pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-Content Complementation Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images
Authors: Gongyang Li, Zhi Liu, Weisi Lin, Haibin Ling
Date: 2021-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

In the computer vision community, great progresses have been achieved in salient object detection from natural scene images (NSI-SOD); by contrast, salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (RSI-SOD) remains to be a challenging emerging topic. The unique characteristics of optical RSIs, such as scales, illuminations and imaging orientations, bring significant differences between NSI-SOD and RSI-SOD. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Content Complementation Network (MCCNet) to explore the complementarity of multiple content for RSI-SOD. Specifically, MCCNet is based on the general encoder-decoder architecture, and contains a novel key component named Multi-Content Complementation Module (MCCM), which bridges the encoder and the decoder. In MCCM, we consider multiple types of features that are critical to RSI-SOD, including foreground features, edge features, background features, and global image-level features, and exploit the content complementarity between them to highlight salient regions over various scales in RSI features through the attention mechanism. Besides, we comprehensively introduce pixel-level, map-level and metric-aware losses in the training phase. Extensive experiments on two popular datasets demonstrate that the proposed MCCNet outperforms 23 state-of-the-art methods, including both NSI-SOD and RSI-SOD methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/MCCNet.
Bio-inspired Polarization Event Camera
Authors: Germain Haessig, Damien Joubert, Justin Haque, Yingkai Chen, Moritz Milde, Tobi Delbruck, Viktor Gruev
Date: 2021-12-02 00:00:00

The stomatopod (mantis shrimp) visual system has recently provided a blueprint for the design of paradigm-shifting polarization and multispectral imaging sensors, enabling solutions to challenging medical and remote sensing problems. However, these bioinspired sensors lack the high dynamic range (HDR) and asynchronous polarization vision capabilities of the stomatopod visual system, limiting temporal resolution to \~12 ms and dynamic range to \~ 72 dB. Here we present a novel stomatopod-inspired polarization camera which mimics the sustained and transient biological visual pathways to save power and sample data beyond the maximum Nyquist frame rate. This bio-inspired sensor simultaneously captures both synchronous intensity frames and asynchronous polarization brightness change information with sub-millisecond latencies over a million-fold range of illumination. Our PDAVIS camera is comprised of 346x260 pixels, organized in 2-by-2 macropixels, which filter the incoming light with four linear polarization filters offset by 45 degrees. Polarization information is reconstructed using both low cost and latency event-based algorithms and more accurate but slower deep neural networks. Our sensor is used to image HDR polarization scenes which vary at high speeds and to observe dynamical properties of single collagen fibers in bovine tendon under rapid cyclical loads
Boosting Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Soft Pseudo-label and Curriculum Learning
Authors: Shengjia Zhang, Tiancheng Lin, Yi Xu
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Pseudo Label, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

By leveraging data from a fully labeled source domain, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) improves classification performance on an unlabeled target domain through explicit discrepancy minimization of data distribution or adversarial learning. As an enhancement, category alignment is involved during adaptation to reinforce target feature discrimination by utilizing model prediction. However, there remain unexplored problems about pseudo-label inaccuracy incurred by wrong category predictions on target domain, and distribution deviation caused by overfitting on source domain. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic two-stage learning framework, which greatly reduces flawed model predictions using soft pseudo-label strategy and avoids overfitting on source domain with a curriculum learning strategy. Theoretically, it successfully decreases the combined risk in the upper bound of expected error on the target domain. At the first stage, we train a model with distribution alignment-based UDA method to obtain soft semantic label on target domain with rather high confidence. To avoid overfitting on source domain, at the second stage, we propose a curriculum learning strategy to adaptively control the weighting between losses from the two domains so that the focus of the training stage is gradually shifted from source distribution to target distribution with prediction confidence boosted on the target domain. Extensive experiments on two well-known benchmark datasets validate the universal effectiveness of our proposed framework on promoting the performance of the top-ranked UDA algorithms and demonstrate its consistent superior performance.
Optimization of phase-only holograms calculated with scaled diffraction calculation through deep neural networks
Authors: Yoshiyuki Ishii, Tomoyoshi Shimobaba, David Blinder, Tobias Birnbaum, Peter Schelkens, Takashi Kakue, Tomoyoshi Ito
Date: 2021-12-02 00:00:00

Computer-generated holograms (CGHs) are used in holographic three-dimensional (3D) displays and holographic projections. The quality of the reconstructed images using phase-only CGHs is degraded because the amplitude of the reconstructed image is difficult to control. Iterative optimization methods such as the Gerchberg-Saxton (GS) algorithm are one option for improving image quality. They optimize CGHs in an iterative fashion to obtain a higher image quality. However, such iterative computation is time consuming, and the improvement in image quality is often stagnant. Recently, deep learning-based hologram computation has been proposed. Deep neural networks directly infer CGHs from input image data. However, it is limited to reconstructing images that are the same size as the hologram. In this study, we use deep learning to optimize phase-only CGHs generated using scaled diffraction computations and the random phase-free method. By combining the random phase-free method with the scaled diffraction computation, it is possible to handle a zoomable reconstructed image larger than the hologram. In comparison to the GS algorithm, the proposed method optimizes both high quality and speed.
CoNeRF: Controllable Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Kacper Kania, Kwang Moo Yi, Marek Kowalski, Tomasz Trzciński, Andrea Tagliasacchi
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D Face Modelling, 3D Reconstruction, Attribute, Few-Shot Learning

We extend neural 3D representations to allow for intuitive and interpretable user control beyond novel view rendering (i.e. camera control). We allow the user to annotate which part of the scene one wishes to control with just a small number of mask annotations in the training images. Our key idea is to treat the attributes as latent variables that are regressed by the neural network given the scene encoding. This leads to a few-shot learning framework, where attributes are discovered automatically by the framework, when annotations are not provided. We apply our method to various scenes with different types of controllable attributes (e.g. expression control on human faces, or state control in movement of inanimate objects). Overall, we demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time novel view and novel attribute re-rendering of scenes from a single video.
ROCA: Robust CAD Model Retrieval and Alignment from a Single Image
Authors: Can Gümeli, Angela Dai, Matthias Nießner
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D Dense Shape Correspondence, 3D Object Detection From Monocular Images, 3D Object Retrieval, 3D Shape Reconstruction From A Single 2D Image

We present ROCA, a novel end-to-end approach that retrieves and aligns 3D CAD models from a shape database to a single input image. This enables 3D perception of an observed scene from a 2D RGB observation, characterized as a lightweight, compact, clean CAD representation. Core to our approach is our differentiable alignment optimization based on dense 2D-3D object correspondences and Procrustes alignment. ROCA can thus provide a robust CAD alignment while simultaneously informing CAD retrieval by leveraging the 2D-3D correspondences to learn geometrically similar CAD models. Experiments on challenging, real-world imagery from ScanNet show that ROCA significantly improves on state of the art, from 9.5% to 17.6% in retrieval-aware CAD alignment accuracy.
Bridging the Gap: Point Clouds for Merging Neurons in Connectomics
Authors: Jules Berman, Dmitri B. Chklovskii, Jingpeng Wu
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Classification

In the field of Connectomics, a primary problem is that of 3D neuron segmentation. Although deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable accuracy, errors still exist, especially in regions with image defects. One common type of defect is that of consecutive missing image sections. Here, data is lost along some axis, and the resulting neuron segmentations are split across the gap. To address this problem, we propose a novel method based on point cloud representations of neurons. We formulate the problem as a classification problem and train CurveNet, a state-of-the-art point cloud classification model, to identify which neurons should be merged. We show that our method not only performs strongly but also scales reasonably to gaps well beyond what other methods have attempted to address. Additionally, our point cloud representations are highly efficient in terms of data, maintaining high performance with an amount of data that would be unfeasible for other methods. We believe that this is an indicator of the viability of using point cloud representations for other proofreading tasks.
Geometry-aware Two-scale PIFu Representation for Human Reconstruction
Authors: Zheng Dong, Ke Xu, Ziheng Duan, Hujun Bao, Weiwei Xu, Rynson W. H. Lau
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction, Denoising, Multi-Task Learning, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Although PIFu-based 3D human reconstruction methods are popular, the quality of recovered details is still unsatisfactory. In a sparse (e.g., 3 RGBD sensors) capture setting, the depth noise is typically amplified in the PIFu representation, resulting in flat facial surfaces and geometry-fallible bodies. In this paper, we propose a novel geometry-aware two-scale PIFu for 3D human reconstruction from sparse, noisy inputs. Our key idea is to exploit the complementary properties of depth denoising and 3D reconstruction, for learning a two-scale PIFu representation to reconstruct high-frequency facial details and consistent bodies separately. To this end, we first formulate depth denoising and 3D reconstruction as a multi-task learning problem. The depth denoising process enriches the local geometry information of the reconstruction features, while the reconstruction process enhances depth denoising with global topology information. We then propose to learn the two-scale PIFu representation using two MLPs based on the denoised depth and geometry-aware features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reconstructing facial details and bodies of different poses and its superiority over state-of-the-art methods.
Automatic tumour segmentation in H&E-stained whole-slide images of the pancreas
Authors: Pierpaolo Vendittelli, Esther M. M. Smeets, Geert Litjens
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis, Segmentation, whole slide images

Pancreatic cancer will soon be the second leading cause of cancer-related death in Western society. Imaging techniques such as CT, MRI and ultrasound typically help providing the initial diagnosis, but histopathological assessment is still the gold standard for final confirmation of disease presence and prognosis. In recent years machine learning approaches and pathomics pipelines have shown potential in improving diagnostics and prognostics in other cancerous entities, such as breast and prostate cancer. A crucial first step in these pipelines is typically identification and segmentation of the tumour area. Ideally this step is done automatically to prevent time consuming manual annotation. We propose a multi-task convolutional neural network to balance disease detection and segmentation accuracy. We validated our approach on a dataset of 29 patients (for a total of 58 slides) at different resolutions. The best single task segmentation network achieved a median Dice of 0.885 (0.122) IQR at a resolution of 15.56 $\mu$m. Our multi-task network improved on that with a median Dice score of 0.934 (0.077) IQR.
Learning to automate cryo-electron microscopy data collection with Ptolemy
Authors: Paul T. Kim, Alex J. Noble, Anchi Cheng, Tristan Bepler
Date: 2021-12-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Cryogenic Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM), Navigate

Over the past decade, cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has emerged as a primary method for determining near-native, near-atomic resolution 3D structures of biological macromolecules. In order to meet increasing demand for cryo-EM, automated methods to improve throughput and efficiency while lowering costs are needed. Currently, all high-magnification cryo-EM data collection softwares require human input and manual tuning of parameters. Expert operators must navigate low- and medium-magnification images to find good high-magnification collection locations. Automating this is non-trivial: the images suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio and are affected by a range of experimental parameters that can differ for each collection session. Here, we use various computer vision algorithms, including mixture models, convolutional neural networks, and U-Nets to develop the first pipeline to automate low- and medium-magnification targeting. Learned models in this pipeline are trained on a large internal dataset of images from real world cryo-EM data collection sessions, labeled with locations that were selected by operators. Using these models, we show that we can effectively detect and classify regions of interest in low- and medium-magnification images, and can generalize to unseen sessions, as well as to images captured using different microscopes from external facilities. We expect our open-source pipeline, Ptolemy, will be both immediately useful as a tool for automation of cryo-EM data collection, and serve as a foundation for future advanced methods for efficient and automated cryo-EM microscopy.
Fast Neural Representations for Direct Volume Rendering
Authors: Sebastian Weiss, Philipp Hermüller, Rüdiger Westermann
Date: 2021-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Super-Resolution

Despite the potential of neural scene representations to effectively compress 3D scalar fields at high reconstruction quality, the computational complexity of the training and data reconstruction step using scene representation networks limits their use in practical applications. In this paper, we analyze whether scene representation networks can be modified to reduce these limitations and whether such architectures can also be used for temporal reconstruction tasks. We propose a novel design of scene representation networks using GPU tensor cores to integrate the reconstruction seamlessly into on-chip raytracing kernels, and compare the quality and performance of this network to alternative network- and non-network-based compression schemes. The results indicate competitive quality of our design at high compression rates, and significantly faster decoding times and lower memory consumption during data reconstruction. We investigate how density gradients can be computed using the network and show an extension where density, gradient and curvature are predicted jointly. As an alternative to spatial super-resolution approaches for time-varying fields, we propose a solution that builds upon latent-space interpolation to enable random access reconstruction at arbitrary granularity. We summarize our findings in the form of an assessment of the strengths and limitations of scene representation networks \changed{for compression domain volume rendering, and outline future research directions.
Localized Feature Aggregation Module for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Ryouichi Furukawa, Kazuhiro Hotta
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Semantic Segmentation

We propose a new information aggregation method which called Localized Feature Aggregation Module based on the similarity between the feature maps of an encoder and a decoder. The proposed method recovers positional information by emphasizing the similarity between decoder's feature maps with superior semantic information and encoder's feature maps with superior positional information. The proposed method can learn positional information more efficiently than conventional concatenation in the U-net and attention U-net. Additionally, the proposed method also uses localized attention range to reduce the computational cost. Two innovations contributed to improve the segmentation accuracy with lower computational cost. By experiments on the Drosophila cell image dataset and COVID-19 image dataset, we confirmed that our method outperformed conventional methods.
MT-TransUNet: Mediating Multi-Task Tokens in Transformers for Skin Lesion Segmentation and Classification
Authors: Jingye Chen, Jieneng Chen, Zongwei Zhou, Bin Li, Alan Yuille, Yongyi Lu
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Computational Efficiency, Lesion Classification, Lesion Segmentation, Segmentation, Skin Lesion Segmentation

Recent advances in automated skin cancer diagnosis have yielded performance on par with board-certified dermatologists. However, these approaches formulated skin cancer diagnosis as a simple classification task, dismissing the potential benefit from lesion segmentation. We argue that an accurate lesion segmentation can supplement the classification task with additive lesion information, such as asymmetry, border, intensity, and physical size; in turn, a faithful lesion classification can support the segmentation task with discriminant lesion features. To this end, this paper proposes a new multi-task framework, named MT-TransUNet, which is capable of segmenting and classifying skin lesions collaboratively by mediating multi-task tokens in Transformers. Furthermore, we have introduced dual-task and attended region consistency losses to take advantage of those images without pixel-level annotation, ensuring the model's robustness when it encounters the same image with an account of augmentation. Our MT-TransUNet exceeds the previous state of the art for lesion segmentation and classification tasks in ISIC-2017 and PH2; more importantly, it preserves compelling computational efficiency regarding model parameters (48M~vs.~130M) and inference speed (0.17s~vs.~2.02s per image). Code will be available at https://github.com/JingyeChen/MT-TransUNet.
Fully automatic integration of dental CBCT images and full-arch intraoral impressions with stitching error correction via individual tooth segmentation and identification
Authors: Tae Jun Jang, Hye Sun Yun, Chang Min Hyun, Jong-Eun Kim, Sang-Hwy Lee, Jin Keun Seo
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00

We present a fully automated method of integrating intraoral scan (IOS) and dental cone-beam computerized tomography (CBCT) images into one image by complementing each image's weaknesses. Dental CBCT alone may not be able to delineate precise details of the tooth surface due to limited image resolution and various CBCT artifacts, including metal-induced artifacts. IOS is very accurate for the scanning of narrow areas, but it produces cumulative stitching errors during full-arch scanning. The proposed method is intended not only to compensate the low-quality of CBCT-derived tooth surfaces with IOS, but also to correct the cumulative stitching errors of IOS across the entire dental arch. Moreover, the integration provide both gingival structure of IOS and tooth roots of CBCT in one image. The proposed fully automated method consists of four parts; (i) individual tooth segmentation and identification module for IOS data (TSIM-IOS); (ii) individual tooth segmentation and identification module for CBCT data (TSIM-CBCT); (iii) global-to-local tooth registration between IOS and CBCT; and (iv) stitching error correction of full-arch IOS. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieved landmark and surface distance errors of 112.4 $\mu$m and 301.7 $\mu$m, respectively.
SSDL: Self-Supervised Dictionary Learning
Authors: Shuai Shao, Lei Xing, Wei Yu, Rui Xu, Yanjiang Wang, BaoDi Liu
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Dictionary Learning, Human Activity Recognition, Self-Supervised Learning

The label-embedded dictionary learning (DL) algorithms generate influential dictionaries by introducing discriminative information. However, there exists a limitation: All the label-embedded DL methods rely on the labels due that this way merely achieves ideal performances in supervised learning. While in semi-supervised and unsupervised learning, it is no longer sufficient to be effective. Inspired by the concept of self-supervised learning (e.g., setting the pretext task to generate a universal model for the downstream task), we propose a Self-Supervised Dictionary Learning (SSDL) framework to address this challenge. Specifically, we first design a $p$-Laplacian Attention Hypergraph Learning (pAHL) block as the pretext task to generate pseudo soft labels for DL. Then, we adopt the pseudo labels to train a dictionary from a primary label-embedded DL method. We evaluate our SSDL on two human activity recognition datasets. The comparison results with other state-of-the-art methods have demonstrated the efficiency of SSDL.
Detection of Large Vessel Occlusions using Deep Learning by Deforming Vessel Tree Segmentations
Authors: Florian Thamm, Oliver Taubmann, Markus Jürgens, Hendrik Ditt, Andreas Maier
Date: 2021-12-03 00:00:00

Computed Tomography Angiography is a key modality providing insights into the cerebrovascular vessel tree that are crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of ischemic strokes, in particular in cases of large vessel occlusions (LVO). Thus, the clinical workflow greatly benefits from an automated detection of patients suffering from LVOs. This work uses convolutional neural networks for case-level classification trained with elastic deformation of the vessel tree segmentation masks to artificially augment training data. Using only masks as the input to our model uniquely allows us to apply such deformations much more aggressively than one could with conventional image volumes while retaining sample realism. The neural network classifies the presence of an LVO and the affected hemisphere. In a 5-fold cross validated ablation study, we demonstrate that the use of the suggested augmentation enables us to train robust models even from few data sets. Training the EfficientNetB1 architecture on 100 data sets, the proposed augmentation scheme was able to raise the ROC AUC to 0.85 from a baseline value of 0.56 using no augmentation. The best performance was achieved using a 3D-DenseNet yielding an AUC of 0.87. The augmentation had positive impact in classification of the affected hemisphere as well, where the 3D-DenseNet reached an AUC of 0.93 on both sides.