mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Towards Adversarially Robust Object Detection
Authors: Jianyu Wang Haichao Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Object detection is an important vision task and has emerged as an indispensable component in many vision system, rendering its robustness as an increasingly important performance factor for practical applications. While object detection models have been demonstrated to be vulnerable against adversarial attacks by many recent works, very few efforts have been devoted to improving their robustness. In this work, we take an initial attempt towards this direction. We first revisit and systematically analyze object detectors and many recently developed attacks from the perspective of model robustness. We then present a multi-task learning perspective of object detection and identify an asymmetric role of task losses. We further develop an adversarial training approach which can leverage the multiple sources of attacks for improving the robustness of detection models. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO verified the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Automatic and Robust Skull Registration Based on Discrete Uniformization
Authors: Xin Qi,  Chengfeng Wen,  Na Lei,  Xianfeng Gu Junli Zhao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Skull registration plays a fundamental role in forensic science and is crucial for craniofacial reconstruction. The complicated topology, lack of anatomical features, and low quality reconstructed mesh make skull registration challenging. In this work, we propose an automatic skull registration method based on the discrete uniformization theory, which can handle complicated topologies and is robust to low quality meshes. We apply dynamic Yamabe flow to realize discrete uniformization, which modifies the mesh combinatorial structure during the flow and conformally maps the multiply connected skull surface onto a planar disk with circular holes. The 3D surfaces can be registered by matching their planar images using harmonic maps. This method is rigorous with theoretic guarantee, automatic without user intervention, and robust to low mesh quality. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of the method.
Few-Shot Image Recognition With Knowledge Transfer
Authors: Zechao Li,  Junge Zhang,  Yan Li,  Guo-Jun Qi,  Jinhui Tang Zhimao Peng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Human can well recognize images of novel categories just after browsing few examples of these categories. One possible reason is that they have some external discriminative visual information about these categories from their prior knowledge. Inspired from this, we propose a novel Knowledge Transfer Network architecture (KTN) for few-shot image recognition. The proposed KTN model jointly incorporates visual feature learning, knowledge inferring and classifier learning into one unified framework for their optimal compatibility. First, the visual classifiers for novel categories are learned based on the convolutional neural network with the cosine similarity optimization. To fully explore the prior knowledge, a semantic-visual mapping network is then developed to conduct knowledge inference, which enables to infer the classifiers for novel categories from base categories. Finally, we design an adaptive fusion scheme to infer the desired classifiers by effectively integrating the above knowledge and visual information. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely-used Mini-ImageNet and ImageNet Few-Shot benchmarks to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results compared with the state-of-the-art approaches show the encouraging performance of the proposed method, especially on 1-shot and 2-shot tasks.
Fine-Grained Action Retrieval Through Multiple Parts-of-Speech Embeddings
Authors: Diane Larlus,  Gabriela Csurka,  Dima Damen Michael Wray
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We address the problem of cross-modal fine-grained action retrieval between text and video. Cross-modal retrieval is commonly achieved through learning a shared embedding space, that can indifferently embed modalities. In this paper, we propose to enrich the embedding by disentangling parts-of-speech (PoS) in the accompanying captions. We build a separate multi-modal embedding space for each PoS tag. The outputs of multiple PoS embeddings are then used as input to an integrated multi-modal space, where we perform action retrieval. All embeddings are trained jointly through a combination of PoS-aware and PoS-agnostic losses. Our proposal enables learning specialised embedding spaces that offer multiple views of the same embedded entities. We report the first retrieval results on fine-grained actions for the large-scale EPIC dataset, in a generalised zero-shot setting. Results show the advantage of our approach for both video-to-text and text-to-video action retrieval. We also demonstrate the benefit of disentangling the PoS for the generic task of cross-modal video retrieval on the MSR-VTT dataset.
Vehicle Re-Identification in Aerial Imagery: Dataset and Approach
Authors: Bingliang Jiao,  Lu Yang,  Yifei Yang,  Shizhou Zhang,  Wei Wei,  Yanning Zhang Peng Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In this work, we construct a large-scale dataset for vehicle re-identification (ReID), which contains 137k images of 13k vehicle instances captured by UAV-mounted cameras. To our knowledge, it is the largest UAV-based vehicle ReID dataset. To increase intra-class variation, each vehicle is captured by at least two UAVs at different locations, with diverse view-angles and flight-altitudes. We manually label a variety of vehicle attributes, including vehicle type, color, skylight, bumper, spare tire and luggage rack. Furthermore, for each vehicle image, the annotator is also required to mark the discriminative parts that helps them to distinguish this particular vehicle from others. Besides the dataset, we also design a specific vehicle ReID algorithm to make full use of the rich annotation information. It is capable of explicitly detecting discriminative parts for each specific vehicle and significantly outperforming the evaluated baselines and state-of-the-art vehicle ReID approaches.
Bridging the Domain Gap for Ground-to-Aerial Image Matching
Authors: Mubarak Shah Krishna Regmi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The visual entities in cross-view (e.g. ground and aerial) images exhibit drastic domain changes due to the differences in viewpoints each set of images is captured from. Existing state-of-the-art methods address the problem by learning view-invariant images descriptors. We propose a novel method for solving this task by exploiting the gener- ative powers of conditional GANs to synthesize an aerial representation of a ground-level panorama query and use it to minimize the domain gap between the two views. The synthesized image being from the same view as the ref- erence (target) image, helps the network to preserve im- portant cues in aerial images following our Joint Feature Learning approach. We fuse the complementary features from a synthesized aerial image with the original ground- level panorama features to obtain a robust query represen- tation. In addition, we employ multi-scale feature aggre- gation in order to preserve image representations at dif- ferent scales useful for solving this complex task. Experi- mental results show that our proposed approach performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art methods on the challenging CVUSA dataset in terms of top-1 and top-1% retrieval accuracies. Furthermore, we evaluate the gen- eralization of the proposed method for urban landscapes on our newly collected cross-view localization dataset with geo-reference information.
A Robust Learning Approach to Domain Adaptive Object Detection
Authors: Arash Vahdat,  Mani Ranjbar,  William G. Macready Mehran Khodabandeh
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Domain shift is unavoidable in real-world applications of object detection. For example, in self-driving cars, the target domain consists of unconstrained road environments which cannot all possibly be observed in training data. Similarly, in surveillance applications sufficiently representative training data may be lacking due to privacy regulations. In this paper, we address the domain adaptation problem from the perspective of robust learning and show that the problem may be formulated as training with noisy labels. We propose a robust object detection framework that is resilient to noise in bounding box class labels, locations and size annotations. To adapt to the domain shift, the model is trained on the target domain using a set of noisy object bounding boxes that are obtained by a detection model trained only in the source domain. We evaluate the accuracy of our approach in various source/target domain pairs and demonstrate that the model significantly improves the state-of-the-art on multiple domain adaptation scenarios on the SIM10K, Cityscapes and KITTI datasets.
Graph-Based Object Classification for Neuromorphic Vision Sensing
Authors: Aaron Chadha,  Alhabib Abbas,  Eirina Bourtsoulatze,  Yiannis Andreopoulos Yin Bi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Neuromorphic vision sensing (NVS) devices represent visual information as sequences of asynchronous discrete events (a.k.a., "spikes'") in response to changes in scene reflectance. Unlike conventional active pixel sensing (APS), NVS allows for significantly higher event sampling rates at substantially increased energy efficiency and robustness to illumination changes. However, object classification with NVS streams cannot leverage on state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs), since NVS does not produce frame representations. To circumvent this mismatch between sensing and processing with CNNs, we propose a compact graph representation for NVS. We couple this with novel residual graph CNN architectures and show that, when trained on spatio-temporal NVS data for object classification, such residual graph CNNs preserve the spatial and temporal coherence of spike events, while requiring less computation and memory. Finally, to address the absence of large real-world NVS datasets for complex recognition tasks, we present and make available a 100k dataset of NVS recordings of the American sign language letters, acquired with an iniLabs DAVIS240c device under real-world conditions.
Gaussian YOLOv3: An Accurate and Fast Object Detector Using Localization Uncertainty for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Dayoung Chun,  Hyun Kim,  Hyuk-Jae Lee Jiwoong Choi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The use of object detection algorithms is becoming increasingly important in autonomous vehicles, and object detection at high accuracy and a fast inference speed is essential for safe autonomous driving. A false positive (FP) from a false localization during autonomous driving can lead to fatal accidents and hinder safe and efficient driving. Therefore, a detection algorithm that can cope with mislocalizations is required in autonomous driving applications. This paper proposes a method for improving the detection accuracy while supporting a real-time operation by modeling the bounding box (bbox) of YOLOv3, which is the most representative of one-stage detectors, with a Gaussian parameter and redesigning the loss function. In addition, this paper proposes a method for predicting the localization uncertainty that indicates the reliability of bbox. By using the predicted localization uncertainty during the detection process, the proposed schemes can significantly reduce the FP and increase the true positive (TP), thereby improving the accuracy. Compared to a conventional YOLOv3, the proposed algorithm, Gaussian YOLOv3, improves the mean average precision (mAP) by 3.09 and 3.5 on the KITTI and Berkeley deep drive (BDD) datasets, respectively. Nevertheless, the proposed algorithm is capable of real-time detection at faster than 42 frames per second (fps) and shows a higher accuracy than previous approaches with a similar fps. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is the most suitable for autonomous driving applications.
Sharpen Focus: Learning With Attention Separability and Consistency
Authors: Ziyan Wu,  Srikrishna Karanam,  Kuan-Chuan Peng,  Rajat Vikram Singh,  Bo Liu,  Dimitris N. Metaxas Lezi Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Recent developments in gradient-based attention modeling have seen attention maps emerge as a powerful tool for interpreting convolutional neural networks. Despite good localization for an individual class of interest, these techniques produce attention maps with substantially overlapping responses among different classes, leading to the problem of visual confusion and the need for discriminative attention. In this paper, we address this problem by means of a new framework that makes class-discriminative attention a principled part of the learning process. Our key innovations include new learning objectives for attention separability and cross-layer consistency, which result in improved attention discriminability and reduced visual confusion. Extensive experiments on image classification benchmarks show the effectiveness of our approach in terms of improved classification accuracy, including CIFAR-100 (+3.33%), Caltech-256 (+1.64%), ImageNet (+0.92%), CUB-200-2011 (+4.8%) and PASCAL VOC2012 (+5.73%).
Learning Semantic-Specific Graph Representation for Multi-Label Image Recognition
Authors: Muxin Xu,  Xiaolu Hui,  Hefeng Wu,  Liang Lin Tianshui Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Recognizing multiple labels of images is a practical and challenging task, and significant progress has been made by searching semantic-aware regions and modeling label dependency. However, current methods cannot locate the semantic regions accurately due to the lack of part-level supervision or semantic guidance. Moreover, they cannot fully explore the mutual interactions among the semantic regions and do not explicitly model the label co-occurrence. To address these issues, we propose a Semantic-Specific Graph Representation Learning (SSGRL) framework that consists of two crucial modules: 1) a semantic decoupling module that incorporates category semantics to guide learning semantic-specific representations and 2) a semantic interaction module that correlates these representations with a graph built on the statistical label co-occurrence and explores their interactions via a graph propagation mechanism. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that our SSGRL framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a sizable margin, e.g. with an mAP improvement of 2.5%, 2.6%, 6.7%, and 3.1% on the PASCAL VOC 2007 & 2012, Microsoft-COCO and Visual Genome benchmarks, respectively. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/SSGRL.
DeceptionNet: Network-Driven Domain Randomization
Authors: Wadim Kehl,  Slobodan Ilic Sergey Zakharov
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We present a novel approach to tackle domain adaptation between synthetic and real data. Instead, of employing "blind" domain randomization, i.e., augmenting synthetic renderings with random backgrounds or changing illumination and colorization, we leverage the task network as its own adversarial guide toward useful augmentations that maximize the uncertainty of the output. To this end, we design a min-max optimization scheme where a given task competes against a special deception network to minimize the task error subject to the specific constraints enforced by the deceiver. The deception network samples from a family of differentiable pixel-level perturbations and exploits the task architecture to find the most destructive augmentations. Unlike GAN-based approaches that require unlabeled data from the target domain, our method achieves robust mappings that scale well to multiple target distributions from source data alone. We apply our framework to the tasks of digit recognition on enhanced MNIST variants, classification and object pose estimation on the Cropped LineMOD dataset as well as semantic segmentation on the Cityscapes dataset and compare it to a number of domain adaptation approaches, thereby demonstrating similar results with superior generalization capabilities.
Pose-Guided Feature Alignment for Occluded Person Re-Identification
Authors: Yu Wu,  Ping Liu,  Yuhang Ding,  Yi Yang Jiaxu Miao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Persons are often occluded by various obstacles in person retrieval scenarios. Previous person re-identification (re-id) methods, either overlook this issue or resolve it based on an extreme assumption. To alleviate the occlusion problem, we propose to detect the occluded regions, and explicitly exclude those regions during feature generation and matching. In this paper, we introduce a novel method named Pose-Guided Feature Alignment (PGFA), exploiting pose landmarks to disentangle the useful information from the occlusion noise. During the feature constructing stage, our method utilizes human landmarks to generate attention maps. The generated attention maps indicate if a specific body part is occluded and guide our model to attend to the non-occluded regions. During matching, we explicitly partition the global feature into parts and use the pose landmarks to indicate which partial features belonging to the target person. Only the visible regions are utilized for the retrieval. Besides, we construct a large-scale dataset for the Occluded Person Re-ID problem, namely Occluded-DukeMTMC, which is by far the largest dataset for the Occlusion Person Re-ID. Extensive experiments are conducted on our constructed occluded re-id dataset, two partial re-id datasets, and two commonly used holistic re-id datasets. Our method largely outperforms existing person re-id methods on three occlusion datasets, while remains top performance on two holistic datasets.
Robust Person Re-Identification by Modelling Feature Uncertainty
Authors: Da Li,  Yongxin Yang,  Timothy M. Hospedales,  Tao Xiang Tianyuan Yu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We aim to learn deep person re-identification (ReID) models that are robust against noisy training data. Two types of noise are prevalent in practice: (1) label noise caused by human annotator errors and (2) data outliers caused by person detector errors or occlusion. Both types of noise pose serious problems for training ReID models, yet have been largely ignored so far. In this paper, we propose a novel deep network termed DistributionNet for robust ReID. Instead of representing each person image as a feature vector, DistributionNet models it as a Gaussian distribution with its variance representing the uncertainty of the extracted features. A carefully designed loss is formulated in DistributionNet to unevenly allocate uncertainty across training samples. Consequently, noisy samples are assigned large variance/uncertainty, which effectively alleviates their negative impacts on model fitting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model is more effective than alternative noise-robust deep models. The source code is available at: https://github.com/TianyuanYu/DistributionNet
Co-Segmentation Inspired Attention Networks for Video-Based Person Re-Identification
Authors: Athira Nambiar,  Anurag Mittal Arulkumar Subramaniam
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Person re-identification (Re-ID) is an important real-world surveillance problem that entails associating a person's identity over a network of cameras. Video-based Re-ID approaches have gained significant attention recently since a video, and not just an image, is often available. In this work, we propose a novel Co-segmentation inspired video Re-ID deep architecture and formulate a Co-segmentation based Attention Module (COSAM) that activates a common set of salient features across multiple frames of a video via mutual consensus in an unsupervised manner. As opposed to most of the prior work, our approach is able to attend to person accessories along with the person. Our plug-and-play and interpretable COSAM module applied on two deep architectures (ResNet50, SE-ResNet50) outperform the state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets.
A Delay Metric for Video Object Detection: What Average Precision Fails to Tell
Authors: Xiaodong Yang,  William J. Dally Huizi Mao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Average precision (AP) is a widely used metric to evaluate detection accuracy of image and video object detectors. In this paper, we analyze the object detection from video and point out that mAP alone is not sufficient to capture the temporal nature of video object detection. To tackle this problem, we propose a comprehensive metric, Average Delay (AD), to measure and compare detection delay. To facilitate delay evaluation, we carefully select a subset of ImageNet VID, which we name as ImageNet VIDT with an emphasis on complex trajectories. By extensively evaluating a wide range of detectors on VIDT, we show that most methods drastically increase the detection delay but still preserve mAP well. In other words, mAP is not sensitive enough to reflect the temporal characteristics of a video object detector. Our results suggest that video object detection methods should be evaluated with a delay metric, particularly for latency-critical applications such as autonomous vehicle perception.
IL2M: Class Incremental Learning With Dual Memory
Authors: Adrian Popescu Eden Belouadah
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper presents a class incremental learning (IL) method which exploits fine tuning and a dual memory to reduce the negative effect of catastrophic forgetting in image recognition. First, we simplify the current fine tuning based approaches which use a combination of classification and distillation losses to compensate for the limited availability of past data. We find that the distillation term actually hurts performance when a memory is allowed. Then, we modify the usual class IL memory component. Similar to existing works, a first memory stores exemplar images of past classes. A second memory is introduced here to store past class statistics obtained when they were initially learned. The intuition here is that classes are best modeled when all their data are available and that their initial statistics are useful across different incremental states. A prediction bias towards newly learned classes appears during inference because the dataset is imbalanced in their favor. The challenge is to make predictions of new and past classes more comparable. To do this, scores of past classes are rectified by leveraging contents from both memories. The method has negligible added cost, both in terms of memory and of inference complexity. Experiments with three large public datasets show that the proposed approach is more effective than a range of competitive state-of-the-art methods.
Asymmetric Non-Local Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Mengde Xu,  Song Bai,  Tengteng Huang,  Xiang Bai Zhen Zhu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The non-local module works as a particularly useful technique for semantic segmentation while criticized for its prohibitive computation and GPU memory occupation. In this paper, we present Asymmetric Non-local Neural Network to semantic segmentation, which has two prominent components: Asymmetric Pyramid Non-local Block (APNB) and Asymmetric Fusion Non-local Block (AFNB). APNB leverages a pyramid sampling module into the non-local block to largely reduce the computation and memory consumption without sacrificing the performance. AFNB is adapted from APNB to fuse the features of different levels under a sufficient consideration of long range dependencies and thus considerably improves the performance. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our work. In particular, we report the state-of-the-art performance of 81.3 mIoU on the Cityscapes test set. For a 256x128 input, APNB is around 6 times faster than a non-local block on GPU while 28 times smaller in GPU running memory occupation. Code is available at: https://github.com/MendelXu/ANN.git.
CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Xinggang Wang,  Lichao Huang,  Chang Huang,  Yunchao Wei,  Wenyu Liu Zilong Huang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Full-image dependencies provide useful contextual information to benefit visual understanding problems. In this work, we propose a Criss-Cross Network (CCNet) for obtaining such contextual information in a more effective and efficient way. Concretely, for each pixel, a novel criss-cross attention module in CCNet harvests the contextual information of all the pixels on its criss-cross path. By taking a further recurrent operation, each pixel can finally capture the full-image dependencies from all pixels. Overall, CCNet is with the following merits: 1) GPU memory friendly. Compared with the non-local block, the proposed recurrent criss-cross attention module requires 11x less GPU memory usage. 2) High computational efficiency. The recurrent criss-cross attention significantly reduces FLOPs by about 85% of the non-local block in computing full-image dependencies. 3) The state-of-the-art performance. We conduct extensive experiments on popular semantic segmentation benchmarks including Cityscapes, ADE20K, and instance segmentation benchmark COCO. In particular, our CCNet achieves the mIoU score of 81.4 and 45.22 on Cityscapes test set and ADE20K validation set, respectively, which are the new state-of-the-art results. The source code is available at https://github.com/speedinghzl/CCNet.
Convex Shape Prior for Multi-Object Segmentation Using a Single Level Set Function
Authors: Xue-Cheng Tai,  Limei Huo,  Yang Wang,  Roland Glowinski Shousheng Luo
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Many objects in real world have convex shapes. It is a difficult task to have representations for convex shapes with good and fast numerical solutions. This paper proposes a method to incorporate convex shape prior for multi-object segmentation using level set method. The relationship between the convexity of the segmented objects and the signed distance function corresponding to their union is analyzed theoretically. This result is combined with Gaussian mixture method for the multiple objects segmentation with convexity shape prior. Alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) is adopted to solve the proposed model. Special boundary conditions are also imposed to obtain efficient algorithms for 4th order partial differential equations in one step of ADMM algorithm. In addition, our method only needs one level set function regardless of the number of objects. So the increase in the number of objects does not result in the increase of model and algorithm complexity. Various numerical experiments are illustrated to show the performance and advantages of the proposed method.
Surface Networks via General Covers
Authors: Nimrod Segol,  Heli Ben-Hamu,  Haggai Maron,  Yaron Lipman Niv Haim
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Developing deep learning techniques for geometric data is an active and fruitful research area. This paper tackles the problem of sphere-type surface learning by developing a novel surface-to-image representation. Using this representation we are able to quickly adapt successful CNN models to the surface setting. The surface-image representation is based on a covering map from the image domain to the surface. Namely, the map wraps around the surface several times, making sure that every part of the surface is well represented in the image. Differently from previous surface-to-image representations, we provide a low distortion coverage of all surface parts in a single image. Specifically, for the use case of learning spherical signals, our representation provides a low distortion alternative to several popular spherical parameterizations used in deep learning. We have used the surface-to-image representation to apply standard CNN architectures to 3D models including spherical signals. We show that our method achieves state of the art or comparable results on the tasks of shape retrieval, shape classification and semantic shape segmentation.
SSAP: Single-Shot Instance Segmentation With Affinity Pyramid
Authors: Yanhu Shan,  Yupei Wang,  Xin Zhao,  Yinan Yu,  Ming Yang,  Kaiqi Huang Naiyu Gao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Recently, proposal-free instance segmentation has received increasing attention due to its concise and efficient pipeline. Generally, proposal-free methods generate instance-agnostic semantic segmentation labels and instance-aware features to group pixels into different object instances. However, previous methods mostly employ separate modules for these two sub-tasks and require multiple passes for inference. We argue that treating these two sub-tasks separately is suboptimal. In fact, employing multiple separate modules significantly reduces the potential for application. The mutual benefits between the two complementary sub-tasks are also unexplored. To this end, this work proposes a single-shot proposal-free instance segmentation method that requires only one single pass for prediction. Our method is based on a pixel-pair affinity pyramid, which computes the probability that two pixels belong to the same instance in a hierarchical manner. The affinity pyramid can also be jointly learned with the semantic class labeling and achieve mutual benefits. Moreover, incorporating with the learned affinity pyramid, a novel cascaded graph partition module is presented to sequentially generate instances from coarse to fine. Unlike previous time-consuming graph partition methods, this module achieves 5x speedup and 9% relative improvement on Average-Precision (AP). Our approach achieves new state of the art on the challenging Cityscapes dataset.
Learning Propagation for Arbitrarily-Structured Data
Authors: Xueting Li,  Varun Jampani,  Shalini De Mello,  Jan Kautz Sifei Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Processing an input signal that contains arbitrary structures, e.g., superpixels and point clouds, remains a big challenge in computer vision. Linear diffusion, an effective model for image processing, has been recently integrated with deep learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose to learn pairwise relations among data points in a global fashion to improve semantic segmentation with arbitrarily-structured data, through spatial generalized propagation networks (SGPN). The network propagates information on a group of graphs, which represent the arbitrarily-structured data, through a learned, linear diffusion process. The module is flexible to be embedded and jointly trained with many types of networks, e.g., CNNs. We experiment with semantic segmentation networks, where we use our propagation module to jointly train on different data -- images, superpixels, and point clouds. We show that SGPN consistently improves the performance of both pixel and point cloud segmentation, compared to networks that do not contain this module. Our method suggests an effective way to model the global pairwise relations for arbitrarily-structured data.
MultiSeg: Semantically Meaningful, Scale-Diverse Segmentations From Minimal User Input
Authors: Scott Cohen,  Brian Price,  Long Mai,  Sim-Heng Ong,  Jiashi Feng Jun Hao Liew
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Existing deep learning-based interactive image segmentation approaches typically assume the target-of-interest is always a single object and fail to account for the potential diversity in user expectations, thus requiring excessive user input when it comes to segmenting an object part or a group of objects instead. Motivated by the observation that the object part, full object, and a collection of objects essentially differ in size, we propose a new concept called scale-diversity, which characterizes the spectrum of segmentations w.r.t. different scales. To address this, we present MultiSeg, a scale-diverse interactive image segmentation network that incorporates a set of two-dimensional scale priors into the model to generate a set of scale-varying proposals that conform to the user input. We explicitly encourage segmentation diversity during training by synthesizing diverse training samples for a given image. As a result, our method allows the user to quickly locate the closest segmentation target for further refinement if necessary. Despite its simplicity, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of quickly producing diverse yet plausible segmentation outputs, reducing the user interaction required, especially in cases where many types of segmentations (object parts or groups) are expected.
Robust Motion Segmentation From Pairwise Matches
Authors: Tomas Pajdla Federica Arrigoni
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In this paper we consider the problem of motion segmentation, where only pairwise correspondences are assumed as input without prior knowledge about tracks. The problem is formulated as a two-step process. First, motion segmentation is performed on image pairs independently. Secondly, we combine independent pairwise segmentation results in a robust way into the final globally consistent segmentation. Our approach is inspired by the success of averaging methods. We demonstrate in simulated as well as in real experiments that our method is very effective in reducing the errors in the pairwise motion segmentation and can cope with large number of mismatches.
InstaBoost: Boosting Instance Segmentation via Probability Map Guided Copy-Pasting
Authors: Jianhua Sun,  Runzhong Wang,  Minghao Gou,  Yong-Lu Li,  Cewu Lu Hao-Shu Fang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Instance segmentation requires a large number of training samples to achieve satisfactory performance and benefits from proper data augmentation. To enlarge the training set and increase the diversity, previous methods have investigated using data annotation from other domain (e.g. bbox, point) in a weakly supervised mechanism. In this paper, we present a simple, efficient and effective method to augment the training set using the existing instance mask annotations. Exploiting the pixel redundancy of the background, we are able to improve the performance of Mask R-CNN for 1.7 mAP on COCO dataset and 3.3 mAP on Pascal VOC dataset by simply introducing random jittering to objects. Furthermore, we propose a location probability map based approach to explore the feasible locations that objects can be placed based on local appearance similarity. With the guidance of such map, we boost the performance of R101-Mask R-CNN on instance segmentation from 35.7 mAP to 37.9 mAP without modifying the backbone or network structure. Our method is simple to implement and does not increase the computational complexity. It can be integrated into the training pipeline of any instance segmentation model without affecting the training and inference efficiency. Our code and models have been released at https://github.com/GothicAi/InstaBoost.
Racial Faces in the Wild: Reducing Racial Bias by Information Maximization Adaptation Network
Authors: Weihong Deng,  Jiani Hu,  Xunqiang Tao,  Yaohai Huang Mei Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Racial bias is an important issue in biometric, but has not been thoroughly studied in deep face recognition. In this paper, we first contribute a dedicated dataset called Racial Faces in-the-Wild (RFW) database, on which we firmly validated the racial bias of four commercial APIs and four state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms. Then, we further present the solution using deep unsupervised domain adaptation and propose a deep information maximization adaptation network (IMAN) to alleviate this bias by using Caucasian as source domain and other races as target domains. This unsupervised method simultaneously aligns global distribution to decrease race gap at domain-level, and learns the discriminative target representations at cluster level. A novel mutual information loss is proposed to further enhance the discriminative ability of network output without label information. Extensive experiments on RFW, GBU, and IJB-A databases show that IMAN successfully learns features that generalize well across different races and across different databases.
Uncertainty Modeling of Contextual-Connections Between Tracklets for Unconstrained Video-Based Face Recognition
Authors: Ruichi Yu,  Jun-Cheng Chen,  Boyu Lu,  Carlos D. Castillo,  Rama Chellappa Jingxiao Zheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Unconstrained video-based face recognition is a challenging problem due to significant within-video variations caused by pose, occlusion and blur. To tackle this problem, an effective idea is to propagate the identity from high-quality faces to low-quality ones through contextual connections, which are constructed based on context such as body appearance. However, previous methods have often propagated erroneous information due to lack of uncertainty modeling of the noisy contextual connections. In this paper, we propose the Uncertainty-Gated Graph (UGG), which conducts graph-based identity propagation between tracklets, which are represented by nodes in a graph. UGG explicitly models the uncertainty of the contextual connections by adaptively updating the weights of the edge gates according to the identity distributions of the nodes during inference. UGG is a generic graphical model that can be applied at only inference time or with end-to-end training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UGG with state-of-the-art results in the recently released challenging Cast Search in Movies and IARPA Janus Surveillance Video Benchmark dataset.
Spatio-Temporal Fusion Based Convolutional Sequence Learning for Lip Reading
Authors: Feng Cheng,  Shilin Wang Xingxuan Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Current state-of-the-art approaches for lip reading are based on sequence-to-sequence architectures that are designed for natural machine translation and audio speech recognition. Hence, these methods do not fully exploit the characteristics of the lip dynamics, causing two main drawbacks. First, the short-range temporal dependencies, which are critical to the mapping from lip images to visemes, receives no extra attention. Second, local spatial information is discarded in the existing sequence models due to the use of global average pooling (GAP). To well solve these drawbacks, we propose a Temporal Focal block to sufficiently describe short-range dependencies and a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Module (STFM) to maintain the local spatial information and to reduce the feature dimensions as well. From the experiment results, it is demonstrated that our method achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art approach using much less training data and much lighter Convolutional Feature Extractor. The training time is reduced by 12 days due to the convolutional structure and the local self-attention mechanism.
Occlusion-Aware Networks for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video
Authors: Bo Yang,  Bo Wang,  Wending Yan,  Robby T. Tan Yu Cheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Occlusion is a key problem in 3D human pose estimation from a monocular video. To address this problem, we introduce an occlusion-aware deep-learning framework. By employing estimated 2D confidence heatmaps of keypoints and an optical-flow consistency constraint, we filter out the unreliable estimations of occluded keypoints. When occlusion occurs, we have incomplete 2D keypoints and feed them to our 2D and 3D temporal convolutional networks (2D and 3D TCNs) that enforce temporal smoothness to produce a complete 3D pose. By using incomplete 2D keypoints, instead of complete but incorrect ones, our networks are less affected by the error-prone estimations of occluded keypoints. Training the occlusion-aware 3D TCN requires pairs of a 3D pose and a 2D pose with occlusion labels. As no such a dataset is available, we introduce a "Cylinder Man Model" to approximate the occupation of body parts in 3D space. By projecting the model onto a 2D plane in different viewing angles, we obtain and label the occluded keypoints, providing us plenty of training data. In addition, we use this model to create a pose regularization constraint, preferring the 2D estimations of unreliable keypoints to be occluded. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on Human 3.6M and HumanEva-I datasets.
Context-Aware Feature and Label Fusion for Facial Action Unit Intensity Estimation With Partially Labeled Data
Authors: Haiyong Jiang,  Baoyuan Wu,  Yanbo Fan,  Qiang Ji Yong Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Facial action unit (AU) intensity estimation is a fundamental task for facial behaviour analysis. Most previous methods use a whole face image as input for intensity prediction. Considering that AUs are defined according to their corresponding local appearance, a few patch-based methods utilize image features of local patches. However, fusion of local features is always performed via straightforward feature concatenation or summation. Besides, these methods require fully annotated databases for model learning, which is expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised patch-based deep model on basis of two types of attention mechanisms for joint intensity estimation of multiple AUs. The model consists of a feature fusion module and a label fusion module. And we augment attention mechanisms of these two modules with a learnable task-related context, as one patch may play different roles in analyzing different AUs and each AU has its own temporal evolution rule. The context-aware feature fusion module is used to capture spatial relationships among local patches while the context-aware label fusion module is used to capture the temporal dynamics of AUs. The latter enables the model to be trained on a partially annotated database. Experimental evaluations on two benchmark expression databases demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.
Distill Knowledge From NRSfM for Weakly Supervised 3D Pose Learning
Authors: Chen Kong,  Simon Lucey Chaoyang Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We propose to learn a 3D pose estimator by distilling knowledge from Non-Rigid Structure from Motion (NRSfM). Our method uses solely 2D landmark annotations. No 3D data, multi-view/temporal footage, or object specific prior is required. This alleviates the data bottleneck, which is one of the major concern for supervised methods. The challenge for using NRSfM as teacher is that they often make poor depth reconstruction when the 2D projections have strong ambiguity. Directly using those wrong depth as hard target would negatively impact the student. Instead, we propose a novel loss that ties depth prediction to the cost function used in NRSfM. This gives the student pose estimator freedom to reduce depth error by associating with image features. Validated on H3.6M dataset, our learned 3D pose estimation network achieves more accurate reconstruction compared to NRSfM methods. It also outperforms other weakly supervised methods, in spite of using significantly less supervision.
MONET: Multiview Semi-Supervised Keypoint Detection via Epipolar Divergence
Authors: Yasamin Jafarian,  Hyun Soo Park Yuan Yao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper presents MONET---an end-to-end semi-supervised learning framework for a keypoint detector using multiview image streams. In particular, we consider general subjects such as non-human species where attaining a large scale annotated dataset is challenging. While multiview geometry can be used to self-supervise the unlabeled data, integrating the geometry into learning a keypoint detector is challenging due to representation mismatch. We address this mismatch by formulating a new differentiable representation of the epipolar constraint called epipolar divergence---a generalized distance from the epipolar lines to the corresponding keypoint distribution. Epipolar divergence characterizes when two view keypoint distributions produce zero reprojection error. We design a twin network that minimizes the epipolar divergence through stereo rectification that can significantly alleviate computational complexity and sampling aliasing in training. We demonstrate that our framework can localize customized keypoints of diverse species, e.g., humans, dogs, and monkeys.
Talking With Hands 16.2M: A Large-Scale Dataset of Synchronized Body-Finger Motion and Audio for Conversational Motion Analysis and Synthesis
Authors: Zhiwei Deng,  Shugao Ma,  Takaaki Shiratori,  Siddhartha S. Srinivasa,  Yaser Sheikh Gilwoo Lee
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We present a 16.2-million frame (50-hour) multimodal dataset of two-person face-to-face spontaneous conversations. Our dataset features synchronized body and finger motion as well as audio data. To the best of our knowledge, it represents the largest motion capture and audio dataset of natural conversations to date. The statistical analysis verifies strong intraperson and interperson covariance of arm, hand, and speech features, potentially enabling new directions on data-driven social behavior analysis, prediction, and synthesis. As an illustration, we propose a novel real-time finger motion synthesis method: a temporal neural network innovatively trained with an inverse kinematics (IK) loss, which adds skeletal structural information to the generative model. Our qualitative user study shows that the finger motion generated by our method is perceived as natural and conversation enhancing, while the quantitative ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness of IK loss.