pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Learning Based Image Retrieval in the JPEG Compressed Domain
Authors: Shrikant Temburwar, Bulla Rajesh, Mohammed Javed
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Content-Based Image Retrieval, Deep Learning, Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems on pixel domain use low-level features, such as colour, texture and shape, to retrieve images. In this context, two types of image representations i.e. local and global image features have been studied in the literature. Extracting these features from pixel images and comparing them with images from the database is very time-consuming. Therefore, in recent years, there has been some effort to accomplish image analysis directly in the compressed domain with lesser computations. Furthermore, most of the images in our daily transactions are stored in the JPEG compressed format. Therefore, it would be ideal if we could retrieve features directly from the partially decoded or compressed data and use them for retrieval. Here, we propose a unified model for image retrieval which takes DCT coefficients as input and efficiently extracts global and local features directly in the JPEG compressed domain for accurate image retrieval. The experimental findings indicate that our proposed model performed similarly to the current DELG model which takes RGB features as an input with reference to mean average precision while having a faster training and retrieval speed.
Image restoration quality assessment based on regional differential information entropy
Authors: Zhiyu Wang, Jiayan Zhuang, Ningyuan Xu, Sichao Ye, Jiangjian Xiao, Chengbin Peng
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Quantization, SSIM, Super-Resolution

With the development of image recovery models,especially those based on adversarial and perceptual losses,the detailed texture portions of images are being recovered more naturally.However,these restored images are similar but not identical in detail texture to their reference images.With traditional image quality assessment methods,results with better subjective perceived quality often score lower in objective scoring.Assessment methods suffer from subjective and objective inconsistencies.This paper proposes a regional differential information entropy (RDIE) method for image quality assessment to address this problem.This approach allows better assessment of similar but not identical textural details and achieves good agreement with perceived quality.Neural networks are used to reshape the process of calculating information entropy,improving the speed and efficiency of the operation. Experiments conducted with this study image quality assessment dataset and the PIPAL dataset show that the proposed RDIE method yields a high degree of agreement with people average opinion scores compared to other image quality assessment metrics,proving that RDIE can better quantify the perceived quality of images.
NccFlow: Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow With Non-occlusion from Geometry
Authors: Guangming Wang, Shuaiqi Ren, Hesheng Wang
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Blocking, Optical Flow Estimation

Optical flow estimation is a fundamental problem of computer vision and has many applications in the fields of robot learning and autonomous driving. This paper reveals novel geometric laws of optical flow based on the insight and detailed definition of non-occlusion. Then, two novel loss functions are proposed for the unsupervised learning of optical flow based on the geometric laws of non-occlusion. Specifically, after the occlusion part of the images are masked, the flowing process of pixels is carefully considered and geometric constraints are conducted based on the geometric laws of optical flow. First, neighboring pixels in the first frame will not intersect during the pixel displacement to the second frame. Secondly, when the cluster containing adjacent four pixels in the first frame moves to the second frame, no other pixels will flow into the quadrilateral formed by them. According to the two geometrical constraints, the optical flow non-intersection loss and the optical flow non-blocking loss in the non-occlusion regions are proposed. Two loss functions punish the irregular and inexact optical flows in the non-occlusion regions. The experiments on datasets demonstrated that the proposed unsupervised losses of optical flow based on the geometric laws in non-occlusion regions make the estimated optical flow more refined in detail, and improve the performance of unsupervised learning of optical flow. In addition, the experiments training on synthetic data and evaluating on real data show that the generalization ability of optical flow network is improved by our proposed unsupervised approach.
Multi-frame Collaboration for Effective Endoscopic Video Polyp Detection via Spatial-Temporal Feature Transformation
Authors: Lingyun Wu, Zhiqiang Hu, Yuanfeng Ji, Ping Luo, Shaoting Zhang
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00

Precise localization of polyp is crucial for early cancer screening in gastrointestinal endoscopy. Videos given by endoscopy bring both richer contextual information as well as more challenges than still images. The camera-moving situation, instead of the common camera-fixed-object-moving one, leads to significant background variation between frames. Severe internal artifacts (e.g. water flow in the human body, specular reflection by tissues) can make the quality of adjacent frames vary considerately. These factors hinder a video-based model to effectively aggregate features from neighborhood frames and give better predictions. In this paper, we present Spatial-Temporal Feature Transformation (STFT), a multi-frame collaborative framework to address these issues. Spatially, STFT mitigates inter-frame variations in the camera-moving situation with feature alignment by proposal-guided deformable convolutions. Temporally, STFT proposes a channel-aware attention module to simultaneously estimate the quality and correlation of adjacent frames for adaptive feature aggregation. Empirical studies and superior results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our method. For example, STFT improves the still image baseline FCOS by 10.6% and 20.6% on the comprehensive F1-score of the polyp localization task in CVC-Clinic and ASUMayo datasets, respectively, and outperforms the state-of-the-art video-based method by 3.6% and 8.0%, respectively. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/lingyunwu14/STFT}.
4D Attention: Comprehensive Framework for Spatio-Temporal Gaze Mapping
Authors: Shuji Oishi, Kenji Koide, Masashi Yokozuka, Atsuhiko Banno
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Localization

This study presents a framework for capturing human attention in the spatio-temporal domain using eye-tracking glasses. Attention mapping is a key technology for human perceptual activity analysis or Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) to support human visual cognition; however, measuring human attention in dynamic environments is challenging owing to the difficulty in localizing the subject and dealing with moving objects. To address this, we present a comprehensive framework, 4D Attention, for unified gaze mapping onto static and dynamic objects. Specifically, we estimate the glasses pose by leveraging a loose coupling of direct visual localization and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) values. Further, by installing reconstruction components into our framework, dynamic objects not captured in the 3D environment map are instantiated based on the input images. Finally, a scene rendering component synthesizes a first-person view with identification (ID) textures and performs direct 2D-3D gaze association. Quantitative evaluations showed the effectiveness of our framework. Additionally, we demonstrated the applications of 4D Attention through experiments in real situations.
Case-based Similar Image Retrieval for Weakly Annotated Large Histopathological Images of Malignant Lymphoma Using Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Noriaki Hashimoto, Yusuke Takagi, Hiroki Masuda, Hiroaki Miyoshi, Kei Kohno, Miharu Nagaishi, Kensaku Sato, Mai Takeuchi, Takuya Furuta, Keisuke Kawamoto, Kyohei Yamada, Mayuko Moritsubo, Kanako Inoue, Yasumasa Shimasaki, Yusuke Ogura, Teppei Imamoto, Tatsuzo Mishina, Ken Tanaka, Yoshino Kawaguchi, Shigeo Nakamura, Koichi Ohshima, Hidekata Hontani, Ichiro Takeuchi
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Metric Learning, Multiple Instance Learning, Retrieval

In the present study, we propose a novel case-based similar image retrieval (SIR) method for hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained histopathological images of malignant lymphoma. When a whole slide image (WSI) is used as an input query, it is desirable to be able to retrieve similar cases by focusing on image patches in pathologically important regions such as tumor cells. To address this problem, we employ attention-based multiple instance learning, which enables us to focus on tumor-specific regions when the similarity between cases is computed. Moreover, we employ contrastive distance metric learning to incorporate immunohistochemical (IHC) staining patterns as useful supervised information for defining appropriate similarity between heterogeneous malignant lymphoma cases. In the experiment with 249 malignant lymphoma patients, we confirmed that the proposed method exhibited higher evaluation measures than the baseline case-based SIR methods. Furthermore, the subjective evaluation by pathologists revealed that our similarity measure using IHC staining patterns is appropriate for representing the similarity of H&E-stained tissue images for malignant lymphoma.
Superpoint-guided Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Shuang Deng, Qiulei Dong, Bo Liu, Zhanyi Hu
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Segmentation, Pseudo Label, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

3D point cloud semantic segmentation is a challenging topic in the computer vision field. Most of the existing methods in literature require a large amount of fully labeled training data, but it is extremely time-consuming to obtain these training data by manually labeling massive point clouds. Addressing this problem, we propose a superpoint-guided semi-supervised segmentation network for 3D point clouds, which jointly utilizes a small portion of labeled scene point clouds and a large number of unlabeled point clouds for network training. The proposed network is iteratively updated with its predicted pseudo labels, where a superpoint generation module is introduced for extracting superpoints from 3D point clouds, and a pseudo-label optimization module is explored for automatically assigning pseudo labels to the unlabeled points under the constraint of the extracted superpoints. Additionally, there are some 3D points without pseudo-label supervision. We propose an edge prediction module to constrain features of edge points. A superpoint feature aggregation module and a superpoint feature consistency loss function are introduced to smooth superpoint features. Extensive experimental results on two 3D public datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve better performance than several state-of-the-art point cloud segmentation networks and several popular semi-supervised segmentation methods with few labeled scenes.
Relation-Based Associative Joint Location for Human Pose Estimation in Videos
Authors: Yonghao Dang, Jianqin Yin, Shaojie Zhang
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Relation

Video-based human pose estimation (VHPE) is a vital yet challenging task. While deep learning methods have made significant progress for the VHPE, most approaches to this task implicitly model the long-range interaction between joints by enlarging the receptive field of the convolution. Unlike prior methods, we design a lightweight and plug-and-play joint relation extractor (JRE) to model the associative relationship between joints explicitly and automatically. The JRE takes the pseudo heatmaps of joints as input and calculates the similarity between pseudo heatmaps. In this way, the JRE flexibly learns the relationship between any two joints, allowing it to learn the rich spatial configuration of human poses. Moreover, the JRE can infer invisible joints according to the relationship between joints, which is beneficial for the model to locate occluded joints. Then, combined with temporal semantic continuity modeling, we propose a Relation-based Pose Semantics Transfer Network (RPSTN) for video-based human pose estimation. Specifically, to capture the temporal dynamics of poses, the pose semantic information of the current frame is transferred to the next with a joint relation guided pose semantics propagator (JRPSP). The proposed model can transfer the pose semantic features from the non-occluded frame to the occluded frame, making our method robust to the occlusion. Furthermore, the proposed JRE module is also suitable for image-based human pose estimation. The proposed RPSTN achieves state-of-the-art results on the video-based Penn Action dataset, Sub-JHMDB dataset, and PoseTrack2018 dataset. Moreover, the proposed JRE improves the performance of backbones on the image-based COCO2017 dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/YHDang/pose-estimation.
Video 3D Sampling for Self-supervised Representation Learning
Authors: Wei Li, Dezhao Luo, Bo Fang, Yu Zhou, Weiping Wang
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Representation Learning, Retrieval, Video Retrieval

Most of the existing video self-supervised methods mainly leverage temporal signals of videos, ignoring that the semantics of moving objects and environmental information are all critical for video-related tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised method for video representation learning, referred to as Video 3D Sampling (V3S). In order to sufficiently utilize the information (spatial and temporal) provided in videos, we pre-process a video from three dimensions (width, height, time). As a result, we can leverage the spatial information (the size of objects), temporal information (the direction and magnitude of motions) as our learning target. In our implementation, we combine the sampling of the three dimensions and propose the scale and projection transformations in space and time respectively. The experimental results show that, when applied to action recognition, video retrieval and action similarity labeling, our approach improves the state-of-the-arts with significant margins.
Rethinking of Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: A Reliable Evaluation under Zero-Shot Pedestrian Identity Setting
Authors: Jian Jia, Houjing Huang, Xiaotang Chen, Kaiqi Huang
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian attribute recognition aims to assign multiple attributes to one pedestrian image captured by a video surveillance camera. Although numerous methods are proposed and make tremendous progress, we argue that it is time to step back and analyze the status quo of the area. We review and rethink the recent progress from three perspectives. First, given that there is no explicit and complete definition of pedestrian attribute recognition, we formally define and distinguish pedestrian attribute recognition from other similar tasks. Second, based on the proposed definition, we expose the limitations of the existing datasets, which violate the academic norm and are inconsistent with the essential requirement of practical industry application. Thus, we propose two datasets, PETA\textsubscript{$ZS$} and RAP\textsubscript{$ZS$}, constructed following the zero-shot settings on pedestrian identity. In addition, we also introduce several realistic criteria for future pedestrian attribute dataset construction. Finally, we reimplement existing state-of-the-art methods and introduce a strong baseline method to give reliable evaluations and fair comparisons. Experiments are conducted on four existing datasets and two proposed datasets to measure progress on pedestrian attribute recognition.
Uncertainty-aware Human Motion Prediction
Authors: Pengxiang Ding, Jianqin Yin
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Human motion prediction, motion prediction, Prediction

Human motion prediction is essential for tasks such as human motion analysis and human-robot interactions. Most existing approaches have been proposed to realize motion prediction. However, they ignore an important task, the evaluation of the quality of the predicted result. It is far more enough for current approaches in actual scenarios because people can't know how to interact with the machine without the evaluation of prediction, and unreliable predictions may mislead the machine to harm the human. Hence, we propose an uncertainty-aware framework for human motion prediction (UA-HMP). Concretely, we first design an uncertainty-aware predictor through Gaussian modeling to achieve the value and the uncertainty of predicted motion. Then, an uncertainty-guided learning scheme is proposed to quantitate the uncertainty and reduce the negative effect of the noisy samples during optimization for better performance. Our proposed framework is easily combined with current SOTA baselines to overcome their weakness in uncertainty modeling with slight parameters increment. Extensive experiments also show that they can achieve better performance in both short and long-term predictions in H3.6M, CMU-Mocap.
Automated Object Behavioral Feature Extraction for Potential Risk Analysis based on Video Sensor
Authors: Byeongjoon Noh, Dongho Ka, Wonjun Noh, Hwasoo Yeo
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00

Pedestrians are exposed to risk of death or serious injuries on roads, especially unsignalized crosswalks, for a variety of reasons. To date, an extensive variety of studies have reported on vision based traffic safety system. However, many studies required manual inspection of the volumes of traffic video to reliably obtain traffic related objects behavioral factors. In this paper, we propose an automated and simpler system for effectively extracting object behavioral features from video sensors deployed on the road. We conduct basic statistical analysis on these features, and show how they can be useful for monitoring the traffic behavior on the road. We confirm the feasibility of the proposed system by applying our prototype to two unsignalized crosswalks in Osan city, South Korea. To conclude, we compare behaviors of vehicles and pedestrians in those two areas by simple statistical analysis. This study demonstrates the potential for a network of connected video sensors to provide actionable data for smart cities to improve pedestrian safety in dangerous road environments.
Staying in Shape: Learning Invariant Shape Representations using Contrastive Learning
Authors: Jeffrey Gu, Serena Yeung
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Creating representations of shapes that are invari-ant to isometric or almost-isometric transforma-tions has long been an area of interest in shape anal-ysis, since enforcing invariance allows the learningof more effective and robust shape representations.Most existing invariant shape representations arehandcrafted, and previous work on learning shaperepresentations do not focus on producing invariantrepresentations. To solve the problem of learningunsupervised invariant shape representations, weuse contrastive learning, which produces discrimi-native representations through learning invarianceto user-specified data augmentations. To producerepresentations that are specifically isometry andalmost-isometry invariant, we propose new dataaugmentations that randomly sample these transfor-mations. We show experimentally that our methodoutperforms previous unsupervised learning ap-proaches in both effectiveness and robustness.
An audiovisual and contextual approach for categorical and continuous emotion recognition in-the-wild
Authors: Panagiotis Antoniadis, Ioannis Pikoulis, Panagiotis P. Filntisis, Petros Maragos
Date: 2021-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition

In this work we tackle the task of video-based audio-visual emotion recognition, within the premises of the 2nd Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW2). Poor illumination conditions, head/body orientation and low image resolution constitute factors that can potentially hinder performance in case of methodologies that solely rely on the extraction and analysis of facial features. In order to alleviate this problem, we leverage both bodily and contextual features, as part of a broader emotion recognition framework. We choose to use a standard CNN-RNN cascade as the backbone of our proposed model for sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) learning. Apart from learning through the RGB input modality, we construct an aural stream which operates on sequences of extracted mel-spectrograms. Our extensive experiments on the challenging and newly assembled Aff-Wild2 dataset verify the validity of our intuitive multi-stream and multi-modal approach towards emotion recognition in-the-wild. Emphasis is being laid on the the beneficial influence of the human body and scene context, as aspects of the emotion recognition process that have been left relatively unexplored up to this point. All the code was implemented using PyTorch and is publicly available.
Comparing Machine Learning based Segmentation Models on Jet Fire Radiation Zones
Authors: Carmina Pérez-Guerrero, Adriana Palacios, Gilberto Ochoa-Ruiz, Christian Mata, Miguel Gonzalez-Mendoza, Luis Eduardo Falcón-Morales
Date: 2021-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Management, Segmentation

Risk assessment is relevant in any workplace, however there is a degree of unpredictability when dealing with flammable or hazardous materials so that detection of fire accidents by itself may not be enough. An example of this is the impingement of jet fires, where the heat fluxes of the flame could reach nearby equipment and dramatically increase the probability of a domino effect with catastrophic results. Because of this, the characterization of such fire accidents is important from a risk management point of view. One such characterization would be the segmentation of different radiation zones within the flame, so this paper presents an exploratory research regarding several traditional computer vision and Deep Learning segmentation approaches to solve this specific problem. A data set of propane jet fires is used to train and evaluate the different approaches and given the difference in the distribution of the zones and background of the images, different loss functions, that seek to alleviate data imbalance, are also explored. Additionally, different metrics are correlated to a manual ranking performed by experts to make an evaluation that closely resembles the expert's criteria. The Hausdorff Distance and Adjusted Random Index were the metrics with the highest correlation and the best results were obtained from the UNet architecture with a Weighted Cross-Entropy Loss. These results can be used in future research to extract more geometric information from the segmentation masks or could even be implemented on other types of fire accidents.