mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
S3VAADA: Submodular Subset Selection for Virtual Adversarial Active Domain Adaptation
Authors: Harsh Rangwani, Arihant Jain, Sumukh K Aithal, R. Venkatesh Babu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) methods have focused on achieving maximal performance through aligning features from source and target domains without using labeled data in the target domain. Whereas, in the real-world scenario's it might be feasible to get labels for a small proportion of target data. In these scenarios, it is important to select maximally-informative samples to label and find an effective way to combine them with the existing knowledge from source data. Towards achieving this, we propose S^3VAADA which i) introduces a novel submodular criterion to select a maximally informative subset to label and ii) enhances a cluster-based DA procedure through novel improvements to effectively utilize all the available data for improving generalization on target. Our approach consistently outperforms the competing state-of-the-art approaches on datasets with varying degrees of domain shifts. The project page with additional details is available here: https://sites.google.com/iisc.ac.in/s3vaada-iccv2021.
Cross-Sentence Temporal and Semantic Relations in Video Activity Localisation
Authors: Jiabo Huang, Yang Liu, Shaogang Gong, Hailin Jin
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Video activity localisation has recently attained increasing attention due to its practical values in automatically localising the most salient visual segments corresponding to their language descriptions (sentences) from untrimmed and unstructured videos. For supervised model training, a temporal annotation of both the start and end time index of each video segment for a sentence (a video moment) must be given. This is not only very expensive but also sensitive to ambiguity and subjective annotation bias, a much harder task than image labelling. In this work, we develop a more accurate weakly-supervised solution by introducing Cross-Sentence Relations Mining (CRM) in video moment proposal generation and matching when only a paragraph description of activities without per-sentence temporal annotation is available. Specifically, we explore two cross-sentence relational constraints: (1) Temporal ordering and (2) semantic consistency among sentences in a paragraph description of video activities. Existing weakly-supervised techniques only consider within-sentence video segment correlations in training without considering cross-sentence paragraph context. This can mislead due to ambiguous expressions of individual sentences with visually indiscriminate video moment proposals in isolation. Experiments on two publicly available activity localisation datasets show the advantages of our approach over the state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods, especially so when the video activity descriptions become more complex.
StructDepth: Leveraging the Structural Regularities for Self-Supervised Indoor Depth Estimation
Authors: Boying Li, Yuan Huang, Zeyu Liu, Danping Zou, Wenxian Yu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has achieved impressive performance on outdoor datasets. Its performance however degrades notably in indoor environments because of the lack of textures. Without rich textures, the photometric consistency is too weak to train a good depth network. Inspired by the early works on indoor modeling, we leverage the structural regularities exhibited in indoor scenes, to train a better depth network. Specifically, we adopt two extra supervisory signals for self-supervised training: 1) the Manhattan normal constraint and 2) the co-planar constraint. The Manhattan normal constraint enforces the major surfaces (the floor, ceiling, and walls) to be aligned with dominant directions. The co-planar constraint states that the 3D points be well fitted by a plane if they are located within the same planar region. To generate the supervisory signals, we adopt two components to classify the major surface normal into dominant directions and detect the planar regions on the fly during training. As the predicted depth becomes more accurate after more training epochs, the supervisory signals also improve and in turn feedback to obtain a better depth model. Through extensive experiments on indoor benchmark datasets, the results show that our network outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/SJTU-ViSYS/StructDepth.
Feature Interactive Representation for Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Bingli Wu, Jie Ma, Gaojie Chen, Pei An
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Point cloud registration is the process of using the common structures in two point clouds to splice them together. To find out these common structures and make these structures match more accurately, we investigate the direction of interacting information of the source and target point clouds. To this end, we propose a Feature Interactive Representation learning Network (FIRE-Net), which can explore feature interaction among the source and target point clouds from different levels. Specifically, we first introduce a Combined Feature Encoder (CFE) based on feature interaction intra point cloud. CFE extracts interactive features intra each point cloud and combines them to enhance the ability of the network to describe the local geometric structure. Then, we propose a feature interaction mechanism inter point clouds which includes a Local Interaction Unit (LIU) and a Global Interaction Unit (GIU). The former is used to interact information between point pairs across two point clouds, thus the point features in one point cloud and its similar point features in another point cloud can be aware of each other. The latter is applied to change the per-point features depending on the global cross information of two point clouds, thus one point cloud has the global perception of another. Extensive experiments on partially overlapping point cloud registration show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Walk in the Cloud: Learning Curves for Point Clouds Shape Analysis
Authors: Tiange Xiang, Chaoyi Zhang, Yang Song, Jianhui Yu, Weidong Cai
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Discrete point cloud objects lack sufficient shape descriptors of 3D geometries. In this paper, we present a novel method for aggregating hypothetical curves in point clouds. Sequences of connected points (curves) are initially grouped by taking guided walks in the point clouds, and then subsequently aggregated back to augment their point-wise features. We provide an effective implementation of the proposed aggregation strategy including a novel curve grouping operator followed by a curve aggregation operator. Our method was benchmarked on several point cloud analysis tasks where we achieved the state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 94.2% on the ModelNet40 classification task, instance IoU of 86.8% on the ShapeNetPart segmentation task and cosine error of 0.11 on the ModelNet40 normal estimation task.
LSG-CPD: Coherent Point Drift With Local Surface Geometry for Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Weixiao Liu, Hongtao Wu, Gregory S. Chirikjian
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Probabilistic point cloud registration methods are becoming more popular because of their robustness. However, unlike point-to-plane variants of iterative closest point (ICP) which incorporate local surface geometric information such as surface normals, most probabilistic methods (e.g., coherent point drift (CPD)) ignore such information and build Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with isotropic Gaussian covariances. This results in sphere-like GMM components which only penalize the point-to-point distance between the two point clouds. In this paper, we propose a novel method called CPD with Local Surface Geometry (LSG-CPD) for rigid point cloud registration. Our method adaptively adds different levels of point-to-plane penalization on top of the point-to-point penalization based on the flatness of the local surface. This results in GMM components with anisotropic covariances. We formulate point cloud registration as a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) problem and solve it with the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the E step, we demonstrate that the computation can be recast into simple matrix manipulations and efficiently computed on a GPU. In the M step, we perform an unconstrained optimization on a matrix Lie group to efficiently update the rigid transformation of the registration. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of accuracy and robustness on various datasets captured with range scanners, RGBD cameras, and LiDARs. Also, it is significantly faster than modern implementations of CPD. The source code is available at https://github.com/ChirikjianLab/LSG-CPD.git.
ISD: Self-Supervised Learning by Iterative Similarity Distillation
Authors: Ajinkya Tejankar, Soroush Abbasi Koohpayegani, Vipin Pillai, Paolo Favaro, Hamed Pirsiavash
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, contrastive learning has achieved great results in self-supervised learning, where the main idea is to pull two augmentations of an image (positive pairs) closer compared to other random images (negative pairs). We argue that not all negative images are equally negative. Hence, we introduce a self-supervised learning algorithm where we use a soft similarity for the negative images rather than a binary distinction between positive and negative pairs. We iteratively distill a slowly evolving teacher model to the student model by capturing the similarity of a query image to some random images and transferring that knowledge to the student. Specifically, our method should handle unbalanced and unlabeled data better than existing contrastive learning methods, because the randomly chosen negative set might include many samples that are semantically similar to the query image. In this case, our method labels them as highly similar while standard contrastive methods label them as negatives. Our method achieves comparable results to the state-of-the-art models. Our code is available here: https://github.com/UMBCvision/ISD
An Empirical Study of the Collapsing Problem in Semi-Supervised 2D Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Rongchang Xie, Chunyu Wang, Wenjun Zeng, Yizhou Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: The state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning models are consistency-based which learn about unlabeled images by maximizing the similarity between different augmentations of an image. But when we apply the methods to human pose estimation which has extremely imbalanced class distribution, the models often collapse and predict every pixel in unlabeled images as background. This is because the decision boundary may pass through the high-density area of the minor class so more and more pixels are gradually mis-classified as the background class. In this work, we present a surprisingly simple approach to drive the model to learn in the correct direction. For each image, it composes a pair of easy and hard augmentations and uses the more accurate predictions on the easy image to teach the network to learn about the hard one. The accuracy superiority of teaching signals allows the network to be "monotonically" improved which effectively avoids collapsing. We apply our method to recent pose estimators and find that they achieve significantly better performances than their supervised counterparts on three public datasets.
Self-Supervised Neural Networks for Spectral Snapshot Compressive Imaging
Authors: Ziyi Meng, Zhenming Yu, Kun Xu, Xin Yuan
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We consider using untrained neural networks to solve the reconstruction problem of snapshot compressive imaging (SCI), which uses a two-dimensional (2D) detector to capture a high-dimensional (usually 3D) data-cube in a compressed manner. Various SCI systems have been built in recent years to capture data such as high-speed videos, hyperspectral images, and the state-of-the-art reconstruction is obtained by the deep neural networks. However, most of these networks are trained in an end-to-end manner by a large amount of corpus with sometimes simulated ground truth, measurement pairs. In this paper, inspired by the untrained neural networks such as deep image priors (DIP) and deep decoders, we develop a framework by integrating DIP into the plug-and-play regime, leading to a self-supervised network for spectral SCI reconstruction. Extensive synthetic and real data results show that the proposed algorithm without training is capable of achieving competitive results to the training based networks. Furthermore, by integrating the proposed method with a pre-trained deep denoising prior, we have achieved higher performance than existing state-of-the-art.
Group-Aware Contrastive Regression for Action Quality Assessment
Authors: Xumin Yu, Yongming Rao, Wenliang Zhao, Jiwen Lu, Jie Zhou
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Assessing action quality is challenging due to the subtle differences between videos and large variations in scores. Most existing approaches tackle this problem by regressing a quality score from a single video, suffering a lot from the large inter-video score variations. In this paper, we show that the relations among videos can provide important clues for more accurate action quality assessment during both training and inference. Specifically, we reformulate the problem of action quality assessment as regressing the relative scores with reference to another video that has shared attributes (e.g. category and difficulty), instead of learning unreferenced scores. Following this formulation, we propose a new contrastive regression (CoRe) framework to learn the relative scores by pair-wise comparison, which highlights the differences between videos and guides the models to learn the key hints for assessment. In order to further exploit the relative information between two videos, we devise a group-aware regression tree to convert the conventional score regression into two easier sub-problems: coarse-to-fine classification and regression in small intervals. To demonstrate the effectiveness of CoRe, we conduct extensive experiments on three mainstream AQA datasets including AQA-7, MTL-AQA, and JIGSAWS. Our approaches outperform previous methods by a large margin and establish new state-of-the-art on all three benchmarks.
The Road To Know-Where: An Object-and-Room Informed Sequential BERT for Indoor Vision-Language Navigation
Authors: Yuankai Qi, Zizheng Pan, Yicong Hong, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Anton van den Hengel, Qi Wu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to find a path to a remote location on the basis of natural-language instructions and a set of photo-realistic panoramas. Most existing methods take the words in the instructions and the discrete views of each panorama as the minimal unit of encoding. However, this requires a model to match different nouns (e.g., TV, table) against the same input view feature. In this work, we propose an object-informed sequential BERT to encode visual perceptions and linguistic instructions at the same fine-grained level, namely objects and words. Our sequential BERT also enables the visual-textual clues to be interpreted in light of the temporal context, which is crucial to multi-round VLN tasks. Additionally, we enable the model to identify the relative direction (e.g., left/right/front/back) of each navigable location and the room type (e.g., bedroom, kitchen) of its current and final navigation goal, as such information is widely mentioned in instructions implying the desired next and final locations. We thus enable the model to know-where the objects lie in the images, and to know-where they stand in the scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness compared against several state-of-the-art methods on three indoor VLN tasks: REVERIE, NDH, and R2R. Project repository: https://github.com/YuankaiQi/ORIST
Support-Set Based Cross-Supervision for Video Grounding
Authors: Xinpeng Ding, Nannan Wang, Shiwei Zhang, De Cheng, Xiaomeng Li, Ziyuan Huang, Mingqian Tang, Xinbo Gao
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Current approaches for video grounding propose kinds of complex architectures to capture the video-text relations, and have achieved impressive improvements. However, it is hard to learn the complicated multi-modal relations by only architecture designing in fact. In this paper, we introduce a novel Support-set Based Cross-Supervision (Sscs) module which can improve existing methods during training phase without extra inference cost. The contrastive objective aims to learn effective representations by contrastive learning, while the caption objective can train a powerful video encoder supervised by texts. Due to the co-existence of some visual entities in both ground-truth and background intervals, i.e., mutual exclusion, naively contrastive learning is unsuitable to video grounding. We address the problem by boosting the cross-supervision with the support-set concept, which collects visual information from the whole video and eliminates the mutual exclusion of entities. Combined with the original objective, Sscs can enhance the abilities of multi-modal relation modeling for existing approaches. We extensively evaluate Sscs on three challenging datasets, and show that our method can improves current state-of-the-art methods by large margins, especially 6.35% in terms of R1@0.5 on Charades-STA.
Sampling Network Guided Cross-Entropy Method for Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Haobo Jiang, Yaqi Shen, Jin Xie, Jun Li, Jianjun Qian, Jian Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: In this paper, by modeling the point cloud registration task as a Markov decision process, we propose an end-to-end deep model embedded with the cross-entropy method (CEM) for unsupervised 3D registration. Our model consists of a sampling network module and a differentiable CEM module. In our sampling network module, given a pair of point clouds, the sampling network learns a prior sampling distribution over the transformation space. The learned sampling distribution can be used as a "good"" initialization of the differentiable CEM module. In our differentiable CEM module, we first propose a maximum consensus criterion based alignment metric as the reward function for the point cloud registration task. Based on the reward function, for each state, we then construct a fused score function to evaluate the sampled transformations, where we weight the current and future rewards of the transformations. Particularly, the future rewards of the sampled transforms are obtained by performing the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm on the transformed state. By selecting the top-k transformations with the highest scores, we iteratively update the sampling distribution. Furthermore, in order to make the CEM differentiable, we use the sparsemax function to replace the hard top-k selection. Finally, we formulate a Geman-McClure estimator based loss to train our end-to-end registration model. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the good registration performance of our method on benchmark datasets.
Voxel-Based Network for Shape Completion by Leveraging Edge Generation
Authors: Xiaogang Wang, Marcelo H Ang, Gim Hee Lee
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Deep learning technique has yielded significant improvements in point cloud completion with the aim of completing missing object shapes from partial inputs. However, most existing methods fail to recover realistic structures due to over-smoothing of fine-grained details. In this paper, we develop a voxel-based network for point cloud completion by leveraging edge generation (VE-PCN). We first embed point clouds into regular voxel grids, and then generate complete objects with the help of the hallucinated shape edges. This decoupled architecture together with a multi-scale grid feature learning is able to generate more realistic on-surface details. We evaluate our model on the publicly available completion datasets and show that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches quantitatively and qualitatively. Our source code is available at https://github.com/xiaogangw/VE-PCN.
THUNDR: Transformer-Based 3D Human Reconstruction With Markers
Authors: Mihai Zanfir, Andrei Zanfir, Eduard Gabriel Bazavan, William T. Freeman, Rahul Sukthankar, Cristian Sminchisescu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We present THUNDR, a transformer-based deep neural network methodology to reconstruct the 3d pose and shape of people, given monocular RGB images. Key to our methodology is an intermediate 3d marker representation, where we aim to combine the predictive power of model-free-output architectures and the regularizing, anthropometrically-preserving properties of a statistical human surface model like GHUM---a recently introduced, expressive full body statistical 3d human model, trained end-to-end. Our novel transformer-based prediction pipeline can focus on image regions relevant to the task, supports self-supervised regimes, and ensures that solutions are consistent with human anthropometry. We show state-of-the-art results on Human3.6M and 3DPW, for both the fully-supervised and the self-supervised models, for the task of inferring 3d human shape, joint positions, and global translation. Moreover, we observe very solid 3d reconstruction performance for difficult human poses collected in the wild.
OadTR: Online Action Detection With Transformers
Authors: Xiang Wang, Shiwei Zhang, Zhiwu Qing, Yuanjie Shao, Zhengrong Zuo, Changxin Gao, Nong Sang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Most recent approaches for online action detection tend to apply Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to capture long-range temporal structure. However, RNN suffers from non-parallelism and gradient vanishing, hence it is hard to be optimized. In this paper, we propose a new encoder-decoder framework based on Transformers, named OadTR, to tackle these problems. The encoder attached with a task token aims to capture the relationships and global interactions between historical observations. The decoder extracts auxiliary information by aggregating anticipated future clip representations. Therefore, OadTR can recognize current actions by encoding historical information and predicting future context simultaneously. We extensively evaluate the proposed OadTR on three challenging datasets: HDD, TVSeries, and THUMOS14. The experimental results show that OadTR achieves higher training and inference speeds than current RNN based approaches, and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both mAP and mcAP. Code is available at https: //github.com/wangxiang1230/OadTR.
Instance-Level Image Retrieval Using Reranking Transformers
Authors: Fuwen Tan, Jiangbo Yuan, Vicente Ordonez
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Instance-level image retrieval is the task of searching in a large database for images that match an object in a query image. To address this task, systems usually rely on a retrieval step that uses global image descriptors, and a subsequent step that performs domain-specific refinements or reranking by leveraging operations such as geometric verification based on local features. In this work, we propose Reranking Transformers (RRTs) as a general model to incorporate both local and global features to rerank the matching images in a supervised fashion and thus replace the relatively expensive process of geometric verification. RRTs are lightweight and can be easily parallelized so that reranking a set of top matching results can be performed in a single forward-pass. We perform extensive experiments on the Revisited Oxford and Paris datasets, and the Google Landmarks v2 dataset, showing that RRTs outperform previous reranking approaches while using much fewer local descriptors. Moreover, we demonstrate that, unlike existing approaches, RRTs can be optimized jointly with the feature extractor, which can lead to feature representations tailored to downstream tasks and further accuracy improvements. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/uvavision/RerankingTransformer.
Mutual-Complementing Framework for Nuclei Detection and Segmentation in Pathology Image
Authors: Zunlei Feng, Zhonghua Wang, Xinchao Wang, Yining Mao, Thomas Li, Jie Lei, Yuexuan Wang, Mingli Song
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Detection and segmentation of nuclei are fundamental analysis operations in pathology images, the assessments derived from which serve as the gold standard for cancer diagnosis. Manual segmenting nuclei is expensive and time-consuming. What's more, accurate segmentation detection of nuclei can be challenging due to the large appearance variation, conjoined and overlapping nuclei, and serious degeneration of histological structures. Supervised methods highly rely on massive annotated samples. The existing two unsupervised methods are prone to failure on degenerated samples. This paper proposes a Mutual-Complementing Framework (MCF) for nuclei detection and segmentation in pathology images. Two branches of MCF are trained in the mutual-complementing manner, where the detection branch complements the pseudo mask of the segmentation branch, while the progressive trained segmentation branch complements the missing nucleus templates through calculating the mask residual between the predicted mask and detected result. In the detection branch, two response map fusion strategies and gradient direction based postprocessing are devised to obtain the optimal detection response. Furthermore, the confidence loss combined with the synthetic samples and self-finetuning is adopted to train the segmentation network with only high confidence areas. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MCF achieves comparable performance with only a few nucleus patches as supervision. Especially, MCF possesses good robustness (only dropping by about 6%) on degenerated samples, which are critical and common cases in clinical diagnosis.
Accelerating Atmospheric Turbulence Simulation via Learned Phase-to-Space Transform
Authors: Zhiyuan Mao, Nicholas Chimitt, Stanley H. Chan
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Fast and accurate simulation of imaging through atmospheric turbulence is essential for developing turbulence mitigation algorithms. Recognizing the limitations of previous approaches, we introduce a new concept known as the phase-to-space (P2S) transform to significantly speed up the simulation. P2S is built upon three ideas: (1) reformulating the spatially varying convolution as a set of invariant convolutions with basis functions, (2) learning the basis function via the known turbulence statistics models, (3) implementing the P2S transform via a light-weight network that directly converts the phase representation to spatial representation. The new simulator offers 300x - 1000x speed up compared to the mainstream split-step simulators while preserving the essential turbulence statistics.
Graph Constrained Data Representation Learning for Human Motion Segmentation
Authors: Mariella Dimiccoli, Lluís Garrido, Guillem Rodriguez-Corominas, Herwig Wendt
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, transfer subspace learning based approaches have shown to be a valid alternative to unsupervised subspace clustering and temporal data clustering for human motion segmentation (HMS). These approaches leverage prior knowledge from a source domain to improve clustering performance on a target domain, and currently they represent the state of the art in HMS. Bucking this trend, in this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised model that learns a representation of the data and digs clustering information from the data itself. Our model is reminiscent of temporal subspace clustering, but presents two critical differences. First, we learn an auxiliary data matrix that can deviate from the initial data, hence confers more degrees of freedom to the coding matrix. Second, we introduce a regularization term for this auxiliary data matrix that preserves the local geometrical structure present in the high-dimensional space. The proposed model is efficiently optimized by using an original Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) formulation allowing to learn jointly the auxiliary data representation, a nonnegative dictionary and a coding matrix. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets for HMS demonstrate that our approach achieves significantly better clustering performance then state-of-the-art methods, including both unsupervised and more recent semi-supervised transfer learning approaches.
Spatial and Semantic Consistency Regularizations for Pedestrian Attribute Recognition
Authors: Jian Jia, Xiaotang Chen, Kaiqi Huang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: While recent studies on pedestrian attribute recognition have shown remarkable progress in leveraging complicated networks and attention mechanisms, most of them neglect the inter-image relations and an important prior: spatial consistency and semantic consistency of attributes under surveillance scenarios. The spatial locations of the same attribute should be consistent between different pedestrian images, e.g., the "hat" attribute and the "boots" attribute are always located at the top and bottom of the picture respectively. In addition, the inherent semantic feature of the "hat" attribute should be consistent, whether it is a baseball cap, beret, or helmet. To fully exploit inter-image relations and aggregate human prior in the model learning process, we construct a Spatial and Semantic Consistency (SSC) framework that consists of two complementary regularizations to achieve spatial and semantic consistency for each attribute. Specifically, we first propose a spatial consistency regularization to focus on reliable and stable attribute-related regions. Based on the precise attribute locations, we further propose a semantic consistency regularization to extract intrinsic and discriminative semantic features. We conduct extensive experiments on popular benchmarks including PA100K, RAP, and PETA. Results show that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods without increasing parameters.
Learning To Stylize Novel Views
Authors: Hsin-Ping Huang, Hung-Yu Tseng, Saurabh Saini, Maneesh Singh, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We tackle a 3D scene stylization problem -- generating stylized images of a scene from arbitrary novel views given a set of images of the same scene and a reference image of the desired style as inputs. Direct solution of combining novel view synthesis and stylization approaches lead to results that are blurry or not consistent across different views. We propose a point cloud-based method for consistent 3D scene stylization. First, we construct the point cloud by back-projecting the image features to the 3D space. Second, we develop point cloud aggregation modules to gather the style information of the 3D scene, and then modulate the features in the point cloud with a linear transformation matrix. Finally, we project the transformed features to 2D space to obtain the novel views. Experimental results on two diverse datasets of real-world scenes validate that our method generates consistent stylized novel view synthesis results against other alternative approaches.
Morphable Detector for Object Detection on Demand
Authors: Xiangyun Zhao, Xu Zou, Ying Wu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Many emerging applications of intelligent robots need to explore and understand new environments, where it is desirable to detect objects of novel categories on the fly with minimum online efforts. This is an object detection on demand (ODOD) task. It is challenging, because it is impossible to annotate large data on the fly, and the embedded systems are usually unable to perform back-propagation which is essential for training. Most existing few-shot detection methods are confronted here as they need extra training. We propose a novel morphable detector (MD), that simply "morphs"" some of its changeable parameters online estimated from the few samples, so as to detect novel categories without any extra training. The MD has two sets of parameters, one for the feature embedding and the other for category representation(called "prototypes""). Each category is associated with a hidden prototype to be learned by integrating the visual and semantic embeddings. The learning of the MD is based on the alternate learning of the feature embedding and the prototypes in an EM-like approach which allows the recovery of an unknown prototype from a few samples of a novel category. Once an MD is learned, it is able to use a few samples of a novel category to directly compute its prototype to fulfill the online morphing process. We have shown the superiority of the MD in Pascal, COCO and FSOD datasets.
Stacked Homography Transformations for Multi-View Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Liangchen Song, Jialian Wu, Ming Yang, Qian Zhang, Yuan Li, Junsong Yuan
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Multi-view pedestrian detection aims to predict a bird's eye view (BEV) occupancy map from multiple camera views. This task is confronted with two challenges: how to establish the 3D correspondences from views to the BEV map and how to assemble occupancy information across views. In this paper, we propose a novel Stacked HOmography Transformations (SHOT) approach, which is motivated by approximating projections in 3D world coordinates via a stack of homographies. We first construct a stack of transformations for projecting views to the ground plane at different height levels. Then we design a soft selection module so that the network learns to predict the likelihood of the stack of transformations. Moreover, we provide an in-depth theoretical analysis on constructing SHOT and how well SHOT approximates projections in 3D world coordinates. SHOT is empirically verified to be capable of estimating accurate correspondences from individual views to the BEV map, leading to new state-of-the-art performance on standard evaluation benchmarks.
Env-QA: A Video Question Answering Benchmark for Comprehensive Understanding of Dynamic Environments
Authors: Difei Gao, Ruiping Wang, Ziyi Bai, Xilin Chen
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Visual understanding goes well beyond the study of images or videos on the web. To achieve complex tasks in volatile situations, the human can deeply understand the environment, quickly perceive events happening around, and continuously track objects' state changes, which are still challenging for current AI systems. To equip AI system with the ability to understand dynamic ENVironments, we build a video Question Answering dataset named Env-QA. Env-QA contains 23K egocentric videos, where each video is composed of a series of events about exploring and interacting in the environment. It also provides 85K questions to evaluate the ability of understanding the composition, layout, and state changes of the environment presented by the events in videos. Moreover, we propose a video QA model, Temporal Segmentation and Event Attention network (TSEA), which introduces event-level video representation and corresponding attention mechanisms to better extract environment information and answer questions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and show the formidable challenges of Env-QA in terms of long-term state tracking, multi-event temporal reasoning and event counting, etc.
Region-Aware Contrastive Learning for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Hanzhe Hu, Jinshi Cui, Liwei Wang
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recent works have made great success in semantic segmentation by exploiting contextual information in a local or global manner within individual image and supervising the model with pixel-wise cross entropy loss. However, from the holistic view of the whole dataset, semantic relations not only exist inside one single image, but also prevail in the whole training data, which makes solely considering intra-image correlations insufficient. Inspired by recent progress in unsupervised contrastive learning, we propose the region-aware contrastive learning (RegionContrast) for semantic segmentation in the supervised manner. In order to enhance the similarity of semantically similar pixels while keeping the discrimination from others, we employ contrastive learning to realize this objective. With the help of memory bank, we explore to store all the representative features into the memory. Without loss of generality, to efficiently incorporate all training data into the memory bank while avoiding taking too much computation resource, we propose to construct region centers to represent features from different categories for every image. Hence, the proposed region-aware contrastive learning is performed in a region level for all the training data, which saves much more memory than methods exploring the pixel-level relations. The proposed RegionContrast brings little computation cost during training and requires no extra overhead for testing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets including Cityscapes, ADE20K and COCO Stuff.
Image Retrieval on Real-Life Images With Pre-Trained Vision-and-Language Models
Authors: Zheyuan Liu, Cristian Rodriguez-Opazo, Damien Teney, Stephen Gould
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: We extend the task of composed image retrieval, where an input query consists of an image and short textual description of how to modify the image. Existing methods have only been applied to non-complex images within narrow domains, such as fashion products, thereby limiting the scope of study on in-depth visual reasoning in rich image and language contexts. To address this issue, we collect the Compose Image Retrieval on Real-life images (CIRR) dataset, which consists of over 36,000 pairs of crowd-sourced, open-domain images with human-generated modifying text. To extend current methods to the open-domain, we propose CIRPLANT, a transformer based model that leverages rich pre-trained vision-and-language (V&L) knowledge for modifying visual features conditioned on natural language. Retrieval is then done by nearest neighbor lookup on the modified features. We demonstrate that with a relatively simple architecture, CIRPLANT outperforms existing methods on open-domain images, while matching state-of-the-art accuracy on the existing narrow datasets, such as fashion. Together with the release of CIRR, we believe this work will inspire further research on composed image retrieval. Our dataset, code and pre-trained models are available at https://cuberick-orion.github.io/CIRR/.
Self-Supervised Real-to-Sim Scene Generation
Authors: Aayush Prakash, Shoubhik Debnath, Jean-Francois Lafleche, Eric Cameracci, Gavriel State, Stan Birchfield, Marc T. Law
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Synthetic data is emerging as a promising solution to the scalability issue of supervised deep learning, especially when real data are difficult to acquire or hard to annotate. Synthetic data generation, however, can itself be prohibitively expensive when domain experts have to manually and painstakingly oversee the process. Moreover, neural networks trained on synthetic data often do not perform well on real data because of the domain gap. To solve these challenges, we propose Sim2SG, a self-supervised automatic scene generation technique for matching the distribution of real data. Importantly, Sim2SG does not require supervision from the real-world dataset, thus making it applicable in situations for which such annotations are difficult to obtain. Sim2SG is designed to bridge both the content and appearance gaps, by matching the content of real data, and by matching the features in the source and target domains. We select scene graph (SG) generation as the downstream task, due to the limited availability of labeled datasets. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements over leading baselines in reducing the domain gap both qualitatively and quantitatively, on several synthetic datasets as well as the real-world KITTI dataset.
GP-S3Net: Graph-Based Panoptic Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network
Authors: Ryan Razani, Ran Cheng, Enxu Li, Ehsan Taghavi, Yuan Ren, Liu Bingbing
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Panoptic segmentation as an integrated task of both static environmental understanding and dynamic object identification, has recently begun to receive broad research interest. In this paper, we propose a new computationally efficient LiDAR based panoptic segmentation framework, called GP-S3Net. GP-S3Net is a proposal-free approach in which no object proposals are needed to identify the objects in contrast to conventional two-stage panoptic systems, where a detection network is incorporated for capturing instance information.  Our new design consists of a novel instance-level network to process the semantic results by constructing a graph convolutional network to identify objects (foreground), which later on are fused with the background classes. Through the fine-grained clusters of the foreground objects from the semantic segmentation backbone, over-segmentation priors are generated and subsequently processed by 3D sparse convolution to embed each cluster. Each cluster is treated as a node in the graph and its corresponding embedding is used as its node feature. Then a GCNN predicts whether edges exist between each cluster pair. We utilize the instance label to generate ground truth edge labels for each constructed graph in order to supervise the learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GP-S3Net outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches, by a significant margin across available datasets such as, nuScenes and SemanticPOSS, ranking first on the competitive public SemanticKITTI leaderboard upon publication.
Learning From Noisy Data With Robust Representation Learning
Authors: Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong, Steven C.H. Hoi
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Learning from noisy data has attracted much attention, where most methods focus on label noise. In this work, we propose a new learning framework which simultaneously addresses three types of noise commonly seen in real-world data: label noise, out-of-distribution input, and input corruption. In contrast to most existing methods, we combat noise by learning robust representation. Specifically, we embed images into a low-dimensional subspace, and regularize the geometric structure of the subspace with robust contrastive learning, which includes an unsupervised consistency loss and a supervised mixup prototypical loss. We also propose a new noise cleaning method which leverages the learned representation to enforce a smoothness constraint on neighboring samples. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our method and robustness of the learned representation. Code is available at https://github.com/salesforce/RRL/.
Self-Supervised 3D Skeleton Action Representation Learning With Motion Consistency and Continuity
Authors: Yukun Su, Guosheng Lin, Qingyao Wu
Published in: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021 (Main Conference Track), 2021

Abstract: Recently, self-supervised learning (SSL) has been proved very effective and it can help boost the performance in learning representations from unlabeled data in the image domain. Yet, very little is explored about its usefulness in 3D skeleton-based action recognition understanding. Directly applying existing SSL techniques for 3D skeleton learning, however, suffers from trivial solutions and imprecise representations. To tackle these drawbacks, we consider perceiving the consistency and continuity of motion at different playback speeds are two critical issues. To this end, we propose a novel SSL method to learn the 3D skeleton representation in an efficacious way. Specifically, by constructing a positive clip (speed-changed) and a negative clip (motion-broken) of the sampled action sequence, we encourage the positive pairs closer while pushing the negative pairs to force the network to learn the intrinsic dynamic motion consistency information. Moreover, to enhance the learning features, skeleton interpolation is further exploited to model the continuity of human skeleton data. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted on Kinetics, NTU60, NTU120, and PKUMMD datasets with several alternative network architectures. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our approach and through which, we can gain significant performance improvement without using extra labeled data.