pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GOHOME: Graph-Oriented Heatmap Output for future Motion Estimation
Authors: Thomas Gilles, Stefano Sabatini, Dzmitry Tsishkou, Bogdan Stanciulescu, Fabien Moutarde
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation, Motion Forecasting, Trajectory Prediction

In this paper, we propose GOHOME, a method leveraging graph representations of the High Definition Map and sparse projections to generate a heatmap output representing the future position probability distribution for a given agent in a traffic scene. This heatmap output yields an unconstrained 2D grid representation of agent future possible locations, allowing inherent multimodality and a measure of the uncertainty of the prediction. Our graph-oriented model avoids the high computation burden of representing the surrounding context as squared images and processing it with classical CNNs, but focuses instead only on the most probable lanes where the agent could end up in the immediate future. GOHOME reaches 2$nd$ on Argoverse Motion Forecasting Benchmark on the MissRate$_6$ metric while achieving significant speed-up and memory burden diminution compared to Argoverse 1$^{st}$ place method HOME. We also highlight that heatmap output enables multimodal ensembling and improve 1$^{st}$ place MissRate$_6$ by more than 15$\%$ with our best ensemble on Argoverse. Finally, we evaluate and reach state-of-the-art performance on the other trajectory prediction datasets nuScenes and Interaction, demonstrating the generalizability of our method.
RiWNet: A moving object instance segmentation Network being Robust in adverse Weather conditions
Authors: Chenjie Wang, Chengyuan Li, Bin Luo, Wei Wang, Jun Liu
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Segmenting each moving object instance in a scene is essential for many applications. But like many other computer vision tasks, this task performs well in optimal weather, but then adverse weather tends to fail. To be robust in weather conditions, the usual way is to train network in data of given weather pattern or to fuse multiple sensors. We focus on a new possibility, that is, to improve its resilience to weather interference through the network's structural design. First, we propose a novel FPN structure called RiWFPN with a progressive top-down interaction and attention refinement module. RiWFPN can directly replace other FPN structures to improve the robustness of the network in non-optimal weather conditions. Then we extend SOLOV2 to capture temporal information in video to learn motion information, and propose a moving object instance segmentation network with RiWFPN called RiWNet. Finally, in order to verify the effect of moving instance segmentation in different weather disturbances, we propose a VKTTI-moving dataset which is a moving instance segmentation dataset based on the VKTTI dataset, taking into account different weather scenes such as rain, fog, sunset, morning as well as overcast. The experiment proves how RiWFPN improves the network's resilience to adverse weather effects compared to other FPN structures. We compare RiWNet to several other state-of-the-art methods in some challenging datasets, and RiWNet shows better performance especially under adverse weather conditions.
Dual Transfer Learning for Event-based End-task Prediction via Pluggable Event to Image Translation
Authors: Lin Wang, Yujeong Chae, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Decoder, Depth Estimation, Event-based Object Segmentation, Representation Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning, Translation

Event cameras are novel sensors that perceive the per-pixel intensity changes and output asynchronous event streams with high dynamic range and less motion blur. It has been shown that events alone can be used for end-task learning, e.g., semantic segmentation, based on encoder-decoder-like networks. However, as events are sparse and mostly reflect edge information, it is difficult to recover original details merely relying on the decoder. Moreover, most methods resort to pixel-wise loss alone for supervision, which might be insufficient to fully exploit the visual details from sparse events, thus leading to less optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet flexible two-stream framework named Dual Transfer Learning (DTL) to effectively enhance the performance on the end-tasks without adding extra inference cost. The proposed approach consists of three parts: event to end-task learning (EEL) branch, event to image translation (EIT) branch, and transfer learning (TL) module that simultaneously explores the feature-level affinity information and pixel-level knowledge from the EIT branch to improve the EEL branch. This simple yet novel method leads to strong representation learning from events and is evidenced by the significant performance boost on the end-tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation.
A Comprehensive Approach for UAV Small Object Detection with Simulation-based Transfer Learning and Adaptive Fusion
Authors: Chen Rui, Guo Youwei, Zheng Huafei, Jiang Hongyu
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection, Transfer Learning

Precisely detection of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) plays a critical role in UAV defense systems. Deep learning is widely adopted for UAV object detection whereas researches on this topic are limited by the amount of dataset and small scale of UAV. To tackle these problems, a novel comprehensive approach that combines transfer learning based on simulation data and adaptive fusion is proposed. Firstly, the open-source plugin AirSim proposed by Microsoft is used to generate mass realistic simulation data. Secondly, transfer learning is applied to obtain a pre-trained YOLOv5 model on the simulated dataset and fine-tuned model on the real-world dataset. Finally, an adaptive fusion mechanism is proposed to further improve small object detection performance. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of simulation-based transfer learning which leads to a 2.7% performance increase on UAV object detection. Furthermore, with transfer learning and adaptive fusion mechanism, 7.1% improvement is achieved compared to the original YOLO v5 model.
PR-Net: Preference Reasoning for Personalized Video Highlight Detection
Authors: Runnan Chen, Penghao Zhou, Wenzhe Wang, Nenglun Chen, Pai Peng, Xing Sun, Wenping Wang
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Highlight Detection, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Personalized video highlight detection aims to shorten a long video to interesting moments according to a user's preference, which has recently raised the community's attention. Current methods regard the user's history as holistic information to predict the user's preference but negating the inherent diversity of the user's interests, resulting in vague preference representation. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient preference reasoning framework (PR-Net) to explicitly take the diverse interests into account for frame-level highlight prediction. Specifically, distinct user-specific preferences for each input query frame are produced, presented as the similarity weighted sum of history highlights to the corresponding query frame. Next, distinct comprehensive preferences are formed by the user-specific preferences and a learnable generic preference for more overall highlight measurement. Lastly, the degree of highlight and non-highlight for each query frame is calculated as semantic similarity to its comprehensive and non-highlight preferences, respectively. Besides, to alleviate the ambiguity due to the incomplete annotation, a new bi-directional contrastive loss is proposed to ensure a compact and differentiable metric space. In this way, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a relative improvement of 12% in mean accuracy precision.
To be Critical: Self-Calibrated Weakly Supervised Learning for Salient Object Detection
Authors: Yongri Piao, Jian Wang, Miao Zhang, Zhengxuan Ma, Huchuan Lu
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection, Weakly-supervised Learning

Weakly-supervised salient object detection (WSOD) aims to develop saliency models using image-level annotations. Despite of the success of previous works, explorations on an effective training strategy for the saliency network and accurate matches between image-level annotations and salient objects are still inadequate. In this work, 1) we propose a self-calibrated training strategy by explicitly establishing a mutual calibration loop between pseudo labels and network predictions, liberating the saliency network from error-prone propagation caused by pseudo labels. 2) we prove that even a much smaller dataset (merely 1.8% of ImageNet) with well-matched annotations can facilitate models to achieve better performance as well as generalizability. This sheds new light on the development of WSOD and encourages more contributions to the community. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms all the existing WSOD methods by adopting the self-calibrated strategy only. Steady improvements are further achieved by training on the proposed dataset. Additionally, our method achieves 94.7% of the performance of fully-supervised methods on average. And what is more, the fully supervised models adopting our predicted results as "ground truths" achieve successful results (95.6% for BASNet and 97.3% for ITSD on F-measure), while costing only 0.32% of labeling time for pixel-level annotation.
Seam Carving Detection and Localization using Two-Stage Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Lakshmanan Nataraj, Chandrakanth Gudavalli, Tajuddin Manhar Mohammed, Shivkumar Chandrasekaran, B. S. Manjunath
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Seam carving is a method to resize an image in a content aware fashion. However, this method can also be used to carve out objects from images. In this paper, we propose a two-step method to detect and localize seam carved images. First, we build a detector to detect small patches in an image that has been seam carved. Next, we compute a heatmap on an image based on the patch detector's output. Using these heatmaps, we build another detector to detect if a whole image is seam carved or not. Our experimental results show that our approach is effective in detecting and localizing seam carved images.
CodeNeRF: Disentangled Neural Radiance Fields for Object Categories
Authors: Wonbong Jang, Lourdes Agapito
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: NeRF, Object

CodeNeRF is an implicit 3D neural representation that learns the variation of object shapes and textures across a category and can be trained, from a set of posed images, to synthesize novel views of unseen objects. Unlike the original NeRF, which is scene specific, CodeNeRF learns to disentangle shape and texture by learning separate embeddings. At test time, given a single unposed image of an unseen object, CodeNeRF jointly estimates camera viewpoint, and shape and appearance codes via optimization. Unseen objects can be reconstructed from a single image, and then rendered from new viewpoints or their shape and texture edited by varying the latent codes. We conduct experiments on the SRN benchmark, which show that CodeNeRF generalises well to unseen objects and achieves on-par performance with methods that require known camera pose at test time. Our results on real-world images demonstrate that CodeNeRF can bridge the sim-to-real gap. Project page: \url{https://github.com/wayne1123/code-nerf}
A realistic approach to generate masked faces applied on two novel masked face recognition data sets
Authors: Tudor Mare, Georgian Duta, Mariana-Iuliana Georgescu, Adrian Sandru, Bogdan Alexe, Marius Popescu, Radu Tudor Ionescu
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

The COVID-19 pandemic raises the problem of adapting face recognition systems to the new reality, where people may wear surgical masks to cover their noses and mouths. Traditional data sets (e.g., CelebA, CASIA-WebFace) used for training these systems were released before the pandemic, so they now seem unsuited due to the lack of examples of people wearing masks. We propose a method for enhancing data sets containing faces without masks by creating synthetic masks and overlaying them on faces in the original images. Our method relies on SparkAR Studio, a developer program made by Facebook that is used to create Instagram face filters. In our approach, we use 9 masks of different colors, shapes and fabrics. We employ our method to generate a number of 445,446 (90%) samples of masks for the CASIA-WebFace data set and 196,254 (96.8%) masks for the CelebA data set, releasing the mask images at https://github.com/securifai/masked_faces. We show that our method produces significantly more realistic training examples of masks overlaid on faces by asking volunteers to qualitatively compare it to other methods or data sets designed for the same task. We also demonstrate the usefulness of our method by evaluating state-of-the-art face recognition systems (FaceNet, VGG-face, ArcFace) trained on our enhanced data sets and showing that they outperform equivalent systems trained on original data sets (containing faces without masks) or competing data sets (containing masks generated by related methods), when the test benchmarks contain masked faces.
F3S: Free Flow Fever Screening
Authors: Kunal Rao, Giuseppe Coviello, Min Feng, Biplob Debnath, Wang-Pin Hsiung, Murugan Sankaradas, Yi Yang, Oliver Po, Utsav Drolia, Srimat Chakradhar
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensor Fusion

Identification of people with elevated body temperature can reduce or dramatically slow down the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19. We present a novel fever-screening system, F3S, that uses edge machine learning techniques to accurately measure core body temperatures of multiple individuals in a free-flow setting. F3S performs real-time sensor fusion of visual camera with thermal camera data streams to detect elevated body temperature, and it has several unique features: (a) visual and thermal streams represent very different modalities, and we dynamically associate semantically-equivalent regions across visual and thermal frames by using a new, dynamic alignment technique that analyzes content and context in real-time, (b) we track people through occlusions, identify the eye (inner canthus), forehead, face and head regions where possible, and provide an accurate temperature reading by using a prioritized refinement algorithm, and (c) we robustly detect elevated body temperature even in the presence of personal protective equipment like masks, or sunglasses or hats, all of which can be affected by hot weather and lead to spurious temperature readings. F3S has been deployed at over a dozen large commercial establishments, providing contact-less, free-flow, real-time fever screening for thousands of employees and customers in indoors and outdoor settings.
Navigating the Mise-en-Page: Interpretive Machine Learning Approaches to the Visual Layouts of Multi-Ethnic Periodicals
Authors: Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Joshua Ortiz Baco, Sarah H. Salter, Jim Casey
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This paper presents a computational method of analysis that draws from machine learning, library science, and literary studies to map the visual layouts of multi-ethnic newspapers from the late 19th and early 20th century United States. This work departs from prior approaches to newspapers that focus on individual pieces of textual and visual content. Our method combines Chronicling America's MARC data and the Newspaper Navigator machine learning dataset to identify the visual patterns of newspaper page layouts. By analyzing high-dimensional visual similarity, we aim to better understand how editors spoke and protested through the layout of their papers.
Towards Accurate Alignment in Real-time 3D Hand-Mesh Reconstruction
Authors: Xiao Tang, Tianyu Wang, Chi-Wing Fu
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: 3D Hand Pose Estimation

3D hand-mesh reconstruction from RGB images facilitates many applications, including augmented reality (AR). However, this requires not only real-time speed and accurate hand pose and shape but also plausible mesh-image alignment. While existing works already achieve promising results, meeting all three requirements is very challenging. This paper presents a novel pipeline by decoupling the hand-mesh reconstruction task into three stages: a joint stage to predict hand joints and segmentation; a mesh stage to predict a rough hand mesh; and a refine stage to fine-tune it with an offset mesh for mesh-image alignment. With careful design in the network structure and in the loss functions, we can promote high-quality finger-level mesh-image alignment and drive the models together to deliver real-time predictions. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the quality of our results outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on hand-mesh/pose precision and hand-image alignment. In the end, we also showcase several real-time AR scenarios.
Revisiting 3D ResNets for Video Recognition
Authors: Xianzhi Du, Yeqing Li, Yin Cui, Rui Qian, Jing Li, Irwan Bello
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Contrastive Learning, Video Recognition

A recent work from Bello shows that training and scaling strategies may be more significant than model architectures for visual recognition. This short note studies effective training and scaling strategies for video recognition models. We propose a simple scaling strategy for 3D ResNets, in combination with improved training strategies and minor architectural changes. The resulting models, termed 3D ResNet-RS, attain competitive performance of 81.0 on Kinetics-400 and 83.8 on Kinetics-600 without pre-training. When pre-trained on a large Web Video Text dataset, our best model achieves 83.5 and 84.3 on Kinetics-400 and Kinetics-600. The proposed scaling rule is further evaluated in a self-supervised setup using contrastive learning, demonstrating improved performance. Code is available at: https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official.
Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Segmentation Via Meta-Learning
Authors: Pedro H. T. Gama, Hugo Oliveira, José Marcato Junior, Jefersson A. dos Santos
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Meta-Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a classic computer vision task with multiple applications, which includes medical and remote sensing image analysis. Despite recent advances with deep-based approaches, labeling samples (pixels) for training models is laborious and, in some cases, unfeasible. In this paper, we present two novel meta learning methods, named WeaSeL and ProtoSeg, for the few-shot semantic segmentation task with sparse annotations. We conducted extensive evaluation of the proposed methods in different applications (12 datasets) in medical imaging and agricultural remote sensing, which are very distinct fields of knowledge and usually subject to data scarcity. The results demonstrated the potential of our method, achieving suitable results for segmenting both coffee/orange crops and anatomical parts of the human body in comparison with full dense annotation.
ReLaX: Retinal Layer Attribution for Guided Explanations of Automated Optical Coherence Tomography Classification
Authors: Evan Wen, Rebecca Sorenson, Max Ehrlich
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00

30 million Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) imaging tests are issued annually to diagnose various retinal diseases, but accurate diagnosis of OCT scans requires trained eye care professionals who are still prone to making errors. With better systems for diagnosis, many cases of vision loss caused by retinal disease could be entirely avoided. In this work, we present ReLaX, a novel deep learning framework for explainable, accurate classification of retinal pathologies which achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. Furthermore, we emphasize producing both qualitative and quantitative explanations of the model's decisions. While previous works use pixel-level attribution methods for generating model explanations, our work uses a novel retinal layer attribution method for producing rich qualitative and quantitative model explanations. ReLaX determines the importance of each retinal layer by combining heatmaps with an OCT segmentation model. Our work is the first to produce detailed quantitative explanations of a model's predictions in this way. The combination of accuracy and interpretability can be clinically applied for accessible, high-quality patient care.
Automated detection of COVID-19 cases from chest X-ray images using deep neural network and XGBoost
Authors: Hamid Nasiri, Sharif Hasani
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: COVID-19 Diagnosis, Image Classification, Medical Diagnosis

In late 2019 and after COVID-19 pandemic in the world, many researchers and scholars have tried to provide methods for detection of COVID-19 cases. Accordingly, this study focused on identifying COVID-19 cases from chest X-ray images. In this paper, a novel approach to diagnosing coronavirus disease from X-ray images was proposed. In the proposed method, DenseNet169 deep neural network was used to extract the features of X-ray images taken from the patients' chest and the extracted features were then given as input to the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) algorithm so that it could perform the classification task. Evaluation of the proposed approach and its comparison with the methods presented in recent years revealed that the proposed method was more accurate and faster than the existing ones and had an acceptable performance in detection of COVID-19 cases from X-ray images.
How Reliable Are Out-of-Distribution Generalization Methods for Medical Image Segmentation?
Authors: Antoine Sanner, Camila Gonzalez, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Hippocampus, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Semantic Segmentation

The recent achievements of Deep Learning rely on the test data being similar in distribution to the training data. In an ideal case, Deep Learning models would achieve Out-of-Distribution (OoD) Generalization, i.e. reliably make predictions on out-of-distribution data. Yet in practice, models usually fail to generalize well when facing a shift in distribution. Several methods were thereby designed to improve the robustness of the features learned by a model through Regularization- or Domain-Prediction-based schemes. Segmenting medical images such as MRIs of the hippocampus is essential for the diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. But these brain images often suffer from distribution shift due to the patient's age and various pathologies affecting the shape of the organ. In this work, we evaluate OoD Generalization solutions for the problem of hippocampus segmentation in MR data using both fully- and semi-supervised training. We find that no method performs reliably in all experiments. Only the V-REx loss stands out as it remains easy to tune, while it outperforms a standard U-Net in most cases.