pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Fusion Siamese Network for Automatic Kinship Verification
Authors: Jun Yu, Mengyan Li, Xinlong Hao, Guochen Xie
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Kinship Verification, Triplet

Automatic kinship verification aims to determine whether some individuals belong to the same family. It is of great research significance to help missing persons reunite with their families. In this work, the challenging problem is progressively addressed in two respects. First, we propose a deep siamese network to quantify the relative similarity between two individuals. When given two input face images, the deep siamese network extracts the features from them and fuses these features by combining and concatenating. Then, the fused features are fed into a fully-connected network to obtain the similarity score between two faces, which is used to verify the kinship. To improve the performance, a jury system is also employed for multi-model fusion. Second, two deep siamese networks are integrated into a deep triplet network for tri-subject (i.e., father, mother and child) kinship verification, which is intended to decide whether a child is related to a pair of parents or not. Specifically, the obtained similarity scores of father-child and mother-child are weighted to generate the parent-child similarity score for kinship verification. Recognizing Families In the Wild (RFIW) is a challenging kinship recognition task with multiple tracks, which is based on Families in the Wild (FIW), a large-scale and comprehensive image database for automatic kinship recognition. The Kinship Verification (track I) and Tri-Subject Verification (track II) are supported during the ongoing RFIW2020 Challenge. Our team (ustc-nelslip) ranked 1st in track II, and 3rd in track I. The code is available at https://github.com/gniknoil/FG2020-kinship.
Challenge report: Recognizing Families In the Wild Data Challenge
Authors: Zhipeng Luo, Zhiguang Zhang, Zhenyu Xu, Lixuan Che
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Metric Learning

This paper is a brief report to our submission to the Recognizing Families In the Wild Data Challenge (4th Edition), in conjunction with FG 2020 Forum. Automatic kinship recognition has attracted many researchers' attention for its full application, but it is still a very challenging task because of the limited information that can be used to determine whether a pair of faces are blood relatives or not. In this paper, we studied previous methods and proposed our method. We try many methods, like deep metric learning-based, to extract deep embedding feature for every image, then determine if they are blood relatives by Euclidean distance or method based on classes. Finally, we find some tricks like sampling more negative samples and high resolution that can help get better performance. Moreover, we proposed a symmetric network with a binary classification based method to get our best score in all tasks.
Joint Person Objectness and Repulsion for Person Search
Authors: Hantao Yao, Changsheng Xu
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection, Person Search

Person search targets to search the probe person from the unconstrainted scene images, which can be treated as the combination of person detection and person matching. However, the existing methods based on the Detection-Matching framework ignore the person objectness and repulsion (OR) which are both beneficial to reduce the effect of distractor images. In this paper, we propose an OR similarity by jointly considering the objectness and repulsion information. Besides the traditional visual similarity term, the OR similarity also contains an objectness term and a repulsion term. The objectness term can reduce the similarity of distractor images that not contain a person and boost the performance of person search by improving the ranking of positive samples. Because the probe person has a different person ID with its \emph{neighbors}, the gallery images having a higher similarity with the \emph{neighbors of probe} should have a lower similarity with the probe person. Based on this repulsion constraint, the repulsion term is proposed to reduce the similarity of distractor images that are not most similar to the probe person. Treating the Faster R-CNN as the person detector, the OR similarity is evaluated on PRW and CUHK-SYSU datasets by the Detection-Matching framework with six description models. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed OR similarity can effectively reduce the similarity of distractor samples and further boost the performance of person search, e.g., improve the mAP from 92.32% to 93.23% for CUHK-SYSY dataset, and from 50.91% to 52.30% for PRW datasets.
Retrieval of Family Members Using Siamese Neural Network
Authors: Jun Yu, Guochen Xie, Mengyan Li, Xinlong Hao
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Retrieval of family members in the wild aims at finding family members of the given subject in the dataset, which is useful in finding the lost children and analyzing the kinship. However, due to the diversity in age, gender, pose and illumination of the collected data, this task is always challenging. To solve this problem, we propose our solution with deep Siamese neural network. Our solution can be divided into two parts: similarity computation and ranking. In training procedure, the Siamese network firstly takes two candidate images as input and produces two feature vectors. And then, the similarity between the two vectors is computed with several fully connected layers. While in inference procedure, we try another similarity computing method by dropping the followed several fully connected layers and directly computing the cosine similarity of the two feature vectors. After similarity computation, we use the ranking algorithm to merge the similarity scores with the same identity and output the ordered list according to their similarities. To gain further improvement, we try different combinations of backbones, training methods and similarity computing methods. Finally, we submit the best combination as our solution and our team(ustc-nelslip) obtains favorable result in the track3 of the RFIW2020 challenge with the first runner-up, which verifies the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/gniknoil/FG2020-kinship
When2com: Multi-Agent Perception via Communication Graph Grouping
Authors: Yen-Cheng Liu, Junjiao Tian, Nathaniel Glaser, Zsolt Kira
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6

While significant advances have been made for single-agent perception, many applications require multiple sensing agents and cross-agent communication due to benefits such as coverage and robustness. It is therefore critical to develop frameworks which support multi-agent collaborative perception in a distributed and bandwidth-efficient manner. In this paper, we address the collaborative perception problem, where one agent is required to perform a perception task and can communicate and share information with other agents on the same task. Specifically, we propose a communication framework by learning both to construct communication groups and decide when to communicate. We demonstrate the generalizability of our framework on two different perception tasks and show that it significantly reduces communication bandwidth while maintaining superior performance.
An Efficient Planar Bundle Adjustment Algorithm
Authors: Lipu Zhou, Daniel Koppel, Hui Ju, Frank Steinbruecker, Michael Kaess
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for the least-squares problem using the point-to-plane cost, which aims to jointly optimize depth sensor poses and plane parameters for 3D reconstruction. We call this least-squares problem \textbf{Planar Bundle Adjustment} (PBA), due to the similarity between this problem and the original Bundle Adjustment (BA) in visual reconstruction. As planes ubiquitously exist in the man-made environment, they are generally used as landmarks in SLAM algorithms for various depth sensors. PBA is important to reduce drift and improve the quality of the map. However, directly adopting the well-established BA framework in visual reconstruction will result in a very inefficient solution for PBA. This is because a 3D point only has one observation at a camera pose. In contrast, a depth sensor can record hundreds of points in a plane at a time, which results in a very large nonlinear least-squares problem even for a small-scale space. Fortunately, we find that there exist a special structure of the PBA problem. We introduce a reduced Jacobian matrix and a reduced residual vector, and prove that they can replace the original Jacobian matrix and residual vector in the generally adopted Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm. This significantly reduces the computational cost. Besides, when planes are combined with other features for 3D reconstruction, the reduced Jacobian matrix and residual vector can also replace the corresponding parts derived from planes. Our experimental results verify that our algorithm can significantly reduce the computational time compared to the solution using the traditional BA framework. Besides, our algorithm is faster, more accuracy, and more robust to initialization errors compared to the start-of-the-art solution using the plane-to-plane cost
OPAL-Net: A Generative Model for Part-based Object Layout Generation
Authors: Rishabh Baghel, Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Layout Generation

We propose OPAL-Net, a novel hierarchical architecture for part-based layout generation of objects from multiple categories using a single unified model. We adopt a coarse-to-fine strategy involving semantically conditioned autoregressive generation of bounding box layouts and pixel-level part layouts for objects. We use Graph Convolutional Networks, Deep Recurrent Networks along with custom-designed Conditional Variational Autoencoders to enable flexible, diverse and category-aware generation of object layouts. We train OPAL-Net on PASCAL-Parts dataset. The generated samples and corresponding evaluation scores demonstrate the versatility of OPAL-Net compared to ablative variants and baselines.
Attention-Guided Discriminative Region Localization and Label Distribution Learning for Bone Age Assessment
Authors: Chao Chen, Zhihong Chen, Xinyu Jin, Lanjuan Li, William Speier, Corey W. Arnold
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, regression

Bone age assessment (BAA) is clinically important as it can be used to diagnose endocrine and metabolic disorders during child development. Existing deep learning based methods for classifying bone age use the global image as input, or exploit local information by annotating extra bounding boxes or key points. However, training with the global image underutilizes discriminative local information, while providing extra annotations is expensive and subjective. In this paper, we propose an attention-guided approach to automatically localize the discriminative regions for BAA without any extra annotations. Specifically, we first train a classification model to learn the attention maps of the discriminative regions, finding the hand region, the most discriminative region (the carpal bones), and the next most discriminative region (the metacarpal bones). Guided by those attention maps, we then crop the informative local regions from the original image and aggregate different regions for BAA. Instead of taking BAA as a general regression task, which is suboptimal due to the label ambiguity problem in the age label space, we propose using joint age distribution learning and expectation regression, which makes use of the ordinal relationship among hand images with different individual ages and leads to more robust age estimation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the RSNA pediatric bone age data set. Using no training annotations, our method achieves competitive results compared with existing state-of-the-art semi-automatic deep learning-based methods that require manual annotation. Code is available at https: //github.com/chenchao666/Bone-Age-Assessment.
Complex Sequential Understanding through the Awareness of Spatial and Temporal Concepts
Authors: Bo Pang, Kaiwen Zha, Hanwen Cao, Jiajun Tang, Minghui Yu, Cewu Lu
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Understanding sequential information is a fundamental task for artificial intelligence. Current neural networks attempt to learn spatial and temporal information as a whole, limited their abilities to represent large scale spatial representations over long-range sequences. Here, we introduce a new modeling strategy called Semi-Coupled Structure (SCS), which consists of deep neural networks that decouple the complex spatial and temporal concepts learning. Semi-Coupled Structure can learn to implicitly separate input information into independent parts and process these parts respectively. Experiments demonstrate that a Semi-Coupled Structure can successfully annotate the outline of an object in images sequentially and perform video action recognition. For sequence-to-sequence problems, a Semi-Coupled Structure can predict future meteorological radar echo images based on observed images. Taken together, our results demonstrate that a Semi-Coupled Structure has the capacity to improve the performance of LSTM-like models on large scale sequential tasks.
Self-adaptive Re-weighted Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Shan-Shan Wang, Lei Zhang
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Triplet

Existing adversarial domain adaptation methods mainly consider the marginal distribution and these methods may lead to either under transfer or negative transfer. To address this problem, we present a self-adaptive re-weighted adversarial domain adaptation approach, which tries to enhance domain alignment from the perspective of conditional distribution. In order to promote positive transfer and combat negative transfer, we reduce the weight of the adversarial loss for aligned features while increasing the adversarial force for those poorly aligned measured by the conditional entropy. Additionally, triplet loss leveraging source samples and pseudo-labeled target samples is employed on the confusing domain. Such metric loss ensures the distance of the intra-class sample pairs closer than the inter-class pairs to achieve the class-level alignment. In this way, the high accurate pseudolabeled target samples and semantic alignment can be captured simultaneously in the co-training process. Our method achieved low joint error of the ideal source and target hypothesis. The expected target error can then be upper bounded following Ben-David's theorem. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the proposed model outperforms state of the arts on standard domain adaptation datasets.
Web page classification with Google Image Search results
Authors: Fahri Aydos, A. Murat Özbayoğlu, Yahya Şirin, M. Fatih Demirci
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Descriptive, General Classification, Image Retrieval

In this paper, we introduce a novel method that combines multiple neural network results to decide the class of the input. This is the first study which used the method for web pages classification. In our model, each element is represented by multiple descriptive images. After the training process of the neural network model, each element is classified by calculating its descriptive image results. We apply our idea to the web page classification problem using Google Image Search results as descriptive images. We obtained a classification rate of 94.90% on the WebScreenshots dataset that contains 20000 web sites in 4 classes. The method is easily applicable to similar problems.
Is Depth Really Necessary for Salient Object Detection?
Authors: Jia-Wei Zhao, Yifan Zhao, Jia Li, Xiaowu Chen
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB-D Salient Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Salient object detection (SOD) is a crucial and preliminary task for many computer vision applications, which have made progress with deep CNNs. Most of the existing methods mainly rely on the RGB information to distinguish the salient objects, which faces difficulties in some complex scenarios. To solve this, many recent RGBD-based networks are proposed by adopting the depth map as an independent input and fuse the features with RGB information. Taking the advantages of RGB and RGBD methods, we propose a novel depth-aware salient object detection framework, which has following superior designs: 1) It only takes the depth information as training data while only relies on RGB information in the testing phase. 2) It comprehensively optimizes SOD features with multi-level depth-aware regularizations. 3) The depth information also serves as error-weighted map to correct the segmentation process. With these insightful designs combined, we make the first attempt in realizing an unified depth-aware framework with only RGB information as input for inference, which not only surpasses the state-of-the-art performances on five public RGB SOD benchmarks, but also surpasses the RGBD-based methods on five benchmarks by a large margin, while adopting less information and implementation light-weighted. The code and model will be publicly available.
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) image enhancement using a gradient vector orientation based nonlinear diffusion filter (GVOF) for accurate quantitation of radioactivity concentration
Authors: Mahbubunnabi Tamal
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement

To accurately quantify in vivo radiotracer uptake using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a challenging task due to low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and poor spatial resolution of PET camera along with the finite image sampling constraint. Furthermore, inter lesion variations of the SNR and contrast along with the variations in size of the lesion make the quantitation even more difficult. One of the ways to improve the quantitation is via post reconstruction filtering with Gaussian Filter (GF). Edge preserving Bilateral Filter (BF) and Nonlinear Diffusion Filter (NDF) are the alternatives to GF that can improve the SNR without degrading the image resolution. However, the performance of these edge preserving methods are only optimum for high count and low noise cases. A novel parameter free gradient vector orientation based nonlinear diffusion filter (GVOF) is proposed in this paper that is insensitive to statistical fluctuations (e. g., SNR, contrast, size etc.). GVOF method applied on the PET images collected with the NEMA phantom with varying levels of contrast and noise reveals that the GVOF method provides the highest SNR, CNR (contrast-to-noise ratio) and resolution compared to the original and other filtered images. The percentage bias in estimating the maximum activity representing SUVmax (Maximum Standardized Uptake Value) for the spheres with diameter > 2cm where the partial volume effects (PVE) is negligible is the lowest for the GVOF method. The GVOF method also improves the maximum intensity reproducibility. Robustness of the GVOF against variation in sizes, contrast levels and SNR makes it a suitable post filtering method for both accurate diagnosis and response assessment. Furthermore, its capability to provide accurate quantitative measurements irrespective of the SNR, it can also be effective in reduction of radioactivity dose.
Super-BPD: Super Boundary-to-Pixel Direction for Fast Image Segmentation
Authors: Jianqiang Wan, Yang Liu, Donglai Wei, Xiang Bai, Yongchao Xu
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Superpixels

Image segmentation is a fundamental vision task and a crucial step for many applications. In this paper, we propose a fast image segmentation method based on a novel super boundary-to-pixel direction (super-BPD) and a customized segmentation algorithm with super-BPD. Precisely, we define BPD on each pixel as a two-dimensional unit vector pointing from its nearest boundary to the pixel. In the BPD, nearby pixels from different regions have opposite directions departing from each other, and adjacent pixels in the same region have directions pointing to the other or each other (i.e., around medial points). We make use of such property to partition an image into super-BPDs, which are novel informative superpixels with robust direction similarity for fast grouping into segmentation regions. Extensive experimental results on BSDS500 and Pascal Context demonstrate the accuracy and efficency of the proposed super-BPD in segmenting images. In practice, the proposed super-BPD achieves comparable or superior performance with MCG while running at ~25fps vs. 0.07fps. Super-BPD also exhibits a noteworthy transferability to unseen scenes. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/JianqiangWan/Super-BPD.
SDCT-AuxNet$^θ$: DCT Augmented Stain Deconvolutional CNN with Auxiliary Classifier for Cancer Diagnosis
Authors: Shiv Gehlot, Anubha Gupta, Ritu Gupta
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a pervasive pediatric white blood cell cancer across the globe. With the popularity of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), computer-aided diagnosis of cancer has attracted considerable attention. Such tools are easily deployable and are cost-effective. Hence, these can enable extensive coverage of cancer diagnostic facilities. However, the development of such a tool for ALL cancer was challenging so far due to the non-availability of a large training dataset. The visual similarity between the malignant and normal cells adds to the complexity of the problem. This paper discusses the recent release of a large dataset and presents a novel deep learning architecture for the classification of cell images of ALL cancer. The proposed architecture, namely, SDCT-AuxNet$^{\theta}$ is a 2-module framework that utilizes a compact CNN as the main classifier in one module and a Kernel SVM as the auxiliary classifier in the other one. While CNN classifier uses features through bilinear-pooling, spectral-averaged features are used by the auxiliary classifier. Further, this CNN is trained on the stain deconvolved quantity images in the optical density domain instead of the conventional RGB images. A novel test strategy is proposed that exploits both the classifiers for decision making using the confidence scores of their predicted class labels. Elaborate experiments have been carried out on our recently released public dataset of 15114 images of ALL cancer and healthy cells to establish the validity of the proposed methodology that is also robust to subject-level variability. A weighted F1 score of 94.8$\%$ is obtained that is best so far on this challenging dataset.
Semi-Supervised Fine-Tuning for Deep Learning Models in Remote Sensing Applications
Authors: Eftychios Protopapadakis, Anastasios Doulamis, Nikolaos Doulamis, Evangelos Maltezos
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

A combinatory approach of two well-known fields: deep learning and semi supervised learning is presented, to tackle the land cover identification problem. The proposed methodology demonstrates the impact on the performance of deep learning models, when SSL approaches are used as performance functions during training. Obtained results, at pixel level segmentation tasks over orthoimages, suggest that SSL enhanced loss functions can be beneficial in models' performance.