pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-Modal Recognition of Worker Activity for Human-Centered Intelligent Manufacturing
Authors: Wenjin Tao, Ming C. Leu, Zhaozheng Yin
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Prediction, Activity Recognition

In a human-centered intelligent manufacturing system, sensing and understanding of the worker's activity are the primary tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal approach for worker activity recognition by leveraging information from different sensors and in different modalities. Specifically, a smart armband and a visual camera are applied to capture Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) signals and videos, respectively. For the IMU signals, we design two novel feature transform mechanisms, in both frequency and spatial domains, to assemble the captured IMU signals as images, which allow using convolutional neural networks to learn the most discriminative features. Along with the above two modalities, we propose two other modalities for the video data, at the video frame and video clip levels, respectively. Each of the four modalities returns a probability distribution on activity prediction. Then, these probability distributions are fused to output the worker activity classification result. A worker activity dataset of 6 activities is established, which at present contains 6 common activities in assembly tasks, i.e., grab a tool/part, hammer a nail, use a power-screwdriver, rest arms, turn a screwdriver, and use a wrench. The developed multi-modal approach is evaluated on this dataset and achieves recognition accuracies as high as 97% and 100% in the leave-one-out and half-half experiments, respectively.
Action recognition with spatial-temporal discriminative filter banks
Authors: Brais Martinez, Davide Modolo, Yuanjun Xiong, Joseph Tighe
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition, Computational Efficiency

Action recognition has seen a dramatic performance improvement in the last few years. Most of the current state-of-the-art literature either aims at improving performance through changes to the backbone CNN network, or they explore different trade-offs between computational efficiency and performance, again through altering the backbone network. However, almost all of these works maintain the same last layers of the network, which simply consist of a global average pooling followed by a fully connected layer. In this work we focus on how to improve the representation capacity of the network, but rather than altering the backbone, we focus on improving the last layers of the network, where changes have low impact in terms of computational cost. In particular, we show that current architectures have poor sensitivity to finer details and we exploit recent advances in the fine-grained recognition literature to improve our model in this aspect. With the proposed approach, we obtain state-of-the-art performance on Kinetics-400 and Something-Something-V1, the two major large-scale action recognition benchmarks.
On Object Symmetries and 6D Pose Estimation from Images
Authors: Giorgia Pitteri, Michaël Ramamonjisoa, Slobodan Ilic, Vincent Lepetit
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, Object, Pose Estimation

Objects with symmetries are common in our daily life and in industrial contexts, but are often ignored in the recent literature on 6D pose estimation from images. In this paper, we study in an analytical way the link between the symmetries of a 3D object and its appearance in images. We explain why symmetrical objects can be a challenge when training machine learning algorithms that aim at estimating their 6D pose from images. We propose an efficient and simple solution that relies on the normalization of the pose rotation. Our approach is general and can be used with any 6D pose estimation algorithm. Moreover, our method is also beneficial for objects that are 'almost symmetrical', i.e. objects for which only a detail breaks the symmetry. We validate our approach within a Faster-RCNN framework on a synthetic dataset made with objects from the T-Less dataset, which exhibit various types of symmetries, as well as real sequences from T-Less.
Saccader: Improving Accuracy of Hard Attention Models for Vision
Authors: Gamaleldin F. Elsayed, Simon Kornblith, Quoc V. Le
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Hard Attention, image-classification, Image Classification

Although deep convolutional neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance across nearly all image classification tasks, their decisions are difficult to interpret. One approach that offers some level of interpretability by design is \textit{hard attention}, which uses only relevant portions of the image. However, training hard attention models with only class label supervision is challenging, and hard attention has proved difficult to scale to complex datasets. Here, we propose a novel hard attention model, which we term Saccader. Key to Saccader is a pretraining step that requires only class labels and provides initial attention locations for policy gradient optimization. Our best models narrow the gap to common ImageNet baselines, achieving $75\%$ top-1 and $91\%$ top-5 while attending to less than one-third of the image.
Communal Domain Learning for Registration in Drifted Image Spaces
Authors: Awais Mansoor, Marius George Linguraru
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Designing a registration framework for images that do not share the same probability distribution is a major challenge in modern image analytics yet trivial task for the human visual system (HVS). Discrepancies in probability distributions, also known as \emph{drifts}, can occur due to various reasons including, but not limited to differences in sequences and modalities (e.g., MRI T1-T2 and MRI-CT registration), or acquisition settings (e.g., multisite, inter-subject, or intra-subject registrations). The popular assumption about the working of HVS is that it exploits a communal feature subspace exists between the registering images or fields-of-view that encompasses key drift-invariant features. Mimicking the approach that is potentially adopted by the HVS, herein, we present a representation learning technique of this invariant communal subspace that is shared by registering domains. The proposed communal domain learning (CDL) framework uses a set of hierarchical nonlinear transforms to learn the communal subspace that minimizes the probability differences and maximizes the amount of shared information between the registering domains. Similarity metric and parameter optimization calculations for registration are subsequently performed in the drift-minimized learned communal subspace. This generic registration framework is applied to register multisequence (MR: T1, T2) and multimodal (MR, CT) images. Results demonstrated generic applicability, consistent performance, and statistically significant improvement for both multi-sequence and multi-modal data using the proposed approach ($p$-value$<0.001$; Wilcoxon rank sum test) over baseline methods.
FusionNet: Incorporating Shape and Texture for Abnormality Detection in 3D Abdominal CT Scans
Authors: Fengze Liu, Yuyin Zhou, Elliot Fishman, Alan Yuille
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Classification, Anomaly Detection, Binary Classification, Classification, General Classification, Specificity

Automatic abnormality detection in abdominal CT scans can help doctors improve the accuracy and efficiency in diagnosis. In this paper we aim at detecting pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common pancreatic cancer. Taking the fact that the existence of tumor can affect both the shape and the texture of pancreas, we design a system to extract the shape and texture feature at the same time for detecting PDAC. In this paper we propose a two-stage method for this 3D classification task. First, we segment the pancreas into a binary mask. Second, a FusionNet is proposed to take both the binary mask and CT image as input and perform a binary classification. The optimal architecture of the FusionNet is obtained by searching a pre-defined functional space. We show that the classification results using either shape or texture information are complementary, and by fusing them with the optimized architecture, the performance improves by a large margin. Our method achieves a specificity of 97% and a sensitivity of 92% on 200 normal scans and 136 scans with PDAC.
Preserving Semantic and Temporal Consistency for Unpaired Video-to-Video Translation
Authors: Kwanyong Park, Sanghyun Woo, Dahun Kim, Donghyeon Cho, In So Kweon
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Translation

In this paper, we investigate the problem of unpaired video-to-video translation. Given a video in the source domain, we aim to learn the conditional distribution of the corresponding video in the target domain, without seeing any pairs of corresponding videos. While significant progress has been made in the unpaired translation of images, directly applying these methods to an input video leads to low visual quality due to the additional time dimension. In particular, previous methods suffer from semantic inconsistency (i.e., semantic label flipping) and temporal flickering artifacts. To alleviate these issues, we propose a new framework that is composed of carefully-designed generators and discriminators, coupled with two core objective functions: 1) content preserving loss and 2) temporal consistency loss. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method against previous approaches. We further apply our framework to a domain adaptation task and achieve favorable results.
Are Registration Uncertainty and Error Monotonically Associated
Authors: Jie Luo, Sarah Frisken, Duo Wang, Alexandra Golby, Masashi Sugiyama, William M. Wells III
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

In image-guided neurosurgery, current commercial systems usually provide only rigid registration, partly because it is harder to predict, validate and understand non-rigid registration error. For instance, when surgeons see a discrepancy in aligned image features, they may not be able to distinguish between registration error and actual tissue deformation caused by tumor resection. In this case, the spatial distribution of registration error could help them make more informed decisions, e.g., ignoring the registration where the estimated error is high. However, error estimates are difficult to acquire. Probabilistic image registration (PIR) methods provide measures of registration uncertainty, which could be a surrogate for assessing the registration error. It is intuitive and believed by many clinicians that high uncertainty indicates a large error. However, the monotonic association between uncertainty and error has not been examined in image registration literature. In this pilot study, we attempt to address this fundamental problem by looking at one PIR method, the Gaussian process (GP) registration. We systematically investigate the relation between GP uncertainty and error based on clinical data and show empirically that there is a weak-to-moderate positive monotonic correlation between point-wise GP registration uncertainty and non-rigid registration error.
KeystoneDepth: Visualizing History in 3D
Authors: Xuan Luo, Yanmeng Kong, Jason Lawrence, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Steve Seitz
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00

This paper introduces the largest and most diverse collection of rectified stereo image pairs to the research community, KeystoneDepth, consisting of tens of thousands of stereographs of historical people, events, objects, and scenes between 1860 and 1963. Leveraging the Keystone-Mast raw scans from the California Museum of Photography, we apply multiple processing steps to produce clean stereo image pairs, complete with calibration data, rectification transforms, and depthmaps. A second contribution is a novel approach for view synthesis that runs at real-time rates on a mobile device, simulating the experience of looking through an open window into these historical scenes. We produce results for thousands of antique stereographs, capturing many important historical moments.
RBCN: Rectified Binary Convolutional Networks for Enhancing the Performance of 1-bit DCNNs
Authors: Chunlei Liu, Wenrui Ding, Xin Xia, Yuan Hu, Baochang Zhang, Jianzhuang Liu, Bohan Zhuang, Guodong Guo
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Object Tracking

Binarized convolutional neural networks (BCNNs) are widely used to improve memory and computation efficiency of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for mobile and AI chips based applications. However, current BCNNs are not able to fully explore their corresponding full-precision models, causing a significant performance gap between them. In this paper, we propose rectified binary convolutional networks (RBCNs), towards optimized BCNNs, by combining full-precision kernels and feature maps to rectify the binarization process in a unified framework. In particular, we use a GAN to train the 1-bit binary network with the guidance of its corresponding full-precision model, which significantly improves the performance of BCNNs. The rectified convolutional layers are generic and flexible, and can be easily incorporated into existing DCNNs such as WideResNets and ResNets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed RBCNs over state-of-the-art BCNNs. In particular, our method shows strong generalization on the object tracking task.
A Realistic Face-to-Face Conversation System based on Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Zezhou Chen, Zhaoxiang Liu, Huan Hu, Jinqiang Bai, Shiguo Lian, Fuyuan Shi, Kai Wang
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

To improve the experiences of face-to-face conversation with avatar, this paper presents a novel conversation system. It is composed of two sequence-to-sequence models respectively for listening and speaking and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based realistic avatar synthesizer. The models exploit the facial action and head pose to learn natural human reactions. Based on the models' output, the synthesizer uses the Pixel2Pixel model to generate realistic facial images. To show the improvement of our system, we use a 3D model based avatar driving scheme as a reference. We train and evaluate our neural networks with the data from ESPN shows. Experimental results show that our conversation system can generate natural facial reactions and realistic facial images.
Video-based Bottleneck Detection utilizing Lagrangian Dynamics in Crowded Scenes
Authors: Maik Simon, Markus Küchhold, Tobias Senst, Erik Bochinski, Thomas Sikora
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Avoiding bottleneck situations in crowds is critical for the safety and comfort of people at large events or in public transportation. Based on the work of Lagrangian motion analysis we propose a novel video-based bottleneckdetector by identifying characteristic stowage patterns in crowd-movements captured by optical flow fields. The Lagrangian framework allows to assess complex timedependent crowd-motion dynamics at large temporal scales near the bottleneck by two dimensional Lagrangian fields. In particular we propose long-term temporal filtered Finite Time Lyapunov Exponents (FTLE) fields that provide towards a more global segmentation of the crowd movements and allows to capture its deformations when a crowd is passing a bottleneck. Finally, these deformations are used for an automatic spatio-temporal detection of such situations. The performance of the proposed approach is shown in extensive evaluations on the existing J\"ulich and AGORASET datasets, that we have updated with ground truth data for spatio-temporal bottleneck analysis.
Adaptive Structure-constrained Robust Latent Low-Rank Coding for Image Recovery
Authors: Zhao Zhang, Lei Wang, Sheng Li, Yang Wang, Zheng Zhang, Zheng-Jun Zha, Meng Wang
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

In this paper, we propose a robust representation learning model called Adaptive Structure-constrained Low-Rank Coding (AS-LRC) for the latent representation of data. To recover the underlying subspaces more accurately, AS-LRC seamlessly integrates an adaptive weighting based block-diagonal structure-constrained low-rank representation and the group sparse salient feature extraction into a unified framework. Specifically, AS-LRC performs the latent decomposition of given data into a low-rank reconstruction by a block-diagonal codes matrix, a group sparse locality-adaptive salient feature part and a sparse error part. To enforce the block-diagonal structures adaptive to different real datasets for the low-rank recovery, AS-LRC clearly computes an auto-weighting matrix based on the locality-adaptive features and multiplies by the low-rank coefficients for direct minimization at the same time. This encourages the codes to be block-diagonal and can avoid the tricky issue of choosing optimal neighborhood size or kernel width for the weight assignment, suffered in most local geometrical structures-preserving low-rank coding methods. In addition, our AS-LRC selects the L2,1-norm on the projection for extracting group sparse features rather than learning low-rank features by Nuclear-norm regularization, which can make learnt features robust to noise and outliers in samples, and can also make the feature coding process efficient. Extensive visualizations and numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our AS-LRC for image representation and recovery.
Learning Structured Twin-Incoherent Twin-Projective Latent Dictionary Pairs for Classification
Authors: Zhao Zhang, Yulin Sun, Zheng Zhang, Yang Wang, Guangcan Liu, Meng Wang
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

In this paper, we extend the popular dictionary pair learning (DPL) into the scenario of twin-projective latent flexible DPL under a structured twin-incoherence. Technically, a novel framework called Twin-Projective Latent Flexible DPL (TP-DPL) is proposed, which minimizes the twin-incoherence constrained flexibly-relaxed reconstruction error to avoid the possible over-fitting issue and produce accurate reconstruction. In this setting, our TP-DPL integrates the twin-incoherence based latent flexible DPL and the joint embedding of codes as well as salient features by twin-projection into a unified model in an adaptive neighborhood-preserving manner. As a result, TP-DPL unifies the salient feature extraction, representation and classification. The twin-incoherence constraint on codes and features can explicitly ensure high intra-class compactness and inter-class separation over them. TP-DPL also integrates the adaptive weighting to preserve the local neighborhood of the coefficients and salient features within each class explicitly. For efficiency, TP-DPL uses Frobenius-norm and abandons the costly l0/l1-norm for group sparse representation. Another byproduct is that TP-DPL can directly apply the class-specific twin-projective reconstruction residual to compute the label of data. Extensive results on public databases show that TP-DPL can deliver the state-of-the-art performance.
Effects of Blur and Deblurring to Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Qing Guo, Wei Feng, Zhihao Chen, Ruijun Gao, Liang Wan, Song Wang
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Deblurring, Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking

Intuitively, motion blur may hurt the performance of visual object tracking. However, we lack quantitative evaluation of tracker robustness to different levels of motion blur. Meanwhile, while image deblurring methods can produce visually clearer videos for pleasing human eyes, it is unknown whether visual object tracking can benefit from image deblurring or not. In this paper, we address these two problems by constructing a Blurred Video Tracking benchmark, which contains a variety of videos with different levels of motion blurs, as well as ground truth tracking results for evaluating trackers. We extensively evaluate 23 trackers on this benchmark and observe several new interesting results. Specifically, we find that light blur may improve the performance of many trackers, but heavy blur always hurts the tracking performance. We also find that image deblurring may help to improve tracking performance on heavily blurred videos but hurt the performance on lightly blurred videos. According to these observations, we propose a new GAN based scheme to improve the tracker robustness to motion blurs. In this scheme, a finetuned discriminator is used as an adaptive assessor to selectively deblur frames during the tracking process. We use this scheme to successfully improve the accuracy and robustness of 6 trackers.
DomainSiam: Domain-Aware Siamese Network for Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Mohamed H. Abdelpakey, Mohamed S. Shehata
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Object, Object Tracking, regression, Visual Object Tracking

Visual object tracking is a fundamental task in the field of computer vision. Recently, Siamese trackers have achieved state-of-the-art performance on recent benchmarks. However, Siamese trackers do not fully utilize semantic and objectness information from pre-trained networks that have been trained on the image classification task. Furthermore, the pre-trained Siamese architecture is sparsely activated by the category label which leads to unnecessary calculations and overfitting. In this paper, we propose to learn a Domain-Aware, that is fully utilizing semantic and objectness information while producing a class-agnostic using a ridge regression network. Moreover, to reduce the sparsity problem, we solve the ridge regression problem with a differentiable weighted-dynamic loss function. Our tracker, dubbed DomainSiam, improves the feature learning in the training phase and generalization capability to other domains. Extensive experiments are performed on five tracking benchmarks including OTB2013 and OTB2015 for a validation set; as well as the VOT2017, VOT2018, LaSOT, TrackingNet, and GOT10k for a testing set. DomainSiam achieves state-of-the-art performance on these benchmarks while running at 53 FPS.
PCRNet: Point Cloud Registration Network using PointNet Encoding
Authors: Vinit Sarode, Xueqian Li, Hunter Goforth, Yasuhiro Aoki, Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan, Simon Lucey, Howie Choset
Date: 2019-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, object-detection, Object Detection, Point Cloud Registration, Pose Estimation

PointNet has recently emerged as a popular representation for unstructured point cloud data, allowing application of deep learning to tasks such as object detection, segmentation and shape completion. However, recent works in literature have shown the sensitivity of the PointNet representation to pose misalignment. This paper presents a novel framework that uses the PointNet representation to align point clouds and perform registration for applications such as tracking, 3D reconstruction and pose estimation. We develop a framework that compares PointNet features of template and source point clouds to find the transformation that aligns them accurately. Depending on the prior information about the shape of the object formed by the point clouds, our framework can produce approaches that are shape specific or general to unseen shapes. The shape specific approach uses a Siamese architecture with fully connected (FC) layers and is robust to noise and initial misalignment in data. We perform extensive simulation and real-world experiments to validate the efficacy of our approach and compare the performance with state-of-art approaches.