mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Beyond Fixed Grid: Learning Geometric Image Representation with a Deformable Grid
Authors: Zian Wang, Jinchen Xuan, Sanja Fidler Jun Gao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In modern computer vision, images are typically represented as a fixed uniform grid with some stride and processed via a deep convolutional neural network. We argue that deforming the grid to better align with the high-frequency image content is a more effective strategy. We introduce mph{Deformable Grid} (Defgrid), a learnable neural network module that predicts location offsets of vertices of a 2-dimensional triangular grid such that the edges of the deformed grid align with image boundaries. We showcase our Defgrid in a variety of use cases, i.e., by inserting it as a module at various levels of processing. We utilize Defgrid as an end-to-end mph{learnable geometric downsampling} layer that replaces standard pooling methods for reducing feature resolution when feeding images into a deep CNN. We show significantly improved results at the same grid resolution compared to using CNNs on uniform grids for the task of semantic segmentation. We also utilize Defgrid at the output layers for the task of object mask annotation, and show that reasoning about object boundaries on our predicted polygonal grid leads to more accurate results over existing pixel-wise and curve-based approaches. We finally showcase DefGrid as a standalone module for unsupervised image segmentation, showing superior performance over existing superpixel-based approaches. Project website: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jungao/def-grid ."
Soft Expert Reward Learning for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Qi Wu, Chunhua Shen Hu Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to find a specified spot in an unseen environment by following natural language instructions. Dominant methods based on supervised learning clone expert's behaviours and thus perform better on seen environments, while showing restricted performance on unseen ones. Reinforcement Learning (RL) based models show better generalisation ability but have issues as well, requiring large amount of manual reward engineering is one of which. In this paper, we introduce a Soft Expert Reward Learning (SERL) model to overcome the reward engineering designing and generalisation problems of the VLN task. Our proposed method consists of two complementary components: Soft Expert Distillation (SED) module encourages agents to behave like an expert as much as possible, but in a soft fashion; Self Perceiving (SP) module targets at pushing the agent towards the final destination as fast as possible. Empirically, we evaluate our model on the VLN seen, unseen and test splits and the model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on most of the evaluation metrics."
Part-aware Prototype Network for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Xiangyi Zhang, Songyang Zhang, Xuming He Yongfei Liu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to learn to segment new object classes with only a few annotated examples, which has a wide range of real-world applications. Most existing methods either focus on the restrictive setting of one-way few-shot segmentation or suffer from incomplete coverage of object regions. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot semantic segmentation framework based on the prototype representation. Our key idea is to decompose the holistic class representation into a set of part-aware prototypes, capable of capturing diverse and fine-grained object features. In addition, we propose to leverage unlabeled data to enrich our part-aware prototypes, resulting in better modeling of intra-class variations of semantic objects. We develop a novel graph neural network model to generate and enhance the proposed part-aware prototypes based on labeled and unlabeled images. Extensive experimental evaluations on two benchmarks show that our method outperforms the prior art with a sizable margin."
Learning from Extrinsic and Intrinsic Supervisions for Domain Generalization
Authors: Lequan Yu, Caizi Li, Chi-Wing Fu, Pheng-Ann Heng Shujun Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The generalization capability of neural networks across domains is crucial for real-world applications. We argue that a generalized object recognition system should well understand the relationships among different images and also the images themselves at the same time. To this end, we present a new domain generalization framework that learns how to generalize across domains simultaneously from extit{extrinsic} relationship supervision and extit{intrinsic} self-supervision for images from multi-source domains. To be specific, we formulate our framework with feature embedding using a multi-task learning paradigm. Besides conducting the common supervised recognition task, we seamlessly integrate a momentum metric learning task and a self-supervised auxiliary task to collectively utilize the extrinsic supervision and intrinsic supervision. Also, we develop an effective momentum metric learning scheme with K-hard negative mining to boost the network to capture image relationship for domain generalization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two standard object recognition benchmarks VLCS and PACS, and show that our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance."
Joint Learning of Social Groups, Individuals Action and Sub-group Activities in Videos
Authors: Alireza Abedin, Fatemeh Saleh, Javen Shi, Ian Reid , Hamid Rezatofighi Mahsa Ehsanpour
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Individuals Action and Sub-group Activities in Videos","The state-of-the art solutions for human activity understanding from a video stream formulate the task as a spatio-temporal problem which requires joint localization of all individuals in the scene and classification of their actions or group activity over time. Who is interacting with whom, e.g. not everyone in a queue is interacting with each other, is often not predicted. There are scenarios where people are best to be split into sub-groups, which we call social groups, and each social group may be engaged in a different social activity. In this paper, we solve the problem of simultaneously grouping people by their social interactions, predicting their individual actions and the social activity of each social group, which we call the social task. Our main contributions are: i) we propose an end-to-end trainable framework for the social task; ii) our proposed method also sets the state-of-the-art results on two widely adopted benchmarks for the traditional group activity recognition task (assuming individuals of the scene form a single group and predicting a single group activity label for the scene); iii) we introduce new annotations on an existing group activity dataset, re-purposing it for the social task."
Whole-Body Human Pose Estimation in the Wild
Authors: Lumin Xu, Jin Xu, Can Wang, Wentao Liu, Chen Qian, Wanli Ouyang, Ping Luo Sheng Jin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper investigates the task of 2D human whole-body pose estimation, which aims to localize dense landmarks on the entire human body including face, hands, body, and feet. As existing datasets do not have whole-body annotations, previous methods have to assemble different deep models trained independently on different datasets of the human face, hand, and body, struggling with dataset biases and large model complexity. To fill in this blank, we introduce COCO-WholeBody which extends COCO dataset with whole-body annotations. To our best knowledge, it is the first benchmark that has manual annotations on the entire human body, including 133 dense landmarks with 68 on the face, 42 on hands and 23 on the body and feet. A single-network model, named ZoomNet, is devised to take into account the hierarchical structure of the full human body to solve the scale variation of different body parts of the same person. ZoomNet is able to significantly outperform existing methods on the proposed COCO-WholeBody dataset. Extensive experiments show that COCO-WholeBody not only can be used to train deep models from scratch for whole-body pose estimation but also can serve as a powerful pre-training dataset for many different tasks such as facial landmark detection and hand keypoint estimation. The dataset is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/jin-s13/COCO-WholeBody}."
Relative Pose Estimation of Calibrated Cameras with Known SE(3) Invariants
Authors: Evgeniy Martyushev, Gim Hee Lee Bo Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ invariants of a pose include its rotation angle and screw translation. In this paper, we present a complete comprehensive study of the relative pose estimation problem for a calibrated camera constrained by known $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ invariant, which involves 5 minimal problems in total. These problems reduces the minimal number of point pairs for relative pose estimation and improves the estimation efficiency and robustness. The $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ invariant constraints can come from extra sensor measurements or motion assumption. Different from conventional relative pose estimation with extra constraints, no extrinsic calibration is required to transform the constraints to the camera frame. This advantage comes from the invariance of $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ invariants cross different coordinate systems on a rigid body and makes the solvers more convenient and flexible in practical applications. Besides proposing the concept of relative pose estimation constrained by $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ invariants, we present a comprehensive study of existing polynomial formulations for relative pose estimation and discover their relationship. Different formulations are carefully chosen for each proposed problems to achieve best efficiency. Experiments on synthetic and real data shows performance improvement compared to conventional relative pose estimation methods."
Sequential Convolution and Runge-Kutta Residual Architecture for Image Compressed Sensing
Authors: Yinqi Zhang, Daolang Huang, Qingliang Chen Runkai Zheng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In recent years, Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have empowered Compressed Sensing (CS) substantially and have achieved high reconstruction quality and speed far exceeding traditional CS methods. However, there are still lots of issues to be further explored before it can be practical enough. There are mainly two challenging problems in CS, one is to achieve efficient data sampling, and the other is to reconstruct images with high-quality. To address the two challenges, this paper proposes a novel Runge-Kutta Convolutional Compressed Sensing Network (RK-CCSNet). In the sensing stage, RK-CCSNet applies Sequential Convolutional Module (SCM) to gradually compact measurements through a series of convolution filters. In the reconstruction stage, RK-CCSNet establishes a novel Learned Runge-Kutta Block (LRKB) based on the famous Runge-Kutta methods, reformulating the process of image reconstruction as a discrete dynamical system. Finally, the implementation of RK-CCSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on influential benchmarks with respect to prestigious baselines, and all the codes are available at https://github.com/rkteddy/RK-CCSNet."
Deep Hough Transform for Semantic Line Detection
Authors: Kai Zhao, Jun Xu, Ming-Ming Cheng Qi Han
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we put forward a simple yet effective method to detect meaningful straight lines, a.k.a. semantic lines, in given scenes. Prior methods take line detection as a special case of object detection, while neglect the inherent characteristics of lines, leading to less efficient and suboptimal results. We propose a one-shot end-to-end framework by incorporating the classical Hough transform into deeply learned representations. By parameterizing lines with slopes and biases, we perform Hough transform to translate deep representations to the parametric space and then directly detect lines in the parametric space. More concretely, we aggregate features along candidate lines on the feature map plane and then assign the aggregated features to corresponding locations in the parametric domain. Consequently, the problem of detecting semantic lines in the spatial domain is transformed to spotting individual points in the parametric domain, making the post-processing steps, i.e. non-maximal suppression, more efficient. Furthermore, our method makes it easy to extract contextual line features, that are critical to accurate line detection. Experimental results on a public dataset demonstrate the advantages of our method over state-of-the-arts. Code and models will be publicly released."
Structured Landmark Detection via Topology-Adapting Deep Graph Learning
Authors: Yuhang Lu, Kang Zheng, Haofu Liao, Chihung Lin, Jiebo Luo, Chi-Tung Cheng, Jing Xiao, Le Lu, Chang-Fu Kuo, Shun Miao Weijian Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Image landmark detection aims to automatically identify the locations of predefined fiducial points. Despite recent success in this field, higher-ordered structural modeling to capture implicit or explicit relationships among anatomical landmarks has not been adequately exploited. In this work, we present a new topology-adapting deep graph learning approach for accurate anatomical facial and medical (e.g., hand, pelvis) landmark detection. The proposed method constructs graph signals leveraging both local image features and global shape features. The adaptive graph topology naturally explores and lands on task-specific structures which are learned end-to-end with two Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs). Extensive experiments are conducted on three public facial image datasets (WFLW, 300W, and COFW-68) as well as three real-world X-ray medical datasets (Cephalometric (public), Hand and Pelvis). Quantitative results comparing with the previous state-of-the-art approaches across all studied datasets indicating the superior performance in both robustness and accuracy. Qualitative visualizations of the learned graph topologies demonstrate a physically plausible connectivity laying behind the landmarks."
3D Human Shape and Pose from a Single Low-Resolution Image with Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Hao Chen, Francesc Moreno-Noguer, László A. Jeni, Fernando De la Torre Xiangyu Xu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: 3D human shape and pose estimation from monocular images has been an active area of research in computer vision, having a substantial impact on the development of new applications, from activity recognition to creating virtual avatars. Existing deep learning methods for 3D human shape and pose estimation rely on relatively high-resolution input images; however, high-resolution visual content is not always available in several practical scenarios such as video surveillance and sports broadcasting. Low-resolution images in real scenarios can vary in a wide range of sizes, and a model trained in one resolution does not typically degrade gracefully across resolutions. Two common approaches to solve the problem of low-resolution input are applying super-resolution techniques to the input images which may result in visual artifacts, or simply training one model for each resolution, which is impractical in many realistic applications. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a novel algorithm called RSC-Net, which consists of a Resolution-aware network, a Self-supervision loss, and a Contrastive learning scheme. The proposed network is able to learn the 3D body shape and pose across different resolutions with a single model. The self-supervision loss encourages scale-consistency of the output, and the contrastive learning scheme enforces scale-consistency of the deep features. We show that both these new training losses provide robustness when learning 3D shape and pose in a weakly-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the RSC-Net can achieve consistently better results than the state-of-the-art methods for challenging low-resolution images."
Learning to Balance Specificity and Invariance for In and Out of Domain Generalization
Authors: Yogesh Balaji, Judy Hoffman Prithvijit Chattopadhyay
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We introduce Domain-specific Masks for Generalization, a model for improving both in-domain and out-of-domain generalization performance. For domain generalization, the goal is to learn from a set of source domains to produce a single model that will best generalize to an unseen target domain. As such, many prior approaches focus on learning representations which persist across all source domains with the assumption that these domain agnostic representations will generalize well. However, often individual domains contain characteristics which are unique and when leveraged can significantly aid in-domain recognition performance. To produce a model which best generalizes to both seen and unseen domains, we propose learning domain specific masks. The masks are encouraged to learn a balance of domain-invariant and domain-specific features, thus enabling a model which can benefit from the predictive power of specialized features while retaining the universal applicability of domain-invariant features. We demonstrate competitive performance compared to naive baselines and state-of-the-art methods on both PACS and DomainNet."
Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Taesung Park Alexei A. Efros Richard Zhang Jun-Yan Zhu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In image-to-image translation, each patch in the output should reflect the content of the corresponding patch in the input, independent of domain. We propose a straightforward method for doing so -- maximizing mutual information between the two, using a framework based on contrastive learning. The method encourages two elements (corresponding patches) to map to a similar point in a learned feature space, relative to other elements (other patches) in the dataset, referred to as negatives. We explore several critical design choices for making contrastive learning effective in the image synthesis setting. Notably, we use a multilayer, patch-based approach, rather than operate on entire images. Furthermore, we draw negatives from within the input image itself, rather than from the rest of the dataset. We demonstrate that our framework enables one-sided translation in the unpaired image-to-image translation setting, while improving quality and reducing training time. In addition, our method can even be extended to the training setting where each ``domain'' is only a single image."
DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Prediction
Authors: Kris Kitani Ye Yuan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep generative models are often used for human motion prediction as they are able to model multi-modal data distributions and characterize diverse human behavior. While much care has been taken into designing and learning deep generative models, how to efficiently produce diverse samples from a deep generative model after it has been trained is still an under-explored problem. To obtain samples from a pretrained generative model, most existing generative human motion prediction methods draw a set of independent Gaussian latent codes and convert them to motion samples. Clearly, this random sampling strategy is not guaranteed to produce diverse samples for two reasons: (1) The independent sampling cannot force the samples to be diverse; (2) The sampling is based solely on likelihood which may only produce samples that correspond to the major modes of the data distribution. To address these problems, we propose a novel sampling method, Diversifying Latent Flows (DLow), to produce a diverse set of samples from a pretrained deep generative model. Unlike random (independent) sampling, the proposed DLow sampling method samples a single random variable and then maps it with a set of learnable mapping functions to a set of correlated latent codes. The correlated latent codes are then decoded into a set of correlated samples. During training, DLow uses a diversity-promoting prior over samples as an objective to optimize the latent mappings to improve sample diversity. The design of the prior is highly flexible and can be customized to generate diverse motions with common features (e.g., similar leg motion but diverse upper-body motion). Our experiments demonstrate that DLow outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of sample diversity and accuracy."
GRNet: Gridding Residual Network for Dense Point Cloud Completion
Authors: Hongxun Yao, Shangchen Zhou, Jiageng Mao, Shengping Zhang, Wenxiu Sun Haozhe Xie
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Estimating the complete 3D point cloud from an incomplete one is a key problem in many vision and robotics applications. Mainstream methods (e.g., PCN and TopNet) use Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs) to directly process point clouds, which may cause the loss of details because the structural and context of point clouds are not fully considered. To solve this problem, we introduce 3D grids as intermediate representations to regularize unordered point clouds. We therefore propose a novel Gridding Residual Network (GRNet) for point cloud completion. In particular, we devise two novel differentiable layers, named Gridding and Gridding Reverse, to convert between point clouds and 3D grids without losing structural information. We also present the differentiable Cubic Feature Sampling layer to extract features of neighboring points, which preserves context information. In addition, we design a new loss function, namely Gridding Loss, to calculate the L1 distance between the 3D grids of the predicted and ground truth point clouds, which is helpful to recover details. Experimental results indicate that the proposed GRNet performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on the ShapeNet, Completion3D, and KITTI benchmarks."
Gait Lateral Network: Learning Discriminative and Compact Representations for Gait Recognition
Authors: Chunshui Cao, Xu Liu, Yongzhen Huang Saihui Hou
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Gait recognition aims at identifying different people by the walking patterns, which can be conducted at a long distance without the cooperation of subjects. A key challenge for gait recognition is to learn representations from the silhouettes that are invariant to the factors such as clothing, carrying conditions and camera viewpoints. Besides being discriminative for identification, the gait representations should also be compact for storage to keep millions of subjects registered in the gallery. In this work, we propose a novel network named Gait Lateral Network (GLN) which can learn both discriminative and compact representations from the silhouettes for gait recognition. Specifically, GLN leverages the inherent feature pyramid in deep convolutional neural networks to enhance the gait representations. The silhouette-level and set-level features extracted by different stages are merged with the lateral connections in a top-down manner. Besides, GLN is equipped with a Compact Block which can significantly reduce the dimension of the gait representations without hindering the accuracy. Extensive experiments on CASIA-B and OUMVLP show that GLN can achieve state-of-the-art performance using the $256$-dimensional representations. Under the most challenging condition of walking in different clothes on CASIA-B, our method improves the rank-1 accuracy by $6.45\%$."
Blind Face Restoration via Deep Multi-scale Component Dictionaries
Authors: Chaofeng Chen, Shangchen Zhou, Xianhui Lin, Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang Xiaoming Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recent reference-based face restoration methods have received considerable attention due to their great capability in recovering high-frequency details on real low-quality images. However, most of these methods require a high-quality reference image of the same identity, making them only applicable in limited scenes. To address this issue, this paper suggests a deep face dictionary network (termed as DFDNet) to guide the restoration process of degraded observations. To begin with, we use K-means to generate deep dictionaries for perceptually significant face components (i.e., left/right eyes, nose and mouth) from high-quality images. Next, with the degraded input, we match and select the most similar component features from their corresponding dictionaries and transfer the high-quality details to the input via the proposed dictionary feature transfer (DFT) block. In particular, component AdaIN is leveraged to eliminate the style diversity between the input and dictionary features (e.g., illumination), and a confidence score is proposed to adaptively fuse the dictionary feature to the input. Finally, multi-scale dictionaries are adopted in a progressive manner to enable the coarse-to-fine restoration. Experiments show that our proposed method can achieve plausible performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and more importantly, can generate realistic and promising results on real degraded images without requiring an identity-belonging reference. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/csxmli2016/DFDNet."
Robust Neural Networks inspired by Strong Stability Preserving Runge-Kutta methods
Authors: Bryce Chudomelka, Jinyoung Park, Jaewoo Kang, Youngjoon Hong, Hyunwoo J. Kim Byungjoo Kim
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of fields. Recent works observe that a class of widely used neural networks can be viewed as the Euler method of numerical discretization. From the numerical discretization perspective, Strong Stability Preserving (SSP) methods are more advanced techniques than the explicit Euler method that produce both accurate and stable solutions. Motivated by the SSP property and a generalized Runge-Kutta method, we proposed Strong Stability Preserving networks (SSP networks) which improve robustness against adversarial attacks. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed networks improve the robustness against adversarial examples without any defensive methods. Further, the SSP networks are complementary with a state-of-the-art adversarial training scheme. Lastly, our experiments show that SSP networks suppress the blow-up of adversarial perturbations. Our results open up a way to study robust architectures of neural networks leveraging rich knowledge from numerical discretization literature."
Inequality-Constrained and Robust 3D Face Model Fitting
Authors: Casey J. Zampella, Robert T. Schultz, Birkan Tunc Evangelos Sariyanidi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Fitting 3D morphable models (3DMMs) on faces is a well-studied problem, motivated by various industrial and research applications. 3DMMs express a 3D facial shape as a linear sum of basis functions. The resulting shape, however, is a plausible face only when the basis coefficients take values within limited intervals. Methods based on unconstrained optimization address this issue with a weighted $ll_2$ penalty on coefficients; however, determining the weight of this penalty is difficult, and the existence of a unique weight that works universally is questionable. We propose a new formulation that does not require the tuning of any weight parameter. Specifically, we formulate 3DMM fitting as an inequality-constrained optimization problem, where the primary constraint is that basis coefficients should not exceed the interval that is learned when the 3DMM is constructed. We employ additional constraints to exploit sparse landmark detectors by enforcing the facial shape to be within the error bounds of a reliable detector. To enable operation ``in-the-wild'', we use a robust objective function, namely gradient correlation. Our approach performs comparably with deep learning (DL) methods on ``in-the-wild'' data, which have inexact ground truth, and better than DL methods on more controlled data with exact ground truth. Since our formulation does not require any learning, it enjoys a versatility that allows it to operate with multiple frames of arbitrary sizes. This study's results encourage further research on 3DMM fitting with inequality-constrained optimization methods, which remained unexplored compared to unconstrained methods."
Gabor Layers Enhance Network Robustness
Authors: Motasem Alfarra, Guillaume Jeanneret, Adel Bibi, Ali Thabet, Bernard Ghanem, Pablo Arbeláez Juan C. Pérez
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We revisit the benefits of merging classical vision concepts with deep learning models. In particular, we explore the effect of replacing the first layers of various deep architectures with Gabor layers (i.e. convolutional layers with filters that are based on learnable Gabor parameters) on robustness against adversarial attacks. We observe that architectures with Gabor layers gain a consistent boost in robustness over regular models and maintain high generalizing test performance. We then exploit the analytical expression of Gabor filters to derive a compact expression for a Lipschitz constant of such filters, and harness this theoretical result to develop a regularizer we use during training to further enhance network robustness. We conduct extensive experiments with various architectures (LeNet, AlexNet, VGG16, and WideResNet) on several datasets (MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100) and demonstrate large empirical robustness gains. Furthermore, we experimentally show how our regularizer provides consistent robustness improvements."
Conditional Image Repainting via Semantic Bridge and Piecewise Value Function
Authors: Wenbo Li, Dawei Li, Hongxia Jin, Boxin Shi Shuchen Weng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We study conditional image repainting where a model is trained to generate visual content conditioned on user inputs, and composite the generated content seamlessly onto a user provided image while preserving the semantics of users' inputs. The content generation community have been pursuing to lower the skill barriers. The usage of human language is the rose among horns for this purpose, because the language is friendly to users but poses great difficulties for the model in associating relevant words with the semantically ambiguous regions. To resolve this issue, we propose a delicate mechanism which bridges the semantic chasm between the language input and the generated visual content. The state-of-the-art image compositing techniques pose a latent ceiling of fidelity for the composited content during the adversarial training process. In this work, we improve the compositing by breaking through the latent ceiling using a novel piecewise value function. We demonstrate on two datasets that the proposed techniques can better assist tackling conditional image repainting compared to the existing ones."
Learnable Cost Volume Using the Cayley Representation
Authors: Jinwei Yuan, Deqing Sun, Qifei Wang Xin-Yu Zhang, Kehan Xu, Ming-Hsuan Yang Taihong Xiao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Cost volume is an essential component of recent deep models for optical flow estimation and is usually constructed by calculating the inner product between two feature vectors. However, the standard inner product in the commonly-used cost volume may limit the representation capacity of flow models because it neglects the correlation among different channel dimensions and weighs each dimension equally. To address this issue, we propose a learnable cost volume (LCV) using an elliptical inner product, which generalizes the standard inner product by a positive definite kernel matrix. To guarantee its positive definiteness, we perform spectral decomposition on the kernel matrix and re-parameterize it via the Cayley representation. The proposed LCV is a lightweight module and can be easily plugged into existing models to replace the vanilla cost volume. Experimental results show that the LCV module not only improves the accuracy of state-of-the-art models on standard benchmarks, but also promotes their robustness against illumination change, noises, and adversarial perturbations of the input signals."
HALO: Hardware-Aware Learning to Optimize
Authors: Tianlong Chen, Haoran You, Zhangyang Wang, Yingyan Lin Chaojian Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: There has been an explosive demand for bringing machine learning (ML) powered intelligence into numerous Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. However, the effectiveness of such intelligent functionality requires in-situ continuous model adaptation for adapting to new data and environments, while the on-device computing and energy resources are usually extremely constrained. Neither traditional hand-crafted (e.g., SGD, Adagrad, and Adam) nor existing meta optimizers are specifically designed to meet those challenges, as the former requires tedious hyper-parameter tuning while the latter are often costly due to the meta algorithms’ own overhead. To this end, we propose hardware-aware learning to optimize (HALO), a practical meta optimizer dedicated to resource-efficient on-device adaptation. Our HALO optimizer features the following highlights: (1) faster adaptation speed (i.e., taking fewer data or iterations to reach a specified accuracy) by introducing a new regularizer to promote empirical generalization; and (2) lower per-iteration complexity, thanks to a stochastic structural sparsity regularizer being enforced. Furthermore, the optimizer itself is designed as a very light-weight RNN and thus incurs negligible overhead. Ablation studies and experiments on five datasets, six optimizees, and two state-of-the-art (SOTA) edge AI devices validate that, while always achieving a better accuracy (↑0.46% - ↑20.28%), HALO can greatly trim down the energy cost (up to ↓60%) in adaptation, quantified using an IoT device or SOTA simulator. Codes and pre-trained models are at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/HALO ."
Structured3D: A Large Photo-realistic Dataset for Structured 3D Modeling
Authors: Junfei Zhang, Jing Li, Rui Tang, Shenghua Gao, Zihan Zhou Jia Zheng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recently, there has been growing interest in developing learning-based methods to detect and utilize salient semi-global or global structures, such as junctions, lines, planes, cuboids, smooth surfaces, and all types of symmetries, for 3D scene modeling and understanding. However, the ground truth annotations are often obtained via human labor, which is particularly challenging and inefficient for such tasks due to the large number of 3D structure instances (e.g., line segments) and other factors such as viewpoints and occlusions. In this paper, we present a new synthetic dataset, Structured3D, with the aim of providing large-scale photo-realistic images with rich 3D structure annotations for a wide spectrum of structured 3D modeling tasks. We take advantage of the availability of professional interior designs and automatically extract 3D structures from them. We generate high-quality images with an industry-leading rendering engine. We use our synthetic dataset in combination with real images to train deep networks for room layout estimation and demonstrate improved performance on benchmark datasets."
BroadFace: Looking at Tens of Thousands of People at Once for Face Recognition
Authors: Wonpyo Park, Jongju Shin Yonghyun Kim
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The datasets of face recognition contain an enormous number of identities and instances. However, conventional methods have difficulty in reflecting the entire distribution of the datasets because a mini-batch of small size contains only a small portion of all identities. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a novel method called BroadFace, which is a learning process to consider a massive set of identities, comprehensively. In BroadFace, a linear classifier learns optimal decision boundaries among identities from a large number of embedding vectors accumulated over past iterations. By referring more instances at once, the optimality of the classifier is naturally increased on the entire datasets. Thus, the encoder is also globally optimized by referring the weight matrix of the classifier. Moreover, we propose a novel compensation method to increase the number of referenced instances in the training stage. BroadFace can be easily applied on many existing methods to accelerate a learning process and obtain a significant improvement in accuracy without extra computational burden at inference stage. We perform extensive ablation studies and experiments on various datasets to show the effectiveness of BroadFace, and also empirically prove the validity of our compensation method. BroadFace achieves the state-of-the-art results with significant improvements on nine datasets in 1:1 face verification and 1:N face identification tasks, and is also effective in image retrieval."
Interpretable Visual Reasoning via Probabilistic Formulation under Natural Supervision
Authors: Shuhui Wang, Chi Su, Weigang Zhang, Qingming Huang, Qi Tian Xinzhe Han
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Visual reasoning is crucial for visual question answering (VQA). However, without labelled programs, implicit reasoning under natural supervision is still quite challenging and previous models are hard to interpret. In this paper, we rethink implicit reasoning process in VQA, and propose a new formulation which maximizes the log-likelihood of joint distribution for the observed question and predicted answer. Accordingly, we derive a Temporal Reasoning Network (TRN) framework which models the implicit reasoning process as sequential planning in latent space. Our model is interpretable on both model design in probabilist and reasoning process via visualization. We experimentally demonstrate that TRN can support implicit reasoning across various datasets. The experiment results of our model are competitive to existing implicit reasoning models and surpass baseline by large margin on complicated reasoning tasks without extra computation cost in forward stage."
Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Using Weak Labels
Authors: Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Samuel Schulter, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, Manmohan Chandraker Sujoy Paul
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose a novel framework for domain adaptation in semantic segmentation with image-level weak labels in the target domain. The weak labels may be obtained based on a model prediction for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), or from a human oracle in a new weakly-supervised domain adaptation (WDA) paradigm for semantic segmentation. Using weak labels is both practical and useful, since (i) collecting image-level target annotations is comparably cheap in WDA and incurs no cost in UDA, and (ii) it opens the opportunity for category-wise domain alignment. Our framework uses weak labels to enable the interplay between feature alignment and pseudo-labeling, improving both in the process of domain adaptation. Specifically, we develop a weak-label classification module to enforce the network to attend to certain categories, and then use such training signals to guide the proposed category-wise alignment method. In experiments, we show considerable improvements with respect to the existing state-of-the-arts in UDA and present a new benchmark in the WDA setting."
Knowledge Distillation Meets Self-Supervision
Authors: Ziwei Liu, Xiaoxiao Li, Chen Change Loy Guodong Xu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Knowledge distillation, which involves extracting the ""dark knowledge"" from a teacher network to guide the learning of a student network, has emerged as an important technique for model compression and transfer learning. Unlike previous works that exploit architecture-specific cues such as activation and attention for distillation, here we wish to explore a more general and model-agnostic approach for extracting ""richer dark knowledge"" from the pre-trained teacher model. We show that the seemingly different self-supervision task can serve as a simple yet powerful solution. For example, when performing contrastive learning between transformed entities, the noisy predictions of the teacher network reflect its intrinsic composition of semantic and pose information. By exploiting the similarity between those self-supervision signals as an auxiliary task, one can effectively transfer the hidden information from the teacher to the student. In this paper, we discuss practical ways to exploit those noisy self-supervision signals with selective transfer for distillation. We further show that self-supervision signals improve conventional distillation with substantial gains under few-shot and noisy-label scenarios. Given the richer knowledge mined from self-supervision, our knowledge distillation approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, i.e., CIFAR100 and ImageNet, under both similar-architecture and cross-architecture settings. The advantage is even more pronounced under the cross-architecture setting, where our method outperforms the state of the art CRD by an average of 2.3% in accuracy rate on CIFAR100 across six different teacher-student pairs."
Efficient Neighbourhood Consensus Networks via Submanifold Sparse Convolutions
Authors: Relja Arandjelović, Josef Sivic Ignacio Rocco
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this work we target the problem of estimating accurately localised correspondences between a pair of images. We adopt the recent Neighbourhood Consensus Networks that have demonstrated promising performance for difficult correspondence problems and propose modifications to overcome their main limitations: large memory consumption, large inference time and poorly localised correspondences. Our proposed modifications can reduce the memory footprint and execution time more than $10 imes$, with equivalent results. This is achieved by sparsifying the correlation tensor containing tentative matches, and its subsequent processing with a 4D CNN using submanifold sparse convolutions. Localisation accuracy is significantly improved by processing the input images in higher resolution, which is possible due to the reduced memory footprint, and by a novel two-stage correspondence relocalisation module. The proposed Sparse-NCNet method obtains state-of-the art results on the HPatches Sequences and InLoc visual localisation benchmarks, and competitive results on the Aachen Day-Night benchmark."
Reconstructing the Noise Variance Manifold for Image Denoising
Authors: Grigorios G. Chrysos, Ioannis Alexiou, Gregory Slabaugh, Stefanos Zafeiriou Ioannis Marras
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been successfully used in many low-level vision problems like image denoising. Although the conditional image generation techniques have led to large improvements in this task, there has been little effort in providing conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) with an explicit way of understanding the image noise for object-independent denoising reliable for real-world applications. The task of leveraging structures in the target space is unstable due to the complexity of patterns in natural scenes, so the presence of unnatural artifacts or over-smoothed image areas cannot be avoided. To fill the gap, in this work we introduce the idea of a cGAN which explicitly leverages structure in the image noise variance space. By learning directly a low dimensional manifold of the image noise variance, the generator promotes the removal from the noisy image only that information which spans this manifold. This idea brings many advantages while it can be appended at the end of any denoiser to significantly improve its performance. Based on our experiments, our model substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art architectures, resulting in denoised images with less oversmoothing and better detail."
Occlusion-Aware Depth Estimation with Adaptive Normal Constraints
Authors: Lingjie Liu, Christian Theobalt, Wenping Wang Xiaoxiao Long
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We present a new learning-based method for multi-frame depth estimation from a color video, which is a fundamental problem in scene understanding, robot navigation or handheld 3D reconstruction. While recent learning-based methods estimate depth at high accuracy, 3D point clouds exported from their depth maps often fail to preserve important geometric feature (e.g., corners, edges, planes) of man-made scenes. Widely-used pixel-wise depth errors do not specifically penalize inconsistency on these features. These inaccuracies are particularly severe when subsequent depth reconstructions are accumulated in an attempt to scan a full environment with man-made objects with this kind of features. Our depth estimation algorithm therefore introduces a Combined Normal Map (CNM) constraint, which is designed to better preserve high-curvature features and global planar regions. In order to further improve the depth estimation accuracy, we introduce a new occlusion-aware strategy that aggregates initial depth predictions from multiple adjacent views into one final depth map and occlusion probability map for the current reference view. With the CNM constraint and the occlusion-aware loss, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of depth estimation accuracy, and preserves essential geometric features of man-made indoor scenes much better than other algorithms."