OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Quasi-Newton Solver for Robust Non-Rigid Registration
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Imperfect data (noise, outliers and partial overlap) and high degrees of freedom make non-rigid registration a classical challenging problem in computer vision. Existing methods typically adopt the $\ell_{p}$ type robust estimator to regularize the fitting and smoothness, and the proximal operator is used to solve the resulting non-smooth problem. However, the slow convergence of these algorithms limits its wide applications. In this paper, we propose a formulation for robust non-rigid registration based on a globally smooth robust estimator for data fitting and regularization, which can handle outliers and partial overlaps. We apply the majorization-minimization algorithm to the problem, which reduces each iteration to solving a simple least-squares problem with L-BFGS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for non-rigid alignment between two shapes with outliers and partial overlap, with quantitative evaluation showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of registration accuracy and computational speed. The source code is available at https://github.com/Juyong/Fast_RNRR.
Multi-Scale Progressive Fusion Network for Single Image Deraining
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Rain streaks in the air appear in various blurring degrees and resolutions due to different distances from their positions to the camera. Similar rain patterns are visible in a rain image as well as its multi-scale (or multi-resolution) versions, which makes it possible to exploit such complementary information for rain streak representation. In this work, we explore the multi-scale collaborative representation for rain streaks from the perspective of input image scales and hierarchical deep features in a unified framework, termed multi-scale progressive fusion network (MSPFN) for single image rain streak removal. For similar rain streaks at different positions, we employ recurrent calculation to capture the global texture, thus allowing to explore the complementary and redundant information at the spatial dimension to characterize target rain streaks. Besides, we construct multi-scale pyramid structure, and further introduce the attention mechanism to guide the fine fusion of this correlated information from different scales. This multi-scale progressive fusion strategy not only promotes the cooperative representation, but also boosts the end-to-end training. Our proposed method is extensively evaluated on several benchmark datasets and achieves state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we conduct experiments on joint deraining, detection, and segmentation tasks, and inspire a new research direction of vision task-driven image deraining. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/kuihua/MSPFN}.
Real-Time Panoptic Segmentation From Dense Detections
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Panoptic segmentation is a complex full scene parsing task requiring simultaneous instance and semantic segmentation at high resolution. Current state-of-the-art approaches cannot run in real-time, and simplifying these architectures to improve efficiency severely degrades their accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new single-shot panoptic segmentation network that leverages dense detections and a global self-attention mechanism to operate in real-time with performance approaching the state of the art. We introduce a novel parameter-free mask construction method that substantially reduces computational complexity by efficiently reusing information from the object detection and semantic segmentation sub-tasks. The resulting network has a simple data flow that does not require feature map re-sampling or clustering post-processing, enabling significant hardware acceleration. Our experiments on the Cityscapes and COCO benchmarks show that our network works at 30 FPS on 1024x2048 resolution, trading a 3% relative performance degradation from the current state of the art for up to 440% faster inference.
NestedVAE: Isolating Common Factors via Weak Supervision
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Fair and unbiased machine learning is an important and active field of research, as decision processes are increasingly driven by models that learn from data. Unfortunately, any biases present in the data may be learned by the model, thereby inappropriately transferring that bias into the decision making process. We identify the connection between the task of bias reduction and that of isolating factors common between domains whilst encouraging domain specific invariance. To isolate the common factors we combine the theory of deep latent variable models with information bottleneck theory for scenarios whereby data may be naturally paired across domains and no additional supervision is required. The result is the Nested Variational AutoEncoder (NestedVAE). Two outer VAEs with shared weights attempt to reconstruct the input and infer a latent space, whilst a nested VAE attempts to reconstruct the latent representation of one image, from the latent representation of its paired image. In so doing, the nested VAE isolates the common latent factors/causes and becomes invariant to unwanted factors that are not shared between paired images. We also propose a new metric to provide a balanced method of evaluating consistency and classifier performance across domains which we refer to as the Adjusted Parity metric. An evaluation of NestedVAE on both domain and attribute invariance, change detection, and learning common factors for the prediction of biological sex demonstrates that NestedVAE significantly outperforms alternative methods.
Recurrent Feature Reasoning for Image Inpainting
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Existing inpainting methods have achieved promising performance for recovering regular or small image defects. However, filling in large continuous holes remains difficult due to the lack of constraints for the hole center. In this paper, we devise a Recurrent Feature Reasoning (RFR) network which is mainly constructed by a plug-and-play Recurrent Feature Reasoning module and a Knowledge Consistent Attention (KCA) module. Analogous to how humans solve puzzles (i.e., first solve the easier parts and then use the results as additional information to solve difficult parts), the RFR module recurrently infers the hole boundaries of the convolutional feature maps and then uses them as clues for further inference. The module progressively strengthens the constraints for the hole center and the results become explicit. To capture information from distant places in the feature map for RFR, we further develop KCA and incorporate it in RFR. Empirically, we first compare the proposed RFR-Net with existing backbones, demonstrating that RFR-Net is more efficient (e.g., a 4\% SSIM improvement for the same model size). We then place the network in the context of the current state-of-the-art, where it exhibits improved performance. The corresponding source code is available at: https://github.com/jingyuanli001/RFR-Inpainting
Harmonizing Transferability and Discriminability for Adapting Object Detectors
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Recent advances in adaptive object detection have achieved compelling results in virtue of adversarial feature adaptation to mitigate the distributional shifts along the detection pipeline. Whilst adversarial adaptation significantly enhances the transferability of feature representations, the feature discriminability of object detectors remains less investigated. Moreover, transferability and discriminability may come at a contradiction in adversarial adaptation given the complex combinations of objects and the differentiated scene layouts between domains. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Transferability Calibration Network (HTCN) that hierarchically (local-region/image/instance) calibrates the transferability of feature representations for harmonizing transferability and discriminability. The proposed model consists of three components: (1) Importance Weighted Adversarial Training with input Interpolation (IWAT-I), which strengthens the global discriminability by re-weighting the interpolated image-level features; (2) Context-aware Instance-Level Alignment (CILA) module, which enhances the local discriminability by capturing the underlying complementary effect between the instance-level feature and the global context information for the instance-level feature alignment; (3) local feature masks that calibrate the local transferability to provide semantic guidance for the following discriminative pattern alignment. Experimental results show that HTCN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
PADS: Policy-Adapted Sampling for Visual Similarity Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Learning visual similarity requires to learn relations, typically between triplets of images. Albeit triplet approaches being powerful, their computational complexity mostly limits training to only a subset of all possible training triplets. Thus, sampling strategies that decide when to use which training sample during learning are crucial. Currently, the prominent paradigm are fixed or curriculum sampling strategies that are predefined before training starts. However, the problem truly calls for a sampling process that adjusts based on the actual state of the similarity representation during training. We, therefore, employ reinforcement learning and have a teacher network adjust the sampling distribution based on the current state of the learner network, which represents visual similarity. Experiments on benchmark datasets using standard triplet-based losses show that our adaptive sampling strategy significantly outperforms fixed sampling strategies. Moreover, although our adaptive sampling is only applied on top of basic triplet-learning frameworks, we reach competitive results to state-of-the-art approaches that employ diverse additional learning signals or strong ensemble architectures. Code can be found under https://github.com/Confusezius/CVPR2020_PADS.
SketchyCOCO: Image Generation From Freehand Scene Sketches
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce the first method for automatic image generation from scene-level freehand sketches. Our model allows for controllable image generation by specifying the synthesis goal via freehand sketches. The key contribution is an attribute vector bridged Generative Adversarial Network called EdgeGAN, which supports high visual-quality object-level image content generation without using freehand sketches as training data. We have built a large-scale composite dataset called SketchyCOCO to support and evaluate the solution. We validate our approach on the tasks of both object-level and scene-level image generation on SketchyCOCO. Through quantitative, qualitative results, human evaluation and ablation studies, we demonstrate the method's capacity to generate realistic complex scene-level images from various freehand sketches.
Effectively Unbiased FID and Inception Score and Where to Find Them
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

This paper shows that two commonly used evaluation metrics for generative models, the Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and the Inception Score (IS), are biased -- the expected value of the score computed for a finite sample set is not the true value of the score. Worse, the paper shows that the bias term depends on the particular model being evaluated, so model A may get a better score than model B simply because model A's bias term is smaller. This effect cannot be fixed by evaluating at a fixed number of samples. This means all comparisons using FID or IS as currently computed are unreliable. We then show how to extrapolate the score to obtain an effectively bias-free estimate of scores computed with an infinite number of samples, which we term $\overline{\textrm{FID}}_\infty$ and $\overline{\textrm{IS}}_\infty$. In turn, this effectively bias-free estimate requires good estimates of scores with a finite number of samples. We show that using Quasi-Monte Carlo integration notably improves estimates of FID and IS for finite sample sets. Our extrapolated scores are simple, drop-in replacements for the finite sample scores. Additionally, we show that using low discrepancy sequence in GAN training offers small improvements in the resulting generator.
Controllable Orthogonalization in Training DNNs
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Orthogonality is widely used for training deep neural networks (DNNs) due to its ability to maintain all singular values of the Jacobian close to 1 and reduce redundancy in representation. This paper proposes a computationally efficient and numerically stable orthogonalization method using Newton's iteration (ONI), to learn a layer-wise orthogonal weight matrix in DNNs. ONI works by iteratively stretching the singular values of a weight matrix towards 1. This property enables it to control the orthogonality of a weight matrix by its number of iterations. We show that our method improves the performance of image classification networks by effectively controlling the orthogonality to provide an optimal tradeoff between optimization benefits and representational capacity reduction. We also show that ONI stabilizes the training of generative adversarial networks (GANs) by maintaining the Lipschitz continuity of a network, similar to spectral normalization (SN), and further outperforms SN by providing controllable orthogonality.
Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Despite the recent advance of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in high-fidelity image synthesis, there lacks enough understanding of how GANs are able to map a latent code sampled from a random distribution to a photo-realistic image. Previous work assumes the latent space learned by GANs follows a distributed representation but observes the vector arithmetic phenomenon. In this work, we propose a novel framework, called InterFaceGAN, for semantic face editing by interpreting the latent semantics learned by GANs. In this framework, we conduct a detailed study on how different semantics are encoded in the latent space of GANs for face synthesis. We find that the latent code of well-trained generative models actually learns a disentangled representation after linear transformations. We explore the disentanglement between various semantics and manage to decouple some entangled semantics with subspace projection, leading to more precise control of facial attributes. Besides manipulating gender, age, expression, and the presence of eyeglasses, we can even vary the face pose as well as fix the artifacts accidentally generated by GAN models. The proposed method is further applied to achieve real image manipulation when combined with GAN inversion methods or some encoder-involved models. Extensive results suggest that learning to synthesize faces spontaneously brings a disentangled and controllable facial attribute representation.
Tracking by Instance Detection: A Meta-Learning Approach
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the tracking problem as a special type of object detection problem, which we call instance detection. With proper initialization, a detector can be quickly converted into a tracker by learning the new instance from a single image. We find that model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) offers a strategy to initialize the detector that satisfies our needs. We propose a principled three-step approach to build a high-performance tracker. First, pick any modern object detector trained with gradient descent. Second, conduct offline training (or initialization) with MAML. Third, perform domain adaptation using the initial frame. We follow this procedure to build two trackers, named Retina-MAML and FCOS-MAML, based on two modern detectors RetinaNet and FCOS. Evaluations on four benchmarks show that both trackers are competitive against state-of-the-art trackers. On OTB-100, Retina-MAML achieves the highest ever AUC of 0.712. On TrackingNet, FCOS-MAML ranks the first on the leader board with an AUC of 0.757 and the normalized precision of 0.822. Both trackers run in real-time at 40 FPS.
PointGroup: Dual-Set Point Grouping for 3D Instance Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Instance segmentation is an important task for scene understanding. Compared to the fully-developed 2D, 3D instance segmentation for point clouds have much room to improve. In this paper, we present PointGroup, a new end-to-end bottom-up architecture, specifically focused on better grouping the points by exploring the void space between objects. We design a two-branch network to extract point features and predict semantic labels and offsets, for shifting each point towards its respective instance centroid. A clustering component is followed to utilize both the original and offset-shifted point coordinate sets, taking advantage of their complementary strength. Further, we formulate the ScoreNet to evaluate the candidate instances, followed by the Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) to remove duplicates. We conduct extensive experiments on two challenging datasets, ScanNet v2 and S3DIS, on which our method achieves the highest performance, 63.6% and 64.0%, compared to 54.9% and 54.4% achieved by former best solutions in terms of mAP with IoU threshold 0.5.
Semantic Drift Compensation for Class-Incremental Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Class-incremental learning of deep networks sequentially increases the number of classes to be classified. During training, the network has only access to data of one task at a time, where each task contains several classes. In this setting, networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting which refers to the drastic drop in performance on previous tasks. The vast majority of methods have studied this scenario for classification networks, where for each new task the classification layer of the network must be augmented with additional weights to make room for the newly added classes. Embedding networks have the advantage that new classes can be naturally included into the network without adding new weights. Therefore, we study incremental learning for embedding networks. In addition, we propose a new method to estimate the drift, called semantic drift, of features and compensate for it without the need of any exemplars. We approximate the drift of previous tasks based on the drift that is experienced by current task data. We perform experiments on fine-grained datasets, CIFAR100 and ImageNet-Subset. We demonstrate that embedding networks suffer significantly less from catastrophic forgetting. We outperform existing methods which do not require exemplars and obtain competitive results compared to methods which store exemplars. Furthermore, we show that our proposed SDC when combined with existing methods to prevent forgetting consistently improves results.
Generating 3D People in Scenes Without People
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We present a fully automatic system that takes a 3D scene and generates plausible 3D human bodies that are posed naturally in that 3D scene. Given a 3D scene without people, humans can easily imagine how people could interact with the scene and the objects in it. However, this is a challenging task for a computer as solving it requires that (1) the generated human bodies to be semantically plausible within the 3D environment (e.g. people sitting on the sofa or cooking near the stove), and (2) the generated human-scene interaction to be physically feasible such that the human body and scene do not interpenetrate while, at the same time, body-scene contact supports physical interactions. To that end, we make use of the surface-based 3D human model SMPL-X. We first train a conditional variational autoencoder to predict semantically plausible 3D human poses conditioned on latent scene representations, then we further refine the generated 3D bodies using scene constraints to enforce feasible physical interaction. We show that our approach is able to synthesize realistic and expressive 3D human bodies that naturally interact with 3D environment. We perform extensive experiments demonstrating that our generative framework compares favorably with existing methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We believe that our scene-conditioned 3D human generation pipeline will be useful for numerous applications; e.g. to generate training data for human pose estimation, in video games and in VR/AR. Our project page for data and code can be seen at: \url{https://vlg.inf.ethz.ch/projects/PSI/}.
End-to-End Pseudo-LiDAR for Image-Based 3D Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Reliable and accurate 3D object detection is a necessity for safe autonomous driving. Although LiDAR sensors can provide accurate 3D point cloud estimates of the environment, they are also prohibitively expensive for many settings. Recently, the introduction of pseudo-LiDAR (PL) has led to a drastic reduction in the accuracy gap between methods based on LiDAR sensors and those based on cheap stereo cameras. PL combines state-of-the-art deep neural networks for 3D depth estimation with those for 3D object detection by converting 2D depth map outputs to 3D point cloud inputs. However, so far these two networks have to be trained separately. In this paper, we introduce a new framework based on differentiable Change of Representation (CoR) modules that allow the entire PL pipeline to be trained end-to-end. The resulting framework is compatible with most state-of-the-art networks for both tasks and in combination with PointRCNN improves over PL consistently across all benchmarks -- yielding the highest entry on the KITTI image-based 3D object detection leaderboard at the time of submission. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/mileyan/pseudo-LiDAR_e2e.
A Quantum Computational Approach to Correspondence Problems on Point Sets
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Modern adiabatic quantum computers (AQC) are already used to solve difficult combinatorial optimisation problems in various domains of science. Currently, only a few applications of AQC in computer vision have been demonstrated. We review AQC and derive a new algorithm for correspondence problems on point sets suitable for execution on AQC. Our algorithm has a subquadratic computational complexity of the state preparation. Examples of successful transformation estimation and point set alignment by simulated sampling are shown in the systematic experimental evaluation. Finally, we analyse the differences in the solutions and the corresponding energy values.
High-Frequency Component Helps Explain the Generalization of Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We investigate the relationship between the frequency spectrum of image data and the generalization behavior of convolutional neural networks (CNN). We first notice CNN's ability in capturing the high-frequency components of images. These high-frequency components are almost imperceptible to a human. Thus the observation leads to multiple hypotheses that are related to the generalization behaviors of CNN, including a potential explanation for adversarial examples, a discussion of CNN's trade-off between robustness and accuracy, and some evidence in understanding training heuristics.