Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Image Completion with Heterogeneously Filtered Spectral Hints

Image completion with large-scale free-form missing regions is one of the most challenging tasks for the computer vision community. While researchers pursue better solutions, drawbacks such as pattern unawareness, blurry textures, and structure distortion remain noticeable, and thus leave space for improvement. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new StyleGAN-based image completion network, Spectral Hint GAN (SH-GAN), inside which a carefully designed spectral processing module, Spectral Hint Unit, is introduced. We also propose two novel 2D spectral processing strategies, Heterogeneous Filtering and Gaussian Split that well-fit modern deep learning models and may further be extended to other tasks. From our inclusive experiments, we demonstrate that our model can reach FID scores of 3.4134 and 7.0277 on the benchmark datasets FFHQ and Places2, and therefore outperforms prior works and reaches a new state-of-the-art. We also prove the effectiveness of our design via ablation studies, from which one may notice that the aforementioned challenges, i.e. pattern unawareness, blurry textures, and structure distortion, can be noticeably resolved. Our code will be open-sourced at: https://github.com/SHI-Labs/SH-GAN.
Semi-Supervised Learning for Low-light Image Restoration through Quality Assisted Pseudo-Labeling

Convolutional neural networks have been successful in restoring images captured under poor illumination conditions. Nevertheless, such approaches require a large number of paired low-light and ground truth images for training. Thus, we study the problem of semi-supervised learning for low-light image restoration when limited low-light images have ground truth labels. Our main contributions in this work are twofold. We first deploy an ensemble of low-light restoration networks to restore the unlabeled images and generate a set of potential pseudo-labels. We model the contrast distortions in the labeled set to generate different sets of training data and create the ensemble of networks. We then design a contrastive self-supervised learning based image quality measure to obtain the pseudo-label among the images restored by the ensemble. We show that training the restoration network with the pseudo-labels allows us to achieve excellent restoration performance even with very few labeled pairs. We conduct extensive experiments on three popular low-light image restoration datasets to show the superior performance of our semi-supervised low-light image restoration compared to other approaches. Project page is available at https://github.com/sameerIISc/SSL-LLR.
More Knowledge, Less Bias: Unbiasing Scene Graph Generation with Explicit Ontological Adjustment

Scene graph generation (SGG) models seek to detect relationships between objects in a given image. One challenge in this area is the biased distribution of predicates in the dataset and the semantic space. Recent works incorporating knowledge graphs with scene graphs prove effective in improving recall for the tail predicate classes. Moreover, many recent SGG approaches with promising results explicitly redistribute the predicates in both the training process and in the prediction step. To incorporate external knowledge, we construct a commonsense knowledge graph by integrating ConceptNet and Wikidata. To explicitly unbias SGG with knowledge in the reasoning process, we propose a novel framework, Explicit Ontological Adjustment (EOA), to adjust the graph model predictions with knowledge priors. We use the edge matrix from the commonsense knowledge graph as a module in the graph neural network model to refine the relationship detection process. This module proves effective in alleviating the long-tail distribution of predicates. When combined, we show that these modules achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Visual Genome dataset in most cases. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhanwenchen/eoa.
Synthetic Latent Fingerprint Generator

Given a full fingerprint image (rolled or slap), we present CycleGAN models to generate multiple latent impressions of the same identity as the full print. Our models can control the degree of distortion, noise, blurriness and occlusion in the generated latent print images to obtain Good, Bad and Ugly latent image categories as introduced in the NIST SD27 latent database. The contributions of our work are twofold: (i) demonstrate the similarity of synthetically generated latent fingerprint images to crime scene latents in NIST SD27 and MSP databases as evaluated by the NIST NFIQ 2 quality measure and recognition accuracies obtained by a SOTA fingerprint matcher, and (ii) use of synthetic latents to augment small-size latent training databases in the public domain to improve the performance of DeepPrint, a SOTA fingerprint matcher designed for rolled to rolled fingerprint matching on three latent databases (NIST SD27, NIST SD302, and IIITD-SLF). As an example, with synthetic latent data augmentation, the Rank-1 retrieval performance of DeepPrint is improved from 15.50% to 29.07% on challenging NIST SD27 latent database. Our approach for generating synthetic latent fingerprints can be used to improve the recognition performance of any latent matcher and its individual components (e.g., enhancement, segmentation and feature extraction). https://prip-lab.github.io/Synthetic-Latent-Fingerprint-Generator/
Gallery Filter Network for Person Search

In person search, we aim to localize a query person from one scene in other gallery scenes. The cost of this search operation is dependent on the number of gallery scenes, making it beneficial to reduce the pool of likely scenes. We describe and demonstrate the Gallery Filter Network (GFN), a novel module which can efficiently discard gallery scenes from the search process, and benefit scoring for persons detected in remaining scenes. We show that the GFN is robust under a range of different conditions by testing on different retrieval sets, including cross-camera, occluded, and low-resolution scenarios. In addition, we develop the base SeqNeXt person search model, which improves and simplifies the original SeqNet model. We show that the SeqNeXt+GFN combination yields significant performance gains over other state-of-the-art methods on the standard PRW and CUHK-SYSU person search datasets. To aid experimentation for this and other models, we provide standardized tooling for the data processing and evaluation pipeline typically used for person search research.
Instance-Dependent Noisy Label Learning via Graphical Modelling

Noisy labels are unavoidable yet troublesome in the ecosystem of deep learning because models can easily overfit them. There are many types of label noise, such as symmetric, asymmetric and instance-dependent noise (IDN), with IDN being the only type that depends on image information. Such dependence on image information makes IDN a critical type of label noise to study, given that labelling mistakes are caused in large part by insufficient or ambiguous information about the visual classes present in images. Aiming to provide an effective technique to address IDN, we present a new graphical modelling approach called InstanceGM, that combines discriminative and generative models. The main contributions of InstanceGM are: i) the use of the continuous Bernoulli distribution to train the generative model, offering significant training advantages, and ii) the exploration of a state-of-the-art noisy-label discriminative classifier to generate clean labels from instance-dependent noisy-label samples. InstanceGM is competitive with current noisy-label learning approaches, particularly in IDN benchmarks using synthetic and real-world datasets, where our method shows better accuracy than the competitors in most experiments <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
Federated Domain Generalization for Image Recognition via Cross-Client Style Transfer

Domain generalization (DG) has been a hot topic in image recognition, with a goal to train a general model that can perform well on unseen domains. Recently, federated learning (FL), an emerging machine learning paradigm to train a global model from multiple decentralized clients without compromising data privacy, has brought new challenges and possibilities to DG. In the FL scenario, many existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) DG methods become ineffective because they require the centralization of data from different domains during training. In this paper, we propose a novel domain generalization method for image recognition under federated learning through cross-client style transfer (CCST) without exchanging data samples. Our CCST method can lead to more uniform distributions of source clients, and make each local model learn to fit the image styles of all the clients to avoid the different model biases. Two types of style (single image style and overall domain style) with corresponding mechanisms are proposed to be chosen according to different scenarios. Our style representation is exceptionally lightweight and can hardly be used to reconstruct the dataset. The level of diversity is also flexible to be controlled with a hyper-parameter. Our method outperforms recent SOTA DG methods on two DG benchmarks (PACS, OfficeHome) and a large-scale medical image dataset (Camelyon17) in the FL setting. Last but not least, our method is orthogonal to many classic DG methods, achieving additive performance by combined utilization. Our code is available at: https://chenjunming.ml/proj/CCST.
TransVLAD: Multi-Scale Attention-Based Global Descriptors for Visual Geo-Localization

Visual geo-localization remains a challenging task due to variations in the appearance and perspective among captured images. This paper introduces an efficient TransVLAD module, which aggregates attention-based feature maps into a discriminative and compact global descriptor. Unlike existing methods that generate feature maps using only convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we propose a sparse transformer to encode global dependencies and compute attention-based feature maps, which effectively reduces visual ambiguities that occurs in large-scale geo-localization problems. A positional embedding mechanism is used to learn the corresponding geometric configurations between query and gallery images. A grouped VLAD layer is also introduced to reduce the number of parameters, and thus construct an efficient module. Finally, rather than only learning from the global descriptors on entire images, we propose a self-supervised learning method to further encode more information from multi-scale patches between the query and positive gallery images. Extensive experiments on three challenging large-scale datasets indicate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models, and has lower computational complexity. The code is available at: https://github.com/wacv-23/TVLAD.
My Face My Choice: Privacy Enhancing Deepfakes for Social Media Anonymization

Recently, productization of face recognition and identification algorithms have become the most controversial topic about ethical AI. As new policies around digital identities are formed [22], we introduce three face access models in a hypothetical social network, where the user has the power to only appear in photos they approve. Our approach eclipses current tagging systems and replaces unapproved faces with quantitatively dissimilar deepfakes. In addition, we propose new metrics specific for this task, where the deepfake is generated at random with a guaranteed dissimilarity. We explain access models based on strictness of the data flow, and discuss impact of each model on privacy, usability, and performance. We evaluate our system on Facial Descriptor Dataset [61] as the real dataset, and two synthetic datasets with random and equal class distributions. Running seven SOTA face recognizers on our results, MFMC reduces the average accuracy by 61%. Lastly, we extensively analyze similarity metrics, deepfake generators, and datasets in structural, visual, and generative spaces; supporting the design choices and verifying the quality.
MovieCLIP: Visual Scene Recognition in Movies

Longform media such as movies have complex narrative structures, with events spanning a rich variety of ambient visual scenes. Domain specific challenges associated with visual scenes in movies include transitions, person coverage, and a wide array of real-life and fictional scenarios. Existing visual scene datasets in movies have limited taxonomies and don’t consider the visual scene transition within movie clips. In this work, we address the problem of visual scene recognition in movies by first automatically curating a new and extensive movie-centric taxonomy of 179 scene labels derived from movie scripts and auxiliary web-based video datasets. Instead of manual annotations which can be expensive, we use CLIP to weakly label 1.12 million shots from 32K movie clips based on our proposed taxonomy. We provide baseline visual models trained on the weakly labeled dataset called MovieCLIP and evaluate them on an independent dataset verified by human raters. We show that leveraging features from models pretrained on MovieCLIP benefits downstream tasks such as multi-label scene and genre classification of web videos and movie trailers.
Empirical Generalization Study: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation vs. Domain Generalization Methods for Semantic Segmentation in the Wild

For autonomous vehicles and mobile robots to safely operate in the real world, i.e., the wild, scene understanding models should perform well in the many different scenarios that can be encountered. In reality, these scenarios are not all represented in the model’s training data, leading to poor performance. To tackle this, current training strategies attempt to either exploit additional unlabeled data with unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), or to reduce overfitting using the limited available labeled data with domain generalization (DG). However, it is not clear from current literature which of these methods allows for better generalization to unseen data from the wild. Therefore, in this work, we present an evaluation framework in which the generalization capabilities of state-of-the-art UDA and DG methods can be compared fairly. From this evaluation, we find that UDA methods, which leverage unlabeled data, outperform DG methods in terms of generalization, and can deliver similar performance on unseen data as fully-supervised training methods that require all data to be labeled. We show that semantic segmentation performance can be increased up to 30% for a priori unknown data without using any extra labeled data.
Watch Those Words: Video Falsification Detection Using Word-Conditioned Facial Motion

In today’s era of digital misinformation, we are increasingly faced with new threats posed by video falsification techniques. Such falsifications range from cheapfakes (e.g., lookalikes or audio dubbing) to deepfakes (e.g., sophisticated AI media synthesis methods), which are becoming perceptually indistinguishable from real videos. To tackle this challenge, we propose a multi-modal semantic forensic approach to discover clues that go beyond detecting discrepancies in visual quality, thereby handling both simpler cheapfakes and visually persuasive deepfakes. In this work, our goal is to verify that the purported person seen in the video is indeed themselves by detecting anomalous facial movements corresponding to the spoken words. We leverage the idea of attribution to learn person-specific biometric patterns that distinguish a given speaker from others. We use interpretable Action Units (AUs) to capture a person’s face and head movement as opposed to deep CNN features, and we are the first to use word-conditioned facial motion analysis. We further demonstrate our method’s effectiveness on a range of fakes not seen in training including those without video manipulation, that were not addressed in prior work.
Efficient Certificateless Authenticated Key Agreement for Blockchain-Enabled Internet of Medical Things

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) plays an essential role in collecting and managing personal medical data.In recent years, blockchain technology has put power in traditional IoMT systems for data sharing between different medical institutions and improved the utilization of medical data.However, some problems in the information transfer process between wireless medical devices and mobile medical apps, such as information leakage and privacy disclosure.This paper first designs a cross-device key agreement model for blockchain-enabled IoMT.This model can establish a key agreement mechanism for secure medical data sharing.Meanwhile, a certificateless authenticated key agreement (KA) protocol has been proposed to strengthen the information transfer security in the cross-device key agreement model.The proposed KA protocol only requires one exchange of messages between the two parties, which can improve the protocol execution efficiency.Then, any unauthorized tampering of the transmitted signed message sent by the sender can be detected by the receiver, so this can guarantee the success of the establishment of a session key between the strange entities.The blockchain ledger can ensure that the medical data cannot be tampered with, and the certificateless mechanism can weaken the key escrow problem.Moreover, the security proof and performance analysis are given, which show that the proposed model and KA protocol are more secure and efficient than other schemes in similar literature.
3DMM-RF: Convolutional Radiance Fields for 3D Face Modeling

Facial 3D Morphable Models are a main computer vision subject with countless applications and have been highly optimized in the last two decades. The tremendous improvements of deep generative networks have created various possibilities for improving such models and have attracted wide interest. Moreover, the recent advances in neural radiance fields, are revolutionising novel-view synthesis of known scenes. In this work, we present a facial 3D Morphable Model, which exploits both of the above, and can accurately model a subject’s identity, pose and expression and render it in arbitrary illumination. This is achieved by utilizing a powerful deep style-based generator to overcome two main weaknesses of neural radiance fields, their rigidity and rendering speed. We introduce a style-based generative network that synthesizes in one pass all and only the required rendering samples of a neural radiance field. We create a vast labelled synthetic dataset of facial renders, and train the network, so that it can accurately model and generalize on facial identity, pose and appearance. Finally, we show that this model can accurately be fit to "in-the-wild" facial images of arbitrary pose and illumination, extract the facial characteristics, and be used to re-render the face in controllable conditions.
ProtoSeg: Interpretable Semantic Segmentation with Prototypical Parts

We introduce ProtoSeg, a novel model for interpretable semantic image segmentation, which constructs its predictions using similar patches from the training set. To achieve accuracy comparable to baseline methods, we adapt the mechanism of prototypical parts and introduce a diversity loss function that increases the variety of prototypes within each class. We show that ProtoSeg discovers semantic concepts, in contrast to standard segmentation models. Experiments conducted on Pascal VOC and Cityscapes datasets confirm the precision and transparency of the presented method.
Splatting-based Synthesis for Video Frame Interpolation

Frame interpolation is an essential video processing technique that adjusts the temporal resolution of an image sequence. While deep learning has brought great improvements to the area of video frame interpolation, techniques that make use of neural networks can typically not easily be deployed in practical applications like a video editor since they are either computationally too demanding or fail at high resolutions. In contrast, we propose a deep learning approach that solely relies on splatting to synthesize interpolated frames. This splatting-based synthesis for video frame interpolation is not only much faster than similar approaches, especially for multi-frame interpolation, but can also yield new state-of-the-art results at high resolutions.
HyperShot: Few-Shot Learning by Kernel HyperNetworks

Few-shot models aim at making predictions using a minimal number of labeled examples from a given task. The main challenge in this area is the one-shot setting where only one element represents each class. We propose HyperShot - the fusion of kernels and hypernetwork paradigm. Compared to reference approaches that apply a gradientbased adjustment of the parameters, our model aims to switch the classification module parameters depending on the task’s embedding. In practice, we utilize a hypernetwork, which takes the aggregated information from support data and returns the classifier’s parameters handcrafted for the considered problem. Moreover, we introduce the kernel-based representation of the support examples delivered to hypernetwork to create the parameters of the classification module. Consequently, we rely on relations between embeddings of the support examples instead of direct feature values provided by the backbone models. Thanks to this approach, our model can adapt to highly different tasks. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">*</sup>
SAT: Scale-Augmented Transformer for Person Search

Person search is a challenging computer vision problem where the objective is to simultaneously detect and reidentify a target person from the gallery of whole scene images captured from multiple cameras. Here, the challenges related to underlying detection and re-identification tasks need to be addressed along with a joint optimization of these two tasks. In this paper, we propose a three-stage cascaded Scale-Augmented Transformer (SAT) person search framework. In the three-stage design of our SAT framework, the first stage performs person detection whereas the last two stages performs both detection and re-identification. Considering the contradictory nature of detection and re-identification, in the last two stages, we introduce separate norm feature embeddings for the two tasks to reconcile the relationship between them in a joint person search model. Our SAT framework benefits from the attributes of convolutional neural networks and transformers by introducing a convolutional encoder and a scale modulator within each stage. Here, the convolutional encoder increases the generalization ability of the model whereas the scale modulator performs context aggregation at different granularity levels to aid in handling pose/scale variations within a region of interest. To further improve the performance during occlusion, we apply shifting augmentation operations at each granularity level within the scale modulator. Experimental results on challenging CUHK-SYSU [35] and PRW [47] datasets demonstrate the favorable performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our source code and trained models are available at this https URL.