pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An End-to-End Khmer Optical Character Recognition using Sequence-to-Sequence with Attention
Authors: Rina Buoy, Sokchea Kor, Nguonly Taing
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Sentence

This paper presents an end-to-end deep convolutional recurrent neural network solution for Khmer optical character recognition (OCR) task. The proposed solution uses a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) architecture with attention mechanism. The encoder extracts visual features from an input text-line image via layers of residual convolutional blocks and a layer of gated recurrent units (GRU). The features are encoded in a single context vector and a sequence of hidden states which are fed to the decoder for decoding one character at a time until a special end-of-sentence (EOS) token is reached. The attention mechanism allows the decoder network to adaptively select parts of the input image while predicting a target character. The Seq2Seq Khmer OCR network was trained on a large collection of computer-generated text-line images for seven common Khmer fonts. The proposed model's performance outperformed the state-of-art Tesseract OCR engine for Khmer language on the 3000-images test set by achieving a character error rate (CER) of 1% vs 3%.
Moving in a 360 World: Synthesizing Panoramic Parallaxes from a Single Panorama
Authors: Ching-Yu Hsu, Cheng Sun, Hwann-Tzong Chen
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis

We present Omnidirectional Neural Radiance Fields (OmniNeRF), the first method to the application of parallax-enabled novel panoramic view synthesis. Recent works for novel view synthesis focus on perspective images with limited field-of-view and require sufficient pictures captured in a specific condition. Conversely, OmniNeRF can generate panorama images for unknown viewpoints given a single equirectangular image as training data. To this end, we propose to augment the single RGB-D panorama by projecting back and forth between a 3D world and different 2D panoramic coordinates at different virtual camera positions. By doing so, we are able to optimize an Omnidirectional Neural Radiance Field with visible pixels collecting from omnidirectional viewing angles at a fixed center for the estimation of new viewing angles from varying camera positions. As a result, the proposed OmniNeRF achieves convincing renderings of novel panoramic views that exhibit the parallax effect. We showcase the effectiveness of each of our proposals on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
CUDA-GHR: Controllable Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Gaze and Head Redirection
Authors: Swati Jindal, Xin Eric Wang
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Domain Adaptation, gaze redirection, Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Transfer Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The robustness of gaze and head pose estimation models is highly dependent on the amount of labeled data. Recently, generative modeling has shown excellent results in generating photo-realistic images, which can alleviate the need for annotations. However, adopting such generative models to new domains while maintaining their ability to provide fine-grained control over different image attributes, \eg, gaze and head pose directions, has been a challenging problem. This paper proposes CUDA-GHR, an unsupervised domain adaptation framework that enables fine-grained control over gaze and head pose directions while preserving the appearance-related factors of the person. Our framework simultaneously learns to adapt to new domains and disentangle visual attributes such as appearance, gaze direction, and head orientation by utilizing a label-rich source domain and an unlabeled target domain. Extensive experiments on the benchmarking datasets show that the proposed method can outperform state-of-the-art techniques on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of generated image-label pairs in the target domain for pretraining networks for the downstream task of gaze and head pose estimation. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/jswati31/cuda-ghr.
Robust Pooling through the Data Mode
Authors: Ayman Mukhaimar, Ruwan Tennakoon, Chow Yin Lai, Reza Hoseinnezhad, AlirezaBab-Hadiashar
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The task of learning from point cloud data is always challenging due to the often occurrence of noise and outliers in the data. Such data inaccuracies can significantly influence the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning networks and their ability to classify or segment objects. While there are some robust deep learning approaches, they are computationally too expensive for real-time applications. This paper proposes a deep learning solution that includes a novel robust pooling layer which greatly enhances network robustness and performs significantly faster than state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed pooling layer looks for data a mode/cluster using two methods, RANSAC, and histogram, as clusters are indicative of models. We tested the pooling layer into frameworks such as Point-based and graph-based neural networks, and the tests showed enhanced robustness as compared to robust state-of-the-art methods.
Active Learning for Deep Neural Networks on Edge Devices
Authors: Yuya Senzaki, Christian Hamelain
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

When dealing with deep neural network (DNN) applications on edge devices, continuously updating the model is important. Although updating a model with real incoming data is ideal, using all of them is not always feasible due to limits, such as labeling and communication costs. Thus, it is necessary to filter and select the data to use for training (i.e., active learning) on the device. In this paper, we formalize a practical active learning problem for DNNs on edge devices and propose a general task-agnostic framework to tackle this problem, which reduces it to a stream submodular maximization. This framework is light enough to be run with low computational resources, yet provides solutions whose quality is theoretically guaranteed thanks to the submodular property. Through this framework, we can configure data selection criteria flexibly, including using methods proposed in previous active learning studies. We evaluate our approach on both classification and object detection tasks in a practical setting to simulate a real-life scenario. The results of our study show that the proposed framework outperforms all other methods in both tasks, while running at a practical speed on real devices.
Interpretable Face Manipulation Detection via Feature Whitening
Authors: Yingying Hua, Daichi Zhang, Pengju Wang, Shiming Ge
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Why should we trust the detections of deep neural networks for manipulated faces? Understanding the reasons is important for users in improving the fairness, reliability, privacy and trust of the detection models. In this work, we propose an interpretable face manipulation detection approach to achieve the trustworthy and accurate inference. The approach could make the face manipulation detection process transparent by embedding the feature whitening module. This module aims to whiten the internal working mechanism of deep networks through feature decorrelation and feature constraint. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach can strike a balance between the detection accuracy and the model interpretability.
Two-Stream Consensus Network: Submission to HACS Challenge 2021 Weakly-Supervised Learning Track
Authors: Yuanhao Zhai, Le Wang, David Doermann, Junsong Yuan
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Optical Flow Estimation, Temporal Action Localization, Weakly-supervised Learning, Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization

This technical report presents our solution to the HACS Temporal Action Localization Challenge 2021, Weakly-Supervised Learning Track. The goal of weakly-supervised temporal action localization is to temporally locate and classify action of interest in untrimmed videos given only video-level labels. We adopt the two-stream consensus network (TSCN) as the main framework in this challenge. The TSCN consists of a two-stream base model training procedure and a pseudo ground truth learning procedure. The base model training encourages the model to predict reliable predictions based on single modality (i.e., RGB or optical flow), based on the fusion of which a pseudo ground truth is generated and in turn used as supervision to train the base models. On the HACS v1.1.1 dataset, without fine-tuning the feature-extraction I3D models, our method achieves 22.20% on the validation set and 21.68% on the testing set in terms of average mAP. Our solution ranked the 2nd in this challenge, and we hope our method can serve as a baseline for future academic research.
3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Survey
Authors: Rui Qian, Xin Lai, Xirong Li
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Attribute, Autonomous Driving, Collision Avoidance, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning, Survey

Autonomous driving is regarded as one of the most promising remedies to shield human beings from severe crashes. To this end, 3D object detection serves as the core basis of perception stack especially for the sake of path planning, motion prediction, and collision avoidance etc. Taking a quick glance at the progress we have made, we attribute challenges to visual appearance recovery in the absence of depth information from images, representation learning from partially occluded unstructured point clouds, and semantic alignments over heterogeneous features from cross modalities. Despite existing efforts, 3D object detection for autonomous driving is still in its infancy. Recently, a large body of literature have been investigated to address this 3D vision task. Nevertheless, few investigations have looked into collecting and structuring this growing knowledge. We therefore aim to fill this gap in a comprehensive survey, encompassing all the main concerns including sensors, datasets, performance metrics and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods, together with their pros and cons. Furthermore, we provide quantitative comparisons with the state of the art. A case study on fifteen selected representative methods is presented, involved with runtime analysis, error analysis, and robustness analysis. Finally, we provide concluding remarks after an in-depth analysis of the surveyed works and identify promising directions for future work.
Structured Sparse R-CNN for Direct Scene Graph Generation
Authors: Yao Teng, LiMin Wang
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: graph construction, Graph Generation, Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection, Relation Prediction, Scene Graph Generation, Triplet

Scene graph generation (SGG) is to detect object pairs with their relations in an image. Existing SGG approaches often use multi-stage pipelines to decompose this task into object detection, relation graph construction, and dense or dense-to-sparse relation prediction. Instead, from a perspective on SGG as a direct set prediction, this paper presents a simple, sparse, and unified framework, termed as Structured Sparse R-CNN. The key to our method is a set of learnable triplet queries and a structured triplet detector which could be jointly optimized from the training set in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, the triplet queries encode the general prior for object pairs with their relations, and provide an initial guess of scene graphs for subsequent refinement. The triplet detector presents a cascaded architecture to progressively refine the detected scene graphs with the customized dynamic heads. In addition, to relieve the training difficulty of our method, we propose a relaxed and enhanced training strategy based on knowledge distillation from a Siamese Sparse R-CNN. We perform experiments on several datasets: Visual Genome and Open Images V4/V6, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance. In addition, we also perform in-depth ablation studies to provide insights on our structured modeling in triplet detector design and training strategies. The code and models are made available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/Structured-Sparse-RCNN.
ToAlign: Task-oriented Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Guoqiang Wei, Cuiling Lan, Wenjun Zeng, Zhizheng Zhang, Zhibo Chen
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptive classifcation intends to improve the classifcation performance on unlabeled target domain. To alleviate the adverse effect of domain shift, many approaches align the source and target domains in the feature space. However, a feature is usually taken as a whole for alignment without explicitly making domain alignment proactively serve the classifcation task, leading to sub-optimal solution. In this paper, we propose an effective Task-oriented Alignment (ToAlign) for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). We study what features should be aligned across domains and propose to make the domain alignment proactively serve classifcation by performing feature decomposition and alignment under the guidance of the prior knowledge induced from the classifcation task itself. Particularly, we explicitly decompose a feature in the source domain into a task-related/discriminative feature that should be aligned, and a task-irrelevant feature that should be avoided/ignored, based on the classifcation meta-knowledge. Extensive experimental results on various benchmarks (e.g., Offce-Home, Visda-2017, and DomainNet) under different domain adaptation settings demonstrate the effectiveness of ToAlign which helps achieve the state-of-the-art performance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/UDA
Large-scale image segmentation based on distributed clustering algorithms
Authors: Ran Lu, Aleksandar Zlateski, H. Sebastian Seung
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking, Clustering, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Many approaches to 3D image segmentation are based on hierarchical clustering of supervoxels into image regions. Here we describe a distributed algorithm capable of handling a tremendous number of supervoxels. The algorithm works recursively, the regions are divided into chunks that are processed independently in parallel by multiple workers. At each round of the recursive procedure, the chunk size in all dimensions are doubled until a single chunk encompasses the entire image. The final result is provably independent of the chunking scheme, and the same as if the entire image were processed without division into chunks. This is nontrivial because a pair of adjacent regions is scored by some statistical property (e.g. mean or median) of the affinities at the interface, and the interface may extend over arbitrarily many chunks. The trick is to delay merge decisions for regions that touch chunk boundaries, and only complete them in a later round after the regions are fully contained within a chunk. We demonstrate the algorithm by clustering an affinity graph with over 1.5 trillion edges between 135 billion supervoxels derived from a 3D electron microscopic brain image.
Manifold Matching via Deep Metric Learning for Generative Modeling
Authors: Mengyu Dai, Haibin Hang
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Image Generation, Metric Learning, Super-Resolution, Unconditional Image Generation

We propose a manifold matching approach to generative models which includes a distribution generator (or data generator) and a metric generator. In our framework, we view the real data set as some manifold embedded in a high-dimensional Euclidean space. The distribution generator aims at generating samples that follow some distribution condensed around the real data manifold. It is achieved by matching two sets of points using their geometric shape descriptors, such as centroid and $p$-diameter, with learned distance metric; the metric generator utilizes both real data and generated samples to learn a distance metric which is close to some intrinsic geodesic distance on the real data manifold. The produced distance metric is further used for manifold matching. The two networks are learned simultaneously during the training process. We apply the approach on both unsupervised and supervised learning tasks: in unconditional image generation task, the proposed method obtains competitive results compared with existing generative models; in super-resolution task, we incorporate the framework in perception-based models and improve visual qualities by producing samples with more natural textures. Experiments and analysis demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Mobile Sensing for Multipurpose Applications in Transportation
Authors: Armstrong Aboah, Michael Boeding, Yaw Adu-Gyamfi
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00

Routine and consistent data collection is required to address contemporary transportation issues.The cost of data collection increases significantly when sophisticated machines are used to collect data. Due to this constraint, State Departments of Transportation struggles to collect consistent data for analyzing and resolving transportation problems in a timely manner. Recent advancements in the sensors integrated into smartphones have resulted in a more affordable method of data collection.The primary objective of this study is to develop and implement a smartphone application for data collection.The currently designed app consists of three major modules: a frontend graphical user interface (GUI), a sensor module, and a backend module. While the frontend user interface enables interaction with the app, the sensor modules collect relevant data such as video and accelerometer readings while the app is in use. The backend, on the other hand, is made up of firebase storage, which is used to store the gathered data.In comparison to other developed apps for collecting pavement information, this current app is not overly reliant on the internet enabling the app to be used in areas of restricted internet access.The developed application was evaluated by collecting data on the i70W highway connecting Columbia, Missouri, and Kansas City, Missouri.The data was analyzed for a variety of purposes, including calculating the International Roughness Index (IRI), identifying pavement distresses, and understanding driver's behaviour and environment .The results of the application indicate that the data collected by the app is of high quality.
Underwater Image Restoration via Contrastive Learning and a Real-world Dataset
Authors: Junlin Han, Mehrdad Shoeiby, Tim Malthus, Elizabeth Botha, Janet Anstee, Saeed Anwar, Ran Wei, Mohammad Ali Armin, Hongdong Li, Lars Petersson
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Contrastive Learning, Image Restoration, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation, Underwater Image Restoration, Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation

Underwater image restoration is of significant importance in unveiling the underwater world. Numerous techniques and algorithms have been developed in the past decades. However, due to fundamental difficulties associated with imaging/sensing, lighting, and refractive geometric distortions, in capturing clear underwater images, no comprehensive evaluations have been conducted of underwater image restoration. To address this gap, we have constructed a large-scale real underwater image dataset, dubbed `HICRD' (Heron Island Coral Reef Dataset), for the purpose of benchmarking existing methods and supporting the development of new deep-learning based methods. We employ accurate water parameter (diffuse attenuation coefficient) in generating reference images. There are 2000 reference restored images and 6003 original underwater images in the unpaired training set. Further, we present a novel method for underwater image restoration based on unsupervised image-to-image translation framework. Our proposed method leveraged contrastive learning and generative adversarial networks to maximize the mutual information between raw and restored images. Extensive experiments with comparisons to recent approaches further demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method. Our code and dataset are publicly available at GitHub.
Automated Deepfake Detection
Authors: Ping Liu, Yuewei Lin, Yang He, Yunchao Wei, Liangli Zhen, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Rick Siow Mong Goh, Jingen Liu
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

In this paper, we propose to utilize Automated Machine Learning to adaptively search a neural architecture for deepfake detection. This is the first time to employ automated machine learning for deepfake detection. Based on our explored search space, our proposed method achieves competitive prediction accuracy compared to previous methods. To improve the generalizability of our method, especially when training data and testing data are manipulated by different methods, we propose a simple yet effective strategy in our network learning process: making it to estimate potential manipulation regions besides predicting the real/fake labels. Unlike previous works manually design neural networks, our method can relieve us from the high labor cost in network construction. More than that, compared to previous works, our method depends much less on prior knowledge, e.g., which manipulation method is utilized or where exactly the fake image is manipulated. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for deepfake detection.
NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction
Authors: Peng Wang, Lingjie Liu, YuAn Liu, Christian Theobalt, Taku Komura, Wenping Wang
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: NeRF, Novel View Synthesis, Surface Reconstruction

We present a novel neural surface reconstruction method, called NeuS, for reconstructing objects and scenes with high fidelity from 2D image inputs. Existing neural surface reconstruction approaches, such as DVR and IDR, require foreground mask as supervision, easily get trapped in local minima, and therefore struggle with the reconstruction of objects with severe self-occlusion or thin structures. Meanwhile, recent neural methods for novel view synthesis, such as NeRF and its variants, use volume rendering to produce a neural scene representation with robustness of optimization, even for highly complex objects. However, extracting high-quality surfaces from this learned implicit representation is difficult because there are not sufficient surface constraints in the representation. In NeuS, we propose to represent a surface as the zero-level set of a signed distance function (SDF) and develop a new volume rendering method to train a neural SDF representation. We observe that the conventional volume rendering method causes inherent geometric errors (i.e. bias) for surface reconstruction, and therefore propose a new formulation that is free of bias in the first order of approximation, thus leading to more accurate surface reconstruction even without the mask supervision. Experiments on the DTU dataset and the BlendedMVS dataset show that NeuS outperforms the state-of-the-arts in high-quality surface reconstruction, especially for objects and scenes with complex structures and self-occlusion.