pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Joint Representation of Temporal Image Sequences and Object Motion for Video Object Detection
Authors: Junho Koh, Jaekyum Kim, Younji Shin, Byeongwon Lee, Seungji Yang, Jun Won Choi
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Video Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a new video object detector (VoD) method referred to as temporal feature aggregation and motion-aware VoD (TM-VoD), which produces a joint representation of temporal image sequences and object motion. The proposed TM-VoD aggregates visual feature maps extracted by convolutional neural networks applying the temporal attention gating and spatial feature alignment. This temporal feature aggregation is performed in two stages in a hierarchical fashion. In the first stage, the visual feature maps are fused at a pixel level via gated attention model. In the second stage, the proposed method aggregates the features after aligning the object features using temporal box offset calibration and weights them according to the cosine similarity measure. The proposed TM-VoD also finds the representation of the motion of objects in two successive steps. The pixel-level motion features are first computed based on the incremental changes between the adjacent visual feature maps. Then, box-level motion features are obtained from both the region of interest (RoI)-aligned pixel-level motion features and the sequential changes of the box coordinates. Finally, all these features are concatenated to produce a joint representation of the objects for VoD. The experiments conducted on the ImageNet VID dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing VoD methods and achieves a performance comparable to that of state-of-the-art VoDs.
Image Denoising by Gaussian Patch Mixture Model and Low Rank Patches
Authors: Jing Guo, Shuping Wang, Chen Luo, Qiyu Jin, Michael Kwok-Po Ng
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Patch Matching, SSIM

Non-local self-similarity based low rank algorithms are the state-of-the-art methods for image denoising. In this paper, a new method is proposed by solving two issues: how to improve similar patches matching accuracy and build an appropriate low rank matrix approximation model for Gaussian noise. For the first issue, similar patches can be found locally or globally. Local patch matching is to find similar patches in a large neighborhood which can alleviate noise effect, but the number of patches may be insufficient. Global patch matching is to determine enough similar patches but the error rate of patch matching may be higher. Based on this, we first use local patch matching method to reduce noise and then use Gaussian patch mixture model to achieve global patch matching. The second issue is that there is no low rank matrix approximation model to adapt to Gaussian noise. We build a new model according to the characteristics of Gaussian noise, then prove that there is a globally optimal solution of the model. By solving the two issues, experimental results are reported to show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art denoising methods includes several deep learning ones in both PSNR / SSIM values and visual quality.
Segmentation overlapping wear particles with few labelled data and imbalance sample
Authors: Peng Peng, Jiugen Wang
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Detection, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Ferrograph image segmentation is of significance for obtaining features of wear particles. However, wear particles are usually overlapped in the form of debris chains, which makes challenges to segment wear debris. An overlapping wear particle segmentation network (OWPSNet) is proposed in this study to segment the overlapped debris chains. The proposed deep learning model includes three parts: a region segmentation network, an edge detection network and a feature refine module. The region segmentation network is an improved U shape network, and it is applied to separate the wear debris form background of ferrograph image. The edge detection network is used to detect the edges of wear particles. Then, the feature refine module combines low-level features and high-level semantic features to obtain the final results. In order to solve the problem of sample imbalance, we proposed a square dice loss function to optimize the model. Finally, extensive experiments have been carried out on a ferrograph image dataset. Results show that the proposed model is capable of separating overlapping wear particles. Moreover, the proposed square dice loss function can improve the segmentation results, especially for the segmentation results of wear particle edge.
Self-Supervised Small Soccer Player Detection and Tracking
Authors: Samuel Hurault, Coloma Ballester, Gloria Haro
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00

In a soccer game, the information provided by detecting and tracking brings crucial clues to further analyze and understand some tactical aspects of the game, including individual and team actions. State-of-the-art tracking algorithms achieve impressive results in scenarios on which they have been trained for, but they fail in challenging ones such as soccer games. This is frequently due to the player small relative size and the similar appearance among players of the same team. Although a straightforward solution would be to retrain these models by using a more specific dataset, the lack of such publicly available annotated datasets entails searching for other effective solutions. In this work, we propose a self-supervised pipeline which is able to detect and track low-resolution soccer players under different recording conditions without any need of ground-truth data. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results are presented evaluating its performance. We also present a comparison to several state-of-the-art methods showing that both the proposed detector and the proposed tracker achieve top-tier results, in particular in the presence of small players.
Neural Scene Graphs for Dynamic Scenes
Authors: Julian Ost, Fahim Mannan, Nils Thuerey, Julian Knodt, Felix Heide
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Neural Rendering

Recent implicit neural rendering methods have demonstrated that it is possible to learn accurate view synthesis for complex scenes by predicting their volumetric density and color supervised solely by a set of RGB images. However, existing methods are restricted to learning efficient representations of static scenes that encode all scene objects into a single neural network, and lack the ability to represent dynamic scenes and decompositions into individual scene objects. In this work, we present the first neural rendering method that decomposes dynamic scenes into scene graphs. We propose a learned scene graph representation, which encodes object transformation and radiance, to efficiently render novel arrangements and views of the scene. To this end, we learn implicitly encoded scenes, combined with a jointly learned latent representation to describe objects with a single implicit function. We assess the proposed method on synthetic and real automotive data, validating that our approach learns dynamic scenes -- only by observing a video of this scene -- and allows for rendering novel photo-realistic views of novel scene compositions with unseen sets of objects at unseen poses.
SalSum: Saliency-based Video Summarization using Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: George Pantazis, George Dimas, Dimitris K. Iakovidis
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Video Summarization

The huge amount of video data produced daily by camera-based systems, such as surveilance, medical and telecommunication systems, emerges the need for effective video summarization (VS) methods. These methods should be capable of creating an overview of the video content. In this paper, we propose a novel VS method based on a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model pre-trained with human eye fixations. The main contribution of the proposed method is that it can provide perceptually compatible video summaries by combining both perceived color and spatiotemporal visual attention cues in a unsupervised scheme. Several fusion approaches are considered for robustness under uncertainty, and personalization. The proposed method is evaluated in comparison to state-of-the-art VS approaches on the benchmark dataset VSUMM. The experimental results conclude that SalSum outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by providing the highest f-measure score on the VSUMM benchmark.
Crowdsourcing Airway Annotations in Chest Computed Tomography Images
Authors: Veronika Cheplygina, Adria Perez-Rovira, Wieying Kuo, Harm A. W. M. Tiddens, Marleen de Bruijne
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

Measuring airways in chest computed tomography (CT) scans is important for characterizing diseases such as cystic fibrosis, yet very time-consuming to perform manually. Machine learning algorithms offer an alternative, but need large sets of annotated scans for good performance. We investigate whether crowdsourcing can be used to gather airway annotations. We generate image slices at known locations of airways in 24 subjects and request the crowd workers to outline the airway lumen and airway wall. After combining multiple crowd workers, we compare the measurements to those made by the experts in the original scans. Similar to our preliminary study, a large portion of the annotations were excluded, possibly due to workers misunderstanding the instructions. After excluding such annotations, moderate to strong correlations with the expert can be observed, although these correlations are slightly lower than inter-expert correlations. Furthermore, the results across subjects in this study are quite variable. Although the crowd has potential in annotating airways, further development is needed for it to be robust enough for gathering annotations in practice. For reproducibility, data and code are available online: \url{http://github.com/adriapr/crowdairway.git}.
Online Descriptor Enhancement via Self-Labelling Triplets for Visual Data Association
Authors: Yorai Shaoul, Katherine Liu, Kyel Ok, Nicholas Roy
Date: 2020-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Object-level data association is central to robotic applications such as tracking-by-detection and object-level simultaneous localization and mapping. While current learned visual data association methods outperform hand-crafted algorithms, many rely on large collections of domain-specific training examples that can be difficult to obtain without prior knowledge. Additionally, such methods often remain fixed during inference-time and do not harness observed information to better their performance. We propose a self-supervised method for incrementally refining visual descriptors to improve performance in the task of object-level visual data association. Our method optimizes deep descriptor generators online, by continuously training a widely available image classification network pre-trained with domain-independent data. We show that earlier layers in the network outperform later-stage layers for the data association task while also allowing for a 94% reduction in the number of parameters, enabling the online optimization. We show that self-labelling challenging triplets--choosing positive examples separated by large temporal distances and negative examples close in the descriptor space--improves the quality of the learned descriptors for the multi-object tracking task. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach surpasses other visual data-association methods applied to a tracking-by-detection task, and show that it provides better performance-gains when compared to other methods that attempt to adapt to observed information.
GenderRobustness: Robustness of Gender Detection in Facial Recognition Systems with variation in Image Properties
Authors: Sharadha Srinivasan, Madan Musuvathi
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00

In recent times, there have been increasing accusations on artificial intelligence systems and algorithms of computer vision of possessing implicit biases. Even though these conversations are more prevalent now and systems are improving by performing extensive testing and broadening their horizon, biases still do exist. One such class of systems where bias is said to exist is facial recognition systems, where bias has been observed on the basis of gender, ethnicity, skin tone and other facial attributes. This is even more disturbing, given the fact that these systems are used in practically every sector of the industries today. From as critical as criminal identification to as simple as getting your attendance registered, these systems have gained a huge market, especially in recent years. That in itself is a good enough reason for developers of these systems to ensure that the bias is kept to a bare minimum or ideally non-existent, to avoid major issues like favoring a particular gender, race, or class of people or rather making a class of people susceptible to false accusations due to inability of these systems to correctly recognize those people.
Recovering the Imperfect: Cell Segmentation in the Presence of Dynamically Localized Proteins
Authors: Özgün Çiçek, Yassine Marrakchi, Enoch Boasiako Antwi, Barbara Di Ventura, Thomas Brox
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Segmentation, Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Instance Segmentation, Optical Flow Estimation, Segmentation

Deploying off-the-shelf segmentation networks on biomedical data has become common practice, yet if structures of interest in an image sequence are visible only temporarily, existing frame-by-frame methods fail. In this paper, we provide a solution to segmentation of imperfect data through time based on temporal propagation and uncertainty estimation. We integrate uncertainty estimation into Mask R-CNN network and propagate motion-corrected segmentation masks from frames with low uncertainty to those frames with high uncertainty to handle temporary loss of signal for segmentation. We demonstrate the value of this approach over frame-by-frame segmentation and regular temporal propagation on data from human embryonic kidney (HEK293T) cells transiently transfected with a fluorescent protein that moves in and out of the nucleus over time. The method presented here will empower microscopic experiments aimed at understanding molecular and cellular function.
Intrinsic Image Decomposition using Paradigms
Authors: D. A. Forsyth, Jason J. Rock
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrinsic Image Decomposition

Intrinsic image decomposition is the classical task of mapping image to albedo. The WHDR dataset allows methods to be evaluated by comparing predictions to human judgements ("lighter", "same as", "darker"). The best modern intrinsic image methods learn a map from image to albedo using rendered models and human judgements. This is convenient for practical methods, but cannot explain how a visual agent without geometric, surface and illumination models and a renderer could learn to recover intrinsic images. This paper describes a method that learns intrinsic image decomposition without seeing WHDR annotations, rendered data, or ground truth data. The method relies on paradigms - fake albedos and fake shading fields - together with a novel smoothing procedure that ensures good behavior at short scales on real images. Long scale error is controlled by averaging. Our method achieves WHDR scores competitive with those of strong recent methods allowed to see training WHDR annotations, rendered data, and ground truth data. Because our method is unsupervised, we can compute estimates of the test/train variance of WHDR scores; these are quite large, and it is unsafe to rely small differences in reported WHDR.
FLAVA: Find, Localize, Adjust and Verify to Annotate LiDAR-Based Point Clouds
Authors: Tai Wang, Conghui He, Zhe Wang, Jianping Shi, Dahua Lin
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Recent years have witnessed the rapid progress of perception algorithms on top of LiDAR, a widely adopted sensor for autonomous driving systems. These LiDAR-based solutions are typically data hungry, requiring a large amount of data to be labeled for training and evaluation. However, annotating this kind of data is very challenging due to the sparsity and irregularity of point clouds and more complex interaction involved in this procedure. To tackle this problem, we propose FLAVA, a systematic approach to minimizing human interaction in the annotation process. Specifically, we divide the annotation pipeline into four parts: find, localize, adjust and verify. In addition, we carefully design the UI for different stages of the annotation procedure, thus keeping the annotators to focus on the aspects that are most important to each stage. Furthermore, our system also greatly reduces the amount of interaction by introducing a light-weight yet effective mechanism to propagate the annotation results. Experimental results show that our method can remarkably accelerate the procedure and improve the annotation quality.
Targeted Self Supervision for Classification on a Small COVID-19 CT Scan Dataset
Authors: Nicolas Ewen, Naimul Khan
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Traditionally, convolutional neural networks need large amounts of data labelled by humans to train. Self supervision has been proposed as a method of dealing with small amounts of labelled data. The aim of this study is to determine whether self supervision can increase classification performance on a small COVID-19 CT scan dataset. This study also aims to determine whether the proposed self supervision strategy, targeted self supervision, is a viable option for a COVID-19 imaging dataset. A total of 10 experiments are run comparing the classification performance of the proposed method of self supervision with different amounts of data. The experiments run with the proposed self supervision strategy perform significantly better than their non-self supervised counterparts. We get almost 8% increase in accuracy with full self supervision when compared to no self supervision. The results suggest that self supervision can improve classification performance on a small COVID-19 CT scan dataset. Code for targeted self supervision can be found at this link: https://github.com/Mewtwo/Targeted-Self-Supervision/tree/main/COVID-CT
Discriminative Localized Sparse Representations for Breast Cancer Screening
Authors: Sokratis Makrogiannis, Chelsea E. Harris, Keni Zheng
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Dictionary Learning

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women both in developed and developing countries. Early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer may reduce its mortality and improve the quality of life. Computer-aided detection (CADx) and computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) techniques have shown promise for reducing the burden of human expert reading and improve the accuracy and reproducibility of results. Sparse analysis techniques have produced relevant results for representing and recognizing imaging patterns. In this work we propose a method for Label Consistent Spatially Localized Ensemble Sparse Analysis (LC-SLESA). In this work we apply dictionary learning to our block based sparse analysis method to classify breast lesions as benign or malignant. The performance of our method in conjunction with LC-KSVD dictionary learning is evaluated using 10-, 20-, and 30-fold cross validation on the MIAS dataset. Our results indicate that the proposed sparse analyses may be a useful component for breast cancer screening applications.
CLIPPER: A Graph-Theoretic Framework for Robust Data Association
Authors: Parker C. Lusk, Kaveh Fathian, Jonathan P. How
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Point Cloud Registration

We present CLIPPER (Consistent LInking, Pruning, and Pairwise Error Rectification), a framework for robust data association in the presence of noise and outliers. We formulate the problem in a graph-theoretic framework using the notion of geometric consistency. State-of-the-art techniques that use this framework utilize either combinatorial optimization techniques that do not scale well to large-sized problems, or use heuristic approximations that yield low accuracy in high-noise, high-outlier regimes. In contrast, CLIPPER uses a relaxation of the combinatorial problem and returns solutions that are guaranteed to correspond to the optima of the original problem. Low time complexity is achieved with an efficient projected gradient ascent approach. Experiments indicate that CLIPPER maintains a consistently low runtime of 15 ms where exact methods can require up to 24 s at their peak, even on small-sized problems with 200 associations. When evaluated on noisy point cloud registration problems, CLIPPER achieves 100% precision and 98% recall in 90% outlier regimes while competing algorithms begin degrading by 70% outliers. In an instance of associating noisy points of the Stanford Bunny with 990 outlier associations and only 10 inlier associations, CLIPPER successfully returns 8 inlier associations with 100% precision in 138 ms. Code is available at https://mit-acl.github.io/clipper.
Compressive Shack-Hartmann Wavefront Sensor based on Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Peng Jia, Mingyang Ma, Dongmei Cai, Weihua Wang, Juanjuan Li, Can Li
Date: 2020-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Image Deconvolution, Image Restoration

The Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor is widely used to measure aberrations induced by atmospheric turbulence in adaptive optics systems. However if there exists strong atmospheric turbulence or the brightness of guide stars is low, the accuracy of wavefront measurements will be affected. In this paper, we propose a compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method. Instead of reconstructing wavefronts with slope measurements of all sub-apertures, our method reconstructs wavefronts with slope measurements of sub-apertures which have spot images with high signal to noise ratio. Besides, we further propose to use a deep neural network to accelerate wavefront reconstruction speed. During the training stage of the deep neural network, we propose to add a drop-out layer to simulate the compressive sensing process, which could increase development speed of our method. After training, the compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method can reconstruct wavefronts in high spatial resolution with slope measurements from only a small amount of sub-apertures. We integrate the straightforward compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method with image deconvolution algorithm to develop a high-order image restoration method. We use images restored by the high-order image restoration method to test the performance of our the compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method. The results show that our method can improve the accuracy of wavefront measurements and is suitable for real-time applications.