pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Neural Compression-Based Feature Learning for Video Restoration
Authors: Cong Huang, Jiahao Li, Bin Li, Dong Liu, Yan Lu
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Denoising, Quantization, Rain Removal, Video Denoising, Video deraining, Video Restoration

How to efficiently utilize the temporal features is crucial, yet challenging, for video restoration. The temporal features usually contain various noisy and uncorrelated information, and they may interfere with the restoration of the current frame. This paper proposes learning noise-robust feature representations to help video restoration. We are inspired by that the neural codec is a natural denoiser. In neural codec, the noisy and uncorrelated contents which are hard to predict but cost lots of bits are more inclined to be discarded for bitrate saving. Therefore, we design a neural compression module to filter the noise and keep the most useful information in features for video restoration. To achieve robustness to noise, our compression module adopts a spatial channel-wise quantization mechanism to adaptively determine the quantization step size for each position in the latent. Experiments show that our method can significantly boost the performance on video denoising, where we obtain 0.13 dB improvement over BasicVSR++ with only 0.23x FLOPs. Meanwhile, our method also obtains SOTA results on video deraining and dehazing.
HSC4D: Human-centered 4D Scene Capture in Large-scale Indoor-outdoor Space Using Wearable IMUs and LiDAR
Authors: Yudi Dai, Yitai Lin, Chenglu Wen, Siqi Shen, Lan Xu, Jingyi Yu, Yuexin Ma, Cheng Wang
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Autonomous Driving

We propose Human-centered 4D Scene Capture (HSC4D) to accurately and efficiently create a dynamic digital world, containing large-scale indoor-outdoor scenes, diverse human motions, and rich interactions between humans and environments. Using only body-mounted IMUs and LiDAR, HSC4D is space-free without any external devices' constraints and map-free without pre-built maps. Considering that IMUs can capture human poses but always drift for long-period use, while LiDAR is stable for global localization but rough for local positions and orientations, HSC4D makes both sensors complement each other by a joint optimization and achieves promising results for long-term capture. Relationships between humans and environments are also explored to make their interaction more realistic. To facilitate many down-stream tasks, like AR, VR, robots, autonomous driving, etc., we propose a dataset containing three large scenes (1k-5k $m^2$) with accurate dynamic human motions and locations. Diverse scenarios (climbing gym, multi-story building, slope, etc.) and challenging human activities (exercising, walking up/down stairs, climbing, etc.) demonstrate the effectiveness and the generalization ability of HSC4D. The dataset and code are available at http://www.lidarhumanmotion.net/hsc4d/.
Surgical Workflow Recognition: from Analysis of Challenges to Architectural Study
Authors: Tobias Czempiel, Aidean Sharghi, Magdalini Paschali, Nassir Navab, Omid Mohareri
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00

Algorithmic surgical workflow recognition is an ongoing research field and can be divided into laparoscopic (Internal) and operating room (External) analysis. So far many different works for the internal analysis have been proposed with the combination of a frame-level and an additional temporal model to address the temporal ambiguities between different workflow phases. For the External recognition task, Clip-level methods are in the focus of researchers targeting the local ambiguities present in the OR scene. In this work we evaluate combinations of different model architectures for the task of surgical workflow recognition to provide a fair comparison of the methods for both Internal and External analysis. We show that methods designed for the Internal analysis can be transferred to the external task with comparable performance gains for different architectures.
On the Properties of Adversarially-Trained CNNs
Authors: Mattia Carletti, Matteo Terzi, Gian Antonio Susto
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00

Adversarial Training has proved to be an effective training paradigm to enforce robustness against adversarial examples in modern neural network architectures. Despite many efforts, explanations of the foundational principles underpinning the effectiveness of Adversarial Training are limited and far from being widely accepted by the Deep Learning community. In this paper, we describe surprising properties of adversarially-trained models, shedding light on mechanisms through which robustness against adversarial attacks is implemented. Moreover, we highlight limitations and failure modes affecting these models that were not discussed by prior works. We conduct extensive analyses on a wide range of architectures and datasets, performing a deep comparison between robust and natural models.
Contrastive Learning for Cross-Domain Open World Recognition
Authors: Francesco Cappio Borlino, Silvia Bucci, Tatiana Tommasi
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

The ability to evolve is fundamental for any valuable autonomous agent whose knowledge cannot remain limited to that injected by the manufacturer. Consider for example a home assistant robot: it should be able to incrementally learn new object categories when requested, but also to recognize the same objects in different environments (rooms) and poses (hand-held/on the floor/above furniture), while rejecting unknown ones. Despite its importance, this scenario has started to raise interest in the robotic community only recently and the related research is still in its infancy, with existing experimental testbeds but no tailored methods. With this work, we propose the first learning approach that deals with all the previously mentioned challenges at once by exploiting a single contrastive objective. We show how it learns a feature space perfectly suitable to incrementally include new classes and is able to capture knowledge which generalizes across a variety of visual domains. Our method is endowed with a tailored effective stopping criterion for each learning episode and exploits a self-paced thresholding strategy that provides the classifier with a reliable rejection option. Both these novel contributions are based on the observation of the data statistics and do not need manual tuning. An extensive experimental analysis confirms the effectiveness of the proposed approach in establishing the new state-of-the-art. The code is available at https://github.com/FrancescoCappio/Contrastive_Open_World.
ART-SS: An Adaptive Rejection Technique for Semi-Supervised restoration for adverse weather-affected images
Authors: Rajeev Yasarla, Carey E. Priebe, Vishal Patel
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Rain Removal

In recent years, convolutional neural network-based single image adverse weather removal methods have achieved significant performance improvements on many benchmark datasets. However, these methods require large amounts of clean-weather degraded image pairs for training, which is often difficult to obtain in practice. Although various weather degradation synthesis methods exist in the literature, the use of synthetically generated weather degraded images often results in sub-optimal performance on the real weather degraded images due to the domain gap between synthetic and real-world images. To deal with this problem, various semi-supervised restoration (SSR) methods have been proposed for deraining or dehazing which learn to restore the clean image using synthetically generated datasets while generalizing better using unlabeled real-world images. The performance of a semi-supervised method is essentially based on the quality of the unlabeled data. In particular, if the unlabeled data characteristics are very different from that of the labeled data, then the performance of a semi-supervised method degrades significantly. We theoretically study the effect of unlabeled data on the performance of an SSR method and develop a technique that rejects the unlabeled images that degrade the performance. Extensive experiments and ablation study show that the proposed sample rejection method increases the performance of existing SSR deraining and dehazing methods significantly. Code is available at :https://github.com/rajeevyasarla/ART-SS
PanoFormer: Panorama Transformer for Indoor 360 Depth Estimation
Authors: Zhijie Shen, Chunyu Lin, Kang Liao, Lang Nie, Zishuo Zheng, Yao Zhao
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Existing panoramic depth estimation methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) focus on removing panoramic distortions, failing to perceive panoramic structures efficiently due to the fixed receptive field in CNNs. This paper proposes the panorama transformer (named PanoFormer) to estimate the depth in panorama images, with tangent patches from spherical domain, learnable token flows, and panorama specific metrics. In particular, we divide patches on the spherical tangent domain into tokens to reduce the negative effect of panoramic distortions. Since the geometric structures are essential for depth estimation, a self-attention module is redesigned with an additional learnable token flow. In addition, considering the characteristic of the spherical domain, we present two panorama-specific metrics to comprehensively evaluate the panoramic depth estimation models' performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, the proposed method can be effectively extended to solve semantic panorama segmentation, a similar pixel2pixel task. Code will be available.
HybridCap: Inertia-aid Monocular Capture of Challenging Human Motions
Authors: Han Liang, Yannan He, Chengfeng Zhao, Mutian Li, Jingya Wang, Jingyi Yu, Lan Xu
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Monocular 3D motion capture (mocap) is beneficial to many applications. The use of a single camera, however, often fails to handle occlusions of different body parts and hence it is limited to capture relatively simple movements. We present a light-weight, hybrid mocap technique called HybridCap that augments the camera with only 4 Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) in a learning-and-optimization framework. We first employ a weakly-supervised and hierarchical motion inference module based on cooperative Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) blocks that serve as limb, body and root trackers as well as an inverse kinematics solver. Our network effectively narrows the search space of plausible motions via coarse-to-fine pose estimation and manages to tackle challenging movements with high efficiency. We further develop a hybrid optimization scheme that combines inertial feedback and visual cues to improve tracking accuracy. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate HybridCap can robustly handle challenging movements ranging from fitness actions to Latin dance. It also achieves real-time performance up to 60 fps with state-of-the-art accuracy.
PreTR: Spatio-Temporal Non-Autoregressive Trajectory Prediction Transformer
Authors: Lina Achaji, Thierno Barry, Thibault Fouqueray, Julien Moreau, Francois Aioun, Francois Charpillet
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, motion prediction, Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Nowadays, our mobility systems are evolving into the era of intelligent vehicles that aim to improve road safety. Due to their vulnerability, pedestrians are the users who will benefit the most from these developments. However, predicting their trajectory is one of the most challenging concerns. Indeed, accurate prediction requires a good understanding of multi-agent interactions that can be complex. Learning the underlying spatial and temporal patterns caused by these interactions is even more of a competitive and open problem that many researchers are tackling. In this paper, we introduce a model called PRediction Transformer (PReTR) that extracts features from the multi-agent scenes by employing a factorized spatio-temporal attention module. It shows less computational needs than previously studied models with empirically better results. Besides, previous works in motion prediction suffer from the exposure bias problem caused by generating future sequences conditioned on model prediction samples rather than ground-truth samples. In order to go beyond the proposed solutions, we leverage encoder-decoder Transformer networks for parallel decoding a set of learned object queries. This non-autoregressive solution avoids the need for iterative conditioning and arguably decreases training and testing computational time. We evaluate our model on the ETH/UCY datasets, a publicly available benchmark for pedestrian trajectory prediction. Finally, we justify our usage of the parallel decoding technique by showing that the trajectory prediction task can be better solved as a non-autoregressive task.
A Differentiable Two-stage Alignment Scheme for Burst Image Reconstruction with Large Shift
Authors: Shi Guo, Xi Yang, jianqi ma, Gaofeng Ren, Lei Zhang
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 4k, Burst Image Reconstruction, Demosaicking, Denoising, Image Reconstruction, Joint Demosaicing and Denoising

Denoising and demosaicking are two essential steps to reconstruct a clean full-color image from the raw data. Recently, joint denoising and demosaicking (JDD) for burst images, namely JDD-B, has attracted much attention by using multiple raw images captured in a short time to reconstruct a single high-quality image. One key challenge of JDD-B lies in the robust alignment of image frames. State-of-the-art alignment methods in feature domain cannot effectively utilize the temporal information of burst images, where large shifts commonly exist due to camera and object motion. In addition, the higher resolution (e.g., 4K) of modern imaging devices results in larger displacement between frames. To address these challenges, we design a differentiable two-stage alignment scheme sequentially in patch and pixel level for effective JDD-B. The input burst images are firstly aligned in the patch level by using a differentiable progressive block matching method, which can estimate the offset between distant frames with small computational cost. Then we perform implicit pixel-wise alignment in full-resolution feature domain to refine the alignment results. The two stages are jointly trained in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significant improvement of our method over existing JDD-B methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/GuoShi28/2StageAlign.
MSPred: Video Prediction at Multiple Spatio-Temporal Scales with Hierarchical Recurrent Networks
Authors: Angel Villar-Corrales, Ani Karapetyan, Andreas Boltres, Sven Behnke
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Video Prediction

Autonomous systems not only need to understand their current environment, but should also be able to predict future actions conditioned on past states, for instance based on captured camera frames. However, existing models mainly focus on forecasting future video frames for short time-horizons, hence being of limited use for long-term action planning. We propose Multi-Scale Hierarchical Prediction (MSPred), a novel video prediction model able to simultaneously forecast future possible outcomes of different levels of granularity at different spatio-temporal scales. By combining spatial and temporal downsampling, MSPred efficiently predicts abstract representations such as human poses or locations over long time horizons, while still maintaining a competitive performance for video frame prediction. In our experiments, we demonstrate that MSPred accurately predicts future video frames as well as high-level representations (e.g. keypoints or semantics) on bin-picking and action recognition datasets, while consistently outperforming popular approaches for future frame prediction. Furthermore, we ablate different modules and design choices in MSPred, experimentally validating that combining features of different spatial and temporal granularity leads to a superior performance. Code and models to reproduce our experiments can be found in https://github.com/AIS-Bonn/MSPred.
Localizing Visual Sounds the Easy Way
Authors: Shentong Mo, Pedro Morgado
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00

Unsupervised audio-visual source localization aims at localizing visible sound sources in a video without relying on ground-truth localization for training. Previous works often seek high audio-visual similarities for likely positive (sounding) regions and low similarities for likely negative regions. However, accurately distinguishing between sounding and non-sounding regions is challenging without manual annotations. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach for Easy Visual Sound Localization, namely EZ-VSL, without relying on the construction of positive and/or negative regions during training. Instead, we align audio and visual spaces by seeking audio-visual representations that are aligned in, at least, one location of the associated image, while not matching other images, at any location. We also introduce a novel object guided localization scheme at inference time for improved precision. Our simple and effective framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular benchmarks, Flickr SoundNet and VGG-Sound Source. In particular, we improve the CIoU of the Flickr SoundNet test set from 76.80% to 83.94%, and on the VGG-Sound Source dataset from 34.60% to 38.85%. The code is available at https://github.com/stoneMo/EZ-VSL.
Modulated Contrast for Versatile Image Synthesis
Authors: Fangneng Zhan, Jiahui Zhang, Yingchen Yu, Rongliang Wu, Shijian Lu
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Generation

Perceiving the similarity between images has been a long-standing and fundamental problem underlying various visual generation tasks. Predominant approaches measure the inter-image distance by computing pointwise absolute deviations, which tends to estimate the median of instance distributions and leads to blurs and artifacts in the generated images. This paper presents MoNCE, a versatile metric that introduces image contrast to learn a calibrated metric for the perception of multifaceted inter-image distances. Unlike vanilla contrast which indiscriminately pushes negative samples from the anchor regardless of their similarity, we propose to re-weight the pushing force of negative samples adaptively according to their similarity to the anchor, which facilitates the contrastive learning from informative negative samples. Since multiple patch-level contrastive objectives are involved in image distance measurement, we introduce optimal transport in MoNCE to modulate the pushing force of negative samples collaboratively across multiple contrastive objectives. Extensive experiments over multiple image translation tasks show that the proposed MoNCE outperforms various prevailing metrics substantially. The code is available at https://github.com/fnzhan/MoNCE.
Object Localization under Single Coarse Point Supervision
Authors: Xuehui Yu, Pengfei Chen, Di wu, Najmul Hassan, Guorong Li, Junchi Yan, Humphrey Shi, Qixiang Ye, Zhenjun Han
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Multiple Instance Learning, Object, Object Localization

Point-based object localization (POL), which pursues high-performance object sensing under low-cost data annotation, has attracted increased attention. However, the point annotation mode inevitably introduces semantic variance for the inconsistency of annotated points. Existing POL methods heavily reply on accurate key-point annotations which are difficult to define. In this study, we propose a POL method using coarse point annotations, relaxing the supervision signals from accurate key points to freely spotted points. To this end, we propose a coarse point refinement (CPR) approach, which to our best knowledge is the first attempt to alleviate semantic variance from the perspective of algorithm. CPR constructs point bags, selects semantic-correlated points, and produces semantic center points through multiple instance learning (MIL). In this way, CPR defines a weakly supervised evolution procedure, which ensures training high-performance object localizer under coarse point supervision. Experimental results on COCO, DOTA and our proposed SeaPerson dataset validate the effectiveness of the CPR approach. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/ucas-vg/PointTinyBenchmark/.
Fine Detailed Texture Learning for 3D Meshes with Generative Models
Authors: Aysegul Dundar, Jun Gao, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

This paper presents a method to reconstruct high-quality textured 3D models from both multi-view and single-view images. The reconstruction is posed as an adaptation problem and is done progressively where in the first stage, we focus on learning accurate geometry, whereas in the second stage, we focus on learning the texture with a generative adversarial network. In the generative learning pipeline, we propose two improvements. First, since the learned textures should be spatially aligned, we propose an attention mechanism that relies on the learnable positions of pixels. Secondly, since discriminator receives aligned texture maps, we augment its input with a learnable embedding which improves the feedback to the generator. We achieve significant improvements on multi-view sequences from Tripod dataset as well as on single-view image datasets, Pascal 3D+ and CUB. We demonstrate that our method achieves superior 3D textured models compared to the previous works. Please visit our web-page for 3D visuals.
Interacting Attention Graph for Single Image Two-Hand Reconstruction
Authors: Mengcheng Li, Liang An, Hongwen Zhang, Lianpeng Wu, Feng Chen, Tao Yu, Yebin Liu
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Graph convolutional network (GCN) has achieved great success in single hand reconstruction task, while interacting two-hand reconstruction by GCN remains unexplored. In this paper, we present Interacting Attention Graph Hand (IntagHand), the first graph convolution based network that reconstructs two interacting hands from a single RGB image. To solve occlusion and interaction challenges of two-hand reconstruction, we introduce two novel attention based modules in each upsampling step of the original GCN. The first module is the pyramid image feature attention (PIFA) module, which utilizes multiresolution features to implicitly obtain vertex-to-image alignment. The second module is the cross hand attention (CHA) module that encodes the coherence of interacting hands by building dense cross-attention between two hand vertices. As a result, our model outperforms all existing two-hand reconstruction methods by a large margin on InterHand2.6M benchmark. Moreover, ablation studies verify the effectiveness of both PIFA and CHA modules for improving the reconstruction accuracy. Results on in-the-wild images and live video streams further demonstrate the generalization ability of our network. Our code is available at https://github.com/Dw1010/IntagHand.