pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FocusFace: Multi-task Contrastive Learning for Masked Face Recognition
Authors: Pedro C. Neto, Fadi Boutros, João Ribeiro Pinto, Naser Damer, Ana F. Sequeira, Jaime S. Cardoso
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Face Recognition, Face Verification

SARS-CoV-2 has presented direct and indirect challenges to the scientific community. One of the most prominent indirect challenges advents from the mandatory use of face masks in a large number of countries. Face recognition methods struggle to perform identity verification with similar accuracy on masked and unmasked individuals. It has been shown that the performance of these methods drops considerably in the presence of face masks, especially if the reference image is unmasked. We propose FocusFace, a multi-task architecture that uses contrastive learning to be able to accurately perform masked face recognition. The proposed architecture is designed to be trained from scratch or to work on top of state-of-the-art face recognition methods without sacrificing the capabilities of a existing models in conventional face recognition tasks. We also explore different approaches to design the contrastive learning module. Results are presented in terms of masked-masked (M-M) and unmasked-masked (U-M) face verification performance. For both settings, the results are on par with published methods, but for M-M specifically, the proposed method was able to outperform all the solutions that it was compared to. We further show that when using our method on top of already existing methods the training computational costs decrease significantly while retaining similar performances. The implementation and the trained models are available at GitHub.
GPU based GMM segmentation of kinect data
Authors: Abdenour Amamra, Tarek Mouats, Nabil Aouf
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Foreground Segmentation, GPU, Segmentation

This paper presents a novel approach for background/foreground segmentation of RGBD data with the Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). We first start by the background subtraction from the colour and depth images separately. The foregrounds resulting from both streams are then fused for a more accurate detection. Our segmentation solution is implemented on the GPU. Thus, it works at the full frame rate of the sensor (30fps). Test results show its robustness against illumination change, shadows and reflections.
A recursive robust filtering approach for 3D registration
Authors: Abdenour Amamra, Nabil Aouf, Dowling Stuart, Mark Richardson
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00

This work presents a new recursive robust filtering approach for feature-based 3D registration. Unlike the common state-of-the-art alignment algorithms, the proposed method has four advantages that have not yet occurred altogether in any previous solution. For instance, it is able to deal with inherent noise contaminating sensory data; it is robust to uncertainties caused by noisy feature localisation; it also combines the advantages of both (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.) norms for a higher performance and a more prospective prevention of local minima. The result is an accurate and stable rigid body transformation. The latter enables a thorough control over the convergence regarding the alignment as well as a correct assessment of the quality of registration. The mathematical rationale behind the proposed approach is explained, and the results are validated on physical and synthetic data.
Counterfactual Explanation of Brain Activity Classifiers using Image-to-Image Transfer by Generative Adversarial Network
Authors: Teppei Matsui, Masato Taki, Trung Quang Pham, Junichi Chikazoe, Koji Jimura
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation, Generative Adversarial Network

Deep neural networks (DNNs) can accurately decode task-related information from brain activations. However, because of the nonlinearity of the DNN, the decisions made by DNNs are hardly interpretable. One of the promising approaches for explaining such a black-box system is counterfactual explanation. In this framework, the behavior of a black-box system is explained by comparing real data and realistic synthetic data that are specifically generated such that the black-box system outputs an unreal outcome. Here we introduce a novel generative DNN (counterfactual activation generator, CAG) that can provide counterfactual explanations for DNN-based classifiers of brain activations. Importantly, CAG can simultaneously handle image transformation among multiple classes associated with different behavioral tasks. Using CAG, we demonstrated counterfactual explanation of DNN-based classifiers that learned to discriminate brain activations of seven behavioral tasks. Furthermore, by iterative applications of CAG, we were able to enhance and extract subtle spatial brain activity patterns that affected the classifier's decisions. Together, these results demonstrate that the counterfactual explanation based on image-to-image transformation would be a promising approach to understand and extend the current application of DNNs in fMRI analyses.
3D Object Tracking with Transformer
Authors: Yubo Cui, Zheng Fang, Jiayao Shan, Zuoxu Gu, Sifan Zhou
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Tracking, Decoder, Object, Object Tracking

Feature fusion and similarity computation are two core problems in 3D object tracking, especially for object tracking using sparse and disordered point clouds. Feature fusion could make similarity computing more efficient by including target object information. However, most existing LiDAR-based approaches directly use the extracted point cloud feature to compute similarity while ignoring the attention changes of object regions during tracking. In this paper, we propose a feature fusion network based on transformer architecture. Benefiting from the self-attention mechanism, the transformer encoder captures the inter- and intra- relations among different regions of the point cloud. By using cross-attention, the transformer decoder fuses features and includes more target cues into the current point cloud feature to compute the region attentions, which makes the similarity computing more efficient. Based on this feature fusion network, we propose an end-to-end point cloud object tracking framework, a simple yet effective method for 3D object tracking using point clouds. Comprehensive experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/3bobo/lttr.
E-ffective: A Visual Analytic System for Exploring the Emotion and Effectiveness of Inspirational Speeches
Authors: Kevin Maher, Zeyuan Huang, Jiancheng Song, Xiaoming Deng, Yu-Kun Lai, Cuixia Ma, Hao Wang, Yong-Jin Liu, Hongan Wang
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00

What makes speeches effective has long been a subject for debate, and until today there is broad controversy among public speaking experts about what factors make a speech effective as well as the roles of these factors in speeches. Moreover, there is a lack of quantitative analysis methods to help understand effective speaking strategies. In this paper, we propose E-ffective, a visual analytic system allowing speaking experts and novices to analyze both the role of speech factors and their contribution in effective speeches. From interviews with domain experts and investigating existing literature, we identified important factors to consider in inspirational speeches. We obtained the generated factors from multi-modal data that were then related to effectiveness data. Our system supports rapid understanding of critical factors in inspirational speeches, including the influence of emotions by means of novel visualization methods and interaction. Two novel visualizations include E-spiral (that shows the emotional shifts in speeches in a visually compact way) and E-script (that connects speech content with key speech delivery information). In our evaluation we studied the influence of our system on experts' domain knowledge about speech factors. We further studied the usability of the system by speaking novices and experts on assisting analysis of inspirational speech effectiveness.
Degraded Reference Image Quality Assessment
Authors: ShahRukh Athar, Zhou Wang
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, valid

In practical media distribution systems, visual content usually undergoes multiple stages of quality degradation along the delivery chain, but the pristine source content is rarely available at most quality monitoring points along the chain to serve as a reference for quality assessment. As a result, full-reference (FR) and reduced-reference (RR) image quality assessment (IQA) methods are generally infeasible. Although no-reference (NR) methods are readily applicable, their performance is often not reliable. On the other hand, intermediate references of degraded quality are often available, e.g., at the input of video transcoders, but how to make the best use of them in proper ways has not been deeply investigated. Here we make one of the first attempts to establish a new paradigm named degraded-reference IQA (DR IQA). Specifically, we lay out the architectures of DR IQA and introduce a 6-bit code to denote the choices of configurations. We construct the first large-scale databases dedicated to DR IQA and will make them publicly available. We make novel observations on distortion behavior in multi-stage distortion pipelines by comprehensively analyzing five multiple distortion combinations. Based on these observations, we develop novel DR IQA models and make extensive comparisons with a series of baseline models derived from top-performing FR and NR models. The results suggest that DR IQA may offer significant performance improvement in multiple distortion environments, thereby establishing DR IQA as a valid IQA paradigm that is worth further exploration.
Generalized Depthwise-Separable Convolutions for Adversarially Robust and Efficient Neural Networks
Authors: Hassan Dbouk, Naresh R. Shanbhag
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Model Compression

Despite their tremendous successes, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) incur high computational/storage costs and are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Recent works on robust model compression address these challenges by combining model compression techniques with adversarial training. But these methods are unable to improve throughput (frames-per-second) on real-life hardware while simultaneously preserving robustness to adversarial perturbations. To overcome this problem, we propose the method of Generalized Depthwise-Separable (GDWS) convolution -- an efficient, universal, post-training approximation of a standard 2D convolution. GDWS dramatically improves the throughput of a standard pre-trained network on real-life hardware while preserving its robustness. Lastly, GDWS is scalable to large problem sizes since it operates on pre-trained models and doesn't require any additional training. We establish the optimality of GDWS as a 2D convolution approximator and present exact algorithms for constructing optimal GDWS convolutions under complexity and error constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GDWS via extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet datasets. Our code can be found at https://github.com/hsndbk4/GDWS.
Audio-visual Representation Learning for Anomaly Events Detection in Crowds
Authors: Junyu Gao, Maoguo Gong, Xuelong Li
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

In recent years, anomaly events detection in crowd scenes attracts many researchers' attention, because of its importance to public safety. Existing methods usually exploit visual information to analyze whether any abnormal events have occurred due to only visual sensors are generally equipped in public places. However, when an abnormal event in crowds occurs, sound information may be discriminative to assist the crowd analysis system to determine whether there is an abnormality. Compare with vision information that is easily occluded, audio signals have a certain degree of penetration. Thus, this paper attempt to exploit multi-modal learning for modeling the audio and visual signals simultaneously. To be specific, we design a two-branch network to model different types of information. The first is a typical 3D CNN model to extract temporal appearance features from video clips. The second is an audio CNN for encoding Log Mel-Spectrogram of audio signals. Finally, by fusing the above features, a more accurate prediction will be produced. We conduct the experiments on SHADE dataset, a synthetic audio-visual dataset in surveillance scenes, and find introducing audio signals effectively improves the performance of anomaly events detection and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we will release the code and the pre-trained models as soon as possible.
ODMTCNet: An Interpretable Multi-view Deep Neural Network Architecture for Image Feature Representation
Authors: Lei Gao, Zheng Guo, Ling Guan
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This work proposes an interpretable multi-view deep neural network architecture, namely optimal discriminant multi-view tensor convolutional network (ODMTCNet), by integrating statistical machine learning (SML) principles with the deep neural network (DNN) architecture.
Characterizing and Taming Resolution in Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Eddie Yan, Liang Luo, Luis Ceze
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00

Image resolution has a significant effect on the accuracy and computational, storage, and bandwidth costs of computer vision model inference. These costs are exacerbated when scaling out models to large inference serving systems and make image resolution an attractive target for optimization. However, the choice of resolution inherently introduces additional tightly coupled choices, such as image crop size, image detail, and compute kernel implementation that impact computational, storage, and bandwidth costs. Further complicating this setting, the optimal choices from the perspective of these metrics are highly dependent on the dataset and problem scenario. We characterize this tradeoff space, quantitatively studying the accuracy and efficiency tradeoff via systematic and automated tuning of image resolution, image quality and convolutional neural network operators. With the insights from this study, we propose a dynamic resolution mechanism that removes the need to statically choose a resolution ahead of time.
SCALP -- Supervised Contrastive Learning for Cardiopulmonary Disease Classification and Localization in Chest X-rays using Patient Metadata
Authors: Ajay Jaiswal, TianHao Li, Cyprian Zander, Yan Han, Justin F. Rousseau, Yifan Peng, Ying Ding
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Triplet

Computer-aided diagnosis plays a salient role in more accessible and accurate cardiopulmonary diseases classification and localization on chest radiography. Millions of people get affected and die due to these diseases without an accurate and timely diagnosis. Recently proposed contrastive learning heavily relies on data augmentation, especially positive data augmentation. However, generating clinically-accurate data augmentations for medical images is extremely difficult because the common data augmentation methods in computer vision, such as sharp, blur, and crop operations, can severely alter the clinical settings of medical images. In this paper, we proposed a novel and simple data augmentation method based on patient metadata and supervised knowledge to create clinically accurate positive and negative augmentations for chest X-rays. We introduce an end-to-end framework, SCALP, which extends the self-supervised contrastive approach to a supervised setting. Specifically, SCALP pulls together chest X-rays from the same patient (positive keys) and pushes apart chest X-rays from different patients (negative keys). In addition, it uses ResNet-50 along with the triplet-attention mechanism to identify cardiopulmonary diseases, and Grad-CAM++ to highlight the abnormal regions. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that SCALP outperforms existing baselines with significant margins in both classification and localization tasks. Specifically, the average classification AUCs improve from 82.8% (SOTA using DenseNet-121) to 83.9% (SCALP using ResNet-50), while the localization results improve on average by 3.7% over different IoU thresholds.
SiamPolar: Semi-supervised Realtime Video Object Segmentation with Polar Representation
Authors: Yaochen Li, Yuhui Hong, Yonghong Song, Chao Zhu, Ying Zhang, Ruihao Wang
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Detection, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Video object segmentation (VOS) is an essential part of autonomous vehicle navigation. The real-time speed is very important for the autonomous vehicle algorithms along with the accuracy metric. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised real-time method based on the Siamese network using a new polar representation. The input of bounding boxes is initialized rather than the object masks, which are applied to the video object detection tasks. The polar representation could reduce the parameters for encoding masks with subtle accuracy loss so that the algorithm speed can be improved significantly. An asymmetric siamese network is also developed to extract the features from different spatial scales. Moreover, the peeling convolution is proposed to reduce the antagonism among the branches of the polar head. The repeated cross-correlation and semi-FPN are designed based on this idea. The experimental results on the DAVIS-2016 dataset and other public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Detecting Dementia from Speech and Transcripts using Transformers
Authors: Loukas Ilias, Dimitris Askounis, John Psarras
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) constitutes a neurodegenerative disease with serious consequences to peoples' everyday lives, if it is not diagnosed early since there is no available cure. Alzheimer's is the most common cause of dementia, which constitutes a general term for loss of memory. Due to the fact that dementia affects speech, existing research initiatives focus on detecting dementia from spontaneous speech. However, little work has been done regarding the conversion of speech data to Log-Mel spectrograms and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and the usage of pretrained models. Concurrently, little work has been done in terms of both the usage of transformer networks and the way the two modalities, i.e., speech and transcripts, are combined in a single neural network. To address these limitations, first we represent speech signal as an image and employ several pretrained models, with Vision Transformer (ViT) achieving the highest evaluation results. Secondly, we propose multimodal models. More specifically, our introduced models include Gated Multimodal Unit in order to control the influence of each modality towards the final classification and crossmodal attention so as to capture in an effective way the relationships between the two modalities. Extensive experiments conducted on the ADReSS Challenge dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models and their superiority over state-of-the-art approaches.
Regularized Frank-Wolfe for Dense CRFs: Generalizing Mean Field and Beyond
Authors: Đ. Khuê Lê-Huu, Karteek Alahari
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

We introduce regularized Frank-Wolfe, a general and effective algorithm for inference and learning of dense conditional random fields (CRFs). The algorithm optimizes a nonconvex continuous relaxation of the CRF inference problem using vanilla Frank-Wolfe with approximate updates, which are equivalent to minimizing a regularized energy function. Our proposed method is a generalization of existing algorithms such as mean field or concave-convex procedure. This perspective not only offers a unified analysis of these algorithms, but also allows an easy way of exploring different variants that potentially yield better performance. We illustrate this in our empirical results on standard semantic segmentation datasets, where several instantiations of our regularized Frank-Wolfe outperform mean field inference, both as a standalone component and as an end-to-end trainable layer in a neural network. We also show that dense CRFs, coupled with our new algorithms, produce significant improvements over strong CNN baselines.
Vision Transformer for Classification of Breast Ultrasound Images
Authors: Behnaz Gheflati, Hassan Rivaz
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Medical ultrasound (US) imaging has become a prominent modality for breast cancer imaging due to its ease-of-use, low-cost and safety. In the past decade, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as the method of choice in vision applications and have shown excellent potential in automatic classification of US images. Despite their success, their restricted local receptive field limits their ability to learn global context information. Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT) designs that are based on self-attention between image patches have shown great potential to be an alternative to CNNs. In this study, for the first time, we utilize ViT to classify breast US images using different augmentation strategies. The results are provided as classification accuracy and Area Under the Curve (AUC) metrics, and the performance is compared with the state-of-the-art CNNs. The results indicate that the ViT models have comparable efficiency with or even better than the CNNs in classification of US breast images.
Lung Cancer Lesion Detection in Histopathology Images Using Graph-Based Sparse PCA Network
Authors: Sundaresh Ram, Wenfei Tang, Alexander J. Bell, Cara Spencer, Alexander Buschhaus, Charles R. Hatt, Marina Pasca diMagliano, Jeffrey J. Rodriguez, Stefanie Galban, Craig J. Galban
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Lesion Detection

Early detection of lung cancer is critical for improvement of patient survival. To address the clinical need for efficacious treatments, genetically engineered mouse models (GEMM) have become integral in identifying and evaluating the molecular underpinnings of this complex disease that may be exploited as therapeutic targets. Assessment of GEMM tumor burden on histopathological sections performed by manual inspection is both time consuming and prone to subjective bias. Therefore, an interplay of needs and challenges exists for computer-aided diagnostic tools, for accurate and efficient analysis of these histopathology images. In this paper, we propose a simple machine learning approach called the graph-based sparse principal component analysis (GS-PCA) network, for automated detection of cancerous lesions on histological lung slides stained by hematoxylin and eosin (H&E). Our method comprises four steps: 1) cascaded graph-based sparse PCA, 2) PCA binary hashing, 3) block-wise histograms, and 4) support vector machine (SVM) classification. In our proposed architecture, graph-based sparse PCA is employed to learn the filter banks of the multiple stages of a convolutional network. This is followed by PCA hashing and block histograms for indexing and pooling. The meaningful features extracted from this GS-PCA are then fed to an SVM classifier. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm on H&E slides obtained from an inducible K-rasG12D lung cancer mouse model using precision/recall rates, F-score, Tanimoto coefficient, and area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) and show that our algorithm is efficient and provides improved detection accuracy compared to existing algorithms.