mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning Scalable lY=-Constrained Near-Lossless Image Compression via Joint Lossy Image and Residual Compression
Authors: Yuanchao Bai, Xianming Liu, Wangmeng Zuo, Yaowei Wang, Xiangyang Ji
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a novel joint lossy image and residual compression framework for learning l_infinity-constrained near-lossless image compression. Specifically, we obtain a lossy reconstruction of the raw image through lossy image compression and uniformly quantize the corresponding residual to satisfy a given tight l_infinity error bound. Suppose that the error bound is zero, i.e., lossless image compression, we formulate the joint optimization problem of compressing both the lossy image and the original residual in terms of variational auto-encoders and solve it with end-to-end training. To achieve scalable compression with the error bound larger than zero, we derive the probability model of the quantized residual by quantizing the learned probability model of the original residual, instead of training multiple networks. We further correct the bias of the derived probability model caused by the context mismatch between training and inference. Finally, the quantized residual is encoded according to the bias-corrected probability model and is concatenated with the bitstream of the compressed lossy image. Experimental results demonstrate that our near-lossless codec achieves the state-of-the-art performance for lossless and near-lossless image compression, and achieves competitive PSNR while much smaller l_infinity error compared with lossy image codecs at high bit rates.
XProtoNet: Diagnosis in Chest Radiography With Global and Local Explanations
Authors: Eunji Kim, Siwon Kim, Minji Seo, Sungroh Yoon
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Automated diagnosis using deep neural networks in chest radiography can help radiologists detect life-threatening diseases. However, existing methods only provide predictions without accurate explanations, undermining the trustworthiness of the diagnostic methods. Here, we present XProtoNet, a globally and locally interpretable diagnosis framework for chest radiography. XProtoNet learns representative patterns of each disease from X-ray images, which are prototypes, and makes a diagnosis on a given X-ray image based on the patterns. It predicts the area where a sign of the disease is likely to appear and compares the features in the predicted area with the prototypes. It can provide a global explanation, the prototype, and a local explanation, how the prototype contributes to the prediction of a single image. Despite the constraint for interpretability, XProtoNet achieves state-of-the-art classification performance on the public NIH chest X-ray dataset.
Learning Scene Structure Guidance via Cross-Task Knowledge Transfer for Single Depth Super-Resolution
Authors: Baoli Sun, Xinchen Ye, Baopu Li, Haojie Li, Zhihui Wang, Rui Xu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Existing color-guided depth super-resolution (DSR) approaches require paired RGB-D data as training examples where the RGB image is used as structural guidance to recover the degraded depth map due to their geometrical similarity. However, the paired data may be limited or expensive to be collected in actual testing environment. Therefore, we explore for the first time to learn the cross-modal knowledge at training stage, where both RGB and depth modalities are available, but test on the target dataset, where only single depth modality exists. Our key idea is to distill the knowledge of scene structural guidance from color modality to the single DSR task without changing its network architecture. Specifically, we propose an auxiliary depth estimation (DE) task that takes color image as input to estimate a depth map, and train both DSR task and DE task collaboratively to boost the performance of DSR. A cross-task distillation module is designed to realize bilateral cross-task knowledge transfer. Moreover, to address the problem of RGB-D structure inconsistency and boost the structure perception, we advance a structure prediction (SP) task that provides extra structure regularization to help both DSR and DE networks learn more informative structure representations for depth recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our scheme achieves superior performance in comparison with other DSR methods.
Visual Navigation With Spatial Attention
Authors: Bar Mayo, Tamir Hazan, Ayellet Tal
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This work focuses on object goal visual navigation, aiming at finding the location of an object from a given class, where in each step the agent is provided with an egocentric RGB image of the scene. We propose to learn the agent's policy using a reinforcement learning algorithm. Our key contribution is a novel attention probability model for visual navigation tasks. This attention encodes semantic information about observed objects, as well as spatial information about their place. This combination of the "what"" and the "where"" allows the agent to navigate toward the sought-after object effectively. The attention model is shown to improve the agent's policy and to achieve state-of-the-art results on commonly-used datasets.
Model-Based 3D Hand Reconstruction via Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Yujin Chen, Zhigang Tu, Di Kang, Linchao Bao, Ying Zhang, Xuefei Zhe, Ruizhi Chen, Junsong Yuan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Reconstructing a 3D hand from a single-view RGB image is challenging due to various hand configurations and depth ambiguity. To reliably reconstruct a 3D hand from a monocular image, most state-of-the-art methods heavily rely on 3D annotations at the training stage, but obtaining 3D annotations is expensive. To alleviate reliance on labeled training data, we propose S2HAND, a self-supervised 3D hand reconstruction network that can jointly estimate pose, shape, texture, and the camera viewpoint. Specifically, we obtain geometric cues from the input image through easily accessible 2D detected keypoints. To learn an accurate hand reconstruction model from these noisy geometric cues, we utilize the consistency between 2D and 3D representations and propose a set of novel losses to rationalize outputs of the neural network. For the first time, we demonstrate the feasibility of training an accurate 3D hand reconstruction network without relying on manual annotations. Our experiments show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance with recent fully-supervised methods while using fewer supervision data.
Robust Reflection Removal With Reflection-Free Flash-Only Cues
Authors: Chenyang Lei, Qifeng Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a simple yet effective reflection-free cue for robust reflection removal from a pair of flash and ambient (no-flash) images. The reflection-free cue exploits a flash-only image obtained by subtracting the ambient image from the corresponding flash image in raw data space. The flash-only image is equivalent to an image taken in a dark environment with only a flash on. We observe that this flash-only image is visually reflection-free, and thus it can provide robust cues to infer the reflection in the ambient image. Since the flash-only image usually has artifacts, we further propose a dedicated model that not only utilizes the reflection-free cue but also avoids introducing artifacts, which helps accurately estimate reflection and transmission. Our experiments on real-world images with various types of reflection demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with reflection-free flash-only cues: our model outperforms state-of-the-art reflection removal approaches by more than 5.23dB in PSNR, 0.04 in SSIM, and 0.068 in LPIPS. Our source code and dataset are publicly available at github.com/ChenyangLEI/flash-reflection-removal.
Real-Time Selfie Video Stabilization
Authors: Jiyang Yu, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Keli Cheng, Michel Sarkis, Ning Bi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a novel real-time selfie video stabilization method. Our method is completely automatic and runs at 26 fps. We use a 1D linear convolutional network to directly infer the rigid moving least squares warping which implicitly balances between the global rigidity and local flexibility. Our network structure is specifically designed to stabilize the background and foreground at the same time, while providing optional control of stabilization focus (relative importance of foreground vs. background) to the users. To train our network, we collect a selfie video dataset with 1005 videos, which is significantly larger than previous selfie video datasets. We also propose a grid approximation to the rigid moving least squares that enables the real-time frame warping. Our method is fully automatic and produces visually and quantitatively better results than previous real-time general video stabilization methods. Compared to previous offline selfie video methods, our approach produces comparable quality with a speed improvement of orders of magnitude. Our code and selfie video dataset is available at https://github.com/jiy173/selfievideostabilization.
3D Human Action Representation Learning via Cross-View Consistency Pursuit
Authors: Linguo Li, Minsi Wang, Bingbing Ni, Hang Wang, Jiancheng Yang, Wenjun Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this work, we propose a Cross-view Contrastive Learning framework for unsupervised 3D skeleton-based action representation (CrosSCLR), by leveraging multi-view complementary supervision signal. CrosSCLR consists of both single-view contrastive learning (SkeletonCLR) and cross-view consistent knowledge mining (CVC-KM) modules, integrated in a collaborative learning manner. It is noted that CVC-KM works in such a way that high-confidence positive/negative samples and their distributions are exchanged among views according to their embedding similarity, ensuring cross-view consistency in terms of contrastive context, i.e., similar distributions. Extensive experiments show that CrosSCLR achieves remarkable action recognition results on NTU-60 and NTU-120 datasets under unsupervised settings, with observed higher-quality action representations. Our code is available at https://github.com/LinguoLi/CrosSCLR.
Differentiable SLAM-Net: Learning Particle SLAM for Visual Navigation
Authors: Peter Karkus, Shaojun Cai, David Hsu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) remains challenging for a number of downstream applications, such as visual robot navigation, because of rapid turns, featureless walls, and poor camera quality. We introduce the Differentiable SLAM Network (SLAM-net) along with a navigation architecture to enable planar robot navigation in previously unseen indoor environments. SLAM-net encodes a particle filter based SLAM algorithm in a differentiable computation graph, and learns task-oriented neural network components by backpropagating through the SLAM algorithm. Because it can optimize all model components jointly for the end-objective, SLAM-net learns to be robust in challenging conditions. We run experiments in the Habitat platform with different real-world RGB and RGB-D datasets. SLAM-net significantly outperforms the widely adapted ORB-SLAM in noisy conditions. Our navigation architecture with SLAM-net improves the state-of-the-art for the Habitat Challenge 2020 PointNav task by a large margin (37% to 64% success).
Learning Goals From Failure
Authors: Dave Epstein, Carl Vondrick
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We introduce a framework that predicts the goals behind observable human action in video. Motivated by evidence in developmental psychology, we leverage video of unintentional action to learn video representations of goals without direct supervision. Our approach models videos as contextual trajectories that represent both low-level motion and high-level action features. Experiments and visualizations show our trained model is able to predict the underlying goals in video of unintentional action. We also propose a method to "automatically correct" unintentional action by leveraging gradient signals of our model to adjust latent trajectories. Although the model is trained with minimal supervision, it is competitive with or outperforms baselines trained on large (supervised) datasets of successfully executed goals, showing that observing unintentional action is crucial to learning about goals in video.
Rank-One Prior: Toward Real-Time Scene Recovery
Authors: Jun Liu, Wen Liu, Jianing Sun, Tieyong Zeng
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Scene recovery is a fundamental imaging task for several practical applications, e.g., video surveillance and autonomous vehicles, etc. To improve visual quality under different weather/imaging conditions, we propose a real-time light correction method to recover the degraded scenes in the cases of sandstorms, underwater, and haze. The heart of our work is that we propose an intensity projection strategy to estimate the transmission. This strategy is motivated by a straightforward rank-one transmission prior. The complexity of transmission estimation is O(N) where N is the size of the single image. Then we can recover the scene in real-time. Comprehensive experiments on different types of weather/imaging conditions illustrate that our method outperforms competitively several state-of-the-art imaging methods in terms of efficiency and robustness.
Body2Hands: Learning To Infer 3D Hands From Conversational Gesture Body Dynamics
Authors: Evonne Ng, Shiry Ginosar, Trevor Darrell, Hanbyul Joo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We propose a novel learned deep prior of body motion for 3D hand shape synthesis and estimation in the domain of conversational gestures. Our model builds upon the insight that body motion and hand gestures are strongly correlated in non-verbal communication settings. We formulate the learning of this prior as a prediction task of 3D hand shape over time given body motion input alone. Trained with 3D pose estimations obtained from a large-scale dataset of internet videos, our hand prediction model produces convincing 3D hand gestures given only the 3D motion of the speaker's arms as input. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on hand gesture synthesis from body motion input, and as a strong body prior for single-view image-based 3D hand pose estimation. We demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches and can generalize beyond the monologue-based training data to multi-person conversations.
Linear Semantics in Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Jianjin Xu, Changxi Zheng
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are able to generate high-quality images, but it remains difficult to explicitly specify the semantics of synthesized images. In this work, we aim to better understand the semantic representation of GANs, and thereby enable semantic control in GAN's generation process. Interestingly, we find that a well-trained GAN encodes image semantics in its internal feature maps in a surprisingly simple way: a linear transformation of feature maps suffices to extract the generated image semantics. To verify this simplicity, we conduct extensive experiments on various GANs and datasets; and thanks to this simplicity, we are able to learn a semantic segmentation model for a trained GAN from a small number (e.g., 8) of labeled images. Last but not least, leveraging our finding, we propose two few-shot image editing approaches, namely Semantic-Conditional Sampling and Semantic Image Editing. Given a trained GAN and as few as eight semantic annotations, the user is able to generate diverse images subject to a user-provided semantic layout, and control the synthesized image semantics. We have made the code publicly available.
Mesoscopic Photogrammetry With an Unstabilized Phone Camera
Authors: Kevin C. Zhou, Colin Cooke, Jaehee Park, Ruobing Qian, Roarke Horstmeyer, Joseph A. Izatt, Sina Farsiu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a feature-free photogrammetric technique that enables quantitative 3D mesoscopic (mm-scale height variation) imaging with tens-of-micron accuracy from sequences of images acquired by a smartphone at close range (several cm) under freehand motion without additional hardware. Our end-to-end, pixel-intensity-based approach jointly registers and stitches all the images by estimating a coaligned height map, which acts as a pixel-wise radial deformation field that orthorectifies each camera image to allow plane-plus-parallax registration. The height maps themselves are reparameterized as the output of an untrained encoder-decoder convolutional neural network (CNN) with the raw camera images as the input, which effectively removes many reconstruction artifacts. Our method also jointly estimates both the camera's dynamic 6D pose and its distortion using a nonparametric model, the latter of which is especially important in mesoscopic applications when using cameras not designed for imaging at short working distances, such as smartphone cameras. We also propose strategies for reducing computation time and memory, applicable to other multi-frame registration problems. Finally, we demonstrate our method using sequences of multi-megapixel images captured by an unstabilized smartphone on a variety of samples (e.g., painting brushstrokes, circuit board, seeds).
Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification
Authors: Hao Chen, Yaohui Wang, Benoit Lagadec, Antitza Dantcheva, Francois Bremond
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent self-supervised contrastive learning provides an effective approach for unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) by learning invariance from different views (transformed versions) of an input. In this paper, we incorporate a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and a contrastive learning module into one joint training framework. While the GAN provides online data augmentation for contrastive learning, the contrastive module learns view-invariant features for generation. In this context, we propose a mesh-based view generator. Specifically, mesh projections serve as references towards generating novel views of a person. In addition, we propose a view-invariant loss to facilitate contrastive learning between original and generated views. Deviating from previous GAN-based unsupervised ReID methods involving domain adaptation, we do not rely on a labeled source dataset, which makes our method more flexible. Extensive experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods under both, fully unsupervised and unsupervised domain adaptive settings on several large scale ReID datsets.
Wide-Baseline Multi-Camera Calibration Using Person Re-Identification
Authors: Yan Xu, Yu-Jhe Li, Xinshuo Weng, Kris Kitani
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We address the problem of estimating the 3D pose of a network of cameras for large-environment wide-baseline scenarios, e.g., cameras for construction sites, sports stadiums, and public spaces. This task is challenging since detecting and matching the same 3D keypoint observed from two very different camera views is difficult, making standard structure-from-motion (SfM) pipelines inapplicable. In such circumstances, treating people in the scene as "keypoints" and associating them across different camera views can be an alternative method for obtaining correspondences. Based on this intuition, we propose a method that uses ideas from person re-identification (re-ID) for wide-baseline camera calibration. Our method first employs a re-ID method to associate human bounding boxes across cameras, then converts bounding box correspondences to point correspondences, and finally solves for camera pose using multi-view geometry and bundle adjustment. Since our method does not require specialized calibration targets except for visible people, it applies to situations where frequent calibration updates are required. We perform extensive experiments on datasets captured from scenes of different sizes, camera settings (indoor and outdoor), and human activities (walking, playing basketball, construction). Experiment results show that our method achieves similar performance to standard SfM methods relying on manually labeled point correspondences.
ATSO: Asynchronous Teacher-Student Optimization for Semi-Supervised Image Segmentation
Authors: Xinyue Huo, Lingxi Xie, Jianzhong He, Zijie Yang, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li, Qi Tian
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Semi-supervised learning is a useful tool for image segmentation, mainly due to its ability in extracting knowledge from unlabeled data to assist learning from labeled data. This paper focuses on a popular pipeline known as self-learning, where we point out a weakness named lazy mimicking that refers to the inertia that a model retains the prediction from itself and thus resists updates. To alleviate this issue, we propose the Asynchronous Teacher-Student Optimization (ATSO) algorithm that (i) breaks up continual learning from teacher to student and (ii) partitions the unlabeled training data into two subsets and alternately uses one subset to fine-tune the model which updates the labels on the other. We show the ability of ATSO on medical and natural image segmentation. In both scenarios, our method reports competitive performance, on par with the state-of-the-arts, in either using partial labeled data in the same dataset or transferring the trained model to an unlabeled dataset.
Panoramic Image Reflection Removal
Authors: Yuchen Hong, Qian Zheng, Lingran Zhao, Xudong Jiang, Alex C. Kot, Boxin Shi
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of panoramic image reflection removal, aiming at reliving the content ambiguity between reflection and transmission scenes. Although a partial view of the reflection scene is included in the panoramic image, it cannot be utilized directly due to its misalignment with the reflection-contaminated image. We propose a two-step approach to solve this problem, by first accomplishing geometric and photometric alignment for the reflection scene via a coarse-to-fine strategy, and then restoring the transmission scene via a recovery network. The proposed method is trained with a synthetic dataset and verified quantitatively with a real panoramic image dataset. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by the significant performance advantage over single image-based reflection removal methods and generalization capacity to limited-FoV scenarios captured by conventional camera or mobile phone users.
OTCE: A Transferability Metric for Cross-Domain Cross-Task Representations
Authors: Yang Tan, Yang Li, Shao-Lun Huang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Transfer learning across heterogeneous data distributions (a.k.a. domains) and distinct tasks is a more general and challenging problem than conventional transfer learning, where either domains or tasks are assumed to be the same. While neural network based feature transfer is widely used in transfer learning applications, finding the optimal transfer strategy still requires time-consuming experiments and domain knowledge. We propose a transferability metric called Optimal Transport based Conditional Entropy (OTCE), to analytically predict the transfer performance for supervised classification tasks in such cross-domain and cross-task feature transfer settings. Our OTCE score characterizes transferability as a combination of domain difference and task difference, and explicitly evaluates them from data in a unified framework. Specifically, we use optimal transport to estimate domain difference and the optimal coupling between source and target distributions, which is then used to derive the conditional entropy of the target task (task difference). Experiments on the largest cross-domain dataset DomainNet and Office31 demonstrate that OTCE shows an average of 21% gain in the correlation with the ground truth transfer accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. We also investigate two applications of the OTCE score including source model selection and multi-source feature fusion.
Diverse Semantic Image Synthesis via Probability Distribution Modeling
Authors: Zhentao Tan, Menglei Chai, Dongdong Chen, Jing Liao, Qi Chu, Bin Liu, Gang Hua, Nenghai Yu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Semantic image synthesis, translating semantic layouts to photo-realistic images, is a one-to-many mapping problem. Though impressive progress has been recently made, diverse semantic synthesis that can efficiently produce semantic-level multimodal results, still remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel diverse semantic image synthesis framework from the perspective of semantic class distributions, which naturally supports diverse generation at semantic or even instance level. We achieve this by modeling class-level conditional modulation parameters as continuous probability distributions instead of discrete values, and sampling per-instance modulation parameters through instance-adaptive stochastic sampling that is consistent across the network. Moreover, we propose prior noise remapping, through linear perturbation parameters encoded from paired references, to facilitate supervised training and exemplar-based instance style control at test time. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that our method can achieve superior diversity and comparable quality compared to state-of-the-art methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/tzt101/INADE.git
NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections
Authors: Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Noha Radwan, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Jonathan T. Barron, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Daniel Duckworth
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a learning-based method for synthesizingnovel views of complex scenes using only unstructured collections of in-the-wild photographs. We build on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), which uses the weights of a multi-layer perceptron to model the density and color of a scene as a function of 3D coordinates. While NeRF works well on images of static subjects captured under controlled settings, it is incapable of modeling many ubiquitous, real-world phenomena in uncontrolled images, such as variable illumination or transient occluders. We introduce a series of extensions to NeRF to address these issues, thereby enabling accurate reconstructions from unstructured image collections taken from the internet. We apply our system, dubbed NeRF-W, to internet photo collections of famous landmarks,and demonstrate temporally consistent novel view renderings that are significantly closer to photorealism than the prior state of the art.
Learning by Watching
Authors: Jimuyang Zhang, Eshed Ohn-Bar
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: When in a new situation or geographical location, human drivers have an extraordinary ability to watch others and learn maneuvers that they themselves may have never performed. In contrast, existing techniques for learning to drive preclude such a possibility as they assume direct access to an instrumented ego-vehicle with fully known observations and expert driver actions. However, such measurements cannot be directly accessed for the non-ego vehicles when learning by watching others. Therefore, in an application where data is regarded as a highly valuable asset, current approaches completely discard the vast portion of the training data that can be potentially obtained through indirect observation of surrounding vehicles. Motivated by this key insight, we propose the Learning by Watching (LbW) framework which enables learning a driving policy without requiring full knowledge of neither the state nor expert actions. To increase its data, i.e., with new perspectives and maneuvers, LbW makes use of the demonstrations of other vehicles in a given scene by (1) transforming the ego-vehicle's observations to their points of view, and (2) inferring their expert actions. Our LbW agent learns more robust driving policies while enabling data-efficient learning, including quick adaptation of the policy to rare and novel scenarios. In particular, LbW drives robustly even with a fraction of available driving data required by existing methods, achieving an average success rate of 92% on the original CARLA benchmark with only 30 minutes of total driving data and 82% with only 10 minutes.
Pseudo Facial Generation With Extreme Poses for Face Recognition
Authors: Guoli Wang, Jiaqi Ma, Qian Zhang, Jiwen Lu, Jie Zhou
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Face recognition has achieved a great success in recent years, it is still challenging to recognize those facial images with extreme poses. Traditional methods consider it as a domain gap problem. Many of them settle it by generating fake frontal faces from extreme ones, whereas they are tough to maintain the identity information with high computational consumption and uncontrolled disturbances. Our experimental analysis shows a dramatic precision drop with extreme poses. Meanwhile, those extreme poses just exist minor visual differences after small rotations. Derived from this insight, we attempt to relieve such a huge precision drop by making minor changes to the input images without modifying existing discriminators. A novel lightweight pseudo facial generation is proposed to relieve the problem of extreme poses without generating any frontal facial image. It can depict the facial contour information and make appropriate modifications to preserve the critical identity information. Specifically, the proposed method reconstructs pseudo profile faces by minimizing the pixel-wise differences with original profile faces and maintaining the identity consistent information from their corresponding frontal faces simultaneously. The proposed framework can improve existing discriminators and obtain a great promotion on several benchmark datasets.
Inverting Generative Adversarial Renderer for Face Reconstruction
Authors: Jingtan Piao, Keqiang Sun, Quan Wang, Kwan-Yee Lin, Hongsheng Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Given a monocular face image as input, 3D face geometry reconstruction aims to recover a corresponding 3Dface mesh. Recently, both optimization-based and learning-based face reconstruction methods have taken advantage of the emerging differentiable renderer and shown promising results. However, the differentiable renderer, mainly based on graphics rules, simplifies the realistic mechanism of the illumination, reflection, etc., of the real world, thus can-not produce realistic images. This brings a lot of domain-shift noise to the optimization or training process. In this work, we introduce a novel Generative Adversarial Renderer (GAR) and propose to tailor its inverted version to the general fitting pipeline, to tackle the above problem. Specifically, the carefully designed neural renderer takes a face normal map and a latent code representing other fac-tors as inputs and renders a realistic face image. Since the GAR learns to model the complicated real-world image, instead of relying on the simplified graphics rules, it is capable of producing realistic images, which essentially inhibits the domain-shift noise in training and optimization. Equipped with the elaborated GAR, we further proposed a novel approach to predict 3D face parameters, in which we first obtain fine initial parameters via Renderer Invertingand then refine it with gradient-based optimizers. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed generative adversarial renderer and the novel optimization-based face reconstruction framework. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple face reconstruction datasets.
Efficient Object Embedding for Spliced Image Retrieval
Authors: Bor-Chun Chen, Zuxuan Wu, Larry S. Davis, Ser-Nam Lim
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Detecting spliced images is one of the emerging challenges in computer vision. Unlike prior methods that focus on detecting low-level artifacts generated during the manipulation process, we use an image retrieval approach to tackle this problem. When given a spliced query image, our goal is to retrieve the original image from a database of authentic images. To achieve this goal, we propose representing an image by its constituent objects based on the intuition that the finest granularity of manipulations is oftentimes at the object-level. We introduce a framework, object embeddings for spliced image retrieval (OE-SIR), that utilizes modern object detectors to localize object regions. Each region is then embedded and collectively used to represent the image. Further, we propose a student-teacher training paradigm for learning discriminative embeddings within object regions to avoid expensive multiple forward passes. Detailed analysis of the efficacy of different feature embedding models is also provided in this study. Extensive experimental results show that the OE-SIR achieves state-of-the-art performance in spliced image retrieval.
GrooMeD-NMS: Grouped Mathematically Differentiable NMS for Monocular 3D Object Detection
Authors: Abhinav Kumar, Garrick Brazil, Xiaoming Liu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Modern 3D object detectors have immensely benefited from the end-to-end learning idea. However, most of them use a post-processing algorithm called Non-Maximal Suppression (NMS) only during inference. While there were attempts to include NMS in the training pipeline for tasks such as 2D object detection, they have been less widely adopted due to a non-mathematical expression of the NMS. In this paper, we present and integrate GrooMeD-NMS -- a novel Grouped Mathematically Differentiable NMS for monocular 3D object detection, such that the network is trained end-to-end with a loss on the boxes after NMS. We first formulate NMS as a matrix operation and then group and mask the boxes in an unsupervised manner to obtain a simple closed-form expression of the NMS. GrooMeD-NMS addresses the mismatch between training and inference pipelines and, therefore, forces the network to select the best 3D box in a differentiable manner. As a result, GrooMeD-NMS achieves state-of-the-art monocular 3D object detection results on the KITTI benchmark dataset performing comparably to monocular video-based methods.
Flow Guided Transformable Bottleneck Networks for Motion Retargeting
Authors: Jian Ren, Menglei Chai, Oliver J. Woodford, Kyle Olszewski, Sergey Tulyakov
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Human motion retargeting aims to transfer the motion of one person in a driving video or set of images to another person. Existing efforts leverage a long training video from each target person to train a subject-specific motion transfer model. However, the scalability of such methods is limited, as each model can only generate videos for the given target subject, and such training videos are labor-intensive to acquire and process. Few-shot motion transfer techniques, which only require one or a few images from a target, have recently drawn considerable attention. Methods addressing this task generally use either 2D or explicit 3D representations to transfer motion, and in doing so, sacrifice either accurate geometric modeling or the flexibility of an end-to-end learned representation. Inspired by the Transformable Bottleneck Network, which renders novel views and manipulations of rigid objects, we propose an approach based on an implicit volumetric representation of the image content, which can then be spatially manipulated using volumetric flow fields. We address the challenging question of how to aggregate information across different body poses, learning flow fields that allow for combining content from the appropriate regions of input images of highly non-rigid human subjects performing complex motions into a single implicit volumetric representation. This allows us to learn our 3D representation solely from videos of moving people. Armed with both 3D object understanding and end-to-end learned rendering, this categorically novel representation delivers state-of-the-art image generation quality, as shown by our quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
Projecting Your View Attentively: Monocular Road Scene Layout Estimation via Cross-View Transformation
Authors: Weixiang Yang, Qi Li, Wenxi Liu, Yuanlong Yu, Yuexin Ma, Shengfeng He, Jia Pan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: HD map reconstruction is crucial for autonomous driving. LiDAR-based methods are limited due to the deployed expensive sensors and time-consuming computation. Camera-based methods usually need to separately perform road segmentation and view transformation, which often causes distortion and the absence of content. To push the limits of the technology, we present a novel framework that enables reconstructing a local map formed by road layout and vehicle occupancy in the bird's-eye view given a front-view monocular image only. In particular, we propose a cross-view transformation module, which takes the constraint of cycle consistency between views into account and makes full use of their correlation to strengthen the view transformation and scene understanding. Considering the relationship between vehicles and roads, we also design a context-aware discriminator to further refine the results. Experiments on public benchmarks show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the tasks of road layout estimation and vehicle occupancy estimation. Especially for the latter task, our model outperforms all competitors by a large margin. Furthermore, our model runs at 35 FPS on a single GPU, which is efficient and applicable for real-time panorama HD map reconstruction.
Deep Analysis of CNN-Based Spatio-Temporal Representations for Action Recognition
Authors: Chun-Fu Richard Chen, Rameswar Panda, Kandan Ramakrishnan, Rogerio Feris, John Cohn, Aude Oliva, Quanfu Fan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In recent years, a number of approaches based on 2D or 3D convolutional neural networks (CNN) have emerged for video action recognition, achieving state-of-the-art results on several large-scale benchmark datasets. In this paper, we carry out in-depth comparative analysis to better understand the differences between these approaches and the progress made by them. To this end, we develop an unified framework for both 2D-CNN and 3D-CNN action models, which enables us to remove bells and whistles and provides a common ground for fair comparison. We then conduct an effort towards a large-scale analysis involving over 300 action recognition models. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that a) a significant leap is made in efficiency for action recognition, but not in accuracy; b) 2D-CNN and 3D-CNN models behave similarly in terms of spatio-temporal representation abilities and transferability. Our codes are available at https://github.com/IBM/action-recognition-pytorch.
Generalizable Person Re-Identification With Relevance-Aware Mixture of Experts
Authors: Yongxing Dai, Xiaotong Li, Jun Liu, Zekun Tong, Ling-Yu Duan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Domain generalizable (DG) person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging problem because we cannot access any unseen target domain data during training. Almost all the existing DG ReID methods follow the same pipeline where they use a hybrid dataset from multiple source domains for training, and then directly apply the trained model to the unseen target domains for testing. These methods often neglect individual source domains' discriminative characteristics and their relevances w.r.t. the unseen target domains, though both of which can be leveraged to help the model's generalization. To handle the above two issues, we propose a novel method called the relevance-aware mixture of experts (RaMoE), using an effective voting-based mixture mechanism to dynamically leverage source domains' diverse characteristics to improve the model's generalization. Specifically, we propose a decorrelation loss to make the source domain networks (experts) keep the diversity and discriminability of individual domains' characteristics. Besides, we design a voting network to adaptively integrate all the experts' features into the more generalizable aggregated features with domain relevance. Considering the target domains' invisibility during training, we propose a novel learning-to-learn algorithm combined with our relation alignment loss to update the voting network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed RaMoE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Part-Aware Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Daan de Geus, Panagiotis Meletis, Chenyang Lu, Xiaoxiao Wen, Gijs Dubbelman
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this work, we introduce the new scene understanding task of Part-aware Panoptic Segmentation (PPS), which aims to understand a scene at multiple levels of abstraction, and unifies the tasks of scene parsing and part parsing. For this novel task, we provide consistent annotations on two commonly used datasets: Cityscapes and Pascal VOC. Moreover, we present a single metric to evaluate PPS, called Part-aware Panoptic Quality (PartPQ). For this new task, using the metric and annotations, we set multiple baselines by merging results of existing state-of-the-art methods for panoptic segmentation and part segmentation. Finally, we conduct several experiments that evaluate the importance of the different levels of abstraction in this single task.
Unsupervised Degradation Representation Learning for Blind Super-Resolution
Authors: Longguang Wang, Yingqian Wang, Xiaoyu Dong, Qingyu Xu, Jungang Yang, Wei An, Yulan Guo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Most existing CNN-based super-resolution (SR) methods are developed based on an assumption that the degradation is fixed and known (e.g., bicubic downsampling). However, these methods suffer a severe performance drop when the real degradation is different from their assumption. To handle various unknown degradations in real-world applications, previous methods rely on degradation estimation to reconstruct the SR image. Nevertheless, degradation estimation methods are usually time-consuming and may lead to SR failure due to large estimation errors. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised degradation representation learning scheme for blind SR without explicit degradation estimation. Specifically, we learn abstract representations to distinguish various degradations in the representation space rather than explicit estimation in the pixel space. Moreover, we introduce a Degradation-Aware SR (DASR) network with flexible adaption to various degradations based on the learned representations. It is demonstrated that our degradation representation learning scheme can extract discriminative representations to obtain accurate degradation information. Experiments on both synthetic and real images show that our network achieves state-of-the-art performance for the blind SR task. Code is available at: https://github.com/LongguangWang/DASR.
Convolutional Hough Matching Networks
Authors: Juhong Min, Minsu Cho
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Despite advances in feature representation, leveraging geometric relations is crucial for establishing reliable visual correspondences under large variations of images. In this work we introduce a Hough transform perspective on convolutional matching and propose an effective geometric matching algorithm, dubbed Convolutional Hough Matching (CHM). The method distributes similarities of candidate matches over a geometric transformation space and evaluate them in a convolutional manner. We cast it into a trainable neural layer with a semi-isotropic high-dimensional kernel, which learns non-rigid matching with a small number of interpretable parameters. To validate the effect, we develop the neural network with CHM layers that perform convolutional matching in the space of translation and scaling. Our method sets a new state of the art on standard benchmarks for semantic visual correspondence, proving its strong robustness to challenging intra-class variations.
Hierarchical and Partially Observable Goal-Driven Policy Learning With Goals Relational Graph
Authors: Xin Ye, Yezhou Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present a novel two-layer hierarchical reinforcement learning approach equipped with a Goals Relational Graph (GRG) for tackling the partially observable goal-driven task, such as goal-driven visual navigation. Our GRG captures the underlying relations of all goals in the goal space through a Dirichlet-categorical process that facilitates: 1) the high-level network raising a sub-goal towards achieving a designated final goal; 2) the low-level network towards an optimal policy; and 3) the overall system generalizing unseen environments and goals. We evaluate our approach with two settings of partially observable goal-driven tasks -- a grid-world domain and a robotic object search task. Our experimental results show that our approach exhibits superior generalization performance on both unseen environments and new goals.