mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Attributes as Operators: Factorizing Unseen Attribute-Object Compositions
Authors: Tushar Nagarajan, Kristen Grauman
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We present a new approach to modeling visual attributes. Prior work casts attributes in a similar role as objects, learning a latent representation where properties (e.g., sliced) are recognized by classifiers much in the way objects (e.g., apple) are. However, this common approach fails to separate the attributes observed during training from the objects with which they are composed, making it ineffectual when encountering new attribute-object compositions. Instead, we propose to model attributes as operators. Our approach learns a semantic embedding that explicitly factors out attributes from their accompanying objects, and also benefits from novel regularizers expressing attribute operators’ effects (e.g., blunt should undo the effects of sharp). Not only does our approach align conceptually with the linguistic role of attributes as modifiers, but it also generalizes to recognize unseen compositions of objects and attributes, We validate our approach on two challenging datasets and demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art. In addition, we show that not only can our model recognize unseen compositions robustly in an open-world setting, it can also generalize to compositions where objects themselves were unseen during training.
Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset
Authors: Dima Damen, Hazel Doughty, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Sanja Fidler, Antonino Furnari, Evangelos Kazakos, Davide Moltisanti, Jonathan Munro, Toby Perrett, Will Price, Michael Wray
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: First-person vision is gaining interest as it offers a unique viewpoint on people’s interaction with objects, their attention, and even intention. However, progress in this challenging domain has been relatively slow due to the lack of sufficiently large datasets. In this paper, we introduce EPIC-KITCHENS, a large-scale egocentric video benchmark recorded by 32 participants in their native kitchen environments. Our videos depict non-scripted daily activities: we simply asked each participant to start recording every time they entered their kitchen. Recording took place in 4 cities (in North America and Europe) by participants belonging to 10 different nationalities, resulting in highly diverse cooking styles. Our dataset features 55 hours of video consisting of 11.5M frames, which we densely labelled for a total of 39.6K action segments and 454.3K object bounding boxes. Our annotation is unique in that we had the participants narrate their own videos (after recording), thus reflecting true intention, and we crowd-sourced ground-truths based on these. We describe our object, action and anticipation challenges, and evaluate several baselines over two test splits, seen and unseen kitchens.
Realtime Time Synchronized Event-based Stereo
Authors: Alex Zihao Zhu, Yibo Chen, Kostas Daniilidis
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In this work, we propose a novel event based stereo method which addresses the problem of motion blur for a moving event camera. Our method uses the velocity of the camera and a range of disparities, to synchronize the positions of the events, as if they were captured at a single point in time. We represent these events using a pair of novel time synchronized event disparity volumes, which we show remove motion blur for pixels at the correct disparity in the volume, while further blurring pixels at the wrong disparity. We then apply a novel matching cost over these time synchronized event disparity volumes, which both rewards similarity between the volumes while penalizing blurriness. We show that our method outperforms more expensive, smoothing based event stereo methods, by evaluating on the Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera dataset.
Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget
Authors: Rahaf Aljundi, Francesca Babiloni, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Marcus Rohrbach, Tinne Tuytelaars
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Humans can learn in a continuous manner. Old rarely utilized knowledge can be overwritten by new incoming information while important, frequently used knowledge is prevented from being erased. In artificial learning systems, lifelong learning so far has focused mainly on accumulating knowledge over tasks and overcoming catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we argue that, given the limited model capacity and the unlimited new information to be learned, knowledge has to be preserved or erased selectively. Inspired by neuroplasticity, we propose a novel approach for lifelong learning, coined Memory Aware Synapses (MAS). It computes the importance of the parameters of a neural network in an unsupervised and online manner. Given a new sample which is fed to the network, MAS accumulates an importance measure for each parameter of the network, based on how sensitive the predicted output function is to a change in this parameter. When learning a new task, changes to important parameters can then be penalized, effectively preventing important knowledge related to previous tasks from being overwritten. Further, we show an interesting connection between a local version of our method and Hebb’s rule, which is a model for the learning process in the brain. We test our method on a sequence of object recognition tasks and on the challenging problem of learning an embedding for predicting triplets. We show state-of-the-art performance and, for the first time, the ability to adapt the importance of the parameters based on unlabeled data towards what the network needs (not) to forget, which may vary depending on test conditions.
Learning and Matching Multi-View Descriptors for Registration of Point Clouds
Authors: Lei Zhou, Siyu Zhu, Zixin Luo, Tianwei Shen, Runze Zhang, Mingmin Zhen, Tian Fang, Long Quan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Critical to the registration of point clouds is the establishment of a set of accurate correspondences between points in 3D space. The correspondence problem is generally addressed by the design of discriminative 3D local descriptors on the one hand, and the development of robust matching strategies on the other hand. In this work, we first propose a multi-view local descriptor, which is learned from the images of multiple views, for the description of 3D keypoints. Then, we develop a robust matching approach, aiming at rejecting outlier matches based on the efficient inference via belief propagation on the defined graphical model. We have demonstrated the boost of our approaches to registration on the public scanning and multi-view stereo datasets. The superior performance has been verified by the intensive comparisons against a variety of descriptors and matching methods.
Semi-Dense 3D Reconstruction with a Stereo Event Camera
Authors: Yi Zhou, Guillermo Gallego, Henri Rebecq, Laurent Kneip, Hongdong Li, Davide Scaramuzza
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that offer several advantages, such as low latency, high-speed and high dynamic range, to tackle challenging scenarios in computer vision. This paper presents a solution to the problem of 3D reconstruction from data captured by a stereo event-camera rig moving in a static scene, such as in the context of stereo Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. The proposed method consists of the optimization of an energy function designed to exploit small-baseline spatio-temporal consistency of events triggered across both stereo image planes. To improve the density of the reconstruction and to reduce the uncertainty of the estimation, a probabilistic depth-fusion strategy is also developed. The resulting method has no special requirements on either the motion of the stereo event-camera rig or on prior knowledge about the scene. Experiments demonstrate our method can deal with both texture-rich scenes as well as sparse scenes, outperforming state-of-the-art stereo methods based on event data image representations.
Scale-Awareness of Light Field Camera based Visual Odometry
Authors: Niclas Zeller, Franz Quint, Uwe Stilla
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We propose a novel direct visual odometry algorithm for micro-lens-array-based light field cameras. The algorithm calculates a detailed, semi-dense 3D point cloud of its environment. This is achieved by establishing probabilistic depth hypotheses based on stereo observations between the micro images of different recordings. Tracking is performed in a coarse-to-fine process, working directly on the recorded raw images. The tracking accounts for changing lighting conditions and utilizes a linear motion model to be more robust. A novel scale optimization framework is proposed. It estimates the scene scale, on the basis of keyframes, and optimizes the scale of the entire trajectory by filtering over multiple estimates. The method is tested based on a versatile dataset consisting of challenging indoor and outdoor sequences and is compared to state-of-the-art monocular and stereo approaches. The algorithm shows the ability to recover the absolute scale of the scene and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art monocular algorithms with respect to scale drifts.
Revisiting Autofocus for Smartphone Cameras
Authors: Abdullah Abuolaim, Abhijith Punnappurath, Michael S. Brown
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Autofocus (AF) on smartphones is the process of determining how to move a camera's lens such that certain scene content is in focus. The underlying algorithms used by AF systems, such as contrast detection and phase differencing, are well established. However, determining a high-level objective regarding how to best focus a particular scene is less clear. This is evident in part by the fact that different smartphone cameras employ different AF criteria; for example, some attempt to keep items in the center in focus, others give priority to faces while others maximize the sharpness of the entire scene. The fact that different objectives exist raises the research question of whether there is a preferred objective. This becomes more interesting when AF is applied to videos of dynamic scenes. The work in this paper aims to revisit AF for smartphones within the context of temporal image data. As part of this effort, we describe the capture of a new 4D dataset that provides access to a full focal stack at each time point in a temporal sequence. Based on this dataset, we have developed a platform and associated application programming interface (API) that mimic real AF systems, restricting lens motion within the constraints of a dynamic environment and frame capture. Using our platform we evaluated several high-level focusing objectives and found interesting insight into what users prefer. We believe our new temporal focal stack dataset, AF platform, and initial user-study findings will be useful in advancing AF research.
Deep Adversarial Attention Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: the Benefit of Target Expectation Maximization
Authors: Guoliang Kang, Liang Zheng, Yan Yan, Yi Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In this paper, we make two contributions to unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) using the convolutional neural network (CNN). First, our approach transfers knowledge in all the convolutional layers through attention alignment. Most previous methods align high-level representations, e.g., activations of the fully connected (FC) layer. In these methods, however, the convolutional layers which underpin critical low-level domain knowledge cannot be updated directly towards reducing domain discrepancy. Specifically, we assume that the discriminative regions in an image are relatively invariant to image style changes. Based on this assumption, we propose an attention alignment scheme on all the target convolutional layers to uncover the knowledge shared by the source domain. Second, we estimate the posterior label distribution of the unlabeled data for target network training. Previous methods, which iteratively update the pseudo labels by the target network and refine the target network by the updated pseudo labels, are vulnerable to label estimation errors. Instead, our approach uses category distribution to calculate the cross-entropy loss for training, thereby ameliorating the error accumulation of the estimated labels. The two contributions allow our approach to outperform the state-of-the-art methods by +2.6% on the Office-31 dataset.
Efficient 6-DoF Tracking of Handheld Objects from an Egocentric Viewpoint
Authors: Rohit Pandey, Pavel Pidlypenskyi, Shuoran Yang, Christine Kaeser-Chen
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Virtual and augmented reality technologies have seen significant growth in the past few years. A key component of such systems is the ability to track the pose of head mounted displays and controllers in 3D space. We tackle the problem of efficient 6-DoF tracking of a handheld controller from egocentric camera perspectives. We collected the HMD Controller dataset which consist of over 540,000 stereo image pairs labelled with the full 6-DoF pose of the handheld controller. Our proposed SSD-AF-Stereo3D model achieves a mean average error of 33.5 millimeters in 3D keypoint prediction and is used in conjunction with an IMU sensor on the controller to enable 6-DoF tracking. We also present results on approaches for model based full 6-DoF tracking. All our models operate under the strict constraints of real time mobile CPU inference.
How good is my GAN?
Authors: Konstantin Shmelkov, Cordelia Schmid, Karteek Alahari
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Generative adverserial networks (GANs) are one of the most popular methods for generating images today. While impressive results have been validated by visual inspection, a number of quantitive criteria have emerged only recently. We argue here that the existing ones are insufficient and need to be in adequation with the task at hand. In this paper we introduce two measures based on image classification---GAN-train and GAN-test, which approximate the recall (diversity) and precision (quality of the image) of GANs respectively. We evaluate a number of recent GAN approaches based on these two measures and demonstrate a clear difference in performance. Furthermore, we observe that the increasing difficulty of the dataset, from CIFAR10 over CIFAR100 to ImageNet, shows an inverse correlation with the quality of the GANs, as clearly evident from our measures.
Superpixel Sampling Networks
Authors: Varun Jampani, Deqing Sun, Ming-Yu Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Superpixels provide an efficient low/mid-level representation of image data, which greatly reduces the number of image primitives for subsequent vision tasks. Existing superpixel algorithms are not differentiable, making them difficult to integrate into otherwise end-to-end trainable deep neural networks. We develop a new differentiable model for superpixel sampling that leverages deep networks for learning superpixel segmentation. The resulting "Superpixel Sampling Network" (SSN) is end-to-end trainable, which allows learning task-specific superpixels with flexible loss functions and has fast runtime. Extensive experimental analysis indicates that SSNs not only outperform existing superpixel algorithms on traditional segmentation benchmarks, but can also learn superpixels for other tasks. In addition, SSNs can be easily integrated into downstream deep networks resulting in performance improvements.
Effective Use of Synthetic Data for Urban Scene Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Fatemeh Sadat Saleh, Mohammad Sadegh Aliakbarian, Mathieu Salzmann, Lars Petersson, Jose M. Alvarez
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Training a deep network to perform semantic segmentation requires large amounts of labeled data. To alleviate the manual effort of annotating real images, researchers have investigated the use of synthetic data, which can be labeled automatically. Unfortunately, a network trained on synthetic data performs relatively poorly on real images. While this can be addressed by domain adaptation, existing methods all require having access to real images during training. In this paper, we introduce a drastically different way to handle synthetic images that does not require seeing any real images at training time. Our approach builds on the observation that foreground and background classes are not affected in the same manner by the domain shift, and thus should be treated differently. In particular, the former should be handled in a detection-based manner to better account for the fact that, while their texture in synthetic images is not photo-realistic, their shape looks natural. Our experiments evidence the effectiveness of our approach on Cityscapes and CamVid with models trained on synthetic data only.
Generating 3D Faces using Convolutional Mesh Autoencoders
Authors: Anurag Ranjan, Timo Bolkart, Soubhik Sanyal, Michael J. Black
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Learned 3D representations of human faces are useful for computer vision problems such as 3D face tracking and reconstruction from images, as well as graphics applications such as character generation and animation. Traditional models learn a latent representation of a face using linear subspaces or higher-order tensor generalizations. Due to this linearity, they can not capture extreme deformations and non-linear expressions. To address this, we introduce a versatile model that learns a non-linear representation of a face using spectral convolutions on a mesh surface. We introduce mesh sampling operations that enable a hierarchical mesh representation that captures non-linear variations in shape and expression at multiple scales within the model. In a variational setting, our model samples diverse realistic 3D faces from a multivariate Gaussian distribution. Our training data consists of 20,466 meshes of extreme expressions captured over 12 different subjects. Despite limited training data, our trained model outperforms state-of-the-art face models with 50% lower reconstruction error, while using 75% fewer parameters. We also show that, replacing the expression space of an existing state-of-the-art face model with our autoencoder, achieves a lower reconstruction error. Our data, model and code are available at http://coma.is.tue.mpg.de/.
3D Face Reconstruction from Light Field Images: A Model-free Approach
Authors: Mingtao Feng, Syed Zulqarnain Gilani, Yaonan Wang, Ajmal Mian
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Reconstructing 3D facial geometry from a single RGB image has recently instigated wide research interest. However, it is still an ill-posed problem and most methods rely on prior models hence undermining the accuracy of the recovered 3D faces. In this paper, we exploit the Epipolar Plane Images (EPI) obtained from light field cameras and learn CNN models that recover horizontal and vertical 3D facial curves from the respective horizontal and vertical EPIs. Our 3D face reconstruction network (FaceLFnet) comprises a densely connected architecture to learn accurate 3D facial curves from low resolution EPIs. To train the proposed FaceLFnets from scratch, we synthesize photo-realistic light field images from 3D facial scans. The curve by curve 3D face estimation approach allows the networks to learn from only 14K images of 80 identities, which still comprises over 11 Million EPIs/curves. The estimated facial curves are merged into a single pointcloud to which a surface is fitted to get the final 3D face. Our method is model-free, requires only a few training samples to learn FaceLFnet and can reconstruct 3D faces with high accuracy from single light field images under varying poses, expressions and lighting conditions. Comparison on the BU-3DFE and BU-4DFE datasets show that our method reduces reconstruction errors by over 20% compared to recent state of the art.
Attention-aware Deep Adversarial Hashing for Cross-Modal Retrieval
Authors: Xi Zhang, Hanjiang Lai, Jiashi Feng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Due to the rapid growth of multi-modal data, hashing methods for cross-modal retrieval have received considerable attention. However, finding content similarities between different modalities of data is still challenging due to an existing heterogeneity gap. To further address this problem, we propose an adversarial hashing network with an attention mechanism to enhance the measurement of content similarities by selectively focusing on the informative parts of multi-modal data. The proposed new deep adversarial network consists of three building blocks: 1) the feature learning module to obtain the feature representations; 2) the attention module to generate an attention mask, which is used to divide the feature representations into the attended and unattended feature representations; and 3) the hashing module to learn hash functions that preserve the similarities between different modalities. In our framework, the attention and hashing modules are trained in an adversarial way: the attention module attempts to make the hashing module unable to preserve the similarities of multi-modal data w.r.t. the unattended feature representations, while the hashing module aims to preserve the similarities of multi-modal data w.r.t. the attended and unattended feature representations. Extensive evaluations on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method brings substantial improvements over other state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing methods.
Museum Exhibit Identification Challenge for the Supervised Domain Adaptation and Beyond
Authors: Piotr Koniusz, Yusuf Tas, Hongguang Zhang, Mehrtash Harandi, Fatih Porikli, Rui Zhang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We study an open problem of artwork identification and propose a new dataset dubbed Open Museum Identification Challenge (Open MIC). It contains photos of exhibits captured in 10 distinct exhibition spaces of several museums which showcase paintings, timepieces, sculptures, glassware, relics, science exhibits, natural history pieces, ceramics, pottery, tools and indigenous crafts. The goal of Open MIC is to stimulate research in domain adaptation, egocentric recognition and few-shot learning by providing a testbed complementary to the famous Office dataset which reaches ~90% accuracy. To form our dataset, we captured a number of images per art piece with a mobile phone and wearable cameras to form the source and target data splits, respectively. To achieve robust baselines, we build on a recent approach that aligns per-class scatter matrices of the source and target CNN streams. Moreover, we exploit the positive definite nature of such representations by using end-to-end Bregman divergences and the Riemannian metric. We present baselines such as training/evaluation per exhibition and training/evaluation on the combined set covering 866 exhibit identities. As each exhibition poses distinct challenges e.g., quality of lighting, motion blur, occlusions, clutter, viewpoint and scale variations, rotations, glares, transparency, non-planarity, clipping, we break down results w.r.t. these factors.
End-to-End Deep Structured Models for Drawing Crosswalks
Authors: Justin Liang, Raquel Urtasun
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In this paper we address the problem of detecting crosswalks from LiDAR and camera imagery. Towards this goal, given multiple LiDAR sweeps and the corresponding imagery, we project both inputs onto the ground surface to produce a top down view of the scene. We then leverage convolutional neural networks to extract semantic cues about the location of the crosswalks. These are then used in combination with road centerlines from freely available maps (e.g., OpenStreetMaps) to solve a structured optimization problem which draws the final crosswalk boundaries. Our experiments over crosswalks in a large city area show that 96.6% automation can be achieved.
Learning Visual Question Answering by Bootstrapping Hard Attention
Authors: Mateusz Malinowski, Carl Doersch, Adam Santoro, Peter Battaglia
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Attention mechanisms in biological perception are thought to select subsets of perceptual information for more sophisticated processing which would be prohibitive to perform on all sensory inputs. In computer vision, however, there has been relatively little exploration of hard attention, where some information is selectively ignored, in spite of the success of soft attention, where information is re-weighted and aggregated, but never filtered out. Here, we introduce a new approach for hard attention and find it achieves very competitive performance on a recently-released visual question answering dataset, equalling and in some cases surpassing similar soft attention architectures while entirely ignoring some features. Even though the hard attention mechanism is not differentiable, we found that the feature magnitudes correlate with semantic relevance, and provided a useful signal for our mechanism's attentional selection criterion. Because hard attention selects important features of the input information, it can also be more efficient than analogous soft attention mechanisms. This is especially important for recent approaches that use non-local pairwise operations, whereby computational and memory costs are quadratic in the size of the set of features.
Deep Adaptive Attention for Joint Facial Action Unit Detection and Face Alignment
Authors: Zhiwen Shao, Zhilei Liu, Jianfei Cai, Lizhuang Ma
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Facial action unit (AU) detection and face alignment are two highly correlated tasks since facial landmarks can provide precise AU locations to facilitate the extraction of meaningful local features for AU detection. Most existing AU detection works often treat face alignment as a preprocessing and handle the two tasks independently. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning framework for joint AU detection and face alignment, which has not been explored before. In particular, multi-scale shared features are learned firstly, and high-level features of face alignment are fed into AU detection. Moreover, to extract precise local features, we propose an adaptive attention learning module to refine the attention map of each AU adaptively. Finally, the assembled local features are integrated with face alignment features and global features for AU detection. Experiments on BP4D and DISFA benchmarks demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for AU detection.
Data-Driven Sparse Structure Selection for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Zehao Huang, Naiyan Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks have liberated its extraordinary power on various tasks. However, it is still very challenging to deploy state-of-the-art models into real-world applications due to their high computational complexity. How can we design a compact and effective network without massive experiments and expert knowledge? In this paper, we propose a simple and effective framework to learn and prune deep models in an end-to-end manner. In our framework, a new type of parameter -- scaling factor is first introduced to scale the outputs of specific structures, such as neurons, groups or residual blocks. Then we add sparsity regularizations on these factors, and solve this optimization problem by a modified stochastic Accelerated Proximal Gradient (APG) method. By forcing some of the factors to zero, we can safely remove the corresponding structures, thus prune the unimportant parts of a CNN. Comparing with other structure selection methods that may need thousands of trials or iterative fine-tuning, our method is trained fully end-to-end in one training pass without bells and whistles. We evaluate our method, Sparse Structure Selection with several state-of-the-art CNNs, and demonstrate very promising results with adaptive depth and width selection. Code is available at: https://github.com/huangzehao/sparse-structure-selection.
To learn image super-resolution, use a GAN to learn how to do image degradation first
Authors: Adrian Bulat, Jing Yang, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: This paper is on image and face super-resolution. The vast majority of prior work for this problem focus on how to increase the resolution of low-resolution images which are artificially generated by simple bilinear down-sampling (or in a few cases by blurring followed by down-sampling). We show that such methods fail to produce good results when applied to real-world low-resolution, low quality images. To circumvent this problem, we propose a two-stage process which firstly trains a High-to-Low Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to learn how to degrade and downsample high-resolution images requiring, during training, only extit{unpaired} high and low-resolution images. Once this is achieved, the output of this network is used to train a Low-to-High GAN for image super-resolution using this time extit{paired} low- and high-resolution images. Our main result is that this network can be now used to effectively increase the quality of real-world low-resolution images. We have applied the proposed pipeline for the problem of face super-resolution where we report large improvement over baselines and prior work although the proposed method is potentially applicable to other object categories.
Self-Supervised Relative Depth Learning for Urban Scene Understanding
Authors: Huaizu Jiang, Gustav Larsson, Michael Maire Greg Shakhnarovich, Erik Learned-Miller
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: As an agent moves through the world, the apparent motion of scene elements is (usually) inversely proportional to their depth. It is natural for a learning agent to associate image patterns with the magnitude of their displacement over time: as the agent moves, faraway mountains don't move much; nearby trees move a lot. This natural relationship between the appearance of objects and their motion is a rich source of information about the world. In this work, we start by training a deep network, using fully automatic supervision, to predict relative scene depth from single images. The relative depth training images are automatically derived from simple videos of cars moving through a scene, using recent motion segmentation techniques, and no human-provided labels. This proxy task of predicting relative depth from a single image induces features in the network that result in large improvements in a set of downstream tasks including semantic segmentation, joint road segmentation and car detection, and monocular (absolute) depth estimation, over a network trained from scratch. The improvement on the semantic segmentation task is greater than those produced by any other automatically supervised methods. Moreover, for monocular depth estimation, our unsupervised pre-training method even outperforms supervised pre-training with ImageNet. In addition, we demonstrate benefits from learning to predict (again, completely unsupervised) relative depth in the specific videos associated with various downstream tasks (e.g., KITTI). We adapt to the specific scenes in those tasks in an unsupervised manner to improve performance. In summary, for semantic segmentation, we present state-of-the-art results among methods that do not use supervised pre-training, and we even exceed the performance of supervised ImageNet pre-trained models for monocular depth estimation, achieving results that are comparable with state-of-the-art methods.
End-to-End Joint Semantic Segmentation of Actors and Actions in Video
Authors: Jingwei Ji, Shyamal Buch, Alvaro Soto, Juan Carlos Niebles
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Traditional video understanding tasks include human action recognition and actor/object semantic segmentation. However, the combined task of providing semantic segmentation for different actor classes simultaneously with their action class remains a challenging but necessary task for many applications. In this work, we propose a new end-to-end architecture for tackling this task in videos. Our model effectively leverages multiple input modalities, contextual information, and multitask learning in the video to directly output semantic segmentations in a single unified framework. We train and benchmark our model on the Actor-Action Dataset (A2D) for joint actor-action semantic segmentation, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for both segmentation and detection. We also perform experiments verifying our approach improves performance for zero-shot recognition, indicating generalizability of our jointly learned feature space.
Deep Texture and Structure Aware Filtering Network for Image Smoothing
Authors: Kaiyue Lu, Shaodi You, Nick Barnes
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Image smoothing is a fundamental task in computer vision, which aims to retain salient structures and remove insignificant textures. In this paper, we tackle the natural deficiency of existing methods, that they cannot properly distinguish textures and structures with similar low-level appearance. While deep learning approaches have addressed preserving structures, they do not yet properly address textures. To this end, we generate a large dataset by blending natural textures with clean structure-only images, and then build a texture prediction network (TPN) that predicts location and magnitude of textures. After that, we combine it with a semantic structure prediction network (SPN) so that the final texture and structure aware filtering network (TSAFN) is informed the textures to remove ("texture-awareness") and the structures to preserve ("structure-awareness"). The proposed model is easy to understand and implement, and shows excellent performance on real images in the wild as well as our generated dataset.
Pairwise Relational Networks for Face Recognition
Authors: Bong-Nam Kang, Yonghyun Kim, Daijin Kim
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Existing face recognition using deep neural networks is difficult to know what kind of features are used to discriminate the identities of face images clearly. To investigate the effective features for face recognition, we propose a novel face recognition method, called a pairwise relational network (PRN), that obtains local appearance patches around landmark points on the feature map, and captures the pairwise relation between a pair of local appearance patches. The PRN is trained to capture unique and discriminative pairwise relations among different identities. Because the existence and meaning of pairwise relations should be identity dependent, we add a face identity state feature, which obtains from the long short-term memory (LSTM) units network with the sequential local appearance patches on the feature maps, to the PRN. To further improve accuracy of face recognition, we combined the global appearance representation with the pairwise relational feature. Experimental results on the LFW show that the PRN using only pairwise relations achieved 99.65% accuracy and the PRN using both pairwise relations and face identity state feature achieved 99.76% accuracy. On the YTF, both the PRN using only pairwise relations and the PRN using pairwise relations and the face identity state feature achieved the state-of-the-art (95.7% and 96.3%). The PRN also achieved comparable results to the state-of-the-art for both face verification and face identification tasks on the IJB-A, and the state-of-the-art on the IJB-B.
LAPRAN: A Scalable Laplacian Pyramid Reconstructive Adversarial Network for Flexible Compressive Sensing Reconstruction
Authors: Kai XU, Zhikang Zhang, Fengbo Ren
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: This paper addresses the single-image compressive sensing (CS) and reconstruction problem. We propose a scalable Laplacian pyramid reconstructive adversarial network (LAPRAN) that enables high-fidelity, flexible and fast CS images reconstruction. LAPRAN progressively reconstructs an image following the concept of the Laplacian pyramid through multiple stages of reconstructive adversarial networks (RANs). At each pyramid level, CS measurements are fused with a contextual latent vector to generate a high-frequency image residual. Consequently, LAPRAN can produce hierarchies of reconstructed images and each with an incremental resolution and improved quality. The scalable pyramid structure of LAPRAN enables high-fidelity CS reconstruction with a flexible resolution that is adaptive to a wide range of compression ratios (CRs), which is infeasible with existing methods. Experimental results on multiple public datasets show that LAPRAN offers an average 7.47dB and 5.98dB PSNR, and an average 57.93% and 33.20% SSIM improvement compared to model-based and data-driven baselines, respectively.
Learning Warped Guidance for Blind Face Restoration
Authors: Xiaoming Li, Ming Liu, Yuting Ye, Wangmeng Zuo, Liang Lin, Ruigang Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of blind face restoration from an unconstrained blurry, noisy, low-resolution, or compressed image (i.e., degraded observation). For better recovery of fine facial details, we modify the problem setting by taking both the degraded observation and a high-quality guided image of the same identity as input to our guided face restoration network (GFRNet). However, the degraded observation and guided image generally are different in pose, illumination and expression, thereby making plain CNNs (e.g., U-Net) fail to recover fine and identity-aware facial details. To tackle this issue, our GFRNet model includes both a warping subnetwork (WarpNet) and a reconstruction subnetwork (RecNet). The WarpNet is introduced to predict flow field for warping the guided image to correct pose and expression (i.e., warped guidance), while the RecNet takes the degraded observation and warped guidance as input to produce the restoration result. Due to that the ground-truth flow field is unavailable, landmark loss together with total variation regularization are incorporated to guide the learning of WarpNet. Furthermore, to make the model applicable to blind restoration, our GFRNet is trained on the synthetic data with versatile settings on blur kernel, noise level, downsampling scale factor, and JPEG quality factor. Experiments show that our GFRNet not only performs favorably against the state-of-the-art image and face restoration methods, but also generates visually photo-realistic results on real degraded facial images.
Shift-Net: Image Inpainting via Deep Feature Rearrangement
Authors: Zhaoyi Yan, Xiaoming Li, Mu Li, Wangmeng Zuo, Shiguang Shan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Deep convolutional networks (CNNs) have exhibited their potential in image inpainting for producing plausible results. However, in most existing methods, e.g., context encoder, the missing parts are predicted by propagating the surrounding convolutional features through a fully connected layer, which intends to produce semantically plausible but blurry result. In this paper, we introduce a special shift-connection layer to the U-Net architecture, namely Shift-Net, for filling in missing regions of any shape with sharp structures and fine-detailed textures. To this end, the encoder feature of the known region is shifted to serve as an estimation of the missing parts. A guidance loss is introduced on decoder feature to minimize the distance between the decoder feature after fully connected layer and the ground-truth encoder feature of the missing parts. With such constraint, the decoder feature in missing region can be used to guide the shift of encoder feature in known region. An end-to-end learning algorithm is further developed to train the Shift-Net. Experiments on the Paris StreetView and Places datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our Shift-Net in producing sharper, fine-detailed, and visually plausible results. The codes and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Zhaoyi-Yan/Shift-Net.
Question-Guided Hybrid Convolution for Visual Question Answering
Authors: Peng Gao, Hongsheng Li, Shuang Li, Pan Lu, Yikang Li, Steven C.H. Hoi, Xiaogang Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel Question-Guided Hybrid Convolution (QGHC) network for Visual Question Answering (VQA). Most state-of-the-art VQA methods fuse the high-level textual and visual features from the neural network and abandon the visual spatial information when learning multi-modal features. To address these problems, question-guided kernels generated from the input question are designed to convolute with visual features for capturing the textual and visual relationship in the early stage. The question-guided convolution can tightly couple the textual and visual information but also introduces more parameters when learning kernels. We apply the group convolution which consists of question-independent kernels and question-dependent kernels, to reduce the parameter size and release the over-fitting. The hybrid convolution can generate discriminative multi-modal features with fewer parameters. Our proposed approach is also complementary to existing bilinear pooling fusion methods and attention methods. Integration with them could further boost the performance. Extensive experiments on public VQA datasets validate the effectiveness of QGHC.
Disentangling Factors of Variation with Cycle-Consistent Variational Auto-Encoders
Authors: Ananya Harsh Jha, Saket Anand, Maneesh Singh, VSR Veeravasarapu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Generative models that learn disentangled representations for different factors of variation in an image can be very useful for targeted data augmentation. By sampling from the disentangled latent subspace of interest, we can efficiently generate new data necessary for a particular task. Learning disentangled representations is a challenging problem, especially when certain factors of variation are difficult to label. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture that disentangles the latent space into two complementary subspaces by using only weak supervision in form of pairwise similarity labels. Inspired by the recent success of cycle-consistent adversarial architectures, we use cycle-consistency in a variational auto-encoder framework. Our non-adversarial approach is in contrast with the recent works that combine adversarial training with auto-encoders to disentangle representations. We show compelling results of disentangled latent subspaces on three datasets and compare with recent works that leverage adversarial training.
Deep Fundamental Matrix Estimation
Authors: Rene Ranftl, Vladlen Koltun
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: We present an approach to robust estimation of fundamental matrices from noisy data contaminated by outliers. The problem is cast as a series of weighted homogeneous least-squares problems, where robust weights are estimated using deep networks. The presented formulation acts directly on putative correspondences and thus fits into standard 3D vision pipelines that perform feature extraction, matching, and model fitting. The approach can be trained end-to-end and yields computationally efficient robust estimators. Our experiments indicate that the presented approach is able to train robust estimators that outperform classic approaches on real data by a significant margin.
Where are the blobs: Counting by Localization with Point Supervision
Authors: Issam H. Laradji, Negar Rostamzadeh, Pedro O. Pinheiro, David Vazquez, Mark Schmidt
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Object counting is an important task in computer vision due to its growing demand in applications such as surveillance, traffic monitoring, and counting everyday objects. State-of-the-art methods use regression-based optimization where they explicitly learn to count the objects of interest. These often perform better than detection-based methods that need to learn the more difficult task of predicting the location, size, and shape of each object. However, we propose a detection-based method that does not need to estimate the size and shape of the objects and that outperforms regression-based methods. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we propose a novel loss function that encourages the network to output a single blob per object instance using point-level annotations only; (2) we design two methods for splitting large predicted blobs between object instances; and (3) we show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on several challenging datasets including the Pascal VOC and the Penguins dataset. Our method even outperforms those that use stronger supervision such as depth features, multi-point annotations, and bounding-box labels.
Pose Guided Human Video Generation
Authors: Ceyuan Yang, Zhe Wang, Xinge Zhu, Chen Huang, Jianping Shi, Dahua Lin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (Main Conference Track), 2018

Abstract: Due to the emergence of Generative Adversarial Networks, video synthesis has witnessed exceptional breakthroughs. However, existing methods lack a proper representation to explicitly control the dynamics in videos. Human pose, on the other hand, can represent motion patterns intrinsically and interpretably, and impose the geometric constraints regardless of appearance. In this paper, we propose a pose guided method to synthesize human videos in a disentangled way: plausible motion prediction and coherent appearance generation. In the first stage, a Pose Sequence Generative Adversarial Network (PSGAN) learns in an adversarial manner to yield pose sequences conditioned on the class label. In the second stage, a Semantic Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (SCGAN) generates video frames from the poses while preserving coherent appearances in the input image. By enforcing semantic consistency between the generated and ground-truth poses at a high feature level, our SCGAN is robust to noisy or abnormal poses. Extensive experiments on both human action and human face datasets manifest the superiority of the proposed method over other state-of-the-arts.