pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploit Visual Dependency Relations for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Mingyuan Liu, Dan Schonfeld, Wei Tang
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Object, Semantic Segmentation

    Dependency relations among visual entities are ubiquity because both objects and scenes are highly structured. They provide prior knowledge about the real world that can help improve the generalization ability of deep learning approaches. Different from contextual reasoning which focuses on feature aggregation in the spatial domain, visual dependency reasoning explicitly models the dependency relations among visual entities. In this paper, we introduce a novel network architecture, termed the dependency network or DependencyNet, for semantic segmentation. It unifies dependency reasoning at three semantic levels. Intra-class reasoning decouples the representations of different object categories and updates them separately based on the internal object structures. Inter-class reasoning then performs spatial and semantic reasoning based on the dependency relations among different object categories. We will have an in-depth investigation on how to discover the dependency graph from the training annotations. Global dependency reasoning further refines the representations of each object category based on the global scene information. Extensive ablative studies with a controlled model size and the same network depth show that each individual dependency reasoning component benefits semantic segmentation and they together significantly improve the base network. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show the DependencyNet achieves comparable performance to the recent states of the art.
SRDAN: Scale-Aware and Range-Aware Domain Adaptation Network for Cross-Dataset 3D Object Detection
Authors: Weichen Zhang, Wen Li, Dong Xu
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Domain Adaptation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

    Geometric characteristic plays an important role in the representation of an object in 3D point clouds. For example, large objects often contain more points, while small ones contain fewer points. The point clouds of objects near the capture device are denser, while those of distant objects are sparser. These issues bring new challenges to 3D object detection, especially under the domain adaptation scenarios. In this work, we propose a new cross-dataset 3D object detection method named Scale-aware and Range-aware Domain Adaptation Network (SRDAN). We take advantage of the geometric characteristics of 3D data (i.e., size and distance), and propose the scale-aware domain alignment and the range-aware domain alignment strategies to guide the distribution alignment between two domains. For scale-aware domain alignment, we design a 3D voxel-based feature pyramid network to extract multi-scale semantic voxel features, and align the features and instances with similar scales between two domains. For range-aware domain alignment, we introduce a range-guided domain alignment module to align the features of objects according to their distance to the capture device. Extensive experiments under three different scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our SRDAN approach, and comprehensive ablation study also validates the importance of geometric characteristics for cross-dataset 3D object detection.
Learning an Explicit Weighting Scheme for Adapting Complex HSI Noise
Authors: Xiangyu Rui, Xiangyong Cao, Qi Xie, Zongsheng Yue, Qian Zhao, Deyu Meng
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Denoising, Variational Inference

    A general approach for handling hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising issue is to impose weights on different HSI pixels to suppress negative influence brought by noisy elements. Such weighting scheme, however, largely depends on the prior understanding or subjective distribution assumption on HSI noises, making them easily biased to complicated real noises, and hardly generalizable to diverse practical scenarios. Against this issue, this paper proposes a new scheme aiming to capture general weighting principle in a data-driven manner. Specifically, such weighting principle is delivered by an explicit function, called hyperweight-net (HWnet), mapping from an input noisy image to its properly imposed weights. A Bayesian framework, as well as a variational inference algorithm, for inferring HWnet parameters is elaborately designed, expecting to extract the latent weighting rule for general diverse and complicated noisy HSIs. Comprehensive experiments substantiate that the learned HWnet can be not only finely generalized to different noise types from those used in training, but also effectively transferred to other weighted models for the issue. Besides, as a sounder guidance, HWnet can help to more faithfully and robustly achieve deep hyperspectral prior(DHP). Specially, the extracted weights by HWnet are verified to be able to effectively capture complex noise knowledge underlying input HSI, revealing its working insight in experiments.
Learning To Reconstruct High Speed and High Dynamic Range Videos From Events
Authors: Yunhao Zou, Yinqiang Zheng, Tsuyoshi Takatani, Ying Fu
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

    Event cameras are novel sensors that capture the dynamics of a scene asynchronously. Such cameras record event streams with much shorter response latency than images captured by conventional cameras, and are also highly sensitive to intensity change, which is brought by the triggering mechanism of events. On the basis of these two features, previous works attempt to reconstruct high speed and high dynamic range (HDR) videos from events. However, these works either suffer from unrealistic artifacts, or cannot provide sufficiently high frame rate. In this paper, we present a convolutional recurrent neural network which takes a sequence of neighboring events to reconstruct high speed HDR videos, and temporal consistency is well considered to facilitate the training process. In addition, we setup a prototype optical system to collect a real-world dataset with paired high speed HDR videos and event streams, which will be made publicly accessible for future researches in this field. Experimental results on both simulated and real scenes verify that our method can generate high speed HDR videos with high quality, and outperform the state-of-the-art reconstruction methods.
Leveraging Line-Point Consistence To Preserve Structures for Wide Parallax Image Stitching
Authors: Qi Jia, ZhengJun Li, Xin Fan, Haotian Zhao, Shiyu Teng, Xinchen Ye, Longin Jan Latecki
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Image Stitching

    Generating high-quality stitched images with natural structures is a challenging task in computer vision. In this paper, we succeed in preserving both local and global geometric structures for wide parallax images, while reducing artifacts and distortions. A projective invariant, Characteristic Number, is used to match co-planar local sub-regions for input images. The homography between these well-matched sub-regions produces consistent line and point pairs, suppressing artifacts in overlapping areas. We explore and introduce global collinear structures into an objective function to specify and balance the desired characters for image warping, which can preserve both local and global structures while alleviating distortions. We also develop comprehensive measures for stitching quality to quantify the collinearity of points and the discrepancy of matched line pairs by considering the sensitivity to linear structures for human vision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art by presenting sharp textures and preserving prominent natural structures in stitched images. Especially, our method not only exhibits lower errors but also the least divergence across all test images. Code is available at https://github.com/dut-media-lab/Image-Stitching
Removing Raindrops and Rain Streaks in One Go
Authors: Ruijie Quan, Xin Yu, Yuanzhi Liang, Yi Yang
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, Raindrop Removal, Rain Removal, Video deraining

    Existing rain-removal algorithms often tackle either rain streak removal or raindrop removal, and thus may fail to handle real-world rainy scenes. Besides, the lack of real-world deraining datasets comprising different types of rain and their corresponding rain-free ground-truth also impedes deraining algorithm development. In this paper, we aim to address real-world deraining problems from two aspects. First, we propose a complementary cascaded network architecture, namely CCN, to remove rain streaks and raindrops in a unified framework. Specifically, our CCN removes raindrops and rain streaks in a complementary fashion, i.e., raindrop removal followed by rain streak removal and vice versa, and then fuses the results via an attention based fusion module. Considering significant shape and structure differences between rain streaks and raindrops, it is difficult to manually design a sophisticated network to remove them effectively. Thus, we employ neural architecture search to adaptively find optimal architectures within our specified deraining search space. Second, we present a new real-world rain dataset, namely RainDS, to prosper the development of deraining algorithms in practical scenarios. RainDS consists of rain images in different types and their corresponding rain-free ground-truth, including rain streak only, raindrop only, and both of them. Extensive experimental results on both existing benchmarks and RainDS demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art.
ABMDRNet: Adaptive-Weighted Bi-Directional Modality Difference Reduction Network for RGB-T Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Qiang Zhang, Shenlu Zhao, Yongjiang Luo, Dingwen Zhang, Nianchang Huang, Jungong Han
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Thermal Image Segmentation

    Semantic segmentation models gain robustness against poor lighting conditions by virtue of complementary information from visible (RGB) and thermal images. Despite its importance, most existing RGB-T semantic segmentation models perform primitive fusion strategies, such as concatenation, element-wise summation and weighted summation, to fuse features from different modalities. These strategies, unfortunately, overlook the modality differences due to different imaging mechanisms, so that they suffer from the reduced discriminability of the fused features. To address such an issue, we propose, for the first time, the strategy of bridging-then-fusing, where the innovation lies in a novel Adaptive-weighted Bi-directional Modality Difference Reduction Network (ABMDRNet). Concretely, a Modality Difference Reduction and Fusion (MDRF) subnetwork is designed, which first employs a bi-directional image-to-image translation based method to reduce the modality differences between RGB features and thermal features, and then adaptively selects those discriminative multi-modality features for RGB-T semantic segmentation in a channel-wise weighted fusion way. Furthermore, considering the importance of contextual information in semantic segmentation, a Multi-Scale Spatial Context (MSC) module and a Multi-Scale Channel Context (MCC) module are proposed to exploit the interactions among multi-scale contextual information of cross-modality features together with their long-range dependencies along spatial and channel dimensions, respectively. Comprehensive experiments on MFNet dataset demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results.
Multispectral Photometric Stereo for Spatially-Varying Spectral Reflectances: A Well Posed Problem?
Authors: Heng Guo, Fumio Okura, Boxin Shi, Takuya Funatomi, Yasuhiro Mukaigawa, Yasuyuki Matsushita
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1

    Multispectral photometric stereo (MPS) aims at recovering the surface normal of a scene from a single-shot multispectral image, which is known as an ill-posed problem. To make the problem well-posed, existing MPS methods rely on restrictive assumptions, such as shape prior, surfaces having a monochromatic with uniform albedo. This paper alleviates the restrictive assumptions in existing methods. We show that the problem becomes well-posed for a surface with a uniform chromaticity but spatially-varying albedos based on our new formulation. Specifically, if at least three (or two) scene points share the same chromaticity, the proposed method uniquely recovers their surface normals and spectral reflectance with the illumination of more than or equal to four (or five) spectral lights. Besides, our method can be made robust by having many (i.e., 4 or more) spectral bands using robust estimation techniques for conventional photometric stereo. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our data and result can be found at https://github.com/GH-HOME/MultispectralPS.git.
Hierarchical Layout-Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Unified Aesthetics Assessment
Authors: Dongyu She, Yu-Kun Lai, Gaoxiong Yi, Kun Xu
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1

    Learning computational models of image aesthetics can have a substantial impact on visual art and graphic design. Although automatic image aesthetics assessment is a challenging topic by its subjective nature, psychological studies have confirmed a strong correlation between image layouts and perceived image quality. While previous state-of-the-art methods attempt to learn holistic information using deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), our approach is motivated by the fact that Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architecture is conceivably more suited for modeling complex relations among image regions than vanilla convolutional layers. Specifically, we present a Hierarchical Layout-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (HLA-GCN) to capture layout information. It is a dedicated double-subnet neural network consisting of two LAGCN modules. The first LA-GCN module constructs an aesthetics-related graph in the coordinate space and performs reasoning over spatial nodes. The second LA-GCN module performs graph reasoning after aggregating significant regions in a latent space. The model output is a hierarchical representation with layout-aware features from both spatial and aggregated nodes for unified aesthetics assessment. Extensive evaluations show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the AVA and AADB datasets across three different tasks. The code is available at http://github.com/days1011/HLAGCN.
Densely Connected Multi-Dilated Convolutional Networks for Dense Prediction Tasks
Authors: Naoya Takahashi, Yuki Mitsufuji
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Audio Source Separation, Semantic Segmentation

    Tasks that involve high-resolution dense prediction require a modeling of both local and global patterns in a large input field. Although the local and global structures often depend on each other and their simultaneous modeling is important, many convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches interchange representations in different resolutions only a few times. In this paper, we claim the importance of a dense simultaneous modeling of multiresolution representation and propose a novel CNN architecture called densely connected multidilated DenseNet (D3Net). D3Net involves a novel multidilated convolution that has different dilation factors in a single layer to model different resolutions simultaneously. By combining the multidilated convolution with the DenseNet architecture, D3Net incorporates multiresolution learning with an exponentially growing receptive field in almost all layers, while avoiding the aliasing problem that occurs when we naively incorporate the dilated convolution in DenseNet. Experiments on the image semantic segmentation task using Cityscapes and the audio source separation task using MUSDB18 show that the proposed method has superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.
Hybrid Message Passing With Performance-Driven Structures for Facial Action Unit Detection
Authors: Tengfei Song, Zijun Cui, Wenming Zheng, Qiang Ji
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Action Unit Detection, Facial Action Unit Detection

    Message passing neural network has been an effective method to represent dependencies among nodes by propagating messages. However, most of message passing algorithms focus on one structure and the messages are estimated by one single approach. For the real-world data, like facial action units (AUs), the dependencies may vary in terms of different expressions and individuals. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid message passing neural network with performance-driven structures (HMP-PS), which combines complementary message passing methods and captures more possible structures in a Bayesian manner. Particularly, a performance-driven Monte Carlo Markov Chain sampling method is proposed for generating high performance graph structures. Besides, the hybrid message passing is proposed to combine different types of messages, which provide the complementary information. The contribution of each type of message is adaptively adjusted along with different inputs. The experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets, i.e., BP4D and DISFA, validate that our proposed method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance.
Normal Integration via Inverse Plane Fitting With Minimum Point-to-Plane Distance
Authors: Xu Cao, Boxin Shi, Fumio Okura, Yasuyuki Matsushita
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Surface Reconstruction

    This paper presents a surface normal integration method that solves an inverse problem of local plane fitting. Surface reconstruction from normal maps is essential in photometric shape reconstruction. To this end, we formulate normal integration in the camera coordinates and jointly solve for 3D point positions and local plane displacements. Unlike existing methods that consider the vertical distances between 3D points, we minimize the sum of squared point-to-plane distances. Our method can deal with both orthographic or perspective normal maps with arbitrary boundaries. Compared to existing normal integration methods, our method avoids the checkerboard artifact and performs more robustly against natural boundaries, sharp features, and outliers. We further provide a geometric analysis of the source of artifacts that appear in previous methods based on our plane fitting formulation. Experimental results on analytically computed, synthetic, and real-world surfaces show that our method yields accurate and stable reconstruction for both orthographic and perspective normal maps.
Learning Cross-Modal Retrieval With Noisy Labels
Authors: Peng Hu, Xi Peng, Hongyuan Zhu, Liangli Zhen, Jie Lin
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Retrieval

    Recently, cross-modal retrieval is emerging with the help of deep multimodal learning. However, even for unimodal data, collecting large-scale well-annotated data is expensive and time-consuming, and not to mention the additional challenges from multiple modalities. Although crowd-sourcing annotation, e.g., Amazon's Mechanical Turk, can be utilized to mitigate the labeling cost, but leading to the unavoidable noise in labels for the non-expert annotating. To tackle the challenge, this paper presents a general Multimodal Robust Learning framework (MRL) for learning with multimodal noisy labels to mitigate noisy samples and correlate distinct modalities simultaneously. To be specific, we propose a Robust Clustering loss (RC) to make the deep networks focus on clean samples instead of noisy ones. Besides, a simple yet effective multimodal loss function, called Multimodal Contrastive loss (MC), is proposed to maximize the mutual information between different modalities, thus alleviating the interference of noisy samples and cross-modal discrepancy. Extensive experiments are conducted on four widely-used multimodal datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by comparing to 14 state-of-the-art methods.
Can We Characterize Tasks Without Labels or Features?
Authors: Bram Wallace, Ziyang Wu, Bharath Hariharan
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Model Selection

    The problem of expert model selection deals with choosing the appropriate pretrained network ("expert") to transfer to a target task. Methods, however, generally depend on two separate assumptions: the presence of labeled images and access to powerful "probe" networks that yield useful features. In this work, we demonstrate the current reliance on both of these aspects and develop algorithms to operate when either of these assumptions fail. In the unlabeled case, we show that pseudolabels from the probe network provide discriminative enough gradients to perform nearly-equal task selection even when the probe network is trained on imagery unrelated to the tasks. To compute the embedding with no probe network at all, we introduce the Task Tangent Kernel (TTK) which uses a kernelized distance across multiple random networks to achieve performance over double that of other methods with randomly initialized models. Code is available at https://github.com/BramSW/task_characterization_cvpr_2021/.
Toward Joint Thing-and-Stuff Mining for Weakly Supervised Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Yunhang Shen, Liujuan Cao, Zhiwei Chen, Feihong Lian, Baochang Zhang, Chi Su, Yongjian Wu, Feiyue Huang, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2021-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Multiple Instance Learning, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly Supervised Object Detection, Weakly-supervised panoptic segmentation

    Panoptic segmentation aims to partition an image to object instances and semantic content for thing and stuff categories, respectively. To date, learning weakly supervised panoptic segmentation (WSPS) with only image-level labels remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose an efficient jointly thing-and-stuff mining (JTSM) framework for WSPS. To this end, we design a novel mask of interest pooling (MoIPool) to extract fixed-size pixel-accurate feature maps of arbitrary-shape segmentations. MoIPool enables a panoptic mining branch to leverage multiple instance learning (MIL) to recognize things and stuff segmentation in a unified manner. We further refine segmentation masks with parallel instance and semantic segmentation branches via self-training, which collaborates the mined masks from panoptic mining with bottom-up object evidence as pseudo-ground-truth labels to improve spatial coherence and contour localization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of JTSM on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. As a by-product, we achieve competitive results for weakly supervised object detection and instance segmentation. This work is a first step towards tackling challenge panoptic segmentation task with only image-level labels.