OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Progressive Sparse Local Attention for Video Object Detection
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Transferring image-based object detectors to the domain of videos remains a challenging problem. Previous efforts mostly exploit optical flow to propagate features across frames, aiming to achieve a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. However, introducing an extra model to estimate optical flow can significantly increase the overall model size. The gap between optical flow and high-level features can also hinder it from establishing spatial correspondence accurately. Instead of relying on optical flow, this paper proposes a novel module called Progressive Sparse Local Attention (PSLA), which establishes the spatial correspondence between features across frames in a local region with progressively sparser stride and uses the correspondence to propagate features. Based on PSLA, Recursive Feature Updating (RFU) and Dense Feature Transforming (DenseFT) are proposed to model temporal appearance and enrich feature representation respectively in a novel video object detection framework. Experiments on ImageNet VID show that our method achieves the best accuracy compared to existing methods with smaller model size and acceptable runtime speed.
Reasoning About Human-Object Interactions Through Dual Attention Networks
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Objects are entities we act upon, where the functionality of an object is determined by how we interact with it. In this work we propose a Dual Attention Network model which reasons about human-object interactions. The dual-attentional framework weights the important features for objects and actions respectively. As a result, the recognition of objects and actions mutually benefit each other. The proposed model shows competitive classification performance on the human-object interaction dataset Something-Something. Besides, it can perform weak spatiotemporal localization and affordance segmentation, despite being trained only with video-level labels. The model not only finds when an action is happening and which object is being manipulated, but also identifies which part of the object is being interacted with. Project page: \url{https://dual-attention-network.github.io/}.
DMM-Net: Differentiable Mask-Matching Network for Video Object Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose the differentiable mask-matching network (DMM-Net) for solving the video object segmentation problem where the initial object masks are provided. Relying on the Mask R-CNN backbone, we extract mask proposals per frame and formulate the matching between object templates and proposals at one time step as a linear assignment problem where the cost matrix is predicted by a CNN. We propose a differentiable matching layer by unrolling a projected gradient descent algorithm in which the projection exploits the Dykstra's algorithm. We prove that under mild conditions, the matching is guaranteed to converge to the optimum. In practice, it performs similarly to the Hungarian algorithm during inference. Meanwhile, we can back-propagate through it to learn the cost matrix. After matching, a refinement head is leveraged to improve the quality of the matched mask. Our DMM-Net achieves competitive results on the largest video object segmentation dataset YouTube-VOS. On DAVIS 2017, DMM-Net achieves the best performance without online learning on the first frames. Without any fine-tuning, DMM-Net performs comparably to state-of-the-art methods on SegTrack v2 dataset. At last, our matching layer is very simple to implement; we attach the PyTorch code ($<50$ lines) in the supplementary material. Our code is released at https://github.com/ZENGXH/DMM_Net.
Global-Local Temporal Representations for Video Person Re-Identification
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

This paper proposes the Global-Local Temporal Representation (GLTR) to exploit the multi-scale temporal cues in video sequences for video person Re-Identification (ReID). GLTR is constructed by first modeling the short-term temporal cues among adjacent frames, then capturing the long-term relations among inconsecutive frames. Specifically, the short-term temporal cues are modeled by parallel dilated convolutions with different temporal dilation rates to represent the motion and appearance of pedestrian. The long-term relations are captured by a temporal self-attention model to alleviate the occlusions and noises in video sequences. The short and long-term temporal cues are aggregated as the final GLTR by a simple single-stream CNN. GLTR shows substantial superiority to existing features learned with body part cues or metric learning on four widely-used video ReID datasets. For instance, it achieves Rank-1 Accuracy of 87.02% on MARS dataset without re-ranking, better than current state-of-the art.
RANet: Ranking Attention Network for Fast Video Object Segmentation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Despite online learning (OL) techniques have boosted the performance of semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) methods, the huge time costs of OL greatly restrict their practicality. Matching based and propagation based methods run at a faster speed by avoiding OL techniques. However, they are limited by sub-optimal accuracy, due to mismatching and drifting problems. In this paper, we develop a real-time yet very accurate Ranking Attention Network (RANet) for VOS. Specifically, to integrate the insights of matching based and propagation based methods, we employ an encoder-decoder framework to learn pixel-level similarity and segmentation in an end-to-end manner. To better utilize the similarity maps, we propose a novel ranking attention module, which automatically ranks and selects these maps for fine-grained VOS performance. Experiments on DAVIS-16 and DAVIS-17 datasets show that our RANet achieves the best speed-accuracy trade-off, e.g., with 33 milliseconds per frame and J&F=85.5% on DAVIS-16. With OL, our RANet reaches J&F=87.1% on DAVIS-16, exceeding state-of-the-art VOS methods. The code can be found at https://github.com/Storife/RANet.
Spatial-Temporal Relation Networks for Multi-Object Tracking
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Recent progress in multiple object tracking (MOT) has shown that a robust similarity score is key to the success of trackers. A good similarity score is expected to reflect multiple cues, e.g. appearance, location, and topology, over a long period of time. However, these cues are heterogeneous, making them hard to be combined in a unified network. As a result, existing methods usually encode them in separate networks or require a complex training approach. In this paper, we present a unified framework for similarity measurement which could simultaneously encode various cues and perform reasoning across both spatial and temporal domains. We also study the feature representation of a tracklet-object pair in depth, showing a proper design of the pair features can well empower the trackers. The resulting approach is named spatial-temporal relation networks (STRN). It runs in a feed-forward way and can be trained in an end-to-end manner. The state-of-the-art accuracy was achieved on all of the MOT15-17 benchmarks using public detection and online settings.
Learning the Model Update for Siamese Trackers
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Siamese approaches address the visual tracking problem by extracting an appearance template from the current frame, which is used to localize the target in the next frame. In general, this template is linearly combined with the accumulated template from the previous frame, resulting in an exponential decay of information over time. While such an approach to updating has led to improved results, its simplicity limits the potential gain likely to be obtained by learning to update. Therefore, we propose to replace the handcrafted update function with a method which learns to update. We use a convolutional neural network, called UpdateNet, which given the initial template, the accumulated template and the template of the current frame aims to estimate the optimal template for the next frame. The UpdateNet is compact and can easily be integrated into existing Siamese trackers. We demonstrate the generality of the proposed approach by applying it to two Siamese trackers, SiamFC and DaSiamRPN. Extensive experiments on VOT2016, VOT2018, LaSOT, and TrackingNet datasets demonstrate that our UpdateNet effectively predicts the new target template, outperforming the standard linear update. On the large-scale TrackingNet dataset, our UpdateNet improves the results of DaSiamRPN with an absolute gain of 3.9% in terms of success score.
Program-Guided Image Manipulators
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Humans are capable of building holistic representations for images at various levels, from local objects, to pairwise relations, to global structures. The interpretation of structures involves reasoning over repetition and symmetry of the objects in the image. In this paper, we present the Program-Guided Image Manipulator (PG-IM), inducing neuro-symbolic program-like representations to represent and manipulate images. Given an image, PG-IM detects repeated patterns, induces symbolic programs, and manipulates the image using a neural network that is guided by the program. PG-IM learns from a single image, exploiting its internal statistics. Despite trained only on image inpainting, PG-IM is directly capable of extrapolation and regularity editing in a unified framework. Extensive experiments show that PG-IM achieves superior performance on all the tasks.
A Dataset of Multi-Illumination Images in the Wild
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Collections of images under a single, uncontrolled illumination have enabled the rapid advancement of core computer vision tasks like classification, detection, and segmentation. But even with modern learning techniques, many inverse problems involving lighting and material understanding remain too severely ill-posed to be solved with single-illumination datasets. To fill this gap, we introduce a new multi-illumination dataset of more than 1000 real scenes, each captured under 25 lighting conditions. We demonstrate the richness of this dataset by training state-of-the-art models for three challenging applications: single-image illumination estimation, image relighting, and mixed-illuminant white balance.
Monocular Neural Image Based Rendering With Continuous View Control
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

We present an approach that learns to synthesize high-quality, novel views of 3D objects or scenes, while providing fine-grained and precise control over the 6-DOF viewpoint. The approach is self-supervised and only requires 2D images and associated view transforms for training. Our main contribution is a network architecture that leverages a transforming auto-encoder in combination with a depth-guided warping procedure to predict geometrically accurate unseen views. Leveraging geometric constraints renders direct supervision via depth or flow maps unnecessary. If large parts of the object are occluded in the source view, a purely learning based prior is used to predict the values for dis-occluded pixels. Our network furthermore predicts a per-pixel mask, used to fuse depth-guided and pixel-based predictions. The resulting images reflect the desired 6-DOF transformation and details are preserved. We thoroughly evaluate our architecture on synthetic and real scenes and under fine-grained and fixed-view settings. Finally, we demonstrate that the approach generalizes to entirely unseen images such as product images downloaded from the internet.
Context-Aware Image Matting for Simultaneous Foreground and Alpha Estimation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Natural image matting is an important problem in computer vision and graphics. It is an ill-posed problem when only an input image is available without any external information. While the recent deep learning approaches have shown promising results, they only estimate the alpha matte. This paper presents a context-aware natural image matting method for simultaneous foreground and alpha matte estimation. Our method employs two encoder networks to extract essential information for matting. Particularly, we use a matting encoder to learn local features and a context encoder to obtain more global context information. We concatenate the outputs from these two encoders and feed them into decoder networks to simultaneously estimate the foreground and alpha matte. To train this whole deep neural network, we employ both the standard Laplacian loss and the feature loss: the former helps to achieve high numerical performance while the latter leads to more perceptually plausible results. We also report several data augmentation strategies that greatly improve the network's generalization performance. Our qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method enables high-quality matting for a single natural image. Our inference codes and models have been made publicly available at https://github.com/hqqxyy/Context-Aware-Matting.
CFSNet: Toward a Controllable Feature Space for Image Restoration
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Deep learning methods have witnessed the great progress in image restoration with specific metrics (e.g., PSNR, SSIM). However, the perceptual quality of the restored image is relatively subjective, and it is necessary for users to control the reconstruction result according to personal preferences or image characteristics, which cannot be done using existing deterministic networks. This motivates us to exquisitely design a unified interactive framework for general image restoration tasks. Under this framework, users can control continuous transition of different objectives, e.g., the perception-distortion trade-off of image super-resolution, the trade-off between noise reduction and detail preservation. We achieve this goal by controlling the latent features of the designed network. To be specific, our proposed framework, named Controllable Feature Space Network (CFSNet), is entangled by two branches based on different objectives. Our framework can adaptively learn the coupling coefficients of different layers and channels, which provides finer control of the restored image quality. Experiments on several typical image restoration tasks fully validate the effective benefits of the proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/qibao77/CFSNet.
Fully Convolutional Pixel Adaptive Image Denoiser
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a new image denoising algorithm, dubbed as Fully Convolutional Adaptive Image DEnoiser (FC-AIDE), that can learn from an offline supervised training set with a fully convolutional neural network as well as adaptively fine-tune the supervised model for each given noisy image. We significantly extend the framework of the recently proposed Neural AIDE, which formulates the denoiser to be context-based pixelwise mappings and utilizes the unbiased estimator of MSE for such denoisers. The two main contributions we make are; 1) implementing a novel fully convolutional architecture that boosts the base supervised model, and 2) introducing regularization methods for the adaptive fine-tuning such that a stronger and more robust adaptivity can be attained. As a result, FC-AIDE is shown to possess many desirable features; it outperforms the recent CNN-based state-of-the-art denoisers on all of the benchmark datasets we tested, and gets particularly strong for various challenging scenarios, e.g., with mismatched image/noise characteristics or with scarce supervised training data. The source code of our algorithm is available at https://github.com/csm9493/FC-AIDE-Keras.
Coherent Semantic Attention for Image Inpainting
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

The latest deep learning-based approaches have shown promising results for the challenging task of inpainting missing regions of an image. However, the existing methods often generate contents with blurry textures and distorted structures due to the discontinuity of the local pixels. From a semantic-level perspective, the local pixel discontinuity is mainly because these methods ignore the semantic relevance and feature continuity of hole regions. To handle this problem, we investigate the human behavior in repairing pictures and propose a fined deep generative model-based approach with a novel coherent semantic attention (CSA) layer, which can not only preserve contextual structure but also make more effective predictions of missing parts by modeling the semantic relevance between the holes features. The task is divided into rough, refinement as two steps and model each step with a neural network under the U-Net architecture, where the CSA layer is embedded into the encoder of refinement step. To stabilize the network training process and promote the CSA layer to learn more effective parameters, we propose a consistency loss to enforce the both the CSA layer and the corresponding layer of the CSA in decoder to be close to the VGG feature layer of a ground truth image simultaneously. The experiments on CelebA, Places2, and Paris StreetView datasets have validated the effectiveness of our proposed methods in image inpainting tasks and can obtain images with a higher quality as compared with the existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Counting With Focus for Free
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

This paper aims to count arbitrary objects in images. The leading counting approaches start from point annotations per object from which they construct density maps. Then, their training objective transforms input images to density maps through deep convolutional networks. We posit that the point annotations serve more supervision purposes than just constructing density maps. We introduce ways to repurpose the points for free. First, we propose supervised focus from segmentation, where points are converted into binary maps. The binary maps are combined with a network branch and accompanying loss function to focus on areas of interest. Second, we propose supervised focus from global density, where the ratio of point annotations to image pixels is used in another branch to regularize the overall density estimation. To assist both the density estimation and the focus from segmentation, we also introduce an improved kernel size estimator for the point annotations. Experiments on six datasets show that all our contributions reduce the counting error, regardless of the base network, resulting in state-of-the-art accuracy using only a single network. Finally, we are the first to count on WIDER FACE, allowing us to show the benefits of our approach in handling varying object scales and crowding levels. Code is available at https://github.com/shizenglin/Counting-with-Focus-for-Free
Diverse Image Synthesis From Semantic Layouts via Conditional IMLE
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Most existing methods for conditional image synthesis are only able to generate a single plausible image for any given input, or at best a fixed number of plausible images. In this paper, we focus on the problem of generating images from semantic segmentation maps and present a simple new method that can generate an arbitrary number of images with diverse appearance for the same semantic layout. Unlike most existing approaches which adopt the GAN framework, our method is based on the recently introduced Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE) framework. Compared to the leading approach, our method is able to generate more diverse images while producing fewer artifacts despite using the same architecture. The learned latent space also has sensible structure despite the lack of supervision that encourages such behaviour. Videos and code are available at https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ke.li/projects/imle/scene_layouts/.
Learning to Collocate Neural Modules for Image Captioning
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

We do not speak word by word from scratch; our brain quickly structures a pattern like \textsc{sth do sth at someplace} and then fill in the detailed descriptions. To render existing encoder-decoder image captioners such human-like reasoning, we propose a novel framework: learning to Collocate Neural Modules (CNM), to generate the `inner pattern' connecting visual encoder and language decoder. Unlike the widely-used neural module networks in visual Q\&A, where the language (ie, question) is fully observable, CNM for captioning is more challenging as the language is being generated and thus is partially observable. To this end, we make the following technical contributions for CNM training: 1) compact module design --- one for function words and three for visual content words (eg, noun, adjective, and verb), 2) soft module fusion and multi-step module execution, robustifying the visual reasoning in partial observation, 3) a linguistic loss for module controller being faithful to part-of-speech collocations (eg, adjective is before noun). Extensive experiments on the challenging MS-COCO image captioning benchmark validate the effectiveness of our CNM image captioner. In particular, CNM achieves a new state-of-the-art 127.9 CIDEr-D on Karpathy split and a single-model 126.0 c40 on the official server. CNM is also robust to few training samples, eg, by training only one sentence per image, CNM can halve the performance loss compared to a strong baseline.
Sequential Latent Spaces for Modeling the Intention During Diverse Image Captioning
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Diverse and accurate vision+language modeling is an important goal to retain creative freedom and maintain user engagement. However, adequately capturing the intricacies of diversity in language models is challenging. Recent works commonly resort to latent variable models augmented with more or less supervision from object detectors or part-of-speech tags. Common to all those methods is the fact that the latent variable either only initializes the sentence generation process or is identical across the steps of generation. Both methods offer no fine-grained control. To address this concern, we propose Seq-CVAE which learns a latent space for every word position. We encourage this temporal latent space to capture the 'intention' about how to complete the sentence by mimicking a representation which summarizes the future. We illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach to anticipate the sentence continuation on the challenging MSCOCO dataset, significantly improving diversity metrics compared to baselines while performing on par w.r.t sentence quality.
Why Does a Visual Question Have Different Answers?
Venue: Conference ICCV 2019
Year: 2019

Visual question answering is the task of returning the answer to a question about an image. A challenge is that different people often provide different answers to the same visual question. To our knowledge, this is the first work that aims to understand why. We propose a taxonomy of nine plausible reasons, and create two labelled datasets consisting of ~45,000 visual questions indicating which reasons led to answer differences. We then propose a novel problem of predicting directly from a visual question which reasons will cause answer differences as well as a novel algorithm for this purpose. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of our approach over several related baselines on two diverse datasets. We publicly share the datasets and code at https://vizwiz.org.