pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Deep Learning Methods for Biological Image Reconstruction and Enhancement
Authors: Mehmet Akçakaya, Burhaneddin Yaman, Hyungjin Chung, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Reconstruction, Self-Supervised Learning

Recently, deep learning approaches have become the main research frontier for biological image reconstruction and enhancement problems thanks to their high performance, along with their ultra-fast inference times. However, due to the difficulty of obtaining matched reference data for supervised learning, there has been increasing interest in unsupervised learning approaches that do not need paired reference data. In particular, self-supervised learning and generative models have been successfully used for various biological imaging applications. In this paper, we overview these approaches from a coherent perspective in the context of classical inverse problems, and discuss their applications to biological imaging, including electron, fluorescence and deconvolution microscopy, optical diffraction tomography and functional neuroimaging.
StrobeNet: Category-Level Multiview Reconstruction of Articulated Objects
Authors: Ge Zhang, Or Litany, Srinath Sridhar, Leonidas Guibas
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Object

We present StrobeNet, a method for category-level 3D reconstruction of articulating objects from one or more unposed RGB images. Reconstructing general articulating object categories % has important applications, but is challenging since objects can have wide variation in shape, articulation, appearance and topology. We address this by building on the idea of category-level articulation canonicalization -- mapping observations to a canonical articulation which enables correspondence-free multiview aggregation. Our end-to-end trainable neural network estimates feature-enriched canonical 3D point clouds, articulation joints, and part segmentation from one or more unposed images of an object. These intermediate estimates are used to generate a final implicit 3D reconstruction.Our approach reconstructs objects even when they are observed in different articulations in images with large baselines, and animation of reconstructed shapes. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on different object categories show that our method is able to achieve high reconstruction accuracy, especially as more views are added.
Unknown-box Approximation to Improve Optical Character Recognition Performance
Authors: Ayantha Randika, Nilanjan Ray, Xiao Xiao, Allegra Latimer
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a widely used pattern recognition application in numerous domains. There are several feature-rich, general-purpose OCR solutions available for consumers, which can provide moderate to excellent accuracy levels. However, accuracy can diminish with difficult and uncommon document domains. Preprocessing of document images can be used to minimize the effect of domain shift. In this paper, a novel approach is presented for creating a customized preprocessor for a given OCR engine. Unlike the previous OCR agnostic preprocessing techniques, the proposed approach approximates the gradient of a particular OCR engine to train a preprocessor module. Experiments with two datasets and two OCR engines show that the presented preprocessor is able to improve the accuracy of the OCR up to 46% from the baseline by applying pixel-level manipulations to the document image. The implementation of the proposed method and the enhanced public datasets are available for download.
DFENet: A Novel Dimension Fusion Edge Guided Network for Brain MRI Segmentation
Authors: Hritam Basak, Rukhshanda Hussain, Ajay Rana
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, MRI segmentation, Segmentation

The rapid increment of morbidity of brain stroke in the last few years have been a driving force towards fast and accurate segmentation of stroke lesions from brain MRI images. With the recent development of deep-learning, computer-aided and segmentation methods of ischemic stroke lesions have been useful for clinicians in early diagnosis and treatment planning. However, most of these methods suffer from inaccurate and unreliable segmentation results because of their inability to capture sufficient contextual features from the MRI volumes. To meet these requirements, 3D convolutional neural networks have been proposed, which, however, suffer from huge computational requirements. To mitigate these problems, we propose a novel Dimension Fusion Edge-guided network (DFENet) that can meet both of these requirements by fusing the features of 2D and 3D CNNs. Unlike other methods, our proposed network uses a parallel partial decoder (PPD) module for aggregating and upsampling selected features, rich in important contextual information. Additionally, we use an edge-guidance and enhanced mixing loss for constantly supervising and improvising the learning process of the network. The proposed method is evaluated on publicly available Anatomical Tracings of Lesions After Stroke (ATLAS) dataset, resulting in mean DSC, IoU, Precision and Recall values of 0.5457, 0.4015, 0.6371, and 0.4969 respectively. The results, when compared to other state-of-the-art methods, outperforms them by a significant margin. Therefore, the proposed model is robust, accurate, superior to the existing methods, and can be relied upon for biomedical applications.
Joint Optimization of Hadamard Sensing and Reconstruction in Compressed Sensing Fluorescence Microscopy
Authors: Alan Q. Wang, Aaron K. LaViolette, Leo Moon, Chris Xu, Mert R. Sabuncu
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, regression

Compressed sensing fluorescence microscopy (CS-FM) proposes a scheme whereby less measurements are collected during sensing and reconstruction is performed to recover the image. Much work has gone into optimizing the sensing and reconstruction portions separately. We propose a method of jointly optimizing both sensing and reconstruction end-to-end under a total measurement constraint, enabling learning of the optimal sensing scheme concurrently with the parameters of a neural network-based reconstruction network. We train our model on a rich dataset of confocal, two-photon, and wide-field microscopy images comprising of a variety of biological samples. We show that our method outperforms several baseline sensing schemes and a regularized regression reconstruction algorithm.
Ensemble-based Semi-supervised Learning to Improve Noisy Soiling Annotations in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Michal Uricar, Ganesh Sistu, Lucie Yahiaoui, Senthil Yogamani
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Pseudo Label

Manual annotation of soiling on surround view cameras is a very challenging and expensive task. The unclear boundary for various soiling categories like water drops or mud particles usually results in a large variance in the annotation quality. As a result, the models trained on such poorly annotated data are far from being optimal. In this paper, we focus on handling such noisy annotations via pseudo-label driven ensemble model which allow us to quickly spot problematic annotations and in most cases also sufficiently fixing them. We train a soiling segmentation model on both noisy and refined labels and demonstrate significant improvements using the refined annotations. It also illustrates that it is possible to effectively refine lower cost coarse annotations.
Towards Robust Vision Transformer
Authors: Xiaofeng Mao, Gege Qi, Yuefeng Chen, Xiaodan Li, Ranjie Duan, Shaokai Ye, Yuan He, Hui Xue
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Image Classification, Robust Design

Recent advances on Vision Transformer (ViT) and its improved variants have shown that self-attention-based networks surpass traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in most vision tasks. However, existing ViTs focus on the standard accuracy and computation cost, lacking the investigation of the intrinsic influence on model robustness and generalization. In this work, we conduct systematic evaluation on components of ViTs in terms of their impact on robustness to adversarial examples, common corruptions and distribution shifts. We find some components can be harmful to robustness. By using and combining robust components as building blocks of ViTs, we propose Robust Vision Transformer (RVT), which is a new vision transformer and has superior performance with strong robustness. We further propose two new plug-and-play techniques called position-aware attention scaling and patch-wise augmentation to augment our RVT, which we abbreviate as RVT*. The experimental results on ImageNet and six robustness benchmarks show the advanced robustness and generalization ability of RVT compared with previous ViTs and state-of-the-art CNNs. Furthermore, RVT-S* also achieves Top-1 rank on multiple robustness leaderboards including ImageNet-C and ImageNet-Sketch. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust}.
BigEarthNet-MM: A Large Scale Multi-Modal Multi-Label Benchmark Archive for Remote Sensing Image Classification and Retrieval
Authors: Gencer Sumbul, Arne de Wall, Tristan Kreuziger, Filipe Marcelino, Hugo Costa, Pedro Benevides, Mário Caetano, Begüm Demir, Volker Markl
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Retrieval, Multi-Label Image Retrieval, Remote Sensing Image Classification, Retrieval, Scene Classification

This paper presents the multi-modal BigEarthNet (BigEarthNet-MM) benchmark archive made up of 590,326 pairs of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 image patches to support the deep learning (DL) studies in multi-modal multi-label remote sensing (RS) image retrieval and classification. Each pair of patches in BigEarthNet-MM is annotated with multi-labels provided by the CORINE Land Cover (CLC) map of 2018 based on its thematically most detailed Level-3 class nomenclature. Our initial research demonstrates that some CLC classes are challenging to be accurately described by only considering (single-date) BigEarthNet-MM images. In this paper, we also introduce an alternative class-nomenclature as an evolution of the original CLC labels to address this problem. This is achieved by interpreting and arranging the CLC Level-3 nomenclature based on the properties of BigEarthNet-MM images in a new nomenclature of 19 classes. In our experiments, we show the potential of BigEarthNet-MM for multi-modal multi-label image retrieval and classification problems by considering several state-of-the-art DL models. We also demonstrate that the DL models trained from scratch on BigEarthNet-MM outperform those pre-trained on ImageNet, especially in relation to some complex classes, including agriculture and other vegetated and natural environments. We make all the data and the DL models publicly available at https://bigearth.net, offering an important resource to support studies on multi-modal image scene classification and retrieval problems in RS.
CNN-based Approaches For Cross-Subject Classification in Motor Imagery: From The State-of-The-Art to DynamicNet
Authors: Alberto Zancanaro, Giulia Cisotto, João Ruivo Paulo, Gabriel Pires, Urbano J. Nunes
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Computer Interface, Deep Learning, EEG, Motor Imagery, valid

Motor imagery (MI)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems are being increasingly employed to provide alternative means of communication and control for people suffering from neuro-motor impairments, with a special effort to bring these systems out of the controlled lab environments. Hence, accurately classifying MI from brain signals, e.g., from electroencephalography (EEG), is essential to obtain reliable BCI systems. However, MI classification is still a challenging task, because the signals are characterized by poor SNR, high intra-subject and cross-subject variability. Deep learning approaches have started to emerge as valid alternatives to standard machine learning techniques, e.g., filter bank common spatial pattern (FBCSP), to extract subject-independent features and to increase the cross-subject classification performance of MI BCI systems. In this paper, we first present a review of the most recent studies using deep learning for MI classification, with particular attention to their cross-subject performance. Second, we propose DynamicNet, a Python-based tool for quick and flexible implementations of deep learning models based on convolutional neural networks. We show-case the potentiality of DynamicNet by implementing EEGNet, a well-established architecture for effective EEG classification. Finally, we compare its performance with FBCSP in a 4-class MI classification over public datasets. To explore its cross-subject classification ability, we applied three different cross-validation schemes. From our results, we demonstrate that DynamicNet-implemented EEGNet outperforms FBCSP by about 25%, with a statistically significant difference when cross-subject validation schemes are applied.
Large-Scale Unsupervised Person Re-Identification with Contrastive Learning
Authors: Weiquan Huang, Yan Bai, Qiuyu Ren, Xinbo Zhao, Ming Feng, Yin Wang
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification, Pedestrian Detection, Person Re-Identification, Self-Supervised Image Classification, Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Existing public person Re-Identification~(ReID) datasets are small in modern terms because of labeling difficulty. Although unlabeled surveillance video is abundant and relatively easy to obtain, it is unclear how to leverage these footage to learn meaningful ReID representations. In particular, most existing unsupervised and domain adaptation ReID methods utilize only the public datasets in their experiments, with labels removed. In addition, due to small data sizes, these methods usually rely on fine tuning by the unlabeled training data in the testing domain to achieve good performance. Inspired by the recent progress of large-scale self-supervised image classification using contrastive learning, we propose to learn ReID representation from large-scale unlabeled surveillance video alone. Assisted by off-the-shelf pedestrian detection tools, we apply the contrastive loss at both the image and the tracklet levels. Together with a principal component analysis step using camera labels freely available, our evaluation using a large-scale unlabeled dataset shows far superior performance among unsupervised methods that do not use any training data in the testing domain. Furthermore, the accuracy improves with the data size and therefore our method has great potential with even larger and more diversified datasets.
Multi-object Tracking with Tracked Object Bounding Box Association
Authors: Nanyang Yang, Yi Wang, Lap-Pui Chau
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

The CenterTrack tracking algorithm achieves state-of-the-art tracking performance using a simple detection model and single-frame spatial offsets to localize objects and predict their associations in a single network. However, this joint detection and tracking method still suffers from high identity switches due to the inferior association method. To reduce the high number of identity switches and improve the tracking accuracy, in this paper, we propose to incorporate a simple tracked object bounding box and overlapping prediction based on the current frame onto the CenterTrack algorithm. Specifically, we propose an Intersection over Union (IOU) distance cost matrix in the association step instead of simple point displacement distance. We evaluate our proposed tracker on the MOT17 test dataset, showing that our proposed method can reduce identity switches significantly by 22.6% and obtain a notable improvement of 1.5% in IDF1 compared to the original CenterTrack's under the same tracklet lifetime. The source code is released at https://github.com/Nanyangny/CenterTrack-IOU.
Fast and Accurate Camera Scene Detection on Smartphones
Authors: Angeline Pouget, Sidharth Ramesh, Maximilian Giang, Ramithan Chandrapalan, Toni Tanner, Moritz Prussing, Radu Timofte, Andrey Ignatov
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00

AI-powered automatic camera scene detection mode is nowadays available in nearly any modern smartphone, though the problem of accurate scene prediction has not yet been addressed by the research community. This paper for the first time carefully defines this problem and proposes a novel Camera Scene Detection Dataset (CamSDD) containing more than 11K manually crawled images belonging to 30 different scene categories. We propose an efficient and NPU-friendly CNN model for this task that demonstrates a top-3 accuracy of 99.5% on this dataset and achieves more than 200 FPS on the recent mobile SoCs. An additional in-the-wild evaluation of the obtained solution is performed to analyze its performance and limitation in the real-world scenarios. The dataset and pre-trained models used in this paper are available on the project website.
Learning to Relate Depth and Semantics for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Suman Saha, Anton Obukhov, Danda Pani Paudel, Menelaos Kanakis, Yuhua Chen, Stamatios Georgoulis, Luc van Gool
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Domain Adaptation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Multi-Task Learning, Segmentation, Self-Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

We present an approach for encoding visual task relationships to improve model performance in an Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) setting. Semantic segmentation and monocular depth estimation are shown to be complementary tasks; in a multi-task learning setting, a proper encoding of their relationships can further improve performance on both tasks. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel Cross-Task Relation Layer (CTRL), which encodes task dependencies between the semantic and depth predictions. To capture the cross-task relationships, we propose a neural network architecture that contains task-specific and cross-task refinement heads. Furthermore, we propose an Iterative Self-Learning (ISL) training scheme, which exploits semantic pseudo-labels to provide extra supervision on the target domain. We experimentally observe improvements in both tasks' performance because the complementary information present in these tasks is better captured. Specifically, we show that: (1) our approach improves performance on all tasks when they are complementary and mutually dependent; (2) the CTRL helps to improve both semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks performance in the challenging UDA setting; (3) the proposed ISL training scheme further improves the semantic segmentation performance. The implementation is available at https://github.com/susaha/ctrl-uda.
Real-Time Quantized Image Super-Resolution on Mobile NPUs, Mobile AI 2021 Challenge: Report
Authors: Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Maurizio Denna, Abdel Younes, Andrew Lek, Mustafa Ayazoglu, Jie Liu, Zongcai Du, Jiaming Guo, Xueyi Zhou, Hao Jia, Youliang Yan, Zexin Zhang, Yixin Chen, Yunbo Peng, Yue Lin, Xindong Zhang, Hui Zeng, Kun Zeng, Peirong Li, Zhihuang Liu, Shiqi Xue, Shengpeng Wang
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Image super-resolution is one of the most popular computer vision problems with many important applications to mobile devices. While many solutions have been proposed for this task, they are usually not optimized even for common smartphone AI hardware, not to mention more constrained smart TV platforms that are often supporting INT8 inference only. To address this problem, we introduce the first Mobile AI challenge, where the target is to develop an end-to-end deep learning-based image super-resolution solutions that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile or edge NPUs. For this, the participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained quantized models to do an efficient 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. The proposed solutions are fully compatible with all major mobile AI accelerators and are capable of reconstructing Full HD images under 40-60 ms while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.
Learned Smartphone ISP on Mobile NPUs with Deep Learning, Mobile AI 2021 Challenge: Report
Authors: Andrey Ignatov, Cheng-Ming Chiang, Hsien-Kai Kuo, Anastasia Sycheva, Radu Timofte, Min-Hung Chen, Man-Yu Lee, Yu-Syuan Xu, Yu Tseng, Shusong Xu, Jin Guo, Chao-Hung Chen, Ming-Chun Hsyu, Wen-Chia Tsai, Chao-Wei Chen, Grigory Malivenko, Minsu Kwon, Myungje Lee, Jaeyoon Yoo, Changbeom Kang, Shinjo Wang, Zheng Shaolong, Hao Dejun, Xie Fen, Feng Zhuang, Yipeng Ma, Jingyang Peng, Tao Wang, Fenglong Song, Chih-Chung Hsu, Kwan-Lin Chen, Mei-Hsuang Wu, Vishal Chudasama, Kalpesh Prajapati, Heena Patel, Anjali Sarvaiya, Kishor Upla, Kiran Raja, Raghavendra Ramachandra, Christoph Busch, Etienne de Stoutz
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00

As the quality of mobile cameras starts to play a crucial role in modern smartphones, more and more attention is now being paid to ISP algorithms used to improve various perceptual aspects of mobile photos. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop an end-to-end deep learning-based image signal processing (ISP) pipeline that can replace classical hand-crafted ISPs and achieve nearly real-time performance on smartphone NPUs. For this, the participants were provided with a novel learned ISP dataset consisting of RAW-RGB image pairs captured with the Sony IMX586 Quad Bayer mobile sensor and a professional 102-megapixel medium format camera. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the MediaTek Dimensity 1000+ platform with a dedicated AI processing unit capable of accelerating both floating-point and quantized neural networks. The proposed solutions are fully compatible with the above NPU and are capable of processing Full HD photos under 60-100 milliseconds while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper.
Multi-modal Visual Place Recognition in Dynamics-Invariant Perception Space
Authors: Lin Wu, Teng Wang, Changyin Sun
Date: 2021-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Visual Place Recognition

Visual place recognition is one of the essential and challenging problems in the fields of robotics. In this letter, we for the first time explore the use of multi-modal fusion of semantic and visual modalities in dynamics-invariant space to improve place recognition in dynamic environments. We achieve this by first designing a novel deep learning architecture to generate the static semantic segmentation and recover the static image directly from the corresponding dynamic image. We then innovatively leverage the spatial-pyramid-matching model to encode the static semantic segmentation into feature vectors. In parallel, the static image is encoded using the popular Bag-of-words model. On the basis of the above multi-modal features, we finally measure the similarity between the query image and target landmark by the joint similarity of their semantic and visual codes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach for place recognition in dynamic environments.