mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Towards Data-Efficient Detection Transformers
Authors: Wen Wang, Jing Zhang, Yang Cao, Yongliang Shen, Dacheng Tao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Detection transformers have achieved competitive performance on the sample-rich COCO dataset. However, we show most of them suffer from significant performance drops on small-size datasets, like Cityscapes. In other words, the detection transformers are generally data-hungry. To tackle this problem, we empirically analyze the factors that affect data efficiency, through a step-by-step transition from a data-efficient RCNN variant to the representative DETR. The empirical results suggest that sparse feature sampling from local image areas holds the key. Based on this observation, we alleviate the data-hungry issue of existing detection transformers by simply alternating how key and value sequences are constructed in the cross-attention layer, with minimum modifications to the original models. Besides, we introduce a simple yet effective label augmentation method to provide richer supervision and improve data efficiency. Experiments show that our method can be readily applied to different detection transformers and improve their performance on both small-size and sample-rich datasets."
Open-Vocabulary DETR with Conditional Matching
Authors: Yuhang Zang, Wei Li, Kaiyang Zhou, Chen Huang, Chen Change Loy
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Open-vocabulary object detection, which is concerned with the problem of detecting novel objects guided by natural language, has gained increasing attention from the community. Ideally, we would like to extend an open-vocabulary detector such that it can produce bounding box predictions based on user inputs in form of either natural language or exemplar image. This offers great flexibility and user experience for human-computer interaction. To this end, we propose a novel open-vocabulary detector based on DETR---hence the name OV-DETR---which, once trained, can detect any object given its class name or an exemplar image. The biggest challenge of turning DETR into an open-vocabulary detector is that it is impossible to calculate the classification cost matrix of novel classes without access to their labeled images. To overcome this challenge, we formulate the learning objective as a binary matching one between input queries (class name or exemplar image) and the corresponding objects, which learns useful correspondence to generalize to unseen queries during testing. For training, we choose to condition the Transformer decoder on the input embeddings obtained from a pre-trained vision-language model like CLIP, in order to enable matching for both text and image queries. With extensive experiments on LVIS and COCO datasets, we demonstrate that our OV-DETR---the first end-to-end Transformer-based open-vocabulary detector---achieves non-trivial improvements over current state of the arts."
Prediction-Guided Distillation for Dense Object Detection
Authors: Chenhongyi Yang, Mateusz Ochal, Amos Storkey, Elliot J. Crowley
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Real-world object detection models should be cheap and accurate. Knowledge distillation (KD) can boost the accuracy of a small, light detection model by leveraging useful information from a larger teacher model. However, a key challenge is identifying the most informative features produced by the teacher for distillation. In this work, we show that only a very small fraction of features within a ground-truth bounding box are responsible for a teacher’s high detection performance. Based on this, we propose Prediction-Guided Distillation (PGD), which focuses distillation on these key predictive regions of the teacher and yields considerable gains in performance over many existing KD baselines. In addition, we propose an adaptive weighting scheme over the key regions to smooth out their influence and achieve even better performance. Our proposed approach outperforms current state-of-the-art KD baselines on a variety of advanced one-stage detection architectures. Specifically, on the COCO dataset, our method achieves between +3.1% and +4.6% AP improvement using ResNet-101 and ResNet-50 as the teacher and student backbones, respectively. On the CrowdHuman dataset, we achieve +3.2% and +2.0% improvements in MR and AP, also using these backbones. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/PGD."
Multimodal Object Detection via Probabilistic Ensembling
Authors: Yi-Ting Chen, Jinghao Shi, Zelin Ye, Christoph Mertz, Deva Ramanan, Shu Kong
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Object detection with multimodal inputs can improve many safety-critical systems such as autonomous vehicles (AVs). Motivated by AVs that operate in both day and night, we study multimodal object detection with RGB and thermal cameras, since the latter provides much stronger object signatures under poor illumination. We explore strategies for fusing information from different modalities. Our key contribution is a probabilistic ensembling technique, ProbEn, a simple non-learned method that fuses together detections from multi-modalities. We derive ProbEn from Bayes’ rule and first principles that assume conditional independence across modalities. Through probabilistic marginalization, ProbEn elegantly handles missing modalities when detectors do not fire on the same object. Importantly, ProbEn also notably improves multimodal detection even when the conditional independence assumption does not hold, e.g., fusing outputs from other fusion methods (both off-the-shelf and trained in-house). We validate ProbEn on two benchmarks containing both aligned (KAIST) and unaligned (FLIR) multimodal images, showing that ProbEn outperforms prior work by more than {\bf 13\%} in relative performance!"
Exploiting Unlabeled Data with Vision and Language Models for Object Detection
Authors: Shiyu Zhao, Zhixing Zhang, Samuel Schulter, Long Zhao, Vijay Kumar B G, Anastasis Stathopoulos, Manmohan Chandraker, Dimitris N. Metaxas
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Building robust and generic object detection frameworks requires scaling to larger label spaces and bigger training datasets. However, it is prohibitively costly to acquire annotations for thousands of categories at a large scale. We propose a novel method that leverages the rich semantics available in recent vision and language models to localize and classify objects in unlabeled images, effectively generating pseudo labels for object detection. Starting with a generic and class-agnostic region proposal mechanism, we use vision and language models to categorize each region of an image into any object category that is required for downstream tasks. We demonstrate the value of the generated pseudo labels in two specific tasks, open-vocabulary detection, where a model needs to generalize to unseen object categories, and semi-supervised object detection, where additional unlabeled images can be used to improve the model. Our empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of the pseudo labels in both tasks, where we outperform competitive baselines and achieve a novel state-of-the-art for open-vocabulary object detection. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaofeng94/VL-PLM."
CPO: Change Robust Panorama to Point Cloud Localization
Authors: Junho Kim, Hojun Jang, Changwoon Choi, Young Min Kim
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We present CPO, a fast and robust algorithm that localizes a 2D panorama with respect to a 3D point cloud of a scene possibly containing changes. To robustly handle scene changes, our approach deviates from conventional feature point matching, and focuses on the spatial context provided from panorama images. Specifically, we propose efficient color histogram generation and subsequent robust localization using score maps. By utilizing the unique equivariance of spherical projections, we propose very fast color histogram generation for a large number of camera poses without explicitly rendering images for all candidate poses. We accumulate the regional consistency of the panorama and point cloud as 2D/3D score maps, and use them to weigh the input color values to further increase robustness. The weighted color distribution quickly finds good initial poses and achieves stable convergence for gradient-based optimization. CPO is lightweight and achieves effective localization in all tested scenarios, showing stable performance despite scene changes, repetitive structures, or featureless regions, which are typical challenges for visual localization with perspective cameras."
INT: Towards Infinite-Frames 3D Detection with an Efficient Framework
Authors: Jianyun Xu, Zhenwei Miao, Da Zhang, Hongyu Pan, Kaixuan Liu, Peihan Hao, Jun Zhu, Zhengyang Sun, Hongmin Li, Xin Zhan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "It is natural to construct a multi-frame instead of a single-frame 3D detector for a continuous-time stream. Although increasing the number of frames might improve performance, previous multi-frame studies only used very limited frames to build their systems due to the dramatically increased computational and memory cost. To address these issues, we propose a novel on-stream training and prediction framework that, in theory, can employ an infinite number of frames while keeping the same amount of computation as a single-frame detector. This infinite framework (INT), which can be used with most existing detectors, is utilized, for example, on the popular CenterPoint, with significant latency reductions and performance improvements. We’ve also conducted extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets, nuScenes and Waymo Open Dataset, to demonstrate the scheme’s effectiveness and efficiency. By employing INT on CenterPoint, we can get around 7% (Waymo) and 15% (nuScenes) performance boost with only 2 4ms latency overhead, and currently SOTA on the Waymo 3D Detection leaderboard."
End-to-End Weakly Supervised Object Detection with Sparse Proposal Evolution
Authors: Mingxiang Liao, Fang Wan, Yuan Yao, Zhenjun Han, Jialing Zou, Yuze Wang, Bailan Feng, Peng Yuan, Qixiang Ye
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Conventional methods for weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) typically enumerate dense proposals and select the discriminative proposals as objects. However, these two-stage “enumerate-and-select” methods suffer object feature ambiguity brought by dense proposals and low detection efficiency caused by the proposal enumeration procedure. In this study, we propose a sparse proposal evolution (SPE) approach, which advances WSOD from the two-stage pipeline with dense proposals to an end-to-end framework with sparse proposals. SPE is built upon a visual transformer equipped with a seed proposal generation (SPG) branch and a sparse proposal refinement (SPR) branch. SPG generates high-quality seed proposals by taking advantage of the cascaded self-attention mechanism of the visual transformer, and SPR trains the detector to predict sparse proposals which are supervised by the seed proposals in a one-to-one matching fashion. SPG and SPR are iteratively performed so that seed proposals update to accurate supervision signals and sparse proposals evolve to precise object regions. Experiments on VOC and COCO object detection datasets show that SPE outperforms the state-of-the-art end-to-end methods by 7.0% mAP and 8.1% AP50. It is an order of magnitude faster than the two-stage methods, setting the first solid baseline for end-to-end WSOD with sparse proposals."
Calibration-Free Multi-View Crowd Counting
Authors: Qi Zhang, Antoni B. Chan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Deep learning-based multi-view crowd counting (MVCC) has been proposed to handle scenes with large size, in irregular shape, or with severe occlusions. The current MVCC methods require camera calibrations in both training and testing, limiting the real application scenarios of MVCC. To extend and apply MVCC to more practical situations, in this paper we propose calibration-free multi-view crowd counting (CF-MVCC), which obtains the scene-level count directly from the density map predictions for each camera view without needing the camera calibrations in the test. Specifically, the proposed CF-MVCC method first estimates the homography matrix to align each pair of camera views, and then estimates a matching probability map for each camera-view pair. Based on the matching maps of all camera-view pairs, a weight map for each camera view is predicted, which represents how many cameras can reliably see a given pixel in the camera view. Finally, using the weight maps, the total scene-level count is obtained as a simple weighted sum of the density maps for the camera views. Experiments are conducted on several multi-view counting datasets, and promising performance is achieved compared to calibrated MVCC methods that require camera calibrations as input and use scene-level density maps as supervision."
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Monocular 3D Object Detection via Self-Training
Authors: Zhenyu Li, Zehui Chen, Ang Li, Liangji Fang, Qinhong Jiang, Xianming Liu, Junjun Jiang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) has achieved unprecedented success with the advent of deep learning techniques and emerging large-scale autonomous driving datasets. However, drastic performance degradation remains an unwell-studied challenge for practical cross-domain deployment as the lack of labels on the target domain. In this paper, we first comprehensively investigate the significant underlying factor of the domain gap in Mono3D, where the critical observation is a depth-shift issue caused by the geometric misalignment of domains. Then, we propose STMono3D, a new self-teaching framework for unsupervised domain adaptation on Mono3D. To mitigate the depth-shift, we introduce the geometry-aligned multi-scale training strategy to disentangle the camera parameters and guarantee the geometry consistency of domains. Based on this, we develop a teacher-student paradigm to generate adaptive pseudo labels on the target domain. Benefiting from the end-to-end framework that provides richer information of the pseudo labels, we propose the quality-aware supervision strategy to take instance-level pseudo confidences into account and improve the effectiveness of the target-domain training process. Moreover, the positive focusing training strategy and dynamic threshold are proposed to handle tremendous FN and FP pseudo samples. STMono3D achieves remarkable performance on all evaluated datasets and even surpasses fully supervised results on the KITTI 3D object detection dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore effective UDA methods for Mono3D."
SuperLine3D: Self-Supervised Line Segmentation and Description for LiDAR Point Cloud
Authors: Xiangrui Zhao, Sheng Yang, Tianxin Huang, Jun Chen, Teng Ma, Mingyang Li, Yong Liu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Poles and building edges are frequently observable objects on urban roads, conveying reliable hints for various computer vision tasks. To repetitively extract them as features and perform association between discrete LiDAR frames for registration, we propose the first learning-based feature segmentation and description model for 3D lines in LiDAR point cloud. To train our model without the time consuming and tedious data labeling process, we first generate synthetic primitives for the basic appearance of target lines, and build an iterative line auto-labeling process to gradually refine line labels on real LiDAR scans. Our segmentation model can extract lines under arbitrary scale perturbations, and we use shared EdgeConv encoder layers to train the two segmentation and descriptor heads jointly. Base on the model, we can build a highly-available global registration module for point cloud registration, in conditions without initial transformation hints. Experiments have demonstrated that our line-based registration method is highly competitive to state-of-the-art point-based approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zxrzju/SuperLine3D.git."
Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection
Authors: Yanghao Li, Hanzi Mao, Ross Girshick, Kaiming He
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We explore the plain, non-hierarchical Vision Transformer (ViT) as a backbone network for object detection. This design enables the original ViT architecture to be fine-tuned for object detection without needing to redesign a hierarchical backbone for pre-training. With minimal adaptations for fine-tuning, our plain-backbone detector can achieve competitive results. Surprisingly, we observe: (i) it is sufficient to build a simple feature pyramid from a single-scale feature map (without the common FPN design) and (ii) it is sufficient to use window attention (without shifting) aided with very few cross-window propagation blocks. With plain ViT backbones pre-trained as Masked Autoencoders (MAE), our detector, named ViTDet, can compete with the previous leading methods that were all based on hierarchical backbones, reaching up to 61.3 AP_box on the COCO dataset using only ImageNet-1K pre-training. We hope our study will draw attention to research on plain-backbone detectors. Code for ViTDet is available in Detectron2."
Adversarially-Aware Robust Object Detector
Authors: Ziyi Dong, Pengxu Wei, Liang Lin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Object detection, as a fundamental computer vision task, has achieved a remarkable progress with the emergence of deep neural networks. Nevertheless, few works explore the adversarial robustness of object detectors to resist adversarial attacks for practical applications in various real-world scenarios. Detectors have been greatly challenged by unnoticeable perturbation, with sharp performance drop on clean images and extremely poor performance on adversarial images. In this work, we empirically explore the model training for adversarial robustness in object detection, which greatly attributes to the conflict between learning clean images and adversarial images. To mitigate this issue, we propose a Robust Detector (RobustDet) based on adversarially-aware convolution to disentangle gradients for model learning on clean and adversarial images. RobustDet also employs the Adversarial Image Discriminator (AID) and Consistent Features with Reconstruction (CFR) to ensure a reliable robustness. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO demonstrate that our model effectively disentangles gradients and significantly enhances the detection robustness with maintaining the detection ability on clean images."
HEAD: HEtero-Assists Distillation for Heterogeneous Object Detectors
Authors: Luting Wang, Xiaojie Li, Yue Liao, Zeren Jiang, Jianlong Wu, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Si Liu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Conventional knowledge distillation (KD) methods for object detection mainly concentrate on homogeneous teacher-student detectors. However, the design of a lightweight detector for deployment is often significantly different from a high-capacity detector. Thus, we investigate KD among heterogeneous teacher-student pairs for a wide application. We observe that the core difficulty for heterogeneous KD (hetero-KD) is the significant semantic gap between the backbone features of heterogeneous detectors due to the different optimization manners. Conventional homogeneous KD (homo-KD) methods suffer from such a gap and are hard to directly obtain satisfactory performance for hetero-KD. In this paper, we propose the HEtero-Assists Distillation (HEAD) framework, leveraging heterogeneous detection heads as assistants to guide the optimization of the student detector to reduce this gap. In HEAD, the assistant is an additional detection head with the architecture homogeneous to the teacher head attached to the student backbone. Thus, a hetero-KD is transformed into a homo-KD, allowing efficient knowledge transfer from the teacher to the student. Moreover, we extend HEAD into a Teacher-Free HEAD (TF-HEAD) framework when a well-trained teacher detector is unavailable. Our method has achieved significant improvement compared to current detection KD methods. For example, on the MS-COCO dataset, TF-HEAD helps R18 RetinaNet achieve 33.9 mAP (+2.2), while HEAD further pushes the limit to 36.2 mAP (+4.5)."
You Should Look at All Objects
Authors: Zhenchao Jin, Dongdong Yu, Luchuan Song, Zehuan Yuan, Lequan Yu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Feature pyramid network (FPN) is one of the key components for object detectors. However, there is a long-standing puzzle for researchers that the detection performance of large-scale objects are usually suppressed after introducing FPN. To this end, this paper first revisits FPN in the detection framework and reveals the nature of the success of FPN from the perspective of optimization. Then, we point out that the degraded performance of large-scale objects is due to the arising of improper back-propagation paths after integrating FPN. It makes each level of the backbone network only has the ability to look at the objects within a certain scale range. Based on these analysis, two feasible strategies are proposed to enable each level of the backbone to look at all objects in the FPN-based detection frameworks. Specifically, one is to introduce auxiliary objective functions to make each backbone level directly receive the back-propagation signals of various-scale objects during training. The other is to construct the feature pyramid in a more reasonable way to avoid the irrational back-propagation paths. Extensive experiments on the COCO benchmark validate the soundness of our analysis and the effectiveness of our methods. Without bells and whistles, we demonstrate that our method achieves solid improvements (more than 2%) on various detection frameworks: one-stage, two-stage, anchor-based, anchor-free and transformer-based detectors."
Detecting Twenty-Thousand Classes Using Image-Level Supervision
Authors: Xingyi Zhou, Rohit Girdhar, Armand Joulin, Philipp Krähenbühl, Ishan Misra
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Current object detectors are limited in vocabulary size due to the small scale of detection datasets. Image classifiers, on the other hand, reason about much larger vocabularies, as their datasets are larger and easier to collect. We propose Detic, which simply trains the classifiers of a detector on image classification data and thus expands the vocabulary of detectors to tens of thousands of concepts. Unlike prior work, Detic does not need complex assignment schemes to assign image labels to boxes based on model predictions, making it much easier to implement and compatible with a range of detection architectures and backbones. Our results show that Detic yields excellent detectors even for classes without box annotations. It outperforms prior work on both open-vocabulary and long-tail detection benchmarks. Detic provides a gain of 2.4 mAP for all classes and 8.3 mAP for novel classes on the open-vocabulary LVIS benchmark. On the standard LVIS benchmark, Detic obtains 41.7 mAP when evaluated on all classes, or only rare classes, hence closing the gap in performance for object categories with few samples. For the first time, we train a detector with all the twenty-one-thousand classes of the ImageNet dataset and show that it generalizes to new datasets without finetuning. Code is provided in the supplementary."
DCL-Net: Deep Correspondence Learning Network for 6D Pose Estimation
Authors: Hongyang Li, Jiehong Lin, Kui Jia
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Establishment of point correspondence between camera and object coordinate systems is a promising way to solve 6D object poses. However, surrogate objectives of correspondence learning in 3D space are a step away from the true ones of object pose estimation, making the learning suboptimal for the end task. In this paper, we address this shortcoming by introducing a new method of Deep Correspondence Learning Network for direct 6D object pose estimation, shortened as DCL-Net. Specifically, DCL-Net employs dual newly proposed Feature Disengagement and Alignment (FDA) modules to establish, in the feature space, partial-to-partial correspondence and complete-to-complete one for partial object observation and its complete CAD model, respectively, which result in aggregated pose and match feature pairs from two coordinate systems; these two FDA modules thus bring complementary advantages. The match feature pairs are used to learn confidence scores for measuring the qualities of deep correspondence, while the pose ones are weighted by confidence scores for direct object pose regression. A confidence-based pose refinement network is also proposed to further improve pose precision in an iterative manner. Extensive experiments show that DCL-Net outperforms existing methods on three benchmarking datasets, including YCB-Video, LineMOD, and Oclussion-LineMOD; ablation studies also confirm the efficacy of our novel designs. Our code is released publicly at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/DCL-Net."
Monocular 3D Object Detection with Depth from Motion
Authors: Tai Wang, Jiangmiao Pang, Dahua Lin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Perceiving 3D objects from monocular inputs is crucial for robotic systems, given its economy compared to multi-sensor settings. It is notably difficult as a single image can not provide any clues for predicting absolute depth values. Motivated by binocular methods for 3D object detection, we take advantage of the strong geometry structure provided by camera ego-motion for accurate object depth estimation and detection. We first make a theoretical analysis on this general two-view case and notice two challenges: 1) Cumulative errors from multiple estimations that make the direct prediction intractable; 2) Inherent dilemmas caused by static cameras and matching ambiguity. Accordingly, we establish the stereo correspondence with a geometry-aware cost volume as the alternative for depth estimation and further compensate it with monocular understanding to address the second problem. Our framework, named Depth from Motion (DfM), then uses the established geometry to lift 2D image features to the 3D space and detects 3D objects thereon. We also present a pose-free DfM to make it usable when the camera pose is unavailable. Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on the KITTI benchmark. Detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses also validate our theoretical conclusions. The code is released at https://github.com/Tai-Wang/Depth-from-Motion."
DISP6D: Disentangled Implicit Shape and Pose Learning for Scalable 6D Pose Estimation
Authors: Yilin Wen, Xiangyu Li, Hao Pan, Lei Yang, Zheng Wang, Taku Komura, Wenping Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Scalable 6D pose estimation for rigid objects from RGB images aims at handling multiple objects and generalizing to novel objects. Building on a well-known auto-encoding framework to cope with object symmetry and the lack of labeled training data, we achieve scalability by disentangling the latent representation of auto-encoder into shape and pose sub-spaces. The latent shape space models the similarity of different objects through contrastive metric learning, and the latent pose code is compared with canonical rotations for rotation retrieval. Because different object symmetries induce inconsistent latent pose spaces, we re-entangle the shape representation with canonical rotations to generate shape-dependent pose codebooks for rotation retrieval. We show state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks containing textureless CAD objects without category and daily objects with categories respectively, and further demonstrate improved scalability by extending to a more challenging setting of daily objects across categories."
Distilling Object Detectors with Global Knowledge
Authors: Sanli Tang, Zhongyu Zhang, Zhanzhan Cheng, Jing Lu, Yunlu Xu, Yi Niu, Fan He
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Knowledge distillation learns a lightweight student model that mimics a cumbersome teacher. Existing methods regard the knowledge as the feature of each instance or their relations, which is the instance-level knowledge only from the teacher model, i.e., the local knowledge. However, the empirical studies show that the local knowledge is much noisy in object detection tasks, especially on the blurred, occluded, or small instances. Thus, a more intrinsic approach is to measure the representations of instances w.r.t. a group of common basis vectors in the two feature spaces of the teacher and the student detectors, i.e., global knowledge. Then, the distilling algorithm can be applied as space alignment. To this end, a novel prototype generation module (PGM) is proposed to find the common basis vectors, dubbed prototypes, in the two feature spaces. Then, a robust distilling module (RDM) is applied to construct the global knowledge based on the prototypes and filtrate noisy global and local knowledge by measuring the discrepancy of the representations in two feature spaces. Experiments with Faster-RCNN and RetinaNet on PASCAL and COCO datasets show that our method achieves the best performance for distilling object detectors with various backbones, which even surpasses the performance of the teacher model. We also show that the existing methods can be easily combined with global knowledge and obtain further improvement. Code is available: https://github.com/hikvision-research/DAVAR-Lab-ML."
Unifying Visual Perception by Dispersible Points Learning
Authors: Jianming Liang, Guanglu Song, Biao Leng, Yu Liu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and universal visual perception head for variant visual tasks, e.g., classification, object detection, instance segmentation and pose estimation, and different frameworks, such as one-stage or two-stage pipelines. Our approach effectively identifies an object in an image while simultaneously generating a high-quality bounding box or contour-based segmentation mask or set of keypoints. The method, called UniHead, views different visual perception tasks as the dispersible points learning via the transformer encoder architecture. Given a fixed spatial coordinate, UniHead adaptively scatters it to different spatial points and reasons about their relations by transformer encoder. It directly outputs the final set of predictions in the form of multiple points, allowing us to perform different visual tasks in different frameworks with the same head design. We show extensive evaluations on ImageNet classification and all three tracks of the COCO suite of challenges, including object detection, instance segmentation and pose estimation. Without bells and whistles, UniHead can unify these visual tasks via a single visual head design and achieve comparable performance compared to expert models developed for each task. We hope our simple and universal UniHead will serve as a solid baseline and help promote universal visual perception research. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Sense-X/UniHead."
PseCo: Pseudo Labeling and Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Object Detection
Authors: Gang Li, Xiang Li, Yujie Wang, Yichao Wu, Ding Liang, Shanshan Zhang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "In this paper, we delve into two key techniques in Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD), namely pseudo labeling and consistency training. We observe that these two techniques currently neglect some important properties of object detection, hindering efficient learning on unlabeled data. Specifically, for pseudo labeling, existing works only focus on the classification score yet fail to guarantee the localization precision of pseudo boxes; For consistency training, the widely adopted random-resize training only considers the label-level consistency but misses the feature-level one, which also plays an important role in ensuring the scale invariance. To address the problems incurred by noisy pseudo boxes, we design Noisy Pseudo box Learning (NPL) that includes Prediction-guided Label Assignment (PLA) and Positive-proposal Consistency Voting (PCV). PLA relies on model predictions to assign labels and makes it robust to even coarse pseudo boxes; while PCV leverages the regression consistency of positive proposals to reflect the localization quality of pseudo boxes. Furthermore, in consistency training, we propose Multi-view Scale-invariant Learning (MSL) that includes mechanisms of both label- and feature-level consistency, where feature consistency is achieved by aligning shifted feature pyramids between two images with identical content but varied scales. On COCO benchmark, our method, termed PSEudo labeling and COnsistency training (PseCo), outperforms the SOTA (Soft Teacher) by 2.0, 1.8, 2.0 points under 1%, 5%, and 10% labelling ratios, respectively. It also significantly improves the learning efficiency for SSOD, e.g., PseCo halves the training time of the SOTA approach but achieves even better performance. Code is available at https://github.com/ligang-cs/PseCo."
Exploring Resolution and Degradation Clues As Self-Supervised Signal for Low Quality Object Detection
Authors: Ziteng Cui, Yingying Zhu, Lin Gu, Guo-Jun Qi, Xiaoxiao Li, Renrui Zhang, Zenghui Zhang, Tatsuya Harada
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Image restoration algorithms such as super resolution (SR) are indispensable pre-processing modules for object detection in low qual-ity images. Most of these algorithms assume the degradation is fixed andknown a priori. However, in pratical, either the real degrdation or optimalup-sampling ratio rate is unknown or differs from assumption, leading toa deteriorating performance for both the pre-processing module and theconsequent high-level task such as object detection. Here, we propose anovel self-supervised framework to detect objects in degraded low res-olution images. We utilizes the downsampling degradation as a kind oftransformation for self-supervised signals to explore the equivariant representation against various resolutions and other degradation conditions.The Auto Encoding Resolution in Self-supervision (AERIS) frameworkcould further take the advantage of advanced SR architectures with anarbitrary resolution restoring decoder to reconstruct the original corre-spondence from the degraded input image. Both the representation learn-ing and object detection are optimized jointly in an end-to-end trainingfashion. The generic AERIS frameworkcould be implemented on variousmainstream object detection architectures from CNN to Transformer.The extensive experiments show that our methods has achieved supe-rior performance compared with existing methods when facing variantdegradation situations.We will release the open source code."
Robust Category-Level 6D Pose Estimation with Coarse-to-Fine Rendering of Neural Features
Authors: Wufei Ma, Angtian Wang, Alan Yuille, Adam Kortylewski
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We consider the problem of category-level 6D pose estimation from a single RGB image. Our approach represents an object category as a cuboid mesh and learns a generative model of the neural feature activations at each mesh vertex to perform pose estimation through differentiable rendering. A common problem of rendering-based approaches is that they rely on bounding box proposals, which do not convey information about the 3D rotation of the object and are not reliable when objects are partially occluded. Instead, we introduce a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy that utilizes the rendering process to estimate a sparse set of 6D object proposals, which are subsequently refined with gradient-based optimization. The key to enabling the convergence of our approach is a neural feature representation that is trained to be scale- and rotation-invariant using contrastive learning. Our experiments demonstrate an enhanced category-level 6D pose estimation performance compared to prior work, particularly under strong partial occlusion."
"Translation, Scale and Rotation: Cross-Modal Alignment Meets RGB-Infrared Vehicle Detection"
Authors: Maoxun Yuan, Yinyan Wang, Xingxing Wei
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Integrating multispectral data in object detection, especially visible and infrared images, has received great attention in recent years. Since visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) images can provide complementary information to handle light variations, the paired images are used in many fields, such as multispectral pedestrian detection, RGB-IR crowd counting and RGB-IR salient object detection. Compared with natural RGB-IR images, we find detection in aerial RGB-IR images suffers from cross-modal weakly misalignment problems, which are manifested in the position, size and angle deviations of the same object. In this paper, we mainly address the challenge of cross-modal weakly misalignment in aerial RGB-IR images. Specifically, we firstly explain and analyze the cause of the weakly misalignment problem. Then, we propose a Translation-Scale-Rotation Alignment (TSRA) module to address the problem by calibrating the feature maps from these two modalities. The module predicts the deviation between two modality objects through an alignment process and utilizes Modality-Selection (MS) strategy to improve the performance of alignment. Finally, a two-stream feature alignment detector (TSFADet) based on the TSRA module is constructed for RGB-IR object detection in aerial images. With comprehensive experiments on the public DroneVehicle datasets, we verify that our method reduces the effect of the cross-modal misalignment and achieve robust detection results."
RFLA: Gaussian Receptive Field Based Label Assignment for Tiny Object Detection
Authors: Chang Xu, Jinwang Wang, Wen Yang, Huai Yu, Lei Yu, Gui-Song Xia
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Detecting tiny objects is one of the main obstacles hindering the development of object detection. The performance of generic object detectors tends to drastically deteriorate on tiny object detection tasks. In this paper, we point out that either box prior in the anchor-based detector or point prior in the anchor-free detector is sub-optimal for tiny objects. Our key observation is that the current anchor-based or anchor-free label assignment paradigms will incur many outlier tiny-sized ground truth samples, leading to detectors imposing less focus on the tiny objects. To this end, we propose a Gaussian Receptive Field based Label Assignment (RFLA) strategy for tiny object detection. Specifically, RFLA first utilizes the prior information that the feature receptive field follows Gaussian distribution. Then, instead of assigning samples with IoU or center sampling strategy, a new Receptive Field Distance (RFD) is proposed to directly measure the similarity between the Gaussian receptive field and ground truth. Considering that the IoU-threshold based and center sampling strategy are skewed to large objects, we further design a Hierarchical Label Assignment (HLA) module based on RFD to achieve balanced learning for tiny objects. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Especially, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors with 4.0 AP points on the AI-TOD dataset. Codes are available at https://github.com/Chasel-Tsui/mmdet-rfla."
Rethinking IoU-Based Optimization for Single-Stage 3D Object Detection
Authors: Hualian Sheng, Sijia Cai, Na Zhao, Bing Deng, Jianqiang Huang, Xian-Sheng Hua, Min-Jian Zhao, Gim Hee Lee
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Since Intersection-over-Union (IoU) based optimization maintains the consistency of the final IoU prediction metric and losses, it has been widely used in both regression and classification branches of single-stage 2D object detectors. Recently, several 3D object detection methods adopt IoU-based optimization and directly replace the 2D IoU with 3D IoU. However, such a direct computation in 3D is very costly due to the complex implementation and inefficient backward operations. Moreover, 3D IoU-based optimization is sub-optimal as it is sensitive to rotation and thus can cause training instability and detection performance deterioration. In this paper, we propose a novel Rotation-Decoupled IoU (RDIoU) method that can mitigate the rotation-sensitivity issue, and produce more efficient optimization objectives compared with 3D IoU during the training stage. Specifically, our RDIoU simplifies the complex interactions of regression parameters by decoupling the rotation variable as an independent term, yet preserving the geometry of 3D IoU. By incorporating RDIoU into both the regression and classification branches, the network is encouraged to learn more precise bounding boxes and concurrently overcome the misalignment issue between classification and regression. Extensive experiments on the benchmark KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset validate that our RDIoU method can bring substantial improvement for the single-stage 3D object detection. Our code will be available upon paper acceptance."
TD-Road: Top-Down Road Network Extraction with Holistic Graph Construction
Authors: Yang He, Ravi Garg, Amber Roy Chowdhury
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Graph-based approaches have been becoming increasingly popular in road network extraction, in addition to segmentation-based methods. Road networks are represented as graph structures, being able to explicitly define the topology structures and avoid the ambiguity of segmentation masks, such as between a real junction area and multiple separate roads in different heights. In contrast to the bottom-up graph-based approaches, which rely on orientation information, we propose a novel top-down approach to generate road network graphs with a holistic model, namely TD-Road. We decompose road extraction as two subtasks: key point prediction and connectedness prediction. We directly apply graph structures (i.e., locations of node and connections between them) as training supervisions for neural networks and generate road graph outputs in inference, instead of learning some intermediate properties of a graph structure (e.g., orientations or distances for the next move). Our network integrates a relation inference module with key point prediction, to capture connections between neighboring points and outputs the final road graphs with no post-processing steps required. Extensive experiments are conducted on challenging datasets, including City-Scale and SpaceNet to show the effectiveness and simplicity of our method, that the proposed method achieves remarkable results compared with previous state-of-the-art methods."
Multi-faceted Distillation of Base-Novel Commonality for Few-Shot Object Detection
Authors: Shuang Wu, Wenjie Pei, Dianwen Mei, Fanglin Chen, Jiandong Tian, Guangming Lu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Most of existing methods for few-shot object detection follow the fine-tuning paradigm, which potentially assumes that the class-agnostic generalizable knowledge can be learned and transferred implicitly from base classes with abundant samples to novel classes with limited samples via such a two-stage training strategy. However, it is not necessarily true since the object detector can hardly distinguish between class-agnostic knowledge and class-specific knowledge automatically without explicit modeling. In this work we propose to learn three types of class-agnostic commonalities between base and novel classes explicitly: recognition-related semantic commonalities, localization-related semantic commonalities and distribution commonalities. We design a unified distillation framework based on a memory bank, which is able to perform distillation of all three types of commonalities jointly and efficiently. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can be readily integrated into most of existing fine-tuning based methods and consistently improve the performance by a large margin."
PointCLM: A Contrastive Learning-Based Framework for Multi-Instance Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Mingzhi Yuan, Zhihao Li, Qiuye Jin, Xinrong Chen, Manning Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Multi-instance point cloud registration is the problem of estimating multiple poses of source point cloud instances within a target point cloud. Solving this problem is challenging since inlier correspondences of one instance constitute outliers of all the other instances. Existing methods often rely on time-consuming hypothesis sampling or features leveraging spatial consistency, resulting in limited performance. In this paper, we propose PointCLM, a contrastive learning-based framework for mutli-instance point cloud registration. We first utilize contrastive learning to learn well-distributed deep representations for the input putative correspondences. Then based on these representations, we propose a outlier pruning strategy and a clustering strategy to efficiently remove outliers and assign the remaining correspondences to correct instances. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real datasets by a large margin."