Swapping
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Numerous attempts have been made to the task of person-agnostic face swapping given its wide applications. While existing methods mostly rely on tedious network and loss designs, they still struggle in the information balancing between the source and target faces, and tend to produce visible artifacts. In this work, we introduce a concise and effective framework named StyleSwap. Our core idea is to leverage a style-based generator to empower high-fidelity and robust face swapping, thus the generator's advantage can be adopted for optimizing identity similarity. We identify that with only minimal modifications, a StyleGAN2 architecture can successfully handle the desired information from both source and target. Additionally, inspired by the ToRGB layers, a Swapping-Driven Mask Branch is further devised to improve information blending. Furthermore, the advantage of StyleGAN inversion can be adopted. Particularly, a Swapping-Guided ID Inversion strategy is proposed to optimize identity similarity. Extensive experiments validate that our framework generates high-quality face swapping results that outperform state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Paint2Pix: Interactive Painting Based Progressive Image Synthesis and Editing
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Controllable image synthesis with user scribbles is a topic of keen interest in the computer vision community. In this paper, for the first time we study the problem of photorealistic image synthesis from incomplete and primitive human paintings. In particular, we propose a novel approach paint2pix, which learns to predict (and adapt) "what a user wants to draw" from rudimentary brushstroke inputs, by learning a mapping from the manifold of incomplete human paintings to their realistic renderings. When used in conjunction with recent works in autonomous painting agents, we show that paint2pix can be used for progressive image synthesis from scratch. During this process, paint2pix allows a novice user to progressively synthesize the desired image output, while requiring just few coarse user scribbles to accurately steer the trajectory of the synthesis process. Furthermore, we find that our approach also forms a surprisingly convenient approach for real image editing, and allows the user to perform a diverse range of custom fine-grained edits through the addition of only a few well-placed brushstrokes. Supplemental video and demo are available at https://1jsingh.github.io/paint2pix
FurryGAN: High Quality Foreground-Aware Image Synthesis
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Foreground-aware image synthesis aims to generate images as well as their foreground masks. A common approach is to formulate an image as an masked blending of a foreground image and a background image. It is a challenging problem because it is prone to reach the trivial solution where either image overwhelms the other, i.e., the masks become completely full or empty, and the foreground and background are not meaningfully separated. We present FurryGAN with three key components: 1) imposing both the foreground image and the composite image to be realistic, 2) designing a mask as a combination of coarse and fine masks, and 3) guiding the generator by an auxiliary mask predictor in the discriminator. Our method produces realistic images with remarkably detailed alpha masks which cover hair, fur, and whiskers in a fully unsupervised manner.
SCAM! Transferring Humans between Images with Semantic Cross Attention Modulation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

A large body of recent work targets semantically conditioned image generation. Most such methods focus on the narrower task of pose transfer and ignore the more challenging task of subject transfer that consists in not only transferring the pose but also the appearance and background. In this work, we introduce SCAM (Semantic Cross Attention Modulation), a system that encodes rich and diverse information in each semantic region of the image (including foreground and background), thus achieving precise generation with emphasis on fine details. This is enabled by the Semantic Attention Transformer Encoder that extracts multiple latent vectors for each semantic region, and the corresponding generator that exploits these multiple latents by using semantic cross attention modulation. It is trained only using a reconstruction setup, while subject transfer is performed at test time. Our analysis shows that our proposed architecture is successful at encoding the diversity of appearance in each semantic region. Extensive experiments on the iDesigner and CelebAMask-HD datasets show that SCAM outperforms SEAN and SPADE; moreover, it sets the new state of the art on subject transfer.
Sem2NeRF: Converting Single-View Semantic Masks to Neural Radiance Fields
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Image translation and manipulation have gain increasing attention along with the rapid development of deep generative models. Although existing approaches have brought impressive results, they mainly operated in 2D space. In light of recent advances in NeRF-based 3D-aware generative models, we introduce a new task, Semantic-to-NeRF translation, that aims to reconstruct a 3D scene modelled by NeRF, conditioned on one single-view semantic mask as input. To kick-off this novel task, we propose the Sem2NeRF framework. In particular, Sem2NeRF addresses the highly challenging task by encoding the semantic mask into the latent code that controls the 3D scene representation of a pre-trained decoder. To further improve the accuracy of the mapping, we integrate a new region-aware learning strategy into the design of both the encoder and the decoder. We verify the efficacy of the proposed Sem2NeRF and demonstrate that it outperforms several strong baselines on two benchmark datasets. Code and video are available at https://donydchen.github.io/sem2nerf/
WaveGAN: Frequency-Aware GAN for High-Fidelity Few-Shot Image Generation
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing few-shot image generation approaches typically employ fusion-based strategies, either on the image or the feature level, to produce new images. However, previous approaches struggle to synthesize high-frequency signals with fine details, deteriorating the synthesis quality. To address this, we propose WaveGAN, a frequency-aware model for few-shot image generation. Concretely, we disentangle encoded features into multiple frequency components and perform low-frequency skip connections to preserve outline and structural information. Then we alleviate the generator's struggles of synthesizing fine details by employing high-frequency skip connections, thus providing informative frequency information to the generator. Moreover, we utilize a frequency L1-loss on the generated and real images to further impede frequency information loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and advancement of our method on three datasets. Noticeably, we achieve new state-of-the-art with FID 42.17, LPIPS 0.3868, FID 30.35, LPIPS 0.5076, and FID 4.96, LPIPS 0.3822 respectively on Flower, Animal Faces, and VGGFace. GitHub: https://github.com/kobeshegu/ECCV2022_WaveGAN
End-to-End Visual Editing with a Generatively Pre-trained Artist
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

We consider the targeted image editing problem: blending a region in a source image with a driver image that specifies the desired change. Differently from prior works, we solve this problem by learning a conditional probability distribution of the edits, end-to-end. Training such a model requires addressing a fundamental technical challenge: the lack of example edits for training. To this end, we propose a self-supervised approach that simulates edits by augmenting off-the-shelf images in a target domain. The benefits are remarkable: implemented as a state-of-the-art auto-regressive transformer, our approach is simple, sidesteps difficulties with previous methods based on GAN-like priors, obtains significantly better edits, and is efficient. Furthermore, we show that different blending effects can be learned by an intuitive control of the augmentation process, with no other changes required to the model architecture. We demonstrate the superiority of this approach across several datasets in extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments, including human studies, significantly outperforming prior work.
High-Fidelity GAN Inversion with Padding Space
Venue: Conference ECCV 2022
Year: 2022

Inverting a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) facilitates a wide range of image editing tasks using pre-trained generators. Existing methods typically employ the latent space of GANs as the inversion space yet observe the insufficient recovery of spatial details. In this work, we propose to involve the padding space of the generator to complement the latent space with spatial information. Concretely, we replace the constant padding (e.g., usually zeros) used in convolution layers with some instance-aware coefficients. In this way, the inductive bias assumed in the pre-trained model can be appropriately adapted to fit each individual image. Through learning a carefully designed encoder, we manage to improve the inversion quality both qualitatively and quantitatively, outperforming existing alternatives. We then demonstrate that such a space extension barely affects the native GAN manifold, hence we can still reuse the prior knowledge learned by GANs for various downstream applications. Beyond the editing tasks explored in prior arts, our approach allows a more flexible image manipulation, such as the separate control of face contour and facial details, and enables a novel editing manner where users can customize their own manipulations highly efficiently.