mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning Continuous Image Representation With Local Implicit Image Function
Authors: Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang Yinbo Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: How to represent an image? While the visual world is presented in a continuous manner, machines store and see the images in a discrete way with 2D arrays of pixels. In this paper, we seek to learn a continuous representation for images. Inspired by the recent progress in 3D reconstruction with implicit neural representation, we propose Local Implicit Image Function (LIIF), which takes an image coordinate and the 2D deep features around the coordinate as inputs, predicts the RGB value at a given coordinate as an output. Since the coordinates are continuous, LIIF can be presented in arbitrary resolution. To generate the continuous representation for images, we train an encoder with LIIF representation via a self-supervised task with super-resolution. The learned continuous representation can be presented in arbitrary resolution even extrapolate to x30 higher resolution, where the training tasks are not provided. We further show that LIIF representation builds a bridge between discrete and continuous representation in 2D, it naturally supports the learning tasks with size-varied image ground-truths and significantly outperforms the method with resizing the ground-truths.
Locally Aware Piecewise Transformation Fields for 3D Human Mesh Registration
Authors: Andreas Geiger, Siyu Tang Shaofei Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Registering point clouds of dressed humans to parametric human models is a challenging task in computer vision. Traditional approaches often rely on heavily engineered pipelines that require accurate manual initialization of human poses and tedious post-processing. More recently, learning-based methods are proposed in hope to automate this process. We observe that pose initialization is key to accurate registration but existing methods often fail to provide accurate pose initialization. One major obstacle is that, despite recent effort on rotation representation learning in neural networks, regressing joint rotations from point clouds or images of humans is still very challenging. To this end, we propose novel piecewise transformation fields (PTF), a set of functions that learn 3D translation vectors to map any query point in posed space to its correspond position in rest-pose space. We combine PTF with multi-class occupancy networks, obtaining a novel learning-based framework that learns to simultaneously predict shape and per-point correspondences between the posed space and the canonical space for clothed human. Our key insight is that the translation vector for each query point can be effectively estimated using the point-aligned local features; consequently, rigid per bone transformations and joint rotations can be obtained efficiently via a least-square fitting given the estimated point correspondences, circumventing the challenging task of directly regressing joint rotations from neural networks. Furthermore, the proposed PTF facilitate canonicalized occupancy estimation, which greatly improves generalization capability and result in more accurate surface reconstruction with only half of the parameters compared with the state-of-the-art. Both qualitative and quantitative studies show that fitting parametric models with poses initialized by our network results in much better registration quality, especially for extreme poses.
Graph Attention Tracking
Authors: Yanyan Shao, Ying Cui, Zhenhua Wang, Liyan Zhang, Chunhua Shen Dongyan Guo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Siamese network based trackers formulate the visual tracking task as a similarity matching problem. Almost all popular Siamese trackers realize the similarity learning via convolutional feature cross-correlation between a target branch and a search branch. However, since the size of target feature region needs to be pre-fixed, these cross-correlation base methods suffer from either reserving much adverse background information or missing a great deal of foreground information. Moreover, the global matching between the target and search region also largely neglects the target structure and part-level information. In this paper, to solve the above issues, we propose a simple target-aware Siamese graph attention network for general object tracking. We propose to establish part-to-part correspondence between the target and the search region with a complete bipartite graph, and apply the graph attention mechanism to propagate target information from the template feature to the search feature. Further, instead of using the pre-fixed region cropping for template-feature-area selection, we investigate a target-aware area selection mechanism to fit the size and aspect ratio variations of different objects. Experiments on challenging benchmarks including GOT-10k, UAV123, OTB-100 and LaSOT demonstrate that the proposed SiamGAT outperforms many state-of-the-art trackers and achieves leading performance. Code is available at: https://git.io/SiamGAT
ReDet: A Rotation-Equivariant Detector for Aerial Object Detection
Authors: Jian Ding, Nan Xue, Gui-Song Xia Jiaming Han
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, object detection in aerial images has gained much attention in computer vision. Different from objects in natural images, aerial objects are often distributed with arbitrary orientation. Therefore, the detector requires more parameters to encode the orientation information, which are often highly redundant and inefficient. Moreover, as ordinary CNNs do not explicitly model the orientation variation, large amounts of rotation augmented data is needed to train an accurate object detector. In this paper, we propose a Rotation-equivariant Detector (ReDet) to address these issues, which explicitly encodes rotation equivariance and rotation invariance. More precisely, we incorporate rotation-equivariant networks into the detector to extract rotation-equivariant features, which can accurately predict the orientation and lead to a huge reduction of model size. Based on the rotation-equivariant features, we also present Rotation-invariant RoI Align (RiRoI Align), which adaptively extracts rotation-invariant features from equivariant features according to the orientation of RoI. Extensive experiments on several challenging aerial image datasets DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5 and HRSC2016, show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the task of aerial object detection. Compared with previous best results, our ReDet gains 1.2, 3.5 and 2.6 mAP on DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5 and HRSC2016 respectively while reducing the number of parameters by 60% (313 Mb vs. 121 Mb). The code is available at: https://github.com/csuhan/ReDet.
Action Shuffle Alternating Learning for Unsupervised Action Segmentation
Authors: Sinisa Todorovic Jun Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper addresses unsupervised action segmentation. Prior work captures the frame-level temporal structure of videos by a feature embedding that encodes time locations of frames in the video. We advance prior work with a new self-supervised learning (SSL) of a feature embedding that accounts for both frame- and action-level structure of videos. Our SSL trains an RNN to recognize positive and negative action sequences, and the RNN's hidden layer is taken as our new action-level feature embedding. The positive and negative sequences consist of action segments sampled from videos, where in the former the sampled action segments respect their time ordering in the video, and in the latter they are shuffled. As supervision of actions is not available and our SSL requires access to action segments, we specify an HMM that explicitly models action lengths, and infer a MAP action segmentation with the Viterbi algorithm. The resulting action segmentation is used as pseudo-ground truth for estimating our action-level feature embedding and updating the HMM. We alternate the above steps within the Generalized EM framework, which ensures convergence. Our evaluation on the Breakfast, YouTube Instructions, and 50Salads datasets gives superior results to those of the state of the art.
Progressive Modality Reinforcement for Human Multimodal Emotion Recognition From Unaligned Multimodal Sequences
Authors: Xiang Chen, Yanyong Huang, Lixin Duan, Guosheng Lin Fengmao Lv
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Human multimodal emotion recognition involves time-series data of different modalities, such as natural language, visual motions, and acoustic behaviors. Due to the variable sampling rates for sequences from different modalities, the collected multimodal streams are usually unaligned. The asynchrony across modalities increases the difficulty on conducting efficient multimodal fusion. Hence, this work mainly focuses on multimodal fusion from unaligned multimodal sequences. To this end, we propose the Progressive Modality Reinforcement (PMR) approach based on the recent advances of crossmodal transformer. Our approach introduces a message hub to exchange information with each modality. The message hub sends common messages to each modality and reinforces their features via crossmodal attention. In turn, it also collects the reinforced features from each modality and uses them to generate a reinforced common message. By repeating the cycle process, the common message and the modalities' features can progressively complement each other. Finally, the reinforced features are used to make predictions for human emotion. Comprehensive experiments on different human multimodal emotion recognition benchmarks clearly demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
OpenMix: Reviving Known Knowledge for Discovering Novel Visual Categories in an Open World
Authors: Linchao Zhu, Zhiming Luo, Shaozi Li, Yi Yang, Nicu Sebe Zhun Zhong
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, we tackle the problem of discovering new classes in unlabeled visual data given labeled data from disjoint classes. Existing methods typically first pre-train a model with labeled data, and then identify new classes in unlabeled data via unsupervised clustering. However, the labeled data that provide essential knowledge are often underexplored in the second step. The challenge is that the labeled and unlabeled examples are from non-overlapping classes, which makes it difficult to build a learning relationship between them. In this work, we introduce OpenMix to mix the unlabeled examples from an open set and the labeled examples from known classes, where their non-overlapping labels and pseudo-labels are simultaneously mixed into a joint label distribution. OpenMix dynamically compounds examples in two ways. First, we produce mixed training images by incorporating labeled examples with unlabeled examples. With the benefit of unique prior knowledge in novel class discovery, the generated pseudo-labels will be more credible than the original unlabeled predictions. As a result, OpenMix helps preventing the model from overfitting on unlabeled samples that may be assigned with wrong pseudo-labels. Second, the first way encourages the unlabeled examples with high class-probabilities to have considerable accuracy. We introduce these examples as reliable anchors and further integrate them with unlabeled samples. This enables us to generate more combinations in unlabeled examples and exploit finer object relations among the new classes. Experiments on three classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed OpenMix, which is superior to state-of-the-art methods in novel class discovery.
Combining Semantic Guidance and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Generating Human Level Paintings
Authors: Liang Zheng Jaskirat Singh
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Generation of stroke-based non-photorealistic imagery, is an important problem in the computer vision community. As an endeavor in this direction, substantial recent research efforts have been focused on teaching machines "how to paint", in a manner similar to a human painter. However, the applicability of previous methods has been limited to datasets with little variation in position, scale and saliency of the foreground object. As a consequence, we find that these methods struggle to cover the granularity and diversity possessed by real world images. To this end, we propose a Semantic Guidance pipeline with 1) a bi-level painting procedure for learning the distinction between foreground and background brush strokes at training time. 2) We also introduce invariance to the position and scale of the foreground object through a neural alignment model, which combines object localization and spatial transformer networks in an end to end manner, to zoom into a particular semantic instance. 3) The distinguishing features of the in-focus object are then amplified by maximizing a novel guided backpropagation based focus reward. The proposed agent does not require any supervision on human stroke-data and successfully handles variations in foreground object attributes, thus, producing much higher quality canvases for the CUB-200 Birds and Stanford Cars-196 datasets. Finally, we demonstrate the further efficacy of our method on complex datasets with multiple foreground object instances by evaluating an extension of our method on the challenging Virtual-KITTI dataset. Source code and models are available at https://github.com/1jsingh/semantic-guidance.
Event-Based Bispectral Photometry Using Temporally Modulated Illumination
Authors: Yuzuha Ito, Ayaka Ebisu, Yinqiang Zheng, Takahito Aoto Tsuyoshi Takatani
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Analysis of bispectral difference plays a critical role in various applications that involve rays propagating in a light absorbing medium. In general, the bispectral difference is obtained by subtracting signals at two individual wavelengths captured by ordinary digital cameras, which tends to inherit the drawbacks of conventional cameras in dynamic range, response speed and quantization precision. In this paper, we propose a novel method to obtain a bispectral difference image using an event camera with temporally modulated illumination. Our method is rooted in a key observation on the analogy between the bispectral photometry principle of the participating medium and the event generating mechanism in an event camera. By carefully modulating the bispectral illumination, our method allows to read out the bispectral difference directly from triggered events. Experiments using a prototype imaging system have verified the feasibility of this novel usage of event cameras in photometry based vision tasks, such as 3D shape reconstruction in water.
LiDAR-Aug: A General Rendering-Based Augmentation Framework for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Xinxin Zuo, Dingfu Zhou, Shengze Jin, Sen Wang, Liangjun Zhang Jin Fang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Annotating the LiDAR point cloud is crucial for deep learning-based 3D object detection tasks. Due to expensive labeling costs, data augmentation has been taken as a necessary module and plays an important role in training the neural network. "Copy" and "paste" (i.e., GT-Aug) is the most commonly used data augmentation strategy, however, the occlusion between objects has not been taken into consideration. To handle the above limitation, we propose a rendering-based LiDAR augmentation framework (i.e., LiDAR-Aug) to enrich the training data and boost the performance of LiDAR-based 3D object detectors. The proposed LiDAR-Aug is a plug-and-play module that can be easily integrated into different types of 3D object detection frameworks. Compared to the traditional object augmentation methods, LiDAR-Aug is more realistic and effective. Finally, we verify the proposed framework on the public KITTI dataset with different 3D object detectors. The experimental results show the superiority of our method compared to other data augmentation strategies. We plan to make our data and code public to help other researchers reproduce our results.
Semantic-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning
Authors: Shafin Rahman, Pengfei Fang, Soumava Kumar Roy, Lars Petersson, Mehrtash Harandi Ali Cheraghian
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) portrays the problem of learning new concepts gradually, where only a few examples per concept are available to the learner. Due to the limited number of examples for training, the techniques developed for standard incremental learning cannot be applied verbatim to FSCIL. In this work, we introduce a distillation algorithm to address the problem of FSCIL and propose to make use of semantic information during training. To this end, we make use of word embeddings as semantic information which is cheap to obtain and which facilitate the distillation process. Furthermore, we propose a method based on an attention mechanism on multiple parallel embeddings of visual data to align visual and semantic vectors, which reduces issues related to catastrophic forgetting. Via experiments on MiniImageNet, CUB200, and CIFAR100 dataset, we establish new state-of-the-art results by outperforming existing approaches.
General Instance Distillation for Object Detection
Authors: Zeren Jiang, Zhao Wu, Yiping Bao, Zhicheng Wang, Si Liu, Erjin Zhou Xing Dai
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In recent years, knowledge distillation has been proved to be an effective solution for model compression. This approach can make lightweight student models acquire the knowledge extracted from cumbersome teacher models. However, previous distillation methods of detection have weak generalization for different detection frameworks and rely heavily on ground truth (GT), ignoring the valuable relation information between instances. Thus, we propose a novel distillation method for detection tasks based on discriminative instances without considering the positive or negative distinguished by GT, which is called general instance distillation (GID). Our approach contains a general instance selection module (GISM) to make full use of feature-based, relation-based and response-based knowledge for distillation. Extensive results demonstrate that the student model achieves significant AP improvement and even outperforms the teacher in various detection frameworks. Specifically, RetinaNet with ResNet-50 achieves 39.1% in mAP with GID on COCO dataset, which surpasses the baseline 36.2% by 2.9%, and even better than the ResNet-101 based teacher model with 38.1% AP.
Joint Noise-Tolerant Learning and Meta Camera Shift Adaptation for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification
Authors: Zhun Zhong, Zhiming Luo, Yuanzheng Cai, Yaojin Lin, Shaozi Li, Nicu Sebe Fengxiang Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of unsupervised person re-identification (re-ID), which aims to learn discriminative models with unlabeled data. One popular method is to obtain pseudo-label by clustering and use them to optimize the model. Although this kind of approach has shown promising accuracy, it is hampered by 1) noisy labels produced by clustering and 2) feature variations caused by camera shift. The former will lead to incorrect optimization and thus hinders the model accuracy. The latter will result in assigning the intra-class samples of different cameras to different pseudo-label, making the model sensitive to camera variations. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to solve both problems. Concretely, we propose a Dynamic and Symmetric Cross-Entropy loss (DSCE) to deal with noisy samples and a camera-aware meta-learning algorithm (MetaCam) to adapt camera shift. DSCE can alleviate the negative effects of noisy samples and accommodate the change of clusters after each clustering step. MetaCam simulates cross-camera constraint by splitting the training data into meta-train and meta-test based on camera IDs. With the interacted gradient from meta-train and meta-test, the model is enforced to learn camera-invariant features. Extensive experiments on three re-ID benchmarks show the effectiveness and the complementary of the proposed DSCE and MetaCam. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both fully unsupervised re-ID and unsupervised domain adaptive re-ID.
Mutual Graph Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection
Authors: Xin Li, Fan Yang, Chenglizhao Chen, Hong Cheng, Deng-Ping Fan Qiang Zhai
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Automatically detecting/segmenting object(s) that blend in with their surroundings is difficult for current models. A major challenge is that the intrinsic similarities between such foreground objects and background surroundings make the features extracted by deep model indistinguishable. To overcome this challenge, an ideal model should be able to seek valuable, extra clues from the given scene and incorporate them into a joint learning framework for representation co-enhancement. With this inspiration, we design a novel Mutual Graph Learning (MGL) model, which generalizes the idea of conventional mutual learning from regular grids to the graph domain. Specifically, MGL decouples an image into two task-specific feature maps -- one for roughly locating the target and the other for accurately capturing its boundary details -- and fully exploits the mutual benefits by recurrently reasoning their high-order relations through graphs. Importantly, in contrast to most mutual learning approaches that use a shared function to model all between-task interactions, MGL is equipped with typed functions for handling different complementary relations to maximize information interactions. Experiments on challenging datasets, including CHAMELEON, CAMO and COD10K, demonstrate the effectiveness of our MGL with superior performance to existing state-of-the-art methods.
Single Pair Cross-Modality Super Resolution
Authors: Dov Danon, Sharon Fogel, Daniel Cohen-Or Guy Shacht
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Non-visual imaging sensors are widely used in the industry for different purposes. Those sensors are more expensive than visual (RGB) sensors, and usually produce images with lower resolution. To this end, Cross-Modality Super-Resolution methods were introduced, where an RGB image of a high-resolution assists in increasing the resolution of a low-resolution modality. However, fusing images from different modalities is not a trivial task, since each multi-modal pair varies greatly in its internal correlations. For this reason, traditional state-of-the-arts which are trained on external datasets often struggle with yielding an artifact-free result that is still loyal to the target modality characteristics. We present CMSR, a single-pair approach for Cross-Modality Super-Resolution. The network is internally trained on the two input images only, in a self-supervised manner, learns their internal statistics and correlations, and applies them to upsample the target modality. CMSR contains an internal transformer which is trained on-the-fly together with the up-sampling process itself and without supervision, to allow dealing with pairs that are only weakly aligned. We show that CMSR produces state-of-the-art super resolved images, yet without introducing artifacts or irrelevant details that originate from the RGB image only.
Target-Aware Object Discovery and Association for Unsupervised Video Multi-Object Segmentation
Authors: Jianwu Li, Xueyi Li, Ling Shao Tianfei Zhou
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper addresses the task of unsupervised video multi-object segmentation. Current approaches follow a two-stage paradigm: 1) detect object proposals using pre-trained Mask R-CNN, and 2) conduct generic feature matching for temporal association using re-identification techniques. However, the generic features, widely used in both stages, are not reliable for characterizing unseen objects, leading to poor generalization. To address this, we introduce a novel approach for more accurate and efficient spatio-temporal segmentation. In particular, to address instance discrimination, we propose to combine foreground region estimation and instance grouping together in one network, and additionally introduce temporal guidance for segmenting each frame, enabling more accurate object discovery. For temporal association, we complement current video object segmentation architectures with a discriminative appearance model, capable of capturing more fine-grained target-specific information. Given object proposals from the instance discrimination network, three essential strategies are adopted to achieve accurate segmentation: 1) target-specific tracking using a memory-augmented appearance model; 2) target-agnostic verification to trace possible tracklets for the proposal; 3) adaptive memory updating using the verified segments. We evaluate the proposed approach on DAVIS_ 17  and YouTube-VIS, and the results demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods both in segmentation accuracy and inference speed.
Cross-View Regularization for Domain Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Dayan Guan, Aoran Xiao, Shijian Lu Jiaxing Huang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Panoptic segmentation unifies semantic segmentation and instance segmentation which has been attracting increasing attention in recent years. On the other hand, most existing research was conducted under a supervised learning setup whereas domain adaptive panoptic segmentation which is critical in different tasks and applications is largely neglected. We design a domain adaptive panoptic segmentation network that exploits inter-style consistency and inter-task regularization for optimal domain adaptive panoptic segmentation. The inter-style consistency leverages geometric invariance across the same image of the different styles which ` fabricates' certain self-supervisions to guide the network to learn domain-invariant features. The inter-task regularization exploits the complementary nature of instance segmentation and semantic segmentation and uses it as a constraint for better feature alignment across domains. Extensive experiments over multiple domain adaptive panoptic segmentation tasks (e.g. synthetic-to-real and real-to-real) show that our proposed network achieves superior segmentation performance as compared with the state-of-the-art.
End-to-End Learning for Joint Image Demosaicing, Denoising and Super-Resolution
Authors: Karen Egiazarian Wenzhu Xing
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Image denoising, demosaicing and super-resolution are key problems of image restoration well studied in the recent decades. Often, in practice, one has to solve these problems simultaneously. A problem of finding a joint solution of the multiple image restoration tasks just begun to attract an increased attention of researchers. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution for the joint demosaicing, denoising and super-resolution based on a specially designed deep convolutional neural network (CNN). We systematically study different methods to solve this problem and compared them with the proposed method. Extensive experiments carried out on large image datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we have applied various loss functions in the proposed scheme and demonstrate that by using the mean absolute error as a loss function, we can obtain superior results in comparison to other cases.
Keep Your Eyes on the Lane: Real-Time Attention-Guided Lane Detection
Authors: Rodrigo Berriel, Thiago M. Paixao, Claudine Badue, Alberto F. De Souza, Thiago Oliveira-Santos Lucas Tabelini
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Modern lane detection methods have achieved remarkable performances in complex real-world scenarios, but many have issues maintaining real-time efficiency, which is important for autonomous vehicles. In this work, we propose LaneATT: an anchor-based deep lane detection model, which, akin to other generic deep object detectors, uses the anchors for the feature pooling step. Since lanes follow a regular pattern and are highly correlated, we hypothesize that in some cases global information may be crucial to infer their positions, especially in conditions such as occlusion, missing lane markers, and others. Thus, this work proposes a novel anchor-based attention mechanism that aggregates global information. The model was evaluated extensively on three of the most widely used datasets in the literature. The results show that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods showing both higher efficacy and efficiency. Moreover, an ablation study is performed along with a discussion on efficiency trade-off options that are useful in practice. Code and models are available at https://github.com/lucastabelini/LaneATT.
Lesion-Aware Transformers for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading
Authors: Yihao Li, Tianzhu Zhang, Zhendong Mao, Feng Wu, Yongdong Zhang Rui Sun
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is the leading cause of permanent blindness in the working-age population. And automatic DR diagnosis can assist ophthalmologists to design tailored treatments for patients, including DR grading and lesion discovery. However, most of existing methods treat DR grading and lesion discovery as two independent tasks, which require lesion annotations as a learning guidance and limits the actual deployment. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel lesion-aware transformer (LAT) for DR grading and lesion discovery jointly in a unified deep model via an encoder-decoder structure including a pixel relation based encoder and a lesion filter based decoder. The proposed LAT enjoys several merits. First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to formulate lesion discovery as a weakly supervised lesion localization problem via a transformer decoder. Second, to learn lesion filters well with only image-level labels, we design two effective mechanisms including lesion region importance and lesion region diversity for identifying diverse lesion regions. Extensive experimental results on three challenging benchmarks including Messidor-1, Messidor-2 and EyePACS demonstrate that the proposed LAT performs favorably against state-of-the-art DR grading and lesion discovery methods.
Involution: Inverting the Inherence of Convolution for Visual Recognition
Authors: Jie Hu, Changhu Wang, Xiangtai Li, Qi She, Lei Zhu, Tong Zhang, Qifeng Chen Duo Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Convolution has been the core ingredient of modern neural networks, triggering the surge of deep learning in vision. In this work, we rethink the inherent principles of standard convolution for vision tasks, specifically spatial-agnostic and channel-specific. Instead, we present a novel atomic operation for deep neural networks by inverting the aforementioned design principles of convolution, coined as involution. We additionally demystify the recent popular self-attention operator and subsume it into our involution family as an over-complicated instantiation. The proposed involution operator could be leveraged as fundamental bricks to build the new generation of neural networks for visual recognition, powering different deep learning models on several prevalent benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection and segmentation, together with Cityscapes segmentation. Our involution-based models improve the performance of convolutional baselines using ResNet-50 by up to 1.6% top-1 accuracy, 2.5% and 2.4% bounding box AP, and 4.7% mean IoU absolutely while compressing the computational cost to 66%, 65%, 72%, and 57% on the above benchmarks, respectively. Code and pre-trained models for all the tasks are available at https://github.com/d-li14/involution.
QPIC: Query-Based Pairwise Human-Object Interaction Detection With Image-Wide Contextual Information
Authors: Hiroki Ohashi, Tomoaki Yoshinaga Masato Tamura
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a simple, intuitive yet powerful method for human-object interaction (HOI) detection. HOIs are so diverse in spatial distribution in an image that existing CNN-based methods face the following three major drawbacks; they cannot leverage image-wide features due to CNN's locality, they rely on a manually defined location-of-interest for the feature aggregation, which sometimes does not cover contextually important regions, and they cannot help but mix up the features for multiple HOI instances if they are located closely. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a transformer-based feature extractor, in which an attention mechanism and query-based detection play key roles. The attention mechanism is effective in aggregating contextually important information image-wide, while the queries, which we design in such a way that each query captures at most one human-object pair, can avoid mixing up the features from multiple instances. This transformer-based feature extractor produces so effective embeddings that the subsequent detection heads may be fairly simple and intuitive. The extensive analysis reveals that the proposed method successfully extracts contextually important features, and thus outperforms existing methods by large margins (5.37 mAP on HICO-DET, and 5.6 mAP on V-COCO). The source codes are available at https://github.com/hitachi-rd-cv/qpic.
Home Action Genome: Cooperative Compositional Action Understanding
Authors: Haofeng Chen, Jingwei Ji, Rishi Desai, Kazuki Kozuka, Shun Ishizaka, Ehsan Adeli, Juan Carlos Niebles Nishant Rai
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Existing research on action recognition treats activities as monolithic events occurring in videos. Recently, the benefits of formulating actions as a combination of atomic-actions have shown promise in improving action understanding with the emergence of datasets containing such annotations, allowing us to learn representations capturing this information. However, there remains a lack of studies that extend action composition and leverage multiple viewpoints and multiple modalities of data for representation learning. To promote research in this direction, we introduce Home Action Genome (HOMAGE): a multi-view action dataset with multiple modalities and view-points supplemented with hierarchical activity and atomic action labels together with dense scene composition labels. Leveraging rich multi-modal and multi-view settings, we propose Cooperative Compositional Action Understanding (CCAU), a cooperative learning framework for hierarchical action recognition that is aware of compositional action elements. CCAU shows consistent performance improvements across all modalities. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of co-learning compositions in few-shot action recognition by achieving 28.6% mAP with just a single sample.
Deep Lesion Tracker: Monitoring Lesions in 4D Longitudinal Imaging Studies
Authors: Youbao Tang, Ke Yan, Adam P. Harrison, Jing Xiao, Gigin Lin, Le Lu Jinzheng Cai
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Monitoring treatment response in longitudinal studies plays an important role in clinical practice. Accurately identifying lesions across serial imaging follow-up is the core to the monitoring procedure. Typically this incorporates both image and anatomical considerations. However, matching lesions manually is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this work, we present deep lesion tracker (DLT), a deep learning approach that uses both appearance- and anatomical-based signals. To incorporate anatomical constraints, we propose an anatomical signal encoder, which prevents lesions being matched with visually similar but spurious regions. In addition, we present a new formulation for Siamese networks that avoids the heavy computational loads of 3D cross-correlation. To present our network with greater varieties of images, we also propose a self-supervised learning strategy to train trackers with unpaired images, overcoming barriers to data collection. To train and evaluate our tracker, we introduce and release the first lesion tracking benchmark, consisting of 3891 lesion pairs from the public DeepLesion database. The proposed method, DLT, locates lesion centers with a mean error distance of 7mm. This is 5% better than a leading registration algorithm while running 14 times faster with whole CT volumes. We demonstrate even greater improvements over detector or similarity-learning alternatives. DLT also generalizes well on an external clinical test set of 100% longitudinal studies, achieving 88% accuracy. Finally, we plug DLT into an automatic tumor monitoring workflow where it leads to an accuracy of 85% in assessing lesion treatment responses, which is only 0.46% lower than the accuracy of manual inputs.
Learning To Warp for Style Transfer
Authors: Yong-Liang Yang, Peter Hall Xiao-Chang Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Since its inception in 2015, Style Transfer has focused on texturing a content image using an art exemplar. Recently, the geometric changes that artists make have been acknowledged as an important component of style. Our contribution is to propose a neural network that, uniquely, learns a mapping from a 4D array of inter-feature distances to a non-parametric 2D warp field. The system is generic in not being limited by semantic class, a single learned model will suffice; all examples in this paper are output from one model. Our approach combines the benefits of the high speed of Liu et al. with the non-parametric warping of Kim et al. Furthermore, our system extends the normal NST paradigm: although it can be used with a single exemplar, we also allow two style exemplars: one for texture and another for geometry. This supports far greater flexibility in use cases than single exemplars can provide.
Towards Extremely Compact RNNs for Video Recognition With Fully Decomposed Hierarchical Tucker Structure
Authors: Siyu Liao, Xiao-Yang Liu, Xiaodong Wang, Bo Yuan Miao Yin
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been widely used in sequence analysis and modeling. However, when processing high-dimensional data, RNNs typically require very large model sizes, thereby bringing a series of deployment challenges. Although various prior works have been proposed to reduce the RNN model sizes, executing RNN models in resource-restricted environments is still a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose to develop extremely compact RNN models with fully decomposed hierarchical Tucker (FDHT) structure. The HT decomposition does not only provide much higher storage cost reduction than the other tensor decomposition approaches but also brings better accuracy performance improvement for the compact RNN models. Meanwhile, unlike the existing tensor decomposition-based methods that can only decompose the input-to-hidden layer of RNNs, our proposed fully decomposition approach enables the comprehensive compression for the entire RNN models with maintaining very high accuracy. Our experimental results on several popular video recognition datasets show that our proposed fully decomposed hierarchical tucker-based LSTM (FDHT-LSTM) is extremely compact and highly efficient. To the best of our knowledge, FDHT-LSTM, for the first time, consistently achieves very high accuracy with only few thousand parameters (3,132 to 8,808) on different datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art compressed RNN models, such as TT-LSTM, TR-LSTM and BT-LSTM, our FDHT-LSTM simultaneously enjoys both order-of-magnitude (3,985x to 10,711x) fewer parameters and significant accuracy improvement (0.6% to 12.7%).
Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Monocular Scene Flow
Authors: Stefan Roth Junhwa Hur
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Estimating 3D scene flow from a sequence of monocular images has been gaining increased attention due to the simple, economical capture setup. Owing to the severe ill-posedness of the problem, the accuracy of current methods has been limited, especially that of efficient, real-time approaches. In this paper, we introduce a multi-frame monocular scene flow network based on self-supervised learning, improving the accuracy over previous networks while retaining real-time efficiency. Based on an advanced two-frame baseline with a split-decoder design, we propose (i) a multi-frame model using a triple frame input and convolutional LSTM connections, (ii) an occlusion-aware census loss for better accuracy, and (iii) a gradient detaching strategy to improve training stability. On the KITTI dataset, we observe state-of-the-art accuracy among monocular scene flow methods based on self-supervised learning.
Enriching ImageNet With Human Similarity Judgments and Psychological Embeddings
Authors: Bradley C. Love Brett D. Roads
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Advances in supervised learning approaches to object recognition flourished in part because of the availability of high-quality datasets and associated benchmarks. However, these benchmarks---such as ILSVRC---are relatively task-specific, focusing predominately on predicting class labels. We introduce a publicly-available dataset that embodies the task-general capabilities of human perception and reasoning. The Human Similarity Judgments extension to ImageNet (ImageNet-HSJ) is composed of a large set of human similarity judgments that supplements the existing ILSVRC validation set. The new dataset supports a range of task and performance metrics, including evaluation of unsupervised algorithms. We demonstrate two methods of assessment: using the similarity judgments directly and using a psychological embedding trained on the similarity judgments. This embedding space contains an order of magnitude more points (i.e., images) than previous efforts based on human judgments. We were able to scale to the full 50,000 image ILSVRC validation set through a selective sampling process that used variational Bayesian inference and model ensembles to sample aspects of the embedding space that were most uncertain. To demonstrate the utility of ImageNet-HSJ, we used the similarity ratings and the embedding space to evaluate how well several popular models conform to human similarity judgments. One finding is that more complex models that perform better on task-specific benchmarks do not better conform to human semantic judgments. In addition to the human similarity judgments, pre-trained psychological embeddings and code for inferring variational embeddings are made publicly available. ImageNet-HSJ supports the appraisal of internal representations and the development of more human-like models.
What's in the Image? Explorable Decoding of Compressed Images
Authors: Tomer Michaeli Yuval Bahat
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The ever-growing amounts of visual contents captured on a daily basis necessitate the use of lossy compression methods in order to save storage space and transmission bandwidth. While extensive research efforts are devoted to improving compression techniques, every method inevitably discards information. Especially at low bit rates, this information often corresponds to semantically meaningful visual cues, so that decompression involves significant ambiguity. In spite of this fact, existing decompression algorithms typically produce only a single output, and do not allow the viewer to explore the set of images that map to the given compressed code. In this work we propose the first image decompression method to facilitate user-exploration of the diverse set of natural images that could have given rise to the compressed input code, thus granting users the ability to determine what could and what could not have been there in the original scene. Specifically, we develop a novel deep-network based decoder architecture for the ubiquitous JPEG standard, which allows traversing the set of decompressed images that are consistent with the compressed JPEG file. To allow for simple user interaction, we develop a graphical user interface comprising several intuitive exploration tools, including an automatic tool for examining specific solutions of interest. We exemplify our framework on graphical, medical and forensic use cases, demonstrating its wide range of potential applications.
Context Modeling in 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Unified Perspective
Authors: Jiajun Su, Chunyu Wang, Hai Ci, Yizhou Wang Xiaoxuan Ma
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Estimating 3D human pose from a single image suffers from severe ambiguity since multiple 3D joint configurations may have the same 2D projection. The state-of-the-art methods often rely on context modeling methods such as pictorial structure model (PSM) or graph neural network (GNN) to reduce ambiguity. However, there is no study that rigorously compares them side by side. So we first present a general formula for context modeling in which both PSM and GNN are its special cases. By comparing the two methods, we found that the end-to-end training scheme in GNN and the limb length constraints in PSM are two complementary factors to improve results. To combine their advantages, we propose ContextPose based on attention mechanism that allows enforcing soft limb length constraints in a deep network. The approach effectively reduces the chance of getting absurd 3D pose estimates with incorrect limb lengths and achieves state-of-the-art results on two benchmark datasets. More importantly, the introduction of limb length constraints into deep networks enables the approach to achieve much better generalization performance.