mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Robust Optical Flow in Rainy Scenes
Authors: Robby T. Tan, Loong-Fah Cheong Ruoteng Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Optical flow estimation in rainy scenes is challenging due to degradation caused by rain streaks and rain accumulation, where the latter refers to the poor visibility of remote scenes due to intense rainfall. To resolve the problem, we introduce a residue channel, a single channel (gray) image that is free from rain, and its colored version, a colored-residue image. We propose to utilize these two rain-free images in computing optical flow. To deal with the loss of contrast and the attendant sensitivity to noise, we decompose each of the input images into a piecewise-smooth structure layer and a high-frequency fine-detail texture layer. We combine the colored-residue images and structure layers in a unified objective function, so that the estimation of optical flow can be more robust. Results on both synthetic and real images show that our algorithm outperforms existing methods on different types of rain sequences. To our knowledge, this is the first optical flow method specifically dealing with rain. We also provide an optical flow dataset consisting of both synthetic and real rain images.
Scale Aggregation Network for Accurate and Efficient Crowd Counting
Authors: Zhipeng Wang, Yanyun Zhao, Fei Su Xinkun Cao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel encoder-decoder network, called extit{Scale Aggregation Network (SANet)}, for accurate and efficient crowd counting. The encoder extracts multi-scale features with scale aggregation modules and the decoder generates high-resolution density maps by using a set of transposed convolutions. Moreover, we find that most existing works use only Euclidean loss which assumes independence among each pixel but ignores the local correlation in density maps. Therefore, we propose a novel training loss, combining of Euclidean loss and local pattern consistency loss, which improves the performance of the model in our experiments. In addition, we use normalization layers to ease the training process and apply a patch-based test scheme to reduce the impact of statistic shift problem. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on four major crowd counting datasets and our method achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art methods while with much less parameters.
Deep Feature Factorization For Concept Discovery
Authors: Radhakrishna Achanta, Sabine Susstrunk Edo Collins
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We propose Deep Feature Factorization (DFF), a method capable of localizing similar semantic concepts within an image or a set of images. We use DFF to gain insight into a deep convolutional neural network's learned features, where we detect hierarchical cluster structures in feature space. This is visualized as heat maps, which highlight semantically matching regions across a set of images, revealing what the network `perceives' as similar. DFF can also be used to perform co-segmentation and co-localization, and we report state-of-the-art results on these tasks.
Object-centered image stitching
Authors: Chen Wang, Richard Strong Bowen, Emil Keyder, Ramin Zabih Charles Herrmann
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Image stitching is typically decomposed into three phases: registration, which aligns the source images with a common target image; seam finding, which determines for each target pixel the source image it should come from; and blending, which smooths transitions over the seams. As described in Szeliski’s tutorial on image stitching, the seam finding phase attempts to place seams between pixels where the transition between source images is not noticeable. Here, we observe that the most problematic failures of this approach occur when objects are cropped, omitted, or duplicated. We therefore take an object-centered approach to the problem, leveraging recent advances in object detection. We penalize candidate solutions with this class of error by modifying the energy function used in the seam finding stage. This produces substantially more realistic stitching results on challenging imagery. In addition, these methods can be used to determine when there is non-recoverable occlusion in the input data, and also suggest a simple evaluation metric that can be used to evaluate the output of stitching algorithms.
A Style-Aware Content Loss for Real-time HD Style Transfer
Authors: Dmytro Kotovenko, Sabine Lang, Bjorn Ommer Artsiom Sanakoyeu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Recently style transfer has received a lot of attention. While much of this research has aimed at speeding up the processing, the approaches are still lacking from a principled, art historical standpoint: a style is more than just a single image or an artist, but previous work is limited to only a single instance of a style or shows no benefit from more images. Moreover, previous work has relied on a direct comparison of art in the domain of RGB images or on CNNs pre-trained on ImageNet, which requires millions of labeled object bounding boxes and can introduce an extra bias, since it has been assembled without artistic consideration. To circumvent these issues, we propose a style-aware content loss, which is trained jointly with a deep encoder-decoder network for real-time, high-resolution stylization of images and videos. We propose a quantitative measure for evaluating the quality of a stylized image and also have art historians rank patches from our approach against those from previous work. These and our qualitative results ranging from small image patches to megapixel stylistic images and videos show that our approach better captures the subtle nature in which a style affects content.
Recurrent Squeeze-and-Excitation Context Aggregation Net for Single Image Deraining
Authors: Jianlong Wu, Zhouchen Lin, Hong Liu, Hongbin Zha Xia Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Rain streaks can severely degrade the visibility, which causes many current computer vision algorithms fail to work. So it is necessary to remove the rain from images. We propose a novel deep network architecture based on deep convolutional and recurrent neural networks for single image deraining. As contextual information is very important for rain removal, we first adopt the dilated convolutional neural network to acquire large receptive field. To better fit the rain removal task, we also modify the network. In heavy rain, rain streaks have various directions and shapes, which can be regarded as the accumulation of multiple rain streak layers. We assign different alpha-values to various rain streak layers according to the intensity and transparency by incorporating the squeeze-and-excitation block. Since rain streak layers overlap with each other, it is not easy to remove the rain in one stage. So we further decompose the rain removal into multiple stages. Recurrent neural network is incorporated to preserve the useful information in previous stages and benefit the rain removal in later stages. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under all evaluation metrics.method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under all evaluation metrics.
Acquisition of Localization Confidence for Accurate Object Detection
Authors: Ruixuan Luo, Jiayuan Mao, Tete Xiao, Yuning Jiang Borui Jiang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Modern CNN-based object detectors rely on bounding box regression and non-maximum suppression to localize objects. While the probabilities for class labels naturally reflect classification confidence, localization confidence is absent. This makes properly localized bounding boxes degenerate during iterative regression or even suppressed during NMS. In the paper we propose IoU-Net learning to predict the IoU between each detected bounding box and the matched ground-truth. The network acquires this confidence of localization, which improves the NMS procedure by preserving accurately localized bounding boxes. Furthermore, an optimization-based bounding box refinement method is proposed, where the predicted IoU is formulated as the objective. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset show the effectiveness of IoU-Net, as well as its compatibility with and adaptivity to several state-of-the-art object detectors.
Joint 3D Face Reconstruction and Dense Alignment with Position Map Regression Network
Authors: Fan Wu, Xiaohu Shao, Yanfeng Wang, Xi Zhou Yao Feng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We propose a straightforward method that simultaneously reconstructs the 3D facial structure and provides dense alignment. To achieve this, we design a 2D representation called UV position map which records the 3D shape of a complete face in UV space, then train a simple Convolutional Neural Network to regress it from a single 2D image. We also integrate a weight mask into the loss function during training to improve the performance of the network. Our method does not rely on any prior face model, and can reconstruct full facial geometry along with semantic meaning. Meanwhile, our network is very light-weighted and spends only 9.8ms to process an image, which is extremely faster than previous works. Experiments on multiple challenging datasets show that our method surpasses other state-of-the-art methods on both reconstruction and alignment tasks by a large margin. Code is available at https://github.com/YadiraF/PRNet.
Salient Objects in Clutter: Bringing Salient Object Detection to the Foreground
Authors: Ming-Ming Cheng, Jiang-Jiang Liu, Shang-Hua Gao, Qibin Hou, Ali Borji Deng-Ping Fan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We provide a comprehensive evaluation of salient object detection (SOD) models. Our analysis identifies a serious design bias of existing SOD datasets which assumes that each image contains at least one clearly outstanding salient object in low clutter. The design bias has led to a saturated high performance for state-of-the-art SOD models when evaluated on existing datasets. The models, however, still perform far from being satisfactory when applied to real-world daily scenes. Based on our analyses, we rst identify 7 crucial aspects that a comprehensive and balanced dataset should fulll. Then, we propose a new high-quality dataset and update the previous saliency benchmark. Specically, our SOC (Salient Objects in Clutter) dataset, includes images with salient and non-salient objects from daily object categories. Beyond object category annotations, each salient image is accompanied by attributes that reflect common challenges in real-world scenes. Finally, we report attribute-based performance assessment on our dataset.
Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-image Translation
Authors: Ming-Yu Liu, Serge Belongie, Jan Kautz Xun Huang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Unsupervised image-to-image translation is an important and challenging problem in computer vision. Given an image in the source domain, the goal is to learn the conditional distribution of corresponding images in the target domain, without seeing any pairs of corresponding images. While this conditional distribution is inherently multimodal, existing approaches make an overly simplified assumption, modeling it as a deterministic one-to-one mapping. As a result, they fail to generate diverse outputs from a given source domain image. To address this limitation, we propose a Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-image Translation (MUNIT) framework. We assume that the image representation can be decomposed into a content code that is domain-invariant, and a style code that captures domain-specific properties. To translate an image to another domain, we recombine its content code with a random style code sampled from the style space of the target domain. We analyze the proposed framework and establish several theoretical results. Extensive experiments with comparisons to the state-of-the-art approaches further demonstrates the advantage of the proposed framework. Moreover, our framework allows users to control the style of translation outputs by providing an example style image.
Diverse feature visualizations reveal invariances in early layers of deep neural networks
Authors: Marissa A. Weis, Leon A. Gatys, Matthias Bethge, Alexander S. Ecker Santiago A. Cadena
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Visualizing features in deep neural networks (DNNs) can help understanding their computations. Many previous studies aimed to visualize the selectivity of individual units by finding meaningful images that maximize their activation. However, comparably little attention has been paid to visualizing to what image transformations units in DNNs are invariant. Here we propose a method to discover invariances in the responses of hidden layer units of deep neural networks. Our approach is based on simultaneously searching for a batch of images that strongly activate a unit while at the same time being as distinct from each other as possible. We find that even early convolutional layers in VGG-19 exhibit various forms of response invariance: near-perfect phase invariance in some units and invariance to local diffeomorphic transformations in others. At the same time, we uncover representational differences with ResNet-50 in its corresponding layers. We conclude that invariance transformations are a major computational component learned by DNNs and we provide a systematic method to study them.
``Factual'' or ``Emotional'': Stylized Image Captioning with Adaptive Learning and Attention
Authors: Zhongping Zhang, Quanzeng You, Chen Fang, Zhaowen Wang, Hailin Jin, Jiebo Luo Tianlang Chen
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Generating stylized captions for an image is an emerging topic in image captioning. Given an image as input, it requires the system to generate a caption that has a specific style (e.g., humorous, romantic, positive, and negative) while describing the image content semantically accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel stylized image captioning model that effectively takes both requirements into consideration. To this end, we first devise a new variant of LSTM, named style-factual LSTM, as the building block of our model. It uses two groups of matrices to capture the factual and stylized knowledge, respectively, and automatically learns the word-level weights of the two groups based on previous context. In addition, when we train the model to capture stylized elements, we propose an adaptive learning approach based on a reference factual model, it provides factual knowledge to the model as the model learns from stylized caption labels, and can adaptively compute how much information to supply at each time step. We evaluate our model on two stylized image captioning datasets, which contain humorous/romantic captions and positive/negative captions, respectively. Experiments shows that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, without using extra ground truth supervision.
Deblurring Natural Image Using Super-Gaussian Fields
Authors: Wenyong Dong, Dong Gong, Lei Zhang, Qinfeng Shi Yuhang Liu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Blind image deblurring is a challenging problem due to its ill-posed nature, of which the success is closely related to a proper image prior. Although a large number of sparsity-based priors, such as the sparse gradient prior, have been successfully applied for blind image deblurring, they inherently suffer from several drawbacks, limiting their applications. Existing sparsity-based priors are usually rooted in modeling the response of images to some specific filters (e.g., image gradients), which are insufficient to capture the complicated image structures. Moreover, the traditional sparse priors or regularizations model the filter response (e.g., image gradients) independently and thus fail to depict the long range correlation among them. To address the above issues, we present a novel image prior for image deblurring based on a Super-Gaussian field model with adaptive structures. Instead of modeling the response of the fixed short-term filters, the proposed Super-Gaussian fields capture the complicated structures in natural images by integrating potentials on all cliques (e.g., centring at each pixel) into a joint probabilistic distribution. Considering that the fixed filters in different scales are impractical for the coarse-to-fine framework of image deblurring, we define each potential function as a super-Gaussian distribution. Through this definition, the partition function, the curse for traditional MRFs, can be theoretically ignored, and all model parameters of the proposed Super-Gaussian fields can be data-adaptively learned and inferred from the blurred observation with a variational framework. Extensive experiments on both blind deblurring and non-blind deblurring demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Dense Semantic and Topological Correspondence of 3D Faces without Landmarks
Authors: Xiyuan Hu, Chen Chen, Silong Peng Zhenfeng Fan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Many previous literatures use landmarks to guide the cor- respondence of 3D faces. However, these landmarks, either manually or automatically annotated, are hard to define consistently across differ- ent faces in many circumstances. We propose a general framework for dense correspondence of 3D faces without landmarks in this paper. The dense correspondence goal is revisited in two perspectives: semantic and topological correspondence. Starting from a template facial mesh, we sequentially perform global alignment, primary correspondence by tem- plate warping, and contextual mesh refinement, to reach the final cor- respondence result. The semantic correspondence is achieved by a local iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm of kernelized version, allowing accurate matching of local features. Then, robust deformation from the template to the target face is formulated as a minimization problem. Fur- thermore, this problem leads to a well-posed sparse linear system such that the solution is unique and efficient. Finally, a contextual mesh re- fining algorithm is applied to ensure topological correspondence. In the experiment, the proposed method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively on two datasets including a publicly available FRGC v2.0 dataset, demonstrating reasonable and reliable correspondence results.
OmniDepth: Dense Depth Estimation for Indoors Spherical Panoramas
Authors: Antonis Karakottas, Dimitrios Zarpalas, Petros Daras Nikolaos Zioulis
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Recent work on depth estimation up to now has only focused on projective images ignoring 360 content which is now increasingly and more easily produced. We show that monocular depth estimation models trained on traditional images produce sub-optimal results on omnidirectional images, showcasing the need for training directly on 360 datasets, which however, are hard to acquire. In this work, we circumvent the challenges associated with acquiring high quality 360 datasets with ground truth depth annotations, by re-using recently released large scale 3D datasets and re-purposing them to 360 via rendering. This dataset, which is considerably larger than similar projective datasets, is publicly offered to the community to enable future research in this direction. We use this dataset to learn in an end-to-end fashion the task of depth estimation from 360 images. We show promising results in our synthesized data as well as in unseen realistic images.
On Regularized Losses for Weakly-supervised CNN Segmentation
Authors: Federico Perazzi, Abdelaziz Djelouah, Ismail Ben Ayed, Christopher Schroers, Yuri Boykov Meng Tang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Minimization of regularized losses is a principled approach to weak supervision well-established in deep learning, in general. However, it is largely overlooked in semantic segmentation currently dominated by methods mimicking full supervision via ``fake'' fully-labeled masks (proposals) generated from available partial input. To obtain such full masks the typical methods explicitly use standard regularization techniques for ``shallow'' segmentation, e.g. graph cuts or dense CRFs. In contrast, we integrate such standard regularizers directly into the loss functions over partial input. This approach simplifies weakly-supervised training by avoiding extra MRF/CRF inference steps or layers explicitly generating full masks, while improving both the quality and efficiency of training. This paper proposes and experimentally compares different losses integrating MRF/CRF regularization terms. We juxtapose our regularized losses with earlier proposal-generation methods. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in semantic segmentation with near full-supervision quality.
Learning Dynamic Memory Networks for Object Tracking
Authors: Antoni B. Chan Tianyu Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Template-matching methods for visual tracking have gained popularity recently due to their comparable performance and fast speed. However, they lack effective ways to adapt to changes in the target object’s appearance, making their tracking accuracy still far from state-of-the-art. In this paper, we propose a dynamic memory network to adapt the template to the target’s appearance variations during tracking. An LSTM is used as a memory controller, where the input is the search feature map and the outputs are the control signals for the reading and writing process of the memory block. As the location of the target is at first unknown in the search feature map, an attention mechanism is applied to concentrate the LSTM input on the potential target. To prevent aggressive model adaptivity, we apply gated residual template learning to control the amount of retrieved memory that is used to combine with the initial template. Unlike tracking-by-detection methods where the object’s information is maintained by the weight parameters of neural networks, which requires expensive online fine-tuning to be adaptable, our tracker runs completely feed-forward and adapts to the target’s appearance changes by updating the external memory. Moreover, unlike other tracking methods where the model capacity is fixed after offline training – the capacity of our tracker can be easily enlarged as the memory require- ments of a task increase, which is favorable for memorizing long-term ob- ject information. Extensive experiments on OTB and VOT demonstrates that our tracker MemTrack performs favorably against state-of-the-art tracking methods while retaining real-time speed of 50 fps.
Zero-Shot Deep Domain Adaptation
Authors: Ziyan Wu, Jan Ernst Kuan-Chuan Peng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Domain adaptation is an important tool to transfer knowledge about a task (e.g. classification) learned in a source domain to a second, or target domain. Current approaches assume that task-relevant target-domain data is available during training. We demonstrate how to perform domain adaptation when no such task-relevant target-domain data is available. To tackle this issue, we propose zero-shot deep domain adaptation (ZDDA), which uses privileged information from task-irrelevant dual-domain pairs. ZDDA learns a source-domain representation which is not only tailored for the task of interest but also close to the target-domain representation. Therefore, the source-domain task of interest solution (e.g. a classifier for classification tasks) which is jointly trained with the source-domain representation can be applicable to both the source and target representations. Using the MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, NIST, EMNIST, and SUN RGB-D datasets, we show that ZDDA can perform domain adaptation in classification tasks without access to task-relevant target-domain training data. We also extend ZDDA to perform sensor fusion in the SUN RGB-D scene classification task by simulating task-relevant target-domain representations with task-relevant source-domain data. To the best of our knowledge, ZDDA is the first domain adaptation and sensor fusion method which requires no task-relevant target-domain data. The underlying principle is not particular to computer vision data, but should be extensible to other domains.
SphereNet: Learning Spherical Representations for Detection and Classification in Omnidirectional Images
Authors: Alexandru Paul Condurache, Andreas Geiger Benjamin Coors
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Omnidirectional cameras offer great benefits over classical cameras wherever a wide field of view is essential, such as in virtual reality applications or in autonomous robots. Unfortunately, standard convolutional neural networks are not well suited for this scenario as the natural projection surface is a sphere which cannot be unwrapped to a plane without introducing significant distortions, particularly in the polar regions. In this work, we present SphereNet, a novel deep learning framework which encodes invariance against such distortions explicitly into convolutional neural networks. Towards this goal, SphereNet adapts the sampling locations of the convolutional filters, effectively reversing distortions, and wraps the filters around the sphere. By building on regular convolutions, SphereNet enables the transfer of existing perspective convolutional neural network models to the omnidirectional case. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the tasks of image classification and object detection, exploiting two newly created semi-synthetic and real-world omnidirectional datasets.
Graininess-Aware Deep Feature Learning for Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Jiwen Lu, Gang Wang, Jie Zhou Chunze Lin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a graininess-aware deep feature learning method for pedestrian detection. Unlike most existing pedestrian detection methods which only consider low resolution feature maps, we incorporate fine-grained information into convolutional features to make them more discriminative for human body parts. Specifically, we propose a pedestrian attention mechanism which efficiently identifies pedestrian regions. Our method encodes fine-grained attention masks into convolutional feature maps, which significantly suppresses background interference and highlights pedestrians. Hence, our graininess-aware features become more focused on pedestrians, in particular those of small size and with occlusion. We further introduce a zoom-in-zoom-out module, which enhances the features by incorporating local details and context information. We integrate these two modules into a deep neural network, forming an end-to-end trainable pedestrian detector. Comprehensive experimental results on four challenging pedestrian benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Learning to Forecast and Refine Residual Motion for Image-to-Video Generation
Authors: Xi Peng, Yu Tian, Mubbasir Kapadia, Dimitris Metaxas Long Zhao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We consider the problem of image-to-video translation, where an input image is translated into an output video containing motions of a single object. Recent methods for such problems typically train transformation networks to generate future frames conditioned on the structure sequence. Parallel work has shown that short high-quality motions can be generated by spatiotemporal generative networks that leverage temporal knowledge from the training data. We combine the benefits of both approaches and propose a two-stage generation framework where videos are generated from structures and then refined by temporal signals. To model motions more efficiently, we train networks to learn residual motion between the current and future frames, which avoids learning motion-irrelevant details. We conduct extensive experiments on two image-to-video translation tasks: facial expression retargeting and human pose forecasting. Superior results over the state-of-the-art methods on both tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
ML-LocNet: Improving Object Localization with Multi-view Learning Network
Authors: Yang Yang, Jiashi Feng Xiaopeng Zhang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: This paper addresses Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) with only image-level supervision. We propose a Multi-view Learning Localization Network (ML-LocNet) by incorporating multi-view learning into a two-phase WSOL model. The multi-view learning would benefit localization due to the complementary relationships among the learned features from different views and the consensus property among the mined instances from each view. In the first phase, the representation is augmented by integrating features learned from multiple views, and in the second phase, the model performs multi-view co-training to enhance localization performance of one view with the help of instances mined from other views, which thus effectively avoids early fitting. ML-LocNet can be easily combined with existing WSOL models to further improve the localization accuracy. Its effectiveness has been proved experimentally. Notably, it achieves 68.6% CorLoc and 49.7% mAP on PASCAL VOC 2007, surpassing the state-of-the-arts by a large margin.
Statistically-motivated Second-order Pooling
Authors: Mathieu Salzmann Kaicheng Yu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: However, the nature of such operations is usually computationally expensive, and resulting vector representation orders of magnitude larger than first-order baselines. Here, by contrast, we introduce a statistically-motivated framework that projects the second-order descriptor into a compact vector while improving the representational power. To this end, we design a parametric vectorization layer, which maps a covariance matrix, known to follow a Wishart distribution, to a vector whose elements can be shown to follow a Chi-square distribution. We then propose to make use of a square-root normalization, which makes the distribution of the resulting representation converge to a Gaussian, with which most classifiers of recent first-order networks complying. As evidenced by our experiments, this lets us outperform the state-of-the-art first-order and second-order models on several benchmark recognition datasets.
Improving Generalization via Scalable Neighborhood Component Analysis
Authors: Alexei A. Efros, Stella X. Yu Zhirong Wu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Current visual recognition is dominated by the end-to-end formulation of classification problems implemented by the parametric softmax classifiers. Such formulation makes a closed world assumption with a fixed set of categories. This becomes problematic for open-set scenarios where new categories are encountered with very few examples for learning a generalizable parametric classifier. This paper adopts a non-parametric approach for visual recognition by optimizing feature embeddings instead of parametric classifiers. We use a deep neural network to learn embeddings which preserves neighborhood structures by neighborhood component analysis (NCA). Limited by its computational bottlenecks, we devise a mechanism to use an augmented memory to scale NCA for large datasets and very deep neural networks. Our experimental results show state-of-the-art results on ImageNet classification using nearest neighbor classifiers. More importantly, our feature embedding is more generalizable for new categories such as sub-category discovery and few-shot recognition.
Monocular Depth Estimation with Affinity, Vertical Pooling, and Label Enhancement
Authors: Xiangyu Xu, Wenxiu Sun, Liang Lin Yukang Gan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: While significant progress has been made in monocular depth estimation with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) extracting absolute features, such as edges and textures, the depth constraint of neighboring pixels, namely relative features, has been mostly ignored by recent methods. To overcome this limitation, we explicitly model the relationships of different image locations with an affinity layer and combine absolute and relative features in an end-to-end network. In addition, we also consider another prior knowledge that major depth changes in images lie in the vertical direction, and thus, it is beneficial to capture local vertical features for refined depth estimation. In the proposed algorithm we introduce vertical pooling to aggregate image features vertically to improve the depth accuracy.Furthermore, since the Lidar depth ground truth is quite sparse, we enhance the depth labels by generating high-quality dense depth maps with off-the-shelf stereo matching method which takes left-right image pairs as input.We also integrate multi-scale structures in our network to obtain global understanding the image depth and exploit residual learning to help depth refinement.We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively on the KITTI driving dataset.
Learning to Anonymize Faces for Privacy Preserving Action Detection
Authors: Yong Jae Lee, Michael S. Ryoo Zhongzheng Ren
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: There is an increasing concern in computer vision devices invading the privacy of their users. We want the camera systems/robots to recognize important events and assist human daily life by understanding its videos, but we also want to ensure that they do not intrude people's privacy. In this paper, we propose a new principled approach for learning a video anonymizer. We use an adversarial training setting in which two competing systems fight: (1) a video anonymizer that modifies the original video to remove privacy-sensitive information (i.e., human face) while still trying to maximize spatial action detection performance, and (2) a discriminator that tries to extract privacy-sensitive information from such anonymized videos. The end goal is for the video anonymizer to perform a pixel-level modification of video frames to anonymize each person's face, while minimizing the effect on action detection performance. We experimentally confirm the benefit of our approach particularly compared to conventional hand-crafted video/face anonymization methods including masking, blurring, and noise adding.
Distractor-aware Siamese Networks for Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Qiang Wang, Bo Li, Wei Wu, Junjie Yan, Weiming Hu Zheng Zhu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Recently, Siamese networks have drawn great attention in visual tracking community because of their balanced accuracy and speed. However, features used in most Siamese tracking approaches can only discriminate foreground from the non-semantic backgrounds. The semantic backgrounds are always considered as distractors, which hinders the robustness of Siamese trackers. In this paper, we focus on learning distractor-aware Siamese networks for accurate and long-term tracking. To this end, features used in traditional Siamese trackers are analyzed at first. We observe that the imbalanced distribution of training data makes the learned features less discriminative. During the off-line training phase, an effective sampling strategy is introduced to control this distribution and make the model focus on the semantic distractors. During inference, a novel distractor-aware module is designed to perform incremental learning, which can effectively transfer the general embedding to the current video domain. In addition, we extend the proposed approach for long-term tracking by introducing a simple yet effective local-to-global search region strategy. Extensive experiments on benchmarks show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, yielding 9.6% relative gain in VOT2016 dataset and 35.9% relative gain in UAV20L dataset. The proposed tracker can perform at 160 FPS on short-term benchmarks and 110 FPS on long-term benchmarks.
Question Type Guided Attention in Visual Question Answering
Authors: Tommaso Furlanello, Sheng Zha, Animashree Anandkumar Yang Shi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) requires integration of feature maps with drastically different structures and focus of the correct regions. Image descriptors have structures at multiple spatial scales, while lexical inputs inherently follow a temporal sequence and naturally cluster into semantically different question types. A lot of previous works use complex models to extract feature representations but neglect to use high-level information summary such as question types in learning . In this work, we propose Question Type-guided Attention (QTA). It utilizes the information of question type to dynamically balance between bottom-up and top-down visual features, respectively extracted from ResNet and Faster R-CNN networks. We experiment with multiple VQA architectures with extensive input ablation studies over the TDIUC dataset and show that QTA systematically improves the performance by more than 5% across multiple question type categories such as “Activity Recognition”, “Utility” and “Counting” on TDIUC dataset compared to the state-of-art. By adding QTA on the state-of-art model MCB, we achieve 3% improvement for overall accuracy. Finally, we propose a multitask extension to predict question types which generalizes QTA to applications that lack of question type, with minimal performance loss.
Escaping from Collapsing Modes in a Constrained Space
Authors: Chieh Hubert Lin, Che-Rung Lee, Da-Cheng Juan, Wei Wei, Hwann-Tzong Chen Chia-Che Chang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Generative adversarial networks (GANs) often suffer from unpredictable mode-collapsing during training. We study the issue of mode collapse of Boundary Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Network (BEGAN), which is one of the state-of-the-art generative models. Despite its potential of generating high-quality images, we find that BEGAN tends to collapse at some modes after a period of training. We propose a new model, called BEGAN with a Constrained Space (BEGAN-CS), which includes a latent-space constraint in the loss function. We show that BEGAN-CS can significantly improve training stability and suppress mode collapse without either increasing the model complexity or degrading the image quality. Further, we visualize the distribution of latent vectors to elucidate the effect of latent-space constraint. The experimental results show that our method has additional advantages of being able to train on small datasets and to generate images similar to a given real image but with variations of designated attributes on-the-fly.
Light Structure from Pin Motion: Simple and Accurate Point Light Calibration for Physics-based Modeling
Authors: Michael Waechter, Masaki Samejima, Yusuke Sugano, Yasuyuki Matsushita Hiroaki Santo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We present a practical method for geometric point light source calibration. Unlike in prior works that use Lambertian spheres, mirror spheres, or mirror planes, our calibration target consists of a Lambertian plane and small shadow casters at unknown positions above the plane. Due to their small size, the casters' shadows can be localized more precisely than highlights on mirrors. We show that, given shadow observations from a moving calibration target and a fixed camera, the shadow caster positions and the light position or direction can be simultaneously recovered in a structure from motion framework. Our evaluation on simulated and real scenes shows that our method yields light estimates that are stable and more accurate than existing techniques while having a considerably simpler setup and requiring less manual labor.
Bayesian Semantic Instance Segmentation in Open Set World
Authors: Vijay Kumar B. G., Thanh-Toan Do, Gustavo Carneiro, Ian Reid Trung Pham
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: This paper addresses the semantic instance segmentation task in the open-set conditions, where input images can contain known and unknown object classes. The training process of existing semantic instance segmentation methods requires annotation masks for all object instances, which is expensive to acquire or even infeasible in some realistic scenarios, where the number of categories may increase boundlessly. In this paper, we present a novel open-set semantic instance segmentation approach capable of segmenting all known and unknown object classes in images, based on the output of an object detector trained on known object classes. We formulate the problem using a Bayesian framework, where the posterior distribution is approximated with a simulated annealing optimization equipped with an efficient image partition sampler. We show empirically that our method is competitive with state-of-the-art supervised methods on known classes, but also performs well on unknown classes when compared with unsupervised methods.
HybridNet: Classification and Reconstruction Cooperation for Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Nicolas Thome, Matthieu Cord Thomas Robert
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new model for leveraging unlabeled data to improve generalization performances of image classifiers: a two-branch encoder-decoder architecture called HybridNet. The first branch receives supervision signal and is dedicated to the extraction of invariant class-related representations. The second branch is fully unsupervised and dedicated to model information discarded by the first branch to reconstruct input data. To further support the expected behavior of our model, we propose an original training objective. It favors stability in the discriminative branch and complementarity between the learned representations in the two branches. HybridNet is able to outperform state-of-the-art results on CIFAR-10, SVHN and STL-10 in various semi-supervised settings. In addition, visualizations and ablation studies validate our contributions and the behavior of the model on both CIFAR-10 and STL-10 datasets.
Uncertainty Estimates and Multi-Hypotheses Networks for Optical Flow
Authors: Ozgun Cicek, Silvio Galesso, Aaron Klein, Osama Makansi, Frank Hutter, Thomas Brox Eddy Ilg
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Optical flow estimation can be formulated as an end-to-end supervised learning problem, which yields estimates with a superior accuracy-runtime tradeoff compared to alternative methodology. In this paper, we make such networks estimate their local uncertainty about the correctness of their prediction, which is vital information when building decisions on top of the estimations. For the first time we compare several strategies and techniques to estimate uncertainty in a large-scale computer vision task like optical flow estimation. Moreover, we introduce a new network architecture and loss function that enforce complementary hypotheses and provide uncertainty estimates efficiently with a single forward pass and without the need for sampling or ensembles. We demonstrate the quality of the uncertainty estimates, which is clearly above previous confidence measures on optical flow and allows for interactive frame rates.
Discriminative Region Proposal Adversarial Networks for High-Quality Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Haiyong Zheng, Zhibin Yu, Ziqiang Zheng, Zhaorui Gu, Bing Zheng Chao Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Image-to-image translation has been made much progress with embracing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, it's still very challenging for translation tasks that require high quality, especially at high-resolution and photorealism. In this paper, we present Discriminative Region Proposal Adversarial Networks (DRPAN) for high-quality image-to-image translation. We decompose the procedure of image-to-image translation task into three iterated steps, first is to generate an image with global structure but some local artifacts (via GAN), second is using our DRPnet to propose the most fake region from the generated image, and third is to implement "image inpainting" on the most fake region for more realistic result through a reviser, so that the system (DRPAN) can be gradually optimized to synthesize images with more attention on the most artifact local part. Experiments on a variety of image-to-image translation tasks and datasets validate that our method outperforms state-of-the-arts for producing high-quality translation results in terms of both human perceptual studies and automatic quantitative measures.
Transductive Semi-Supervised Deep Learning using Min-Max Features
Authors: Yihong Gong, Chris Ding, Zhiheng MaXiaoyu Tao, Nanning Zheng Weiwei Shi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In this paper, we propose Transductive Semi-Supervised Deep Learning (TSSDL) method that is effective for training Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) models. The method applies transductive learning principle to DCNN training, introduces confidence levels on unlabeled image samples to overcome unreliable label estimates on outliers and uncertain samples, and develops the Min-Max Feature (MMF) regularization that encourages DCNN to learn feature descriptors with better between-class separability and within-class compactness. TSSDL method is independent of any DCNN architectures and complementary to the latest Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods. Comprehensive experiments on the benchmark datasets CIFAR10 and SVHN have shown that the DCNN model trained by the proposed TSSDL method can produce image classification accuracies compatible to the state-of-the-art SSL methods, and that combining TSSDL with the Mean Teacher method can produce the best classification accuracies on the two benchmark datasets.