mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Xilin Chen, Jingdong Wang Yuhui Yuan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we address the semantic segmentation problem with a focus on the context aggregation strategy. Our motivation is that the label of a pixel is the category of the object that the pixel belongs to. We present a simple yet effective approach, object-contextual representations, characterizing a pixel by exploiting the representation of the corresponding object class. First, we learn object regions under the supervision of the ground-truth segmentation. Second, we compute the object region representation by aggregating the representations of the pixels lying in the object region. Last, % the representation similarity we compute the relation between each pixel and each object region, and augment the representation of each pixel with the object-contextual representation which is a weighted aggregation of all the object region representations according to their relations with the pixel. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance on various challenging semantic segmentation benchmarks: Cityscapes, ADE20K, LIP, PASCAL-Context, and COCO-Stuff. Cityscapes, ADE20K, LIP, PASCAL-Context and COCO-Stuff. Our submission ""HRNet + OCR + SegFix"" achieves the 1-st place on the Cityscapes leaderboard by the time of submission. "
Efficient Spatio-Temporal Recurrent Neural Network for Video Deblurring
Authors: Ye Gao, Yinqiang Zheng, Bo Zheng Zhihang Zhong
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Real-time video deblurring still remains a challenging task due to the complexity of spatially and temporally varying blur itself and the requirement of low computational cost. To improve the network efficiency, we adopt residual dense blocks into RNN cells, so as to efficiently extract the spatial features of the current frame. Furthermore, a global spatio-temporal attention module is proposed to fuse the effective hierarchical features from past and future frames to help better deblur the current frame. For evaluation, we also collect a novel dataset with paired blurry/sharp video clips by using a co-axis beam splitter system. Through experiments on synthetic and realistic datasets, we show that our proposed method can achieve better deblurring performance both quantitatively and qualitatively with less computational cost against state-of-the-art video deblurring methods. "
Joint Semantic Instance Segmentation on Graphs with the Semantic Mutex Watershed
Authors: Yuyan Li, Constantin Pape, Alberto Bailoni, Anna Kreshuk, Fred A. Hamprecht Steffen Wolf
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Semantic instance segmentation is the task of simultaneously partitioning an image into distinct segments while associating each pixel with a class label. In commonly used pipelines, segmentation and label assignment are solved separately since joint optimization is computationally expensive. We propose a greedy algorithm for joint graph partitioning and labeling derived from the efficient Mutex Watershed partitioning algorithm. It optimizes an objective function closely related to the Symmetric Multiway Cut objective and empirically shows efficient scaling behavior. Due to the algorithm's efficiency, it can operate directly on pixels without prior over-segmentation of the image into superpixels. We evaluate the performance on the Cityscapes dataset (2D urban scenes) and on a 3D microscopy volume. In urban scenes, the proposed algorithm combined with current deep neural networks outperforms the strong baseline of `Panoptic Feature Pyramid Networks' by Kirillov et al. (2019). In the 3D electron microscopy images, we show explicitly that our joint formulation outperforms a separate optimization of the partitioning and labeling problems. "
Photon-Efficient 3D Imaging with A Non-Local Neural Network
Authors: Zhiwei Xiong, Xin Huang, Zheng-Ping Li, Dong Liu, Feihu Xu Jiayong Peng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Photon-efficient imaging has enabled a number of applications relying on single-photon sensors that can capture a 3D image with as few as one photon per pixel. In practice, however, measurements of low photon counts are often mixed with heavy background noise, which poses a great challenge for existing computational reconstruction algorithms. In this paper, we first analyze the long-range correlations in both spatial and temporal dimensions of the measurements. Then we propose a non-local neural network for depth reconstruction by exploiting the long-range correlations. The proposed network achieves decent reconstruction fidelity even under photon counts (and signal-to-background ratio, SBR) as low as 1 photon/pixel (and 0.01 SBR), which significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art. Moreover, our non-local network trained on simulated data can be well generalized to different real-world imaging systems, which could extend the application scope of photon-efficient imaging in challenging scenarios with a strict limit on optical flux. Code is available at https://github.com/JiayongO-O/PENonLocal."
GeLaTO: Generative Latent Textured Objects
Authors: Rohit Pandey, Sofien Bouaziz, Matthew Brown, Dan B Goldman Ricardo Martin-Brualla
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Accurate modeling of 3D objects exhibiting transparency, reflections and thin structures is an extremely challenging problem. Inspired by billboards and geometric proxies used in computer graphics, this paper proposes Generative Latent Textured Objects (GeLaTO), a compact representation that combines a set of coarse shape proxies defining low frequency geometry with learned neural textures, to encode both medium and fine scale geometry as well as view-dependent appearance. To generate the proxies' textures, we learn a joint latent space allowing category-level appearance and geometry interpolation. The proxies are independently rasterized with their corresponding neural texture and composited using a U-Net, which generates an output photorealistic image including an alpha map. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by reconstructing complex objects from a sparse set of views. We show results on a dataset of real images of eyeglasses frames, which are particularly challenging to reconstruct using classical methods. We also demonstrate that these coarse proxies can be handcrafted when the underlying object geometry is easy to model, like eyeglasses, or generated using a neural network for more complex categories, such as cars."
Improving Vision-and-Language Navigation with Image-Text Pairs from the Web
Authors: Ayush Shrivastava, Stefan Lee, Peter Anderson, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra Arjun Majumdar
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Following a navigation instruction such as 'Walk down the stairs and stop at the brown sofa' requires embodied AI agents to ground referenced scene elements referenced (e.g. 'stairs') to visual content in the environment (pixels corresponding to 'stairs'). We ask the following question -- can we leverage abundant `disembodied' web-scraped vision-and-language corpora (e.g. Conceptual Captions) to learn the visual groundings that improve performance on a relatively data-starved embodied perception task (Vision-and-Language Navigation)? Specifically, we develop VLN-BERT, a visiolinguistic transformer-based model for scoring the compatibility between an instruction ('...stop at the brown sofa') and a trajectory of panoramic RGB images captured by the agent. We demonstrate that pretraining VLN-BERT on image-text pairs from the web before fine-tuning on embodied path-instruction data significantly improves performance on VLN -- outperforming prior state-of-the-art in the fully-observed setting by 4 absolute percentage points on success rate. Ablations of our pretraining curriculum show each stage to be impactful -- with their combination resulting in further gains."
Directional Temporal Modeling for Action Recognition
Authors: Bing Shuai, Joseph Tighe Xinyu Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Many current activity recognition models use 3D convolutional neural networks (e.g. I3D, I3D-NL) to generate local spatial-temporal features. However, such features do not encode clip-level ordered temporal information. In this paper, we introduce a channel independent directional convolution (CIDC) operation, which learns to model the temporal evolution among local features. By applying multiple CIDC units we construct a light-weight network that models the clip-level temporal evolution across multiple spatial scales. Our CIDC network can be attached to any activity recognition backbone network. We evaluate our method on four popular activity recognition datasets and consistently improve upon state-of-the-art techniques. We further visualize the activation map of our CIDC network and show that it is able to focus on more meaningful, action related parts of the frame."
Shonan Rotation Averaging: Global Optimality by Surfing SO(p)(n)
Authors: David M. Rosen, Jing Wu, Robert Mahony, Luca Carlone Frank Dellaert
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Shonan Rotation Averaging is a fast, simple, and elegant rotation averaging algorithm that is guaranteed to recover globally optimal solutions under mild assumptions on the measurement noise. Our method employs semidefinite relaxation in order to recover provably globally optimal solutions of the rotation averaging problem. In contrast to prior work, we show how to solve large-scale instances of these relaxations using manifold minimization on (only slightly) higher-dimensional rotation manifolds, re-using existing high-performance (but local) structure-from-motion pipelines. Our method thus preserves the speed and scalability of those, while enabling the recovery of globally optimal solutions."
Semantic Curiosity for Active Visual Learning
Authors: Helen Jiang, Saurabh Gupta, Abhinav Gupta Devendra Singh Chaplot
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we study the task of embodied interactive learning for object detection. Given a set of environments (and some labeling budget), our goal is to learn an object detector by having an agent select what data to obtain labels for. How should an exploration policy decide which trajectory should be labeled? One possibility is to use a trained object detector's failure cases as an external reward. However, this will require labeling millions of frames required for training RL policies, which is infeasible. Instead, we explore a self-supervised approach for training our exploration policy by introducing a notion of semantic curiosity. Our semantic curiosity policy is based on a simple observation -- the detection outputs should be consistent. Therefore, our semantic curiosity rewards trajectories with inconsistent labeling behavior and encourages the exploration policy to explore such areas. The exploration policy trained via semantic curiosity generalizes to novel scenes and helps train an object detector that outperforms baselines trained with other possible alternatives such as random exploration, prediction-error curiosity, and coverage-maximizing exploration."
Multi-Temporal Recurrent Neural Networks For Progressive Non-Uniform Single Image Deblurring With Incremental Temporal Training
Authors: Dong Un Kang, Jisoo Kim, Se Young Chun Dongwon Park
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Blind non-uniform image deblurring for severe blurs induced by large motions is still challenging. Multi-scale (MS) approach has been widely used for deblurring that sequentially recovers the downsampled original image in low spatial scale first and then further restores in high spatial scale using the result(s) from lower spatial scale(s). Here, we investigate a novel alternative approach to MS, called multi-temporal (MT), for non-uniform single image deblurring by exploiting time-resolved deblurring dataset from high-speed cameras. MT approach models severe blurs as a series of small blurs so that it deblurs small amount of blurs in the original spatial scale progressively instead of restoring the images in different spatial scales. To realize MT approach, we propose progressive deblurring over iterations and incremental temporal training with temporally augmented training data. Our MT approach, that can be seen as a form of curriculum learning in a wide sense, allows a number of state-of-the-art MS based deblurring methods to yield improved performances without using MS approach. We also proposed a MT recurrent neural network with recurrent feature maps that outperformed state-of-the-art deblurring methods with the smallest number of parameters."
ProgressFace: Scale-Aware Progressive Learning for Face Detection
Authors: Dong Li, Tiantian Han, Lu Tian, Yi Shan Jiashu Zhu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Scale variation stands out as one of key challenges in face detection. Recent attempts have been made to cope with this issue by incorporating image / feature pyramids or adjusting anchor sampling / matching strategies. In this work, we propose a novel scale-aware progressive training mechanism to address large scale variations across faces. Inspired by curriculum learning, our method gradually learns large-to-small face instances. The preceding models learned with easier samples (i.e., large faces) can provide good initialization for succeeding learning with harder samples (i.e., small faces), ultimately deriving a better optimum of face detectors. Moreover, we propose an auxiliary anchor-free enhancement module to facilitate the learning of small faces by supplying positive anchors that may be not covered according to the criterion of IoU overlap. Such anchor-free module will be removed during inference and hence no extra computation cost is introduced. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to the state-of-the-arts on the standard FDDB and WIDER FACE benchmarks. Especially, our ProgressFace-Light with MobileNet-0.25 backbone achieves 87.9% AP on the hard set of WIDER FACE, surpassing largely RetinaFace with the same backbone by 9.7%. Code and our trained face detection models are available at https://github.com/jiashu-zhu/ProgressFace."
Learning Multi-layer Latent Variable Model via Variational Optimization of Short Run MCMC for Approximate Inference
Authors: Bo Pang, Tian Han, Linqi Zhou, Song-Chun Zhu, Ying Nian Wu Erik Nijkamp
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper studies the fundamental problem of learning deep generative models that consist of multiple layers of latent variables organized in top-down architectures. Such models have high expressivity and allow for learning hierarchical representations. Learning such a generative model requires inferring the latent variables for each training example based on the posterior distribution of these latent variables. The inference typically requires Markov chain Monte Caro (MCMC) that can be time consuming. In this paper, we propose to use noise initialized non-persistent short run MCMC, such as finite step Langevin dynamics initialized from the prior distribution of the latent variables, as an approximate inference engine, where the step size of the Langevin dynamics is variationally optimized by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the distribution produced by the short run MCMC and the posterior distribution. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms variational auto-encoder (VAE) in terms of reconstruction error and synthesis quality. The advantage of the proposed method is that it is simple and automatic without the need to design an inference model."
CoTeRe-Net: Discovering Collaborative Ternary Relations in Videos
Authors: Cheng Guan, Liangjie Cao, Qianqian Li, Ju Liang, Zhaorui Gu, Haiyong Zheng, Bing Zheng Zhensheng Shi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Modeling relations is crucial to understand videos for action and behavior recognition. Current relation models mainly reason about relations of invisibly implicit cues, while important relations of visually explicit cues are rarely considered, and the collaboration between them is usually ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel relation model that discovers relations of both implicit and explicit cues as well as their collaboration in videos. Our model concerns Collaborative Ternary Relations (CoTeRe), where the ternary relation involves channel (C, for implicit), temporal (T, for implicit), and spatial (S, for explicit) relation (R). We devise a flexible and effective CTSR module to collaborate ternary relations for 3D-CNNs, and then construct CoTeRe-Nets for action recognition. Extensive experiments on both ablation study and performance evaluation demonstrate that our CTSR module is significantly effective with approximate 3% gains and our CoTeRe-Nets outperform state-of-the-art approaches on three popular benchmarks. Boosts analysis and relations visualization also validate that relations of both implicit and explicit cues are discovered with efficacy by our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhenglab/cotere-net ."
Modeling the Effects of Windshield Refraction for Camera Calibration
Authors: Marc Proesmans, Luc Van Gool Frank Verbiest
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we study the effects of windshield refraction for autonomous driving applications. These distortion effects are surprisingly large and can not be explained by traditional camera models. Instead of using a generalized camera approach, we propose a novel approach to jointly optimize a traditional camera model, and a mathematical representation of the windshield’s surface. First, using the laws of geometric optics, the refraction is modeled using a local spherical approximation to the windshield’s geometry. Next, a spline-based model is proposed as a refinement to better adapt to deviations from the ideal shape and manufacturing variations. By jointly optimizing refraction and camera parameters, the projection error can be significantly reduced. The proposed models are validated on real windshield observations and custom setups to compare recordings with and without windshield, with accurate laser scan measurements as 3D ground truth."
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of NIR Images through Generative Latent Search
Authors: Aayush Kumar Tyagi, Sameer Ambekar, Prathosh AP Prashant Pandey
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Segmentation of the pixels corresponding to human skin is an essential first step in multiple applications ranging from surveillance to heart-rate estimation from remote-photoplethysmography. However, the existing literature considers the problem only in the visible-range of the EM-spectrum which limits their utility in low or no light settings where the criticality of the application is higher. To alleviate this problem, we consider the problem of skin segmentation from the Near-infrared images. However, Deep learning based state-of-the-art segmentation techniques demands large amounts of labelled data that is unavailable for the current problem. Therefore we cast the skin segmentation problem as that of target-independent Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) where we use the data from the Red-channel of the visible-range to develop skin segmentation algorithm on NIR images. We propose a method for target-independent segmentation where the 'nearest-clone' of a target image in the source domain is searched and used as a proxy in the segmentation network trained only on the source domain. We prove the existence of 'nearest-clone' and propose a method to find it through an optimization algorithm over the latent space of a Deep generative model based on variational inference. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method for NIR skin segmentation over the state-of-the-art UDA segmentation methods on the two newly created skin segmentation datasets in NIR domain despite not having access to the target NIR data. Additionally, we report state-of-the-art results for adaption from Synthia to Cityscapes which is a popular setting in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for semantic segmentation. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ambekarsameer96/GLSS."
PROFIT: A Novel Training Method for sub-4-bit MobileNet Models
Authors: Sungjoo Yoo Eunhyeok Park
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: 4-bit and lower precision mobile models are required due to the ever-increasing demand for better energy efficiency in mobile devices. In this work, we report that the activation instability induced by weight quantization (AIWQ) is the key obstacle to sub-4-bit quantization of mobile networks. To alleviate the AIWQ problem, we propose a novel training method called PROgressive-Freezing Iterative Training (PROFIT), which attempts to freeze layers whose weights are affected by the instability problem stronger than the other layers. We also propose a differentiable and unified quantization method (DuQ) and a negative padding idea to support asymmetric activation functions such as h-swish. We evaluate the proposed methods by quantizing MobileNet-v1, v2, and v3 on ImageNet and report that 4-bit quantization offers comparable (within 1.48 % top-1 accuracy) accuracy to full precision baseline. In the ablation study of the 3-bit quantization of MobileNet-v3, our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by a large margin, 12.86 % of top-1 accuracy. The quantized model and source code is available at https://github.com/EunhyeokPark/PROFIT."
Visual Relation Grounding in Videos
Authors: Xindi Shang, Xun Yang, Sheng Tang, Tat-Seng Chua Junbin Xiao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we explore a novel task named visual Relation Grounding in Videos (vRGV). The task aims at spatio-temporally localizing the given relations in the form of subject-predicate-object in the videos, so as to provide supportive visual facts for other high-level video-language tasks (e.g., video-language grounding and video question answering). The challenges in this task include but not limited to: (1) both the subject and object are required to be spatio-temporally localized to ground a query relation; (2) the temporal dynamic nature of visual relations in videos is difficult to capture; and (3) the grounding should be achieved without any direct supervision in space and time. To ground the relations, we tackle the challenges by collaboratively optimizing two sequences of regions over a constructed hierarchical spatio-temporal region graph through relation attending and reconstruction, in which we further propose a message passing mechanism by spatial attention shifting between visual entities. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can not only outperform baseline approaches significantly, but also produces visually meaningful facts to support visual grounding. (Code is available at https://github.com/doc-doc/vRGV)."
Weakly Supervised 3D Human Pose and Shape Reconstruction with Normalizing Flows
Authors: Eduard Gabriel Bazavan, Hongyi Xu, William T. Freeman, Rahul Sukthankar, Cristian Sminchisescu Andrei Zanfir
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Monocular 3D human pose and shape estimation is challenging due to the many degrees of freedom of the human body and the difficulty to acquire training data for large-scale supervised learning in complex visual scenes where humans with diverse shape and appearance, appear against complex backgrounds,in a variety of poses, and are partially occluded, or involved in interactions. Essential to learning is leveraging effective 3D human priors, and the ability to work under weak supervision, at scale, by exploiting, to the largest extent, the detailed human body semantics in images. In this paper we present new priors as well as large-scale weakly supervised models for 3D human pose and shape estimation. Key to our formulation are new latent normalizing flow representations, as well as fully differentiable, structurally-sensitive, semantic body part alignment(re-projection) loss functions that ensure consistent estimates and sharp feedback signals for learning. In extensive experiments using both motion capture datasets like CMU, Human3.6M, 3DPW, or AMASS, and repositories like COCO, we show that our proposed methods outperform existing counterparts, supporting the construction of an increasingly more accurate family of models based on large-scale training with unlabeled image data. "
Controlling Style and Semantics in Weakly-Supervised Image Generation
Authors: Aurelien Lucchi, Thomas Hofmann Dario Pavllo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose a weakly-supervised approach for conditional image generation of complex scenes where a user has fine control over objects appearing in the scene. We exploit sparse semantic maps to control object shapes and classes, as well as textual descriptions or attributes to control both local and global style. In order to condition our model on textual descriptions, we introduce a semantic attention module whose computational cost is independent of the image resolution. To further augment the controllability of the scene, we propose a two-step generation scheme that decomposes background and foreground. The label maps used to train our model are produced by a large-vocabulary object detector, which enables access to unlabeled data and provides structured instance information. In such a setting, we report better FID scores compared to fully-supervised settings where the model is trained on ground-truth semantic maps. We also showcase the ability of our model to manipulate a scene on complex datasets such as COCO and Visual Genome."
Jointly learning visual motion and confidence from local patches in event cameras
Authors: Daewon Lee, Colin Prepsius, Volkan Isler, Il Memming Park, Daniel D. Lee Daniel R. Kepple
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose the first network to jointly learn visual motion and confidence from events in spatially local patches. Event-based sensors deliver high temporal resolution motion information in a sparse, non-redundant format. This creates the potential for low computation, low latency motion recognition. Neural networks which extract global motion information, however, are generally computationally expensive. Here, we introduce a novel shallow and compact neural architecture and learning approach to capture reliable visual motion information along with the corresponding confidence of inference. Our network makes a prediction of the visual motion at each spatial location using only local events. Our confidence network then identifies which of these predictions will be accurate. In the task of recovering pan-tilt ego velocities from events, we show that each individual confident local prediction of our network can be expected to be as accurate as state of the art optimization approaches which utilize the full image. Furthermore, on a publicly available dataset, we find our local predictions generalize to scenes with camera motions and the presence of independently moving objects. This makes the output of our network well suited for motion based tasks, such as the segmentation of independently moving objects. We demonstrate on a publicly available motion segmentation dataset that restricting predictions to confident regions is sufficient to achieve results that exceed state of the art methods. "
SODA: Story Oriented Dense Video Captioning Evaluation Framework
Authors: Tsutomu Hirao, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Manabu Okumura, Masaaki Nagata Soichiro Fujita
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Dense Video Captioning (DVC) is a challenging task that localizes all events in a short video and describes them with natural language sentences. The main goal of DVC is video story description, that is, to generate a concise video story that supports human video comprehension without watching it. In recent years, DVC has attracted increasing attention in the research community of Vision and Language, and has been employed as a task of the workshop, ActivityNet Challenge. In the current research community, the official scorer provided by AcivityNet Challenge is the de-facto standard evaluation framework for DVC systems. It computes averaged METEOR scores for matched pairs between generated and reference captions whose Interval of Union (IoU) exceeds a specific threshold value. However, the current framework does not take into account the story of the video, the ordering of captions. It also tends to give high scores to systems that generate redundant, several hundred captions, that humans cannot read. This paper proposes a new evaluation framework, Story Oriented Dense video cAptioning evaluation framework (SODA), for measuring the performance of video story description systems. SODA first tries to find temporally optimal matching between generated and reference captions to capture a story for a video. Then, it computes METEOR scores for the matching and derives F-measure scores from the METEOR scores to penalize redundant captions. To demonstrate that SODA gives low scores for inadequate captions in terms of video story description, we evaluate two state-of-the-art systems with it, varying the number of captions. The results show that SODA can give low scores against too many or too few captions and high scores against captions whose number equals to that of a reference, while the current framework gives good scores for all the cases. Furthermore, we show that SODA tends to give lower scores than the current evaluation framework in evaluating captions with incorrect order."
Sketch-Guided Object Localization in Natural Images
Authors: Rajath R. Dani, Anand Mishra Aditay Tripathi, Anirban Chakraborty
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We introduce a novel problem of localizing all the instances of an object (seen or unseen during training) in a natural image via sketch query. We refer to this problem as sketch-guided object localization. This problem is distinctively different from the traditional sketch-based image retrieval task where the gallery set often contains images with only one object. The sketch-guided object localization proves to be more challenging when we consider the following: (i) the sketches used as queries are abstract representations with little information on the shape and salient attributes of the object, (ii) the sketches have significant variability as they are hand-drawn by a diverse set of untrained human subjects, and (iii) there exists a domain gap between sketch queries and target natural images as these are sampled from very different data distributions. To address the problem of sketch-guided object localization, we propose a novel mph{cross-modal attention} scheme that guides the region proposal network (RPN) to generate object proposals relevant to the sketch query. These object proposals are later scored against the query to obtain final localization. Our method is effective with as little as a single sketch query. Moreover, it also generalizes well to object categories not seen during training and is effective in localizing multiple object instances present in the image. Furthermore, we extend our framework to a multi-query setting using novel feature fusion and attention fusion strategies introduced in this paper. The localization performance is evaluated on publicly available object detection benchmarks, viz. MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC, with sketch queries obtained from `Quick, Draw!'. The proposed method significantly outperforms related baselines on both single-query and multi-query localization tasks."
A unifying mutual information view of metric learning: cross-entropy vs. pairwise losses
Authors: Jérôme Rony, Imtiaz Masud Ziko, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli, Pablo Piantanida, Ismail Ben Ayed Malik Boudiaf
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recently, substantial research efforts in Deep Metric Learning (DML) focused on designing complex pairwise-distance losses, which require convoluted schemes to ease optimization, such as sample mining or pair weighting. The standard cross-entropy loss for classification has been largely overlooked in DML. On the surface, the cross-entropy may seem unrelated and irrelevant to metric learning as it does not explicitly involve pairwise distances. However, we provide a theoretical analysis that links the cross-entropy to several well-known and recent pairwise losses. Our connections are drawn from two different perspectives: one based on an explicit optimization insight; the other on discriminative and generative views of the mutual information between the labels and the learned features. First, we explicitly demonstrate that the cross-entropy is an upper bound on a new pairwise loss, which has a structure similar to various pairwise losses: it minimizes intra-class distances while maximizing inter-class distances. As a result, minimizing the cross-entropy can be seen as an approximate bound-optimization (or Majorize-Minimize) algorithm for minimizing this pairwise loss. Second, we show that, more generally,minimizing the cross-entropy is actually equivalent to maximizing the mutual information, to which we connect several well-known pairwise losses. Furthermore, we show that various standard pairwise losses can be explicitly related to one another via bound relationships. Our findings indicate that the cross-entropy represents a proxy for maximizing the mutual information – as pairwise losses do – without the need for convoluted sample-mining heuristics. Our experiments†over four standard DML benchmarks strongly support our findings. We obtain state-of-the-art results, outperforming recent and complex DML methods."
Behind the Scene: Revealing the Secrets of Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models
Authors: Zhe Gan, Yu Cheng, Licheng Yu, Yen-Chun Chen, Jingjing Liu Jize Cao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recent Transformer-based large-scale pre-trained models have revolutionized vision-and-language (V+L) research. Models such as ViLBERT, LXMERT and UNITER have significantly lifted state of the art across a wide range of V+L benchmarks. However, little is known about the inner mechanisms that destine their impressive success. To reveal the secrets behind the scene, we present VALUE (Vision-And-Language Understanding Evaluation), a set of meticulously designed probing tasks (e.g., Visual Coreference Resolution, Visual Relation Detection) generalizable to standard pre-trained V+L models, to decipher the inner workings of multimodal pre-training (e.g., implicit knowledge garnered in individual attention heads, inherent cross-modal alignment learned through contextualized multimodal embeddings). Through extensive analysis of each archetypal model architecture via these probing tasks, our key observations are: (i) Pre-trained models exhibit a propensity for attending over text rather than images during inference. (ii) There exists a subset of attention heads that are tailored for capturing cross-modal interactions. (iii) Learned attention matrix in pre-trained models demonstrates patterns coherent with the latent alignment between image regions and textual words. (iv) Plotted attention patterns reveal visually-interpretable relations among image regions. (v) Pure linguistic knowledge is also effectively encoded in the attention heads. These are valuable insights serving to guide future work towards designing better model architecture and objectives for multimodal pre-training."
The Hessian Penalty: A Weak Prior for Unsupervised Disentanglement
Authors: John Peebles, Jun-Yan Zhu, Alexei Efros, Antonio Torralba William Peebles
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Existing popular methods for disentanglement rely on hand-picked priors and complex encoder-based architectures. In this paper, we propose the Hessian Penalty, a simple regularization function that encourages the input Hessian of a function to be diagonal. Our method is completely model-agnostic and can be applied to any deep generator with just a few lines of code. We show that our method automatically uncovers meaningful factors of variation in the standard basis when applied to ProgressiveGAN across several datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate that our regularization term can be used to identify interpretable directions in BigGAN's latent space in a fully unsupervised fashion. Finally, we provide provide empirical evidence that our regularization term encourages sparsity when applied to overparameterized latent spaces."
STAR: Sparse Trained Articulated Human Body Regressor
Authors: Timo Bolkart, Michael J. Black Ahmed A. A. Osman
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: The SMPL body model is widely used for the estimation, synthesis, and analysis of 3D human pose and shape. While popular, we show that SMPL has several limitations and introduce STAR, which is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to SMPL. First, SMPL has a huge number of parameters resulting from its use of global blend shapes. These dense pose-corrective offsets relate every vertex on the mesh to all the joints in the kinematic tree, capturing spurious long-range cor- relations. To address this, we define per-joint pose correctives and learn the subset of mesh vertices that are influenced by each joint movement. This sparse formulation results in more realistic deformations and significantly reduces the number of model parameters to 20% of SMPL. When trained on the same data as SMPL, STAR generalizes better despite having many fewer parameters. Second, SMPL factors pose-dependent deformations from body shape while, in reality, people with different shapes deform differently. Consequently, we learn shape-dependent pose- corrective blendshapes that depend on both body pose and BMI. Third, we show that the shape space of SMPL is not rich enough to capture the variation in the human population. We address this by training STAR with an additional 10,000 scans of male and female subjects, and show that this results in better model generalization. STAR is compact, generalizes better to new bodies and is a drop-in replacement for SMPL. STAR is publicly available for research purposes at http://star.is.tue.mpg.de."
Optical Flow Distillation: Towards Efficient and Stable Video Style Transfer
Authors: Yiman Zhang, Yunhe Wang, Han Shu, Chunjing Xu, Chang Xu Xinghao Chen
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Video style transfer techniques inspire many exciting applications on mobile devices. However, their efficiency and stability are still far from satisfactory. To boost the transfer stability across frames, optical flow is widely adopted, despite its high computational complexity, e.g., occupying over 97% inference time. This paper proposes to learn a lightweight video style transfer network via knowledge distillation paradigm. We adopt two teacher networks, one of which takes optical flow during inference while the other does not. The output difference between these two teacher networks highlights the improvements made by optical flow, which is then adopted to distill the target student network. Furthermore, a low-rank distillation loss is employed to stabilize the output of student network by mimicking the rank of input videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our student network without an optical flow module is still able to generate stable video and runs much faster than the teacher network."
Collaboration by Competition: Self-coordinated Knowledge Amalgamation for Multi-talent Student Learning
Authors: Wenwen Pan, Xinchao Wang, Dazhou Wang, Haihong Tang, Mingli Song Sihui Luo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: A vast number of well-trained deep networks have been released by developers online for plug-and-play use. These networks specialize in different tasks and in many cases, the data and annotations used to train them are not publicly available. In this paper, we study how to reuse such heterogeneous pre-trained models as teachers, and build a versatile and compact student model, without accessing human annotations. To this end, we propose a self-coordinate knowledge amalgamation network (SOKA-Net) for learning the multi-talent student model. This is achieved via a dual-step adaptive competitive-cooperation training approach, where the knowledge of the heterogeneous teachers are in the first step amalgamated to guide the shared parameter learning of the student network, and followed by a gradient-based competition-balancing strategy to learn the multi-head prediction network as well as the loss weightings of the distinct tasks in the second step. The two steps, which we term as the collaboration and competition step respectively, are performed alternatively until the balance of the competition is reached for the ultimate collaboration. Experimental results demonstrate that, the learned student not only comes with a smaller size but all achieves performances on par with or even superior to those of the teachers."
Do Not Disturb Me: Person Re-identification Under the Interference of Other Pedestrians
Authors: Changxin Gao, Jun Zhang, Hao Cheng, Chuchu Han, Xinyang Jiang, Xiaowei Guo, Wei-Shi Zheng, Nong Sang, Xing Sun Shizhen Zhao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In the conventional person Re-ID setting, it is assumed that cropped images are the person images within the bounding box for each individual. However, in a crowded scene, off-shelf-detectors may generate bounding boxes involving multiple people, where the large proportion of background pedestrians or human occlusion exists. The representation extracted from such cropped images, which contain both the target and the interference pedestrians, might include distractive information. This will lead to wrong retrieval results. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel deep network termed Pedestrian-Interference Suppression Network (PISNet). PISNet leverages a Query-Guided Attention Block (QGAB) to enhance the feature of the target in the gallery, under the guidance of the query. Furthermore, the involving Guidance Reversed Attention Module and the Multi-Person Separation Loss promote QGAB to suppress the interference of other pedestrians. Our method is evaluated on two new pedestrian-interference datasets and the results show that the proposed method performs favorably against existing Re-ID methods."
Learning 3D Part Assembly from a Single Image
Authors: Kaichun Mo, Lin Shao, Minhyuk Sung, Leonidas Guibas Yichen Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Autonomous assembly is a crucial capability for robots in many applications. For this task, several problems such as obstacle avoidance, motion planning, and actuator control have been extensively studied in robotics. However, when it comes to task specification, the space of possibilities remains under-explored. Towards this end, we introduce a novel problem,single-image-guided 3D part assembly, along with a learning-based solution. We study this problem in the setting of furniture assembly from a given complete set of parts and a single image depicting the entire assembled object. Multiple challenges exist in this setting, including handling ambiguity among parts (e.g., slats in a chair back and leg stretchers) and 3D pose prediction for parts and part subassemblies,whether visible or occluded. We address these issues by proposing a two-module pipeline that leverages strong 2D-3D correspondences and assembly-oriented graph message-passing to infer part relationships. In experiments with a PartNet-based synthetic benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework as compared with three baseline approaches."
PT2PC: Learning to Generate 3D Point Cloud Shapes from Part Tree Conditions
Authors: He Wang, Xinchen Yan, Leonidas Guibas Kaichun Mo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Generative 3D shape modeling is a fundamental research area in computer vision and interactive computer graphics, with many real-world applications. This paper investigates the novel problem of generating a 3D point cloud geometry for a shape from a symbolic part tree representation. In order to learn such a conditional shape generation procedure in an end-to-end fashion, we propose a conditional GAN “part tree”-to-“point cloud” model (PT2PC) that disentangles the structural and geometric factors. The proposed model incorporates the part tree condition into the architecture design by passing messages top-down and bottom-up along the part tree hierarchy. Experimental results and user study demonstrate the strengths of our method in generating perceptually plausible and diverse 3D point clouds, given the part tree condition. We also propose a novel structural measure for evaluating if the generated shape point clouds satisfy the part tree conditions."
Highly Efficient Salient Object Detection with 100K Parameters
Authors: Yong-Qiang Tan, Ming-Ming Cheng, Chengze Lu, Yunpeng Chen, Shuicheng Yan Shang-Hua Gao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Salient object detection models often demand a considerable amount of computation cost to make precise prediction for each pixel, making them hardly applicable on low-power devices. In this paper, we aim to relieve the contradiction between computation cost and model performance by improving the network efficiency to a higher degree. We propose a flexible convolutional module, namely generalized OctConv (gOctConv), to efficiently utilize both in-stage and cross-stages multi-scale features, while reducing the representation redundancy by a novel dynamic weight decay scheme. The effective dynamic weight decay scheme stably boosts the sparsity of parameters during training, supports learnable number of channels for each scale in gOctConv, allowing 80% of parameters reduce with negligible performance drop. Utilizing gOctConv, we build an extremely light-weighted model, namely CSNet, which achieves comparable performance with about 0.2% parameters (100k) of large models on popular salient object detection benchmarks. The source code is publicly available at https://mmcheng.net/sod100k."