pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Rib Suppression in Digital Chest Tomosynthesis
Authors: Yihua Sun, Qingsong Yao, Yuanyuan Lyu, Jianji Wang, Yi Xiao, Hongen Liao, S. Kevin Zhou
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00

Digital chest tomosynthesis (DCT) is a technique to produce sectional 3D images of a human chest for pulmonary disease screening, with 2D X-ray projections taken within an extremely limited range of angles. However, under the limited angle scenario, DCT contains strong artifacts caused by the presence of ribs, jamming the imaging quality of the lung area. Recently, great progress has been achieved for rib suppression in a single X-ray image, to reveal a clearer lung texture. We firstly extend the rib suppression problem to the 3D case at the software level. We propose a $\textbf{T}$omosynthesis $\textbf{RI}$b Su$\textbf{P}$pression and $\textbf{L}$ung $\textbf{E}$nhancement $\textbf{Net}$work (TRIPLE-Net) to model the 3D rib component and provide a rib-free DCT. TRIPLE-Net takes the advantages from both 2D and 3D domains, which model the ribs in DCT with the exact FBP procedure and 3D depth information, respectively. The experiments on simulated datasets and clinical data have shown the effectiveness of TRIPLE-Net to preserve lung details as well as improve the imaging quality of pulmonary diseases. Finally, an expert user study confirms our findings.
Don't Be So Dense: Sparse-to-Sparse GAN Training Without Sacrificing Performance
Authors: Shiwei Liu, Yuesong Tian, Tianlong Chen, Li Shen
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have received an upsurging interest since being proposed due to the high quality of the generated data. While achieving increasingly impressive results, the resource demands associated with the large model size hinders the usage of GANs in resource-limited scenarios. For inference, the existing model compression techniques can reduce the model complexity with comparable performance. However, the training efficiency of GANs has less been explored due to the fragile training process of GANs. In this paper, we, for the first time, explore the possibility of directly training sparse GAN from scratch without involving any dense or pre-training steps. Even more unconventionally, our proposed method enables directly training sparse unbalanced GANs with an extremely sparse generator from scratch. Instead of training full GANs, we start with sparse GANs and dynamically explore the parameter space spanned over the generator throughout training. Such a sparse-to-sparse training procedure enhances the capacity of the highly sparse generator progressively while sticking to a fixed small parameter budget with appealing training and inference efficiency gains. Extensive experiments with modern GAN architectures validate the effectiveness of our method. Our sparsified GANs, trained from scratch in one single run, are able to outperform the ones learned by expensive iterative pruning and re-training. Perhaps most importantly, we find instead of inheriting parameters from expensive pre-trained GANs, directly training sparse GANs from scratch can be a much more efficient solution. For example, only training with a 80% sparse generator and a 70% sparse discriminator, our method can achieve even better performance than the dense BigGAN.
Bridging the Gap Between Learning in Discrete and Continuous Environments for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Yicong Hong, Zun Wang, Qi Wu, Stephen Gould
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Vision and Language Navigation

Most existing works in vision-and-language navigation (VLN) focus on either discrete or continuous environments, training agents that cannot generalize across the two. The fundamental difference between the two setups is that discrete navigation assumes prior knowledge of the connectivity graph of the environment, so that the agent can effectively transfer the problem of navigation with low-level controls to jumping from node to node with high-level actions by grounding to an image of a navigable direction. To bridge the discrete-to-continuous gap, we propose a predictor to generate a set of candidate waypoints during navigation, so that agents designed with high-level actions can be transferred to and trained in continuous environments. We refine the connectivity graph of Matterport3D to fit the continuous Habitat-Matterport3D, and train the waypoints predictor with the refined graphs to produce accessible waypoints at each time step. Moreover, we demonstrate that the predicted waypoints can be augmented during training to diversify the views and paths, and therefore enhance agent's generalization ability. Through extensive experiments we show that agents navigating in continuous environments with predicted waypoints perform significantly better than agents using low-level actions, which reduces the absolute discrete-to-continuous gap by 11.76% Success Weighted by Path Length (SPL) for the Cross-Modal Matching Agent and 18.24% SPL for the Recurrent VLN-BERT. Our agents, trained with a simple imitation learning objective, outperform previous methods by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results on the testing environments of the R2R-CE and the RxR-CE datasets.
DrawingInStyles: Portrait Image Generation and Editing with Spatially Conditioned StyleGAN
Authors: Wanchao Su, Hui Ye, Shu-Yu Chen, Lin Gao, Hongbo Fu
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

The research topic of sketch-to-portrait generation has witnessed a boost of progress with deep learning techniques. The recently proposed StyleGAN architectures achieve state-of-the-art generation ability but the original StyleGAN is not friendly for sketch-based creation due to its unconditional generation nature. To address this issue, we propose a direct conditioning strategy to better preserve the spatial information under the StyleGAN framework. Specifically, we introduce Spatially Conditioned StyleGAN (SC-StyleGAN for short), which explicitly injects spatial constraints to the original StyleGAN generation process. We explore two input modalities, sketches and semantic maps, which together allow users to express desired generation results more precisely and easily. Based on SC-StyleGAN, we present DrawingInStyles, a novel drawing interface for non-professional users to easily produce high-quality, photo-realistic face images with precise control, either from scratch or editing existing ones. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show the superior generation ability of our method to existing and alternative solutions. The usability and expressiveness of our system are confirmed by a user study.
MetaFormer: A Unified Meta Framework for Fine-Grained Recognition
Authors: Qishuai Diao, Yi Jiang, Bin Wen, Jia Sun, Zehuan Yuan
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fine-Grained Image Classification, Image Classification

Fine-Grained Visual Classification(FGVC) is the task that requires recognizing the objects belonging to multiple subordinate categories of a super-category. Recent state-of-the-art methods usually design sophisticated learning pipelines to tackle this task. However, visual information alone is often not sufficient to accurately differentiate between fine-grained visual categories. Nowadays, the meta-information (e.g., spatio-temporal prior, attribute, and text description) usually appears along with the images. This inspires us to ask the question: Is it possible to use a unified and simple framework to utilize various meta-information to assist in fine-grained identification? To answer this problem, we explore a unified and strong meta-framework(MetaFormer) for fine-grained visual classification. In practice, MetaFormer provides a simple yet effective approach to address the joint learning of vision and various meta-information. Moreover, MetaFormer also provides a strong baseline for FGVC without bells and whistles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaFormer can effectively use various meta-information to improve the performance of fine-grained recognition. In a fair comparison, MetaFormer can outperform the current SotA approaches with only vision information on the iNaturalist2017 and iNaturalist2018 datasets. Adding meta-information, MetaFormer can exceed the current SotA approaches by 5.9% and 5.3%, respectively. Moreover, MetaFormer can achieve 92.3% and 92.7% on CUB-200-2011 and NABirds, which significantly outperforms the SotA approaches. The source code and pre-trained models are released athttps://github.com/dqshuai/MetaFormer.
MaxDropoutV2: An Improved Method to Drop out Neurons in Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Claudio Filipi Goncalves do Santos, Mateus Roder, Leandro A. Passos, João P. Papa
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00

In the last decade, exponential data growth supplied the machine learning-based algorithms' capacity and enabled their usage in daily life activities. Additionally, such an improvement is partially explained due to the advent of deep learning techniques, i.e., stacks of simple architectures that end up in more complex models. Although both factors produce outstanding results, they also pose drawbacks regarding the learning process since training complex models denotes an expensive task and results are prone to overfit the training data. A supervised regularization technique called MaxDropout was recently proposed to tackle the latter, providing several improvements concerning traditional regularization approaches. In this paper, we present its improved version called MaxDropoutV2. Results considering two public datasets show that the model performs faster than the standard version and, in most cases, provides more accurate results.
An End-to-End Approach for Seam Carving Detection using Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Thierry P. Moreira, Marcos Cleison S. Santana, Leandro A. Passos João Paulo Papa, Kelton Augusto P. da Costa
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00

Seam carving is a computational method capable of resizing images for both reduction and expansion based on its content, instead of the image geometry. Although the technique is mostly employed to deal with redundant information, i.e., regions composed of pixels with similar intensity, it can also be used for tampering images by inserting or removing relevant objects. Therefore, detecting such a process is of extreme importance regarding the image security domain. However, recognizing seam-carved images does not represent a straightforward task even for human eyes, and robust computation tools capable of identifying such alterations are very desirable. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end approach to cope with the problem of automatic seam carving detection that can obtain state-of-the-art results. Experiments conducted over public and private datasets with several tampering configurations evidence the suitability of the proposed model.
A Novel Dual Dense Connection Network for Video Super-resolution
Authors: Guofang Li, Yonggui Zhu
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution, Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution (VSR) refers to the reconstruction of high-resolution (HR) video from the corresponding low-resolution (LR) video. Recently, VSR has received increasing attention. In this paper, we propose a novel dual dense connection network that can generate high-quality super-resolution (SR) results. The input frames are creatively divided into reference frame, pre-temporal group and post-temporal group, representing information in different time periods. This grouping method provides accurate information of different time periods without causing time information disorder. Meanwhile, we produce a new loss function, which is beneficial to enhance the convergence ability of the model. Experiments show that our model is superior to other advanced models in Vid4 datasets and SPMCS-11 datasets.
High-resolution Coastline Extraction in SAR Images via MISP-GGD Superpixel Segmentation
Authors: Odysseas Pappas, Nantheera Anantrasirichai, Byron Adams, Alin Achim
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Superpixels

High accuracy coastline/shoreline extraction from SAR imagery is a crucial step in a number of maritime and coastal monitoring applications. We present a method based on image segmentation using the Generalised Gamma Mixture Model superpixel algorithm (MISP-GGD). MISP-GGD produces superpixels adhering with great accuracy to object edges in the image, such as the coastline. Unsupervised clustering of the generated superpixels according to textural and radiometric features allows for generation of a land/water mask from which a highly accurate coastline can be extracted. We present results of our proposed method on a number of SAR images of varying characteristics.
$\ell_1$DecNet+: A new architecture framework by $\ell_1$ decomposition and iteration unfolding for sparse feature segmentation
Authors: Yumeng Ren, Yiming Gao, Chunlin Wu, Xue-Cheng Tai
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Retinal Vessel Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

$\ell_1$ based sparse regularization plays a central role in compressive sensing and image processing. In this paper, we propose $\ell_1$DecNet, as an unfolded network derived from a variational decomposition model incorporating $\ell_1$ related sparse regularization and solved by scaled alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). $\ell_1$DecNet effectively decomposes an input image into a sparse feature and a learned dense feature, and thus helps the subsequent sparse feature related operations. Based on this, we develop $\ell_1$DecNet+, a learnable architecture framework consisting of our $\ell_1$DecNet and a segmentation module which operates over extracted sparse features instead of original images. This architecture combines well the benefits of mathematical modeling and data-driven approaches. To our best knowledge, this is the first study to incorporate mathematical image prior into feature extraction in segmentation network structures. Moreover, our $\ell_1$DecNet+ framework can be easily extended to 3D case. We evaluate the effectiveness of $\ell_1$DecNet+ on two commonly encountered sparse segmentation tasks: retinal vessel segmentation in medical image processing and pavement crack detection in industrial abnormality identification. Experimental results on different datasets demonstrate that, our $\ell_1$DecNet+ architecture with various lightweight segmentation modules can achieve equal or better performance than their enlarged versions respectively. This leads to especially practical advantages on resource-limited devices.
Federated and Generalized Person Re-identification through Domain and Feature Hallucinating
Authors: Fengxiang Yang, Zhun Zhong, Zhiming Luo, Shaozi Li, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Person Re-Identification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this paper, we study the problem of federated domain generalization (FedDG) for person re-identification (re-ID), which aims to learn a generalized model with multiple decentralized labeled source domains. An empirical method (FedAvg) trains local models individually and averages them to obtain the global model for further local fine-tuning or deploying in unseen target domains. One drawback of FedAvg is neglecting the data distributions of other clients during local training, making the local model overfit local data and producing a poorly-generalized global model. To solve this problem, we propose a novel method, called "Domain and Feature Hallucinating (DFH)", to produce diverse features for learning generalized local and global models. Specifically, after each model aggregation process, we share the Domain-level Feature Statistics (DFS) among different clients without violating data privacy. During local training, the DFS are used to synthesize novel domain statistics with the proposed domain hallucinating, which is achieved by re-weighting DFS with random weights. Then, we propose feature hallucinating to diversify local features by scaling and shifting them to the distribution of the obtained novel domain. The synthesized novel features retain the original pair-wise similarities, enabling us to utilize them to optimize the model in a supervised manner. Extensive experiments verify that the proposed DFH can effectively improve the generalization ability of the global model. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance for FedDG on four large-scale re-ID benchmarks.
Zoom In and Out: A Mixed-scale Triplet Network for Camouflaged Object Detection
Authors: Pang Youwei, Zhao Xiaoqi, Xiang Tian-Zhu, Zhang Lihe, Lu Huchuan
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Camouflaged Object Segmentation, Image Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Triplet

The recently proposed camouflaged object detection (COD) attempts to segment objects that are visually blended into their surroundings, which is extremely complex and difficult in real-world scenarios. Apart from high intrinsic similarity between the camouflaged objects and their background, the objects are usually diverse in scale, fuzzy in appearance, and even severely occluded. To deal with these problems, we propose a mixed-scale triplet network, \textbf{ZoomNet}, which mimics the behavior of humans when observing vague images, i.e., zooming in and out. Specifically, our ZoomNet employs the zoom strategy to learn the discriminative mixed-scale semantics by the designed scale integration unit and hierarchical mixed-scale unit, which fully explores imperceptible clues between the candidate objects and background surroundings. Moreover, considering the uncertainty and ambiguity derived from indistinguishable textures, we construct a simple yet effective regularization constraint, uncertainty-aware loss, to promote the model to accurately produce predictions with higher confidence in candidate regions. Without bells and whistles, our proposed highly task-friendly model consistently surpasses the existing 23 state-of-the-art methods on four public datasets. Besides, the superior performance over the recent cutting-edge models on the SOD task also verifies the effectiveness and generality of our model. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/lartpang/ZoomNet}.
Newton-PnP: Real-time Visual Navigation for Autonomous Toy-Drones
Authors: Ibrahim Jubran, Fares Fares, Yuval Alfassi, Firas Ayoub, Dan Feldman
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Navigation

The Perspective-n-Point problem aims to estimate the relative pose between a calibrated monocular camera and a known 3D model, by aligning pairs of 2D captured image points to their corresponding 3D points in the model. We suggest an algorithm that runs on weak IoT devices in real-time but still provides provable theoretical guarantees for both running time and correctness. Existing solvers provide only one of these requirements. Our main motivation was to turn the popular DJI's Tello Drone (<90gr, <\$100) into an autonomous drone that navigates in an indoor environment with no external human/laptop/sensor, by simply attaching a Raspberry PI Zero (<9gr, <\$25) to it. This tiny micro-processor takes as input a real-time video from a tiny RGB camera, and runs our PnP solver on-board. Extensive experimental results, open source code, and a demonstration video are included.
Cross Language Image Matching for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jinheng Xie, Xianxu Hou, Kai Ye, Linlin Shen
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

It has been widely known that CAM (Class Activation Map) usually only activates discriminative object regions and falsely includes lots of object-related backgrounds. As only a fixed set of image-level object labels are available to the WSSS (weakly supervised semantic segmentation) model, it could be very difficult to suppress those diverse background regions consisting of open set objects. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross Language Image Matching (CLIMS) framework, based on the recently introduced Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, for WSSS. The core idea of our framework is to introduce natural language supervision to activate more complete object regions and suppress closely-related open background regions. In particular, we design object, background region and text label matching losses to guide the model to excite more reasonable object regions for CAM of each category. In addition, we design a co-occurring background suppression loss to prevent the model from activating closely-related background regions, with a predefined set of class-related background text descriptions. These designs enable the proposed CLIMS to generate a more complete and compact activation map for the target objects. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC2012 dataset show that our CLIMS significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods.
Audio-visual speech separation based on joint feature representation with cross-modal attention
Authors: Junwen Xiong, Peng Zhang, Lei Xie, Wei Huang, Yufei zha, Yanning Zhang
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Speech Separation

Multi-modal based speech separation has exhibited a specific advantage on isolating the target character in multi-talker noisy environments. Unfortunately, most of current separation strategies prefer a straightforward fusion based on feature learning of each single modality, which is far from sufficient consideration of inter-relationships between modalites. Inspired by learning joint feature representations from audio and visual streams with attention mechanism, in this study, a novel cross-modal fusion strategy is proposed to benefit the whole framework with semantic correlations between different modalities. To further improve audio-visual speech separation, the dense optical flow of lip motion is incorporated to strengthen the robustness of visual representation. The evaluation of the proposed work is performed on two public audio-visual speech separation benchmark datasets. The overall improvement of the performance has demonstrated that the additional motion network effectively enhances the visual representation of the combined lip images and audio signal, as well as outperforming the baseline in terms of all metrics with the proposed cross-modal fusion.
A Large-scale Comprehensive Dataset and Copy-overlap Aware Evaluation Protocol for Segment-level Video Copy Detection
Authors: Sifeng He, Xudong Yang, Chen Jiang, Gang Liang, Wei zhang, Tan Pan, Qing Wang, Furong Xu, Chunguang Li, Jingxiong Liu, Hui Xu, Kaiming Huang, Yuan Cheng, Feng Qian, Xiaobo Zhang, Lei Yang
Date: 2022-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Benchmarking, Copy Detection

In this paper, we introduce VCSL (Video Copy Segment Localization), a new comprehensive segment-level annotated video copy dataset. Compared with existing copy detection datasets restricted by either video-level annotation or small-scale, VCSL not only has two orders of magnitude more segment-level labelled data, with 160k realistic video copy pairs containing more than 280k localized copied segment pairs, but also covers a variety of video categories and a wide range of video duration. All the copied segments inside each collected video pair are manually extracted and accompanied by precisely annotated starting and ending timestamps. Alongside the dataset, we also propose a novel evaluation protocol that better measures the prediction accuracy of copy overlapping segments between a video pair and shows improved adaptability in different scenarios. By benchmarking several baseline and state-of-the-art segment-level video copy detection methods with the proposed dataset and evaluation metric, we provide a comprehensive analysis that uncovers the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches, hoping to open up promising directions for future works. The VCSL dataset, metric and benchmark codes are all publicly available at https://github.com/alipay/VCSL.