pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Large-scale, real-time visual-inertial localization revisited
Authors: Simon Lynen, Bernhard Zeisl, Dror Aiger, Michael Bosse, Joel Hesch, Marc Pollefeys, Roland Siegwart, Torsten Sattler
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, geo-localization, Image-Based Localization, Pose Tracking, Robot Navigation

The overarching goals in image-based localization are scale, robustness and speed. In recent years, approaches based on local features and sparse 3D point-cloud models have both dominated the benchmarks and seen successful realworld deployment. They enable applications ranging from robot navigation, autonomous driving, virtual and augmented reality to device geo-localization. Recently end-to-end learned localization approaches have been proposed which show promising results on small scale datasets. However the positioning accuracy, scalability, latency and compute & storage requirements of these approaches remain open challenges. We aim to deploy localization at global-scale where one thus relies on methods using local features and sparse 3D models. Our approach spans from offline model building to real-time client-side pose fusion. The system compresses appearance and geometry of the scene for efficient model storage and lookup leading to scalability beyond what what has been previously demonstrated. It allows for low-latency localization queries and efficient fusion run in real-time on mobile platforms by combining server-side localization with real-time visual-inertial-based camera pose tracking. In order to further improve efficiency we leverage a combination of priors, nearest neighbor search, geometric match culling and a cascaded pose candidate refinement step. This combination outperforms previous approaches when working with large scale models and allows deployment at unprecedented scale. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a proof-of-concept system localizing 2.5 million images against models from four cities in different regions on the world achieving query latencies in the 200ms range.
Learning to Find Correlated Features by Maximizing Information Flow in Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Wei Shen, Fei Li, Rujie Liu
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Training convolutional neural networks for image classification tasks usually causes information loss. Although most of the time the information lost is redundant with respect to the target task, there are still cases where discriminative information is also discarded. For example, if the samples that belong to the same category have multiple correlated features, the model may only learn a subset of the features and ignore the rest. This may not be a problem unless the classification in the test set highly depends on the ignored features. We argue that the discard of the correlated discriminative information is partially caused by the fact that the minimization of the classification loss doesn't ensure to learn the overall discriminative information but only the most discriminative information. To address this problem, we propose an information flow maximization (IFM) loss as a regularization term to find the discriminative correlated features. With less information loss the classifier can make predictions based on more informative features. We validate our method on the shiftedMNIST dataset and show the effectiveness of IFM loss in learning representative and discriminative features.
Random Vector Functional Link Neural Network based Ensemble Deep Learning
Authors: Rakesh Katuwal, P. N. Suganthan, M. Tanveer
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Ensemble Learning

In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework based on randomized neural network. In particular, inspired by the principles of Random Vector Functional Link (RVFL) network, we present a deep RVFL network (dRVFL) with stacked layers. The parameters of the hidden layers of the dRVFL are randomly generated within a suitable range and kept fixed while the output weights are computed using the closed form solution as in a standard RVFL network. We also propose an ensemble deep network (edRVFL) that can be regarded as a marriage of ensemble learning with deep learning. Unlike traditional ensembling approaches that require training several models independently from scratch, edRVFL is obtained by training a single dRVFL network once. Both dRVFL and edRVFL frameworks are generic and can be used with any RVFL variant. To illustrate this, we integrate the deep learning networks with a recently proposed sparse-pretrained RVFL (SP-RVFL). Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets from diverse domains show the superior performance of our proposed deep RVFL networks.
Difficulty-aware Meta-learning for Rare Disease Diagnosis
Authors: Xiaomeng Li, Lequan Yu, Yueming Jin, Chi-Wing Fu, Lei Xing, Pheng-Ann Heng
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Lesion Classification, Meta-Learning, Skin Lesion Classification

Rare diseases have extremely low-data regimes, unlike common diseases with large amount of available labeled data. Hence, to train a neural network to classify rare diseases with a few per-class data samples is very challenging, and so far, catches very little attention. In this paper, we present a difficulty-aware meta-learning method to address rare disease classifications and demonstrate its capability to classify dermoscopy images. Our key approach is to first train and construct a meta-learning model from data of common diseases, then adapt the model to perform rare disease classification.To achieve this, we develop the difficulty-aware meta-learning method that dynamically monitors the importance of learning tasks during the meta-optimization stage. To evaluate our method, we use the recent ISIC 2018 skin lesion classification dataset, and show that with only five samples per class, our model can quickly adapt to classify unseen classes by a high AUC of 83.3%. Also, we evaluated several rare disease classification results in the public Dermofit Image Library to demonstrate the potential of our method for real clinical practice.
Adversarially Trained Deep Neural Semantic Hashing Scheme for Subjective Search in Fashion Inventory
Authors: Saket Singh, Debdoot Sheet, Mithun Dasgupta
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

The simple approach of retrieving a closest match of a query image from one in the gallery, compares an image pair using sum of absolute difference in pixel or feature space. The process is computationally expensive, ill-posed to illumination, background composition, pose variation, as well as inefficient to be deployed on gallery sets with more than 1000 elements. Hashing is a faster alternative which involves representing images in reduced dimensional simple feature spaces. Encoding images into binary hash codes enables similarity comparison in an image-pair using the Hamming distance measure. The challenge, however, lies in encoding the images using a semantic hashing scheme that lets subjective neighbors lie within the tolerable Hamming radius. This work presents a solution employing adversarial learning of a deep neural semantic hashing network for fashion inventory retrieval. It consists of a feature extracting convolutional neural network (CNN) learned to (i) minimize error in classifying type of clothing, (ii) minimize hamming distance between semantic neighbors and maximize distance between semantically dissimilar images, (iii) maximally scramble a discriminator's ability to identify the corresponding hash code-image pair when processing a semantically similar query-gallery image pair. Experimental validation for fashion inventory search yields a mean average precision (mAP) of 90.65% in finding the closest match as compared to 53.26% obtained by the prior art of deep Cauchy hashing for hamming space retrieval.
INN: Inflated Neural Networks for IPMN Diagnosis
Authors: Rodney LaLonde, Irene Tanner, Katerina Nikiforaki, Georgios Z. Papadakis, Pujan Kandel, Candice W. Bolan, Michael B. Wallace, Ulas Bagci
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00

Intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm (IPMN) is a precursor to pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. While over half of patients are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at a distant stage, patients who are diagnosed early enjoy a much higher 5-year survival rate of $34\%$ compared to $3\%$ in the former; hence, early diagnosis is key. Unique challenges in the medical imaging domain such as extremely limited annotated data sets and typically large 3D volumetric data have made it difficult for deep learning to secure a strong foothold. In this work, we construct two novel "inflated" deep network architectures, $\textit{InceptINN}$ and $\textit{DenseINN}$, for the task of diagnosing IPMN from multisequence (T1 and T2) MRI. These networks inflate their 2D layers to 3D and bootstrap weights from their 2D counterparts (Inceptionv3 and DenseNet121 respectively) trained on ImageNet to the new 3D kernels. We also extend the inflation process by further expanding the pre-trained kernels to handle any number of input modalities and different fusion strategies. This is one of the first studies to train an end-to-end deep network on multisequence MRI for IPMN diagnosis, and shows that our proposed novel inflated network architectures are able to handle the extremely limited training data (139 MRI scans), while providing an absolute improvement of $8.76\%$ in accuracy for diagnosing IPMN over the current state-of-the-art. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/lalonderodney/INN-Inflated-Neural-Nets.
Predicting video saliency using crowdsourced mouse-tracking data
Authors: Vitaliy Lyudvichenko, Dmitriy Vatolin
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

This paper presents a new way of getting high-quality saliency maps for video, using a cheaper alternative to eye-tracking data. We designed a mouse-contingent video viewing system which simulates the viewers' peripheral vision based on the position of the mouse cursor. The system enables the use of mouse-tracking data recorded from an ordinary computer mouse as an alternative to real gaze fixations recorded by a more expensive eye-tracker. We developed a crowdsourcing system that enables the collection of such mouse-tracking data at large scale. Using the collected mouse-tracking data we showed that it can serve as an approximation of eye-tracking data. Moreover, trying to increase the efficiency of collected mouse-tracking data we proposed a novel deep neural network algorithm that improves the quality of mouse-tracking saliency maps.
ICDAR 2019 Competition on Scene Text Visual Question Answering
Authors: Ali Furkan Biten, Rubèn Tito, Andres Mafla, Lluis Gomez, Marçal Rusiñol, Minesh Mathew, C. V. Jawahar, Ernest Valveny, Dimosthenis Karatzas
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

This paper presents final results of ICDAR 2019 Scene Text Visual Question Answering competition (ST-VQA). ST-VQA introduces an important aspect that is not addressed by any Visual Question Answering system up to date, namely the incorporation of scene text to answer questions asked about an image. The competition introduces a new dataset comprising 23,038 images annotated with 31,791 question/answer pairs where the answer is always grounded on text instances present in the image. The images are taken from 7 different public computer vision datasets, covering a wide range of scenarios. The competition was structured in three tasks of increasing difficulty, that require reading the text in a scene and understanding it in the context of the scene, to correctly answer a given question. A novel evaluation metric is presented, which elegantly assesses both key capabilities expected from an optimal model: text recognition and image understanding. A detailed analysis of results from different participants is showcased, which provides insight into the current capabilities of VQA systems that can read. We firmly believe the dataset proposed in this challenge will be an important milestone to consider towards a path of more robust and general models that can exploit scene text to achieve holistic image understanding.
Learning to Blindly Assess Image Quality in the Laboratory and Wild
Authors: Weixia Zhang, Kede Ma, Guangtao Zhai, Xiaokang Yang
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, Learning-To-Rank, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Computational models for blind image quality assessment (BIQA) are typically trained in well-controlled laboratory environments with limited generalizability to realistically distorted images. Similarly, BIQA models optimized for images captured in the wild cannot adequately handle synthetically distorted images. To face the cross-distortion-scenario challenge, we develop a BIQA model and an approach of training it on multiple IQA databases (of different distortion scenarios) simultaneously. A key step in our approach is to create and combine image pairs within individual databases as the training set, which effectively bypasses the issue of perceptual scale realignment. We compute a continuous quality annotation for each pair from the corresponding human opinions, indicating the probability of one image having better perceptual quality. We train a deep neural network for BIQA over the training set of massive image pairs by minimizing the fidelity loss. Experiments on six IQA databases demonstrate that the optimized model by the proposed training strategy is effective in blindly assessing image quality in the laboratory and wild, outperforming previous BIQA methods by a large margin.
Cross-view Relation Networks for Mammogram Mass Detection
Authors: Jiechao Ma, Sen Liang, Xiang Li, Hongwei Li, Bjoern H. Menze, Rongguo Zhang, Wei-Shi Zheng
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Lesion Detection, Relation

Mammogram is the most effective imaging modality for the mass lesion detection of breast cancer at the early stage. The information from the two paired views (i.e., medio-lateral oblique and cranio-caudal) are highly relational and complementary, and this is crucial for doctors' decisions in clinical practice. However, existing mass detection methods do not consider jointly learning effective features from the two relational views. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel mammogram mass detection framework, termed Cross-View Relation Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (CVR-RCNN). The proposed CVR-RCNN is expected to capture the latent relation information between the corresponding mass region of interests (ROIs) from the two paired views. Evaluations on a new large-scale private dataset and a public mammogram dataset show that the proposed CVR-RCNN outperforms existing state-of-the-art mass detection methods. Meanwhile, our experimental results suggest that incorporating the relation information across two views helps to train a superior detection model, which is a promising avenue for mammogram mass detection.
Large Area 3D Human Pose Detection Via Stereo Reconstruction in Panoramic Cameras
Authors: Christoph Heindl, Thomas Pönitz, Andreas Pichler, Josef Scharinger
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

We propose a novel 3D human pose detector using two panoramic cameras. We show that transforming fisheye perspectives to rectilinear views allows a direct application of two-dimensional deep-learning pose estimation methods, without the explicit need for a costly re-training step to compensate for fisheye image distortions. By utilizing panoramic cameras, our method is capable of accurately estimating human poses over a large field of view. This renders our method suitable for ergonomic analyses and other pose based assessments.
Spatio-thermal depth correction of RGB-D sensors based on Gaussian Processes in real-time
Authors: Christoph Heindl, Thomas Pönitz, Gernot Stübl, Andreas Pichler, Josef Scharinger
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, regression

Commodity RGB-D sensors capture color images along with dense pixel-wise depth information in real-time. Typical RGB-D sensors are provided with a factory calibration and exhibit erratic depth readings due to coarse calibration values, ageing and thermal influence effects. This limits their applicability in computer vision and robotics. We propose a novel method to accurately calibrate depth considering spatial and thermal influences jointly. Our work is based on Gaussian Process Regression in a four dimensional Cartesian and thermal domain. We propose to leverage modern GPUs for dense depth map correction in real-time. For reproducibility we make our dataset and source code publicly available.
Learning to Approximate Directional Fields Defined over 2D Planes
Authors: Maria Taktasheva, Albert Matveev, Alexey Artemov, Evgeny Burnaev
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00

Reconstruction of directional fields is a need in many geometry processing tasks, such as image tracing, extraction of 3D geometric features, and finding principal surface directions. A common approach to the construction of directional fields from data relies on complex optimization procedures, which are usually poorly formalizable, require a considerable computational effort, and do not transfer across applications. In this work, we propose a deep learning-based approach and study the expressive power and generalization ability.
One Network for Multi-Domains: Domain Adaptive Hashing with Intersectant Generative Adversarial Network
Authors: Tao He, Yuan-Fang Li, Lianli Gao, Dongxiang Zhang, Jingkuan Song
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Retrieval, Object Recognition, Retrieval

With the recent explosive increase of digital data, image recognition and retrieval become a critical practical application. Hashing is an effective solution to this problem, due to its low storage requirement and high query speed. However, most of past works focus on hashing in a single (source) domain. Thus, the learned hash function may not adapt well in a new (target) domain that has a large distributional difference with the source domain. In this paper, we explore an end-to-end domain adaptive learning framework that simultaneously and precisely generates discriminative hash codes and classifies target domain images. Our method encodes two domains images into a semantic common space, followed by two independent generative adversarial networks arming at crosswise reconstructing two domains' images, reducing domain disparity and improving alignment in the shared space. We evaluate our framework on {four} public benchmark datasets, all of which show that our method is superior to the other state-of-the-art methods on the tasks of object recognition and image retrieval.
Permutohedral Attention Module for Efficient Non-Local Neural Networks
Authors: Samuel Joutard, Reuben Dorent, Amanda Isaac, Sebastien Ourselin, Tom Vercauteren, Marc Modat
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Segmentation

Medical image processing tasks such as segmentation often require capturing non-local information. As organs, bones, and tissues share common characteristics such as intensity, shape, and texture, the contextual information plays a critical role in correctly labeling them. Segmentation and labeling is now typically done with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but the context of the CNN is limited by the receptive field which itself is limited by memory requirements and other properties. In this paper, we propose a new attention module, that we call Permutohedral Attention Module (PAM), to efficiently capture non-local characteristics of the image. The proposed method is both memory and computationally efficient. We provide a GPU implementation of this module suitable for 3D medical imaging problems. We demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our module with the challenging task of vertebrae segmentation and labeling where context plays a crucial role because of the very similar appearance of different vertebrae.
Self-supervised Hyperspectral Image Restoration using Separable Image Prior
Authors: Ryuji Imamura, Tatsuki Itasaka, Masahiro Okuda
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Restoration, Self-Supervised Learning

Supervised learning with a convolutional neural network is recognized as a powerful means of image restoration. However, most such methods have been designed for application to grayscale and/or color images; therefore, they have limited success when applied to hyperspectral image restoration. This is partially owing to large datasets being difficult to collect, and also the heavy computational load associated with the restoration of an image with many spectral bands. To address this difficulty, we propose a novel self-supervised learning strategy for application to hyperspectral image restoration. Our method automatically creates a training dataset from a single degraded image and trains a denoising network without any clear images. Another notable feature of our method is the use of a separable convolutional layer. We undertake experiments to prove that the use of a separable network allows us to acquire the prior of a hyperspectral image and to realize efficient restoration. We demonstrate the validity of our method through extensive experiments and show that our method has better characteristics than those that are currently regarded as state-of-the-art.
The Resale Price Prediction of Secondhand Jewelry Items Using a Multi-modal Deep Model with Iterative Co-Attention
Authors: Yusuke Yamaura, Nobuya Kanemaki, Yukihiro Tsuboshita
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00

The resale price assessment of secondhand jewelry items relies heavily on the individual knowledge and skill of domain experts. In this paper, we propose a methodology for reconstructing an AI system that autonomously assesses the resale prices of secondhand jewelry items without the need for professional knowledge. As shown in recent studies on fashion items, multimodal approaches combining specifications and visual information of items have succeeded in obtaining fine-grained representations of fashion items, although they generally apply simple vector operations through a multimodal fusion. We similarly build a multimodal model using images and attributes of the product and further employ state-of-the-art multimodal deep neural networks applied in computer vision to achieve a practical performance level. In addition, we model the pricing procedure of an expert using iterative co-attention networks in which the appearance and attributes of the product are carefully and iteratively observed. Herein, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model using a large dataset of secondhand no brand jewelry items received from a collaborating fashion retailer, and show that the iterative co-attention process operates effectively in the context of resale price prediction. Our model architecture is widely applicable to other fashion items where appearance and specifications are important aspects.