pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deciphering Implicit Hate: Evaluating Automated Detection Algorithms for Multimodal Hate
Authors: Austin Botelho, Bertie Vidgen, Scott A. Hale
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2021 8

Accurate detection and classification of online hate is a difficult task. Implicit hate is particularly challenging as such content tends to have unusual syntax, polysemic words, and fewer markers of prejudice (e.g., slurs). This problem is heightened with multimodal content, such as memes (combinations of text and images), as they are often harder to decipher than unimodal content (e.g., text alone). This paper evaluates the role of semantic and multimodal context for detecting implicit and explicit hate. We show that both text- and visual- enrichment improves model performance, with the multimodal model (0.771) outperforming other models' F1 scores (0.544, 0.737, and 0.754). While the unimodal-text context-aware (transformer) model was the most accurate on the subtask of implicit hate detection, the multimodal model outperformed it overall because of a lower propensity towards false positives. We find that all models perform better on content with full annotator agreement and that multimodal models are best at classifying the content where annotators disagree. To conduct these investigations, we undertook high-quality annotation of a sample of 5,000 multimodal entries. Tweets were annotated for primary category, modality, and strategy. We make this corpus, along with the codebook, code, and final model, freely available.
Unsupervised Co-part Segmentation through Assembly
Authors: Qingzhe Gao, Bin Wang, Libin Liu, Baoquan Chen
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Co-part segmentation is an important problem in computer vision for its rich applications. We propose an unsupervised learning approach for co-part segmentation from images. For the training stage, we leverage motion information embedded in videos and explicitly extract latent representations to segment meaningful object parts. More importantly, we introduce a dual procedure of part-assembly to form a closed loop with part-segmentation, enabling an effective self-supervision. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a host of extensive experiments, ranging from human bodies, hands, quadruped, and robot arms. We show that our approach can achieve meaningful and compact part segmentation, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on diverse benchmarks.
Enforcing Morphological Information in Fully Convolutional Networks to Improve Cell Instance Segmentation in Fluorescence Microscopy Images
Authors: Willard Zamora-Cardenas, Mauro Mendez, Saul Calderon-Ramirez, Martin Vargas, Gerardo Monge, Steve Quiros, David Elizondo, Miguel A. Molina-Cabello
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Tracking, Instance Segmentation, Prognosis, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Cell instance segmentation in fluorescence microscopy images is becoming essential for cancer dynamics and prognosis. Data extracted from cancer dynamics allows to understand and accurately model different metabolic processes such as proliferation. This enables customized and more precise cancer treatments. However, accurate cell instance segmentation, necessary for further cell tracking and behavior analysis, is still challenging in scenarios with high cell concentration and overlapping edges. Within this framework, we propose a novel cell instance segmentation approach based on the well-known U-Net architecture. To enforce the learning of morphological information per pixel, a deep distance transformer (DDT) acts as a back-bone model. The DDT output is subsequently used to train a top-model. The following top-models are considered: a three-class (\emph{e.g.,} foreground, background and cell border) U-net, and a watershed transform. The obtained results suggest a performance boost over traditional U-Net architectures. This opens an interesting research line around the idea of injecting morphological information into a fully convolutional model.
Deep Implicit Surface Point Prediction Networks
Authors: Rahul Venkatesh, Tejan Karmali, Sarthak Sharma, Aurobrata Ghosh, R. Venkatesh Babu, László A. Jeni, Maneesh Singh
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Prediction

Deep neural representations of 3D shapes as implicit functions have been shown to produce high fidelity models surpassing the resolution-memory trade-off faced by the explicit representations using meshes and point clouds. However, most such approaches focus on representing closed shapes. Unsigned distance function (UDF) based approaches have been proposed recently as a promising alternative to represent both open and closed shapes. However, since the gradients of UDFs vanish on the surface, it is challenging to estimate local (differential) geometric properties like the normals and tangent planes which are needed for many downstream applications in vision and graphics. There are additional challenges in computing these properties efficiently with a low-memory footprint. This paper presents a novel approach that models such surfaces using a new class of implicit representations called the closest surface-point (CSP) representation. We show that CSP allows us to represent complex surfaces of any topology (open or closed) with high fidelity. It also allows for accurate and efficient computation of local geometric properties. We further demonstrate that it leads to efficient implementation of downstream algorithms like sphere-tracing for rendering the 3D surface as well as to create explicit mesh-based representations. Extensive experimental evaluation on the ShapeNet dataset validate the above contributions with results surpassing the state-of-the-art.
Multi-resolution Outlier Pooling for Sorghum Classification
Authors: Chao Ren, Justin Dulay, Gregory Rolwes, Duke Pauli, Nadia Shakoor, Abby Stylianou
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Plant Phenotyping

Automated high throughput plant phenotyping involves leveraging sensors, such as RGB, thermal and hyperspectral cameras (among others), to make large scale and rapid measurements of the physical properties of plants for the purpose of better understanding the difference between crops and facilitating rapid plant breeding programs. One of the most basic phenotyping tasks is to determine the cultivar, or species, in a particular sensor product. This simple phenotype can be used to detect errors in planting and to learn the most differentiating features between cultivars. It is also a challenging visual recognition task, as a large number of highly related crops are grown simultaneously, leading to a classification problem with low inter-class variance. In this paper, we introduce the Sorghum-100 dataset, a large dataset of RGB imagery of sorghum captured by a state-of-the-art gantry system, a multi-resolution network architecture that learns both global and fine-grained features on the crops, and a new global pooling strategy called Dynamic Outlier Pooling which outperforms standard global pooling strategies on this task.
The 2021 Hotel-ID to Combat Human Trafficking Competition Dataset
Authors: Rashmi Kamath, Gregory Rolwes, Samuel Black, Abby Stylianou
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Classification

Hotel recognition is an important task for human trafficking investigations since victims are often photographed in hotel rooms. Identifying these hotels is vital to trafficking investigations since they can help track down current and future victims who might be taken to the same places. Hotel recognition is a challenging fine grained visual classification task as there can be little similarity between different rooms within the same hotel, and high similarity between rooms from different hotels (especially if they are from the same chain). Hotel recognition to combat human trafficking poses additional challenges as investigative images are often low quality, contain uncommon camera angles and are highly occluded. Here, we present the 2021 Hotel-ID dataset to help raise awareness for this problem and generate novel approaches. The dataset consists of hotel room images that have been crowd-sourced and uploaded through the TraffickCam mobile application. The quality of these images is similar to investigative images and hence models trained on these images have good chances of accurately narrowing down on the correct hotel.
Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images
Authors: Daniel Roich, Ron Mokady, Amit H. Bermano, Daniel Cohen-Or
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Editing, Image Manipulation

Recently, a surge of advanced facial editing techniques have been proposed that leverage the generative power of a pre-trained StyleGAN. To successfully edit an image this way, one must first project (or invert) the image into the pre-trained generator's domain. As it turns out, however, StyleGAN's latent space induces an inherent tradeoff between distortion and editability, i.e. between maintaining the original appearance and convincingly altering some of its attributes. Practically, this means it is still challenging to apply ID-preserving facial latent-space editing to faces which are out of the generator's domain. In this paper, we present an approach to bridge this gap. Our technique slightly alters the generator, so that an out-of-domain image is faithfully mapped into an in-domain latent code. The key idea is pivotal tuning - a brief training process that preserves the editing quality of an in-domain latent region, while changing its portrayed identity and appearance. In Pivotal Tuning Inversion (PTI), an initial inverted latent code serves as a pivot, around which the generator is fined-tuned. At the same time, a regularization term keeps nearby identities intact, to locally contain the effect. This surgical training process ends up altering appearance features that represent mostly identity, without affecting editing capabilities. We validate our technique through inversion and editing metrics, and show preferable scores to state-of-the-art methods. We further qualitatively demonstrate our technique by applying advanced edits (such as pose, age, or expression) to numerous images of well-known and recognizable identities. Finally, we demonstrate resilience to harder cases, including heavy make-up, elaborate hairstyles and/or headwear, which otherwise could not have been successfully inverted and edited by state-of-the-art methods.
End-to-end lung nodule detection framework with model-based feature projection block
Authors: Ivan Drokin, Elena Ericheva
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Lung Nodule Detection, Sensitivity

This paper proposes novel end-to-end framework for detecting suspicious pulmonary nodules in chest CT scans. The method core idea is a new nodule segmentation architecture with a model-based feature projection block on three-dimensional convolutions. This block acts as a preliminary feature extractor for a two-dimensional U-Net-like convolutional network. Using the proposed approach along with an axial, coronal, and sagittal projection analysis makes it possible to abandon the widely used false positives reduction step. The proposed method achieves SOTA on LUNA2016 with 0.959 average sensitivity, and 0.936 sensitivity if the false-positive level per scan is 0.25. The paper describes the proposed approach and represents the experimental results on LUNA2016 as well as ablation studies.
Face mask detection using convolution neural network
Authors: Riya Shah Rutva Shah
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00

In the recent times, the Coronaviruses that are a big family of different viruses have become very common, contagious and dangerous to the whole human kind. It spreads human to human by exhaling the infection breath, which leaves droplets of the virus on different surface which is then inhaled by other person and catches the infection too. So it has become very important to protect ourselves and the people around us from this situation. We can take precautions such as social distancing, washing hands every two hours, using sanitizer, maintaining social distance and the most important wearing a mask. Public use of wearing a masks has become very common everywhere in the whole world now. From that the most affected and devastating condition is of India due to its extreme population in small area. This paper proposes a method to detect the face mask is put on or not for offices, or any other work place with a lot of people coming to work. We have used convolutional neural network for the same. The model is trained on a real world dataset and tested with live video streaming with a good accuracy. Further the accuracy of the model with different hyper parameters and multiple people at different distance and location of the frame is done.
A Dataset And Benchmark Of Underwater Object Detection For Robot Picking
Authors: Chongwei Liu, Haojie Li, Shuchang Wang, Ming Zhu, Dong Wang, Xin Fan, Zhihui Wang
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Underwater object detection for robot picking has attracted a lot of interest. However, it is still an unsolved problem due to several challenges. We take steps towards making it more realistic by addressing the following challenges. Firstly, the currently available datasets basically lack the test set annotations, causing researchers must compare their method with other SOTAs on a self-divided test set (from the training set). Training other methods lead to an increase in workload and different researchers divide different datasets, resulting there is no unified benchmark to compare the performance of different algorithms. Secondly, these datasets also have other shortcomings, e.g., too many similar images or incomplete labels. Towards these challenges we introduce a dataset, Detecting Underwater Objects (DUO), and a corresponding benchmark, based on the collection and re-annotation of all relevant datasets. DUO contains a collection of diverse underwater images with more rational annotations. The corresponding benchmark provides indicators of both efficiency and accuracy of SOTAs (under the MMDtection framework) for academic research and industrial applications, where JETSON AGX XAVIER is used to assess detector speed to simulate the robot-embedded environment.
To The Point: Correspondence-driven monocular 3D category reconstruction
Authors: Filippos Kokkinos, Iasonas Kokkinos
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

We present To The Point (TTP), a method for reconstructing 3D objects from a single image using 2D to 3D correspondences learned from weak supervision. We recover a 3D shape from a 2D image by first regressing the 2D positions corresponding to the 3D template vertices and then jointly estimating a rigid camera transform and non-rigid template deformation that optimally explain the 2D positions through the 3D shape projection. By relying on 3D-2D correspondences we use a simple per-sample optimization problem to replace CNN-based regression of camera pose and non-rigid deformation and thereby obtain substantially more accurate 3D reconstructions. We treat this optimization as a differentiable layer and train the whole system in an end-to-end manner. We report systematic quantitative improvements on multiple categories and provide qualitative results comprising diverse shape, pose and texture prediction examples. Project website: https://fkokkinos.github.io/to_the_point/.
MST: Masked Self-Supervised Transformer for Visual Representation
Authors: Zhaowen Li, Zhiyang Chen, Fan Yang, Wei Li, Yousong Zhu, Chaoyang Zhao, Rui Deng, Liwei Wu, Rui Zhao, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Linear evaluation, Masked Language Modeling, object-detection, Object Detection, Self-Supervised Learning

Transformer has been widely used for self-supervised pre-training in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and achieved great success. However, it has not been fully explored in visual self-supervised learning. Meanwhile, previous methods only consider the high-level feature and learning representation from a global perspective, which may fail to transfer to the downstream dense prediction tasks focusing on local features. In this paper, we present a novel Masked Self-supervised Transformer approach named MST, which can explicitly capture the local context of an image while preserving the global semantic information. Specifically, inspired by the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) in NLP, we propose a masked token strategy based on the multi-head self-attention map, which dynamically masks some tokens of local patches without damaging the crucial structure for self-supervised learning. More importantly, the masked tokens together with the remaining tokens are further recovered by a global image decoder, which preserves the spatial information of the image and is more friendly to the downstream dense prediction tasks. The experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method. For instance, MST achieves Top-1 accuracy of 76.9% with DeiT-S only using 300-epoch pre-training by linear evaluation, which outperforms supervised methods with the same epoch by 0.4% and its comparable variant DINO by 1.0\%. For dense prediction tasks, MST also achieves 42.7% mAP on MS COCO object detection and 74.04% mIoU on Cityscapes segmentation only with 100-epoch pre-training.
Date Estimation in the Wild of Scanned Historical Photos: An Image Retrieval Approach
Authors: Adrià Molina, Pau Riba, Lluis Gomez, Oriol Ramos-Terrades, Josep Lladós
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

This paper presents a novel method for date estimation of historical photographs from archival sources. The main contribution is to formulate the date estimation as a retrieval task, where given a query, the retrieved images are ranked in terms of the estimated date similarity. The closer are their embedded representations the closer are their dates. Contrary to the traditional models that design a neural network that learns a classifier or a regressor, we propose a learning objective based on the nDCG ranking metric. We have experimentally evaluated the performance of the method in two different tasks: date estimation and date-sensitive image retrieval, using the DEW public database, overcoming the baseline methods.
SVMAC: Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation from a Single Image with Single-view-multi-angle Consistency
Authors: Yicheng Deng, Cheng Sun, Jiahui Zhu, Yongqi Sun
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation

Recovering 3D human pose from 2D joints is still a challenging problem, especially without any 3D annotation, video information, or multi-view information. In this paper, we present an unsupervised GAN-based model consisting of multiple weight-sharing generators to estimate a 3D human pose from a single image without 3D annotations. In our model, we introduce single-view-multi-angle consistency (SVMAC) to significantly improve the estimation performance. With 2D joint locations as input, our model estimates a 3D pose and a camera simultaneously. During training, the estimated 3D pose is rotated by random angles and the estimated camera projects the rotated 3D poses back to 2D. The 2D reprojections will be fed into weight-sharing generators to estimate the corresponding 3D poses and cameras, which are then mixed to impose SVMAC constraints to self-supervise the training process. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on Human 3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Moreover, qualitative results on MPII and LSP show that our method can generalize well to unknown data.
Context-Free TextSpotter for Real-Time and Mobile End-to-End Text Detection and Recognition
Authors: Ryota Yoshihashi, Tomohiro Tanaka, Kenji Doi, Takumi Fujino, Naoaki Yamashita
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text Detection, Text Spotting

In the deployment of scene-text spotting systems on mobile platforms, lightweight models with low computation are preferable. In concept, end-to-end (E2E) text spotting is suitable for such purposes because it performs text detection and recognition in a single model. However, current state-of-the-art E2E methods rely on heavy feature extractors, recurrent sequence modellings, and complex shape aligners to pursue accuracy, which means their computations are still heavy. We explore the opposite direction: How far can we go without bells and whistles in E2E text spotting? To this end, we propose a text-spotting method that consists of simple convolutions and a few post-processes, named Context-Free TextSpotter. Experiments using standard benchmarks show that Context-Free TextSpotter achieves real-time text spotting on a GPU with only three million parameters, which is the smallest and fastest among existing deep text spotters, with an acceptable transcription quality degradation compared to heavier ones. Further, we demonstrate that our text spotter can run on a smartphone with affordable latency, which is valuable for building stand-alone OCR applications.
Spatially Invariant Unsupervised 3D Object-Centric Learning and Scene Decomposition
Authors: Tianyu Wang, Miaomiao Liu, Kee Siong Ng
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Relational Reasoning, Semantic Segmentation

We tackle the problem of object-centric learning on point clouds, which is crucial for high-level relational reasoning and scalable machine intelligence. In particular, we introduce a framework, SPAIR3D, to factorize a 3D point cloud into a spatial mixture model where each component corresponds to one object. To model the spatial mixture model on point clouds, we derive the Chamfer Mixture Loss, which fits naturally into our variational training pipeline. Moreover, we adopt an object-specification scheme that describes each object's location relative to its local voxel grid cell. Such a scheme allows SPAIR3D to model scenes with an arbitrary number of objects. We evaluate our method on the task of unsupervised scene decomposition. Experimental results demonstrate that SPAIR3D has strong scalability and is capable of detecting and segmenting an unknown number of objects from a point cloud in an unsupervised manner.
MiDeCon: Unsupervised and Accurate Fingerprint and Minutia Quality Assessment based on Minutia Detection Confidence
Authors: Philipp Terhörst, André Boller, Naser Damer, Florian Kirchbuchner, Arjan Kuijper
Date: 2021-06-10 00:00:00

An essential factor to achieve high accuracies in fingerprint recognition systems is the quality of its samples. Previous works mainly proposed supervised solutions based on image properties that neglects the minutiae extraction process, despite that most fingerprint recognition techniques are based on detected minutiae. Consequently, a fingerprint image might be assigned a high quality even if the utilized minutia extractor produces unreliable information. In this work, we propose a novel concept of assessing minutia and fingerprint quality based on minutia detection confidence (MiDeCon). MiDeCon can be applied to an arbitrary deep learning based minutia extractor and does not require quality labels for learning. We propose using the detection reliability of the extracted minutia as its quality indicator. By combining the highest minutia qualities, MiDeCon also accurately determines the quality of a full fingerprint. Experiments are conducted on the publicly available databases of the FVC 2006 and compared against several baselines, such as NIST's widely-used fingerprint image quality software NFIQ1 and NFIQ2. The results demonstrate a significantly stronger quality assessment performance of the proposed MiDeCon-qualities as related works on both, minutia- and fingerprint-level. The implementation is publicly available.