pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Developing a New Autism Diagnosis Process Based on a Hybrid Deep Learning Architecture Through Analyzing Home Videos
Authors: Spencer He, Ryan Liu
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00

Currently, every 1 in 54 children have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which is 178% higher than it was in 2000. An early diagnosis and treatment can significantly increase the chances of going off the spectrum and making a full recovery. With a multitude of physical and behavioral tests for neurological and communication skills, diagnosing ASD is very complex, subjective, time-consuming, and expensive. We hypothesize that the use of machine learning analysis on facial features and social behavior can speed up the diagnosis of ASD without compromising real-world performance. We propose to develop a hybrid architecture using both categorical data and image data to automate traditional ASD pre-screening, which makes diagnosis a quicker and easier process. We created and tested a Logistic Regression model and a Linear Support Vector Machine for Module 1, which classifies ADOS categorical data. A Convolutional Neural Network and a DenseNet network are used for module 2, which classifies video data. Finally, we combined the best performing models, a Linear SVM and DenseNet, using three data averaging strategies. We used a standard average, weighted based on number of training data, and weighted based on the number of ASD patients in the training data to average the results, thereby increasing accuracy in clinical applications. The results we obtained support our hypothesis. Our novel architecture is able to effectively automate ASD pre-screening with a maximum weighted accuracy of 84%.
Decomposing 3D Scenes into Objects via Unsupervised Volume Segmentation
Authors: Karl Stelzner, Kristian Kersting, Adam R. Kosiorek
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Decoder, Image Segmentation, NeRF, Object, Semantic Segmentation

We present ObSuRF, a method which turns a single image of a scene into a 3D model represented as a set of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), with each NeRF corresponding to a different object. A single forward pass of an encoder network outputs a set of latent vectors describing the objects in the scene. These vectors are used independently to condition a NeRF decoder, defining the geometry and appearance of each object. We make learning more computationally efficient by deriving a novel loss, which allows training NeRFs on RGB-D inputs without explicit ray marching. After confirming that the model performs equal or better than state of the art on three 2D image segmentation benchmarks, we apply it to two multi-object 3D datasets: A multiview version of CLEVR, and a novel dataset in which scenes are populated by ShapeNet models. We find that after training ObSuRF on RGB-D views of training scenes, it is capable of not only recovering the 3D geometry of a scene depicted in a single input image, but also to segment it into objects, despite receiving no supervision in that regard.
LeViT: a Vision Transformer in ConvNet's Clothing for Faster Inference
Authors: Ben Graham, Alaaeldin El-Nouby, Hugo Touvron, Pierre Stock, Armand Joulin, Hervé Jégou, Matthijs Douze
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: CPU, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

We design a family of image classification architectures that optimize the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency in a high-speed regime. Our work exploits recent findings in attention-based architectures, which are competitive on highly parallel processing hardware. We revisit principles from the extensive literature on convolutional neural networks to apply them to transformers, in particular activation maps with decreasing resolutions. We also introduce the attention bias, a new way to integrate positional information in vision transformers. As a result, we propose LeVIT: a hybrid neural network for fast inference image classification. We consider different measures of efficiency on different hardware platforms, so as to best reflect a wide range of application scenarios. Our extensive experiments empirically validate our technical choices and show they are suitable to most architectures. Overall, LeViT significantly outperforms existing convnets and vision transformers with respect to the speed/accuracy tradeoff. For example, at 80% ImageNet top-1 accuracy, LeViT is 5 times faster than EfficientNet on CPU. We release the code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LeViT
M3L: Language-based Video Editing via Multi-Modal Multi-Level Transformers
Authors: Tsu-Jui Fu, Xin Eric Wang, Scott T. Grafton, Miguel P. Eckstein, William Yang Wang
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Diagnostic, Video Editing, Video Understanding

Video editing tools are widely used nowadays for digital design. Although the demand for these tools is high, the prior knowledge required makes it difficult for novices to get started. Systems that could follow natural language instructions to perform automatic editing would significantly improve accessibility. This paper introduces the language-based video editing (LBVE) task, which allows the model to edit, guided by text instruction, a source video into a target video. LBVE contains two features: 1) the scenario of the source video is preserved instead of generating a completely different video; 2) the semantic is presented differently in the target video, and all changes are controlled by the given instruction. We propose a Multi-Modal Multi-Level Transformer (M$^3$L) to carry out LBVE. M$^3$L dynamically learns the correspondence between video perception and language semantic at different levels, which benefits both the video understanding and video frame synthesis. We build three new datasets for evaluation, including two diagnostic and one from natural videos with human-labeled text. Extensive experimental results show that M$^3$L is effective for video editing and that LBVE can lead to a new field toward vision-and-language research.
Semi-supervised Viewpoint Estimation with Geometry-aware Conditional Generation
Authors: Octave Mariotti, Hakan Bilen
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Viewpoint Estimation

There is a growing interest in developing computer vision methods that can learn from limited supervision. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning to predict camera viewpoints, where obtaining ground-truth annotations are expensive and require special equipment, from a limited number of labeled images. We propose a semi-supervised viewpoint estimation method that can learn to infer viewpoint information from unlabeled image pairs, where two images differ by a viewpoint change. In particular our method learns to synthesize the second image by combining the appearance from the first one and viewpoint from the second one. We demonstrate that our method significantly improves the supervised techniques, especially in the low-label regime and outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods.
Defending Against Image Corruptions Through Adversarial Augmentations
Authors: Dan A. Calian, Florian Stimberg, Olivia Wiles, Sylvestre-Alvise Rebuffi, Andras Gyorgy, Timothy Mann, Sven Gowal
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Modern neural networks excel at image classification, yet they remain vulnerable to common image corruptions such as blur, speckle noise or fog. Recent methods that focus on this problem, such as AugMix and DeepAugment, introduce defenses that operate in expectation over a distribution of image corruptions. In contrast, the literature on $\ell_p$-norm bounded perturbations focuses on defenses against worst-case corruptions. In this work, we reconcile both approaches by proposing AdversarialAugment, a technique which optimizes the parameters of image-to-image models to generate adversarially corrupted augmented images. We theoretically motivate our method and give sufficient conditions for the consistency of its idealized version as well as that of DeepAugment. Our classifiers improve upon the state-of-the-art on common image corruption benchmarks conducted in expectation on CIFAR-10-C and improve worst-case performance against $\ell_p$-norm bounded perturbations on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.
End-to-end learning of keypoint detection and matching for relative pose estimation
Authors: Antoine Fond, Luca Del Pero, Nikola Sivacki, Marco Paladini
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Localization, Keypoint Detection, Pose Estimation, Visual Localization

We propose a new method for estimating the relative pose between two images, where we jointly learn keypoint detection, description extraction, matching and robust pose estimation. While our architecture follows the traditional pipeline for pose estimation from geometric computer vision, all steps are learnt in an end-to-end fashion, including feature matching. We demonstrate our method for the task of visual localization of a query image within a database of images with known pose. Pairwise pose estimation has many practical applications for robotic mapping, navigation, and AR. For example, the display of persistent AR objects in the scene relies on a precise camera localization to make the digital models appear anchored to the physical environment. We train our pipeline end-to-end specifically for the problem of visual localization. We evaluate our proposed approach on localization accuracy, robustness and runtime speed. Our method achieves state of the art localization accuracy on the 7 Scenes dataset.
Enhancing Underwater Image via Adaptive Color and Contrast Enhancement, and Denoising
Authors: Xinjie Li, Guojia Hou, Kunqian Li, Zhenkuan Pan
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Enhancement

Images captured underwater are often characterized by low contrast, color distortion, and noise. To address these visual degradations, we propose a novel scheme by constructing an adaptive color and contrast enhancement, and denoising (ACCE-D) framework for underwater image enhancement. In the proposed framework, Difference of Gaussian (DoG) filter and bilateral filter are respectively employed to decompose the high-frequency and low-frequency components. Benefited from this separation, we utilize soft-thresholding operation to suppress the noise in the high-frequency component. Specially, the low-frequency component is enhanced by using an adaptive color and contrast enhancement (ACCE) strategy. The proposed ACCE is an adaptive variational framework implemented in the HSI color space, which integrates data term and regularized term, as well as introduces Gaussian weight and Heaviside function to avoid over-enhancement and oversaturation. Moreover, we derive a numerical solution for ACCE, and adopt a pyramid-based strategy to accelerate the solving procedure. Experimental results demonstrate that our strategy is effective in color correction, visibility improvement, and detail revealing. Comparison with state-of-the-art techniques also validate the superiority of proposed method. Furthermore, we have verified the utility of our proposed ACCE-D for enhancing other types of degraded scenes, including foggy scene, sandstorm scene and low-light scene.
Prediction of Tuberculosis using U-Net and segmentation techniques
Authors: Dennis Núñez-Fernández, Lamberto Ballan, Gabriel Jiménez-Avalos, Jorge Coronel, Patricia Sheen, Mirko Zimic
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

One of the most serious public health problems in Peru and worldwide is Tuberculosis (TB), which is produced by a bacterium known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The purpose of this work is to facilitate and automate the diagnosis of tuberculosis using the MODS method and using lens-free microscopy, as it is easier to calibrate and easier to use by untrained personnel compared to lens microscopy. Therefore, we employed a U-Net network on our collected data set to perform automatic segmentation of cord shape bacterial accumulation and then predict tuberculosis. Our results show promising evidence for automatic segmentation of TB cords, and thus good accuracy for TB prediction.
MOST: A Multi-Oriented Scene Text Detector with Localization Refinement
Authors: Minghang He, Minghui Liao, Zhibo Yang, Humen Zhong, Jun Tang, Wenqing Cheng, Cong Yao, Yongpan Wang, Xiang Bai
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Scene Text Detection, Text Detection

Over the past few years, the field of scene text detection has progressed rapidly that modern text detectors are able to hunt text in various challenging scenarios. However, they might still fall short when handling text instances of extreme aspect ratios and varying scales. To tackle such difficulties, we propose in this paper a new algorithm for scene text detection, which puts forward a set of strategies to significantly improve the quality of text localization. Specifically, a Text Feature Alignment Module (TFAM) is proposed to dynamically adjust the receptive fields of features based on initial raw detections; a Position-Aware Non-Maximum Suppression (PA-NMS) module is devised to selectively concentrate on reliable raw detections and exclude unreliable ones; besides, we propose an Instance-wise IoU loss for balanced training to deal with text instances of different scales. An extensive ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed strategies. The resulting text detection system, which integrates the proposed strategies with a leading scene text detector EAST, achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on various standard benchmarks for text detection while keeping a fast running speed.
LiftPool: Bidirectional ConvNet Pooling
Authors: Jiaojiao Zhao, Cees G. M. Snoek
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image-to-Image Translation, Philosophy, Semantic Segmentation, Translation

Pooling is a critical operation in convolutional neural networks for increasing receptive fields and improving robustness to input variations. Most existing pooling operations downsample the feature maps, which is a lossy process. Moreover, they are not invertible: upsampling a downscaled feature map can not recover the lost information in the downsampling. By adopting the philosophy of the classical Lifting Scheme from signal processing, we propose LiftPool for bidirectional pooling layers, including LiftDownPool and LiftUpPool. LiftDownPool decomposes a feature map into various downsized sub-bands, each of which contains information with different frequencies. As the pooling function in LiftDownPool is perfectly invertible, by performing LiftDownPool backward, a corresponding up-pooling layer LiftUpPool is able to generate a refined upsampled feature map using the detail sub-bands, which is useful for image-to-image translation challenges. Experiments show the proposed methods achieve better results on image classification and semantic segmentation, using various backbones. Moreover, LiftDownPool offers better robustness to input corruptions and perturbations.
Visual Semantic Role Labeling for Video Understanding
Authors: Arka Sadhu, Tanmay Gupta, Mark Yatskar, Ram Nevatia, Aniruddha Kembhavi
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Semantic Role Labeling, Video Recognition, Video Understanding

We propose a new framework for understanding and representing related salient events in a video using visual semantic role labeling. We represent videos as a set of related events, wherein each event consists of a verb and multiple entities that fulfill various roles relevant to that event. To study the challenging task of semantic role labeling in videos or VidSRL, we introduce the VidSitu benchmark, a large-scale video understanding data source with $29K$ $10$-second movie clips richly annotated with a verb and semantic-roles every $2$ seconds. Entities are co-referenced across events within a movie clip and events are connected to each other via event-event relations. Clips in VidSitu are drawn from a large collection of movies (${\sim}3K$) and have been chosen to be both complex (${\sim}4.2$ unique verbs within a video) as well as diverse (${\sim}200$ verbs have more than $100$ annotations each). We provide a comprehensive analysis of the dataset in comparison to other publicly available video understanding benchmarks, several illustrative baselines and evaluate a range of standard video recognition models. Our code and dataset is available at vidsitu.org.
Brain Tumor Segmentation and Survival Prediction using 3D Attention UNet
Authors: Mobarakol Islam, Vibashan VS, V Jeya Maria Jose, Navodini Wijethilake, Uppal Utkarsh, Hongliang Ren
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Decoder, Survival Prediction, Tumor Segmentation

In this work, we develop an attention convolutional neural network (CNN) to segment brain tumors from Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). Further, we predict the survival rate using various machine learning methods. We adopt a 3D UNet architecture and integrate channel and spatial attention with the decoder network to perform segmentation. For survival prediction, we extract some novel radiomic features based on geometry, location, the shape of the segmented tumor and combine them with clinical information to estimate the survival duration for each patient. We also perform extensive experiments to show the effect of each feature for overall survival (OS) prediction. The experimental results infer that radiomic features such as histogram, location, and shape of the necrosis region and clinical features like age are the most critical parameters to estimate the OS.
Glioma Prognosis: Segmentation of the Tumor and Survival Prediction using Shape, Geometric and Clinical Information
Authors: Mobarakol Islam, V Jeya Maria Jose, Hongliang Ren
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis, Segmentation, Survival Prediction

Segmentation of brain tumor from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a vital process to improve diagnosis, treatment planning and to study the difference between subjects with tumor and healthy subjects. In this paper, we exploit a convolutional neural network (CNN) with hypercolumn technique to segment tumor from healthy brain tissue. Hypercolumn is the concatenation of a set of vectors which form by extracting convolutional features from multiple layers. Proposed model integrates batch normalization (BN) approach with hypercolumn. BN layers help to alleviate the internal covariate shift during stochastic gradient descent (SGD) training by zero-mean and unit variance of each mini-batch. Survival Prediction is done by first extracting features(Geometric, Fractal, and Histogram) from the segmented brain tumor data. Then, the number of days of overall survival is predicted by implementing regression on the extracted features using an artificial neural network (ANN). Our model achieves a mean dice score of 89.78%, 82.53% and 76.54% for the whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumor respectively in segmentation task and 67.90% in overall survival prediction task with the validation set of BraTS 2018 challenge. It obtains a mean dice accuracy of 87.315%, 77.04% and 70.22% for the whole tumor, tumor core and enhancing tumor respectively in the segmentation task and a 46.80% in overall survival prediction task in the BraTS 2018 test data set.
TubeR: Tubelet Transformer for Video Action Detection
Authors: Jiaojiao Zhao, Yanyi Zhang, Xinyu Li, Hao Chen, Shuai Bing, Mingze Xu, Chunhui Liu, Kaustav Kundu, Yuanjun Xiong, Davide Modolo, Ivan Marsic, Cees G. M. Snoek, Joseph Tighe
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Detection, Action Localization, Video Action Detection, Video Understanding

We propose TubeR: a simple solution for spatio-temporal video action detection. Different from existing methods that depend on either an off-line actor detector or hand-designed actor-positional hypotheses like proposals or anchors, we propose to directly detect an action tubelet in a video by simultaneously performing action localization and recognition from a single representation. TubeR learns a set of tubelet-queries and utilizes a tubelet-attention module to model the dynamic spatio-temporal nature of a video clip, which effectively reinforces the model capacity compared to using actor-positional hypotheses in the spatio-temporal space. For videos containing transitional states or scene changes, we propose a context aware classification head to utilize short-term and long-term context to strengthen action classification, and an action switch regression head for detecting the precise temporal action extent. TubeR directly produces action tubelets with variable lengths and even maintains good results for long video clips. TubeR outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on commonly used action detection datasets AVA, UCF101-24 and JHMDB51-21.
Variational Deep Image Denoising
Authors: Jae Woong Soh, Nam Ik Cho
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance on image denoising with the help of large-scale datasets. Earlier methods naively trained a single CNN with many pairs of clean-noisy images. However, the conditional distribution of the clean image given a noisy one is too complicated and diverse, so that a single CNN cannot well learn such distributions. Therefore, there have also been some methods that exploit additional noise level parameters or train a separate CNN for a specific noise level parameter. These methods separate the original problem into easier sub-problems and thus have shown improved performance than the naively trained CNN. In this step, we raise two questions. The first one is whether it is an optimal approach to relate the conditional distribution only to noise level parameters. The second is what if we do not have noise level information, such as in a real-world scenario. To answer the questions and provide a better solution, we propose a novel Bayesian framework based on the variational approximation of objective functions. This enables us to separate the complicated target distribution into simpler sub-distributions. Eventually, the denoising CNN can conquer noise from each sub-distribution, which is generally an easier problem than the original. Experiments show that the proposed method provides remarkable performance on additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and real-noise denoising while requiring fewer parameters than recent state-of-the-art denoisers.
Learning Transferable Kinematic Dictionary for 3D Human Pose and Shape Reconstruction
Authors: Ze Ma, Yifan Yao, Pan Ji, Chao Ma
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Estimating 3D human pose and shape from a single image is highly under-constrained. To address this ambiguity, we propose a novel prior, namely kinematic dictionary, which explicitly regularizes the solution space of relative 3D rotations of human joints in the kinematic tree. Integrated with a statistical human model and a deep neural network, our method achieves end-to-end 3D reconstruction without the need of using any shape annotations during the training of neural networks. The kinematic dictionary bridges the gap between in-the-wild images and 3D datasets, and thus facilitates end-to-end training across all types of datasets. The proposed method achieves competitive results on large-scale datasets including Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP, and LSP, while running in real-time given the human bounding boxes.