OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dense Depth Posterior (DDP) From Single Image and Sparse Range
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

We present a deep learning system to infer the posterior distribution of a dense depth map associated with an image, by exploiting sparse range measurements, for instance from a lidar. While the lidar may provide a depth value for a small percentage of the pixels, we exploit regularities reflected in the training set to complete the map so as to have a probability over depth for each pixel in the image. We exploit a Conditional Prior Network, that allows associating a probability to each depth value given an image, and combine it with a likelihood term that uses the sparse measurements. Optionally we can also exploit the availability of stereo during training, but in any case only require a single image and a sparse point cloud at run-time. We test our approach on both unsupervised and supervised depth completion using the KITTI benchmark, and improve the state-of-the-art in both.
DuLa-Net: A Dual-Projection Network for Estimating Room Layouts From a Single RGB Panorama
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

We present a deep learning framework, called DuLa-Net, to predict Manhattan-world 3D room layouts from a single RGB panorama. To achieve better prediction accuracy, our method leverages two projections of the panorama at once, namely the equirectangular panorama-view and the perspective ceiling-view, that each contains different clues about the room layouts. Our network architecture consists of two encoder-decoder branches for analyzing each of the two views. In addition, a novel feature fusion structure is proposed to connect the two branches, which are then jointly trained to predict the 2D floor plans and layout heights. To learn more complex room layouts, we introduce the Realtor360 dataset that contains panoramas of Manhattan-world room layouts with different numbers of corners. Experimental results show that our work outperforms recent state-of-the-art in prediction accuracy and performance, especially in the rooms with non-cuboid layouts.
Veritatem Dies Aperit - Temporally Consistent Depth Prediction Enabled by a Multi-Task Geometric and Semantic Scene Understanding Approach
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Robust geometric and semantic scene understanding is ever more important in many real-world applications such as autonomous driving and robotic navigation. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning-based approach capable of jointly performing geometric and semantic scene understanding, namely depth prediction (monocular depth estimation and depth completion) and semantic scene segmentation. Within a single temporally constrained recurrent network, our approach uniquely takes advantage of a complex series of skip connections, adversarial training and the temporal constraint of sequential frame recurrence to produce consistent depth and semantic class labels simultaneously. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of our approach compared to other contemporary state-of-the-art techniques.
Segmentation-Driven 6D Object Pose Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

The most recent trend in estimating the 6D pose of rigid objects has been to train deep networks to either directly regress the pose from the image or to predict the 2D locations of 3D keypoints, from which the pose can be obtained using a PnP algorithm. In both cases, the object is treated as a global entity, and a single pose estimate is computed. As a consequence, the resulting techniques can be vulnerable to large occlusions. In this paper, we introduce a segmentation-driven 6D pose estimation framework where each visible part of the objects contributes a local pose prediction in the form of 2D keypoint locations. We then use a predicted measure of confidence to combine these pose candidates into a robust set of 3D-to-2D correspondences, from which a reliable pose estimate can be obtained. We outperform the state-of-the-art on the challenging Occluded-LINEMOD and YCB-Video datasets, which is evidence that our approach deals well with multiple poorly-textured objects occluding each other. Furthermore, it relies on a simple enough architecture to achieve real-time performance.
Exploiting Temporal Context for 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

We present a bundle-adjustment-based algorithm for recovering accurate 3D human pose and meshes from monocular videos. Unlike previous algorithms which operate on single frames, we show that reconstructing a person over an entire sequence gives extra constraints that can resolve ambiguities. This is because videos often give multiple views of a person, yet the overall body shape does not change and 3D positions vary slowly. Our method improves not only on standard mocap-based datasets like Human 3.6M -- where we show quantitative improvements -- but also on challenging in-the-wild datasets such as Kinetics. Building upon our algorithm, we present a new dataset of more than 3 million frames of YouTube videos from Kinetics with automatically generated 3D poses and meshes. We show that retraining a single-frame 3D pose estimator on this data improves accuracy on both real-world and mocap data by evaluating on the 3DPW and HumanEVA datasets.
What Do Single-View 3D Reconstruction Networks Learn?
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Convolutional networks for single-view object reconstruction have shown impressive performance and have become a popular subject of research. All existing techniques are united by the idea of having an encoder-decoder network that performs non-trivial reasoning about the 3D structure of the output space. In this work, we set up two alternative approaches that perform image classification and retrieval respectively. These simple baselines yield better results than state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We show that encoder-decoder methods are statistically indistinguishable from these baselines, thus indicating that the current state of the art in single-view object reconstruction does not actually perform reconstruction but image classification. We identify aspects of popular experimental procedures that elicit this behavior and discuss ways to improve the current state of research.
Mask-Guided Portrait Editing With Conditional GANs
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Portrait editing is a popular subject in photo manipulation. The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) advances the generating of realistic faces and allows more face editing. In this paper, we argue about three issues in existing techniques: diversity, quality, and controllability for portrait synthesis and editing. To address these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end learning framework that leverages conditional GANs guided by provided face masks for generating faces. The framework learns feature embeddings for every face component (e.g., mouth, hair, eye), separately, contributing to better correspondences for image translation, and local face editing. With the mask, our network is available to many applications, like face synthesis driven by mask, face Swap+ (including hair in swapping), and local manipulation. It can also boost the performance of face parsing a bit as an option of data augmentation.
Semantic Alignment: Finding Semantically Consistent Ground-Truth for Facial Landmark Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Recently, deep learning based facial landmark detection has achieved great success. Despite this, we notice that the semantic ambiguity greatly degrades the detection performance. Specifically, the semantic ambiguity means that some landmarks (e.g. those evenly distributed along the face contour) do not have clear and accurate definition, causing inconsistent annotations by annotators. Accordingly, these inconsistent annotations, which are usually provided by public databases, commonly work as the ground-truth to supervise network training, leading to the degraded accuracy. To our knowledge, little research has investigated this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic model which introduces a latent variable, i.e. the 'real' ground-truth which is semantically consistent, to optimize. This framework couples two parts (1) training landmark detection CNN and (2) searching the 'real' ground-truth. These two parts are alternatively optimized: the searched 'real' ground-truth supervises the CNN training; and the trained CNN assists the searching of 'real' ground-truth. In addition, to recover the unconfidently predicted landmarks due to occlusion and low quality, we propose a global heatmap correction unit (GHCU) to correct outliers by considering the global face shape as a constraint. Extensive experiments on both image-based (300W and AFLW) and video-based (300-VW) databases demonstrate that our method effectively improves the landmark detection accuracy and achieves the state of the art performance.
LAEO-Net: Revisiting People Looking at Each Other in Videos
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Capturing the `mutual gaze' of people is essential for understanding and interpreting the social interactions between them. To this end, this paper addresses the problem of detecting people Looking At Each Other (LAEO) in video sequences. For this purpose, we propose LAEO-Net, a new deep CNN for determining LAEO in videos. In contrast to previous works, LAEO-Net takes spatio-temporal tracks as input and reasons about the whole track. It consists of three branches, one for each character's tracked head and one for their relative position. Moreover, we introduce two new LAEO datasets: UCO-LAEO and AVA-LAEO. A thorough experimental evaluation demonstrates the ability of LAEONet to successfully determine if two people are LAEO and the temporal window where it happens. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the existing TVHID-LAEO video dataset, significantly outperforming previous approaches. Finally, we apply LAEO-Net to social network analysis, where we automatically infer the social relationship between pairs of people based on the frequency and duration that they LAEO.
Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Human speech is often accompanied by hand and arm gestures. Given audio speech input, we generate plausible gestures to go along with the sound. Specifically, we perform cross-modal translation from "in-the-wild'' monologue speech of a single speaker to their hand and arm motion. We train on unlabeled videos for which we only have noisy pseudo ground truth from an automatic pose detection system. Our proposed model significantly outperforms baseline methods in a quantitative comparison. To support research toward obtaining a computational understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech, we release a large video dataset of person-specific gestures. The project website with video, code and data can be found at http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~shiry/speech2gesture .
Fast Human Pose Estimation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Existing human pose estimation approaches often only consider how to improve the model generalisation performance, but putting aside the significant efficiency problem. This leads to the development of heavy models with poor scalability and cost-effectiveness in practical use. In this work, we investigate the under-studied but practically critical pose model efficiency problem. To this end, we present a new Fast Pose Distillation (FPD) model learning strategy. Specifically, the FPD trains a lightweight pose neural network architecture capable of executing rapidly with low computational cost. It is achieved by effectively transferring the pose structure knowledge of a strong teacher network. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the advantages of our FPD method over a broad range of state-of-the-art pose estimation approaches in terms of model cost-effectiveness on two standard benchmark datasets, MPII Human Pose and Leeds Sports Pose.
Decorrelated Adversarial Learning for Age-Invariant Face Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

There has been an increasing research interest in age-invariant face recognition. However, matching faces with big age gaps remains a challenging problem, primarily due to the significant discrepancy of face appearances caused by aging. To reduce such a discrepancy, in this paper we propose a novel algorithm to remove age-related components from features mixed with both identity and age information. Specifically, we factorize a mixed face feature into two uncorrelated components: identity-dependent component and age-dependent component, where the identity-dependent component includes information that is useful for face recognition. To implement this idea, we propose the Decorrelated Adversarial Learning (DAL) algorithm, where a Canonical Mapping Module (CMM) is introduced to find the maximum correlation between the paired features generated by a backbone network, while the backbone network and the factorization module are trained to generate features reducing the correlation. Thus, the proposed model learns the decomposed features of age and identity whose correlation is significantly reduced. Simultaneously, the identity-dependent feature and the age-dependent feature are respectively supervised by ID and age preserving signals to ensure that they both contain the correct information. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular public-domain face aging datasets (FG-NET, MORPH Album 2, and CACD-VS) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Cross-Task Weakly Supervised Learning From Instructional Videos
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we investigate learning visual models for the steps of ordinary tasks using weak supervision via instructional narrations and an ordered list of steps instead of strong supervision via temporal annotations. At the heart of our approach is the observation that weakly supervised learning may be easier if a model shares components while learning different steps: `pour egg' should be trained jointly with other tasks involving `pour' and `egg'. We formalize this in a component model for recognizing steps and a weakly supervised learning framework that can learn this model under temporal constraints from narration and the list of steps. Past data does not permit systematic studying of sharing and so we also gather a new dataset, CrossTask, aimed at assessing cross-task sharing. Our experiments demonstrate that sharing across tasks improves performance, especially when done at the component level and that our component model can parse previously unseen tasks by virtue of its compositionality.
D3TW: Discriminative Differentiable Dynamic Time Warping for Weakly Supervised Action Alignment and Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

We address weakly supervised action alignment and segmentation in videos, where only the order of occurring actions is available during training. We propose Discriminative Differentiable Dynamic Time Warping (D3TW), the first discriminative model using weak ordering supervision. The key technical challenge for discriminative modeling with weak supervision is that the loss function of the ordering supervision is usually formulated using dynamic programming and is thus not differentiable. We address this challenge with a continuous relaxation of the min-operator in dynamic programming and extend the alignment loss to be differentiable. The proposed D3TW innovatively solves sequence alignment with discriminative modeling and end-to-end training, which substantially improves the performance in weakly supervised action alignment and segmentation tasks. We show that our model is able to bypass the degenerated sequence problem usually encountered in previous work and outperform the current state-of-the-art across three evaluation metrics in two challenging datasets.
MS-TCN: Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network for Action Segmentation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Temporally locating and classifying action segments in long untrimmed videos is of particular interest to many applications like surveillance and robotics. While traditional approaches follow a two-step pipeline, by generating frame-wise probabilities and then feeding them to high-level temporal models, recent approaches use temporal convolutions to directly classify the video frames. In this paper, we introduce a multi-stage architecture for the temporal action segmentation task. Each stage features a set of dilated temporal convolutions to generate an initial prediction that is refined by the next one. This architecture is trained using a combination of a classification loss and a proposed smoothing loss that penalizes over-segmentation errors. Extensive evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed model in capturing long-range dependencies and recognizing action segments. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and the Breakfast dataset.
Transferable Interactiveness Knowledge for Human-Object Interaction Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Detection is an important problem to understand how humans interact with objects. In this paper, we explore Interactiveness Knowledge which indicates whether human and object interact with each other or not. We found that interactiveness knowledge can be learned across HOI datasets, regardless of HOI category settings. Our core idea is to exploit an Interactiveness Network to learn the general interactiveness knowledge from multiple HOI datasets and perform Non-Interaction Suppression before HOI classification in inference. On account of the generalization of interactiveness, interactiveness network is a transferable knowledge learner and can be cooperated with any HOI detection models to achieve desirable results. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets. Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art HOI detection results by a great margin, verifying its efficacy and flexibility. Code is available at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/Transferable-Interactiveness-Network.
Actional-Structural Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Action recognition with skeleton data has recently attracted much attention in computer vision. Previous studies are mostly based on fixed skeleton graphs, only capturing local physical dependencies among joints, which may miss implicit joint correlations. To capture richer dependencies, we introduce an encoder-decoder structure, called A-link inference module, to capture action-specific latent dependencies, i.e. actional links, directly from actions. We also extend the existing skeleton graphs to represent higher-order dependencies, i.e. structural links. Combing the two types of links into a generalized skeleton graph, we further propose the actional-structural graph convolution network (AS-GCN), which stacks actional-structural graph convolution and temporal convolution as a basic building block, to learn both spatial and temporal features for action recognition. A future pose prediction head is added in parallel to the recognition head to help capture more detailed action patterns through self-supervision. We validate AS-GCN in action recognition using two skeleton data sets, NTU-RGB+D and Kinetics. The proposed AS-GCN achieves consistently large improvement compared to the state-of-the-art methods. As a side product, AS-GCN also shows promising results for future pose prediction.
Multi-Granularity Generator for Temporal Action Proposal
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Temporal action proposal generation is an important task, aiming to localize the video segments containing human actions in an untrimmed video. In this paper, we propose a multi-granularity generator (MGG) to perform the temporal action proposal from different granularity perspectives, relying on the video visual features equipped with the position embedding information. First, we propose to use a bilinear matching model to exploit the rich local information within the video sequence. Afterwards, two components, namely segment proposal producer (SPP) and frame actionness producer (FAP), are combined to perform the task of temporal action proposal at two distinct granularities. SPP considers the whole video in the form of feature pyramid and generates segment proposals from one coarse perspective, while FAP carries out a finer actionness evaluation for each video frame. Our proposed MGG can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. By temporally adjusting the segment proposals with fine-grained frame actionness information, MGG achieves the superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on the public THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3 datasets. Moreover, we employ existing action classifiers to perform the classification of the proposals generated by MGG, leading to significant improvements compared against the competing methods for the video detection task.
Deep Rigid Instance Scene Flow
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we tackle the problem of scene flow estimation in the context of self-driving. We leverage deep learning techniques as well as strong priors as in our application domain the motion of the scene can be composed by the motion of the robot and the 3D motion of the actors in the scene. We formulate the problem as energy minimization in a deep structured model, which can be solved efficiently in the GPU by unrolling a Gaussian-Newton solver. Our experiments in the challenging KITTI scene flow dataset show that we outperform the state-of-the-art by a very large margin, while being 800 times faster.
SPM-Tracker: Series-Parallel Matching for Real-Time Visual Object Tracking
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

The greatest challenge facing visual object tracking is the simultaneous requirements on robustness and discrimination power. In this paper, we propose a SiamFC-based tracker, named SPM-Tracker, to tackle this challenge. The basic idea is to address the two requirements in two separate matching stages. Robustness is strengthened in the coarse matching (CM) stage through generalized training while discrimination power is enhanced in the fine matching (FM) stage through a distance learning network. The two stages are connected in series as the input proposals of the FM stage are generated by the CM stage. They are also connected in parallel as the matching scores and box location refinements are fused to generate the final results. This innovative series-parallel structure takes advantage of both stages and results in superior performance. The proposed SPM-Tracker, running at 120fps on GPU, achieves an AUC of 0.687 on OTB-100 and an EAO of 0.434 on VOT-16, exceeding other real-time trackers by a notable margin.
Spatial Fusion GAN for Image Synthesis
Venue: Conference CVPR 2019
Year: 2019

Recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown great potentials in realistic image synthesis whereas most existing works address synthesis realism in either appearance space or geometry space but few in both. This paper presents an innovative Spatial Fusion GAN (SF-GAN) that combines a geometry synthesizer and an appearance synthesizer to achieve synthesis realism in both geometry and appearance spaces. The geometry synthesizer learns contextual geometries of background images and transforms and places foreground objects into the background images unanimously. The appearance synthesizer adjusts the color, brightness and styles of the foreground objects and embeds them into background images harmoniously, where a guided filter is introduced for detail preserving. The two synthesizers are inter-connected as mutual references which can be trained end-to-end without supervision. The SF-GAN has been evaluated in two tasks: (1) realistic scene text image synthesis for training better recognition models; (2) glass and hat wearing for realistic matching glasses and hats with real portraits. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons with the state-of-the-art demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SF-GAN.