pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Metal Artifact Reduction with Intra-Oral Scan Data for 3D Low Dose Maxillofacial CBCT Modeling
Authors: Chang Min Hyun, Taigyntuya Bayaraa, Hye Sun Yun, Tae Jun Jang, Hyoung Suk Park, Jin Keun Seo
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Metal Artifact Reduction, Multi-Task Learning, Segmentation

Low-dose dental cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) has been increasingly used for maxillofacial modeling. However, the presence of metallic inserts, such as implants, crowns, and dental filling, causes severe streaking and shading artifacts in a CBCT image and loss of the morphological structures of the teeth, which consequently prevents accurate segmentation of bones. A two-stage metal artifact reduction method is proposed for accurate 3D low-dose maxillofacial CBCT modeling, where a key idea is to utilize explicit tooth shape prior information from intra-oral scan data whose acquisition does not require any extra radiation exposure. In the first stage, an image-to-image deep learning network is employed to mitigate metal-related artifacts. To improve the learning ability, the proposed network is designed to take advantage of the intra-oral scan data as side-inputs and perform multi-task learning of auxiliary tooth segmentation. In the second stage, a 3D maxillofacial model is constructed by segmenting the bones from the dental CBCT image corrected in the first stage. For accurate bone segmentation, weighted thresholding is applied, wherein the weighting region is determined depending on the geometry of the intra-oral scan data. Because acquiring a paired training dataset of metal-artifact-free and metal artifact-affected dental CBCT images is challenging in clinical practice, an automatic method of generating a realistic dataset according to the CBCT physics model is introduced. Numerical simulations and clinical experiments show the feasibility of the proposed method, which takes advantage of tooth surface information from intra-oral scan data in 3D low dose maxillofacial CBCT modeling.
Phase-Stretch Adaptive Gradient-Field Extractor (PAGE)
Authors: Callen MacPhee, Madhuri Suthar, Bahram Jalali
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Detection

Phase-Stretch Adaptive Gradient-Field Extractor (PAGE) is an edge detection algorithm that is inspired by physics of electromagnetic diffraction and dispersion. A computational imaging algorithm, it identifies edges, their orientations and sharpness in a digital image where the image brightness changes abruptly. Edge detection is a basic operation performed by the eye and is crucial to visual perception. PAGE embeds an original image into a set of feature maps that can be used for object representation and classification. The algorithm performs exceptionally well as an edge and texture extractor in low light level and low contrast images. This manuscript is prepared to support the open-source code which is being simultaneously made available within the GitHub repository https://github.com/JalaliLabUCLA/Phase-Stretch-Adaptive-Gradient-field-Extractor/.
Accurate super-resolution low-field brain MRI
Authors: Juan Eugenio Iglesias, Riana Schleicher, Sonia Laguna, Benjamin Billot, Pamela Schaefer, Brenna McKaig, Joshua N. Goldstein, Kevin N. Sheth, Matthew S. Rosen, W. Taylor Kimberly
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Image Enhancement, Super-Resolution

The recent introduction of portable, low-field MRI (LF-MRI) into the clinical setting has the potential to transform neuroimaging. However, LF-MRI is limited by lower resolution and signal-to-noise ratio, leading to incomplete characterization of brain regions. To address this challenge, recent advances in machine learning facilitate the synthesis of higher resolution images derived from one or multiple lower resolution scans. Here, we report the extension of a machine learning super-resolution (SR) algorithm to synthesize 1 mm isotropic MPRAGE-like scans from LF-MRI T1-weighted and T2-weighted sequences. Our initial results on a paired dataset of LF and high-field (HF, 1.5T-3T) clinical scans show that: (i) application of available automated segmentation tools directly to LF-MRI images falters; but (ii) segmentation tools succeed when applied to SR images with high correlation to gold standard measurements from HF-MRI (e.g., r = 0.85 for hippocampal volume, r = 0.84 for the thalamus, r = 0.92 for the whole cerebrum). This work demonstrates proof-of-principle post-processing image enhancement from lower resolution LF-MRI sequences. These results lay the foundation for future work to enhance the detection of normal and abnormal image findings at LF and ultimately improve the diagnostic performance of LF-MRI. Our tools are publicly available on FreeSurfer (surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/).
Aladdin: Joint Atlas Building and Diffeomorphic Registration Learning with Pairwise Alignment
Authors: Zhipeng Ding, Marc Niethammer
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Image Registration, Medical Image Analysis

Atlas building and image registration are important tasks for medical image analysis. Once one or multiple atlases from an image population have been constructed, commonly (1) images are warped into an atlas space to study intra-subject or inter-subject variations or (2) a possibly probabilistic atlas is warped into image space to assign anatomical labels. Atlas estimation and nonparametric transformations are computationally expensive as they usually require numerical optimization. Additionally, previous approaches for atlas building often define similarity measures between a fuzzy atlas and each individual image, which may cause alignment difficulties because a fuzzy atlas does not exhibit clear anatomical structures in contrast to the individual images. This work explores using a convolutional neural network (CNN) to jointly predict the atlas and a stationary velocity field (SVF) parameterization for diffeomorphic image registration with respect to the atlas. Our approach does not require affine pre-registrations and utilizes pairwise image alignment losses to increase registration accuracy. We evaluate our model on 3D knee magnetic resonance images (MRI) from the OAI-ZIB dataset. Our results show that the proposed framework achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art image registration algorithms, allows for end-to-end training, and for fast inference at test time.
HeadPosr: End-to-end Trainable Head Pose Estimation using Transformer Encoders
Authors: Naina Dhingra
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

In this paper, HeadPosr is proposed to predict the head poses using a single RGB image. \textit{HeadPosr} uses a novel architecture which includes a transformer encoder. In concrete, it consists of: (1) backbone; (2) connector; (3) transformer encoder; (4) prediction head. The significance of using a transformer encoder for HPE is studied. An extensive ablation study is performed on varying the (1) number of encoders; (2) number of heads; (3) different position embeddings; (4) different activations; (5) input channel size, in a transformer used in HeadPosr. Further studies on using: (1) different backbones, (2) using different learning rates are also shown. The elaborated experiments and ablations studies are conducted using three different open-source widely used datasets for HPE, i.e., 300W-LP, AFLW2000, and BIWI datasets. Experiments illustrate that \textit{HeadPosr} outperforms all the state-of-art methods including both the landmark-free and the others based on using landmark or depth estimation on the AFLW2000 dataset and BIWI datasets when trained with 300W-LP. It also outperforms when averaging the results from the compared datasets, hence setting a benchmark for the problem of HPE, also demonstrating the effectiveness of using transformers over the state-of-the-art.
LwPosr: Lightweight Efficient Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation
Authors: Naina Dhingra
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

This paper presents a lightweight network for head pose estimation (HPE) task. While previous approaches rely on convolutional neural networks, the proposed network \textit{LwPosr} uses mixture of depthwise separable convolutional (DSC) and transformer encoder layers which are structured in two streams and three stages to provide fine-grained regression for predicting head poses. The quantitative and qualitative demonstration is provided to show that the proposed network is able to learn head poses efficiently while using less parameter space. Extensive ablations are conducted using three open-source datasets namely 300W-LP, AFLW2000, and BIWI datasets. To our knowledge, (1) \textit{LwPosr} is the lightest network proposed for estimating head poses compared to both keypoints-based and keypoints-free approaches; (2) it sets a benchmark for both overperforming the previous lightweight network on mean absolute error and on reducing number of parameters; (3) it is first of its kind to use mixture of DSCs and transformer encoders for HPE. This approach is suitable for mobile devices which require lightweight networks.
Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Speech Using Visual Grounding and Masked Language Modeling
Authors: Puyuan Peng, David Harwath
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Representation Learning, Visual Grounding

In this paper, we describe our submissions to the ZeroSpeech 2021 Challenge and SUPERB benchmark. Our submissions are based on the recently proposed FaST-VGS model, which is a Transformer-based model that learns to associate raw speech waveforms with semantically related images, all without the use of any transcriptions of the speech. Additionally, we introduce a novel extension of this model, FaST-VGS+, which is learned in a multi-task fashion with a masked language modeling objective in addition to the visual grounding objective. On ZeroSpeech 2021, we show that our models perform competitively on the ABX task, outperform all other concurrent submissions on the Syntactic and Semantic tasks, and nearly match the best system on the Lexical task. On the SUPERB benchmark, we show that our models also achieve strong performance, in some cases even outperforming the popular wav2vec2.0 model.
SliTraNet: Automatic Detection of Slide Transitions in Lecture Videos using Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Aline Sindel, Abner Hernandez, Seung Hee Yang, Vincent Christlein, Andreas Maier
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00

With the increasing number of online learning material in the web, search for specific content in lecture videos can be time consuming. Therefore, automatic slide extraction from the lecture videos can be helpful to give a brief overview of the main content and to support the students in their studies. For this task, we propose a deep learning method to detect slide transitions in lectures videos. We first process each frame of the video by a heuristic-based approach using a 2-D convolutional neural network to predict transition candidates. Then, we increase the complexity by employing two 3-D convolutional neural networks to refine the transition candidates. Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in finding slide transitions.
MINER: Multiscale Implicit Neural Representations
Authors: Vishwanath Saragadam, Jasper Tan, Guha Balakrishnan, Richard G. Baraniuk, Ashok Veeraraghavan
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

We introduce a new neural signal model designed for efficient high-resolution representation of large-scale signals. The key innovation in our multiscale implicit neural representation (MINER) is an internal representation via a Laplacian pyramid, which provides a sparse multiscale decomposition of the signal that captures orthogonal parts of the signal across scales. We leverage the advantages of the Laplacian pyramid by representing small disjoint patches of the pyramid at each scale with a small MLP. This enables the capacity of the network to adaptively increase from coarse to fine scales, and only represent parts of the signal with strong signal energy. The parameters of each MLP are optimized from coarse-to-fine scale which results in faster approximations at coarser scales, thereby ultimately an extremely fast training process. We apply MINER to a range of large-scale signal representation tasks, including gigapixel images and very large point clouds, and demonstrate that it requires fewer than 25% of the parameters, 33% of the memory footprint, and 10% of the computation time of competing techniques such as ACORN to reach the same representation accuracy.
Integrated Multiscale Domain Adaptive YOLO
Authors: Mazin Hnewa, Hayder Radha
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Adaptation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

The area of domain adaptation has been instrumental in addressing the domain shift problem encountered by many applications. This problem arises due to the difference between the distributions of source data used for training in comparison with target data used during realistic testing scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel MultiScale Domain Adaptive YOLO (MS-DAYOLO) framework that employs multiple domain adaptation paths and corresponding domain classifiers at different scales of the recently introduced YOLOv4 object detector. Building on our baseline multiscale DAYOLO framework, we introduce three novel deep learning architectures for a Domain Adaptation Network (DAN) that generates domain-invariant features. In particular, we propose a Progressive Feature Reduction (PFR), a Unified Classifier (UC), and an Integrated architecture. We train and test our proposed DAN architectures in conjunction with YOLOv4 using popular datasets. Our experiments show significant improvements in object detection performance when training YOLOv4 using the proposed MS-DAYOLO architectures and when tested on target data for autonomous driving applications. Moreover, MS-DAYOLO framework achieves an order of magnitude real-time speed improvement relative to Faster R-CNN solutions while providing comparable object detection performance.
Scribble-based Boundary-aware Network for Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images
Authors: Zhou Huang, Tian-Zhu Xiang, Huai-Xin Chen, Hang Dai
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Existing CNNs-based salient object detection (SOD) heavily depends on the large-scale pixel-level annotations, which is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. By contrast, the sparse annotations become appealing to the salient object detection community. However, few efforts are devoted to learning salient object detection from sparse annotations, especially in the remote sensing field. In addition, the sparse annotation usually contains scanty information, which makes it challenging to train a well-performing model, resulting in its performance largely lagging behind the fully-supervised models. Although some SOD methods adopt some prior cues to improve the detection performance, they usually lack targeted discrimination of object boundaries and thus provide saliency maps with poor boundary localization. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised salient object detection framework to predict the saliency of remote sensing images from sparse scribble annotations. To implement it, we first construct the scribble-based remote sensing saliency dataset by relabelling an existing large-scale SOD dataset with scribbles, namely S-EOR dataset. After that, we present a novel scribble-based boundary-aware network (SBA-Net) for remote sensing salient object detection. Specifically, we design a boundary-aware module (BAM) to explore the object boundary semantics, which is explicitly supervised by the high-confidence object boundary (pseudo) labels generated by the boundary label generation (BLG) module, forcing the model to learn features that highlight the object structure and thus boosting the boundary localization of objects. Then, the boundary semantics are integrated with high-level features to guide the salient object detection under the supervision of scribble labels.
Random Ferns for Semantic Segmentation of PolSAR Images
Authors: Pengchao Wei, Ronny Hänsch
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Random Ferns -- as a less known example of Ensemble Learning -- have been successfully applied in many Computer Vision applications ranging from keypoint matching to object detection. This paper extends the Random Fern framework to the semantic segmentation of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar images. By using internal projections that are defined over the space of Hermitian matrices, the proposed classifier can be directly applied to the polarimetric covariance matrices without the need to explicitly compute predefined image features. Furthermore, two distinct optimization strategies are proposed: The first based on pre-selection and grouping of internal binary features before the creation of the classifier; and the second based on iteratively improving the properties of a given Random Fern. Both strategies are able to boost the performance by filtering features that are either redundant or have a low information content and by grouping correlated features to best fulfill the independence assumptions made by the Random Fern classifier. Experiments show that results can be achieved that are similar to a more complex Random Forest model and competitive to a deep learning baseline.
Multi-modal data generation with a deep metric variational autoencoder
Authors: Josefine Vilsbøll Sundgaard, Morten Rieger Hannemose, Søren Laugesen, Peter Bray, James Harte, Yosuke Kamide, Chiemi Tanaka, Rasmus R. Paulsen, Anders Nymark Christensen
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Triplet

We present a deep metric variational autoencoder for multi-modal data generation. The variational autoencoder employs triplet loss in the latent space, which allows for conditional data generation by sampling in the latent space within each class cluster. The approach is evaluated on a multi-modal dataset consisting of otoscopy images of the tympanic membrane with corresponding wideband tympanometry measurements. The modalities in this dataset are correlated, as they represent different aspects of the state of the middle ear, but they do not present a direct pixel-to-pixel correlation. The approach shows promising results for the conditional generation of pairs of images and tympanograms, and will allow for efficient data augmentation of data from multi-modal sources.
A Coarse-to-fine Morphological Approach With Knowledge-based Rules and Self-adapting Correction for Lung Nodules Segmentation
Authors: Xinliang Fu, Jiayin Zheng, Juanyun Mai, Yanbo Shao, Minghao Wang, Linyu Li, Zhaoqi Diao, Yulong Chen, Jianyu Xiao, Jian You, Airu Yin, Yang Yang, Xiangcheng Qiu, Jinsheng Tao, Bo wang, Hua Ji
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

The segmentation module which precisely outlines the nodules is a crucial step in a computer-aided diagnosis(CAD) system. The most challenging part of such a module is how to achieve high accuracy of the segmentation, especially for the juxtapleural, non-solid and small nodules. In this research, we present a coarse-to-fine methodology that greatly improves the thresholding method performance with a novel self-adapting correction algorithm and effectively removes noisy pixels with well-defined knowledge-based principles. Compared with recent strong morphological baselines, our algorithm, by combining dataset features, achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the public LIDC-IDRI dataset (DSC 0.699) and our private LC015 dataset (DSC 0.760) which closely approaches the SOTA deep learning-based models' performances. Furthermore, unlike most available morphological methods that can only segment the isolated and well-circumscribed nodules accurately, the precision of our method is totally independent of the nodule type or diameter, proving its applicability and generality.
Inference of captions from histopathological patches
Authors: Masayuki Tsuneki, Fahdi Kanavati
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, whole slide images

Computational histopathology has made significant strides in the past few years, slowly getting closer to clinical adoption. One area of benefit would be the automatic generation of diagnostic reports from H\&E-stained whole slide images which would further increase the efficiency of the pathologists' routine diagnostic workflows. In this study, we compiled a dataset (PatchGastricADC22) of histopathological captions of stomach adenocarcinoma endoscopic biopsy specimens, which we extracted from diagnostic reports and paired with patches extracted from the associated whole slide images. The dataset contains a variety of gastric adenocarcinoma subtypes. We trained a baseline attention-based model to predict the captions from features extracted from the patches and obtained promising results. We make the captioned dataset of 262K patches publicly available.
A Topology-Attention ConvLSTM Network and Its Application to EM Images
Authors: Jiaqi Yang, Xiaoling Hu, Chao Chen, Chialing Tsai
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Structural accuracy of segmentation is important for finescale structures in biomedical images. We propose a novel TopologyAttention ConvLSTM Network (TACNet) for 3D image segmentation in order to achieve high structural accuracy for 3D segmentation tasks. Specifically, we propose a Spatial Topology-Attention (STA) module to process a 3D image as a stack of 2D image slices and adopt ConvLSTM to leverage contextual structure information from adjacent slices. In order to effectively transfer topology-critical information across slices, we propose an Iterative-Topology Attention (ITA) module that provides a more stable topology-critical map for segmentation. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our proposed method outperforms various baselines in terms of topology-aware evaluation metrics.
Performance Evaluation of Infrared Image Enhancement Techniques
Authors: Rania Gaber, AbdElmgied Ali, Kareem Ahmed
Date: 2022-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy, Image Enhancement, Object Tracking, Survey

Infrared (IR) images are widely used in many fields such as medical imaging, object tracking, astronomy and military purposes for securing borders. Infrared images can be captured day or night based on the type of capturing device. The capturing devices use electromagnetic radiation with longer wavelengths. There are several types of IR radiation based on the range of wavelength and corresponding frequency. Due to noising and other artifacts, IR images are not clearly visible. In this paper, we present a complete up-todate survey on IR imaging enhancement techniques. The survey includes IR radiation types and devices and existing IR datasets. The survey covers spatial enhancement techniques, frequency-domain based enhancement techniques and Deep learning-based techniques.