pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Searching Central Difference Convolutional Networks for Face Anti-Spoofing
Authors: Zitong Yu, Chenxu Zhao, Zezheng Wang, Yunxiao Qin, Zhuo Su, Xiaobai Li, Feng Zhou, Guoying Zhao
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Face Anti-Spoofing, Face Recognition, Neural Architecture Search

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) plays a vital role in face recognition systems. Most state-of-the-art FAS methods 1) rely on stacked convolutions and expert-designed network, which is weak in describing detailed fine-grained information and easily being ineffective when the environment varies (e.g., different illumination), and 2) prefer to use long sequence as input to extract dynamic features, making them difficult to deploy into scenarios which need quick response. Here we propose a novel frame level FAS method based on Central Difference Convolution (CDC), which is able to capture intrinsic detailed patterns via aggregating both intensity and gradient information. A network built with CDC, called the Central Difference Convolutional Network (CDCN), is able to provide more robust modeling capacity than its counterpart built with vanilla convolution. Furthermore, over a specifically designed CDC search space, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is utilized to discover a more powerful network structure (CDCN++), which can be assembled with Multiscale Attention Fusion Module (MAFM) for further boosting performance. Comprehensive experiments are performed on six benchmark datasets to show that 1) the proposed method not only achieves superior performance on intra-dataset testing (especially 0.2% ACER in Protocol-1 of OULU-NPU dataset), 2) it also generalizes well on cross-dataset testing (particularly 6.5% HTER from CASIA-MFSD to Replay-Attack datasets). The codes are available at \href{https://github.com/ZitongYu/CDCN}{https://github.com/ZitongYu/CDCN}.
A Strong Baseline for Fashion Retrieval with Person Re-Identification Models
Authors: Mikolaj Wieczorek, Andrzej Michalowski, Anna Wroblewska, Jacek Dabrowski
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Fashion retrieval is the challenging task of finding an exact match for fashion items contained within an image. Difficulties arise from the fine-grained nature of clothing items, very large intra-class and inter-class variance. Additionally, query and source images for the task usually come from different domains - street photos and catalogue photos respectively. Due to these differences, a significant gap in quality, lighting, contrast, background clutter and item presentation exists between domains. As a result, fashion retrieval is an active field of research both in academia and the industry. Inspired by recent advancements in Person Re-Identification research, we adapt leading ReID models to be used in fashion retrieval tasks. We introduce a simple baseline model for fashion retrieval, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art results despite a much simpler architecture. We conduct in-depth experiments on Street2Shop and DeepFashion datasets and validate our results. Finally, we propose a cross-domain (cross-dataset) evaluation method to test the robustness of fashion retrieval models.
Hazard Detection in Supermarkets using Deep Learning on the Edge
Authors: M. G. Sarwar Murshed, Edward Verenich, James J. Carroll, Nazar Khan, Faraz Hussain
Date: 2020-02-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

Supermarkets need to ensure clean and safe environments for both shoppers and employees. Slips, trips, and falls can result in injuries that have a physical as well as financial cost. Timely detection of hazardous conditions such as spilled liquids or fallen items on supermarket floors can reduce the chances of serious injuries. This paper presents EdgeLite, a novel, lightweight deep learning model for easy deployment and inference on resource-constrained devices. We describe the use of EdgeLite on two edge devices for detecting supermarket floor hazards. On a hazard detection dataset that we developed, EdgeLite, when deployed on edge devices, outperformed six state-of-the-art object detection models in terms of accuracy while having comparable memory usage and inference time.
The Utility of Feature Reuse: Transfer Learning in Data-Starved Regimes
Authors: Rashik Shadman, M. G. Sarwar Murshed, Edward Verenich, Alvaro Velasquez, Faraz Hussain
Date: 2020-02-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

The use of transfer learning with deep neural networks has increasingly become widespread for deploying well-tested computer vision systems to newer domains, especially those with limited datasets. We describe a transfer learning use case for a domain with a data-starved regime, having fewer than 100 labeled target samples. We evaluate the effectiveness of convolutional feature extraction and fine-tuning of overparameterized models with respect to the size of target training data, as well as their generalization performance on data with covariate shift, or out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Our experiments demonstrate that both overparameterization and feature reuse contribute to the successful application of transfer learning in training image classifiers in data-starved regimes. We provide visual explanations to support our findings and conclude that transfer learning enhances the performance of CNN architectures in data-starved regimes.
iFAN: Image-Instance Full Alignment Networks for Adaptive Object Detection
Authors: Chenfan Zhuang, Xintong Han, Weilin Huang, Matthew R. Scott
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Metric Learning, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Training an object detector on a data-rich domain and applying it to a data-poor one with limited performance drop is highly attractive in industry, because it saves huge annotation cost. Recent research on unsupervised domain adaptive object detection has verified that aligning data distributions between source and target images through adversarial learning is very useful. The key is when, where and how to use it to achieve best practice. We propose Image-Instance Full Alignment Networks (iFAN) to tackle this problem by precisely aligning feature distributions on both image and instance levels: 1) Image-level alignment: multi-scale features are roughly aligned by training adversarial domain classifiers in a hierarchically-nested fashion. 2) Full instance-level alignment: deep semantic information and elaborate instance representations are fully exploited to establish a strong relationship among categories and domains. Establishing these correlations is formulated as a metric learning problem by carefully constructing instance pairs. Above-mentioned adaptations can be integrated into an object detector (e.g. Faster RCNN), resulting in an end-to-end trainable framework where multiple alignments can work collaboratively in a coarse-tofine manner. In two domain adaptation tasks: synthetic-to-real (SIM10K->Cityscapes) and normal-to-foggy weather (Cityscapes->Foggy Cityscapes), iFAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with a boost of 10%+ AP over the source-only baseline.
Accurate Temporal Action Proposal Generation with Relation-Aware Pyramid Network
Authors: Jialin Gao, Zhixiang Shi, Jiani Li, Guanshuo Wang, Yufeng Yuan, Shiming Ge, Xi Zhou
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Temporal Action Proposal Generation

Accurate temporal action proposals play an important role in detecting actions from untrimmed videos. The existing approaches have difficulties in capturing global contextual information and simultaneously localizing actions with different durations. To this end, we propose a Relation-aware pyramid Network (RapNet) to generate highly accurate temporal action proposals. In RapNet, a novel relation-aware module is introduced to exploit bi-directional long-range relations between local features for context distilling. This embedded module enhances the RapNet in terms of its multi-granularity temporal proposal generation ability, given predefined anchor boxes. We further introduce a two-stage adjustment scheme to refine the proposal boundaries and measure their confidence in containing an action with snippet-level actionness. Extensive experiments on the challenging ActivityNet and THUMOS14 benchmarks demonstrate our RapNet generates superior accurate proposals over the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Embedding Propagation: Smoother Manifold for Few-Shot Classification
Authors: Pau Rodríguez, Issam Laradji, Alexandre Drouin, Alexandre Lacoste
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Image Classification, General Classification, Transductive Learning

Few-shot classification is challenging because the data distribution of the training set can be widely different to the test set as their classes are disjoint. This distribution shift often results in poor generalization. Manifold smoothing has been shown to address the distribution shift problem by extending the decision boundaries and reducing the noise of the class representations. Moreover, manifold smoothness is a key factor for semi-supervised learning and transductive learning algorithms. In this work, we propose to use embedding propagation as an unsupervised non-parametric regularizer for manifold smoothing in few-shot classification. Embedding propagation leverages interpolations between the extracted features of a neural network based on a similarity graph. We empirically show that embedding propagation yields a smoother embedding manifold. We also show that applying embedding propagation to a transductive classifier achieves new state-of-the-art results in mini-Imagenet, tiered-Imagenet, Imagenet-FS, and CUB. Furthermore, we show that embedding propagation consistently improves the accuracy of the models in multiple semi-supervised learning scenarios by up to 16\% points. The proposed embedding propagation operation can be easily integrated as a non-parametric layer into a neural network. We provide the training code and usage examples at https://github.com/ElementAI/embedding-propagation.
BirdNet+: End-to-End 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Bird's Eye View
Authors: Alejandro Barrera, Carlos Guindel, Jorge Beltrán, Fernando García
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Vehicles, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

On-board 3D object detection in autonomous vehicles often relies on geometry information captured by LiDAR devices. Albeit image features are typically preferred for detection, numerous approaches take only spatial data as input. Exploiting this information in inference usually involves the use of compact representations such as the Bird's Eye View (BEV) projection, which entails a loss of information and thus hinders the joint inference of all the parameters of the objects' 3D boxes. In this paper, we present a fully end-to-end 3D object detection framework that can infer oriented 3D boxes solely from BEV images by using a two-stage object detector and ad-hoc regression branches, eliminating the need for a post-processing stage. The method outperforms its predecessor (BirdNet) by a large margin and obtains state-of-the-art results on the KITTI 3D Object Detection Benchmark for all the categories in evaluation.
Domain Adversarial Training for Infrared-colour Person Re-Identification
Authors: Nima Mohammadi Meshky, Sara Iodice, Krystian Mikolajczyk
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (re-ID) is a very active area of research in computer vision, due to the role it plays in video surveillance. Currently, most methods only address the task of matching between colour images. However, in poorly-lit environments CCTV cameras switch to infrared imaging, hence developing a system which can correctly perform matching between infrared and colour images is a necessity. In this paper, we propose a part-feature extraction network to better focus on subtle, unique signatures on the person which are visible across both infrared and colour modalities. To train the model we propose a novel variant of the domain adversarial feature-learning framework. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Semantic Object Prediction and Spatial Sound Super-Resolution with Binaural Sounds
Authors: Arun Balajee Vasudevan, Dengxin Dai, Luc van Gool
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Super-Resolution

Humans can robustly recognize and localize objects by integrating visual and auditory cues. While machines are able to do the same now with images, less work has been done with sounds. This work develops an approach for dense semantic labelling of sound-making objects, purely based on binaural sounds. We propose a novel sensor setup and record a new audio-visual dataset of street scenes with eight professional binaural microphones and a 360 degree camera. The co-existence of visual and audio cues is leveraged for supervision transfer. In particular, we employ a cross-modal distillation framework that consists of a vision `teacher' method and a sound `student' method -- the student method is trained to generate the same results as the teacher method. This way, the auditory system can be trained without using human annotations. We also propose two auxiliary tasks namely, a) a novel task on Spatial Sound Super-resolution to increase the spatial resolution of sounds, and b) dense depth prediction of the scene. We then formulate the three tasks into one end-to-end trainable multi-tasking network aiming to boost the overall performance. Experimental results on the dataset show that 1) our method achieves promising results for semantic prediction and the two auxiliary tasks; and 2) the three tasks are mutually beneficial -- training them together achieves the best performance and 3) the number and orientations of microphones are both important. The data and code will be released to facilitate the research in this new direction.
Hierarchical Kinematic Human Mesh Recovery
Authors: Georgios Georgakis, Ren Li, Srikrishna Karanam, Terrence Chen, Jana Kosecka, Ziyan Wu
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Human Mesh Recovery, regression

We consider the problem of estimating a parametric model of 3D human mesh from a single image. While there has been substantial recent progress in this area with direct regression of model parameters, these methods only implicitly exploit the human body kinematic structure, leading to sub-optimal use of the model prior. In this work, we address this gap by proposing a new technique for regression of human parametric model that is explicitly informed by the known hierarchical structure, including joint interdependencies of the model. This results in a strong prior-informed design of the regressor architecture and an associated hierarchical optimization that is flexible to be used in conjunction with the current standard frameworks for 3D human mesh recovery. We demonstrate these aspects by means of extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets, showing how our proposed new design outperforms several existing and popular methods, establishing new state-of-the-art results. By considering joint interdependencies, our method is equipped to infer joints even under data corruptions, which we demonstrate by conducting experiments under varying degrees of occlusion.
Motion-Attentive Transition for Zero-Shot Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Tianfei Zhou, Shunzhou Wang, Yi Zhou, Yazhou Yao, Jianwu Li, Ling Shao
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation, Zero-Shot Video Object Segmentation

In this paper, we present a novel Motion-Attentive Transition Network (MATNet) for zero-shot video object segmentation, which provides a new way of leveraging motion information to reinforce spatio-temporal object representation. An asymmetric attention block, called Motion-Attentive Transition (MAT), is designed within a two-stream encoder, which transforms appearance features into motion-attentive representations at each convolutional stage. In this way, the encoder becomes deeply interleaved, allowing for closely hierarchical interactions between object motion and appearance. This is superior to the typical two-stream architecture, which treats motion and appearance separately in each stream and often suffers from overfitting to appearance information. Additionally, a bridge network is proposed to obtain a compact, discriminative and scale-sensitive representation for multi-level encoder features, which is further fed into a decoder to achieve segmentation results. Extensive experiments on three challenging public benchmarks (i.e. DAVIS-16, FBMS and Youtube-Objects) show that our model achieves compelling performance against the state-of-the-arts.
SOIC: Semantic Online Initialization and Calibration for LiDAR and Camera
Authors: Weimin Wang, Shohei Nobuhara, Ryosuke Nakamura, Ken Sakurada
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00

This paper presents a novel semantic-based online extrinsic calibration approach, SOIC (so, I see), for Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and camera sensors. Previous online calibration methods usually need prior knowledge of rough initial values for optimization. The proposed approach removes this limitation by converting the initialization problem to a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem with the introduction of semantic centroids (SCs). The closed-form solution of this PnP problem has been well researched and can be found with existing PnP methods. Since the semantic centroid of the point cloud usually does not accurately match with that of the corresponding image, the accuracy of parameters are not improved even after a nonlinear refinement process. Thus, a cost function based on the constraint of the correspondence between semantic elements from both point cloud and image data is formulated. Subsequently, optimal extrinsic parameters are estimated by minimizing the cost function. We evaluate the proposed method either with GT or predicted semantics on KITTI dataset. Experimental results and comparisons with the baseline method verify the feasibility of the initialization strategy and the accuracy of the calibration approach. In addition, we release the source code at https://github.com/--/SOIC.
Cascaded Human-Object Interaction Recognition
Authors: Tianfei Zhou, Wenguan Wang, Siyuan Qi, Haibin Ling, Jianbing Shen
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object, Relation, Relation Prediction

Rapid progress has been witnessed for human-object interaction (HOI) recognition, but most existing models are confined to single-stage reasoning pipelines. Considering the intrinsic complexity of the task, we introduce a cascade architecture for a multi-stage, coarse-to-fine HOI understanding. At each stage, an instance localization network progressively refines HOI proposals and feeds them into an interaction recognition network. Each of the two networks is also connected to its predecessor at the previous stage, enabling cross-stage information propagation. The interaction recognition network has two crucial parts: a relation ranking module for high-quality HOI proposal selection and a triple-stream classifier for relation prediction. With our carefully-designed human-centric relation features, these two modules work collaboratively towards effective interaction understanding. Further beyond relation detection on a bounding-box level, we make our framework flexible to perform fine-grained pixel-wise relation segmentation; this provides a new glimpse into better relation modeling. Our approach reached the $1^{st}$ place in the ICCV2019 Person in Context Challenge, on both relation detection and segmentation tasks. It also shows promising results on V-COCO.
Restore from Restored: Video Restoration with Pseudo Clean Video
Authors: Seunghwan Lee, Donghyeon Cho, Jiwon Kim, Tae Hyun Kim
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Denoising, Optical Flow Estimation, Translation, Video Denoising, Video Restoration

In this study, we propose a self-supervised video denoising method called "restore-from-restored." This method fine-tunes a pre-trained network by using a pseudo clean video during the test phase. The pseudo clean video is obtained by applying a noisy video to the baseline network. By adopting a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) as the baseline, we can improve video denoising performance without accurate optical flow estimation and registration steps, in contrast to many conventional video restoration methods, due to the translation equivariant property of the FCN. Specifically, the proposed method can take advantage of plentiful similar patches existing across multiple consecutive frames (i.e., patch-recurrence); these patches can boost the performance of the baseline network by a large margin. We analyze the restoration performance of the fine-tuned video denoising networks with the proposed self-supervision-based learning algorithm, and demonstrate that the FCN can utilize recurring patches without requiring accurate registration among adjacent frames. In our experiments, we apply the proposed method to state-of-the-art denoisers and show that our fine-tuned networks achieve a considerable improvement in denoising performance.
Knowledge distillation via adaptive instance normalization
Authors: Jing Yang, Brais Martinez, Adrian Bulat, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression

This paper addresses the problem of model compression via knowledge distillation. To this end, we propose a new knowledge distillation method based on transferring feature statistics, specifically the channel-wise mean and variance, from the teacher to the student. Our method goes beyond the standard way of enforcing the mean and variance of the student to be similar to those of the teacher through an $L_2$ loss, which we found it to be of limited effectiveness. Specifically, we propose a new loss based on adaptive instance normalization to effectively transfer the feature statistics. The main idea is to transfer the learned statistics back to the teacher via adaptive instance normalization (conditioned on the student) and let the teacher network "evaluate" via a loss whether the statistics learned by the student are reliably transferred. We show that our distillation method outperforms other state-of-the-art distillation methods over a large set of experimental settings including different (a) network architectures, (b) teacher-student capacities, (c) datasets, and (d) domains.
Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning
Authors: Xinlei Chen, Haoqi Fan, Ross Girshick, Kaiming He
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Image Classification, Person Re-Identification, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Image Classification, Self-Supervised Person Re-Identification

Contrastive unsupervised learning has recently shown encouraging progress, e.g., in Momentum Contrast (MoCo) and SimCLR. In this note, we verify the effectiveness of two of SimCLR's design improvements by implementing them in the MoCo framework. With simple modifications to MoCo---namely, using an MLP projection head and more data augmentation---we establish stronger baselines that outperform SimCLR and do not require large training batches. We hope this will make state-of-the-art unsupervised learning research more accessible. Code will be made public.