pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Quantifying urban streetscapes with deep learning: focus on aesthetic evaluation
Authors: Yusuke Kumakoshi, Shigeaki Onoda, Tetsuya Takahashi, Yuji Yoshimura
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The disorder of urban streetscapes would negatively affect people's perception of their aesthetic quality. The presence of billboards on building facades has been regarded as an important factor of the disorder, but its quantification methodology has not yet been developed in a scalable manner. To fill the gap, this paper reports the performance of our deep learning model on a unique data set prepared in Tokyo to recognize the areas covered by facades and billboards in streetscapes, respectively. The model achieved 63.17 % of accuracy, measured by Intersection-over-Union (IoU), thus enabling researchers and practitioners to obtain insights on urban streetscape design by combining data of people's preferences.
TANet++: Triple Attention Network with Filtered Pointcloud on 3D Detection
Authors: Cong Ma
Date: 2021-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

TANet is one of state-of-the-art 3D object detection method on KITTI and JRDB benchmark, the network contains a Triple Attention module and Coarse-to-Fine Regression module to improve the robustness and accuracy of 3D Detection. However, since the original input data (point clouds) contains a lot of noise during collecting the data, which will further affect the training of the model. For example, the object is far from the robot, the sensor is difficult to obtain enough pointcloud. If the objects only contains few point clouds, and the samples are fed into model with the normal samples together during training, the detector will be difficult to distinguish the individual with few pointcloud belong to object or background. In this paper, we propose TANet++ to improve the performance on 3D Detection, which adopt a novel training strategy on training the TANet. In order to reduce the negative impact by the weak samples, the training strategy previously filtered the training data, and then the TANet++ is trained by the rest of data. The experimental results shows that AP score of TANet++ is 8.98 higher than TANet on JRDB benchmark.
Text Prior Guided Scene Text Image Super-resolution
Authors: jianqi ma, Shi Guo, Lei Zhang
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims to improve the resolution and visual quality of low-resolution (LR) scene text images, and consequently boost the performance of text recognition. However, most of existing STISR methods regard text images as natural scene images, ignoring the categorical information of text. In this paper, we make an inspiring attempt to embed categorical text prior into STISR model training. Specifically, we adopt the character probability sequence as the text prior, which can be obtained conveniently from a text recognition model. The text prior provides categorical guidance to recover high-resolution (HR) text images. On the other hand, the reconstructed HR image can refine the text prior in return. Finally, we present a multi-stage text prior guided super-resolution (TPGSR) framework for STISR. Our experiments on the benchmark TextZoom dataset show that TPGSR can not only effectively improve the visual quality of scene text images, but also significantly improve the text recognition accuracy over existing STISR methods. Our model trained on TextZoom also demonstrates certain generalization capability to the LR images in other datasets.
A Behavior-aware Graph Convolution Network Model for Video Recommendation
Authors: Wei Zhuo, Kunchi Liu, Taofeng Xue, Beihong Jin, Beibei Li, Xinzhou Dong, He Chen, Wenhai Pan, Xuejian Zhang, Shuo Zhou
Date: 2021-06-27 00:00:00

Interactions between users and videos are the major data source of performing video recommendation. Despite lots of existing recommendation methods, user behaviors on videos, which imply the complex relations between users and videos, are still far from being fully explored. In the paper, we present a model named Sagittarius. Sagittarius adopts a graph convolutional neural network to capture the influence between users and videos. In particular, Sagittarius differentiates between different user behaviors by weighting and fuses the semantics of user behaviors into the embeddings of users and videos. Moreover, Sagittarius combines multiple optimization objectives to learn user and video embeddings and then achieves the video recommendation by the learned user and video embeddings. The experimental results on multiple datasets show that Sagittarius outperforms several state-of-the-art models in terms of recall, unique recall and NDCG.
IMENet: Joint 3D Semantic Scene Completion and 2D Semantic Segmentation through Iterative Mutual Enhancement
Authors: Jie Li, Laiyan Ding, Rui Huang
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Semantic Segmentation, 3D Semantic Scene Completion, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

3D semantic scene completion and 2D semantic segmentation are two tightly correlated tasks that are both essential for indoor scene understanding, because they predict the same semantic classes, using positively correlated high-level features. Current methods use 2D features extracted from early-fused RGB-D images for 2D segmentation to improve 3D scene completion. We argue that this sequential scheme does not ensure these two tasks fully benefit each other, and present an Iterative Mutual Enhancement Network (IMENet) to solve them jointly, which interactively refines the two tasks at the late prediction stage. Specifically, two refinement modules are developed under a unified framework for the two tasks. The first is a 2D Deformable Context Pyramid (DCP) module, which receives the projection from the current 3D predictions to refine the 2D predictions. In turn, a 3D Deformable Depth Attention (DDA) module is proposed to leverage the reprojected results from 2D predictions to update the coarse 3D predictions. This iterative fusion happens to the stable high-level features of both tasks at a late stage. Extensive experiments on NYU and NYUCAD datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed iterative late fusion scheme, and our approach outperforms the state of the art on both 3D semantic scene completion and 2D semantic segmentation.
How Does Heterogeneous Label Noise Impact Generalization in Neural Nets?
Authors: Bidur Khanal, Christopher Kanan
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00

Incorrectly labeled examples, or label noise, is common in real-world computer vision datasets. While the impact of label noise on learning in deep neural networks has been studied in prior work, these studies have exclusively focused on homogeneous label noise, i.e., the degree of label noise is the same across all categories. However, in the real-world, label noise is often heterogeneous, with some categories being affected to a greater extent than others. Here, we address this gap in the literature. We hypothesized that heterogeneous label noise would only affect the classes that had label noise unless there was transfer from those classes to the classes without label noise. To test this hypothesis, we designed a series of computer vision studies using MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MS-COCO where we imposed heterogeneous label noise during the training of multi-class, multi-task, and multi-label systems. Our results provide evidence in support of our hypothesis: label noise only affects the class affected by it unless there is transfer.
Study of visual processing techniques for dynamic speckles: a comparative analysis
Authors: Amit Chatterjee, Jitendra Dhanotiya, Vimal Bhatia, Shashi Prakash
Date: 2021-06-16 00:00:00

Main visual techniques used to obtain information from speckle patterns are Fujii method, generalized difference, weighted generalized difference, mean windowed difference, structural function (SF), modified SF, etc. In this work, a comparative analysis of major visual techniques for natural gum sample is carried out. Obtained results conclusively establish SF based method as an optimum tool for visual inspection of dynamic speckle data.
Fast and Accurate Road Crack Detection Based on Adaptive Cost-Sensitive Loss Function
Authors: Kai Li, Bo wang, Yingjie Tian, Zhiquan Qi
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00

Numerous detection problems in computer vision, including road crack detection, suffer from exceedingly foreground-background imbalance. Fortunately, modification of loss function appears to solve this puzzle once and for all. In this paper, we propose a pixel-based adaptive weighted cross-entropy loss in conjunction with Jaccard distance to facilitate high-quality pixel-level road crack detection. Our work profoundly demonstrates the influence of loss functions on detection outcomes, and sheds light on the sophisticated consecutive improvements in the realm of crack detection. Specifically, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed loss, we conduct extensive experiments on four public databases, i.e., CrackForest, AigleRN, Crack360, and BJN260. Compared with the vanilla weighted cross-entropy, the proposed loss significantly speeds up the training process while retaining the test accuracy.
Unified Questioner Transformer for Descriptive Question Generation in Goal-Oriented Visual Dialogue
Authors: Shoya Matsumori, Kosuke Shingyouchi, Yuki Abe, Yosuke Fukuchi, Komei Sugiura, Michita Imai
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Descriptive, Question Generation, Question-Generation

Building an interactive artificial intelligence that can ask questions about the real world is one of the biggest challenges for vision and language problems. In particular, goal-oriented visual dialogue, where the aim of the agent is to seek information by asking questions during a turn-taking dialogue, has been gaining scholarly attention recently. While several existing models based on the GuessWhat?! dataset have been proposed, the Questioner typically asks simple category-based questions or absolute spatial questions. This might be problematic for complex scenes where the objects share attributes or in cases where descriptive questions are required to distinguish objects. In this paper, we propose a novel Questioner architecture, called Unified Questioner Transformer (UniQer), for descriptive question generation with referring expressions. In addition, we build a goal-oriented visual dialogue task called CLEVR Ask. It synthesizes complex scenes that require the Questioner to generate descriptive questions. We train our model with two variants of CLEVR Ask datasets. The results of the quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that UniQer outperforms the baseline.
Segmentation with Multiple Acceptable Annotations: A Case Study of Myocardial Segmentation in Contrast Echocardiography
Authors: Dewen Zeng, Mingqi Li, Yukun Ding, Xiaowei Xu, Qiu Xie, Ruixue Xu, Hongwen Fei, Meiping Huang, Jian Zhuang, Yiyu Shi
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Most existing deep learning-based frameworks for image segmentation assume that a unique ground truth is known and can be used for performance evaluation. This is true for many applications, but not all. Myocardial segmentation of Myocardial Contrast Echocardiography (MCE), a critical task in automatic myocardial perfusion analysis, is an example. Due to the low resolution and serious artifacts in MCE data, annotations from different cardiologists can vary significantly, and it is hard to tell which one is the best. In this case, how can we find a good way to evaluate segmentation performance and how do we train the neural network? In this paper, we address the first problem by proposing a new extended Dice to effectively evaluate the segmentation performance when multiple accepted ground truth is available. Then based on our proposed metric, we solve the second problem by further incorporating the new metric into a loss function that enables neural networks to flexibly learn general features of myocardium. Experiment results on our clinical MCE data set demonstrate that the neural network trained with the proposed loss function outperforms those existing ones that try to obtain a unique ground truth from multiple annotations, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, our grading study shows that using extended Dice as an evaluation metric can better identify segmentation results that need manual correction compared with using Dice.
Cosmic-CoNN: A Cosmic Ray Detection Deep-Learning Framework, Dataset, and Toolkit
Authors: Chengyuan Xu, Curtis McCully, Boning Dong, D. Andrew Howell, Pradeep Sen
Date: 2021-06-28 00:00:00

Rejecting cosmic rays (CRs) is essential for the scientific interpretation of CCD-captured data, but detecting CRs in single-exposure images has remained challenging. Conventional CR detectors require experimental parameter tuning for different instruments, and recent deep learning methods only produce instrument-specific models that suffer from performance loss on telescopes not included in the training data. We present Cosmic-CoNN, a generic CR detector deployed for 24 telescopes at the Las Cumbres Observatory, which is made possible by the three contributions in this work: 1) We build a large and diverse ground-based CR dataset leveraging thousands of images from a global telescope network. 2) We propose a novel loss function and a neural network optimized for telescope imaging data to train generic CR detection models. At 95% recall, our model achieves a precision of 93.70% on Las Cumbres imaging data and maintains a consistent performance on new ground-based instruments never used for training. Specifically, the Cosmic-CoNN model trained on the Las Cumbres CR dataset maintains high precisions of 92.03% and 96.69% on Gemini GMOS-N/S 1x1 and 2x2 binning images, respectively. 3) We build a suite of tools including an interactive CR mask visualization and editing interface, console commands, and Python APIs to make automatic, robust CR detection widely accessible by the community of astronomers. Our dataset, open-source codebase, and trained models are available at https://github.com/cy-xu/cosmic-conn.
IREM: High-Resolution Magnetic Resonance (MR) Image Reconstruction via Implicit Neural Representation
Authors: Qing Wu, Yuwei Li, Lan Xu, Ruiming Feng, Hongjiang Wei, Qing Yang, Boliang Yu, Xiaozhao Liu, Jingyi Yu, Yuyao Zhang
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Image Reconstruction, Super-Resolution

For collecting high-quality high-resolution (HR) MR image, we propose a novel image reconstruction network named IREM, which is trained on multiple low-resolution (LR) MR images and achieve an arbitrary up-sampling rate for HR image reconstruction. In this work, we suppose the desired HR image as an implicit continuous function of the 3D image spatial coordinate and the thick-slice LR images as several sparse discrete samplings of this function. Then the super-resolution (SR) task is to learn the continuous volumetric function from a limited observations using an fully-connected neural network combined with Fourier feature positional encoding. By simply minimizing the error between the network prediction and the acquired LR image intensity across each imaging plane, IREM is trained to represent a continuous model of the observed tissue anatomy. Experimental results indicate that IREM succeeds in representing high frequency image feature, and in real scene data collection, IREM reduces scan time and achieves high-quality high-resolution MR imaging in terms of SNR and local image detail.
Two-Stage Self-Supervised Cycle-Consistency Network for Reconstruction of Thin-Slice MR Images
Authors: Zhiyang Lu, Zheng Li, Jun Wang, Jun Shi, Dinggang Shen
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Triplet

The thick-slice magnetic resonance (MR) images are often structurally blurred in coronal and sagittal views, which causes harm to diagnosis and image post-processing. Deep learning (DL) has shown great potential to re-construct the high-resolution (HR) thin-slice MR images from those low-resolution (LR) cases, which we refer to as the slice interpolation task in this work. However, since it is generally difficult to sample abundant paired LR-HR MR images, the classical fully supervised DL-based models cannot be effectively trained to get robust performance. To this end, we propose a novel Two-stage Self-supervised Cycle-consistency Network (TSCNet) for MR slice interpolation, in which a two-stage self-supervised learning (SSL) strategy is developed for unsupervised DL network training. The paired LR-HR images are synthesized along the sagittal and coronal directions of input LR images for network pretraining in the first-stage SSL, and then a cyclic in-terpolation procedure based on triplet axial slices is designed in the second-stage SSL for further refinement. More training samples with rich contexts along all directions are exploited as guidance to guarantee the improved in-terpolation performance. Moreover, a new cycle-consistency constraint is proposed to supervise this cyclic procedure, which encourages the network to reconstruct more realistic HR images. The experimental results on a real MRI dataset indicate that TSCNet achieves superior performance over the conventional and other SSL-based algorithms, and obtains competitive quali-tative and quantitative results compared with the fully supervised algorithm.
Spiking-GAN: A Spiking Generative Adversarial Network Using Time-To-First-Spike Coding
Authors: Vineet Kotariya, Udayan Ganguly
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have shown great potential in solving deep learning problems in an energy-efficient manner. However, they are still limited to simple classification tasks. In this paper, we propose Spiking-GAN, the first spike-based Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). It employs a kind of temporal coding scheme called time-to-first-spike coding. We train it using approximate backpropagation in the temporal domain. We use simple integrate-and-fire (IF) neurons with very high refractory period for our network which ensures a maximum of one spike per neuron. This makes the model much sparser than a spike rate-based system. Our modified temporal loss function called 'Aggressive TTFS' improves the inference time of the network by over 33% and reduces the number of spikes in the network by more than 11% compared to previous works. Our experiments show that on training the network on the MNIST dataset using this approach, we can generate high quality samples. Thereby demonstrating the potential of this framework for solving such problems in the spiking domain.
Hate speech detection using static BERT embeddings
Authors: Gaurav Rajput, Narinder Singh Punn, Sanjay Kumar Sonbhadra, Sonali Agarwal
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection, Specificity, Word Embeddings

With increasing popularity of social media platforms hate speech is emerging as a major concern, where it expresses abusive speech that targets specific group characteristics, such as gender, religion or ethnicity to spread violence. Earlier people use to verbally deliver hate speeches but now with the expansion of technology, some people are deliberately using social media platforms to spread hate by posting, sharing, commenting, etc. Whether it is Christchurch mosque shootings or hate crimes against Asians in west, it has been observed that the convicts are very much influenced from hate text present online. Even though AI systems are in place to flag such text but one of the key challenges is to reduce the false positive rate (marking non hate as hate), so that these systems can detect hate speech without undermining the freedom of expression. In this paper, we use ETHOS hate speech detection dataset and analyze the performance of hate speech detection classifier by replacing or integrating the word embeddings (fastText (FT), GloVe (GV) or FT + GV) with static BERT embeddings (BE). With the extensive experimental trails it is observed that the neural network performed better with static BE compared to using FT, GV or FT + GV as word embeddings. In comparison to fine-tuned BERT, one metric that significantly improved is specificity.
Evaluation of Automated Image Descriptions for Visually Impaired Students
Authors: Anett Hoppe, David Morris, Ralph Ewerth
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00

Illustrations are widely used in education, and sometimes, alternatives are not available for visually impaired students. Therefore, those students would benefit greatly from an automatic illustration description system, but only if those descriptions were complete, correct, and easily understandable using a screenreader. In this paper, we report on a study for the assessment of automated image descriptions. We interviewed experts to establish evaluation criteria, which we then used to create an evaluation questionnaire for sighted non-expert raters, and description templates. We used this questionnaire to evaluate the quality of descriptions which could be generated with a template-based automatic image describer. We present evidence that these templates have the potential to generate useful descriptions, and that the questionnaire identifies problems with description templates.
Topic Modeling Based Extractive Text Summarization
Authors: Kalliath Abdul Rasheed Issam, Shivam Patel, Subalalitha C. N
Date: 2021-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Extractive Text Summarization, Text Summarization

Text summarization is an approach for identifying important information present within text documents. This computational technique aims to generate shorter versions of the source text, by including only the relevant and salient information present within the source text. In this paper, we propose a novel method to summarize a text document by clustering its contents based on latent topics produced using topic modeling techniques and by generating extractive summaries for each of the identified text clusters. All extractive sub-summaries are later combined to generate a summary for any given source document. We utilize the lesser used and challenging WikiHow dataset in our approach to text summarization. This dataset is unlike the commonly used news datasets which are available for text summarization. The well-known news datasets present their most important information in the first few lines of their source texts, which make their summarization a lesser challenging task when compared to summarizing the WikiHow dataset. Contrary to these news datasets, the documents in the WikiHow dataset are written using a generalized approach and have lesser abstractedness and higher compression ratio, thus proposing a greater challenge to generate summaries. A lot of the current state-of-the-art text summarization techniques tend to eliminate important information present in source documents in the favor of brevity. Our proposed technique aims to capture all the varied information present in source documents. Although the dataset proved challenging, after performing extensive tests within our experimental setup, we have discovered that our model produces encouraging ROUGE results and summaries when compared to the other published extractive and abstractive text summarization models.