pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Generating Multi-scale Maps from Remote Sensing Images via Series Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Xu Chen, Bangguo Yin, Songqiang Chen, Haifeng Li, Tian Xu
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Considering the success of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for image-to-image translation, researchers have attempted to translate remote sensing images (RSIs) to maps (rs2map) through GAN for cartography. However, these studies involved limited scales, which hinders multi-scale map creation. By extending their method, multi-scale RSIs can be trivially translated to multi-scale maps (multi-scale rs2map translation) through scale-wise rs2map models trained for certain scales (parallel strategy). However, this strategy has two theoretical limitations. First, inconsistency between various spatial resolutions of multi-scale RSIs and object generalization on multi-scale maps (RS-m inconsistency) increasingly complicate the extraction of geographical information from RSIs for rs2map models with decreasing scale. Second, as rs2map translation is cross-domain, generators incur high computation costs to transform the RSI pixel distribution to that on maps. Thus, we designed a series strategy of generators for multi-scale rs2map translation to address these limitations. In this strategy, high-resolution RSIs are inputted to an rs2map model to output large-scale maps, which are translated to multi-scale maps through series multi-scale map translation models. The series strategy avoids RS-m inconsistency as inputs are high-resolution large-scale RSIs, and reduces the distribution gap in multi-scale map generation through similar pixel distributions among multi-scale maps. Our experimental results showed better quality multi-scale map generation with the series strategy, as shown by average increases of 11.69%, 53.78%, 55.42%, and 72.34% in the structural similarity index, edge structural similarity index, intersection over union (road), and intersection over union (water) for data from Mexico City and Tokyo at zoom level 17-13.
Joint Learning of Neural Transfer and Architecture Adaptation for Image Recognition
Authors: Guangrun Wang, Liang Lin, Rongcong Chen, Guangcong Wang, Jiqi Zhang
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification, Linear evaluation, Neural Architecture Search, Person Re-Identification, Self-Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Current state-of-the-art visual recognition systems usually rely on the following pipeline: (a) pretraining a neural network on a large-scale dataset (e.g., ImageNet) and (b) finetuning the network weights on a smaller, task-specific dataset. Such a pipeline assumes the sole weight adaptation is able to transfer the network capability from one domain to another domain, based on a strong assumption that a fixed architecture is appropriate for all domains. However, each domain with a distinct recognition target may need different levels/paths of feature hierarchy, where some neurons may become redundant, and some others are re-activated to form new network structures. In this work, we prove that dynamically adapting network architectures tailored for each domain task along with weight finetuning benefits in both efficiency and effectiveness, compared to the existing image recognition pipeline that only tunes the weights regardless of the architecture. Our method can be easily generalized to an unsupervised paradigm by replacing supernet training with self-supervised learning in the source domain tasks and performing linear evaluation in the downstream tasks. This further improves the search efficiency of our method. Moreover, we also provide principled and empirical analysis to explain why our approach works by investigating the ineffectiveness of existing neural architecture search. We find that preserving the joint distribution of the network architecture and weights is of importance. This analysis not only benefits image recognition but also provides insights for crafting neural networks. Experiments on five representative image recognition tasks such as person re-identification, age estimation, gender recognition, image classification, and unsupervised domain adaptation demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Neural Response Interpretation through the Lens of Critical Pathways
Authors: Ashkan Khakzar, Soroosh Baselizadeh, Saurabh Khanduja, Christian Rupprecht, Seong Tae Kim, Nassir Navab
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1

Is critical input information encoded in specific sparse pathways within the neural network? In this work, we discuss the problem of identifying these critical pathways and subsequently leverage them for interpreting the network's response to an input. The pruning objective -- selecting the smallest group of neurons for which the response remains equivalent to the original network -- has been previously proposed for identifying critical pathways. We demonstrate that sparse pathways derived from pruning do not necessarily encode critical input information. To ensure sparse pathways include critical fragments of the encoded input information, we propose pathway selection via neurons' contribution to the response. We proceed to explain how critical pathways can reveal critical input features. We prove that pathways selected via neuron contribution are locally linear (in an L2-ball), a property that we use for proposing a feature attribution method: "pathway gradient". We validate our interpretation method using mainstream evaluation experiments. The validation of pathway gradient interpretation method further confirms that selected pathways using neuron contributions correspond to critical input features. The code is publicly available.
ArtFlow: Unbiased Image Style Transfer via Reversible Neural Flows
Authors: Jie An, Siyu Huang, Yibing Song, Dejing Dou, Wei Liu, Jiebo Luo
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Style Transfer

Universal style transfer retains styles from reference images in content images. While existing methods have achieved state-of-the-art style transfer performance, they are not aware of the content leak phenomenon that the image content may corrupt after several rounds of stylization process. In this paper, we propose ArtFlow to prevent content leak during universal style transfer. ArtFlow consists of reversible neural flows and an unbiased feature transfer module. It supports both forward and backward inferences and operates in a projection-transfer-reversion scheme. The forward inference projects input images into deep features, while the backward inference remaps deep features back to input images in a lossless and unbiased way. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArtFlow achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art style transfer methods while avoiding content leak.
VITON-HD: High-Resolution Virtual Try-On via Misalignment-Aware Normalization
Authors: Seunghwan Choi, Sunghyun Park, Minsoo Lee, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Virtual Try-on, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

The task of image-based virtual try-on aims to transfer a target clothing item onto the corresponding region of a person, which is commonly tackled by fitting the item to the desired body part and fusing the warped item with the person. While an increasing number of studies have been conducted, the resolution of synthesized images is still limited to low (e.g., 256x192), which acts as the critical limitation against satisfying online consumers. We argue that the limitation stems from several challenges: as the resolution increases, the artifacts in the misaligned areas between the warped clothes and the desired clothing regions become noticeable in the final results; the architectures used in existing methods have low performance in generating high-quality body parts and maintaining the texture sharpness of the clothes. To address the challenges, we propose a novel virtual try-on method called VITON-HD that successfully synthesizes 1024x768 virtual try-on images. Specifically, we first prepare the segmentation map to guide our virtual try-on synthesis, and then roughly fit the target clothing item to a given person's body. Next, we propose ALIgnment-Aware Segment (ALIAS) normalization and ALIAS generator to handle the misaligned areas and preserve the details of 1024x768 inputs. Through rigorous comparison with existing methods, we demonstrate that VITON-HD highly surpasses the baselines in terms of synthesized image quality both qualitatively and quantitatively. Code is available at https://github.com/shadow2496/VITON-HD.
Robust Registration of Multimodal Remote Sensing Images Based on Structural Similarity
Authors: Yuanxin Ye, Jie Shan, Lorenzo Bruzzone, Li Shen
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Template Matching

Automatic registration of multimodal remote sensing data (e.g., optical, LiDAR, SAR) is a challenging task due to the significant non-linear radiometric differences between these data. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel feature descriptor named the Histogram of Orientated Phase Congruency (HOPC), which is based on the structural properties of images. Furthermore, a similarity metric named HOPCncc is defined, which uses the normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) of the HOPC descriptors for multimodal registration. In the definition of the proposed similarity metric, we first extend the phase congruency model to generate its orientation representation, and use the extended model to build HOPCncc. Then a fast template matching scheme for this metric is designed to detect the control points between images. The proposed HOPCncc aims to capture the structural similarity between images, and has been tested with a variety of optical, LiDAR, SAR and map data. The results show that HOPCncc is robust against complex non-linear radiometric differences and outperforms the state-of-the-art similarities metrics (i.e., NCC and mutual information) in matching performance. Moreover, a robust registration method is also proposed in this paper based on HOPCncc, which is evaluated using six pairs of multimodal remote sensing images. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for multimodal image registration.
Facial Expression Recognition with Visual Transformers and Attentional Selective Fusion
Authors: Fuyan Ma, Bin Sun, Shutao Li
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is extremely challenging due to occlusions, variant head poses, face deformation and motion blur under unconstrained conditions. Although substantial progresses have been made in automatic FER in the past few decades, previous studies were mainly designed for lab-controlled FER. Real-world occlusions, variant head poses and other issues definitely increase the difficulty of FER on account of these information-deficient regions and complex backgrounds. Different from previous pure CNNs based methods, we argue that it is feasible and practical to translate facial images into sequences of visual words and perform expression recognition from a global perspective. Therefore, we propose the Visual Transformers with Feature Fusion (VTFF) to tackle FER in the wild by two main steps. First, we propose the attentional selective fusion (ASF) for leveraging two kinds of feature maps generated by two-branch CNNs. The ASF captures discriminative information by fusing multiple features with the global-local attention. The fused feature maps are then flattened and projected into sequences of visual words. Second, inspired by the success of Transformers in natural language processing, we propose to model relationships between these visual words with the global self-attention. The proposed method is evaluated on three public in-the-wild facial expression datasets (RAF-DB, FERPlus and AffectNet). Under the same settings, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method shows superior performance over other methods, setting new state of the art on RAF-DB with 88.14%, FERPlus with 88.81% and AffectNet with 61.85%. The cross-dataset evaluation on CK+ shows the promising generalization capability of the proposed method.
Attention Map-guided Two-stage Anomaly Detection using Hard Augmentation
Authors: Jou Won Song, Kyeongbo Kong, Ye In Park, Suk-Ju Kang
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Anomaly Segmentation, Generative Adversarial Network, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Anomaly detection is a task that recognizes whether an input sample is included in the distribution of a target normal class or an anomaly class. Conventional generative adversarial network (GAN)-based methods utilize an entire image including foreground and background as an input. However, in these methods, a useless region unrelated to the normal class (e.g., unrelated background) is learned as normal class distribution, thereby leading to false detection. To alleviate this problem, this paper proposes a novel two-stage network consisting of an attention network and an anomaly detection GAN (ADGAN). The attention network generates an attention map that can indicate the region representing the normal class distribution. To generate an accurate attention map, we propose the attention loss and the adversarial anomaly loss based on synthetic anomaly samples generated from hard augmentation. By applying the attention map to an image feature map, ADGAN learns the normal class distribution from which the useless region is removed, and it is possible to greatly reduce the problem difficulty of the anomaly detection task. Additionally, the estimated attention map can be used for anomaly segmentation because it can distinguish between normal and anomaly regions. As a result, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art anomaly detection and anomaly segmentation methods for widely used datasets.
A Novel Deep ML Architecture by Integrating Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) into Mask R-CNN for Real-time Surgical Video Analysis
Authors: Ella Selina Lan
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Recognition, Region Proposal, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Seven million people suffer surgical complications each year, but with sufficient surgical training and review, 50\% of these complications could be prevented. To improve surgical performance, existing research uses various deep learning (DL) technologies including convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) to automate surgical tool and workflow detection. However, there is room to improve accuracy; real-time analysis is also minimal due to the complexity of CNN. In this research, a novel DL architecture is proposed to integrate visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) into Mask R-CNN. This architecture, vSLAM-CNN (vCNN), for the first time, integrates the best of both worlds, inclusive of (1) vSLAM for object detection, by focusing on geometric information for region proposals, and (2) CNN for object recognition, by focusing on semantic information for image classification, combining them into one joint end-to-end training process. This method, using spatio-temporal information in addition to visual features, is evaluated on M2CAI 2016 challenge datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art results with 96.8 mAP for tool detection and 97.5 mean Jaccard score for workflow detection, surpassing all previous works, and reaching a 50 FPS performance, 10x faster than the region-based CNN. A region proposal module (RPM) replaces the region proposal network (RPN) in Mask R-CNN, accurately placing bounding boxes and lessening the annotation requirement. Furthermore, a Microsoft HoloLens 2 application is developed to provide an augmented reality (AR)-based solution for surgical training and assistance.
Fixing the Teacher-Student Knowledge Discrepancy in Distillation
Authors: Jiangfan Han, Mengya Gao, Yujie Wang, Quanquan Li, Hongsheng Li, Xiaogang Wang
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection

Training a small student network with the guidance of a larger teacher network is an effective way to promote the performance of the student. Despite the different types, the guided knowledge used to distill is always kept unchanged for different teacher and student pairs in previous knowledge distillation methods. However, we find that teacher and student models with different networks or trained from different initialization could have distinct feature representations among different channels. (e.g. the high activated channel for different categories). We name this incongruous representation of channels as teacher-student knowledge discrepancy in the distillation process. Ignoring the knowledge discrepancy problem of teacher and student models will make the learning of student from teacher more difficult. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel student-dependent distillation method, knowledge consistent distillation, which makes teacher's knowledge more consistent with the student and provides the best suitable knowledge to different student networks for distillation. Extensive experiments on different datasets (CIFAR100, ImageNet, COCO) and tasks (image classification, object detection) reveal the widely existing knowledge discrepancy problem between teachers and students and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our method is very flexible that can be easily combined with other state-of-the-art approaches.
Channel-Based Attention for LCC Using Sentinel-2 Time Series
Authors: Hermann Courteille, A. Benoît, N Méger, A Atto, D. Ienco
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Land Cover Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are getting increasing attention to deal with Land Cover Classification (LCC) relying on Satellite Image Time Series (SITS). Though high performances can be achieved, the rationale of a prediction yielded by a DNN often remains unclear. An architecture expressing predictions with respect to input channels is thus proposed in this paper. It relies on convolutional layers and an attention mechanism weighting the importance of each channel in the final classification decision. The correlation between channels is taken into account to set up shared kernels and lower model complexity. Experiments based on a Sentinel-2 SITS show promising results.
ReMix: Towards Image-to-Image Translation with Limited Data
Authors: Jie Cao, Luanxuan Hou, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Ran He, Zhenan Sun
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Image-to-image (I2I) translation methods based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) typically suffer from overfitting when limited training data is available. In this work, we propose a data augmentation method (ReMix) to tackle this issue. We interpolate training samples at the feature level and propose a novel content loss based on the perceptual relations among samples. The generator learns to translate the in-between samples rather than memorizing the training set, and thereby forces the discriminator to generalize. The proposed approach effectively reduces the ambiguity of generation and renders content-preserving results. The ReMix method can be easily incorporated into existing GAN models with minor modifications. Experimental results on numerous tasks demonstrate that GAN models equipped with the ReMix method achieve significant improvements.
Online Learning of a Probabilistic and Adaptive Scene Representation
Authors: Zike Yan, Xin Wang, Hongbin Zha
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1

Constructing and maintaining a consistent scene model on-the-fly is the core task for online spatial perception, interpretation, and action. In this paper, we represent the scene with a Bayesian nonparametric mixture model, seamlessly describing per-point occupancy status with a continuous probability density function. Instead of following the conventional data fusion paradigm, we address the problem of online learning the process how sequential point cloud data are generated from the scene geometry. An incremental and parallel inference is performed to update the parameter space in real-time. We experimentally show that the proposed representation achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with promising efficiency. The consistent probabilistic formulation assures a generative model that is adaptive to different sensor characteristics, and the model complexity can be dynamically adjusted on-the-fly according to different data scales.
Convolutional Hough Matching Networks
Authors: Juhong Min, Minsu Cho
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Geometric Matching, Semantic correspondence, Translation

Despite advances in feature representation, leveraging geometric relations is crucial for establishing reliable visual correspondences under large variations of images. In this work we introduce a Hough transform perspective on convolutional matching and propose an effective geometric matching algorithm, dubbed Convolutional Hough Matching (CHM). The method distributes similarities of candidate matches over a geometric transformation space and evaluate them in a convolutional manner. We cast it into a trainable neural layer with a semi-isotropic high-dimensional kernel, which learns non-rigid matching with a small number of interpretable parameters. To validate the effect, we develop the neural network with CHM layers that perform convolutional matching in the space of translation and scaling. Our method sets a new state of the art on standard benchmarks for semantic visual correspondence, proving its strong robustness to challenging intra-class variations.
Self-Regression Learning for Blind Hyperspectral Image Fusion Without Label
Authors: Wu Wang, Yue Huang, Xinhao Ding
Date: 2021-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Spectral Reconstruction

Hyperspectral image fusion (HIF) is critical to a wide range of applications in remote sensing and many computer vision applications. Most traditional HIF methods assume that the observation model is predefined or known. However, in real applications, the observation model involved are often complicated and unknown, which leads to the serious performance drop of many advanced HIF methods. Also, deep learning methods can achieve outstanding performance, but they generally require a large number of image pairs for model training, which are difficult to obtain in realistic scenarios. Towards these issues, we proposed a self-regression learning method that alternatively reconstructs hyperspectral image (HSI) and estimate the observation model. In particular, we adopt an invertible neural network (INN) for restoring the HSI, and two fully-connected network (FCN) for estimating the observation model. Moreover, \emph{SoftMax} nonlinearity is applied to the FCN for satisfying the non-negative, sparsity and equality constraints. Besides, we proposed a local consistency loss function to constrain the observation model by exploring domain specific knowledge. Finally, we proposed an angular loss function to improve spectral reconstruction accuracy. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world dataset show that our model can outperform the state-of-the-art methods