pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Adaptive Training-less System for Anomaly Detection in Crowd Scenes
Authors: Arindam Sikdar, Ananda S. Chowdhury
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Anomaly detection in crowd videos has become a popular area of research for the computer vision community. Several existing methods generally perform a prior training about the scene with or without the use of labeled data. However, it is difficult to always guarantee the availability of prior data, especially, for scenarios like remote area surveillance. To address such challenge, we propose an adaptive training-less system capable of detecting anomaly on-the-fly while dynamically estimating and adjusting response based on certain parameters. This makes our system both training-less and adaptive in nature. Our pipeline consists of three main components, namely, adaptive 3D-DCT model for multi-object detection-based association, local motion structure description through saliency modulated optic flow, and anomaly detection based on earth movers distance (EMD). The proposed model, despite being training-free, is found to achieve comparable performance with several state-of-the-art methods on the publicly available UCSD, UMN, CHUK-Avenue and ShanghaiTech datasets.
Masked Non-Autoregressive Image Captioning
Authors: Junlong Gao, Xi Meng, Shiqi Wang, Xia Li, Shanshe Wang, Siwei Ma, Wen Gao
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Diversity, Image Captioning, Machine Translation, Translation

Existing captioning models often adopt the encoder-decoder architecture, where the decoder uses autoregressive decoding to generate captions, such that each token is generated sequentially given the preceding generated tokens. However, autoregressive decoding results in issues such as sequential error accumulation, slow generation, improper semantics and lack of diversity. Non-autoregressive decoding has been proposed to tackle slow generation for neural machine translation but suffers from multimodality problem due to the indirect modeling of the target distribution. In this paper, we propose masked non-autoregressive decoding to tackle the issues of both autoregressive decoding and non-autoregressive decoding. In masked non-autoregressive decoding, we mask several kinds of ratios of the input sequences during training, and generate captions parallelly in several stages from a totally masked sequence to a totally non-masked sequence in a compositional manner during inference. Experimentally our proposed model can preserve semantic content more effectively and can generate more diverse captions.
Separate In Latent Space: Unsupervised Single Image Layer Separation
Authors: Yunfei Liu, Feng Lu
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrinsic Image Decomposition, Reflection Removal, Triplet

Many real world vision tasks, such as reflection removal from a transparent surface and intrinsic image decomposition, can be modeled as single image layer separation. However, this problem is highly ill-posed, requiring accurately aligned and hard to collect triplet data to train the CNN models. To address this problem, this paper proposes an unsupervised method that requires no ground truth data triplet in training. At the core of the method are two assumptions about data distributions in the latent spaces of different layers, based on which a novel unsupervised layer separation pipeline can be derived. Then the method can be constructed based on the GANs framework with self-supervision and cycle consistency constraints, etc. Experimental results demonstrate its successfulness in outperforming existing unsupervised methods in both synthetic and real world tasks. The method also shows its ability to solve a more challenging multi-layer separation task.
Efficient Object Detection Model for Real-Time UAV Applications
Authors: Subrahmanyam Vaddi, Chandan Kumar, Ali Jannesari
Date: 2019-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Real-Time Object Detection

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) especially drones, equipped with vision techniques have become very popular in recent years, with their extensive use in wide range of applications. Many of these applications require use of computer vision techniques, particularly object detection from the information captured by on-board camera. In this paper, we propose an end to end object detection model running on a UAV platform which is suitable for real-time applications. We propose a deep feature pyramid architecture which makes use of inherent properties of features extracted from Convolutional Networks by capturing more generic features in the images (such as edge, color etc.) along with the minute detailed features specific to the classes contained in our problem. We use VisDrone-18 dataset for our studies which contain different objects such as pedestrians, vehicles, bicycles etc. We provide software and hardware architecture of our platform used in this study. We implemented our model with both ResNet and MobileNet as convolutional bases. Our model combined with modified focal loss function, produced a desirable performance of 30.6 mAP for object detection with an inference time of 14 fps. We compared our results with RetinaNet-ResNet-50 and HAL-RetinaNet and shown that our model combined with MobileNet as backend feature extractor gave the best results in terms of accuracy, speed and memory efficiency and is best suitable for real time object detection with drones.
DualDis: Dual-Branch Disentangling with Adversarial Learning
Authors: Thomas Robert, Nicolas Thome, Matthieu Cord
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Data Augmentation, Decoder, Image Manipulation, Image Reconstruction

In computer vision, disentangling techniques aim at improving latent representations of images by modeling factors of variation. In this paper, we propose DualDis, a new auto-encoder-based framework that disentangles and linearizes class and attribute information. This is achieved thanks to a two-branch architecture forcing the separation of the two kinds of information, accompanied by a decoder for image reconstruction and generation. To effectively separate the information, we propose to use a combination of regular and adversarial classifiers to guide the two branches in specializing for class and attribute information respectively. We also investigate the possibility of using semi-supervised learning for an effective disentangling even using few labels. We leverage the linearization property of the latent spaces for semantic image editing and generation of new images. We validate our approach on CelebA, Yale-B and NORB by measuring the efficiency of information separation via classification metrics, visual image manipulation and data augmentation.
Fashion Editing with Adversarial Parsing Learning
Authors: Haoye Dong, Xiaodan Liang, Yixuan Zhang, Xujie Zhang, Zhenyu Xie, Bowen Wu, Ziqi Zhang, Xiaohui Shen, Jian Yin
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Decoder, Generative Adversarial Network, Human Parsing, Image Manipulation

Interactive fashion image manipulation, which enables users to edit images with sketches and color strokes, is an interesting research problem with great application value. Existing works often treat it as a general inpainting task and do not fully leverage the semantic structural information in fashion images. Moreover, they directly utilize conventional convolution and normalization layers to restore the incomplete image, which tends to wash away the sketch and color information. In this paper, we propose a novel Fashion Editing Generative Adversarial Network (FE-GAN), which is capable of manipulating fashion images by free-form sketches and sparse color strokes. FE-GAN consists of two modules: 1) a free-form parsing network that learns to control the human parsing generation by manipulating sketch and color; 2) a parsing-aware inpainting network that renders detailed textures with semantic guidance from the human parsing map. A new attention normalization layer is further applied at multiple scales in the decoder of the inpainting network to enhance the quality of the synthesized image. Extensive experiments on high-resolution fashion image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on image manipulation.
Automated Steel Bar Counting and Center Localization with Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Zhun Fan, Jiewei Lu, Benzhang Qiu, Tao Jiang, Kang An, Alex Noel Josephraj, Chuliang Wei
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Automated steel bar counting and center localization plays an important role in the factory automation of steel bars. Traditional methods only focus on steel bar counting and their performances are often limited by complex industrial environments. Convolutional neural network (CNN), which has great capability to deal with complex tasks in challenging environments, is applied in this work. A framework called CNN-DC is proposed to achieve automated steel bar counting and center localization simultaneously. The proposed framework CNN-DC first detects the candidate center points with a deep CNN. Then an effective clustering algorithm named as Distance Clustering(DC) is proposed to cluster the candidate center points and locate the true centers of steel bars. The proposed CNN-DC can achieve 99.26% accuracy for steel bar counting and 4.1% center offset for center localization on the established steel bar dataset, which demonstrates that the proposed CNN-DC can perform well on automated steel bar counting and center localization. Code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/BenzhangQiu/Steel-bar-Detection.
The iMet Collection 2019 Challenge Dataset
Authors: Chenyang Zhang, Christine Kaeser-Chen, Grace Vesom, Jennie Choi, Maria Kessler, Serge Belongie
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fine-Grained Visual Recognition, General Classification, Retrieval

Existing computer vision technologies in artwork recognition focus mainly on instance retrieval or coarse-grained attribute classification. In this work, we present a novel dataset for fine-grained artwork attribute recognition. The images in the dataset are professional photographs of classic artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and annotations are curated and verified by world-class museum experts. In addition, we also present the iMet Collection 2019 Challenge as part of the FGVC6 workshop. Through the competition, we aim to spur the enthusiasm of the fine-grained visual recognition research community and advance the state-of-the-art in digital curation of museum collections.
3D Appearance Super-Resolution with Deep Learning
Authors: Yawei Li, Vagia Tsiminaki, Radu Timofte, Marc Pollefeys, Luc van Gool
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2019 6
Tasks: Deep Learning, Super-Resolution

We tackle the problem of retrieving high-resolution (HR) texture maps of objects that are captured from multiple view points. In the multi-view case, model-based super-resolution (SR) methods have been recently proved to recover high quality texture maps. On the other hand, the advent of deep learning-based methods has already a significant impact on the problem of video and image SR. Yet, a deep learning-based approach to super-resolve the appearance of 3D objects is still missing. The main limitation of exploiting the power of deep learning techniques in the multi-view case is the lack of data. We introduce a 3D appearance SR (3DASR) dataset based on the existing ETH3D [42], SyB3R [31], MiddleBury, and our Collection of 3D scenes from TUM [21], Fountain [51] and Relief [53]. We provide the high- and low-resolution texture maps, the 3D geometric model, images and projection matrices. We exploit the power of 2D learning-based SR methods and design networks suitable for the 3D multi-view case. We incorporate the geometric information by introducing normal maps and further improve the learning process. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed networks successfully incorporate the 3D geometric information and super-resolve the texture maps.
Visual Understanding and Narration: A Deeper Understanding and Explanation of Visual Scenes
Authors: Stephanie M. Lukin, Claire Bonial, Clare R. Voss
Date: 2019-05-31 00:00:00

We describe the task of Visual Understanding and Narration, in which a robot (or agent) generates text for the images that it collects when navigating its environment, by answering open-ended questions, such as 'what happens, or might have happened, here?'
Out of Sight But Not Out of Mind: An Answer Set Programming Based Online Abduction Framework for Visual Sensemaking in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jakob Suchan, Mehul Bhatt, Srikrishna Varadarajan
Date: 2019-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Question Answering

We demonstrate the need and potential of systematically integrated vision and semantics} solutions for visual sensemaking (in the backdrop of autonomous driving). A general method for online visual sensemaking using answer set programming is systematically formalised and fully implemented. The method integrates state of the art in (deep learning based) visual computing, and is developed as a modular framework usable within hybrid architectures for perception & control. We evaluate and demo with community established benchmarks KITTIMOD and MOT. As use-case, we focus on the significance of human-centred visual sensemaking ---e.g., semantic representation and explainability, question-answering, commonsense interpolation--- in safety-critical autonomous driving situations.
A Semantic-based Medical Image Fusion Approach
Authors: Fanda Fan, Yunyou Huang, Lei Wang, Xingwang Xiong, Zihan Jiang, Zhifei Zhang, Jianfeng Zhan
Date: 2019-06-01 00:00:00

It is necessary for clinicians to comprehensively analyze patient information from different sources. Medical image fusion is a promising approach to providing overall information from medical images of different modalities. However, existing medical image fusion approaches ignore the semantics of images, making the fused image difficult to understand. In this work, we propose a new evaluation index to measure the semantic loss of fused image, and put forward a Fusion W-Net (FW-Net) for multimodal medical image fusion. The experimental results are promising: the fused image generated by our approach greatly reduces the semantic information loss, and has better visual effects in contrast to five state-of-art approaches. Our approach and tool have great potential to be applied in the clinical setting.
Unsupervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction from Mono-lingual Multimodal Data
Authors: Shizhe Chen, Qin Jin, Alexander Hauptmann
Date: 2019-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilingual Lexicon Induction, Sentence, Translation, Word Translation

Bilingual lexicon induction, translating words from the source language to the target language, is a long-standing natural language processing task. Recent endeavors prove that it is promising to employ images as pivot to learn the lexicon induction without reliance on parallel corpora. However, these vision-based approaches simply associate words with entire images, which are constrained to translate concrete words and require object-centered images. We humans can understand words better when they are within a sentence with context. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to utilize images and their associated captions to address the limitations of previous approaches. We propose a multi-lingual caption model trained with different mono-lingual multimodal data to map words in different languages into joint spaces. Two types of word representation are induced from the multi-lingual caption model: linguistic features and localized visual features. The linguistic feature is learned from the sentence contexts with visual semantic constraints, which is beneficial to learn translation for words that are less visual-relevant. The localized visual feature is attended to the region in the image that correlates to the word, so that it alleviates the image restriction for salient visual representation. The two types of features are complementary for word translation. Experimental results on multiple language pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which substantially outperforms previous vision-based approaches without using any parallel sentences or supervision of seed word pairs.
3D Magic Mirror: Automatic Video to 3D Caricature Translation
Authors: Yudong Guo, Luo Jiang, Lin Cai, Juyong Zhang
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Caricature, Translation

Caricature is an abstraction of a real person which distorts or exaggerates certain features, but still retains a likeness. While most existing works focus on 3D caricature reconstruction from 2D caricatures or translating 2D photos to 2D caricatures, this paper presents a real-time and automatic algorithm for creating expressive 3D caricatures with caricature style texture map from 2D photos or videos. To solve this challenging ill-posed reconstruction problem and cross-domain translation problem, we first reconstruct the 3D face shape for each frame, and then translate 3D face shape from normal style to caricature style by a novel identity and expression preserving VAE-CycleGAN. Based on a labeling formulation, the caricature texture map is constructed from a set of multi-view caricature images generated by CariGANs. The effectiveness and efficiency of our method are demonstrated by comparison with baseline implementations. The perceptual study shows that the 3D caricatures generated by our method meet people's expectations of 3D caricature style.
Probabilistic Noise2Void: Unsupervised Content-Aware Denoising
Authors: Alexander Krull, Tomas Vicar, Florian Jug
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Today, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the leading method for image denoising. They are traditionally trained on pairs of images, which are often hard to obtain for practical applications. This motivates self-supervised training methods such as Noise2Void~(N2V) that operate on single noisy images. Self-supervised methods are, unfortunately, not competitive with models trained on image pairs. Here, we present 'Probabilistic Noise2Void' (PN2V), a method to train CNNs to predict per-pixel intensity distributions. Combining these with a suitable description of the noise, we obtain a complete probabilistic model for the noisy observations and true signal in every pixel. We evaluate PN2V on publicly available microscopy datasets, under a broad range of noise regimes, and achieve competitive results with respect to supervised state-of-the-art methods.
Deep Feature Learning from a Hospital-Scale Chest X-ray Dataset with Application to TB Detection on a Small-Scale Dataset
Authors: Ophir Gozes, Hayit Greenspan
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

The use of ImageNet pre-trained networks is becoming widespread in the medical imaging community. It enables training on small datasets, commonly available in medical imaging tasks. The recent emergence of a large Chest X-ray dataset opened the possibility for learning features that are specific to the X-ray analysis task. In this work, we demonstrate that the features learned allow for better classification results for the problem of Tuberculosis detection and enable generalization to an unseen dataset. To accomplish the task of feature learning, we train a DenseNet-121 CNN on 112K images from the ChestXray14 dataset which includes labels of 14 common thoracic pathologies. In addition to the pathology labels, we incorporate metadata which is available in the dataset: Patient Positioning, Gender and Patient Age. We term this architecture MetaChexNet. As a by-product of the feature learning, we demonstrate state of the art performance on the task of patient Age \& Gender estimation using CNN's. Finally, we show the features learned using ChestXray14 allow for better transfer learning on small-scale datasets for Tuberculosis.
From Words to Sentences: A Progressive Learning Approach for Zero-resource Machine Translation with Visual Pivots
Authors: Shizhe Chen, Qin Jin, Jianlong Fu
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation, Word Translation

The neural machine translation model has suffered from the lack of large-scale parallel corpora. In contrast, we humans can learn multi-lingual translations even without parallel texts by referring our languages to the external world. To mimic such human learning behavior, we employ images as pivots to enable zero-resource translation learning. However, a picture tells a thousand words, which makes multi-lingual sentences pivoted by the same image noisy as mutual translations and thus hinders the translation model learning. In this work, we propose a progressive learning approach for image-pivoted zero-resource machine translation. Since words are less diverse when grounded in the image, we first learn word-level translation with image pivots, and then progress to learn the sentence-level translation by utilizing the learned word translation to suppress noises in image-pivoted multi-lingual sentences. Experimental results on two widely used image-pivot translation datasets, IAPR-TC12 and Multi30k, show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
A new nonlocal forward model for diffuse optical tomography
Authors: Wenqi Lu, Jinming Duan, Joshua Deepak Veesa, Iain B. Styles
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

The forward model in diffuse optical tomography (DOT) describes how light propagates through a turbid medium. It is often approximated by a diffusion equation (DE) that is numerically discretized by the classical finite element method (FEM). We propose a nonlocal diffusion equation (NDE) as a new forward model for DOT, the discretization of which is carried out with an efficient graph-based numerical method (GNM). To quantitatively evaluate the new forward model, we first conduct experiments on a homogeneous slab, where the numerical accuracy of both NDE and DE is compared against the existing analytical solution. We further evaluate NDE by comparing its image reconstruction performance (inverse problem) to that of DE. Our experiments show that NDE is quantitatively comparable to DE and is up to 64% faster due to the efficient graph-based representation that can be implemented identically for geometries in different dimensions.
Greedy inference with structure-exploiting lazy maps
Authors: Michael C. Brennan, Daniele Bigoni, Olivier Zahm, Alessio Spantini, Youssef Marzouk
Date: 2019-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

We propose a framework for solving high-dimensional Bayesian inference problems using \emph{structure-exploiting} low-dimensional transport maps or flows. These maps are confined to a low-dimensional subspace (hence, lazy), and the subspace is identified by minimizing an upper bound on the Kullback--Leibler divergence (hence, structured). Our framework provides a principled way of identifying and exploiting low-dimensional structure in an inference problem. It focuses the expressiveness of a transport map along the directions of most significant discrepancy from the posterior, and can be used to build deep compositions of lazy maps, where low-dimensional projections of the parameters are iteratively transformed to match the posterior. We prove weak convergence of the generated sequence of distributions to the posterior, and we demonstrate the benefits of the framework on challenging inference problems in machine learning and differential equations, using inverse autoregressive flows and polynomial maps as examples of the underlying density estimators.