pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Noise2Score: Tweedie's Approach to Self-Supervised Image Denoising without Clean Images
Authors: Kwanyoung Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Recently, there has been extensive research interest in training deep networks to denoise images without clean reference. However, the representative approaches such as Noise2Noise, Noise2Void, Stein's unbiased risk estimator (SURE), etc. seem to differ from one another and it is difficult to find the coherent mathematical structure. To address this, here we present a novel approach, called Noise2Score, which reveals a missing link in order to unite these seemingly different approaches. Specifically, we show that image denoising problems without clean images can be addressed by finding the mode of the posterior distribution and that the Tweedie's formula offers an explicit solution through the score function (i.e. the gradient of log likelihood). Our method then uses the recent finding that the score function can be stably estimated from the noisy images using the amortized residual denoising autoencoder, the method of which is closely related to Noise2Noise or Nose2Void. Our Noise2Score approach is so universal that the same network training can be used to remove noises from images that are corrupted by any exponential family distributions and noise parameters. Using extensive experiments with Gaussian, Poisson, and Gamma noises, we show that Noise2Score significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised denoising methods in the benchmark data set such as (C)BSD68, Set12, and Kodak, etc.
Pyramidal Dense Attention Networks for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Huapeng Wu, Jie Gui, Jun Zhang, James T. Kwok, Zhihui Wei
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recently, deep convolutional neural network methods have achieved an excellent performance in image superresolution (SR), but they can not be easily applied to embedded devices due to large memory cost. To solve this problem, we propose a pyramidal dense attention network (PDAN) for lightweight image super-resolution in this paper. In our method, the proposed pyramidal dense learning can gradually increase the width of the densely connected layer inside a pyramidal dense block to extract deep features efficiently. Meanwhile, the adaptive group convolution that the number of groups grows linearly with dense convolutional layers is introduced to relieve the parameter explosion. Besides, we also present a novel joint attention to capture cross-dimension interaction between the spatial dimensions and channel dimension in an efficient way for providing rich discriminative feature representations. Extensive experimental results show that our method achieves superior performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art lightweight SR methods.
Is Perfect Filtering Enough Leading to Perfect Phase Correction for dMRI data?
Authors: Liu Feihong, Yang Junwei, He Xiaowei, Zhou Luping, Feng Jun, Shen Dinggang
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diffusion  MRI

Being complex-valued and low in signal-to-noise ratios, magnitude-based diffusion MRI is confounded by the noise-floor that falsely elevates signal magnitude and incurs bias to the commonly used diffusion indices, such as fractional anisotropy (FA). To avoid noise-floor, most existing phase correction methods explore improving filters to estimate the noise-free background phase. In this work, after diving into the phase correction procedures, we argue that even a perfect filter is insufficient for phase correction because the correction procedures are incapable of distinguishing sign-symbols of noise, resulting in artifacts (\textit{i.e.}, arbitrary signal loss). With this insight, we generalize the definition of noise-floor to a complex polar coordinate system and propose a calibration procedure that could conveniently distinguish noise sign symbols. The calibration procedure is conceptually simple and easy to implement without relying on any external technique while keeping distinctly effective.
NDPNet: A novel non-linear data projection network for few-shot fine-grained image classification
Authors: Weichuan Zhang, Xuefang Liu, Zhe Xue, Yongsheng Gao, Changming Sun
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Fine-Grained Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Metric Learning

Metric-based few-shot fine-grained image classification (FSFGIC) aims to learn a transferable feature embedding network by estimating the similarities between query images and support classes from very few examples. In this work, we propose, for the first time, to introduce the non-linear data projection concept into the design of FSFGIC architecture in order to address the limited sample problem in few-shot learning and at the same time to increase the discriminability of the model for fine-grained image classification. Specifically, we first design a feature re-abstraction embedding network that has the ability to not only obtain the required semantic features for effective metric learning but also re-enhance such features with finer details from input images. Then the descriptors of the query images and the support classes are projected into different non-linear spaces in our proposed similarity metric learning network to learn discriminative projection factors. This design can effectively operate in the challenging and restricted condition of a FSFGIC task for making the distance between the samples within the same class smaller and the distance between samples from different classes larger and for reducing the coupling relationship between samples from different categories. Furthermore, a novel similarity measure based on the proposed non-linear data project is presented for evaluating the relationships of feature information between a query image and a support set. It is worth to note that our proposed architecture can be easily embedded into any episodic training mechanisms for end-to-end training from scratch. Extensive experiments on FSFGIC tasks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-art benchmarks.
Learning the Imaging Landmarks: Unsupervised Key point Detection in Lung Ultrasound Videos
Authors: Arpan Tripathi, Mahesh Raveendranatha Panicker, Abhilash R Hareendranathan, Yale Tung Chen, Jacob L Jaremko, Kiran Vishnu Narayan, Kesavadas C
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Lung ultrasound (LUS) is an increasingly popular diagnostic imaging modality for continuous and periodic monitoring of lung infection, given its advantages of non-invasiveness, non-ionizing nature, portability and easy disinfection. The major landmarks assessed by clinicians for triaging using LUS are pleura, A and B lines. There have been many efforts for the automatic detection of these landmarks. However, restricting to a few pre-defined landmarks may not reveal the actual imaging biomarkers particularly in case of new pathologies like COVID-19. Rather, the identification of key landmarks should be driven by data given the availability of a plethora of neural network algorithms. This work is a first of its kind attempt towards unsupervised detection of the key LUS landmarks in LUS videos of COVID-19 subjects during various stages of infection. We adapted the relatively newer approach of transporter neural networks to automatically mark and track pleura, A and B lines based on their periodic motion and relatively stable appearance in the videos. Initial results on unsupervised pleura detection show an accuracy of 91.8% employing 1081 LUS video frames.
An Approach Towards Physics Informed Lung Ultrasound Image Scoring Neural Network for Diagnostic Assistance in COVID-19
Authors: Mahesh Raveendranatha Panicker, Yale Tung Chen, Gayathri M, Madhavanunni A N, Kiran Vishnu Narayan, C Kesavadas, A P Vinod
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Specificity

Ultrasound is fast becoming an inevitable diagnostic tool for regular and continuous monitoring of the lung with the recent outbreak of COVID-19. In this work, a novel approach is presented to extract acoustic propagation-based features to automatically highlight the region below pleura, which is an important landmark in lung ultrasound (LUS). Subsequently, a multichannel input formed by using the acoustic physics-based feature maps is fused to train a neural network, referred to as LUSNet, to classify the LUS images into five classes of varying severity of lung infection to track the progression of COVID-19. In order to ensure that the proposed approach is agnostic to the type of acquisition, the LUSNet, which consists of a U-net architecture is trained in an unsupervised manner with the acoustic feature maps to ensure that the encoder-decoder architecture is learning features in the pleural region of interest. A novel combination of the U-net output and the U-net encoder output is employed for the classification of severity of infection in the lung. A detailed analysis of the proposed approach on LUS images over the infection to full recovery period of ten confirmed COVID-19 subjects shows an average five-fold cross-validation accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 97%, 93%, and 98% respectively over 5000 frames of COVID-19 videos. The analysis also shows that, when the input dataset is limited and diverse as in the case of COVID-19 pandemic, an aided effort of combining acoustic propagation-based features along with the gray scale images, as proposed in this work, improves the performance of the neural network significantly and also aids the labelling and triaging process.
NLHD: A Pixel-Level Non-Local Retinex Model for Low-Light Image Enhancement
Authors: Hao Hou, Yingkun Hou, Yuxuan Shi, Benzheng Wei, Jun Xu
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Low-Light Image Enhancement

Retinex model has been applied to low-light image enhancement in many existing methods. More appropriate decomposition of a low-light image can help achieve better image enhancement. In this paper, we propose a new pixel-level non-local Haar transform based illumination and reflectance decomposition method (NLHD). The unique low-frequency coefficient of Haar transform on each similar pixel group is used to reconstruct the illumination component, and the rest of all high-frequency coefficients are employed to reconstruct the reflectance component. The complete similarity of pixels in a matched similar pixel group and the simple separable Haar transform help to obtain more appropriate image decomposition; thus, the image is hardly sharpened in the image brightness enhancement procedure. The exponential transform and logarithmic transform are respectively implemented on the illumination component. Then a minimum fusion strategy on the results of these two transforms is utilized to achieve more natural illumination component enhancement. It can alleviate the mosaic artifacts produced in the darker regions by the exponential transform with a gamma value less than 1 and reduce information loss caused by excessive enhancement of the brighter regions due to the logarithmic transform. Finally, the Retinex model is applied to the enhanced illumination and reflectance to achieve image enhancement. We also develop a local noise level estimation based noise suppression method and a non-local saturation reduction based color deviation correction method. These two methods can respectively attenuate noise or color deviation usually presented in the enhanced results of the extremely dark low-light images. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method can achieve better low-light image enhancement results on subjective and objective evaluations than most existing methods.
Feedback Pyramid Attention Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Huapeng Wu, Jie Gui, Jun Zhang, James T. Kwok, Zhihui Wei
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) based image super-resolution (SR) methods have achieved significant performance improvement. However, most CNN-based methods mainly focus on feed-forward architecture design and neglect to explore the feedback mechanism, which usually exists in the human visual system. In this paper, we propose feedback pyramid attention networks (FPAN) to fully exploit the mutual dependencies of features. Specifically, a novel feedback connection structure is developed to enhance low-level feature expression with high-level information. In our method, the output of each layer in the first stage is also used as the input of the corresponding layer in the next state to re-update the previous low-level filters. Moreover, we introduce a pyramid non-local structure to model global contextual information in different scales and improve the discriminative representation of the network. Extensive experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of our FPAN in comparison with the state-of-the-art SR methods.
Contrastive Attention for Automatic Chest X-ray Report Generation
Authors: Fenglin Liu, Changchang Yin, Xian Wu, Shen Ge, Ping Zhang, Yuexian Zou, Xu sun
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2021 8

Recently, chest X-ray report generation, which aims to automatically generate descriptions of given chest X-ray images, has received growing research interests. The key challenge of chest X-ray report generation is to accurately capture and describe the abnormal regions. In most cases, the normal regions dominate the entire chest X-ray image, and the corresponding descriptions of these normal regions dominate the final report. Due to such data bias, learning-based models may fail to attend to abnormal regions. In this work, to effectively capture and describe abnormal regions, we propose the Contrastive Attention (CA) model. Instead of solely focusing on the current input image, the CA model compares the current input image with normal images to distill the contrastive information. The acquired contrastive information can better represent the visual features of abnormal regions. According to the experiments on the public IU-X-ray and MIMIC-CXR datasets, incorporating our CA into several existing models can boost their performance across most metrics. In addition, according to the analysis, the CA model can help existing models better attend to the abnormal regions and provide more accurate descriptions which are crucial for an interpretable diagnosis. Specifically, we achieve the state-of-the-art results on the two public datasets.
Exploring and Distilling Posterior and Prior Knowledge for Radiology Report Generation
Authors: Fenglin Liu, Xian Wu, Shen Ge, Wei Fan, Yuexian Zou
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Diagnostic

Automatically generating radiology reports can improve current clinical practice in diagnostic radiology. On one hand, it can relieve radiologists from the heavy burden of report writing; On the other hand, it can remind radiologists of abnormalities and avoid the misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis. Yet, this task remains a challenging job for data-driven neural networks, due to the serious visual and textual data biases. To this end, we propose a Posterior-and-Prior Knowledge Exploring-and-Distilling approach (PPKED) to imitate the working patterns of radiologists, who will first examine the abnormal regions and assign the disease topic tags to the abnormal regions, and then rely on the years of prior medical knowledge and prior working experience accumulations to write reports. Thus, the PPKED includes three modules: Posterior Knowledge Explorer (PoKE), Prior Knowledge Explorer (PrKE) and Multi-domain Knowledge Distiller (MKD). In detail, PoKE explores the posterior knowledge, which provides explicit abnormal visual regions to alleviate visual data bias; PrKE explores the prior knowledge from the prior medical knowledge graph (medical knowledge) and prior radiology reports (working experience) to alleviate textual data bias. The explored knowledge is distilled by the MKD to generate the final reports. Evaluated on MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray datasets, our method is able to outperform previous state-of-the-art models on these two datasets.
Representation and Correlation Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework for Scene Text Recognition
Authors: Mengmeng Cui, Wei Wang, Jinjin Zhang, Liang Wang
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Scene Text Recognition

Attention-based encoder-decoder framework is widely used in the scene text recognition task. However, for the current state-of-the-art(SOTA) methods, there is room for improvement in terms of the efficient usage of local visual and global context information of the input text image, as well as the robust correlation between the scene processing module(encoder) and the text processing module(decoder). In this paper, we propose a Representation and Correlation Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework(RCEED) to address these deficiencies and break performance bottleneck. In the encoder module, local visual feature, global context feature, and position information are aligned and fused to generate a small-size comprehensive feature map. In the decoder module, two methods are utilized to enhance the correlation between scene and text feature space. 1) The decoder initialization is guided by the holistic feature and global glimpse vector exported from the encoder. 2) The feature enriched glimpse vector produced by the Multi-Head General Attention is used to assist the RNN iteration and the character prediction at each time step. Meanwhile, we also design a Layernorm-Dropout LSTM cell to improve model's generalization towards changeable texts. Extensive experiments on the benchmarks demonstrate the advantageous performance of RCEED in scene text recognition tasks, especially the irregular ones.
Do Not Escape From the Manifold: Discovering the Local Coordinates on the Latent Space of GANs
Authors: Jaewoong Choi, Junho Lee, Changyeon Yoon, Jung Ho Park, Geonho Hwang, Myungjoo Kang
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Disentanglement, Image Generation, Image Manipulation

The discovery of the disentanglement properties of the latent space in GANs motivated a lot of research to find the semantically meaningful directions on it. In this paper, we suggest that the disentanglement property is closely related to the geometry of the latent space. In this regard, we propose an unsupervised method for finding the semantic-factorizing directions on the intermediate latent space of GANs based on the local geometry. Intuitively, our proposed method, called Local Basis, finds the principal variation of the latent space in the neighborhood of the base latent variable. Experimental results show that the local principal variation corresponds to the semantic factorization and traversing along it provides strong robustness to image traversal. Moreover, we suggest an explanation for the limited success in finding the global traversal directions in the latent space, especially W-space of StyleGAN2. We show that W-space is warped globally by comparing the local geometry, discovered from Local Basis, through the metric on Grassmannian Manifold. The global warpage implies that the latent space is not well-aligned globally and therefore the global traversal directions are bound to show limited success on it.
A Stronger Baseline for Ego-Centric Action Detection
Authors: Zhiwu Qing, Ziyuan Huang, Xiang Wang, Yutong Feng, Shiwei Zhang, Jianwen Jiang, Mingqian Tang, Changxin Gao, Marcelo H. Ang Jr, Nong Sang
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Video Action Detection

This technical report analyzes an egocentric video action detection method we used in the 2021 EPIC-KITCHENS-100 competition hosted in CVPR2021 Workshop. The goal of our task is to locate the start time and the end time of the action in the long untrimmed video, and predict action category. We adopt sliding window strategy to generate proposals, which can better adapt to short-duration actions. In addition, we show that classification and proposals are conflict in the same network. The separation of the two tasks boost the detection performance with high efficiency. By simply employing these strategy, we achieved 16.10\% performance on the test set of EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Action Detection challenge using a single model, surpassing the baseline method by 11.7\% in terms of average mAP.
Cross-Modal Attention Consistency for Video-Audio Unsupervised Learning
Authors: Shaobo Min, Qi Dai, Hongtao Xie, Chuang Gan, Yongdong Zhang, Jingdong Wang
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning

Cross-modal correlation provides an inherent supervision for video unsupervised representation learning. Existing methods focus on distinguishing different video clips by visual and audio representations. We human visual perception could attend to regions where sounds are made, and our auditory perception could also ground their frequencies of sounding objects, which we call bidirectional local correspondence. Such supervision is intuitive but not well explored in the contrastive learning framework. This paper introduces a pretext task, Cross-Modal Attention Consistency (CMAC), for exploring the bidirectional local correspondence property. The CMAC approach aims to align the regional attention generated purely from the visual signal with the target attention generated under the guidance of acoustic signal, and do a similar alignment for frequency grounding on the acoustic attention. Accompanied by a remoulded cross-modal contrastive loss where we consider additional within-modal interactions, the CMAC approach works effectively for enforcing the bidirectional alignment. Extensive experiments on six downstream benchmarks demonstrate that CMAC can improve the state-of-the-art performance on both visual and audio modalities.
Inverting Adversarially Robust Networks for Image Synthesis
Authors: Renan A. Rojas-Gomez, Raymond A. Yeh, Minh N. Do, Anh Nguyen
Date: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Deep Feature Inversion, Image Denoising, Image Generation, Style Transfer

Despite unconditional feature inversion being the foundation of many image synthesis applications, training an inverter demands a high computational budget, large decoding capacity and imposing conditions such as autoregressive priors. To address these limitations, we propose the use of adversarially robust representations as a perceptual primitive for feature inversion. We train an adversarially robust encoder to extract disentangled and perceptually-aligned image representations, making them easily invertible. By training a simple generator with the mirror architecture of the encoder, we achieve superior reconstruction quality and generalization over standard models. Based on this, we propose an adversarially robust autoencoder and demonstrate its improved performance on style transfer, image denoising and anomaly detection tasks. Compared to recent ImageNet feature inversion methods, our model attains improved performance with significantly less complexity.