pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Discriminative Dictionary Learning based on Statistical Methods
Authors: G. Madhuri, Atul Negi
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Dictionary Learning, Image Denoising, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Sparse Representation (SR) of signals or data has a well founded theory with rigorous mathematical error bounds and proofs. SR of a signal is given by superposition of very few columns of a matrix called Dictionary, implicitly reducing dimensionality. Training dictionaries such that they represent each class of signals with minimal loss is called Dictionary Learning (DL). Dictionary learning methods like Method of Optimal Directions (MOD) and K-SVD have been successfully used in reconstruction based applications in image processing like image "denoising", "inpainting" and others. Other dictionary learning algorithms such as Discriminative K-SVD and Label Consistent K-SVD are supervised learning methods based on K-SVD. In our experience, one of the drawbacks of current methods is that the classification performance is not impressive on datasets like Telugu OCR datasets, with large number of classes and high dimensionality. There is scope for improvement in this direction and many researchers have used statistical methods to design dictionaries for classification. This chapter presents a review of statistical techniques and their application to learning discriminative dictionaries. The objective of the methods described here is to improve classification using sparse representation. In this chapter a hybrid approach is described, where sparse coefficients of input data are generated. We use a simple three layer Multi Layer Perceptron with back-propagation training as a classifier with those sparse codes as input. The results are quite comparable with other computation intensive methods. Keywords: Statistical modeling, Dictionary Learning, Discriminative Dictionary, Sparse representation, Gaussian prior, Cauchy prior, Entropy, Hidden Markov model, Hybrid Dictionary Learning
Image Super-Resolution Using T-Tetromino Pixels
Authors: Simon Grosche, Andy Regensky, Jürgen Seiler, André Kaup
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: compressed sensing, Image Super-Resolution, SSIM, Super-Resolution

For modern high-resolution imaging sensors, pixel binning is performed in low-lighting conditions and in case high frame rates are required. To recover the original spatial resolution, single-image super-resolution techniques can be applied for upscaling. To achieve a higher image quality after upscaling, we propose a novel binning concept using tetromino-shaped pixels. It is embedded into the field of compressed sensing and the coherence is calculated to motivate the sensor layouts used. Next, we investigate the reconstruction quality using tetromino pixels for the first time in literature. Instead of using different types of tetrominoes as proposed elsewhere, we show that using a small repeating cell consisting of only four T-tetrominoes is sufficient. For reconstruction, we use a locally fully connected reconstruction (LFCR) network as well as two classical reconstruction methods from the field of compressed sensing. Using the LFCR network in combination with the proposed tetromino layout, we achieve superior image quality in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and visually compared to conventional single-image super-resolution using the very deep super-resolution (VDSR) network. For PSNR, a gain of up to \SI[retain-explicit-plus]{+1.92}{dB} is achieved.
Probabilistic Spatial Distribution Prior Based Attentional Keypoints Matching Network
Authors: Xiaoming Zhao, Jingmeng Liu, Xingming Wu, Weihai Chen, Fanghong Guo, Zhengguo Li
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Image Stitching, Motion Estimation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Keypoints matching is a pivotal component for many image-relevant applications such as image stitching, visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and so on. Both handcrafted-based and recently emerged deep learning-based keypoints matching methods merely rely on keypoints and local features, while losing sight of other available sensors such as inertial measurement unit (IMU) in the above applications. In this paper, we demonstrate that the motion estimation from IMU integration can be used to exploit the spatial distribution prior of keypoints between images. To this end, a probabilistic perspective of attention formulation is proposed to integrate the spatial distribution prior into the attentional graph neural network naturally. With the assistance of spatial distribution prior, the effort of the network for modeling the hidden features can be reduced. Furthermore, we present a projection loss for the proposed keypoints matching network, which gives a smooth edge between matching and un-matching keypoints. Image matching experiments on visual SLAM datasets indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of the presented method.
Nonlinear Intensity Sonar Image Matching based on Deep Convolution Features
Authors: Xiaoteng Zhou, Changli Yu, Xin Yuan, Yi Wu, Haijun Feng, Citong Luo
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00

In the field of deep-sea exploration, sonar is presently the only efficient long-distance sensing device. The complicated underwater environment, such as noise interference, low target intensity or background dynamics, has brought many negative effects on sonar imaging. Among them, the problem of nonlinear intensity is extremely prevalent. It is also known as the anisotropy of acoustic imaging, that is, when AUVs carry sonar to detect the same target from different angles, the intensity difference between image pairs is sometimes very large, which makes the traditional matching algorithm almost ineffective. However, image matching is the basis of comprehensive tasks such as navigation, positioning, and mapping. Therefore, it is very valuable to obtain robust and accurate matching results. This paper proposes a combined matching method based on phase information and deep convolution features. It has two outstanding advantages: one is that deep convolution features could be used to measure the similarity of the local and global positions of the sonar image; the other is that local feature matching could be performed at the key target position of the sonar image. This method does not need complex manual design, and completes the matching task of nonlinear intensity sonar images in a close end-to-end manner. Feature matching experiments are carried out on the deep-sea sonar images captured by AUVs, and the results show that our proposal has good matching accuracy and robustness.
Pedestrian Detection by Exemplar-Guided Contrastive Learning
Authors: Zebin Lin, Wenjie Pei, Fanglin Chen, David Zhang, Guangming Lu
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Pedestrian Detection

Typical methods for pedestrian detection focus on either tackling mutual occlusions between crowded pedestrians, or dealing with the various scales of pedestrians. Detecting pedestrians with substantial appearance diversities such as different pedestrian silhouettes, different viewpoints or different dressing, remains a crucial challenge. Instead of learning each of these diverse pedestrian appearance features individually as most existing methods do, we propose to perform contrastive learning to guide the feature learning in such a way that the semantic distance between pedestrians with different appearances in the learned feature space is minimized to eliminate the appearance diversities, whilst the distance between pedestrians and background is maximized. To facilitate the efficiency and effectiveness of contrastive learning, we construct an exemplar dictionary with representative pedestrian appearances as prior knowledge to construct effective contrastive training pairs and thus guide contrastive learning. Besides, the constructed exemplar dictionary is further leveraged to evaluate the quality of pedestrian proposals during inference by measuring the semantic distance between the proposal and the exemplar dictionary. Extensive experiments on both daytime and nighttime pedestrian detection validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Generating Unrestricted 3D Adversarial Point Clouds
Authors: Xuelong Dai, YanJie Li, Hua Dai, Bin Xiao
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Generative Adversarial Network

Utilizing 3D point cloud data has become an urgent need for the deployment of artificial intelligence in many areas like facial recognition and self-driving. However, deep learning for 3D point clouds is still vulnerable to adversarial attacks, e.g., iterative attacks, point transformation attacks, and generative attacks. These attacks need to restrict perturbations of adversarial examples within a strict bound, leading to the unrealistic adversarial 3D point clouds. In this paper, we propose an Adversarial Graph-Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (AdvGCGAN) to generate visually realistic adversarial 3D point clouds from scratch. Specifically, we use a graph convolutional generator and a discriminator with an auxiliary classifier to generate realistic point clouds, which learn the latent distribution from the real 3D data. The unrestricted adversarial attack loss is incorporated in the special adversarial training of GAN, which enables the generator to generate the adversarial examples to spoof the target network. Compared with the existing state-of-art attack methods, the experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our unrestricted adversarial attack methods with a higher attack success rate and visual quality. Additionally, the proposed AdvGCGAN can achieve better performance against defense models and better transferability than existing attack methods with strong camouflage.
Tracklet-Switch Adversarial Attack against Pedestrian Multi-Object Tracking Trackers
Authors: Delv Lin, Qi Chen, Chengyu Zhou, Kun He
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Multi-Object Tracking, Object Detection, Object Tracking

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has achieved aggressive progress and derived many excellent deep learning trackers. Meanwhile, most deep learning models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples that are crafted with small perturbations but could mislead the model prediction. In this work, we observe that the robustness on the MOT trackers is rarely studied, and it is challenging to attack the MOT system since its mature association algorithms are designed to be robust against errors during the tracking. To this end, we analyze the vulnerability of popular MOT trackers and propose a novel adversarial attack method called Tracklet-Switch (TraSw) against the complete tracking pipeline of MOT. The proposed TraSw can fool the advanced deep pedestrian trackers (i.e., FairMOT and ByteTrack), causing them fail to track the targets in the subsequent frames by perturbing very few frames. Experiments on the MOT-Challenge datasets (i.e., 2DMOT15, MOT17, and MOT20) show that TraSw can achieve an extraordinarily high success attack rate of over 95% by attacking only four frames on average. To our knowledge, this is the first work on the adversarial attack against the pedestrian MOT trackers. Code is available at https://github.com/JHL-HUST/TraSw .
Transparent Human Evaluation for Image Captioning
Authors: Jungo Kasai, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Lavinia Dunagan, Jacob Morrison, Ronan Le Bras, Yejin Choi, Noah A. Smith
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Image Captioning

We establish THumB, a rubric-based human evaluation protocol for image captioning models. Our scoring rubrics and their definitions are carefully developed based on machine- and human-generated captions on the MSCOCO dataset. Each caption is evaluated along two main dimensions in a tradeoff (precision and recall) as well as other aspects that measure the text quality (fluency, conciseness, and inclusive language). Our evaluations demonstrate several critical problems of the current evaluation practice. Human-generated captions show substantially higher quality than machine-generated ones, especially in coverage of salient information (i.e., recall), while most automatic metrics say the opposite. Our rubric-based results reveal that CLIPScore, a recent metric that uses image features, better correlates with human judgments than conventional text-only metrics because it is more sensitive to recall. We hope that this work will promote a more transparent evaluation protocol for image captioning and its automatic metrics.
Protection of SVM Model with Secret Key from Unauthorized Access
Authors: Ryota Iijima, AprilPyone MaungMaung, Hitoshi Kiya
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a block-wise image transformation method with a secret key for support vector machine (SVM) models. Models trained by using transformed images offer a poor performance to unauthorized users without a key, while they can offer a high performance to authorized users with a key. The proposed method is demonstrated to be robust enough against unauthorized access even under the use of kernel functions in a facial recognition experiment.
EMScore: Evaluating Video Captioning via Coarse-Grained and Fine-Grained Embedding Matching
Authors: Yaya Shi, Xu Yang, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu, Zheng-Jun Zha
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Language Modelling, Video Captioning

Current metrics for video captioning are mostly based on the text-level comparison between reference and candidate captions. However, they have some insuperable drawbacks, e.g., they cannot handle videos without references, and they may result in biased evaluation due to the one-to-many nature of video-to-text and the neglect of visual relevance. From the human evaluator's viewpoint, a high-quality caption should be consistent with the provided video, but not necessarily be similar to the reference in literal or semantics. Inspired by human evaluation, we propose EMScore (Embedding Matching-based score), a novel reference-free metric for video captioning, which directly measures similarity between video and candidate captions. Benefit from the recent development of large-scale pre-training models, we exploit a well pre-trained vision-language model to extract visual and linguistic embeddings for computing EMScore. Specifically, EMScore combines matching scores of both coarse-grained (video and caption) and fine-grained (frames and words) levels, which takes the overall understanding and detailed characteristics of the video into account. Furthermore, considering the potential information gain, EMScore can be flexibly extended to the conditions where human-labeled references are available. Last but not least, we collect VATEX-EVAL and ActivityNet-FOIl datasets to systematically evaluate the existing metrics. VATEX-EVAL experiments demonstrate that EMScore has higher human correlation and lower reference dependency. ActivityNet-FOIL experiment verifies that EMScore can effectively identify "hallucinating" captions. The datasets will be released to facilitate the development of video captioning metrics. The code is available at: https://github.com/ShiYaya/emscore.
Local Texture Estimator for Implicit Representation Function
Authors: Jaewon Lee, Kyong Hwan Jin
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recent works with an implicit neural function shed light on representing images in arbitrary resolution. However, a standalone multi-layer perceptron shows limited performance in learning high-frequency components. In this paper, we propose a Local Texture Estimator (LTE), a dominant-frequency estimator for natural images, enabling an implicit function to capture fine details while reconstructing images in a continuous manner. When jointly trained with a deep super-resolution (SR) architecture, LTE is capable of characterizing image textures in 2D Fourier space. We show that an LTE-based neural function achieves favorable performance against existing deep SR methods within an arbitrary-scale factor. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our implementation takes the shortest running time compared to previous works.
Hierarchical Knowledge Guided Learning for Real-world Retinal Diseases Recognition
Authors: Lie Ju, Zhen Yu, Lin Wang, Xin Zhao, Xin Wang, Paul Bonnington, ZongYuan Ge
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

In the real world, medical datasets often exhibit a long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes occupy the majority of the data, while most classes have only a limited number of samples), which results in a challenging long-tailed learning scenario. Some recently published datasets in ophthalmology AI consist of more than 40 kinds of retinal diseases with complex abnormalities and variable morbidity. Nevertheless, more than 30 conditions are rarely seen in global patient cohorts. From a modeling perspective, most deep learning models trained on these datasets may lack the ability to generalize to rare diseases where only a few available samples are presented for training. In addition, there may be more than one disease for the presence of the retina, resulting in a challenging label co-occurrence scenario, also known as \textit{multi-label}, which can cause problems when some re-sampling strategies are applied during training. To address the above two major challenges, this paper presents a novel method that enables the deep neural network to learn from a long-tailed fundus database for various retinal disease recognition. Firstly, we exploit the prior knowledge in ophthalmology to improve the feature representation using a hierarchy-aware pre-training. Secondly, we adopt an instance-wise class-balanced sampling strategy to address the label co-occurrence issue under the long-tailed medical dataset scenario. Thirdly, we introduce a novel hybrid knowledge distillation to train a less biased representation and classifier. We conducted extensive experiments on four databases, including two public datasets and two in-house databases with more than one million fundus images. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods with recognition accuracy outperforming the state-of-the-art competitors, especially for these rare diseases.
Achieving Human Parity on Visual Question Answering
Authors: Ming Yan, Haiyang Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Bin Bi, Wei Wang, Weihua Chen, Xianzhe Xu, Fan Wang, Zheng Cao, Zhicheng Zhang, Qiyu Zhang, Ji Zhang, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Rong Jin
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

The Visual Question Answering (VQA) task utilizes both visual image and language analysis to answer a textual question with respect to an image. It has been a popular research topic with an increasing number of real-world applications in the last decade. This paper describes our recent research of AliceMind-MMU (ALIbaba's Collection of Encoder-decoders from Machine IntelligeNce lab of Damo academy - MultiMedia Understanding) that obtains similar or even slightly better results than human being does on VQA. This is achieved by systematically improving the VQA pipeline including: (1) pre-training with comprehensive visual and textual feature representation; (2) effective cross-modal interaction with learning to attend; and (3) A novel knowledge mining framework with specialized expert modules for the complex VQA task. Treating different types of visual questions with corresponding expertise needed plays an important role in boosting the performance of our VQA architecture up to the human level. An extensive set of experiments and analysis are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new research work.
SAPNet: Segmentation-Aware Progressive Network for Perceptual Contrastive Deraining
Authors: Shen Zheng, Changjie Lu, Yuxiong Wu, Gaurav Gupta
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Restoration, object-detection, Object Detection, Rain Removal, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Single Image Deraining

Deep learning algorithms have recently achieved promising deraining performances on both the natural and synthetic rainy datasets. As an essential low-level pre-processing stage, a deraining network should clear the rain streaks and preserve the fine semantic details. However, most existing methods only consider low-level image restoration. That limits their performances at high-level tasks requiring precise semantic information. To address this issue, in this paper, we present a segmentation-aware progressive network (SAPNet) based upon contrastive learning for single image deraining. We start our method with a lightweight derain network formed with progressive dilated units (PDU). The PDU can significantly expand the receptive field and characterize multi-scale rain streaks without the heavy computation on multi-scale images. A fundamental aspect of this work is an unsupervised background segmentation (UBS) network initialized with ImageNet and Gaussian weights. The UBS can faithfully preserve an image's semantic information and improve the generalization ability to unseen photos. Furthermore, we introduce a perceptual contrastive loss (PCL) and a learned perceptual image similarity loss (LPISL) to regulate model learning. By exploiting the rainy image and groundtruth as the negative and the positive sample in the VGG-16 latent space, we bridge the fine semantic details between the derained image and the groundtruth in a fully constrained manner. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real-world rainy images show our model surpasses top-performing methods and aids object detection and semantic segmentation with considerable efficacy. A Pytorch Implementation is available at https://github.com/ShenZheng2000/SAPNet-for-image-deraining.
TorchGeo: Deep Learning With Geospatial Data
Authors: Adam J. Stewart, Caleb Robinson, Isaac A. Corley, Anthony Ortiz, Juan M. Lavista Ferres, Arindam Banerjee
Date: 2021-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Transfer Learning

Remotely sensed geospatial data are critical for applications including precision agriculture, urban planning, disaster monitoring and response, and climate change research, among others. Deep learning methods are particularly promising for modeling many remote sensing tasks given the success of deep neural networks in similar computer vision tasks and the sheer volume of remotely sensed imagery available. However, the variance in data collection methods and handling of geospatial metadata make the application of deep learning methodology to remotely sensed data nontrivial. For example, satellite imagery often includes additional spectral bands beyond red, green, and blue and must be joined to other geospatial data sources that can have differing coordinate systems, bounds, and resolutions. To help realize the potential of deep learning for remote sensing applications, we introduce TorchGeo, a Python library for integrating geospatial data into the PyTorch deep learning ecosystem. TorchGeo provides data loaders for a variety of benchmark datasets, composable datasets for generic geospatial data sources, samplers for geospatial data, and transforms that work with multispectral imagery. TorchGeo is also the first library to provide pre-trained models for multispectral satellite imagery (e.g., models that use all bands from the Sentinel-2 satellites), allowing for advances in transfer learning on downstream remote sensing tasks with limited labeled data. We use TorchGeo to create reproducible benchmark results on existing datasets and benchmark our proposed method for preprocessing geospatial imagery on the fly. TorchGeo is open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/torchgeo.