mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Associative Alignment for Few-shot Image Classification
Authors: Arman Afrasiyabi, Jean-François Lalonde, Christian Gagné
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Few-shot image classification aims at training a model from only a few examples for each of the ``novel'' classes. This paper proposes the idea of associative alignment for leveraging part of the base data by aligning the novel training instances to the closely related ones in the base training set. This expands the size of the effective novel training set by adding extra ``related base'' instances to the few novel ones, thereby allowing a constructive fine-tuning. We propose two associative alignment strategies: 1) a metric-learning loss for minimizing the distance between related base samples and the centroid of novel instances in the feature space, and 2) a conditional adversarial alignment loss based on the Wasserstein distance. Experiments on four standard datasets and three backbones demonstrate that combining our centroid-based alignment loss results in absolute accuracy improvements of 4.4%, 1.2%, and 6.2% in 5-shot learning over the state of the art for object recognition, fine-grained classification, and cross-domain adaptation, respectively. "
Cyclic Functional Mapping: Self-supervised Correspondence between Non-isometric Deformable Shapes
Authors: Dvir Ginzburg, Dan Raviv
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We present the first utterly self-supervised network for dense correspondence mapping between non-isometric shapes. The task of alignment in non-Euclidean domains is one of the most fundamental and crucial problems in computer vision. As 3D scanners can generate highly complex and dense models, the mission of finding dense mappings between those models is vital. The novelty of our solution is based on a cyclic mapping between metric spaces, where the distance between a pair of points should remain invariant after the full cycle. As the same learnable rules that generate the point-wise descriptors apply in both directions, the network learns invariant structures without any labels while coping with non-isometric deformations. We show here state-of-the-art-results by a large margin for a variety of tasks compared to known self-supervised and supervised methods."
View-Invariant Probabilistic Embedding for Human Pose
Authors: Jennifer J. Sun, Jiaping Zhao, Liang-Chieh Chen, Florian Schroff, Hartwig Adam, Ting Liu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Depictions of similar human body configurations can vary with changing viewpoints. Using only 2D information, we would like to enable vision algorithms to recognize similarity in human body poses across multiple views. This ability is useful for analyzing body movements and human behaviors in images and videos. In this paper, we propose an approach for learning a compact view-invariant embedding space from 2D joint keypoints alone, without explicitly predicting 3D poses. Since 2D poses are projected from 3D space, they have an inherent ambiguity, which is difficult to represent through a deterministic mapping. Hence, we use probabilistic embeddings to model this input uncertainty. Experimental results show that our embedding model achieves higher accuracy when retrieving similar poses across different camera views, in comparison with 2D-to-3D pose lifting models. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of applying our embeddings to view-invariant action recognition and video alignment. Our code will be released for research."
Contact and Human Dynamics from Monocular Video
Authors: Davis Rempe, Leonidas J. Guibas, Aaron Hertzmann, Bryan Russell, Ruben Villegas, Jimei Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Existing deep models predict 2D and 3D kinematic poses from video that are approximately accurate, but contain visible errors that violate physical constraints, such as feet penetrating the ground and bodies leaning at extreme angles. In this paper, we present a physics-based method for inferring 3D human motion from video sequences that takes initial 2D and 3D pose estimates as input. We first estimate ground contact timings with a novel prediction network which is trained without hand-labeled data. A physics-based trajectory optimization then solves for a physically-plausible motion, based on the inputs. We show this process produces motions that are significantly more realistic than those from purely kinematic methods, substantially improving quantitative measures of both kinematic and dynamic plausibility. We demonstrate our method on character animation and pose estimation tasks on dynamic motions of dancing and sports with complex contact patterns."
PointPWC-Net: Cost Volume on Point Clouds for (Self-)Supervised Scene Flow Estimation
Authors: Wenxuan Wu, Zhi Yuan Wang, Zhuwen Li, Wei Liu, Li Fuxin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose a novel end-to-end deep scene flow model, called PointPWC-Net, that directly processes 3D point cloud scenes with large motions in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Flow computed at the coarse level is upsampled and warped to a finer level, enabling the algorithm to accommodate for large motion without a prohibitive search space. We introduce novel cost volume, upsampling, and warping layers to efficiently handle 3D point cloud data. Unlike traditional cost volumes that require exhaustively computing all the cost values on a high-dimensional grid, our point-based formulation discretizes the cost volume onto input 3D points, and a PointConv operation efficiently computes convolutions on the cost volume. Experiment results on FlyingThings3D and KITTI outperform the state-of-the-art by a large margin. We further explore novel self-supervised losses to train our model and achieve comparable results to state-of-the-art trained with supervised loss. Without any fine-tuning, our method also shows great generalization ability on the KITTI Scene Flow 2015 dataset, outperforming all previous methods."
Points2Surf Learning Implicit Surfaces from Point Clouds
Authors: Philipp Erler, Paul Guerrero, Stefan Ohrhallinger, Niloy J. Mitra, Michael Wimmer
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: A key step in any scanning-based asset creation workflow is to convert unordered point clouds to a surface. Classical methods (e.g. Poisson reconstruction) start to degrade in the presence of noisy and partial scans. Hence, deep learning based methods have recently been proposed to produce complete surfaces, even from partial scans. However, such data-driven methods struggle to generalize to new shapes with large geometric and topological variations. We present Points2Surf, a novel patch-based learning framework that produces accurate surfaces directly from raw scans without normals. Learning a prior over a combination of detailed local patches and coarse global information improves generalization performance and reconstruction accuracy. Our extensive comparison on both synthetic and real data demonstrates a clear advantage of our method over state-of-the-art alternatives on previously unseen classes (on average, Points2Surf brings down reconstruction error by 30% over SPR and by 270%+ over deep learning based SotA methods) at the cost of longer computation times and a slight increase in small-scale topological noise in some cases. Our source code, pre-trained model, and dataset are available at: https://github.com/ErlerPhilipp/points2surf"
Few-Shot Scene-Adaptive Anomaly Detection
Authors: Yiwei Lu, Frank Yu, Mahesh Kumar Krishna Reddy, Yang Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We address the problem of anomaly detection in videos. The goal is to identify unusual behaviours automatically by learning exclusively from normal videos. Most existing approaches are usually data-hungry and have limited generalization abilities. They usually need to be trained on a large number of videos from a target scene to achieve good results in that scene. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot scene-adaptive anomaly detection problem to address the limitations of previous approaches. Our goal is to learn to detect anomalies in a previously unseen scene with only a few frames. A reliable solution for this new problem will have huge potential in real-world applications since it is expensive to collect a massive amount of data for each target scene. We propose a meta-learning based approach for solving this new problem; extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. "
Personalized Face Modeling for Improved Face Reconstruction and Motion Retargeting
Authors: Bindita Chaudhuri, Noranart Vesdapunt, Linda Shapiro, Baoyuan Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Traditional methods for image-based 3D face reconstruction and facial motion retargeting fit a 3D morphable model (3DMM) to the face, which has limited modeling capacity and fail to generalize well to in-the-wild data. Use of deformation transfer or multilinear tensor as a personalized 3DMM for blendshape interpolation does not address the fact that facial expressions result in different local and global skin deformations in different persons. Moreover, existing methods learn a single albedo per user which is not enough to capture the expression-specific skin reflectance variations. We propose an end-to-end framework that jointly learns a personalized face model per user and per-frame facial motion parameters from a large corpus of in-the-wild videos of user expressions. Specifically, we learn user-specific expression blendshapes and dynamic (expression-specific) albedo maps by predicting personalized corrections on top of a 3DMM prior. We introduce novel training constraints to ensure that the corrected blendshapes retain their semantic meanings and the reconstructed geometry is disentangled from the albedo. Experimental results show that our personalization accurately captures fine-grained facial dynamics in a wide range of conditions and efficiently decouples the learned face model from facial motion, resulting in more accurate face reconstruction and facial motion retargeting compared to state-of-the-art methods."
Entropy Minimisation Framework for Event-based Vision Model Estimation
Authors: Urbano Miguel Nunes, Yiannis Demiris
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We propose a novel EMin framework for event-based vision model estimation. The framework extends previous event-based motion compensation algorithms to handle models whose outputs have arbitrary dimensions. The main motivation comes from estimating motion from events directly in 3D space (e. g. events augmented with depth), without projecting them onto an image plane. This is achieved by modelling the event alignment according to candidate parameters and minimising the resultant dispersion. We provide a family of suitable entropy loss functions and an efficient approximation whose complexity is only linear with the number of events (e. g. the complexity does not depend on the number of image pixels). The framework is evaluated on several motion estimation problems, including optical flow and rotational motion. As proof of concept, we also test our framework on 6-DOF estimation by performing the optimisation directly in 3D space."
Reconstructing NBA Players
Authors: Luyang Zhu, Konstantinos Rematas, Brian Curless, Steven M. Seitz, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Great progress has been made in 3D body pose and shape estimation from single photos. Yet, state-of-the-art results still suffer from errors due to challenging body poses, modeling clothing, and self occlusions. The domain of basketball games is particularly challenging, due to all of these factors. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for reconstruction of basketball players, that outperforms the state-of-the-art. Key to our approach is new approach for creating poseable, skinned models of NBA players, and a large database of meshes (derived from the NBA2K19 video game), that we are releasing to the research community. Based on these models, we introduce a new method that takes as input a single photo of a clothed player performing any basketball pose and outputs a high resolution mesh and pose of that player. We compare to state of the art methods for shape generation and show significant improvement in the results. "
PIoU Loss: Towards Accurate Oriented Object Detection in Complex Environments
Authors: Zhiming Chen, Kean Chen, Weiyao Lin, John See, Hui Yu, Yan Ke, Cong Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Object detection using an oriented bounding box (OBB) can better target rotated objects by reducing the overlap with background areas. Existing OBB approaches are mostly built on horizontal bounding box detectors by introducing an additional angle dimension optimized by a distance loss. However, as the distance loss only minimizes the angle error of the OBB and that it loosely correlates to the IoU, it is insensitive to objects with high aspect ratios. Therefore, a novel loss, Pixels-IoU (PIoU) Loss, is formulated to exploit both the angle and IoU for accurate OBB regression. The PIoU loss is derived from IoU metric with a pixel-wise form, which is simple and suitable for both horizontal and oriented bounding box. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we evaluate the PIoU loss on both anchor-based and anchor-free frameworks. The experimental results show that PIoU loss can dramatically improve the performance of OBB detectors, particularly on objects with high aspect ratios and complex backgrounds. Besides, previous evaluation datasets did not include scenarios where the objects have high aspect ratios, hence a new dataset, Retail50K, is introduced to encourage the community to adapt OBB detectors for more complex environments."
TENet: Triple Excitation Network for Video Salient Object Detection
Authors: Sucheng Ren, Chu Han, Xin Yang, Guoqiang Han, Shengfeng He
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach, named Triple Excitation Network, to reinforce the training of video salient object detection (VSOD) from three aspects, spatial, temporal, and online excitations. These excitation mechanisms are designed following the spirit of curriculum learning and aim to reduce learning ambiguities at the beginning of training by selectively exciting feature activations using ground truth. Then we gradually reduce the weight of ground truth excitations by a curriculum rate and replace it by a curriculum complementary map for better and faster convergence. In particular, the spatial excitation strengthens feature activations for clear object boundaries, while the temporal excitation imposes motions to emphasize spatio-temporal salient regions. Spatial and temporal excitations can combat the saliency shifting problem and conflict between spatial and temporal features of VSOD. Furthermore, our semi-curriculum learning design enables the first online refinement strategy for VSOD, which allows exciting and boosting saliency responses during testing without re-training. The proposed triple excitations can easily plug in different VSOD methods. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of all three excitation methods and the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art image and video salient object detection methods."
Deep Feedback Inverse Problem Solver
Authors: Wei-Chiu Ma, Shenlong Wang, Jiayuan Gu, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Antonio Torralba, Raquel Urtasun
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We present an efficient, effective, and generic approach towards solving inverse problems. The key idea is to leverage the feedback signal provided by the forward process and learn an iterative update model. Specifically, in each iteration, the neural network takes the feedback as input and outputs an update on current estimation. Our approach does not have any restrictions on the forward process; it does not require any prior knowledge either. Through the feedback information, our model not only can produce accurate estimations that are coherent to the input observation but also is capable of recovering from early incorrect predictions. We verify the performance of our model over a wide range of inverse problems, including 6-DOF pose estimation, illumination estimation, as well as inverse kinematics. Comparing to traditional optimization-based methods, we can achieve comparable or better performance while being two to three orders of magnitude faster. Compared to deep learning-based approaches, our model consistently improves the performance on all metrics."
Learning From Multiple Experts: Self-paced Knowledge Distillation for Long-tailed Classification
Authors: Liuyu Xiang, Guiguang Ding, Jungong Han
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In real-world scenarios, data tends to exhibit a long-tailed distribution, which increases the difficulty of training deep networks. In this paper, we propose a novel self-paced knowledge distillation framework, termed Learning From Multiple Experts (LFME). Our method is inspired by the observation that networks trained on less imbalanced subsets of the distribution often yield better performances than their jointly-trained counterparts. We refer to these models as `Experts’, and the proposed LFME framework aggregates the knowledge from multiple `Experts' to learn a unified student model. Specifically, the proposed framework involves two levels of adaptive learning schedules: Self-paced Expert Selection and Curriculum Instance Selection, so that the knowledge is adaptively transferred to the `Student'. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that our method is able to achieve superior performances compared to state-of-the-art methods. We also show that our method can be easily plugged into state-of-the-art long-tailed classification algorithms for further improvements."
Hallucinating Visual Instances in Total Absentia
Authors: Jiayan Qiu, Yiding Yang, Xinchao Wang, Dacheng Tao
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate a new visual restoration task, termed as hallucinating visual instances in total absentia (HVITA). Unlike conventional image inpainting task that works on images with only part of a visual instance missing, HVITA concerns scenarios where an object is completely absent from the scene. This seemingly minor difference in fact makes the HVITA a much challenging task, as the restoration algorithm would have to not only infer the category of the object in total absentia, but also hallucinate an object of which the appearance is consistent with the background. Towards solving HVITA, we propose an end-to-end deep approach that explicitly looks into the global semantics within the image. Specifically, we transform the input image to a semantic graph, wherein each node corresponds to a detected object in the scene. We then adopt a Graph Convolutional Network on top of the scene graph to estimate the category of the missing object in the masked region, and finally introduce a Generative Adversarial Module to carry out the hallucination. Experiments on COCO, Visual Genome and NYU Depth v2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach yields truly encouraging and visually plausible results."
Weakly-supervised 3D Shape Completion in the Wild
Authors: Jiayuan Gu, Wei-Chiu Ma, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Wenyuan Zeng, Zihao Wang, Yuwen Xiong, Hao Su, Raquel Urtasun
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: 3D shape completion for real data is important but challenging, since partial point clouds acquired by real-world sensors are usually sparse, noisy and unaligned. Different from previous methods, we address the problem of learning 3D complete shape from unaligned and real-world partial point clouds. To this end, we propose an unsupervised method to estimate both 3D canonical shape and 6-DoF pose for alignment, given multiple partial observations associated with the same instance. The network jointly optimizes canonical shapes and poses with multi-view geometry constraints during training, and can infer the complete shape given a single partial point cloud. Moreover, learned pose estimation can facilitate partial point cloud registration. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show that it is feasible and promising to learn 3D shape completion through large-scale data without shape and pose supervision."
DTVNet: Dynamic Time-lapse Video Generation via Single Still Image
Authors: Jiangning Zhang, Chao Xu, Liang Liu, Mengmeng Wang, Xia Wu, Yong Liu, Yunliang Jiang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper presents a novel end-to-end dynamic time-lapse video generation framework, named DTVNet, to generate diversified time-lapse videos from a single landscape image, which are conditioned on normalized motion vectors. The proposed DTVNet consists of two submodules: mph{Optical Flow Encoder} (OFE) and mph{Dynamic Video Generator} (DVG). The OFE maps a sequence of optical flow maps to a mph{normalized motion vector} that encodes the motion information inside the generated video. The DVG contains motion and content streams that learn from the motion vector and the single image respectively, as well as an encoder and a decoder to learn shared content features and construct video frames with corresponding motion respectively. Specifically, the mph{motion stream} introduces multiple mph{adaptive instance normalization} (AdaIN) layers to integrate multi-level motion information that are processed by linear layers. In the testing stage, videos with the same content but various motion information can be generated by different mph{normalized motion vectors} based on only one input image. We further conduct experiments on Sky Time-lapse dataset, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods for generating high-quality and dynamic videos, as well as the variety for generating videos with various motion information."
CLIFFNet for Monocular Depth Estimation with Hierarchical Embedding Loss
Authors: Lijun Wang, Jianming Zhang, Yifan Wang, Huchuan Lu, Xiang Ruan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper proposes a hierarchical loss for monocular depth estimation, which measures the differences between the prediction and ground truth in hierarchical embedding spaces of depth maps. In order to find an appropriate embedding space, we design different architectures for hierarchical embedding generators (HEGs) and explore relevant tasks to train their parameters. Compared to conventional depth losses manually defined on a per-pixel basis, the proposed hierarchical loss can be learned in a data-driven manner. As verified by our experiments, the hierarchical loss even learned without additional labels can capture multi-scale context information, is more robust to local outliers, and thus delivers superior performance. To further improve depth accuracy, a cross level identity feature fusion network (CLIFFNet) is proposed, where low-level features with finer details are refined using more reliable high-level cues. Through end-to-end training, CLIFFNet can learn to select the optimal combinations of low-level and high-level features, leading to more effective cross level feature fusion. When trained using the proposed hierarchical loss, CLIFFNet sets a new state of the art on popular depth estimation benchmarks."
Collaborative Video Object Segmentation by Foreground-Background Integration
Authors: Zongxin Yang, Yunchao Wei, Yi Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: This paper investigates the principles of embedding learning to tackle the challenging semi-supervised video object segmentation. Different from previous practices that only explore the embedding learning using pixels from foreground object (s), we consider background should be equally treated and thus propose Collaborative video object segmentation by Foreground-Background Integration (CFBI) approach. Our CFBI implicitly imposes the feature embedding from the target foreground object and its corresponding background to be contrastive, promoting the segmentation results accordingly. With the feature embedding from both foreground and background, our CFBI performs the matching process between the reference and the predicted sequence from both pixel and instance levels, making the CFBI be robust to various object scales. We conduct extensive experiments on three popular benchmarks, ie, DAVIS 2016, DAVIS 2017, and YouTube-VOS. Our CFBI achieves the performance (J&F) of 89.4%, 81.9%, and 81.4%, respectively, outperforming all the other state-of-the-art methods. Code: \url{https://github.com/z-x-yang/CFBI}."
Adaptive Margin Diversity Regularizer for handling Data Imbalance in Zero-Shot SBIR
Authors: Titir Dutta, Anurag Singh, Soma Biswas
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Data from new categories are continuously being discovered, which has sparked significant amount of research in developing approaches which generalizes to previously unseen categories, i.e. zero-shot setting. Zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval~(ZS-SBIR) is one such problem in the context of cross-domain retrieval, which has received lot of attention due to its various real-life applications. Since most real-world training data have a fair amount of imbalance; in this work, for the first time in literature, we extensively study the effect of training data imbalance on the generalization to unseen categories, with ZS-SBIR as the application area. We evaluate several state-of-the-art data imbalance mitigating techniques and analyze their results. Furthermore, we propose a novel framework AMDReg (Adaptive Margin Diversity Regularizer), which ensures that the embeddings of the sketch and images in the latent space are not only semantically meaningful, but they also are separated according to their class-representations in the training set. The proposed approach is model-independent, and it can be incorporated seamlessly with several state-of-the-art ZS-SBIR methods to improve their performance under imbalanced condition. Extensive experiments and analysis justifies the effectiveness of the proposed AMDReg for mitigating the effect of data imbalance for generalization to unseen classes in ZS-SBIR."
ETH-XGaze: A Large Scale Dataset for Gaze Estimation under Extreme Head Pose and Gaze Variation
Authors: Xucong Zhang, Seonwook Park, Thabo Beeler, Derek Bradley, Siyu Tang, Otmar Hilliges
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Gaze estimation is a fundamental task in many applications of computer vision, human computer interaction and robotics. Many state-of-the-art methods are trained and tested on custom datasets, making comparison across methods challenging. Furthermore, existing gaze estimation datasets have limited head pose and gaze variations, and the evaluations are conducted using different protocols and metrics. In this paper, we propose a new gaze estimation dataset called ETH-XGaze, consisting of over one million high-resolution images of varying gaze under extreme head poses. We collect this dataset from 110 participants with a custom hardware setup including 18 digital SLR cameras and adjustable illumination conditions, and a calibrated system to record ground truth gaze targets. We show that our dataset can significantly improve the robustness of gaze estimation methods across different head poses and gaze angles. Additionally, we define a standardized experimental protocol and evaluation metric on ETH-XGaze, to better unify gaze estimation research going forward. The dataset and benchmark website are available at https://ait.ethz.ch/projects/2020/ETH-XGaze"
Calibration-free Structure-from-Motion with Calibrated Radial Trifocal Tensors
Authors: Viktor Larsson, Nicolas Zobernig, Kasim Taskin, Marc Pollefeys
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: In this paper we consider the problem of Structure-from-Motion from images with unknown intrinsic calibration. Instead of estimating the internal camera parameters through some self-calibration procedure, we propose to use a subset of the reprojection constraints that is invariant to radial displacement. This allows us to recover metric 3D reconstructions without explicitly estimating the cameras' focal length or radial distortion parameters. The weaker projection model makes initializing the reconstruction especially difficult. To handle this additional challenge we propose two novel minimal solvers for radial trifocal tensor estimation. We evaluate our approach on real images and show that even for extreme optical systems, such as fisheye or catadioptric, we are able to get accurate reconstructions without performing any calibration."
Occupancy Anticipation for Efficient Exploration and Navigation
Authors: Santhosh K. Ramakrishnan, Ziad Al-Halah, Kristen Grauman
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: State-of-the-art navigation methods leverage a spatial memory to generalize to new environments, but their occupancy maps are limited to capturing the geometric structures directly observed by the agent. We propose occupancy anticipation, where the agent uses its egocentric RGB-D observations to infer the occupancy state beyond the visible regions. In doing so, the agent builds its spatial awareness more rapidly, which facilitates efficient exploration and navigation in 3D environments. By exploiting context in both the egocentric views and top-down maps our model successfully anticipates a broader map of the environment, with performance significantly better than strong baselines. Furthermore, when deploying our model for the sequential decision-making tasks of exploration and navigation, we outperform state-of-the-art methods on the Gibson and Matterport3D datasets. Our approach is the winning entry in the 2020 Habitat PointNav Challenge. Project page: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/occupancy_anticipation"
Unified Image and Video Saliency Modeling
Authors: Richard Droste, Jianbo Jiao, J. Alison Noble
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Visual saliency modeling for images and videos is treated as two independent tasks in recent computer vision literature. While image saliency modeling is a well-studied problem and progress on benchmarks like SALICON and MIT300 is slowing, video saliency models have shown rapid gains on the recent DHF1K benchmark. Here, we take a step back and ask: Can image and video saliency modeling be approached via a unified model, with mutual benefit? We identify different sources of domain shift between image and video saliency data and between different video saliency datasets as a key challenge for effective joint modelling. To address this we propose four novel domain adaptation techniques - Domain-Adaptive Priors, Domain-Adaptive Fusion, Domain-Adaptive Smoothing and Bypass-RNN - in addition to an improved formulation of learned Gaussian priors. We integrate these techniques into a simple and lightweight encoder-RNN-decoder-style network, UNISAL, and train it jointly with image and video saliency data. We evaluate our method on the video saliency datasets DHF1K, Hollywood-2 and UCF-Sports, and the image saliency datasets SALICON and MIT300. With one set of parameters, UNISAL achieves state-of-the-art performance on all video saliency datasets and is on par with the state-of-the-art for image saliency datasets, despite faster runtime and a 5 to 20-fold smaller model size compared to all competing deep methods. We provide retrospective analyses and ablation studies which confirm the importance of the domain shift modeling. The code is available at https://github.com/rdroste/unisal."
TAO: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Tracking Any Object
Authors: Achal Dave, Tarasha Khurana, Pavel Tokmakov, Cordelia Schmid, Deva Ramanan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: For many years, multi-object tracking benchmarks have focused on a handful of categories. Motivated primarily by surveillance and self-driving applications, these datasets provide tracks for people, vehicles, and animals, ignoring the vast majority of objects in the world. By contrast, in the related field of object detection, the introduction of large-scale, diverse datasets (e.g., COCO) have fostered significant progress in developing highly robust solutions. To bridge this gap, we introduce a similarly diverse dataset for Tracking Any Object (TAO). It consists of 2,907 high resolution videos, captured in diverse environments, which are half a minute long on average. Importantly, we adopt a bottom-up approach for discovering a large vocabulary of 833 categories, an order of magnitude more than prior tracking benchmarks. To this end, we ask annotators to label objects that move at any point in the video, and give names to them post factum. Our vocabulary is both significantly larger and qualitatively different from existing tracking datasets. To ensure scalability of annotation, we employ a federated approach that focuses manual effort on labeling tracks for those relevant objects in a video (e.g., those that move). We perform an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art trackers and make a number of important discoveries regarding large-vocabulary tracking in an open-world. In particular, we show that existing single- and multi-object trackers struggle when applied to this scenario in the wild, and that detection-based, multi-object trackers are in fact competitive with user-initialized ones. We hope that our dataset and analysis will boost further progress in the tracking community."
A Cordial Sync: Going Beyond Marginal Policies for Multi-Agent Embodied Tasks
Authors: Unnat Jain, Luca Weihs, Eric Kolve, Ali Farhadi, Svetlana Lazebnik, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Alexander Schwing
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Autonomous agents must learn to collaborate. It is not scalable to develop a new centralized agent every time a task’s difficulty outpaces a single agent’s abilities. While multi-agent collaboration research has flourished in gridworld-like environments, relatively little work has considered visually rich domains. Addressing this, we introduce the novel task FurnMove in which agents work together to move a piece of furniture through a living room to a goal. Unlike existing tasks, FurnMove requires agents to coordinate at every timestep. We identify two challenges when training agents to complete FurnMove: existing decentralized action sampling procedures do not permit expressive joint action policies and, in tasks requiring close coordination, the number of failed actions dominates successful actions. To confront these challenges we introduce SYNC-policies (synchronize your actions coherently) and CORDIAL (coordination loss). Using SYNC-policies and CORDIAL, our agents achieve a 58% completion rate on FurnMove, an impressive absolute gain of 25 percentage points over competitive decentralized baselines. Our dataset, code, and pretrained models are available at https://unnat.github.io/cordial-sync ."
Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning
Authors: Alexander Kolesnikov, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Joan Puigcerver, Jessica Yung, Sylvain Gelly, Neil Houlsby
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Transfer of pre-trained representations improves sample efficiency and simplifies hyperparameter tuning when training deep neural networks for vision. We revisit the paradigm of pre-training on large supervised datasets and fine-tuning the model on a target task. We scale up pre-training, and propose a simple recipe that we call Big Transfer (BiT). By combining a few carefully selected components, and transferring using a simple heuristic, we achieve strong performance on over 20 datasets. BiT performs well across a surprisingly wide range of data regimes — from 1 example per class to 1 M total examples. BiT achieves 87.5% top-1 accuracy on ILSVRC-2012, 99.4% on CIFAR-10, and 76.3% on the 19 task Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB). On small datasets, BiT attains 76.8% on ILSVRC-2012 with 10 examples per class, and 97.0% on CIFAR-10 with 10 examples per class. We conduct detailed analysis of the main components that lead to high transfer performance."
VisualCOMET: Reasoning about the Dynamic Context of a Still Image
Authors: Jae Sung Park, Chandra Bhagavatula, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Ali Farhadi, Yejin Choi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Even from a single frame of a still image, people can reason about the dynamic story of the image before, after, and beyond the frame. For example, given an image of a man struggling to stay afloat in water, we can reason that the man fell into the water sometime in the past, the intent of that man at the moment is to stay alive, and he will need help in the near future or else he will get washed away. We propose Visual COMET, the novel framework of visual common-sense reasoning tasks to predict events that might have happened before, events that might happen next, and the intents of the people at present. To support research toward visual commonsense reasoning, we introduce the first large-scale repository of Visual Commonsense Graphs that consists of over 1.4 million textual descriptions of visual commonsense inferences carefully annotated over a diverse set of 59,000 images, each paired with short video summaries of before and after. In addition, we provide person-grounding (i.e., co-reference links) between people appearing in the image and people mentioned in the textual commonsense descriptions, allowing for tighter integration between images and text. We establish strong baseline performances on this task and demonstrate that integration between visual and textual commonsense reasoning is the key and wins over non-integrative alternatives."
Few-shot Action Recognition with Permutation-invariant Attention
Authors: Hongguang Zhang, Li Zhang, Xiaojuan Qi, Hongdong Li, Philip H. S. Torr, Piotr Koniusz
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Many few-shot learning models focus on recognising images. In contrast, we tackle a challenging task of few-shot action recognition from videos. We build on a C3D encoder for spatio-temporal video blocks to capture short-range action patterns. Such encoded blocks are aggregated by permutation-invariant pooling to make our approach robust to varying action lengths and long-range temporal dependencies whose patterns are unlikely to repeat even in clips of the same class. Subsequently, the pooled representations are combined into simple relation descriptors which encode so-called query and support clips. Finally, relation descriptors are fed to the comparator with the goal of similarity learning between query and support clips. Importantly, to re-weight block contributions during pooling, we exploit spatial and temporal attention modules and self-supervision. In naturalistic clips (of the same class) there exists a temporal distribution shift--the locations of discriminative temporal action hotspots vary. Thus, we permute blocks of a clip and align the resulting attention regions with similarly permuted attention regions of non-permuted clip to train the attention mechanism invariant to block (and thus long-term hotspot) permutations. Our method outperforms the state of the art on the HMDB51, UCF101, miniMIT datasets."
Character Grounding and Re-Identification in Story of Videos and Text Descriptions
Authors: Youngjae Yu, Jongseok Kim, Heeseung Yun, Jiwan Chung, Gunhee Kim
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: We address character grounding and re-identification in multiple story-based videos like movies and associated text descriptions. In order to solve these related tasks in a mutually rewarding way, we propose a model named Character in Story Identification Network (CiSIN). Our method builds two semantically informative representations via joint training of multiple objectives for character grounding, video/text re-identification and gender prediction: Visual Track Embedding from videos and Textual Character Embedding from text context. These two representations are learned to retain rich semantic multimodal information that enables even simple MLPs to achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the target tasks. More specifically, our CiSIN model achieves the best performance in the Fill-in the Characters task of LSMDC 2019 challenges. Moreover, it outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in M-VAD Names dataset as a benchmark of multimodal character grounding and re-identification."
AABO: Adaptive Anchor Box Optimization for Object Detection via Bayesian Sub-sampling
Authors: Wenshuo Ma, Tingzhong Tian, Hang Xu, Yimin Huang, Zhenguo Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Most state-of-the-art object detection systems follow an anchor-based diagram. Anchor boxes are densely proposed over the images and the network is trained to predict the boxes position offset as well as the classification confidence. Existing systems pre-define anchor box shapes and sizes and ad-hoc heuristic adjustments are used to define the anchor configurations. However, this might be sub-optimal or even wrong when a new dataset or a new model is adopted. In this paper, we study the problem of automatically optimizing anchor boxes for object detection. We first demonstrate that the number of anchors, anchor scales and ratios are crucial factors for a reliable object detection system. By carefully analyzing the existing bounding box patterns on the feature hierarchy, we design a flexible and tight hyper-parameter space for anchor configurations. Then we propose a novel hyper-parameter optimization method named AABO to determine more appropriate anchor boxes for a certain dataset, in which Bayesian Optimization and subsampling method are combined to achieve precise and efficient anchor configuration optimization. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on different detectors and datasets, e.g. achieving around 2.4% mAP improvement on COCO, 1.6% on ADE and 1.5% on VG, and the optimal anchors can bring 1.4% ∼ 2.4% mAP improvement on SOTA detectors by only optimizing anchor configurations, e.g. boosting Mask RCNN from 40.3% to 42.3%, and HTC detector from 46.8% to 48.2%."
Learning Visual Context by Comparison
Authors: Minchul Kim, Jongchan Park, Seil Na, Chang Min Park, Donggeun Yoo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Finding diseases from an X-ray image is an important yet highly challenging task. Current methods for solving this task exploit various characteristics of the chest X-ray image, but one of the most important characteristics is still missing: the necessity of comparison between related regions in an image. In this paper, we present Attend-and-Compare Module (ACM) for capturing the difference between an object of interest and its corresponding context. We show that explicit difference modeling can be very helpful in tasks that require direct comparison between locations from afar. This module can be plugged into existing deep learning models. For evaluation, we apply our module to three chest X-ray recognition tasks and COCO object detection & segmentation tasks and observe consistent improvements across tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/mk-minchul/attend-and-compare."
Large Scale Holistic Video Understanding
Authors: Ali Diba, Mohsen Fayyaz, Vivek Sharma, Manohar Paluri, Jürgen Gall, Rainer Stiefelhagen, Luc Van Gool
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Video recognition has been advanced in recent years by benchmarks with rich annotations. However, research is still mainly limited to human action or sports recognition - focusing on a highly specific video understanding task and thus leaving a significant gap towards describing the overall content of a video. We fill this gap by presenting a large-scale ``Holistic Video Understanding Dataset""~(HVU). HVU is organized hierarchically in a semantic taxonomy that focuses on multi-label and multi-task video understanding as a comprehensive problem that encompasses the recognition of multiple semantic aspects in the dynamic scene. HVU contains approx.~572k videos in total with 9 million annotations for training, validation, and test set spanning over 3142 labels. HVU encompasses semantic aspects defined on categories of scenes, objects, actions, events, attributes, and concepts which naturally capture the real-world scenarios.We demonstrate the generalisation capability of HVU on three challenging tasks: 1.) Video classification, 2.) Video captioning and 3.) Video clustering tasks. In particular for video classification, we introduce a new spatio-temporal deep neural network architecture called ``Holistic Appearance and Temporal Network""~(HATNet) that builds on fusing 2D and 3D architectures into one by combining intermediate representations of appearance and temporal cues. HATNet focuses on the multi-label and multi-task learning problem and is trained in an end-to-end manner. %The experiments show that HATNet trained on HVU outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on challenging human action datasets: HMDB51, UCF101, and Kinetics. The dataset and codes will be made publicly available. Via our experiments, we validate the idea that holistic representation learning is complementary, and can play a key role in enabling many real-world applications."
Indirect Local Attacks for Context-aware Semantic Segmentation Networks
Authors: Krishna Kanth Nakka, Mathieu Salzmann
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020 (Main Conference Track), 2020

Abstract: Recently, deep networks have achieved impressive semantic segmentation performance, in particular thanks to their use of larger contextual information. In this paper, we show that the resulting networks are sensitive not only to global adversarial attacks, where perturbations affect the entire input image, but also to indirect local attacks, where the perturbations are confined to a small image region that does not overlap with the area that the attacker aims to fool. To this end, we introduce an indirect attack strategy, namely adaptive local attacks, aiming to find the best image location to perturb, while preserving the labels at this location and producing a realistic-looking segmentation map. Furthermore, we propose attack detection techniques both at the global image level and to obtain a pixel-wise localization of the fooled regions. Our results are unsettling: Because they exploit a larger context, more accurate semantic segmentation networks are more sensitive to indirect local attacks. We believe that our comprehensive analysis will motivate the community to design architectures with contextual dependencies that do not trade off robustness for accuracy."