pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sensor Data Validation and Driving Safety in Autonomous Driving Systems
Authors: Jindi Zhang
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Learning

Autonomous driving technology has drawn a lot of attention due to its fast development and extremely high commercial values. The recent technological leap of autonomous driving can be primarily attributed to the progress in the environment perception. Good environment perception provides accurate high-level environment information which is essential for autonomous vehicles to make safe and precise driving decisions and strategies. Moreover, such progress in accurate environment perception would not be possible without deep learning models and advanced onboard sensors, such as optical sensors (LiDARs and cameras), radars, GPS. However, the advanced sensors and deep learning models are prone to recently invented attack methods. For example, LiDARs and cameras can be compromised by optical attacks, and deep learning models can be attacked by adversarial examples. The attacks on advanced sensors and deep learning models can largely impact the accuracy of the environment perception, posing great threats to the safety and security of autonomous vehicles. In this thesis, we study the detection methods against the attacks on onboard sensors and the linkage between attacked deep learning models and driving safety for autonomous vehicles. To detect the attacks, redundant data sources can be exploited, since information distortions caused by attacks in victim sensor data result in inconsistency with the information from other redundant sources. To study the linkage between attacked deep learning models and driving safety...
SIT: A Bionic and Non-Linear Neuron for Spiking Neural Network
Authors: Cheng Jin, Rui-Jie Zhu, Xiao Wu, Liang-Jian Deng
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have piqued researchers' interest because of their capacity to process temporal information and low power consumption. However, current state-of-the-art methods limited their biological plausibility and performance because their neurons are generally built on the simple Leaky-Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) model. Due to the high level of dynamic complexity, modern neuron models have seldom been implemented in SNN practice. In this study, we adopt the Phase Plane Analysis (PPA) technique, a technique often utilized in neurodynamics field, to integrate a recent neuron model, namely, the Izhikevich neuron. Based on the findings in the advancement of neuroscience, the Izhikevich neuron model can be biologically plausible while maintaining comparable computational cost with LIF neurons. By utilizing the adopted PPA, we have accomplished putting neurons built with the modified Izhikevich model into SNN practice, dubbed as the Standardized Izhikevich Tonic (SIT) neuron. For performance, we evaluate the suggested technique for image classification tasks in self-built LIF-and-SIT-consisted SNNs, named Hybrid Neural Network (HNN) on static MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10 datasets and neuromorphic N-MNIST, CIFAR10-DVS, and DVS128 Gesture datasets. The experimental results indicate that the suggested method achieves comparable accuracy while exhibiting more biologically realistic behaviors on nearly all test datasets, demonstrating the efficiency of this novel strategy in bridging the gap between neurodynamics and SNN practice.
Preliminary experiments on thermal emissivity adjustment for face images
Authors: Marcos Faundez-Zanuy, Xavier Font Aragones, Jiri Mekyska
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00

In this paper we summarize several applications based on thermal imaging. We emphasize the importance of emissivity adjustment for a proper temperature measurement. A new set of face images acquired at different emissivity values with steps of 0.01 is also presented and will be distributed for free for research purposes. Among the utilities, we can mention: a) the possibility to apply corrections once an image is acquired with a wrong emissivity value and it is not possible to acquire a new one; b) privacy protection in thermal images, which can be obtained with a low emissivity factor, which is still suitable for several applications, but hides the identity of a user; c) image processing for improving temperature detection in scenes containing objects of different emissivity.
Contribution of the Temperature of the Objects to the Problem of Thermal Imaging Focusing
Authors: Virginia Espinosa-Duró, Marcos Faundez-Zanuy, Jiri Mekyska
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

When focusing an image, depth of field, aperture and distance from the camera to the object, must be taking into account, both, in visible and in infrared spectrum. Our experiments reveal that in addition, the focusing problem in thermal spectrum is also hardly dependent of the temperature of the object itself (and/or the scene).
Global Tracking via Ensemble of Local Trackers
Authors: Zikun Zhou, Jianqiu Chen, Wenjie Pei, Kaige Mao, Hongpeng Wang, Zhenyu He
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1

The crux of long-term tracking lies in the difficulty of tracking the target with discontinuous moving caused by out-of-view or occlusion. Existing long-term tracking methods follow two typical strategies. The first strategy employs a local tracker to perform smooth tracking and uses another re-detector to detect the target when the target is lost. While it can exploit the temporal context like historical appearances and locations of the target, a potential limitation of such strategy is that the local tracker tends to misidentify a nearby distractor as the target instead of activating the re-detector when the real target is out of view. The other long-term tracking strategy tracks the target in the entire image globally instead of local tracking based on the previous tracking results. Unfortunately, such global tracking strategy cannot leverage the temporal context effectively. In this work, we combine the advantages of both strategies: tracking the target in a global view while exploiting the temporal context. Specifically, we perform global tracking via ensemble of local trackers spreading the full image. The smooth moving of the target can be handled steadily by one local tracker. When the local tracker accidentally loses the target due to suddenly discontinuous moving, another local tracker close to the target is then activated and can readily take over the tracking to locate the target. While the activated local tracker performs tracking locally by leveraging the temporal context, the ensemble of local trackers renders our model the global view for tracking. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms.
Omni-DETR: Omni-Supervised Object Detection with Transformers
Authors: Pei Wang, Zhaowei Cai, Hao Yang, Gurumurthy Swaminathan, Nuno Vasconcelos, Bernt Schiele, Stefano Soatto
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Semi-Supervised Object Detection

We consider the problem of omni-supervised object detection, which can use unlabeled, fully labeled and weakly labeled annotations, such as image tags, counts, points, etc., for object detection. This is enabled by a unified architecture, Omni-DETR, based on the recent progress on student-teacher framework and end-to-end transformer based object detection. Under this unified architecture, different types of weak labels can be leveraged to generate accurate pseudo labels, by a bipartite matching based filtering mechanism, for the model to learn. In the experiments, Omni-DETR has achieved state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets and settings. And we have found that weak annotations can help to improve detection performance and a mixture of them can achieve a better trade-off between annotation cost and accuracy than the standard complete annotation. These findings could encourage larger object detection datasets with mixture annotations. The code is available at https://github.com/amazon-research/omni-detr.
STRPM: A Spatiotemporal Residual Predictive Model for High-Resolution Video Prediction
Authors: Zheng Chang, Xinfeng Zhang, Shanshe Wang, Siwei Ma, Wen Gao
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 4k, Video Prediction, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Although many video prediction methods have obtained good performance in low-resolution (64$\sim$128) videos, predictive models for high-resolution (512$\sim$4K) videos have not been fully explored yet, which are more meaningful due to the increasing demand for high-quality videos. Compared with low-resolution videos, high-resolution videos contain richer appearance (spatial) information and more complex motion (temporal) information. In this paper, we propose a Spatiotemporal Residual Predictive Model (STRPM) for high-resolution video prediction. On the one hand, we propose a Spatiotemporal Encoding-Decoding Scheme to preserve more spatiotemporal information for high-resolution videos. In this way, the appearance details for each frame can be greatly preserved. On the other hand, we design a Residual Predictive Memory (RPM) which focuses on modeling the spatiotemporal residual features (STRF) between previous and future frames instead of the whole frame, which can greatly help capture the complex motion information in high-resolution videos. In addition, the proposed RPM can supervise the spatial encoder and temporal encoder to extract different features in the spatial domain and the temporal domain, respectively. Moreover, the proposed model is trained using generative adversarial networks (GANs) with a learned perceptual loss (LP-loss) to improve the perceptual quality of the predictions. Experimental results show that STRPM can generate more satisfactory results compared with various existing methods.
An Efficient Anchor-free Universal Lesion Detection in CT-scans
Authors: Manu Sheoran, Meghal Dani, Monika Sharma, Lovekesh Vig
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Lesion Detection, Medical Object Detection

Existing universal lesion detection (ULD) methods utilize compute-intensive anchor-based architectures which rely on predefined anchor boxes, resulting in unsatisfactory detection performance, especially in small and mid-sized lesions. Further, these default fixed anchor-sizes and ratios do not generalize well to different datasets. Therefore, we propose a robust one-stage anchor-free lesion detection network that can perform well across varying lesions sizes by exploiting the fact that the box predictions can be sorted for relevance based on their center rather than their overlap with the object. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the ULD can be improved by explicitly providing it the domain-specific information in the form of multi-intensity images generated using multiple HU windows, followed by self-attention based feature-fusion and backbone initialization using weights learned via self-supervision over CT-scans. We obtain comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods, achieving an overall sensitivity of 86.05% on the DeepLesion dataset, which comprises of approximately 32K CT-scans with lesions annotated across various body organs.
Learning Program Representations for Food Images and Cooking Recipes
Authors: Dim P. Papadopoulos, Enrique Mora, Nadiia Chepurko, Kuan Wei Huang, Ferda Ofli, Antonio Torralba
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Retrieval

In this paper, we are interested in modeling a how-to instructional procedure, such as a cooking recipe, with a meaningful and rich high-level representation. Specifically, we propose to represent cooking recipes and food images as cooking programs. Programs provide a structured representation of the task, capturing cooking semantics and sequential relationships of actions in the form of a graph. This allows them to be easily manipulated by users and executed by agents. To this end, we build a model that is trained to learn a joint embedding between recipes and food images via self-supervision and jointly generate a program from this embedding as a sequence. To validate our idea, we crowdsource programs for cooking recipes and show that: (a) projecting the image-recipe embeddings into programs leads to better cross-modal retrieval results; (b) generating programs from images leads to better recognition results compared to predicting raw cooking instructions; and (c) we can generate food images by manipulating programs via optimizing the latent code of a GAN. Code, data, and models are available online.
Pay Attention to Hidden States for Video Deblurring: Ping-Pong Recurrent Neural Networks and Selective Non-Local Attention
Authors: JoonKyu Park, Seungjun Nah, Kyoung Mu Lee
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Video Deblurring

Video deblurring models exploit information in the neighboring frames to remove blur caused by the motion of the camera and the objects. Recurrent Neural Networks~(RNNs) are often adopted to model the temporal dependency between frames via hidden states. When motion blur is strong, however, hidden states are hard to deliver proper information due to the displacement between different frames. While there have been attempts to update the hidden states, it is difficult to handle misaligned features beyond the receptive field of simple modules. Thus, we propose 2 modules to supplement the RNN architecture for video deblurring. First, we design Ping-Pong RNN~(PPRNN) that acts on updating the hidden states by referring to the features from the current and the previous time steps alternately. PPRNN gathers relevant information from the both features in an iterative and balanced manner by utilizing its recurrent architecture. Second, we use a Selective Non-Local Attention~(SNLA) module to additionally refine the hidden state by aligning it with the positional information from the input frame feature. The attention score is scaled by the relevance to the input feature to focus on the necessary information. By paying attention to hidden states with both modules, which have strong synergy, our PAHS framework improves the representation powers of RNN structures and achieves state-of-the-art deblurring performance on standard benchmarks and real-world videos.
AxIoU: An Axiomatically Justified Measure for Video Moment Retrieval
Authors: Riku Togashi, Mayu Otani, Yuta Nakashima, Esa Rahtu, Janne Heikkila, Tetsuya Sakai
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Moment Retrieval, Retrieval

Evaluation measures have a crucial impact on the direction of research. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to develop appropriate and reliable evaluation measures for new applications where conventional measures are not well suited. Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) is one such application, and the current practice is to use R@$K,\theta$ for evaluating VMR systems. However, this measure has two disadvantages. First, it is rank-insensitive: It ignores the rank positions of successfully localised moments in the top-$K$ ranked list by treating the list as a set. Second, it binarizes the Intersection over Union (IoU) of each retrieved video moment using the threshold $\theta$ and thereby ignoring fine-grained localisation quality of ranked moments. We propose an alternative measure for evaluating VMR, called Average Max IoU (AxIoU), which is free from the above two problems. We show that AxIoU satisfies two important axioms for VMR evaluation, namely, \textbf{Invariance against Redundant Moments} and \textbf{Monotonicity with respect to the Best Moment}, and also that R@$K,\theta$ satisfies the first axiom only. We also empirically examine how AxIoU agrees with R@$K,\theta$, as well as its stability with respect to change in the test data and human-annotated temporal boundaries.
Self-supervised 360$^{\circ}$ Room Layout Estimation
Authors: Hao-Wen Ting, Cheng Sun, Hwann-Tzong Chen
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Room Layout Estimation

We present the first self-supervised method to train panoramic room layout estimation models without any labeled data. Unlike per-pixel dense depth that provides abundant correspondence constraints, layout representation is sparse and topological, hindering the use of self-supervised reprojection consistency on images. To address this issue, we propose Differentiable Layout View Rendering, which can warp a source image to the target camera pose given the estimated layout from the target image. As each rendered pixel is differentiable with respect to the estimated layout, we can now train the layout estimation model by minimizing reprojection loss. Besides, we introduce regularization losses to encourage Manhattan alignment, ceiling-floor alignment, cycle consistency, and layout stretch consistency, which further improve our predictions. Finally, we present the first self-supervised results on ZilloIndoor and MatterportLayout datasets. Our approach also shows promising solutions in data-scarce scenarios and active learning, which would have an immediate value in the real estate virtual tour software. Code is available at https://github.com/joshua049/Stereo-360-Layout.
Automatic Facial Skin Feature Detection for Everyone
Authors: Qian Zheng, Ankur Purwar, Heng Zhao, Guang Liang Lim, Ling Li, Debasish Behera, Qian Wang, Min Tan, Rizhao Cai, Jennifer Werner, Dennis Sng, Maurice van Steensel, Weisi Lin, Alex C Kot
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Product Recommendation

Automatic assessment and understanding of facial skin condition have several applications, including the early detection of underlying health problems, lifestyle and dietary treatment, skin-care product recommendation, etc. Selfies in the wild serve as an excellent data resource to democratize skin quality assessment, but suffer from several data collection challenges.The key to guaranteeing an accurate assessment is accurate detection of different skin features. We present an automatic facial skin feature detection method that works across a variety of skin tones and age groups for selfies in the wild. To be specific, we annotate the locations of acne, pigmentation, and wrinkle for selfie images with different skin tone colors, severity levels, and lighting conditions. The annotation is conducted in a two-phase scheme with the help of a dermatologist to train volunteers for annotation. We employ Unet++ as the network architecture for feature detection. This work shows that the two-phase annotation scheme can robustly detect the accurate locations of acne, pigmentation, and wrinkle for selfie images with different ethnicities, skin tone colors, severity levels, age groups, and lighting conditions.
Progressively Generating Better Initial Guesses Towards Next Stages for High-Quality Human Motion Prediction
Authors: Tiezheng Ma, Yongwei Nie, Chengjiang Long, Qing Zhang, Guiqing Li
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Human motion prediction, Human Pose Forecasting, motion prediction, Prediction

This paper presents a high-quality human motion prediction method that accurately predicts future human poses given observed ones. Our method is based on the observation that a good initial guess of the future poses is very helpful in improving the forecasting accuracy. This motivates us to propose a novel two-stage prediction framework, including an init-prediction network that just computes the good guess and then a formal-prediction network that predicts the target future poses based on the guess. More importantly, we extend this idea further and design a multi-stage prediction framework where each stage predicts initial guess for the next stage, which brings more performance gain. To fulfill the prediction task at each stage, we propose a network comprising Spatial Dense Graph Convolutional Networks (S-DGCN) and Temporal Dense Graph Convolutional Networks (T-DGCN). Alternatively executing the two networks helps extract spatiotemporal features over the global receptive field of the whole pose sequence. All the above design choices cooperating together make our method outperform previous approaches by large margins: 6%-7% on Human3.6M, 5%-10% on CMU-MoCap, and 13%-16% on 3DPW.
Threshold Matters in WSSS: Manipulating the Activation for the Robust and Accurate Segmentation Model Against Thresholds
Authors: Minhyun Lee, Dongseob Kim, Hyunjung Shim
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) has recently gained much attention for its promise to train segmentation models only with image-level labels. Existing WSSS methods commonly argue that the sparse coverage of CAM incurs the performance bottleneck of WSSS. This paper provides analytical and empirical evidence that the actual bottleneck may not be sparse coverage but a global thresholding scheme applied after CAM. Then, we show that this issue can be mitigated by satisfying two conditions; 1) reducing the imbalance in the foreground activation and 2) increasing the gap between the foreground and the background activation. Based on these findings, we propose a novel activation manipulation network with a per-pixel classification loss and a label conditioning module. Per-pixel classification naturally induces two-level activation in activation maps, which can penalize the most discriminative parts, promote the less discriminative parts, and deactivate the background regions. Label conditioning imposes that the output label of pseudo-masks should be any of true image-level labels; it penalizes the wrong activation assigned to non-target classes. Based on extensive analysis and evaluations, we demonstrate that each component helps produce accurate pseudo-masks, achieving the robustness against the choice of the global threshold. Finally, our model achieves state-of-the-art records on both PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets.
An Iterative Co-Training Transductive Framework for Zero Shot Learning
Authors: Bo Liu, Lihua Hu, Qiulei Dong, Zhanyi Hu
Date: 2022-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Transductive Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

In zero-shot learning (ZSL) community, it is generally recognized that transductive learning performs better than inductive one as the unseen-class samples are also used in its training stage. How to generate pseudo labels for unseen-class samples and how to use such usually noisy pseudo labels are two critical issues in transductive learning. In this work, we introduce an iterative co-training framework which contains two different base ZSL models and an exchanging module. At each iteration, the two different ZSL models are co-trained to separately predict pseudo labels for the unseen-class samples, and the exchanging module exchanges the predicted pseudo labels, then the exchanged pseudo-labeled samples are added into the training sets for the next iteration. By such, our framework can gradually boost the ZSL performance by fully exploiting the potential complementarity of the two models' classification capabilities. In addition, our co-training framework is also applied to the generalized ZSL (GZSL), in which a semantic-guided OOD detector is proposed to pick out the most likely unseen-class samples before class-level classification to alleviate the bias problem in GZSL. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that our proposed methods could significantly outperform about $31$ state-of-the-art ones.