OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Gate-Shift Networks for Video Action Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Deep 3D CNNs for video action recognition are designed to learn powerful representations in the joint spatio-temporal feature space. In practice however, because of the large number of parameters and computations involved, they may under-perform in the lack of sufficiently large datasets for training them at scale. In this paper we introduce spatial gating in spatial-temporal decomposition of 3D kernels. We implement this concept with Gate-Shift Module (GSM). GSM is lightweight and turns a 2D-CNN into a highly efficient spatio-temporal feature extractor. With GSM plugged in, a 2D-CNN learns to adaptively route features through time and combine them, at almost no additional parameters and computational overhead. We perform an extensive evaluation of the proposed module to study its effectiveness in video action recognition, achieving state-of-the-art results on Something Something-V1 and Diving48 datasets, and obtaining competitive results on EPIC-Kitchens with far less model complexity.
CRNet: Cross-Reference Networks for Few-Shot Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Over the past few years, state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms are based on deep convolutional neural networks. To render a deep network with the ability to understand a concept, humans need to collect a large amount of pixel-level annotated data to train the models, which is time-consuming and tedious. Recently, few-shot segmentation is proposed to solve this problem. Few-shot segmentation aims to learn a segmentation model that can be generalized to novel classes with only a few training images. In this paper, we propose a cross-reference network (CRNet) for few-shot segmentation. Unlike previous works which only predict the mask in the query image, our proposed model concurrently make predictions for both the support image and the query image. With a cross-reference mechanism, our network can better find the co-occurrent objects in the two images, thus helping the few-shot segmentation task. We also develop a mask refinement module to recurrently refine the prediction of the foreground regions. For the $k$-shot learning, we propose to finetune parts of networks to take advantage of multiple labeled support images. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset show that our network achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Space-Time-Aware Multi-Resolution Video Enhancement
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the problem of space-time super-resolution (ST-SR): increasing spatial resolution of video frames and simultaneously interpolating frames to increase the frame rate. Modern approaches handle these axes one at a time. In contrast, our proposed model called STARnet super-resolves jointly in space and time. This allows us to leverage mutually informative relationships between time and space: higher resolution can provide more detailed information about motion, and higher frame-rate can provide better pixel alignment. The components of our model that generate latent low- and high-resolution representations during ST-SR can be used to finetune a specialized mechanism for just spatial or just temporal super-resolution. Experimental results demonstrate that STARnet improves the performances of space-time, spatial, and temporal video super-resolution by substantial margins on publicly available datasets.
Image Demoireing with Learnable Bandpass Filters
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Image demoireing is a multi-faceted image restoration task involving both texture and color restoration. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale bandpass convolutional neural network (MBCNN) to address this problem. As an end-to-end solution, MBCNN respectively solves the two sub-problems. For texture restoration, we propose a learnable bandpass filter (LBF) to learn the frequency prior for moire texture removal. For color restoration, we propose a two-step tone mapping strategy, which first applies a global tone mapping to correct for a global color shift, and then performs local fine tuning of the color per pixel. Through an ablation study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the different components of MBCNN. Experimental results on two public datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin (more than 2dB in terms of PSNR).
Weakly-Supervised Action Localization by Generative Attention Modeling
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization is a problem of learning an action localization model with only video-level action labeling available. The general framework largely relies on the classification activation, which employs an attention model to identify the action-related frames and then categorizes them into different classes. Such method results in the action-context confusion issue: context frames near action clips tend to be recognized as action frames themselves, since they are closely related to the specific classes. To solve the problem, in this paper we propose to model the class-agnostic frame-wise probability conditioned on the frame attention using conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). With the observation that the context exhibits notable difference from the action at representation level, a probabilistic model, i.e., conditional VAE, is learned to model the likelihood of each frame given the attention. By maximizing the conditional probability with respect to the attention, the action and non-action frames are well separated. Experiments on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.2 demonstrate advantage of our method and effectiveness in handling action-context confusion problem. Code is now available on GitHub.
Learning Unsupervised Hierarchical Part Decomposition of 3D Objects From a Single RGB Image
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Humans perceive the 3D world as a set of distinct objects that are characterized by various low-level (geometry, reflectance) and high-level (connectivity, adjacency, symmetry) properties. Recent methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) demonstrated impressive progress in 3D reconstruction, even when using a single 2D image as input. However, the majority of these methods focuses on recovering the local 3D geometry of an object without considering its part-based decomposition or relations between parts. We address this challenging problem by proposing a novel formulation that allows to jointly recover the geometry of a 3D object as a set of primitives as well as their latent hierarchical structure without part-level supervision. Our model recovers the higher level structural decomposition of various objects in the form of a binary tree of primitives, where simple parts are represented with fewer primitives and more complex parts are modeled with more components. Our experiments on the ShapeNet and D-FAUST datasets demonstrate that considering the organization of parts indeed facilitates reasoning about 3D geometry.
Light Field Spatial Super-Resolution via Deep Combinatorial Geometry Embedding and Structural Consistency Regularization
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Light field (LF) images acquired by hand-held devices usually suffer from low spatial resolution as the limited sampling resources have to be shared with the angular dimension. LF spatial super-resolution (SR) thus becomes an indispensable part of the LF camera processing pipeline. The high-dimensionality characteristic and complex geometrical structure of LF images make the problem more challenging than traditional single-image SR. The performance of existing methods is still limited as they fail to thoroughly explore the coherence among LF views and are insufficient in accurately preserving the parallax structure of the scene. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based LF spatial SR framework, in which each view of an LF image is first individually super-resolved by exploring the complementary information among views with combinatorial geometry embedding. For accurate preservation of the parallax structure among the reconstructed views, a regularization network trained over a structure-aware loss function is subsequently appended to enforce correct parallax relationships over the intermediate estimation. Our proposed approach is evaluated over datasets with a large number of testing images including both synthetic and real-world scenes. Experimental results demonstrate the advantage of our approach over state-of-the-art methods, i.e., our method not only improves the average PSNR by more than 1.0 dB but also preserves more accurate parallax details, at a lower computational cost.
Auto-Encoding Twin-Bottleneck Hashing
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Conventional unsupervised hashing methods usually take advantage of similarity graphs, which are either pre-computed in the high-dimensional space or obtained from random anchor points. On the one hand, existing methods uncouple the procedures of hash function learning and graph construction. On the other hand, graphs empirically built upon original data could introduce biased prior knowledge of data relevance, leading to sub-optimal retrieval performance. In this paper, we tackle the above problems by proposing an efficient and adaptive code-driven graph, which is updated by decoding in the context of an auto-encoder. Specifically, we introduce into our framework twin bottlenecks (i.e., latent variables) that exchange crucial information collaboratively. One bottleneck (i.e., binary codes) conveys the high-level intrinsic data structure captured by the code-driven graph to the other (i.e., continuous variables for low-level detail information), which in turn propagates the updated network feedback for the encoder to learn more discriminative binary codes. The auto-encoding learning objective literally rewards the code-driven graph to learn an optimal encoder. Moreover, the proposed model can be simply optimized by gradient descent without violating the binary constraints. Experiments on benchmarked datasets clearly show the superiority of our framework over the state-of-the-art hashing methods. Our source code can be found at https://github.com/ymcidence/TBH.
Learning to Super Resolve Intensity Images From Events
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

An event camera detects per-pixel intensity difference and produces asynchronous event stream with low latency, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. As a trade-off, the event camera has low spatial resolution. We propose an end-to-end network to reconstruct high resolution, high dynamic range (HDR) images directly from the event stream. We evaluate our algorithm on both simulated and real-world sequences and verify that it captures fine details of a scene and outperforms the combination of the state-of-the-art event to image algorithms with the state-of-the-art super resolution schemes in many quantitative measures by large margins. We further extend our method by using the active sensor pixel (APS) frames or reconstructing images iteratively.
FaceScape: A Large-Scale High Quality 3D Face Dataset and Detailed Riggable 3D Face Prediction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we present a large-scale detailed 3D face dataset, FaceScape, and propose a novel algorithm that is able to predict elaborate riggable 3D face models from a single image input. FaceScape dataset provides 18,760 textured 3D faces, captured from 938 subjects and each with 20 specific expressions. The 3D models contain the pore-level facial geometry that is also processed to be topologically uniformed. These fine 3D facial models can be represented as a 3D morphable model for rough shapes and displacement maps for detailed geometry. Taking advantage of the large-scale and high-accuracy dataset, a novel algorithm is further proposed to learn the expression-specific dynamic details using a deep neural network. The learned relationship serves as the foundation of our 3D face prediction system from a single image input. Different than the previous methods, our predicted 3D models are riggable with highly detailed geometry under different expressions. The unprecedented dataset and code will be released to public for research purpose.
Foreground-Aware Relation Network for Geospatial Object Segmentation in High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Geospatial object segmentation, as a particular semantic segmentation task, always faces with larger-scale variation, larger intra-class variance of background, and foreground-background imbalance in the high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing imagery. However, general semantic segmentation methods mainly focus on scale variation in the natural scene, with inadequate consideration of the other two problems that usually happen in the large area earth observation scene. In this paper, we argue that the problems lie on the lack of foreground modeling and propose a foreground-aware relation network (FarSeg) from the perspectives of relation-based and optimization-based foreground modeling, to alleviate the above two problems. From perspective of relation, FarSeg enhances the discrimination of foreground features via foreground-correlated contexts associated by learning foreground-scene relation. Meanwhile, from perspective of optimization, a foreground-aware optimization is proposed to focus on foreground examples and hard examples of background during training for a balanced optimization. The experimental results obtained using a large scale dataset suggest that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art general semantic segmentation methods and achieves a better trade-off between speed and accuracy. Code has been made available at: \url{https://github.com/Z-Zheng/FarSeg}.
Single-View View Synthesis With Multiplane Images
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

A recent strand of work in view synthesis uses deep learning to generate multiplane images (a camera-centric, layered 3D representation) given two or more input images at known viewpoints. We apply this representation to single-view view synthesis, a problem which is more challenging but has potentially much wider application. Our method learns to predict a multiplane image directly from a single image input, and we introduce scale-invariant view synthesis for supervision, enabling us to train on online video. We show this approach is applicable to several different datasets, that it additionally generates reasonable depth maps, and that it learns to fill in content behind the edges of foreground objects in background layers. Project page at https://single-view-mpi.github.io/.
Towards Discriminability and Diversity: Batch Nuclear-Norm Maximization Under Label Insufficient Situations
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

The learning of the deep networks largely relies on the data with human-annotated labels. In some label insufficient situations, the performance degrades on the decision boundary with high data density. A common solution is to directly minimize the Shannon Entropy, but the side effect caused by entropy minimization, i.e., reduction of the prediction diversity, is mostly ignored. To address this issue, we reinvestigate the structure of classification output matrix of a randomly selected data batch. We find by theoretical analysis that the prediction discriminability and diversity could be separately measured by the Frobenius-norm and rank of the batch output matrix. Besides, the nuclear-norm is an upperbound of the Frobenius-norm, and a convex approximation of the matrix rank. Accordingly, to improve both discriminability and diversity, we propose Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization (BNM) on the output matrix. BNM could boost the learning under typical label insufficient learning scenarios, such as semi-supervised learning, domain adaptation and open domain recognition. On these tasks, extensive experimental results show that BNM outperforms competitors and works well with existing well-known methods. The code is available at https://github.com/cuishuhao/BNM.
4D Association Graph for Realtime Multi-Person Motion Capture Using Multiple Video Cameras
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

This paper contributes a novel realtime multi-person motion capture algorithm using multiview video inputs. Due to the heavy occlusions in each view, joint optimization on the multiview images and multiple temporal frames is indispensable, which brings up the essential challenge of realtime efficiency. To this end, for the first time, we unify per-view parsing, cross-view matching, and temporal tracking into a single optimization framework, i.e., a 4D association graph that each dimension (image space, viewpoint and time) can be treated equally and simultaneously. To solve the 4D association graph efficiently, we further contribute the idea of 4D limb bundle parsing based on heuristic searching, followed with limb bundle assembling by proposing a bundle Kruskal's algorithm. Our method enables a realtime online motion capture system running at 30fps using 5 cameras on a 5-person scene. Benefiting from the unified parsing, matching and tracking constraints, our method is robust to noisy detection, and achieves high-quality online pose reconstruction quality. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method quantitatively without using high-level appearance information. We also contribute a multiview video dataset synchronized with a marker-based motion capture system for scientific evaluation.
Meshlet Priors for 3D Mesh Reconstruction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Estimating a mesh from an unordered set of sparse, noisy 3D points is a challenging problem that requires carefully selected priors. Existing hand-crafted priors, such as smoothness regularizers, impose an undesirable trade-off between attenuating noise and preserving local detail. Recent deep-learning approaches produce impressive results by learning priors directly from the data. However, the priors are learned at the object level, which makes these algorithms class-specific and even sensitive to the pose of the object. We introduce meshlets, small patches of mesh that we use to learn local shape priors. Meshlets act as a dictionary of local features and thus allow to use learned priors to reconstruct object meshes in any pose and from unseen classes, even when the noise is large and the samples sparse.
Transferable, Controllable, and Inconspicuous Adversarial Attacks on Person Re-identification With Deep Mis-Ranking
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

The success of DNNs has driven the extensive applications of person re-identification (ReID) into a new era. However, whether ReID inherits the vulnerability of DNNs remains unexplored. To examine the robustness of ReID systems is rather important because the insecurity of ReID systems may cause severe losses, e.g., the criminals may use the adversarial perturbations to cheat the CCTV systems. In this work, we examine the insecurity of current best-performing ReID models by proposing a learning-to-mis-rank formulation to perturb the ranking of the system output. As the cross-dataset transferability is crucial in the ReID domain, we also perform a back-box attack by developing a novel multi-stage network architecture that pyramids the features of different levels to extract general and transferable features for the adversarial perturbations. Our method can control the number of malicious pixels by using differentiable multi-shot sampling. To guarantee the inconspicuousness of the attack, we also propose a new perception loss to achieve better visual quality. Extensive experiments on four of the largest ReID benchmarks (i.e., Market1501 [45], CUHK03 [18], DukeMTMC [33], and MSMT17 [40]) not only show the effectiveness of our method, but also provides directions of the future improvement in the robustness of ReID systems. For example, the accuracy of one of the best-performing ReID systems drops sharply from 91.8% to 1.4% after being attacked by our method. Some attack results are shown in Fig. 1. The code is available at https://github.com/whj363636/Adversarial-attack-on-Person-ReID-With-Deep-Mis-Ranking.
More Grounded Image Captioning by Distilling Image-Text Matching Model
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Visual attention not only improves the performance of image captioners, but also serves as a visual interpretation to qualitatively measure the caption rationality and model transparency. Specifically, we expect that a captioner can fix its attentive gaze on the correct objects while generating the corresponding words. This ability is also known as grounded image captioning. However, the grounding accuracy of existing captioners is far from satisfactory. To improve the grounding accuracy while retaining the captioning quality, it is expensive to collect the word-region alignment as strong supervision. To this end, we propose a Part-of-Speech (POS) enhanced image-text matching model (SCAN \cite{lee2018stacked}): POS-SCAN, as the effective knowledge distillation for more grounded image captioning. The benefits are two-fold: 1) given a sentence and an image, POS-SCAN can ground the objects more accurately than SCAN; 2) POS-SCAN serves as a word-region alignment regularization for the captioner's visual attention module. By showing benchmark experimental results, we demonstrate that conventional image captioners equipped with POS-SCAN can significantly improve the grounding accuracy without strong supervision. Last but not the least, we explore the indispensable Self-Critical Sequence Training (SCST) \cite{Rennie_2017_CVPR} in the context of grounded image captioning and show that the image-text matching score can serve as a reward for more grounded captioning \footnote{https://github.com/YuanEZhou/Grounded-Image-Captioning}.
Leveraging Photometric Consistency Over Time for Sparsely Supervised Hand-Object Reconstruction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2020
Year: 2020

Modeling hand-object manipulations is essential for understanding how humans interact with their environment. While of practical importance, estimating the pose of hands and objects during interactions is challenging due to the large mutual occlusions that occur during manipulation. Recent efforts have been directed towards fully-supervised methods that require large amounts of labeled training samples. Collecting 3D ground-truth data for hand-object interactions, however, is costly, tedious, and error-prone. To overcome this challenge we present a method to leverage photometric consistency across time when annotations are only available for a sparse subset of frames in a video. Our model is trained end-to-end on color images to jointly reconstruct hands and objects in 3D by inferring their poses. Given our estimated reconstructions, we differentiably render the optical flow between pairs of adjacent images and use it within the network to warp one frame to another. We then apply a self-supervised photometric loss that relies on the visual consistency between nearby images. We achieve state-of-the-art results on 3D hand-object reconstruction benchmarks and demonstrate that our approach allows us to improve the pose estimation accuracy by leveraging information from neighboring frames in low-data regimes.