pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HLA-Face: Joint High-Low Adaptation for Low Light Face Detection
Authors: Wenjing Wang, Wenhan Yang, Jiaying Liu
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Face Detection, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Face detection in low light scenarios is challenging but vital to many practical applications, e.g., surveillance video, autonomous driving at night. Most existing face detectors heavily rely on extensive annotations, while collecting data is time-consuming and laborious. To reduce the burden of building new datasets for low light conditions, we make full use of existing normal light data and explore how to adapt face detectors from normal light to low light. The challenge of this task is that the gap between normal and low light is too huge and complex for both pixel-level and object-level. Therefore, most existing low-light enhancement and adaptation methods do not achieve desirable performance. To address the issue, we propose a joint High-Low Adaptation (HLA) framework. Through a bidirectional low-level adaptation and multi-task high-level adaptation scheme, our HLA-Face outperforms state-of-the-art methods even without using dark face labels for training. Our project is publicly available at https://daooshee.github.io/HLA-Face-Website/
Cascaded Robust Learning at Imperfect Labels for Chest X-ray Segmentation
Authors: Cheng Xue, Qiao Deng, Xiaomeng Li, Qi Dou, Pheng Ann Heng
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The superior performance of CNN on medical image analysis heavily depends on the annotation quality, such as the number of labeled image, the source of image, and the expert experience. The annotation requires great expertise and labour. To deal with the high inter-rater variability, the study of imperfect label has great significance in medical image segmentation tasks. In this paper, we present a novel cascaded robust learning framework for chest X-ray segmentation with imperfect annotation. Our model consists of three independent network, which can effectively learn useful information from the peer networks. The framework includes two stages. In the first stage, we select the clean annotated samples via a model committee setting, the networks are trained by minimizing a segmentation loss using the selected clean samples. In the second stage, we design a joint optimization framework with label correction to gradually correct the wrong annotation and improve the network performance. We conduct experiments on the public chest X-ray image datasets collected by Shenzhen Hospital. The results show that our methods could achieve a significant improvement on the accuracy in segmentation tasks compared to the previous methods.
Multi-Atlas Based Pathological Stratification of d-TGA Congenital Heart Disease
Authors: Maria A. Zuluaga, Alex F. Mendelson, M. Jorge Cardoso, Andrew M. Taylor, Sébastien Ourselin
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

One of the main sources of error in multi-atlas segmentation propagation approaches comes from the use of atlas databases that are morphologically dissimilar to the target image. In this work, we exploit the segmentation errors associated with poor atlas selection to build a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system for pathological classification in post-operative dextro-transposition of the great arteries (d-TGA). The proposed approach extracts a set of features, which describe the quality of a segmentation, and introduces them into a logical decision tree that provides the final diagnosis. We have validated our method on a set of 60 whole heart MR images containing healthy cases and two different forms of post-operative d-TGA. The reported overall CAD system accuracy was of 93.33%.
Robust Trust Region for Weakly Supervised Segmentation
Authors: Dmitrii Marin, Yuri Boykov
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised segmentation

Acquisition of training data for the standard semantic segmentation is expensive if requiring that each pixel is labeled. Yet, current methods significantly deteriorate in weakly supervised settings, e.g. where a fraction of pixels is labeled or when only image-level tags are available. It has been shown that regularized losses - originally developed for unsupervised low-level segmentation and representing geometric priors on pixel labels - can considerably improve the quality of weakly supervised training. However, many common priors require optimization stronger than gradient descent. Thus, such regularizers have limited applicability in deep learning. We propose a new robust trust region approach for regularized losses improving the state-of-the-art results. Our approach can be seen as a higher-order generalization of the classic chain rule. It allows neural network optimization to use strong low-level solvers for the corresponding regularizers, including discrete ones.
Few-Cost Salient Object Detection with Adversarial-Paced Learning
Authors: Dingwen Zhang, HaiBin Tian, Jungong Han
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Saliency Detection, Salient Object Detection

Detecting and segmenting salient objects from given image scenes has received great attention in recent years. A fundamental challenge in training the existing deep saliency detection models is the requirement of large amounts of annotated data. While gathering large quantities of training data becomes cheap and easy, annotating the data is an expensive process in terms of time, labor and human expertise. To address this problem, this paper proposes to learn the effective salient object detection model based on the manual annotation on a few training images only, thus dramatically alleviating human labor in training models. To this end, we name this task as the few-cost salient object detection and propose an adversarial-paced learning (APL)-based framework to facilitate the few-cost learning scenario. Essentially, APL is derived from the self-paced learning (SPL) regime but it infers the robust learning pace through the data-driven adversarial learning mechanism rather than the heuristic design of the learning regularizer. Comprehensive experiments on four widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively approach to the existing supervised deep salient object detection models with only 1k human-annotated training images. The project page is available at https://github.com/hb-stone/FC-SOD.
Global Guidance Network for Breast Lesion Segmentation in Ultrasound Images
Authors: Cheng Xue, Lei Zhu, Huazhu Fu, Xiaowei Hu, Xiaomeng Li, Hai Zhang, Pheng Ann Heng
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Image Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Automatic breast lesion segmentation in ultrasound helps to diagnose breast cancer, which is one of the dreadful diseases that affect women globally. Segmenting breast regions accurately from ultrasound image is a challenging task due to the inherent speckle artifacts, blurry breast lesion boundaries, and inhomogeneous intensity distributions inside the breast lesion regions. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable results in medical image segmentation tasks. However, the convolutional operations in a CNN often focus on local regions, which suffer from limited capabilities in capturing long-range dependencies of the input ultrasound image, resulting in degraded breast lesion segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we develop a deep convolutional neural network equipped with a global guidance block (GGB) and breast lesion boundary detection (BD) modules for boosting the breast ultrasound lesion segmentation. The GGB utilizes the multi-layer integrated feature map as a guidance information to learn the long-range non-local dependencies from both spatial and channel domains. The BD modules learn additional breast lesion boundary map to enhance the boundary quality of a segmentation result refinement. Experimental results on a public dataset and a collected dataset show that our network outperforms other medical image segmentation methods and the recent semantic segmentation methods on breast ultrasound lesion segmentation. Moreover, we also show the application of our network on the ultrasound prostate segmentation, in which our method better identifies prostate regions than state-of-the-art networks.
Talk, Don't Write: A Study of Direct Speech-Based Image Retrieval
Authors: Ramon Sanabria, Austin Waters, Jason Baldridge
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Image Retrieval, Representation Learning, Retrieval, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Speech-based image retrieval has been studied as a proxy for joint representation learning, usually without emphasis on retrieval itself. As such, it is unclear how well speech-based retrieval can work in practice -- both in an absolute sense and versus alternative strategies that combine automatic speech recognition (ASR) with strong text encoders. In this work, we extensively study and expand choices of encoder architectures, training methodology (including unimodal and multimodal pretraining), and other factors. Our experiments cover different types of speech in three datasets: Flickr Audio, Places Audio, and Localized Narratives. Our best model configuration achieves large gains over state of the art, e.g., pushing recall-at-one from 21.8% to 33.2% for Flickr Audio and 27.6% to 53.4% for Places Audio. We also show our best speech-based models can match or exceed cascaded ASR-to-text encoding when speech is spontaneous, accented, or otherwise hard to automatically transcribe.
Adaptive Gradient Balancing for UndersampledMRI Reconstruction and Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Itzik Malkiel, Sangtae Ahn, Valentina Taviani, Anne Menini, Lior Wolf, Christopher J. Hardy
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image-to-Image Translation, MRI Reconstruction, Translation

Recent accelerated MRI reconstruction models have used Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to reconstruct relatively high-quality images from highly undersampled k-space data, enabling much faster MRI scanning. However, these techniques sometimes struggle to reconstruct sharp images that preserve fine detail while maintaining a natural appearance. In this work, we enhance the image quality by using a Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network combined with a novel Adaptive Gradient Balancing (AGB) technique that automates the process of combining the adversarial and pixel-wise terms and streamlines hyperparameter tuning. In addition, we introduce a Densely Connected Iterative Network, which is an undersampled MRI reconstruction network that utilizes dense connections. In MRI, our method minimizes artifacts, while maintaining a high-quality reconstruction that produces sharper images than other techniques. To demonstrate the general nature of our method, it is further evaluated on a battery of image-to-image translation experiments, demonstrating an ability to recover from sub-optimal weighting in multi-term adversarial training.
Non-Homogeneous Haze Removal via Artificial Scene Prior and Bidimensional Graph Reasoning
Authors: Haoran Wei, Qingbo Wu, Hui Li, King Ngi Ngan, Hongliang Li, Fanman Meng, Linfeng Xu
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing

Due to the lack of natural scene and haze prior information, it is greatly challenging to completely remove the haze from a single image without distorting its visual content. Fortunately, the real-world haze usually presents non-homogeneous distribution, which provides us with many valuable clues in partial well-preserved regions. In this paper, we propose a Non-Homogeneous Haze Removal Network (NHRN) via artificial scene prior and bidimensional graph reasoning. Firstly, we employ the gamma correction iteratively to simulate artificial multiple shots under different exposure conditions, whose haze degrees are different and enrich the underlying scene prior. Secondly, beyond utilizing the local neighboring relationship, we build a bidimensional graph reasoning module to conduct non-local filtering in the spatial and channel dimensions of feature maps, which models their long-range dependency and propagates the natural scene prior between the well-preserved nodes and the nodes contaminated by haze. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exploration to remove non-homogeneous haze via the graph reasoning based framework. We evaluate our method on different benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over many state-of-the-art algorithms for both the single image dehazing and hazy image understanding tasks. The source code of the proposed NHRN is available on https://github.com/whrws/NHRNet.
MetaHTR: Towards Writer-Adaptive Handwritten Text Recognition
Authors: Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Shuvozit Ghose, Amandeep Kumar, Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Aneeshan Sain, Yi-Zhe Song
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Handwritten Text Recognition, HTR, Meta-Learning

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) remains a challenging problem to date, largely due to the varying writing styles that exist amongst us. Prior works however generally operate with the assumption that there is a limited number of styles, most of which have already been captured by existing datasets. In this paper, we take a completely different perspective -- we work on the assumption that there is always a new style that is drastically different, and that we will only have very limited data during testing to perform adaptation. This results in a commercially viable solution -- the model has the best shot at adaptation being exposed to the new style, and the few samples nature makes it practical to implement. We achieve this via a novel meta-learning framework which exploits additional new-writer data through a support set, and outputs a writer-adapted model via single gradient step update, all during inference. We discover and leverage on the important insight that there exists few key characters per writer that exhibit relatively larger style discrepancies. For that, we additionally propose to meta-learn instance specific weights for a character-wise cross-entropy loss, which is specifically designed to work with the sequential nature of text data. Our writer-adaptive MetaHTR framework can be easily implemented on the top of most state-of-the-art HTR models. Experiments show an average performance gain of 5-7% can be obtained by observing very few new style data. We further demonstrate via a set of ablative studies the advantage of our meta design when compared with alternative adaption mechanisms.
Lipstick ain't enough: Beyond Color Matching for In-the-Wild Makeup Transfer
Authors: Thao Nguyen, Anh Tran, Minh Hoai
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Color Manipulation, Facial Makeup Transfer, Style Transfer, Virtual Try-on

Makeup transfer is the task of applying on a source face the makeup style from a reference image. Real-life makeups are diverse and wild, which cover not only color-changing but also patterns, such as stickers, blushes, and jewelries. However, existing works overlooked the latter components and confined makeup transfer to color manipulation, focusing only on light makeup styles. In this work, we propose a holistic makeup transfer framework that can handle all the mentioned makeup components. It consists of an improved color transfer branch and a novel pattern transfer branch to learn all makeup properties, including color, shape, texture, and location. To train and evaluate such a system, we also introduce new makeup datasets for real and synthetic extreme makeup. Experimental results show that our framework achieves the state of the art performance on both light and extreme makeup styles. Code is available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/CPM.
Unsupervised Multi-source Domain Adaptation Without Access to Source Data
Authors: Sk Miraj Ahmed, Dripta S. Raychaudhuri, Sujoy Paul, Samet Oymak, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to learn a predictor model for an unlabeled domain by transferring knowledge from a separate labeled source domain. However, most of these conventional UDA approaches make the strong assumption of having access to the source data during training, which may not be very practical due to privacy, security and storage concerns. A recent line of work addressed this problem and proposed an algorithm that transfers knowledge to the unlabeled target domain from a single source model without requiring access to the source data. However, for adaptation purposes, if there are multiple trained source models available to choose from, this method has to go through adapting each and every model individually, to check for the best source. Thus, we ask the question: can we find the optimal combination of source models, with no source data and without target labels, whose performance is no worse than the single best source? To answer this, we propose a novel and efficient algorithm which automatically combines the source models with suitable weights in such a way that it performs at least as good as the best source model. We provide intuitive theoretical insights to justify our claim. Furthermore, extensive experiments are conducted on several benchmark datasets to show the effectiveness of our algorithm, where in most cases, our method not only reaches best source accuracy but also outperforms it.
Monocular 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation by Integrating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Networks
Authors: Yu Cheng, Bo wang, Bo Yang, Robby T. Tan
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation, 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation (absolute), 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation (root-relative), Human Detection, Multi-Person Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

In monocular video 3D multi-person pose estimation, inter-person occlusion and close interactions can cause human detection to be erroneous and human-joints grouping to be unreliable. Existing top-down methods rely on human detection and thus suffer from these problems. Existing bottom-up methods do not use human detection, but they process all persons at once at the same scale, causing them to be sensitive to multiple-persons scale variations. To address these challenges, we propose the integration of top-down and bottom-up approaches to exploit their strengths. Our top-down network estimates human joints from all persons instead of one in an image patch, making it robust to possible erroneous bounding boxes. Our bottom-up network incorporates human-detection based normalized heatmaps, allowing the network to be more robust in handling scale variations. Finally, the estimated 3D poses from the top-down and bottom-up networks are fed into our integration network for final 3D poses. Besides the integration of top-down and bottom-up networks, unlike existing pose discriminators that are designed solely for single person, and consequently cannot assess natural inter-person interactions, we propose a two-person pose discriminator that enforces natural two-person interactions. Lastly, we also apply a semi-supervised method to overcome the 3D ground-truth data scarcity. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations show the effectiveness of our method compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.
Hierarchical Pyramid Representations for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Hiroaki Aizawa, Yukihiro Domae, Kunihito Kato
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Understanding the context of complex and cluttered scenes is a challenging problem for semantic segmentation. However, it is difficult to model the context without prior and additional supervision because the scene's factors, such as the scale, shape, and appearance of objects, vary considerably in these scenes. To solve this, we propose to learn the structures of objects and the hierarchy among objects because context is based on these intrinsic properties. In this study, we design novel hierarchical, contextual, and multiscale pyramidal representations to capture the properties from an input image. Our key idea is the recursive segmentation in different hierarchical regions based on a predefined number of regions and the aggregation of the context in these regions. The aggregated contexts are used to predict the contextual relationship between the regions and partition the regions in the following hierarchical level. Finally, by constructing the pyramid representations from the recursively aggregated context, multiscale and hierarchical properties are attained. In the experiments, we confirmed that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in PASCAL Context.
Deep Learning-Based Autonomous Driving Systems: A Survey of Attacks and Defenses
Authors: Yao Deng, Tiehua Zhang, Guannan Lou, Xi Zheng, Jiong Jin, Qing-Long Han
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Autonomous Driving, Deep Learning

The rapid development of artificial intelligence, especially deep learning technology, has advanced autonomous driving systems (ADSs) by providing precise control decisions to counterpart almost any driving event, spanning from anti-fatigue safe driving to intelligent route planning. However, ADSs are still plagued by increasing threats from different attacks, which could be categorized into physical attacks, cyberattacks and learning-based adversarial attacks. Inevitably, the safety and security of deep learning-based autonomous driving are severely challenged by these attacks, from which the countermeasures should be analyzed and studied comprehensively to mitigate all potential risks. This survey provides a thorough analysis of different attacks that may jeopardize ADSs, as well as the corresponding state-of-the-art defense mechanisms. The analysis is unrolled by taking an in-depth overview of each step in the ADS workflow, covering adversarial attacks for various deep learning models and attacks in both physical and cyber context. Furthermore, some promising research directions are suggested in order to improve deep learning-based autonomous driving safety, including model robustness training, model testing and verification, and anomaly detection based on cloud/edge servers.
BTS-Net: Bi-directional Transfer-and-Selection Network For RGB-D Salient Object Detection
Authors: Wenbo Zhang, Yao Jiang, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB-D Salient Object Detection, Saliency Prediction, Salient Object Detection

Depth information has been proved beneficial in RGB-D salient object detection (SOD). However, depth maps obtained often suffer from low quality and inaccuracy. Most existing RGB-D SOD models have no cross-modal interactions or only have unidirectional interactions from depth to RGB in their encoder stages, which may lead to inaccurate encoder features when facing low quality depth. To address this limitation, we propose to conduct progressive bi-directional interactions as early in the encoder stage, yielding a novel bi-directional transfer-and-selection network named BTS-Net, which adopts a set of bi-directional transfer-and-selection (BTS) modules to purify features during encoding. Based on the resulting robust encoder features, we also design an effective light-weight group decoder to achieve accurate final saliency prediction. Comprehensive experiments on six widely used datasets demonstrate that BTS-Net surpasses 16 latest state-of-the-art approaches in terms of four key metrics.