pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FarSee-Net: Real-Time Semantic Segmentation by Efficient Multi-scale Context Aggregation and Feature Space Super-resolution
Authors: Zhanpeng Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Real-Time Semantic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Super-Resolution

Real-time semantic segmentation is desirable in many robotic applications with limited computation resources. One challenge of semantic segmentation is to deal with the object scale variations and leverage the context. How to perform multi-scale context aggregation within limited computation budget is important. In this paper, firstly, we introduce a novel and efficient module called Cascaded Factorized Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (CF-ASPP). It is a lightweight cascaded structure for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to efficiently leverage context information. On the other hand, for runtime efficiency, state-of-the-art methods will quickly decrease the spatial size of the inputs or feature maps in the early network stages. The final high-resolution result is usually obtained by non-parametric up-sampling operation (e.g. bilinear interpolation). Differently, we rethink this pipeline and treat it as a super-resolution process. We use optimized super-resolution operation in the up-sampling step and improve the accuracy, especially in sub-sampled input image scenario for real-time applications. By fusing the above two improvements, our methods provide better latency-accuracy trade-off than the other state-of-the-art methods. In particular, we achieve 68.4% mIoU at 84 fps on the Cityscapes test set with a single Nivida Titan X (Maxwell) GPU card. The proposed module can be plugged into any feature extraction CNN and benefits from the CNN structure development.
ROSE: Real One-Stage Effort to Detect the Fingerprint Singular Point Based on Multi-scale Spatial Attention
Authors: Liaojun Pang, Jiong Chen, Fei Guo, Zhicheng Cao, Heng Zhao
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00

Detecting the singular point accurately and efficiently is one of the most important tasks for fingerprint recognition. In recent years, deep learning has been gradually used in the fingerprint singular point detection. However, current deep learning-based singular point detection methods are either two-stage or multi-stage, which makes them time-consuming. More importantly, their detection accuracy is yet unsatisfactory, especially in the case of the low-quality fingerprint. In this paper, we make a Real One-Stage Effort to detect fingerprint singular points more accurately and efficiently, and therefore we name the proposed algorithm ROSE for short, in which the multi-scale spatial attention, the Gaussian heatmap and the variant of focal loss are applied together to achieve a higher detection rate. Experimental results on the datasets FVC2002 DB1 and NIST SD4 show that our ROSE outperforms the state-of-art algorithms in terms of detection rate, false alarm rate and detection speed.
Deconfounded Image Captioning: A Causal Retrospect
Authors: Xu Yang, Hanwang Zhang, Jianfei Cai
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Image Captioning

Dataset bias in vision-language tasks is becoming one of the main problems which hinders the progress of our community. Existing solutions lack a principled analysis about why modern image captioners easily collapse into dataset bias. In this paper, we present a novel perspective: Deconfounded Image Captioning (DIC), to find out the answer of this question, then retrospect modern neural image captioners, and finally propose a DIC framework: DICv1.0 to alleviate the negative effects brought by dataset bias. DIC is based on causal inference, whose two principles: the backdoor and front-door adjustments, help us review previous studies and design new effective models. In particular, we showcase that DICv1.0 can strengthen two prevailing captioning models and can achieve a single-model 131.1 CIDEr-D and 128.4 c40 CIDEr-D on Karpathy split and online split of the challenging MS COCO dataset, respectively. Interestingly, DICv1.0 is a natural derivation from our causal retrospect, which opens promising directions for image captioning.
MCMC Guided CNN Training and Segmentation for Pancreas Extraction
Authors: Jinchan He, Xiaxia Yu, Chudong Cai, Yi Gao
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Organ Segmentation, Pancreas Segmentation, Segmentation

Efficient organ segmentation is the precondition of various quantitative analysis. Segmenting the pancreas from abdominal CT images is a challenging task because of its high anatomical variability in shape, size and location. What's more, the pancreas only occupies a small portion in abdomen, and the organ border is very fuzzy. All these factors make the segmentation methods of other organs less suitable for the pancreas segmentation. In this report, we propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling guided convolutional neural network (CNN) approach, in order to handle such difficulties in morphological and photometric variabilities. Specifically, the proposed method mainly contains three steps: First, registration is carried out to mitigate the body weight and location variability. Then, an MCMC sampling is employed to guide the sampling of 3D patches, which are fed to the CNN for training. At the same time, the pancreas distribution is also learned for the subsequent segmentation. Third, sampled from the learned distribution, an MCMC process guides the segmentation process. Lastly, the patches based segmentation is fused using a Bayesian voting scheme. This method is evaluated on the NIH pancreatic datasets which contains 82 abdominal contrast-enhanced CT volumes. Finally, we achieved a competitive result of 78.13% Dice Similarity Coefficient value and 82.65% Recall value in testing data.
Pacemaker: Intermediate Teacher Knowledge Distillation For On-The-Fly Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Wonchul Son, Youngbin Kim, Wonseok Song, Youngsu Moon, Wonjun Hwang
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression

There is a need for an on-the-fly computational process with very low performance system such as system-on-chip (SoC) and embedded device etc. This paper presents pacemaker knowledge distillation as intermediate ensemble teacher to use convolutional neural network in these systems. For on-the-fly system, we consider student model using 1xN shape on-the-fly filter and teacher model using normal NxN shape filter. We note three points about training student model, caused by applying on-the-fly filter. First, same depth but unavoidable thin model compression. Second, the large capacity gap and parameter size gap due to only the horizontal field must be selected not the vertical receptive. Third, the performance instability and degradation of direct distilling. To solve these problems, we propose intermediate teacher, named pacemaker, for an on-the-fly student. So, student can be trained from pacemaker and original teacher step by step. Experiments prove our proposed method make significant performance (accuracy) improvements: on CIFAR100, 5.39% increased in WRN-40-4 than conventional knowledge distillation which shows even low performance than baseline. And we solve train instability, occurred when conventional knowledge distillation was applied without proposed method, by reducing deviation range by applying proposed method pacemaker knowledge distillation.
Cross-Modal Food Retrieval: Learning a Joint Embedding of Food Images and Recipes with Semantic Consistency and Attention Mechanism
Authors: Hao Wang, Doyen Sahoo, Chenghao Liu, Ke Shu, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee-Peng Lim, Steven C. H. Hoi
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Retrieval

Food retrieval is an important task to perform analysis of food-related information, where we are interested in retrieving relevant information about the queried food item such as ingredients, cooking instructions, etc. In this paper, we investigate cross-modal retrieval between food images and cooking recipes. The goal is to learn an embedding of images and recipes in a common feature space, such that the corresponding image-recipe embeddings lie close to one another. Two major challenges in addressing this problem are 1) large intra-variance and small inter-variance across cross-modal food data; and 2) difficulties in obtaining discriminative recipe representations. To address these two problems, we propose Semantic-Consistent and Attention-based Networks (SCAN), which regularize the embeddings of the two modalities through aligning output semantic probabilities. Besides, we exploit a self-attention mechanism to improve the embedding of recipes. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on the large-scale Recipe1M dataset, and show that we can outperform several state-of-the-art cross-modal retrieval strategies for food images and cooking recipes by a significant margin.
BiDet: An Efficient Binarized Object Detector
Authors: Ziwei Wang, Ziyi Wu, Jiwen Lu, Jie zhou
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Binarization, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a binarized neural network learning method called BiDet for efficient object detection. Conventional network binarization methods directly quantize the weights and activations in one-stage or two-stage detectors with constrained representational capacity, so that the information redundancy in the networks causes numerous false positives and degrades the performance significantly. On the contrary, our BiDet fully utilizes the representational capacity of the binary neural networks for object detection by redundancy removal, through which the detection precision is enhanced with alleviated false positives. Specifically, we generalize the information bottleneck (IB) principle to object detection, where the amount of information in the high-level feature maps is constrained and the mutual information between the feature maps and object detection is maximized. Meanwhile, we learn sparse object priors so that the posteriors are concentrated on informative detection prediction with false positive elimination. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art binary neural networks by a sizable margin.
Cross-View Tracking for Multi-Human 3D Pose Estimation at over 100 FPS
Authors: Long Chen, Haizhou Ai, Rui Chen, Zijie Zhuang, Shuang Liu
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation, 3D Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Estimating 3D poses of multiple humans in real-time is a classic but still challenging task in computer vision. Its major difficulty lies in the ambiguity in cross-view association of 2D poses and the huge state space when there are multiple people in multiple views. In this paper, we present a novel solution for multi-human 3D pose estimation from multiple calibrated camera views. It takes 2D poses in different camera coordinates as inputs and aims for the accurate 3D poses in the global coordinate. Unlike previous methods that associate 2D poses among all pairs of views from scratch at every frame, we exploit the temporal consistency in videos to match the 2D inputs with 3D poses directly in 3-space. More specifically, we propose to retain the 3D pose for each person and update them iteratively via the cross-view multi-human tracking. This novel formulation improves both accuracy and efficiency, as we demonstrated on widely-used public datasets. To further verify the scalability of our method, we propose a new large-scale multi-human dataset with 12 to 28 camera views. Without bells and whistles, our solution achieves 154 FPS on 12 cameras and 34 FPS on 28 cameras, indicating its ability to handle large-scale real-world applications. The proposed dataset is released at https://github.com/longcw/crossview_3d_pose_tracking.
Pseudo-Convolutional Policy Gradient for Sequence-to-Sequence Lip-Reading
Authors: Mingshuang Luo, Shuang Yang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Lipreading, Lip Reading, Sentence

Lip-reading aims to infer the speech content from the lip movement sequence and can be seen as a typical sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) problem which translates the input image sequence of lip movements to the text sequence of the speech content. However, the traditional learning process of seq2seq models always suffers from two problems: the exposure bias resulted from the strategy of "teacher-forcing", and the inconsistency between the discriminative optimization target (usually the cross-entropy loss) and the final evaluation metric (usually the character/word error rate). In this paper, we propose a novel pseudo-convolutional policy gradient (PCPG) based method to address these two problems. On the one hand, we introduce the evaluation metric (refers to the character error rate in this paper) as a form of reward to optimize the model together with the original discriminative target. On the other hand, inspired by the local perception property of convolutional operation, we perform a pseudo-convolutional operation on the reward and loss dimension, so as to take more context around each time step into account to generate a robust reward and loss for the whole optimization. Finally, we perform a thorough comparison and evaluation on both the word-level and sentence-level benchmarks. The results show a significant improvement over other related methods, and report either a new state-of-the-art performance or a competitive accuracy on all these challenging benchmarks, which clearly proves the advantages of our approach.
Context-Aware Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jinyu Yang, Weizhi An, Chaochao Yan, Peilin Zhao, Junzhou Huang
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this paper, we consider the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation in the semantic segmentation. There are two primary issues in this field, i.e., what and how to transfer domain knowledge across two domains. Existing methods mainly focus on adapting domain-invariant features (what to transfer) through adversarial learning (how to transfer). Context dependency is essential for semantic segmentation, however, its transferability is still not well understood. Furthermore, how to transfer contextual information across two domains remains unexplored. Motivated by this, we propose a cross-attention mechanism based on self-attention to capture context dependencies between two domains and adapt transferable context. To achieve this goal, we design two cross-domain attention modules to adapt context dependencies from both spatial and channel views. Specifically, the spatial attention module captures local feature dependencies between each position in the source and target image. The channel attention module models semantic dependencies between each pair of cross-domain channel maps. To adapt context dependencies, we further selectively aggregate the context information from two domains. The superiority of our method over existing state-of-the-art methods is empirically proved on "GTA5 to Cityscapes" and "SYNTHIA to Cityscapes".
Dense Dilated Convolutions Merging Network for Land Cover Classification
Authors: Qinghui Liu, Michael Kampffmeyer, Robert Jessen, Arnt-Børre Salberg
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Land Cover Classification, Semantic Segmentation

Land cover classification of remote sensing images is a challenging task due to limited amounts of annotated data, highly imbalanced classes, frequent incorrect pixel-level annotations, and an inherent complexity in the semantic segmentation task. In this article, we propose a novel architecture called the dense dilated convolutions' merging network (DDCM-Net) to address this task. The proposed DDCM-Net consists of dense dilated image convolutions merged with varying dilation rates. This effectively utilizes rich combinations of dilated convolutions that enlarge the network's receptive fields with fewer parameters and features compared with the state-of-the-art approaches in the remote sensing domain. Importantly, DDCM-Net obtains fused local- and global-context information, in effect incorporating surrounding discriminative capability for multiscale and complex-shaped objects with similar color and textures in very high-resolution aerial imagery. We demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and flexibility of the proposed DDCM-Net on the publicly available ISPRS Potsdam and Vaihingen data sets, as well as the DeepGlobe land cover data set. Our single model, trained on three-band Potsdam and Vaihingen data sets, achieves better accuracy in terms of both mean intersection over union (mIoU) and F1-score compared with other published models trained with more than three-band data. We further validate our model on the DeepGlobe data set, achieving state-of-the-art result 56.2% mIoU with much fewer parameters and at a lower computational cost compared with related recent work. Code available at https://github.com/samleoqh/DDCM-Semantic-Segmentation-PyTorch
Learning Delicate Local Representations for Multi-Person Pose Estimation
Authors: Yuanhao Cai, Zhicheng Wang, Zhengxiong Luo, Binyi Yin, Angang Du, Haoqian Wang, Xiangyu Zhang, Xinyu Zhou, Erjin Zhou, Jian Sun
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Keypoint Detection, Multi-Person Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

In this paper, we propose a novel method called Residual Steps Network (RSN). RSN aggregates features with the same spatial size (Intra-level features) efficiently to obtain delicate local representations, which retain rich low-level spatial information and result in precise keypoint localization. Additionally, we observe the output features contribute differently to final performance. To tackle this problem, we propose an efficient attention mechanism - Pose Refine Machine (PRM) to make a trade-off between local and global representations in output features and further refine the keypoint locations. Our approach won the 1st place of COCO Keypoint Challenge 2019 and achieves state-of-the-art results on both COCO and MPII benchmarks, without using extra training data and pretrained model. Our single model achieves 78.6 on COCO test-dev, 93.0 on MPII test dataset. Ensembled models achieve 79.2 on COCO test-dev, 77.1 on COCO test-challenge dataset. The source code is publicly available for further research at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/RSN/
Transformation-based Adversarial Video Prediction on Large-Scale Data
Authors: Pauline Luc, Aidan Clark, Sander Dieleman, Diego de Las Casas, Yotam Doron, Albin Cassirer, Karen Simonyan
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Video Generation, Video Prediction

Recent breakthroughs in adversarial generative modeling have led to models capable of producing video samples of high quality, even on large and complex datasets of real-world video. In this work, we focus on the task of video prediction, where given a sequence of frames extracted from a video, the goal is to generate a plausible future sequence. We first improve the state of the art by performing a systematic empirical study of discriminator decompositions and proposing an architecture that yields faster convergence and higher performance than previous approaches. We then analyze recurrent units in the generator, and propose a novel recurrent unit which transforms its past hidden state according to predicted motion-like features, and refines it to handle dis-occlusions, scene changes and other complex behavior. We show that this recurrent unit consistently outperforms previous designs. Our final model leads to a leap in the state-of-the-art performance, obtaining a test set Frechet Video Distance of 25.7, down from 69.2, on the large-scale Kinetics-600 dataset.
On the Texture Bias for Few-Shot CNN Segmentation
Authors: Reza Azad, Abdur R Fayjie, Claude Kauffman, Ismail Ben Ayed, Marco Pedersoli, Jose Dolz
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Despite the initial belief that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are driven by shapes to perform visual recognition tasks, recent evidence suggests that texture bias in CNNs provides higher performing models when learning on large labeled training datasets. This contrasts with the perceptual bias in the human visual cortex, which has a stronger preference towards shape components. Perceptual differences may explain why CNNs achieve human-level performance when large labeled datasets are available, but their performance significantly degrades in lowlabeled data scenarios, such as few-shot semantic segmentation. To remove the texture bias in the context of few-shot learning, we propose a novel architecture that integrates a set of Difference of Gaussians (DoG) to attenuate high-frequency local components in the feature space. This produces a set of modified feature maps, whose high-frequency components are diminished at different standard deviation values of the Gaussian distribution in the spatial domain. As this results in multiple feature maps for a single image, we employ a bi-directional convolutional long-short-term-memory to efficiently merge the multi scale-space representations. We perform extensive experiments on three well-known few-shot segmentation benchmarks -- Pascal i5, COCO-20i and FSS-1000 -- and demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in two datasets under the same conditions. The code is available at: https://github.com/rezazad68/fewshot-segmentation
When Person Re-identification Meets Changing Clothes
Authors: Fangbin Wan, Yang Wu, Xuelin Qian, Yixiong Chen, Yanwei Fu
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification, Person Search

Person re-identification (ReID) is now an active research topic for AI-based video surveillance applications such as specific person search, but the practical issue that the target person(s) may change clothes (clothes inconsistency problem) has been overlooked for long. For the first time, this paper systematically studies this problem. We first overcome the difficulty of lack of suitable dataset, by collecting a small yet representative real dataset for testing whilst building a large realistic synthetic dataset for training and deeper studies. Facilitated by our new datasets, we are able to conduct various interesting new experiments for studying the influence of clothes inconsistency. We find that changing clothes makes ReID a much harder problem in the sense of bringing difficulties to learning effective representations and also challenges the generalization ability of previous ReID models to identify persons with unseen (new) clothes. Representative existing ReID models are adopted to show informative results on such a challenging setting, and we also provide some preliminary efforts on improving the robustness of existing models on handling the clothes inconsistency issue in the data. We believe that this study can be inspiring and helpful for encouraging more researches in this direction. The dataset is available on the project website: https://wanfb.github.io/dataset.html.