mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Divergence Optimization for Noisy Universal Domain Adaptation
Authors: Atsushi Hashimoto, Yoshitaka Ushiku Qing Yu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) has been proposed to transfer knowledge learned from a label-rich source domain to a label-scarce target domain without any constraints on the label sets. In practice, however, it is difficult to obtain a large amount of perfectly clean labeled data in a source domain with limited resources. Existing UniDA methods rely on source samples with correct annotations, which greatly limits their application in the real world. Hence, we consider a new realistic setting called Noisy UniDA, in which classifiers are trained with noisy labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data with an unknown class distribution from the target domain. This paper introduces a two-head convolutional neural network framework to solve all problems simultaneously. Our network consists of one common feature generator and two classifiers with different decision boundaries. By optimizing the divergence between the two classifiers' outputs, we can detect noisy source samples, find "unknown" classes in the target domain, and align the distribution of the source and target domains. In an extensive evaluation of different domain adaptation settings, the proposed method outperformed existing methods by a large margin in most settings.
Learning Dynamic Alignment via Meta-Filter for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Yanwei Fu, Chen Liu, Chengjie Wang, Jilin Li, Feiyue Huang, Li Zhang, Xiangyang Xue Chengming Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Few-shot learning (FSL), which aims to recognise new classes by adapting the learned knowledge with extremely limited few-shot (support) examples, remains an important open problem in computer vision. Most of the existing methods for feature alignment in few-shot learning only consider image-level or spatial-level alignment while omitting the channel disparity. Our insight is that these methods would lead to poor adaptation with redundant matching, and leveraging channel-wise adjustment is the key to well adapting the learned knowledge to new classes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to learn a dynamic alignment, which can effectively highlight both query regions and channels according to different local support information. Specifically, this is achieved by first dynamically sampling the neighbourhood of the feature position conditioned on the input few shot, based on which we further predict a both position-dependent and channel-dependent Dynamic Meta-filter. The filter is used to align the query feature with position-specific and channel-specific knowledge. Moreover, we adopt Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) to enable a more accurate control of the alignment. In such a sense our model is able to better capture fine-grained semantic context of the few-shot example and thus facilitates dynamical knowledge adaptation for few-shot learning. The resulting framework establishes the new state-of-the-arts on major few-shot visual recognition benchmarks, including miniImageNet and tieredImageNet.
Unsupervised Learning of 3D Object Categories From Videos in the Wild
Authors: Jeremy Reizenstein, Patrick Labatut, Roman Shapovalov, Tobias Ritschel, Andrea Vedaldi, David Novotny Philipp Henzler
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, numerous works have attempted to learn 3D reconstructors of textured 3D models of visual categories given a training set of annotated static images of objects. In this paper, we seek to decrease the amount of needed supervision by leveraging a collection of object-centric videos captured in-the-wild without requiring any manual 3D annotations. Since existing category-centric datasets are insufficient for this problem, we contribute with a large-scale crowd-sourced dataset of object-centric videos suitable for this task. We further propose a novel method that learns via differentiable rendering of a predicted implicit surface of the scene. Here, inspired by classic multi-view stereo methods, our key technical contribution is a novel warp-conditioned implicit shape function, which is robust to the noise in the SfM video reconstructions that supervise our learning. Our evaluation demonstrates performance improvements over several deep monocular reconstruction baselines on 2 existing benchmarks and on our novel dataset.
Exploring Heterogeneous Clues for Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing
Authors: Yi Yang Yu Wu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We investigate the weakly-supervised audio-visual video parsing task, which aims to parse a video into temporal event segments and predict the audible or visible event categories. The task is challenging since there only exist video-level event labels for training, without indicating the temporal boundaries and modalities. Previous works take the overall event labels to supervise both audio and visual model predictions. However, we argue that such overall labels harm the model training due to the audio-visual asynchrony. For example, commentators speak in a basketball video, but we cannot visually find the speakers. In this paper, we tackle this issue by leveraging the cross-modal correspondence of audio and visual signals. We generate reliable event labels individually for each modality by swapping audio and visual tracks with other unrelated videos. If the original visual/audio data contain event clues, the event prediction from the newly assembled data would still be highly confident. In this way, we could protect our models from being misled by ambiguous event labels. In addition, we propose the cross-modal audio-visual contrastive learning to induce temporal difference on attention models within videos, i.e., urging the model to pick the current temporal segment from all context candidates. Experiments show we outperform state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Dogfight: Detecting Drones From Drones Videos
Authors: Waqas Sultani, Mubarak Shah Muhammad Waseem Ashraf
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: As airborne vehicles are becoming more autonomous and ubiquitous, it has become vital to develop the capability to detect the objects in their surroundings. This paper attempts to address the problem of drones detection from other flying drones. The erratic movement of the source and target drones, small size, arbitrary shape, large intensity variations, and occlusion make this problem quite challenging. In this scenario, region-proposal based methods are not able to capture sufficient discriminative foreground-background information. Also, due to the extremely small size and complex motion of the source and target drones, feature aggregation based methods are unable to perform well. To handle this, instead of using region-proposal based methods, we propose to use a two-stage segmentation-based approach employing spatio-temporal attention cues. During the first stage, given the overlapping frame regions, detailed contextual information is captured over convolution feature maps using pyramid pooling. After that pixel and channel-wise attention is enforced on the feature maps to ensure accurate drone localization. In the second stage, first stage detections are verified and new probable drone locations are explored. To discover new drone locations, motion boundaries are used. This is followed by tracking candidate drone detections for a few frames, cuboid formation, extraction of the 3D convolution feature map, and drones detection within each cuboid. The proposed approach is evaluated on two publicly available drone detection datasets and outperforms over several competitive baselines.
PAUL: Procrustean Autoencoder for Unsupervised Lifting
Authors: Simon Lucey Chaoyang Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent success in casting Non-rigid Structure from Motion (NRSfM) as an unsupervised deep learning problem has raised fundamental questions about what novelty in NRSfM prior could the deep learning offer. In this paper we advocate for a 3D deep auto-encoder framework to be used explicitly as the NRSfM prior. The framework is unique as: (i) it learns the 3D auto-encoder weights solely from 2D projected measurements, and (ii) it is Procrustean in that it jointly resolves the unknown rigid pose for each shape instance. We refer to this architecture as a Procustean Autoencoder for Unsupervised Lifting (PAUL), and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across a number of benchmarks in comparison to recent innovations such as Deep NRSfM and C3PDO.
Group Collaborative Learning for Co-Salient Object Detection
Authors: Deng-Ping Fan, Huazhu Fu, Chi-Keung Tang, Ling Shao, Yu-Wing Tai Qi Fan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel group collaborative learning framework (GCNet) capable of detecting co-salient objects in real time (16ms), by simultaneously mining consensus representations at group level based on the two necessary criteria: 1) intra-group compactness to better formulate the consistency among co-salient objects by capturing their inherent shared attributes using our novel group affinity module; 2) inter-group separability to effectively suppress the influence of noisy objects on the output by introducing our new group collaborating module conditioning the inconsistent consensus. To learn a better embedding space without extra computational overhead, we explicitly employ auxiliary classification supervision. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks, i.e., CoCA, CoSOD3k, and Cosal2015, demonstrate that our simple GCNet outperforms 10 cutting-edge models and achieves the new state-of-the-art. We demonstrate this paper's new technical contributions on a number of important downstream computer vision applications including content aware co-segmentation, co-localization based automatic thumbnails, etc. Our research code with two applications will be released.
RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening
Authors: Sanghun Jung, Huiwon Yun, Joanne T. Kim, Seungryong Kim, Jaegul Choo Sungha Choi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Enhancing the generalization capability of deep neural networks to unseen domains is crucial for safety-critical applications in the real world such as autonomous driving. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel instance selective whitening loss to improve the robustness of the segmentation networks for unseen domains. Our approach disentangles the domain-specific style and domain-invariant content encoded in higher-order statistics (i.e., feature covariance) of the feature representations and selectively removes only the style information causing domain shift. As shown in Fig. 1, our method provides reasonable predictions for (a) low-illuminated, (b) rainy, and (c) unseen structures. These types of images are not included in the training dataset, where the baseline shows a significant performance drop, contrary to ours. Being simple yet effective, our approach improves the robustness of various backbone networks without additional computational cost. We conduct extensive experiments in urban-scene segmentation and show the superiority of our approach to existing work.
Monocular Real-Time Full Body Capture With Inter-Part Correlations
Authors: Marc Habermann, Ikhsanul Habibie, Ayush Tewari, Christian Theobalt, Feng Xu Yuxiao Zhou
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present the first method for real-time full body capture that estimates shape and motion of body and hands together with a dynamic 3D face model from a single color image. Our approach uses a new neural network architecture that exploits correlations between body and hands at high computational efficiency. Unlike previous works, our approach is jointly trained on multiple datasets focusing on hand, body or face separately, without requiring data where all the parts are annotated at the same time, which is much more difficult to create at sufficient variety. The possibility of such multi-dataset training enables superior generalization ability. In contrast to earlier monocular full body methods, our approach captures more expressive 3D face geometry and color by estimating the shape, expression, albedo and illumination parameters of a statistical face model. Our method achieves competitive accuracy on public benchmarks, while being significantly faster and providing more complete face reconstructions.
Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer
Authors: Yunhe Wang, Tianyu Guo, Chang Xu, Yiping Deng, Zhenhua Liu, Siwei Ma, Chunjing Xu, Chao Xu, Wen Gao Hanting Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: As the computing power of modern hardware is increasing strongly, pre-trained deep learning models (e.g., BERT, GPT-3) learned on large-scale datasets have shown their effectiveness over conventional methods. The big progress is mainly contributed to the representation ability of transformer and its variant architectures. In this paper, we study the low-level computer vision task (e.g., denoising, super-resolution and deraining) and develop a new pre-trained model, namely, image processing transformer (IPT). To maximally excavate the capability of transformer, we present to utilize the well-known ImageNet benchmark for generating a large amount of corrupted image pairs. The IPT model is trained on these images with multi-heads and multi-tails. In addition, the constructive learning is introduced for well adapting to different image processing tasks. The pre-trained model can therefore efficiently employed on desired task after fine-tuning. With only one pre-trained model, IPT outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on various low-level benchmarks. Code is available at https://gitee.com/mindspore/mindspore/tree/master/model_zoo/research/cv/IPT
Robust and Accurate Object Detection via Adversarial Learning
Authors: Cihang Xie, Mingxing Tan, Li Zhang, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Boqing Gong Xiangning Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Data augmentation has become a de facto component for training high-performance deep image classifiers, but its potential is under-explored for object detection. Noting that most state-of-the-art object detectors benefit from fine-tuning a pre-trained classifier, we first study how the classifiers' gains from various data augmentations transfer to object detection. The results are discouraging; the gains diminish after fine-tuning in terms of either accuracy or robustness. This work instead augments the fine-tuning stage for object detectors by exploring adversarial examples, which can be viewed as a model-dependent data augmentation. Our method dynamically selects the stronger adversarial images sourced from a detector's classification and localization branches and evolves with the detector to ensure the augmentation policy stays current and relevant. This model-dependent augmentation generalizes to different object detectors better than AutoAugment, a model-agnostic augmentation policy searched based on one particular detector. Our approach boosts the performance of state-of-the-art EfficientDets by +1.1 mAP on the COCO object detection benchmark. It also improves the detectors' robustness against natural distortions by +3.8 mAP and against domain shift by +1.3 mAP.
Faster Meta Update Strategy for Noise-Robust Deep Learning
Authors: Linchao Zhu, Lu Jiang, Yi Yang Youjiang Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: It has been shown that deep neural networks are prone to overfitting on biased training data. Towards addressing this issue, meta-learning employs a meta model for correcting the training bias. Despite the promising performances, super slow training is currently the bottleneck in the meta learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce a novel Faster Meta Update Strategy (FaMUS) to replace the most expensive step in the meta gradient computation with a faster layer-wise approximation. We empirically find that FaMUS yields not only a reasonably accurate but also a low-variance approximation of the meta gradient. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the proposed method on two tasks. We show our method is able to save two-thirds of the training time while still maintaining the comparable or achieving even better generalization performance. In particular, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and realistic noisy labels, and obtains promising performance on long-tailed recognition on standard benchmarks. Code are released at https://github.com/youjiangxu/FaMUS.
ContactOpt: Optimizing Contact To Improve Grasps
Authors: Chengcheng Tang, Christopher D. Twigg, Minh Vo, Samarth Brahmbhatt, Charles C. Kemp Patrick Grady
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Physical contact between hands and objects plays a critical role in human grasps. We show that optimizing the pose of a hand to achieve expected contact with an object can improve hand poses inferred via image-based methods. Given a hand mesh and an object mesh, a deep model trained on ground truth contact data infers desirable contact across the surfaces of the meshes. Then, ContactOpt efficiently optimizes the pose of the hand to achieve desirable contact using a differentiable contact model. Notably, our contact model encourages mesh interpenetration to approximate deformable soft tissue in the hand. In our evaluations, our methods result in grasps that better match ground truth contact, have lower kinematic error, and are significantly preferred by human participants. Code and models are available online.
Panoptic-PolarNet: Proposal-Free LiDAR Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Yang Zhang, Hassan Foroosh Zixiang Zhou
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Panoptic segmentation presents a new challenge in exploiting the merits of both detection and segmentation, with the aim of unifying instance segmentation and semantic segmentation in a single framework. However, an efficient solution for panoptic segmentation in the emerging domain of LiDAR point cloud is still an open research problem and is very much under-explored. In this paper, we present a fast and robust LiDAR point cloud panoptic segmentation framework, referred to as Panoptic-PolarNet. We learn both semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance clustering in a single inference network using a polar Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation, enabling us to circumvent the issue of occlusion among instances in urban street scenes. To improve our network's learnability, we also propose an adapted instance augmentation technique and a novel adversarial point cloud pruning method. Our experiments show that Panoptic-PolarNet outperforms the baseline methods on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets with an almost real-time inference speed. Panoptic-PolarNet achieved 54.1% PQ in the public SemanticKITTI panoptic segmentation leaderboard and leading performance for the validation set of nuScenes.
Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Wei Zhang, Jun Wang Yuang Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can tackle the challenge that convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches for semantic segmentation heavily rely on the pixel-level annotated data, which is labor-intensive. However, existing UDA approaches in this regard inevitably require the full access to source datasets to reduce the gap between the source and target domains during model adaptation, which are impractical in the real scenarios where the source datasets are private, and thus cannot be released along with the well-trained source models. To cope with this issue, we propose a source-free domain adaptation framework for semantic segmentation, namely SFDA, in which only a well-trained source model and an unlabeled target domain dataset are available for adaptation. SFDA not only enables to recover and preserve the source domain knowledge from the source model via knowledge transfer during model adaptation, but also distills valuable information from the target domain for self-supervised learning. The pixel- and patch-level optimization objectives tailored for semantic segmentation are seamlessly integrated in the framework. The extensive experimental results on numerous benchmark datasets highlight the effectiveness of our framework against the existing UDA approaches relying on source data.
Adaptive Weighted Discriminator for Training Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Qiang Cheng, Qiang Ye Vasily Zadorozhnyy
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Generative adversarial network (GAN) has become one of the most important neural network models for classical unsupervised machine learning. A variety of discriminator loss functions have been developed to train GAN's discriminators and they all have a common structure: a sum of real and fake losses that only depends on the actual and generated data respectively. One challenge associated with an equally weighted sum of two losses is that the training may benefit one loss but harm the other, which we show causes instability and mode collapse. In this paper, we introduce a new family of discriminator loss functions that adopts a weighted sum of real and fake parts, which we call adaptive weighted loss functions or aw-loss functions. Using the gradients of the real and fake parts of the loss, we can adaptively choose weights to train a discriminator in the direction that benefits the GAN's stability. Our method can be potentially applied to any discriminator model with a loss that is a sum of the real and fake parts. Experiments validated the effectiveness of our loss functions on unconditional and conditional image generation tasks, improving the baseline results by a significant margin on CIFAR-10, STL-10, and CIFAR-100 datasets in Inception Scores (IS) and Frechet Inception Distance (FID) metrics.
Depth From Camera Motion and Object Detection
Authors: Jason J. Corso Brent A. Griffin
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of learning to estimate the depth of detected objects given some measurement of camera motion (e.g., from robot kinematics or vehicle odometry). We achieve this by 1) designing a recurrent neural network (DBox) that estimates the depth of objects using a generalized representation of bounding boxes and uncalibrated camera movement and 2) introducing the Object Depth via Motion and Detection Dataset (ODMD). ODMD training data are extensible and configurable, and the ODMD benchmark includes 21,600 examples across four validation and test sets. These sets include mobile robot experiments using an end-effector camera to locate objects from the YCB dataset and examples with perturbations added to camera motion or bounding box data. In addition to the ODMD benchmark, we evaluate DBox in other monocular application domains, achieving state-of-the-art results on existing driving and robotics benchmarks and estimating the depth of objects using a camera phone.
PPR10K: A Large-Scale Portrait Photo Retouching Dataset With Human-Region Mask and Group-Level Consistency
Authors: Hui Zeng, Miaomiao Cui, Xuansong Xie, Lei Zhang Jie Liang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Different from general photo retouching tasks, portrait photo retouching (PPR), which aims to enhance the visual quality of a collection of flat-looking portrait photos, has its special and practical requirements such as human-region priority (HRP) and group-level consistency (GLC). HRP requires that more attention should be paid to human regions, while GLC requires that a group of portrait photos should be retouched to a consistent tone. Models trained on existing general photo retouching datasets, however, can hardly meet these requirements of PPR. To facilitate the research on this high-frequency task, we construct a large-scale PPR dataset, namely PPR10K, which is the first of its kind to our best knowledge. PPR10K contains 1, 681 groups and 11, 161 high-quality raw portrait photos in total. High-resolution segmentation masks of human regions are provided. Each raw photo is retouched by three experts, while they elaborately adjust each group of photos to have consistent tones. We define a set of objective measures to evaluate the performance of PPR and propose strategies to learn PPR models with good HRP and GLC performance. The constructed PPR10K dataset provides a good benchmark for studying automatic PPR methods, and experiments demonstrate that the proposed learning strategies are effective to improve the retouching performance. Datasets and codes are available: https://github.com/csjliang/PPR10K.
Transformation Driven Visual Reasoning
Authors: Yanyan Lan, Liang Pang, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng Xin Hong
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper defines a new visual reasoning paradigm by introducing an important factor, i.e. transformation. The motivation comes from the fact that most existing visual reasoning tasks, such as CLEVR in VQA, are solely defined to test how well the machine understands the concepts and relations within static settings, like one image. We argue that this kind of state driven visual reasoning approach has limitations in reflecting whether the machine has the ability to infer the dynamics between different states, which has been shown as important as state-level reasoning for human cognition in Piaget's theory. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel transformation driven visual reasoning task. Given both the initial and final states, the target is to infer the corresponding single-step or multi-step transformation, represented as a triplet (object, attribute, value) or a sequence of triplets, respectively. Following this definition, a new dataset namely TRANCE is constructed on the basis of CLEVR, including three levels of settings, i.e. Basic (single-step transformation), Event (multi-step transformation), and View (multi-step transformation with variant views). Experimental results show that the state-of-the-art visual reasoning models perform well on Basic, but are still far from human-level intelligence on Event and View. We believe the proposed new paradigm will boost the development of machine visual reasoning. More advanced methods and real data need to be investigated in this direction. The resource of TVR is available at https://hongxin2019.github.io/TVR.
Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection With Learnable Proposals
Authors: Rufeng Zhang, Yi Jiang, Tao Kong, Chenfeng Xu, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Lei Li, Zehuan Yuan, Changhu Wang, Ping Luo Peize Sun
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present Sparse R-CNN, a purely sparse method for object detection in images. Existing works on object detection heavily rely on dense object candidates, such as k anchor boxes pre-defined on all grids of image feature map of size HxW. In our method, however, a fixed sparse set of learned object proposals, total length of N, are provided to object recognition head to perform classification and location. By eliminating HWk (up to hundreds of thousands) hand-designed object candidates to N (e.g. 100) learnable proposals, Sparse R-CNN completely avoids all efforts related to object candidates design and many-to-one label assignment. More importantly, final predictions are directly output without non-maximum suppression post-procedure. Sparse R-CNN demonstrates accuracy, run-time and training convergence performance on par with the well-established detector baselines on the challenging COCO dataset, e.g., achieving 45.0 AP in standard 3x training schedule and running at 22 fps using ResNet-50 FPN model. We hope our work could inspire re-thinking the convention of dense prior in object detectors. The code is available at: https://github.com/PeizeSun/SparseR-CNN.
Plan2Scene: Converting Floorplans to 3D Scenes
Authors: Qirui Wu, Yasutaka Furukawa, Angel X. Chang, Manolis Savva Madhawa Vidanapathirana
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We address the task of converting a floorplan and a set of associated photos of a residence into a textured 3D mesh model, a task which we call Plan2Scene. Our system 1) lifts a floorplan image to a 3D mesh model; 2) synthesizes surface textures based on the input photos; and 3) infers textures for unobserved surfaces using a graph neural network architecture. To train and evaluate our system we create indoor surface texture datasets, and augment a dataset of floorplans and photos from prior work with rectified surface crops and additional annotations. Our approach handles the challenge of producing tileable textures for dominant surfaces such as floors, walls, and ceilings from a sparse set of unaligned photos that only partially cover the residence. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our system produces realistic 3D interior models, outperforming baseline approaches on a suite of texture quality metrics and as measured by a holistic user study.
Towards Semantic Segmentation of Urban-Scale 3D Point Clouds: A Dataset, Benchmarks and Challenges
Authors: Bo Yang, Sheikh Khalid, Wen Xiao, Niki Trigoni, Andrew Markham Qingyong Hu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: An essential prerequisite for unleashing the potential of supervised deep learning algorithms in the area of 3D scene understanding is the availability of large-scale and richly annotated datasets. However, publicly available datasets are either in relatively small spatial scales or have limited semantic annotations due to the expensive cost of data acquisition and data annotation, which severely limits the development of fine-grained semantic understanding in the context of 3D point clouds. In this paper, we present an urban-scale photogrammetric point cloud dataset with nearly three billion richly annotated points, which is three times the number of labeled points than the existing largest photogrammetric point cloud dataset. Our dataset consists of large areas from three UK cities, covering about 7.6 km^2 of the city landscape. In the dataset, each 3D point is labeled as one of 13 semantic classes. We extensively evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms on our dataset and provide a comprehensive analysis of the results. In particular, we identify several key challenges towards urban-scale point cloud understanding. The dataset is available at https://github.com/QingyongHu/SensatUrban.
Towards Open World Object Detection
Authors: Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Vineeth N Balasubramanian K J Joseph
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call OREO: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyse the efficacy of OREO in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterising unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
Conditional Bures Metric for Domain Adaptation
Authors: Chuan-Xian Ren You-Wei Luo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: As a vital problem in classification-oriented transfer, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has attracted widespread attention in recent years. Previous UDA methods assume the marginal distributions of different domains are shifted while ignoring the discriminant information in the label distributions. This leads to classification performance degeneration in real applications. In this work, we focus on the conditional distribution shift problem which is of great concern to current conditional invariant models. We aim to seek a kernel covariance embedding for conditional distribution which remains yet unexplored. Theoretically, we propose the Conditional Kernel Bures (CKB) metric for characterizing conditional distribution discrepancy, and derive an empirical estimation for the CKB metric without introducing the implicit kernel feature map. It provides an interpretable approach to understand the knowledge transfer mechanism. The established consistency theory of the empirical estimation provides a theoretical guarantee for convergence. A conditional distribution matching network is proposed to learn the conditional invariant and discriminative features for UDA. Extensive experiments and analysis show the superiority of our proposed model.
DatasetGAN: Efficient Labeled Data Factory With Minimal Human Effort
Authors: Huan Ling, Jun Gao, Kangxue Yin, Jean-Francois Lafleche, Adela Barriuso, Antonio Torralba, Sanja Fidler Yuxuan Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We introduce DatasetGAN: an automatic procedure to generate massive datasets of high-quality semantically segmented images requiring minimal human effort. Current deep networks are extremely data-hungry, benefiting from training on large-scale datasets, which are time-consuming to annotate. Our method relies on the power of recent GANs to generate realistic images. We show how the GAN latent code can be decoded to produce a semantic segmentation of the image. Training the decoder only needs a few labeled examples to generalize to the rest of the latent space, resulting in an infinite annotated dataset generator! These generated datasets can then be used for training any computer vision architecture just as real datasets are. As only a few images need to be manually segmented, it becomes possible to annotate images in extreme detail and generate datasets with rich object and part segmentations. To showcase the power of our approach, we generated datasets for 7 image segmentation tasks which include pixel-level labels for 34 human face parts, and 32 car parts. Our approach outperforms all semi-supervised baselines significantly and is on par with fully supervised methods using labor-intensive annotations.
Repurposing GANs for One-Shot Semantic Part Segmentation
Authors: Pitchaporn Rewatbowornwong, Supasorn Suwajanakorn Nontawat Tritrong
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While GANs have shown success in realistic image generation, the idea of using GANs for other tasks unrelated to synthesis is underexplored. Do GANs learn meaningful structural parts of objects during their attempt to reproduce those objects? In this work, we test this hypothesis and propose a simple and effective approach based on GANs for semantic part segmentation that requires as few as one label example along with an unlabeled dataset. Our key idea is to leverage a trained GAN to extract a pixel-wise representation from the input image and use it as feature vectors for a segmentation network. Our experiments demonstrate that this GAN-derived representation is "readily discriminative" and produces surprisingly good results that are comparable to those from supervised baselines trained with significantly more labels. We believe this novel repurposing of GANs underlies a new class of unsupervised representation learning, which can generalize to many other tasks.
Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation With Interactions in Time
Authors: Hanwen Jiang, Jiarui Xu, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang Shaowei Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Estimating 3D hand and object pose from a single image is an extremely challenging problem: hands and objects are often self-occluded during interactions, and the 3D annotations are scarce as even humans cannot directly label the ground-truths from a single image perfectly. To tackle these challenges, we propose a unified framework for estimating the 3D hand and object poses with semi-supervised learning. We build a joint learning framework where we perform explicit contextual reasoning between hand and object representations. Going beyond limited 3D annotations in a single image, we leverage the spatial-temporal consistency in large-scale hand-object videos as a constraint for generating pseudo labels in semi-supervised learning. Our method not only improves hand pose estimation in challenging real-world dataset, but also substantially improve the object pose which has fewer ground-truths per instance. By training with large-scale diverse videos, our model also generalizes better across multiple out-of-domain datasets. Project page and code: https://stevenlsw.github.io/Semi-Hand-Object
Cyclic Co-Learning of Sounding Object Visual Grounding and Sound Separation
Authors: Di Hu, Chenliang Xu Yapeng Tian
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: There are rich synchronized audio and visual events in our daily life. Inside the events, audio scenes are associated with the corresponding visual objects; meanwhile, sounding objects can indicate and help to separate their individual sounds in the audio track. Based on this observation, in this paper, we propose a cyclic co-learning (CCoL) paradigm that can jointly learn sounding object visual grounding and audio-visual sound separation in a unified framework. Concretely, we can leverage grounded object-sound relations to improve the results of sound separation. Meanwhile, benefiting from discriminative information from separated sounds, we improve training example sampling for sounding object grounding, which builds a co-learning cycle for the two tasks and makes them mutually beneficial. Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms the compared recent approaches on both tasks, and they can benefit from each other with our cyclic co-learning. The source code and pre-trained models are released in https://github.com/YapengTian/CCOL-CVPR21.
Digital Gimbal: End-to-End Deep Image Stabilization With Learnable Exposure Times
Authors: Matan Jacoby, Alex M. Bronstein Omer Dahary
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Mechanical image stabilization using actuated gimbals enables capturing long-exposure shots without suffering from blur due to camera motion. These devices, however, are often physically cumbersome and expensive, limiting their widespread use. In this work, we propose to digitally emulate a mechanically stabilized system from the input of a fast unstabilized camera. To exploit the trade-off between motion blur at long exposures and low SNR at short exposures, we train a CNN that estimates a sharp high-SNR image by aggregating a burst of noisy short-exposure frames, related by unknown motion. We further suggest learning the burst's exposure times in an end-to-end manner, thus balancing the noise and blur across the frames. We demonstrate this method's advantage over the traditional approach of deblurring a single image or denoising a fixed-exposure burst on both synthetic and real data.
Rethinking Text Segmentation: A Novel Dataset and a Text-Specific Refinement Approach
Authors: Zhifei Zhang, Zhaowen Wang, Brian Price, Zhonghao Wang, Humphrey Shi Xingqian Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Text segmentation is a prerequisite in many real-world text-related tasks, e.g., text style transfer, and scene text removal. However, facing the lack of high-quality datasets and dedicated investigations, this critical prerequisite has been left as an assumption in many works, and has been largely overlooked by current research. To bridge this gap, we proposed TextSeg, a large-scale fine-annotated text dataset with six types of annotations: word- and character-wise bounding polygons, masks, and transcriptions. We also introduce Text Refinement Network (TexRNet), a novel text segmentation approach that adapts to the unique properties of text, e.g. non-convex boundary, diverse texture, etc., which often impose burdens on traditional segmentation models. In our TexRNet, we propose text-specific network designs to address such challenges, including key features pooling and attention-based similarity checking. We also introduce trimap and discriminator losses that show significant improvement in text segmentation. Extensive experiments are carried out on both our TextSeg dataset and other existing datasets. We demonstrate that TexRNet consistently improves text segmentation performance by nearly 2% compared to other state-of-the-art segmentation methods. Our dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Rethinking-Text-Segmentation.
SUTD-TrafficQA: A Question Answering Benchmark and an Efficient Network for Video Reasoning Over Traffic Events
Authors: He Huang, Jun Liu Li Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Traffic event cognition and reasoning in videos is an important task that has a wide range of applications in intelligent transportation, assisted driving, and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we create a novel dataset, SUTD-TrafficQA (Traffic Question Answering), which takes the form of video QA based on the collected 10,080 in-the-wild videos and annotated 62,535 QA pairs, for benchmarking the cognitive capability of causal inference and event understanding models in complex traffic scenarios. Specifically, we propose 6 challenging reasoning tasks corresponding to various traffic scenarios, so as to evaluate the reasoning capability over different kinds of complex yet practical traffic events. Moreover, we propose Eclipse, a novel Efficient glimpse network via dynamic inference, in order to achieve computation-efficient and reliable video reasoning. The experiments show that our method achieves superior performance while reducing the computation cost significantly.
T2VLAD: Global-Local Sequence Alignment for Text-Video Retrieval
Authors: Linchao Zhu, Yi Yang Xiaohan Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Text-video retrieval is a challenging task that aims to search relevant video contents based on natural language descriptions. The key to this problem is to measure text-video similarities in a joint embedding space. However, most existing methods only consider the global cross-modal similarity and overlook the local details. Some works incorporate the local comparisons through cross-modal local matching and reasoning. These complex operations introduce tremendous computation. In this paper, we design an efficient global-local alignment method. The multi-modal video sequences and text features are adaptively aggregated with a set of shared semantic centers. The local cross-modal similarities are computed between the video feature and text feature within the same center. This design enables the meticulous local comparison and reduces the computational cost of the interaction between each text-video pair. Moreover, a global alignment method is proposed to provide a global cross-modal measurement that is complementary to the local perspective. The global aggregated visual features also provide additional supervision, which is indispensable to the optimization of the learnable semantic centers. We achieve consistent improvements on three standard text-video retrieval benchmarks and outperform the state-of-the-art by a clear margin.
Privacy-Preserving Image Features via Adversarial Affine Subspace Embeddings
Authors: Johannes L. Schonberger, Sudipta N. Sinha, Marc Pollefeys Mihai Dusmanu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many computer vision systems require users to upload image features to the cloud for processing and storage. These features can be exploited to recover sensitive information about the scene or subjects, e.g., by reconstructing the appearance of the original image. To address this privacy concern, we propose a new privacy-preserving feature representation. The core idea of our work is to drop constraints from each feature descriptor by embedding it within an affine subspace containing the original feature as well as adversarial feature samples. Feature matching on the privacy-preserving representation is enabled based on the notion of subspace-to-subspace distance. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and its high practical relevance for the applications of visual localization and mapping as well as face authentication. Compared to the original features, our approach makes it significantly more difficult for an adversary to recover private information.