mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Single-Stream Multi-level Alignment for Vision-Language Pretraining
Authors: Zaid Khan, Vijay Kumar B G, Xiang Yu, Samuel Schulter, Manmohan Chandraker, Yun Fu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Self-supervised vision-language pretraining from pure images and text with a contrastive loss is effective, but ignores fine-grained alignment due to a dual-stream architecture that aligns image and text representations only on a global level. Earlier, supervised, non-contrastive methods were capable of finer-grained alignment, but required dense annotations that were not scalable. We propose a single stream architecture that aligns images and language at multiple levels: global, fine-grained patch-token, and conceptual/semantic, using two novel tasks: symmetric cross-modality reconstruction (XMM) and a pseudo-labeled key word prediction (PSL). In XMM, we mask input tokens from one modality and use cross-modal information to reconstruct the masked token, thus improving fine-grained alignment between the two modalities. In PSL, we use attention to select keywords in a caption, use a momentum encoder to recommend other important keywords that are missing from the caption but represented in the image, and then train the visual encoder to predict the presence of those keywords, helping it learn semantic concepts that are essential for grounding a textual token to an image region. We demonstrate competitive performance and improved data efficiency on image-text retrieval, grounding, visual question answering/reasoning against larger models and models trained on more data. Code and models available at zaidkhan.me/SIMLA."
Most and Least Retrievable Images in Visual-Language Query Systems
Authors: Liuwan Zhu, Rui Ning, Jiang Li, Chunsheng Xin, Hongyi Wu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This is the first work to introduce the Most Retrievable Image(MRI) and Least Retrievable Image(LRI) concepts in modern text-to-image retrieval systems. An MRI is associated with and thus can be retrieved by many unrelated texts, while an LRI is disassociated from and thus not retrievable by related texts. Both of them have important practical applications and implications. Due to their one-to-many nature, it is fundamentally challenging to construct MRI and LRI. This research addresses this nontrivial problem by developing novel and effective loss functions to craft perturbations that essentially corrupt feature correlation between visual and language spaces, thus enabling MRI and LRI. The proposed schemes are implemented based on CLIP, a state-of-the-art image and text representation model, to demonstrate MRI and LRI and their application in privacy-preserved image sharing and malicious advertisement. They are evaluated by extensive experiments based on the modern visual-language models on multiple benchmarks, including Paris, ImageNet, Flickr30k, and MSCOCO. The experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed schemes for constructing MRI and LRI."
Sports Video Analysis on Large-Scale Data
Authors: Dekun Wu, He Zhao, Xingce Bao, Richard P. Wildes
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This paper investigates the modeling of automated machine description on sports video, which has seen much progress recently. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art approaches fall quite short of capturing how human experts analyze sports scenes. There are several major reasons: (1) The used dataset is collected from non-official providers, which naturally creates a gap between models trained on those datasets and real-world applications; (2) previously proposed methods require extensive annotation efforts (i.e., player and ball segmentation at pixel level) on localizing useful visual features to yield acceptable results; (3) very few public datasets are available. In this paper, we propose a novel large-scale NBA dataset for Sports Video Analysis (NSVA) with a focus on captioning, to address the above challenges. We also design a unified approach to process raw videos into a stack of meaningful features with minimum labelling efforts, showing that cross modeling on such features using a transformer architecture leads to strong performance. In addition, we demonstrate the broad application of NSVA by addressing two additional tasks, namely fine-grained sports action recognition and salient player identification. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/jackwu502/NSVA."
Grounding Visual Representations with Texts for Domain Generalization
Authors: Seonwoo Min, Nokyung Park, Siwon Kim, Seunghyun Park, Jinkyu Kim
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Reducing the representational discrepancy between source and target domains is a key component to maximize the model generalization. In this work, we advocate for leveraging natural language supervision for the domain generalization task. We introduce two modules to ground visual representations with texts containing typical reasoning of humans: (1) Visual and Textual Joint Embedder and (2) Textual Explanation Generator. The former learns the image-text joint embedding space where we can ground high-level class-discriminative information into the model. The latter leverages an explainable model and generates explanations justifying the rationale behind its decision. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage the vision-and-language cross-modality approach for the domain generalization task. Our experiments with a newly created CUB-DG benchmark dataset demonstrate that cross-modality supervision can be successfully used to ground domain-invariant visual representations and improve the model generalization. Furthermore, in the large-scale DomainBed benchmark, our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results and ranks 1st in average performance for five multi-domain datasets. The dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/mswzeus/GVRT."
Bridging the Visual Semantic Gap in VLN via Semantically Richer Instructions
Authors: Joaquín Ossandón, Benjamín Earle, Alvaro Soto
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "The Visual-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task requires understanding a textual instruction to navigate a natural indoor environment using only visual information. While this is a trivial task for most humans, it is still an open problem for AI models. In this work, we hypothesize that poor use of the visual information available is at the core of the low performance of current models. To support this hypothesis, we provide experimental evidence showing that state-of-the-art models are not severely affected when they receive just limited or even no visual data, indicating a strong overfitting to the textual instructions. To encourage a more suitable use of the visual information, we propose a new data augmentation method that fosters the inclusion of more explicit visual information in the generation of textual navigational instructions. Our main intuition is that current VLN datasets include textual instructions that are intended to inform an expert navigator, such as a human, but not a beginner visual navigational agent, such as a randomly initialized DL model. Specifically, to bridge the visual semantic gap of current VLN datasets, we take advantage of metadata available for the Matterport3D dataset that, among others, includes information about object labels that are present in the scenes. Training a state-of-the-art model with the new set of instructions increase its performance by 8% in terms of success rate on unseen environments, demonstrating the advantages of the proposed data augmentation method."
StoryDALL-E: Adapting Pretrained Text-to-Image Transformers for Story Continuation
Authors: Adyasha Maharana, Darryl Hannan, Mohit Bansal
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Recent advances in text-to-image synthesis have led to large pretrained transformers with excellent capabilities to generate visualizations from a given text. However, these models are ill-suited for specialized tasks like story visualization, which requires an agent to produce a sequence of images given a corresponding sequence of captions, forming a narrative. Moreover, we find that the story visualization task fails to accommodate generalization to unseen plots and characters in new narratives. Hence, we first propose the task of story continuation, where the generated visual story is conditioned on a source image, allowing for better generalization to narratives with new characters. Then, we enhance or ‘retro-fit’ the pretrained text-to-image synthesis models with task-specific modules for (a) sequential image generation and (b) copying relevant elements from an initial frame. We explore full-model finetuning, as well as prompt-based tuning for parameter-efficient adaptation, of the pretrained model. We evaluate our approach StoryDALL-E on two existing datasets, PororoSV and FlintstonesSV, and introduce a new dataset DiDeMoSV collected from a video-captioning dataset. We also develop a model StoryGANc based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for story continuation, and compare with the StoryDALL-E model to demonstrate the advantages of our approach. We show that our retro-fitting approach outperforms GAN-based models for story continuation. We also demonstrate that the ‘retro-fitting’ approach facilitates copying of visual elements from the source image and improved continuity in visual frames. Finally, our analysis suggests that pretrained transformers struggle with comprehending narratives containing multiple characters, and translating them into appropriate imagery. Our work encourages future research into story continuation and large-scale models for the task."
VQGAN-CLIP: Open Domain Image Generation and Editing with Natural Language Guidance
Authors: Katherine Crowson, Stella Biderman, Daniel Kornis, Dashiell Stander, Eric Hallahan, Louis Castricato, Edward Raff
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Image generation and manipulation requires technical expertise to use, inhibiting adoption. Current methods rely heavily on training to a specific domain (e.g., only faces), manual work or algorithm tuning to latent vector discovery, and manual effort in mask selection to alter only a part of an image. We address all of these usability constraints while producing images of high visual and semantic quality through a unique combination of OpenAI’s CLIP (Radford et al., 2021), VQGAN (Esser et al., 2021), and a generation augmentation strategy to produce VQGAN-CLIP. This allows generation and manipulation of images using natural language text, without further training on any domain datasets. We demonstrate on a variety of tasks how VQGAN-CLIP produces higher visual quality outputs than prior, less flexible approaches like minDALL-E (Kakaobrain, 2021) and Open-Edit (Liu, 2020), despite not being trained for the tasks presented."
Semantic-Aware Implicit Neural Audio-Driven Video Portrait Generation
Authors: Xian Liu, Yinghao Xu, Qianyi Wu, Hang Zhou, Wayne Wu, Bolei Zhou
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Animating high-fidelity video portrait with speech audio is crucial for virtual reality and digital entertainment. While most previous studies rely on accurate explicit structural information, recent works explore the implicit scene representation of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) for realistic generation. In order to capture the inconsistent motions as well as the semantic difference between human head and torso, some work models them via two individual sets of NeRF, leading to unnatural results. In this work, we propose Semantic-aware Speaking Portrait NeRF (SSP-NeRF), which creates delicate audio-driven portraits using one unified set of NeRF. The proposed model can handle the detailed local facial semantics and the global head-torso relationship through two semantic-aware modules. Specifically, we first propose a Semantic-Aware Dynamic Ray Sampling module with an additional parsing branch that facilitates audio-driven volume rendering. Moreover, to enable portrait rendering in one unified neural radiance field, a Torso Deformation module is designed to stabilize the large-scale non-rigid torso motions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our proposed approach renders realistic video portraits. Demo video and more resources can be found in https://alvinliu0.github.io/projects/SSP-NeRF"
End-to-End Active Speaker Detection
Authors: Juan León Alcázar, Moritz Cordes, Chen Zhao, Bernard Ghanem
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Abstract. Recent advances in the Active Speaker Detection (ASD) problem build upon a two stage process: feature extraction and spatio-temporal context aggregation. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end ASD workflow where feature learning and contextual predictions are jointly learned. Our end-to-end trainable network simultaneously learns multi-modal embeddings and aggregates spatio-temporal context. This results in more suitable feature representations and improved performance in the ASD task. We also introduce interleaved graph neural network (iGNN) blocks, which split the message passing according to the main sources of context in the ASD problem. Experiments show that the aggregated features from the iGNN blocks are more suitable for ASD, resulting in state-of-the art performance. Finally, we design a weakly-supervised strategy, which demonstrates that the ASD problem can also be approached by utilizing audiovisual data but relying exclusively on audio annotations. We achieve this by modelling the direct relationship between the audio signal and the possible sound sources (speakers), as well as introducing a contrastive loss."
Emotion Recognition for Multiple Context Awareness
Authors: Dingkang Yang, Shuai Huang, Shunli Wang, Yang Liu, Peng Zhai, Liuzhen Su, Mingcheng Li, Lihua Zhang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Understanding emotion in context is a rising hotspot in the computer vision community. Existing methods lack reliable context semantics to mitigate uncertainty in expressing emotions and fail to model multiple context representations complementarily. To alleviate these issues, we present a context-aware emotion recognition framework that combines four complementary contexts. The first context is multimodal emotion recognition based on facial expression, facial landmarks, gesture and gait. Secondly, we adopt the channel and spatial attention modules to obtain the emotion semantics of the scene context. Inspired by sociology theory, we explore the emotion transmission between agents by constructing relationship graphs in the third context. Meanwhile, we propose a novel agent-object context, which aggregates emotion cues from the interactions between surrounding agents and objects in the scene to mitigate the ambiguity of prediction. Finally, we introduce an adaptive relevance fusion module for learning the shared representations among multiple contexts. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both EMOTIC and GroupWalk datasets. We also release a dataset annotated with diverse emotion labels, Human Emotion in Context (HECO). In practice, we compare with the existing methods on the HECO, and our approach obtains a higher classification average precision of 50.65% and a lower regression mean error rate of 0.7. The project is available at https://heco2022.github.io/."
Adaptive Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval
Authors: Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Aneeshan Sain, Parth Hiren Shah, Animesh Gupta, Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Tao Xiang, Yi-Zhe Song
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "The recent focus on Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) has shifted towards generalising a model to new categories without any training data from them. In real-world applications, however, a trained FG-SBIR model is often applied to both new categories and different human sketchers, i.e., different drawing styles. Although this complicates the generalisation problem, fortunately, a handful of examples are typically available, enabling the model to adapt to the new category/style. In this paper, we offer a novel perspective -- instead of asking for a model that generalises, we advocate for one that quickly adapts, with just very few samples during testing (in a few-shot manner). To solve this new problem, we introduce a novel model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) based framework with several key modifications: (1) As a retrieval task with a margin-based contrastive loss, we simplify the MAML training in the inner loop to make it more stable and tractable. (2) The margin in our contrastive loss is also meta-learned with the rest of the model. (3) Three additional regularisation losses are introduced in the outer loop, to make the meta-learned FG-SBIR model more effective for category/style adaptation. Extensive experiments on public datasets suggest a large gain over generalisation and zero-shot based approaches, and a few strong few-shot baselines."
Quantized GAN for Complex Music Generation from Dance Videos
Authors: Ye Zhu, Kyle Olszewski, Yu Wu, Panos Achlioptas, Menglei Chai, Yan Yan, Sergey Tulyakov
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We present Dance2Music-GAN (D2M-GAN), a novel adversarial multi-modal framework that generates complex musical samples conditioned on dance videos. Our proposed framework takes dance video frames and human body motions as input, and learns to generate music samples that plausibly accompany the corresponding input. Unlike most existing conditional music generation works that generate specific types of mono-instrumental sounds using symbolic audio representations (e.g., MIDI), and that usually rely on pre-defined musical synthesizers, in this work we generate dance music in complex styles (e.g., pop, breaking, etc.) by employing a Vector Quantized (VQ) audio representation, and leverage both its generality and high abstraction capacity of its symbolic and continuous counterparts. By performing an extensive set of experiments on multiple datasets, and following a comprehensive evaluation protocol, we assess the generative qualities of our proposal against alternatives. The attained quantitative results, which measure the music consistency, beats correspondence, and music diversity, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Last but not least, we curate a challenging dance-music dataset of in-the-wild TikTok videos, which we use to further demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in real-world applications -- and which we hope to serve as a starting point for relevant future research."
Uncertainty-Aware Multi-modal Learning via Cross-Modal Random Network Prediction
Authors: Hu Wang, Jianpeng Zhang, Yuanhong Chen, Congbo Ma, Jodie Avery, Louise Hull, Gustavo Carneiro
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Multi-modal learning focuses on training models by equally combining multiple input data modalities during the prediction process. However, this equal combination can be detrimental to the prediction accuracy because different modalities are usually accompanied by varying levels of uncertainty. Using such uncertainty to combine modalities has been studied by a couple of approaches, but with limited success because these approaches are either designed to deal with specific classification or segmentation problems and cannot be easily translated into other tasks, or suffer from numerical instabilities. In this paper, we propose a new Uncertainty-aware Multi-modal Learner that estimates uncertainty by measuring feature density via Cross-modal Random Network Prediction (CRNP). CRNP is designed to require little adaptation to translate between different prediction tasks, while having a stable training process. From a technical point of view, CRNP is the first approach to explore random network prediction to estimate uncertainty and to combine multi-modal data. Experiments on two 3D multi-modal medical image segmentation tasks and three 2D multi-modal computer vision classification tasks show the effectiveness, adaptability and robustness of CRNP. Also, we provide an extensive discussion on different fusion functions and visualization to validate the proposed model."
Localizing Visual Sounds the Easy Way
Authors: Shentong Mo, Pedro Morgado
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Unsupervised audio-visual source localization aims at localizing visible sound sources in a video without relying on ground-truth localization for training. Previous works often seek high audio-visual similarities for likely positive (sounding) regions and low similarities for likely negative regions. However, accurately distinguishing between sounding and non-sounding regions is challenging without manual annotations. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach for Easy Visual Sound Localization, namely EZ-VSL, without relying on the construction of positive and/or negative regions during training. Instead, we align audio and visual spaces by seeking audio-visual representations that are aligned in, at least, one location of the associated image, while not matching other images, at any location. We also introduce a novel object-guided localization scheme at inference time for improved precision. Our simple and effective framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks, Flickr SoundNet and VGG-Sound Source. In particular, we improve the CIoU of the Flickr SoundNet test set from 76.80% to 83.94%, and on the VGG-Sound Source dataset from 34.60% to 38.85%."
Learning Visual Styles from Audio-Visual Associations
Authors: Tingle Li, Yichen Liu, Andrew Owens, Hang Zhao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "From the patter of rain to the crunch of snow, the sounds we hear often convey the visual textures that appear within a scene. In this paper, we present a method for learning visual styles from unlabeled audio-visual data. Our model learns to manipulate the texture of a scene to match a sound, a problem we term audio-driven image stylization. Given a dataset of paired audio-visual data, we learn to modify input images such that, after manipulation, they are more likely to co-occur with a given input sound. In quantitative and qualitative evaluations, our sound-based model outperforms label-based approaches. We also show that audio can be an intuitive representation for manipulating images, as adjusting a sound’s volume or mixing two sounds together results in predictable changes to visual style."
Remote Respiration Monitoring of Moving Person Using Radio Signals
Authors: Jae-Ho Choi, Ki-Bong Kang, Kyung-Tae Kim
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Non-contact respiration rate measurement (nRRM), which aims to monitor one’s breathing status without any contact with the skin, can be utilized in various remote applications (e.g., telehealth or emergency detection). The existing nRRM approaches mainly analyze fine details from videos to extract minute respiration signals; however, they have practical limitations in that the head or body of a subject must be quasi-stationary. In this study, we examine the task of estimating the respiration signal of a non-stationary subject (a person with large body movements or even walking around) based on radio signals. The key idea is that the received radio signals retain both the reflections from human global motion (GM) and respiration in a mixed form, while preserving the GM-only components at the same time. During training, our model leverages a novel multi-task adversarial learning (MTAL) framework to capture the mapping from radio signals to respiration while excluding the GM components in a self-supervised manner. We test the proposed model based on the newly collected and released datasets under real-world conditions. This study is the first realization of the nRRM task for moving/occluded scenarios, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines even when the person sits still."
Camera Pose Estimation and Localization with Active Audio Sensing
Authors: Karren Yang, Michael Firman, Eric Brachmann, Clément Godard
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "In this work, we show how to estimate a device’s position and orientation indoors by echolocation, i.e., by interpreting the echoes of an audio signal that the device itself emits. Established visual localization methods rely on the device’s camera and yield excellent accuracy if unique visual features are in view and depicted clearly. We argue that audio sensing can offer complementary information to vision for device localization, since audio is invariant to adverse visual conditions and can reveal scene information beyond a camera’s field of view. We first propose a strategy for learning an audio representation that captures the scene geometry around a device using supervision transfer from vision. Subsequently, we leverage this audio representation to complement vision in three device localization tasks: relative pose estimation, place recognition, and absolute pose regression. Our proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art vision models on new audio-visual benchmarks for the Replica and Matterport3D datasets."
PACS: A Dataset for Physical Audiovisual Commonsense Reasoning
Authors: Samuel Yu, Peter Wu, Paul Pu Liang, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Louis-Philippe Morency
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "In order for AI to be safely deployed in real-world scenarios such as hospitals, schools, and the workplace, it must be able to robustly reason about the physical world. Fundamental to this reasoning is physical common sense: understanding the physical properties and affordances of available objects, how they can be manipulated, and how they interact with other objects. Physical commonsense reasoning is fundamentally a multi-sensory task, since physical properties are manifested through multiple modalities - two of them being vision and acoustics. Our paper takes a step towards real-world physical commonsense reasoning by contributing PACS: the first audiovisual benchmark annotated for physical commonsense attributes. PACS contains 13,400 question-answer pairs, involving 1,377 unique physical commonsense questions and 1,526 videos. Our dataset provides new opportunities to advance the research field of physical reasoning by bringing audio as a core component of this multimodal problem. Using PACS, we evaluate multiple state-of-the-art models on our new challenging task. While some models show promising results (70% accuracy), they all fall short of human performance (95% accuracy). We conclude the paper by demonstrating the importance of multimodal reasoning and providing possible avenues for future research."
VoViT: Low Latency Graph-Based Audio-Visual Voice Separation Transformer
Authors: Juan F. Montesinos, Venkatesh S. Kadandale, Gloria Haro
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This paper presents an audio-visual approach for voice separation which produces state-of-the-art results at a low latency in two scenarios: speech and singing voice. The model is based on a two-stage network. Motion cues are obtained with a lightweight graph convolutional network that processes face landmarks. Then, both audio and motion features are fed to an audio-visual transformer which produces a fairly good estimation of the isolated target source. In a second stage, the predominant voice is enhanced with an audio-only network. We present different ablation studies and comparison to state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we explore the transferability of models trained for speech separation in the task of singing voice separation. The demos, code, and weights are available in https://ipcv.github.io/VoViT/"
Telepresence Video Quality Assessment
Authors: Zhenqiang Ying, Deepti Ghadiyaram, Alan Bovik
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Efficient and accurate video quality tools are needed to monitor and perceptually optimize telepresence traffic streamed via Zoom, Webex, Meet, etc. However, existing models are limited in their prediction capabilities on multi-modal, live streaming telepresence content. Here we address the significant challenges of Telepresence Video Quality Assessment (TVQA) in several ways. First, we mitigated the dearth of subjectively labeled data by collecting ~2k telepresence videos from different countries, on which we crowdsourced ~80k subjective quality labels. Using this new resource, we created a first-of-a-kind online video quality prediction framework for live streaming, using a multi-modal learning framework with separate pathways to compute visual and audio quality predictions. Our all-in-one model is able to provide accurate quality predictions at the patch, frame, clip, and audiovisual levels. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both existing quality databases and our new TVQA database, at a considerably lower computational expense, making it an attractive solution for mobile and embedded systems."
MultiMAE: Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoders
Authors: Roman Bachmann, David Mizrahi, Andrei Atanov, Amir Zamir
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: We propose a pre-training strategy called Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoders (MultiMAE). It differs from standard Masked Autoencoding in two key aspects: I) it can ‘optionally’ accept additional modalities of information in the input besides the RGB image (hence “multi-modal""), and II) its training objective accordingly includes predicting multiple outputs besides the RGB image (hence “multi-task""). We make use of masking (across image patches and input modalities) to make training MultiMAE tractable as well as to ensure cross-modality predictive coding is indeed learned by the network. We show this pre-training strategy leads to a flexible, simple, and efficient framework with improved transfer results to downstream tasks. In particular, the same exact pre-trained network can be flexibly used when additional information besides RGB images is available or when no information other than RGB is available - in all configurations yielding competitive to or significantly better results than the baselines. To avoid needing training datasets with multiple modalities and tasks, we train MultiMAE ‘entirely using pseudo-labeling’, which makes the framework widely applicable to any RGB dataset. The experiments are performed on multiple transfer tasks (image classification, semantic segmentation, depth estimation) on different datasets (ImageNet, ADE20K, Taskonomy, Hypersim, NYUv2), and the results show an intriguingly impressive capability by the network in cross-modal/task predictive coding and transfer. Code, pre-trained models, and interactive visualizations are available at https://multimae.epfl.ch.
AudioScopeV2: Audio-Visual Attention Architectures for Calibrated Open-Domain On-Screen Sound Separation
Authors: Efthymios Tzinis, Scott Wisdom, Tal Remez, John R. Hershey
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We introduce AudioScopeV2, a state-of-the-art universal audio-visual on-screen sound separation system which is capable of learning to separate sounds and associate them with on-screen objects by looking at in-the-wild videos. We identify several limitations of previous work on audio-visual on-screen sound separation, including the coarse resolution of spatio-temporal attention, poor convergence of the audio separation model, limited variety in training and evaluation data, and failure to account for the trade off between preservation of on-screen sounds and suppression of off-screen sounds. We provide solutions to all of these issues. Our proposed cross-modal and self-attention network architectures capture audio-visual dependencies at a finer resolution over time, and we also propose efficient separable variants that are capable of scaling to longer videos without sacrificing much performance. We also find that pre-training the separation model only on audio greatly improves results. For training and evaluation, we collected new human annotations of onscreen sounds from a large database of in-the-wild videos (YFCC100M). This new dataset is more diverse and challenging. Finally, we propose a calibration procedure that allows exact tuning of on-screen reconstruction versus off-screen suppression, which greatly simplifies comparing performance between models with different operating points. Overall, our experimental results show marked improvements in on-screen separation performance under much more general conditions than previous methods with minimal additional computational complexity."
Audio—Visual Segmentation
Authors: Jinxing Zhou, Jianyuan Wang, Jiayi Zhang, Weixuan Sun, Jing Zhang, Stan Birchfield, Dan Guo, Lingpeng Kong, Meng Wang, Yiran Zhong
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We propose to explore a new problem called audio-visual segmentation (AVS), in which the goal is to output a pixel-level map of the object(s) that produce sound at the time of the image frame. To facilitate this research, we construct the first audio-visual segmentation benchmark (AVSBench), providing pixel-wise annotations for the sounding objects in audible videos. Two settings are studied with this benchmark: 1) semi-supervised audio-visual segmentation with a single sound source and 2) fully-supervised audio-visual segmentation with multiple sound sources. To deal with the AVS problem, we propose a new method that uses a temporal pixel-wise audio-visual interaction module to inject audio semantics as guidance for the visual segmentation process. We also design a regularization loss to encourage the audio-visual mapping during training. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on the AVSBench compare our approach to several existing methods from related tasks, demonstrating that the proposed method is promising for building a bridge between the audio and pixel-wise visual semantics. Code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/AVSBench."
Unsupervised Night Image Enhancement: When Layer Decomposition Meets Light-Effects Suppression
Authors: Yeying Jin, Wenhan Yang, Robby T. Tan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Night images suffer not only from low light, but also from uneven distributions of light. Most existing night visibility enhancement methods focus mainly on enhancing low-light regions. This inevitably leads to over enhancement and saturation in bright regions, such as those regions affected by light effects (glare, floodlight, etc). To address this problem, we need to suppress the light effects in bright regions while, at the same time, boosting the intensity of dark regions. With this idea in mind, we introduce an unsupervised method that integrates a layer decomposition network and a light-effects suppression network. Given a single night image as input, our decomposition network learns to decompose shading, reflectance and light-effects layers, guided by unsupervised layer-specific prior losses. Our light-effects suppression network further suppresses the light effects and, at the same time, enhances the illumination in dark regions. This light-effects suppression network exploits the estimated light-effects layer as the guidance to focus on the light-effects regions. To recover the background details and reduce hallucination/artefacts, we propose structure and high-frequency consistency losses. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations on real images show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in suppressing night light effects and boosting the intensity of dark regions. Our data and code is available at: https://github.com/jinyeying/night-enhancement>"
Relationformer: A Unified Framework for Image-to-Graph Generation
Authors: Suprosanna Shit, Rajat Koner, Bastian Wittmann, Johannes Paetzold, Ivan Ezhov, Hongwei Li, Jiazhen Pan, Sahand Sharifzadeh, Georgios Kaissis, Volker Tresp, Bjoern Menze
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "A comprehensive representation of an image requires understanding objects and their mutual relationship, especially in image-to-graph generation, e.g., road network extraction, blood-vessel network extraction, or scene graph generation. Traditionally, image-to-graph generation is addressed with a two-stage approach consisting of object detection followed by a separate relation prediction, which prevents simultaneous object-relation interaction. This work proposes a unified one-stage transformer-based framework, namely Relationformer, that jointly predicts objects and their relations. We leverage direct set-based object prediction and incorporate the interaction among the objects to learn an object-relation representation jointly. In addition to existing [obj]-tokens, we propose a novel learnable token, namely [rln]-token. Together with [obj]-tokens, [rln]-token exploits local and global semantic reasoning in an image through a series of mutual associations. In combination with the pair-wise [obj]-token, the [rln]-token contributes to a computationally efficient relation prediction. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple, diverse and multi-domain datasets that demonstrate our approach’s effectiveness and generalizability."
GAMa: Cross-view Video Geo-localization
Authors: Shruti Vyas, Chen Chen, Mubarak Shah
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "The existing work in cross-view geo-localization is based on images where a ground panorama is matched to an aerial image. In this work, we focus on ground videos instead of images which provides additional contextual cues which are important for this task. There are no existing datasets for this problem, therefore we propose GAMa dataset, a large-scale dataset with ground videos and corresponding aerial images. We also propose a novel approach to solve this problem. At clip-level, a short video clip is matched with corresponding aerial image and is later used to get video-level geo-localization of a long video. Moreover, we propose a hierarchical approach to further improve the clip-level geo-localization. On this challenging dataset, with unaligned images and limited field of view, our proposed method achieves a Top-1 recall rate of 19.4% and 45.1% @1.0mile. Code & dataset are available at this link."
Revisiting a kNN-based Image Classification System with High-capacity Storage
Authors: Kengo Nakata, Youyang Ng, Daisuke Miyashita, Asuka Maki, Yu-Chieh Lin, Jun Deguchi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "In existing image classification systems that use deep neural networks, the knowledge needed for image classification is implicitly stored in model parameters. If users want to update this knowledge, then they need to fine-tune the model parameters. Moreover, users cannot verify the validity of inference results or evaluate the contribution of knowledge to the results. In this paper, we investigate a system that stores knowledge for image classification, such as image feature maps, labels, and original images, not in model parameters but in external storage. Our system refers to the storage like a database when classifying input images. To increase knowledge, our system updates the database instead of fine-tuning model parameters, which avoids catastrophic forgetting in incremental learning scenarios. We revisit a kNN (k-nearest neighbor) classifier and employ it in our system. By analyzing the neighborhood samples referred by the kNN algorithm, we can interpret how knowledge learned in the past is used for inference results. Our system achieves 79.8% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet dataset without fine-tuning model parameters after pretraining, and 90.8% accuracy on the Split CIFAR-100 dataset in the task incremental learning setting."
Geometric Representation Learning for Document Image Rectification
Authors: Hao Feng, Wengang Zhou, Jiajun Deng, Yuechen Wang, Houqiang Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "In document image rectification, there exist rich geometric constraints between the distorted image and the ground truth one. How- ever, such geometric constraints are largely ignored in existing advanced solutions, which limits the rectification performance. To this end, we present DocGeoNet for document image rectification by introducing explicit geometric representation. Technically, two typical attributes of the document image are involved in the proposed geometric representation learning, i.e., 3D shape and textlines. Our motivation raises from the insight that 3D shape provides global unwarping cues for rectifying a distorted document image, while overlooking the local structure. On the other hand, textlines complementarily provide explicit geometric constraints for local patterns. The learned geometric representation effectively bridges the distorted image and the ground truth one. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our framework and demonstrate the superiority of our DocGeoNet over state-of-the-art methods on both the DocUNet Benchmark dataset and our proposed DIR300 test set."
S2-VER: Semi-Supervised Visual Emotion Recognition
Authors: Guoli Jia, Jufeng Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Visual emotion recognition (VER), which plays an important role in various applications, has attracted increasing attention of researchers. Due to the ambiguous characteristic of emotion, it is hard to annotate a reliable large-scale dataset in this field. An alternative solution is semi-supervised learning (SSL), which progressively selects high-confidence samples from unlabeled data to help optimize the model. However, it is challenging to directly employ existing SSL algorithms in VER task. On the one hand, compared with object recognition, in VER task, the accuracy of the produced pseudo labels for unlabeled data drops a large margin. On the other hand, the maximum probability in the prediction is difficult to reach the fixed threshold, which leads to few unlabeled samples can be leveraged. Both of them would induce the suboptimal performance of the learned model. To address these issues, we propose S2-VER, the first SSL algorithm for VER, which consists of two com- ponents. The first component, reliable emotion label learning, aims to improve the accuracy of pseudo-labels. In detail, it generates smoothing labels by computing the similarity between the maintained emotion prototypes and the embedding of the sample. The second one is ambiguity-aware adaptive threshold strategy, which is dedicated to leveraging more unlabeled samples. Specifically, our strategy uses information entropy to measure the ambiguity of the smoothing labels, then adaptively adjusts the threshold, which is adopted to select high-confidence unlabeled samples. Extensive experiments conducted on six public datasets show that our proposed S2-VER performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/exped1230/S2-VER."
Image Coding for Machines with Omnipotent Feature Learning
Authors: Ruoyu Feng, Xin Jin, Zongyu Guo, Runsen Feng, Yixin Gao, Tianyu He, Zhizheng Zhang, Simeng Sun, Zhibo Chen
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Image Coding for Machines (ICM) aims to compress images for AI tasks analysis rather than meeting human perception. Learning a kind of feature that is both general (for AI tasks) and compact (for compression) is pivotal for its success. In this paper, we attempt to develop an ICM framework by learning universal features while also considering compression. We name such features as omnipotent features and the corresponding framework as Omni-ICM. Considering self-supervised learning (SSL) improves feature generalization, we integrate it with the compression task into the Omni-ICM framework to learn omnipotent features. However, it is non-trivial to coordinate semantics modeling in SSL and redundancy removing in compression, so we design a novel information filtering (IF) module between them by co-optimization of instance distinguishment and entropy minimization to adaptively drop information that is weakly related to AI tasks (e.g., some texture redundancy). Different from previous task-specific solutions, Omni-ICM could directly support AI tasks analysis based on the learned omnipotent features without joint training or extra transformation. Albeit simple and intuitive, Omni-ICM significantly outperforms existing traditional and learning-based codecs on multiple fundamental vision tasks."
Feature Representation Learning for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval
Authors: Conghui Hu, Gim Hee Lee
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Current supervised cross-domain image retrieval methods can achieve excellent performance. However, the cost of data collection and labeling imposes an intractable barrier to practical deployment in real applications. In this paper, we investigate the unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval task, where class labels and pairing annotations are no longer a prerequisite for training. This is an extremely challenging task because there is no supervision for both in-domain feature representation learning and cross-domain alignment. We address both challenges by introducing: 1) a new cluster-wise contrastive learning mechanism to help extract class semantic-aware features, and 2) a novel distance-of-distance loss to effectively measure and minimize the domain discrepancy without any external supervision. Experiments on the Office-Home and DomainNet datasets consistently show the superior image retrieval accuracies of our framework over state-of-the-art approaches. Our source code can be found at https://github.com/conghuihu/UCDIR."