mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Improving the Performance of Unimodal Dynamic Hand-Gesture Recognition With Multimodal Training
Authors: Mahdi Abavisani, Hamid Reza Vaezi Joze, Vishal M. Patel
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We present an efficient approach for leveraging the knowledge from multiple modalities in training unimodal 3D convolutional neural networks (3D-CNNs) for the task of dynamic hand gesture recognition.   Instead of explicitly combining multimodal information, which is commonplace in many state-of-the-art methods, we propose a different framework in which we embed the knowledge of multiple modalities in individual networks so that each unimodal network can achieve an improved performance.  In particular, we dedicate separate networks per available modality and enforce them to collaborate and learn to develop networks with common semantics and better representations.  We introduce a "spatiotemporal semantic alignment" loss (SSA) to align the content of the features from different networks.  In addition, we regularize this loss with our proposed "focal regularization parameter" to avoid negative knowledge transfer.   Experimental results show that our framework improves the test time recognition accuracy of unimodal networks, and provides the state-of-the-art performance on various dynamic hand gesture recognition datasets.
Learning to Reconstruct People in Clothing From a Single RGB Camera
Authors: Thiemo Alldieck, Marcus Magnor, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Christian Theobalt, Gerard Pons-Moll
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We present Octopus, a learning-based model to infer the personalized 3D shape of people from a few frames (1-8) of a monocular video in which the person is moving with a reconstruction accuracy of 4 to 5mm, while being orders of magnitude faster than previous methods. From semantic segmentation images, our Octopus model reconstructs a 3D shape, including the parameters of SMPL plus clothing and hair in 10 seconds or less.  The model achieves fast and accurate predictions based on two key design choices. First, by predicting shape in a canonical T-pose space, the network learns to encode the images of the person into pose-invariant latent codes, where the information is fused. Second, based on the observation that feed-forward predictions are fast but do not always align with the input images, we predict using both, bottom-up and top-down streams (one per view) allowing information to flow in both directions. Learning relies only on synthetic 3D data. Once learned, Octopus can take a variable number of frames as input, and is able to reconstruct shapes even from a single image with an accuracy of 5mm. Results on 3 different datasets demonstrate the efficacy and accuracy of our approach.
Distilled Person Re-Identification: Towards a More Scalable System
Authors: Ancong Wu, Wei-Shi Zheng, Xiaowei Guo, Jian-Huang Lai
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Person re-identification (Re-ID), for matching pedestrians across non-overlapping camera views, has made great progress in supervised learning with abundant labelled data. However, the scalability problem is the bottleneck for applications in large-scale systems. We consider the scalability problem of Re-ID from three aspects: (1) low labelling cost by reducing label amount, (2) low extension cost by reusing existing knowledge and (3) low testing computation cost by using lightweight models. The requirements render scalable Re-ID a challenging problem. To solve these problems in a unified system, we propose a Multi-teacher Adaptive Similarity Distillation Framework, which requires only a few labelled identities of target domain to transfer knowledge from multiple teacher models to a user-specified lightweight student model without accessing source domain data. We propose the Log-Euclidean Similarity Distillation Loss for Re-ID and further integrate the Adaptive Knowledge Aggregator to select effective teacher models to transfer target-adaptive knowledge. Extensive evaluations show that our method can extend with high scalability and the performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised Re-ID methods.
A Perceptual Prediction Framework for Self Supervised Event Segmentation
Authors: Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur, Sudeep Sarkar
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Temporal segmentation of long videos is an important problem, that has largely been tackled through supervised learning, often requiring large amounts of annotated training data. In this paper, we tackle the problem of self-supervised temporal segmentation that alleviates the need for any supervision in the form of labels (full supervision) or temporal ordering (weak supervision). We introduce a self-supervised, predictive learning framework that draws inspiration from cognitive psychology to segment long, visually complex videos into constituent events. Learning involves only a single pass through the training data. We also introduce a new adaptive learning paradigm that helps reduce the effect of catastrophic forgetting in recurrent neural networks. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets - Breakfast Actions, 50 Salads, and INRIA Instructional Videos datasets show the efficacy of the proposed approach.  We show that the proposed approach outperforms weakly-supervised and unsupervised baselines by up to 24% and achieves competitive segmentation results compared to fully supervised baselines with only a single pass through the training data. Finally, we show that the proposed self-supervised learning paradigm learns highly discriminating features to improve action recognition.
COIN: A Large-Scale Dataset for Comprehensive Instructional Video Analysis
Authors: Yansong Tang, Dajun Ding, Yongming Rao, Yu Zheng, Danyang Zhang, Lili Zhao, Jiwen Lu, Jie Zhou
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: There are substantial instruction videos on the Internet, which enables us to acquire knowledge for completing various tasks. However, most existing datasets for instruction video analysis have the limitations in diversity and scale, which makes them far from many real-world applications where more diverse activities occur. Moreover, it still remains a great challenge to organize and harness such data. To address these problems, we introduce a large-scale dataset called "COIN" for COmprehensive INstruction video analysis. Organized with a hierarchical structure, the COIN dataset contains 11,827 videos of 180 tasks in 12 domains (e.g., vehicles, gadgets, etc.) related to our daily life. With a new developed toolbox, all the videos are annotated effectively with a series of step descriptions and the corresponding temporal boundaries. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective method to capture the dependencies among different steps, which can be easily plugged into conventional proposal-based action detection methods for localizing important steps in instruction videos. In order to provide a benchmark for instruction video analysis, we evaluate plenty of approaches on the COIN dataset under different evaluation criteria. We expect the introduction of the COIN dataset will promote the future in-depth research on instruction video analysis for the community.
Recurrent Attentive Zooming for Joint Crowd Counting and Precise Localization
Authors: Chenchen Liu, Xinyu Weng, Yadong Mu
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Crowd counting is a new frontier in computer vision with far-reaching applications particularly in social safety management. A majority of existing works adopt a methodology that first estimates a person-density map and then calculates integral over this map to obtain the final count. As noticed by several prior investigations, the learned density map can significantly deviate from the true person density even though the final reported count is precise. This implies that the density map is unreliable for localizing crowd. To address this issue, this work proposes a novel framework that simultaneously solving two inherently related tasks - crowd counting and localization. The contributions are several-fold. First, our formulation is based on a crucial observation that localization tends to be inaccurate at high-density regions, and increasing the resolution is an effective albeit simple solution for improving localization. We thus propose Recurrent Attentive Zooming Network, which recurrently detects ambiguous image region and zooms it into high resolution for re-inspection. Second, the two tasks of counting and localization mutually reinforce each other. We propose an adaptive fusion scheme that effectively elevates the performance. Finally, a well-defined evaluation metric is proposed for the rarely-explored localization task. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on several crowd benchmarks, including the newly-developed large-scale UCF-QNRF dataset and demonstrate superior advantages over state-of-the-art methods.
An Attention Enhanced Graph Convolutional LSTM Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Authors: Chenyang Si, Wentao Chen, Wei Wang, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Skeleton-based action recognition is an important task that requires the adequate understanding of movement characteristics of a human action from the given skeleton sequence. Recent studies have shown that exploring spatial and temporal features of the skeleton sequence is vital for this task. Nevertheless, how to effectively extract discriminative spatial and temporal features is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Attention Enhanced Graph Convolutional LSTM Network (AGC-LSTM) for human action recognition from skeleton data. The proposed AGC-LSTM can not only capture discriminative features in spatial configuration and temporal dynamics but also explore the co-occurrence relationship between spatial and temporal domains. We also present a temporal hierarchical architecture to increase temporal receptive fields of the top AGC-LSTM layer, which boosts the ability to learn the high-level semantic representation and significantly reduces the computation cost. Furthermore, to select discriminative spatial information, the attention mechanism is employed to enhance information of key joints in each AGC-LSTM layer. Experimental results on two datasets are provided: NTU RGB+D dataset and Northwestern-UCLA dataset. The comparison results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both datasets.
Graph Convolutional Label Noise Cleaner: Train a Plug-And-Play Action Classifier for Anomaly Detection
Authors: Jia-Xing Zhong, Nannan Li, Weijie Kong, Shan Liu, Thomas H. Li, Ge Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Video anomaly detection under weak labels is formulated as a typical multiple-instance learning problem in previous works. In this paper, we provide a new perspective, i.e., a supervised learning task under noisy labels. In such a viewpoint, as long as cleaning away label noise, we can directly apply fully supervised action classifiers to weakly supervised anomaly detection, and take maximum advantage of these well-developed classifiers. For this purpose, we devise a graph convolutional network to correct noisy labels. Based upon feature similarity and temporal consistency, our network propagates supervisory signals from high-confidence snippets to low-confidence ones. In this manner, the network is capable of providing cleaned supervision for action classifiers. During the test phase, we only need to obtain snippet-wise predictions from the action classifier without any extra post-processing. Extensive experiments on 3 datasets at different scales with 2 types of action classifiers demonstrate the efficacy of our method. Remarkably, we obtain the frame-level AUC score of 82.12% on UCF-Crime.
MAN: Moment Alignment Network for Natural Language Moment Retrieval via Iterative Graph Adjustment
Authors: Da Zhang, Xiyang Dai, Xin Wang, Yuan-Fang Wang, Larry S. Davis
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This research strives for natural language moment retrieval in long, untrimmed video streams. The problem  is not trivial especially when a video contains multiple moments of interests and the language describes complex temporal dependencies, which often happens in real scenarios. We identify two crucial challenges: semantic misalignment and structural misalignment. However, existing approaches treat different moments separately and do not explicitly model complex moment-wise temporal relations. In this paper, we present Moment Alignment Network (MAN), a novel framework that unifies the candidate moment encoding and temporal structural reasoning in a single-shot feed-forward network. MAN naturally assigns candidate moment representations aligned with language semantics over different temporal locations and scales. Most importantly, we propose to explicitly model moment-wise temporal relations as a structured graph and devise an iterative graph adjustment network to jointly learn the best structure in an end-to-end manner. We evaluate the proposed approach on two challenging public benchmarks DiDeMo and Charades-STA, where our MAN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin.
Less Is More: Learning Highlight Detection From Video Duration
Authors: Bo Xiong, Yannis Kalantidis, Deepti Ghadiyaram, Kristen Grauman
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Highlight detection has the potential to significantly ease video browsing, but existing methods often suffer from expensive supervision requirements, where human viewers must manually identify highlights in training videos. We propose a scalable unsupervised solution that exploits video duration as an implicit supervision signal. Our key insight is that video segments from shorter user-generated videos are more likely to be highlights than those from longer videos, since users tend to be more selective about the content when capturing shorter videos. Leveraging this insight,  we introduce a novel ranking framework that prefers segments from shorter videos, while properly accounting for the inherent noise in the (unlabeled) training data. We use it to train a highlight detector with 10M hashtagged Instagram videos.  In experiments on two challenging public video highlight detection benchmarks, our method substantially improves the state-of-the-art for unsupervised highlight detection.
DMC-Net: Generating Discriminative Motion Cues for Fast Compressed Video Action Recognition
Authors: Zheng Shou, Xudong Lin, Yannis Kalantidis, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Marcus Rohrbach, Shih-Fu Chang, Zhicheng Yan
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Motion has shown to be useful for video understanding, where motion is typically represented by optical flow. However, computing flow from video frames is very timeconsuming. Recent works directly leverage the motion vectors and residuals readily available in the compressed video to represent motion at no cost. While this avoids flow computation, it also hurts accuracy since the motion vector is noisy and has substantially reduced resolution, which makes it a less discriminative motion representation. To remedy these issues, we propose a lightweight generator network, which reduces noises in motion vectors and captures fine motion details, achieving a more Discriminative Motion Cue (DMC) representation. Since optical flow is a more accurate motion representation, we train the DMC generator to approximate flow using a reconstruction loss and a generative adversarial loss, jointly with the downstream action classification task. Extensive evaluations on three action recognition benchmarks (HMDB-51, UCF-101, and a subset of Kinetics) confirm the effectiveness of our method. Our full system, consisting of the generator and the classifier, is coined as DMC-Net which obtains high accuracy close to that of using flow and runs two orders of magnitude faster than using optical flow at inference time.
AdaFrame: Adaptive Frame Selection for Fast Video Recognition
Authors: Zuxuan Wu, Caiming Xiong, Chih-Yao Ma, Richard Socher, Larry S. Davis
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We present AdaFrame, a framework that adaptively selects relevant frames on a per-input basis for fast video recognition. AdaFrame contains a Long Short-Term Memory network augmented with a global memory that provides context information for searching which frames to use over time. Trained with policy gradient methods, AdaFrame generates a prediction, determines which frame to observe next, and computes the utility, i.e., expected future rewards, of seeing more frames at each time step. At testing time, AdaFrame exploits predicted utilities to achieve adaptive lookahead inference such that the overall computational costs are reduced without incurring a decrease in accuracy. Extensive experiments are conducted on two large-scale video benchmarks, FCVID and ActivityNet. AdaFrame matches the performance of using all frames with only 8.21 and 8.65 frames on FCVID and ActivityNet, respectively. We further qualitatively demonstrate learned frame usage can indicate the difficulty of making classification decisions; easier samples need fewer frames while harder ones require more, both at instance-level within the same class and at class-level among different categories.
Spatio-Temporal Video Re-Localization by Warp LSTM
Authors: Yang Feng, Lin Ma, Wei Liu, Jiebo Luo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The need for efficiently finding the video content a user wants is increasing because of the erupting of user-generated videos on the Web. Existing keyword-based or content-based video retrieval methods usually determine what occurs in a video but not when and where. In this paper, we make an answer to the question of when and where by formulating a new task, namely spatio-temporal video re-localization. Specifically, given a query video and a reference video, spatio-temporal video re-localization aims to localize tubelets in the reference video such that the tubelets semantically correspond to the query. To accurately localize the desired tubelets in the reference video, we propose a novel warp LSTM network, which propagates the spatio-temporal information for a long period and thereby captures the corresponding long-term dependencies. Another issue for spatio-temporal video re-localization is the lack of properly labeled video datasets. Therefore, we reorganize the videos in the AVA dataset to form a new dataset for spatio-temporal video re-localization research. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed model achieves superior performances over the designed baselines on the spatio-temporal video re-localization task.
Completeness Modeling and Context Separation for Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization
Authors: Daochang Liu, Tingting Jiang, Yizhou Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Temporal action localization is crucial for understanding untrimmed videos. In this work, we first identify two underexplored problems posed by the weak supervision for temporal action localization, namely action completeness modeling and action-context separation. Then by presenting a novel network architecture and its training strategy, the two problems are explicitly looked into. Specifically, to model the completeness of actions, we propose a multi-branch neural network in which branches are enforced to discover distinctive action parts. Complete actions can be therefore localized by fusing activations from different branches. And to separate action instances from their surrounding context, we generate hard negative data for training using the prior that motionless video clips are unlikely to be actions. Experiments performed on datasets THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In particular, the average mAP on ActivityNet v1.2 is significantly improved from 18.0% to 22.4%. Our code will be released soon.
Unsupervised Deep Tracking
Authors: Ning Wang, Yibing Song, Chao Ma, Wengang Zhou, Wei Liu, Houqiang Li
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We propose an unsupervised visual tracking method in this paper. Different from existing approaches using extensive annotated data for supervised learning, our CNN model is trained on large-scale unlabeled videos in an unsupervised manner. Our motivation is that a robust tracker should be effective in both the forward and backward predictions (i.e., the tracker can forward localize the target object in successive frames and backtrace to its initial position in the first frame). We build our framework on a Siamese correlation filter network, which is trained using unlabeled raw videos. Meanwhile, we propose a multiple-frame validation method and a cost-sensitive loss to facilitate unsupervised learning. Without bells and whistles, the proposed unsupervised tracker achieves the baseline accuracy of fully supervised trackers, which require complete and accurate labels during training. Furthermore, unsupervised framework exhibits a potential in leveraging unlabeled or weakly labeled data to further improve the tracking accuracy.
Tracking by Animation: Unsupervised Learning of Multi-Object Attentive Trackers
Authors: Zhen He, Jian Li, Daxue Liu, Hangen He, David Barber
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) from videos is a challenging computer vision task which has been extensively studied for decades. Most of the existing MOT algorithms are based on the Tracking-by-Detection (TBD) paradigm combined with popular machine learning approaches which largely reduce the human effort to tune algorithm parameters. However, the commonly used supervised learning approaches require the labeled data (e.g., bounding boxes), which is expensive for videos. Also, the TBD framework is usually suboptimal since it is not end-to-end, i.e., it considers the task as detection and tracking, but not jointly. To achieve both label-free and end-to-end learning of MOT, we propose a Tracking-by-Animation framework, where a differentiable neural model first tracks objects from input frames and then animates these objects into reconstructed frames. Learning is then driven by the reconstruction error through backpropagation. We further propose a Reprioritized Attentive Tracking to improve the robustness of data association. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real video datasets show the potential of the proposed model. Our project page is publicly available at: https://github.com/zhen-he/tracking-by-animation
Fast Online Object Tracking and Segmentation: A Unifying Approach
Authors: Qiang Wang, Li Zhang, Luca Bertinetto, Weiming Hu, Philip H.S. Torr
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In this paper we illustrate how to perform both visual object tracking and semi-supervised video object segmentation, in real-time, with a single simple approach. Our method, dubbed SiamMask, improves the offline training procedure of popular fully-convolutional Siamese approaches for object tracking by augmenting their loss with a binary segmentation task. Once trained, SiamMask solely relies on a single bounding box initialisation and operates online, producing class-agnostic object segmentation masks and rotated bounding boxes at 55 frames per second. Despite its simplicity, versatility and fast speed, our strategy allows us to establish a new state-of-the-art among real-time trackers on VOT-2018, while at the same time demonstrating competitive performance and the best speed for the semi-supervised video object segmentation task on DAVIS-2016 and DAVIS-2017.
Object Tracking by Reconstruction With View-Specific Discriminative Correlation Filters
Authors: Ugur Kart, Alan Lukezic, Matej Kristan, Joni-Kristian Kamarainen, Jiri Matas
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Standard RGB-D trackers treat the target as a 2D structure, which makes modelling appearance changes related even to out-of-plane rotation challenging. This limitation is addressed by the proposed long-term RGB-D tracker called OTR - Object Tracking by Reconstruction. OTR performs online 3D target reconstruction to facilitate robust learning of a set of view-specific discriminative correlation filters (DCFs). The 3D reconstruction supports two performance- enhancing features: (i) generation of an accurate spatial support for constrained DCF learning from its 2D projection and (ii) point-cloud based estimation of 3D pose change for selection and storage of view-specific DCFs which robustly localize the target after out-of-view rotation or heavy occlusion. Extensive evaluation on the Princeton RGB-D tracking and STC Benchmarks shows OTR outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin.
SoPhie: An Attentive GAN for Predicting Paths Compliant to Social and Physical Constraints
Authors: Amir Sadeghian, Vineet Kosaraju, Ali Sadeghian, Noriaki Hirose, Hamid Rezatofighi, Silvio Savarese
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of path prediction for multiple interacting agents in a scene, which is a crucial step for many autonomous platforms such as self-driving cars and social robots. We present SoPhie; an interpretable framework based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which leverages two sources of information, the path history of all the agents in a scene, and the scene context information, using images of the scene. To predict a future path for an agent, both physical and social information must be leveraged. Previous work has not been successful to jointly model physical and social interactions. Our approach blends a social attention mechanism with physical attention that helps the model to learn where to look in a large scene and extract the most salient parts of the image relevant to the path. Whereas, the social attention component aggregates information across the different agent interactions and extracts the most important trajectory information from the surrounding neighbors. SoPhie also takes advantage of GAN to generates more realistic samples and to capture the uncertain nature of the future paths by modeling its distribution. All these mechanisms enable our approach to predict socially and physically plausible paths for the agents and to achieve state-of-the-art performance on several different trajectory forecasting benchmarks.
Leveraging Shape Completion for 3D Siamese Tracking
Authors: Silvio Giancola, Jesus Zarzar, Bernard Ghanem
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Point clouds are challenging to process due to their sparsity, therefore autonomous vehicles rely more on appearance attributes than pure geometric features. However, 3D LIDAR perception can provide crucial information for urban navigation in challenging light or weather conditions. In this paper, we investigate the versatility of Shape Completion for 3D Object Tracking in LIDAR point clouds. We design a Siamese tracker that encodes model and candidate shapes into a compact latent representation. We regularize the encoding by enforcing the latent representation to decode into an object model shape. We observe that 3D object tracking and 3D shape completion complement each other. Learning a more meaningful latent representation shows better discriminatory capabilities, leading to improved tracking performance. We test our method on the KITTI Tracking set using car 3D bounding boxes. Our model reaches a 76.94% Success rate and 81.38% Precision for 3D Object Tracking, with the shape completion regularization leading to an improvement of 3% in both metrics.
Target-Aware Deep Tracking
Authors: Xin Li, Chao Ma, Baoyuan Wu, Zhenyu He, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Existing deep trackers mainly use convolutional neural networks pre-trained for the generic object recognition task for representations. Despite demonstrated successes for numerous vision tasks, the contributions of using pre-trained deep features for visual tracking are not as significant as that for object recognition. The key issue is that in visual tracking the targets of interest can be arbitrary object class with arbitrary forms. As such, pre-trained deep features are less effective in modeling these targets of arbitrary forms for distinguishing them from the background. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to learn target-aware features, which can better recognize the targets undergoing significant appearance variations than pre-trained deep features. To this end, we develop a regression loss and a ranking loss to guide the generation of target-active and scale-sensitive features. We identify the importance of each convolutional filter according to the back-propagated gradients and select the target-aware features based on activations for representing the targets. The target-aware features are integrated with a Siamese matching network for visual tracking. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and speed.
Spatiotemporal CNN for Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Kai Xu, Longyin Wen, Guorong Li, Liefeng Bo, Qingming Huang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In this paper, we present a unified, end-to-end trainable spatiotemporal CNN model for VOS, which consists of two branches, i.e., the temporal coherence branch and the spatial segmentation branch. Specifically, the temporal coherence branch pretrained in an adversarial fashion from unlabeled video data, is designed to capture the dynamic appearance and motion cues of video sequences to guide object segmentation. The spatial segmentation branch focuses on segmenting objects accurately based on the learned appearance and motion cues. To obtain accurate segmentation results, we design a coarse-to-fine process to sequentially apply a designed attention module on multi-scale feature maps, and concatenate them to produce the final prediction. In this way, the spatial segmentation branch is enforced to gradually concentrate on object regions. These two branches are jointly fine-tuned on video segmentation sequences in an end-to-end manner. Several experiments are carried out on three challenging datasets (i.e., DAVIS-2016, DAVIS-2017 and Youtube-Object) to show that our method achieves favorable performance against the state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/longyin880815/STCNN.
Towards Rich Feature Discovery With Class Activation Maps Augmentation for Person Re-Identification
Authors: Wenjie Yang, Houjing Huang, Zhang Zhang, Xiaotang Chen, Kaiqi Huang, Shu Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The fundamental challenge of small inter-person variation requires Person Re-Identification (Re-ID) models to capture sufficient fine-grained information. This paper proposes to discover diverse discriminative visual cues without extra assistance, e.g., pose estimation, human parsing. Specifically, a Class Activation Maps (CAM) augmentation model is proposed to expand the activation scope of baseline Re-ID model to explore rich visual cues, where the backbone network is extended by a series of ordered branches which share the same input but output complementary CAM. A novel Overlapped Activation Penalty is proposed to force the new branch to pay more attention to the image regions less activated by the old ones, such that spatial diverse visual features can be discovered. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on three person Re-ID benchmarks. Moreover, a visualization approach termed ranking activation map (RAM) is proposed to explicitly interpret the ranking results in the test stage, which gives qualitative validations of the proposed method.
Wide-Context Semantic Image Extrapolation
Authors: Yi Wang, Xin Tao, Xiaoyong Shen, Jiaya Jia
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper studies the fundamental problem of extrapolating visual context using deep generative models, i.e., extending image borders with plausible structure and details. This seemingly easy task actually faces many crucial technical challenges and has its unique properties. The two major issues are size expansion and one-side constraints. We propose a semantic regeneration network with several special contributions and use multiple spatial related losses to address these issues. Our results contain consistent structures and high-quality textures. Extensive experiments are conducted on various possible alternatives and related methods. We also explore the potential of our method for various interesting applications that can benefit research in a variety of fields.
End-To-End Time-Lapse Video Synthesis From a Single Outdoor Image
Authors: Seonghyeon Nam, Chongyang Ma, Menglei Chai, William Brendel, Ning Xu, Seon Joo Kim
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Time-lapse videos usually contain visually appealing content but are often difficult and costly to create. In this paper, we present an end-to-end solution to synthesize a time-lapse video from a single outdoor image using deep neural networks. Our key idea is to train a conditional generative adversarial network based on existing datasets of time-lapse videos and image sequences. We propose a multi-frame joint conditional generation framework to effectively learn the correlation between the illumination change of an outdoor scene and the time of the day. We further present a multi-domain training scheme for robust training of our generative models from two datasets with different distributions and missing timestamp labels. Compared to alternative time-lapse video synthesis algorithms, our method uses the timestamp as the control variable and does not require a reference video to guide the synthesis of the final output. We conduct ablation studies to validate our algorithm and compare with state-of-the-art techniques both qualitatively and quantitatively.
GIF2Video: Color Dequantization and Temporal Interpolation of GIF Images
Authors: Yang Wang, Haibin Huang, Chuan Wang, Tong He, Jue Wang, Minh Hoai
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a highly portable graphics format that is ubiquitous on the Internet. Despite their small sizes, GIF images often contain undesirable visual artifacts such as flat color regions, false contours, color shift, and dotted patterns. In this paper, we propose GIF2Video, the first learning-based method for enhancing the visual quality of GIFs in the wild. We focus on the challenging task of GIF restoration by recovering information lost in the three steps of GIF creation: frame sampling, color quantization, and color dithering. We first propose a novel CNN architecture for color dequantization. It is built upon a compositional architecture for multi-step color correction, with a comprehensive loss function designed to handle large quantization errors. We then adapt the SuperSlomo network for temporal interpolation of GIF frames. We introduce two large datasets, namely GIF-Faces and GIF-Moments, for both training and evaluation. Experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the visual quality of GIFs, and outperforms direct baseline and state-of-the-art approaches.
Mode Seeking Generative Adversarial Networks for Diverse Image Synthesis
Authors: Qi Mao, Hsin-Ying Lee, Hung-Yu Tseng, Siwei Ma, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Most conditional generation tasks expect diverse outputs given a single conditional context. However, conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) often focus on the prior conditional information and ignore the input noise vectors, which contribute to the output variations. Recent attempts to resolve the mode collapse issue for cGANs are usually task-specific and computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization term to address the mode collapse issue for cGANs. The proposed method explicitly maximizes the ratio of the distance between generated images with respect to the corresponding latent codes, thus encouraging the generators to explore more minor modes during training. This mode seeking regularization term is readily applicable to various conditional generation tasks without imposing training overhead or modifying the original network structures. We validate the proposed algorithm on three conditional image synthesis tasks including categorical generation, image-to-image translation, and text-to-image synthesis with different baseline models. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed regularization method for improving diversity without loss of quality.
Pluralistic Image Completion
Authors: Chuanxia Zheng, Tat-Jen Cham, Jianfei Cai
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Most image completion methods produce only one result for each masked input, although there may be many reasonable possibilities. In this paper, we present an approach for pluralistic image completion - the task of generating multiple and diverse plausible solutions for image completion. A major challenge faced by learning-based approaches is that usually only one ground truth training instance per label. As such, sampling from conditional VAEs still leads to minimal diversity. To overcome this, we propose a novel and probabilistically principled framework with two parallel paths. One is a reconstructive path that utilizes the only one given ground truth to get prior distribution of missing parts and rebuild the original image from this distribution. The other is a generative path for which the conditional prior is coupled to the distribution obtained in the reconstructive path. Both are supported by GANs. We also introduce a new short+long term attention layer that exploits distant relations among decoder and encoder features, improving appearance consistency. When tested on datasets with buildings (Paris), faces (CelebA-HQ), and natural images (ImageNet), our method not only generated higherquality completion results, but also with multiple and diverse plausible outputs.
Salient Object Detection With Pyramid Attention and Salient Edges
Authors: Wenguan Wang, Shuyang Zhao, Jianbing Shen, Steven C. H. Hoi, Ali Borji
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper presents a new method for detecting salient objects in images using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The proposed network, named PAGE-Net, offers two key contributions. The first is the exploitation of an essential pyramid attention structure for salient object detection. This enables the network to concentrate more on salient regions while considering multi-scale saliency information. Such a stacked attention design provides a powerful tool to efficiently improve the representation ability of the corresponding network layer with an enlarged receptive field. The second contribution lies in the emphasis on the importance of salient edges. Salient edge information offers a strong cue to better segment salient objects and refine object boundaries. To this end, our model is equipped with a salient edge detection module, which is learned for precise salient boundary estimation. This encourages better edge-preserving salient object segmentation. Exhaustive experiments confirm that the proposed pyramid attention and salient edges are effective for salient object detection. We show that our deep saliency model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for several benchmarks with a fast processing speed (25fps on one GPU).
Latent Filter Scaling for Multimodal Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation
Authors: Yazeed Alharbi, Neil Smith, Peter Wonka
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In multimodal unsupervised image-to-image translation tasks, the goal is to translate an image from the source domain to many images in the target domain. We present a simple method that produces higher quality images than current state-of-the-art while maintaining the same amount of multimodal diversity. Previous methods follow the unconditional approach of trying to map the latent code directly to a full-size image. This leads to complicated network architectures with several introduced hyperparameters to tune. By treating the latent code as a modifier of the convolutional filters, we produce multimodal output while maintaining the traditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) loss and without additional hyperparameters. The only tuning required by our method controls the tradeoff between variability and quality of generated images. Furthermore, we achieve disentanglement between source domain content and target domain style for free as a by-product of our formulation. We perform qualitative and quantitative experiments showing the advantages of our method compared with the state-of-the art on multiple benchmark image-to-image translation datasets.
Attention-Aware Multi-Stroke Style Transfer
Authors: Yuan Yao, Jianqiang Ren, Xuansong Xie, Weidong Liu, Yong-Jin Liu, Jun Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Neural style transfer has drawn considerable attention from both academic and industrial field. Although visual effect and efficiency have been significantly improved, existing methods are unable to coordinate spatial distribution of visual attention between the content image and stylized image, or render diverse level of detail via different brush strokes. In this paper, we tackle these limitations by developing an attention-aware multi-stroke style transfer model. We first propose to assemble self-attention mechanism into a style-agnostic reconstruction autoencoder framework, from which the attention map of a content image can be derived. By performing multi-scale style swap on content features and style features, we produce multiple feature maps reflecting different stroke patterns. A flexible fusion strategy is further presented to incorporate the salient characteristics from the attention map, which allows integrating multiple stroke patterns into different spatial regions of the output image harmoniously. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, as well as generate comparable stylized images with multiple stroke patterns against the state-of-the-art methods.
Feedback Adversarial Learning: Spatial Feedback for Improving Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Minyoung Huh, Shao-Hua Sun, Ning Zhang
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We propose feedback adversarial learning (FAL) framework that can improve existing generative adversarial networks by leveraging spatial feedback from the discriminator. We formulate the generation task as a recurrent framework, in which the discriminator's feedback is integrated into the feedforward path of the generation process. Specifically, the generator conditions on the discriminator's spatial output response, and its previous generation to improve generation quality over time - allowing the generator to attend and fix its previous mistakes. To effectively utilize the feedback, we propose an adaptive spatial transform layer, which learns to spatially modulate feature maps from its previous generation and the error signal from the discriminator. We demonstrate that one can easily adapt FAL to existing adversarial learning frameworks on a wide range of tasks, including image generation, image-to-image translation, and voxel generation.
Learning Pyramid-Context Encoder Network for High-Quality Image Inpainting
Authors: Yanhong Zeng, Jianlong Fu, Hongyang Chao, Baining Guo
Published in: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019 (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: High-quality image inpainting requires filling missing regions in a damaged image with plausible content. Existing works either fill the regions by copying high-resolution patches or generating semantically-coherent patches from region context, while neglecting the fact that both visual and semantic plausibility are highly-demanded. In this paper, we propose a Pyramid-context Encoder Network (denoted as PEN-Net) for image inpainting by deep generative models. The proposed PEN-Net is built upon a U-Net structure with three tailored components, ie., a pyramid-context encoder, a multi-scale decoder, and an adversarial training loss. First, we adopt a U-Net as backbone which can encode the context of an image from high-resolution pixels into high-level semantic features, and decode the features reversely. Second, we propose a pyramid-context encoder, which progressively learns region affinity by attention from a high-level semantic feature map, and transfers the learned attention to its adjacent high-resolution feature map. As the missing content can be filled by attention transfer from deep to shallow in a pyramid fashion, both visual and semantic coherence for image inpainting can be ensured. Third, we further propose a multi-scale decoder with deeply-supervised pyramid losses and an adversarial loss. Such a design not only results in fast convergence in training, but more realistic results in testing. Extensive experiments on a broad range of datasets shows the superior performance of the proposed network.