pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Recurrent Variational Network: A Deep Learning Inverse Problem Solver applied to the task of Accelerated MRI Reconstruction
Authors: George Yiasemis, Jan-Jakob Sonke, Clarisa Sánchez, Jonas Teuwen
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Anatomy, compressed sensing, MRI Reconstruction

Magnetic Resonance Imaging can produce detailed images of the anatomy and physiology of the human body that can assist doctors in diagnosing and treating pathologies such as tumours. However, MRI suffers from very long acquisition times that make it susceptible to patient motion artifacts and limit its potential to deliver dynamic treatments. Conventional approaches such as Parallel Imaging and Compressed Sensing allow for an increase in MRI acquisition speed by reconstructing MR images from sub-sampled MRI data acquired using multiple receiver coils. Recent advancements in Deep Learning combined with Parallel Imaging and Compressed Sensing techniques have the potential to produce high-fidelity reconstructions from highly accelerated MRI data. In this work we present a novel Deep Learning-based Inverse Problem solver applied to the task of Accelerated MRI Reconstruction, called the Recurrent Variational Network (RecurrentVarNet), by exploiting the properties of Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks and unrolled algorithms for solving Inverse Problems. The RecurrentVarNet consists of multiple recurrent blocks, each responsible for one iteration of the unrolled variational optimization scheme for solving the inverse problem of multi-coil Accelerated MRI Reconstruction. Contrary to traditional approaches, the optimization steps are performed in the observation domain ($k$-space) instead of the image domain. Each block of the RecurrentVarNet refines the observed $k$-space and comprises a data consistency term and a recurrent unit which takes as input a learned hidden state and the prediction of the previous block. Our proposed method achieves new state of the art qualitative and quantitative reconstruction results on 5-fold and 10-fold accelerated data from a public multi-coil brain dataset, outperforming previous conventional and deep learning-based approaches.
Automatic Neural Network Pruning that Efficiently Preserves the Model Accuracy
Authors: Thibault Castells, Seul-Ki Yeom
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Pruning

Neural networks performance has been significantly improved in the last few years, at the cost of an increasing number of floating point operations per second (FLOPs). However, more FLOPs can be an issue when computational resources are limited. As an attempt to solve this problem, pruning filters is a common solution, but most existing pruning methods do not preserve the model accuracy efficiently and therefore require a large number of finetuning epochs. In this paper, we propose an automatic pruning method that learns which neurons to preserve in order to maintain the model accuracy while reducing the FLOPs to a predefined target. To accomplish this task, we introduce a trainable bottleneck that only requires one single epoch with 25.6% (CIFAR-10) or 7.49% (ILSVRC2012) of the dataset to learn which filters to prune. Experiments on various architectures and datasets show that the proposed method can not only preserve the accuracy after pruning but also outperform existing methods after finetuning. We achieve a 52.00% FLOPs reduction on ResNet-50, with a Top-1 accuracy of 47.51% after pruning and a state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy of 76.63% after finetuning on ILSVRC2012. Code available at https://github.com/nota-github/autobot_AAAI23.
IMFNet: Interpretable Multimodal Fusion for Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Xiaoshui Huang, Wentao Qu, Yifan Zuo, Yuming Fang, Xiaowei Zhao
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration

The existing state-of-the-art point descriptor relies on structure information only, which omit the texture information. However, texture information is crucial for our humans to distinguish a scene part. Moreover, the current learning-based point descriptors are all black boxes which are unclear how the original points contribute to the final descriptor. In this paper, we propose a new multimodal fusion method to generate a point cloud registration descriptor by considering both structure and texture information. Specifically, a novel attention-fusion module is designed to extract the weighted texture information for the descriptor extraction. In addition, we propose an interpretable module to explain the original points in contributing to the final descriptor. We use the descriptor element as the loss to backpropagate to the target layer and consider the gradient as the significance of this point to the final descriptor. This paper moves one step further to explainable deep learning in the registration task. Comprehensive experiments on 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch and KITTI demonstrate that the multimodal fusion descriptor achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and improve the descriptor's distinctiveness. We also demonstrate that our interpretable module in explaining the registration descriptor extraction.
SimpleTrack: Understanding and Rethinking 3D Multi-object Tracking
Authors: Ziqi Pang, Zhichao Li, Naiyan Wang
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Multi-Object Tracking, Management, Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) has witnessed numerous novel benchmarks and approaches in recent years, especially those under the "tracking-by-detection" paradigm. Despite their progress and usefulness, an in-depth analysis of their strengths and weaknesses is not yet available. In this paper, we summarize current 3D MOT methods into a unified framework by decomposing them into four constituent parts: pre-processing of detection, association, motion model, and life cycle management. We then ascribe the failure cases of existing algorithms to each component and investigate them in detail. Based on the analyses, we propose corresponding improvements which lead to a strong yet simple baseline: SimpleTrack. Comprehensive experimental results on Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes demonstrate that our final method could achieve new state-of-the-art results with minor modifications. Furthermore, we take additional steps and rethink whether current benchmarks authentically reflect the ability of algorithms for real-world challenges. We delve into the details of existing benchmarks and find some intriguing facts. Finally, we analyze the distribution and causes of remaining failures in \name\ and propose future directions for 3D MOT. Our code is available at https://github.com/TuSimple/SimpleTrack.
Person Re-identification Method Based on Color Attack and Joint Defence
Authors: Yunpeng Gong, Liqing Huang, Lifei Chen
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense, Metric Learning, Person Re-Identification

The main challenges of ReID is the intra-class variations caused by color deviation under different camera conditions. Simultaneously, we find that most of the existing adversarial metric attacks are realized by interfering with the color characteristics of the sample. Based on this observation, we first propose a local transformation attack (LTA) based on color variation. It uses more obvious color variation to randomly disturb the color of the retrieved image, rather than adding random noise. Experiments show that the performance of the proposed LTA method is better than the advanced attack methods. Furthermore, considering that the contour feature is the main factor of the robustness of adversarial training, and the color feature will directly affect the success rate of attack. Therefore, we further propose joint adversarial defense (JAD) method, which include proactive defense and passive defense. Proactive defense fuse multi-modality images to enhance the contour feature and color feature, and considers local homomorphic transformation to solve the over-fitting problem. Passive defense exploits the invariance of contour feature during image scaling to mitigate the adversarial disturbance on contour feature. Finally, a series of experimental results show that the proposed joint adversarial defense method is more competitive than a state-of-the-art methods.
Adaptive Shrink-Mask for Text Detection
Authors: Chuang Yang, Mulin Chen, Yuan Yuan, Qi Wang, Xuelong Li
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Detection

Existing real-time text detectors reconstruct text contours by shrink-masks directly, which simplifies the framework and can make the model run fast. However, the strong dependence on predicted shrink-masks leads to unstable detection results. Moreover, the discrimination of shrink-masks is a pixelwise prediction task. Supervising the network by shrink-masks only will lose much semantic context, which leads to the false detection of shrink-masks. To address these problems, we construct an efficient text detection network, Adaptive Shrink-Mask for Text Detection (ASMTD), which improves the accuracy during training and reduces the complexity of the inference process. At first, the Adaptive Shrink-Mask (ASM) is proposed to represent texts by shrink-masks and independent adaptive offsets. It weakens the coupling of texts to shrink-masks, which improves the robustness of detection results. Then, the Super-pixel Window (SPW) is designed to supervise the network. It utilizes the surroundings of each pixel to improve the reliability of predicted shrink-masks and does not appear during testing. In the end, a lightweight feature merging branch is constructed to reduce the computational cost. As demonstrated in the experiments, our method is superior to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both detection accuracy and speed on multiple benchmarks.
Deep neural networks-based denoising models for CT imaging and their efficacy
Authors: Prabhat KC, Rongping Zeng, M. Mehdi Farhangi, Kyle J. Myers
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, SSIM

Most of the Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) based CT image denoising literature shows that DNNs outperform traditional iterative methods in terms of metrics such as the RMSE, the PSNR and the SSIM. In many instances, using the same metrics, the DNN results from low-dose inputs are also shown to be comparable to their high-dose counterparts. However, these metrics do not reveal if the DNN results preserve the visibility of subtle lesions or if they alter the CT image properties such as the noise texture. Accordingly, in this work, we seek to examine the image quality of the DNN results from a holistic viewpoint for low-dose CT image denoising. First, we build a library of advanced DNN denoising architectures. This library is comprised of denoising architectures such as the DnCNN, U-Net, Red-Net, GAN, etc. Next, each network is modeled, as well as trained, such that it yields its best performance in terms of the PSNR and SSIM. As such, data inputs (e.g. training patch-size, reconstruction kernel) and numeric-optimizer inputs (e.g. minibatch size, learning rate, loss function) are accordingly tuned. Finally, outputs from thus trained networks are further subjected to a series of CT bench testing metrics such as the contrast-dependent MTF, the NPS and the HU accuracy. These metrics are employed to perform a more nuanced study of the resolution of the DNN outputs' low-contrast features, their noise textures, and their CT number accuracy to better understand the impact each DNN algorithm has on these underlying attributes of image quality.
Range-Aware Attention Network for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection with Auxiliary Point Density Level Estimation
Authors: Yantao Lu, Xuetao Hao, Yilan Li, Weiheng Chai, Shiqi Sun, Senem Velipasalar
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Density Estimation, object-detection, Object Detection

3D object detection from LiDAR data for autonomous driving has been making remarkable strides in recent years. Among the state-of-the-art methodologies, encoding point clouds into a bird's eye view (BEV) has been demonstrated to be both effective and efficient. Different from perspective views, BEV preserves rich spatial and distance information between objects. Yet, while farther objects of the same type do not appear smaller in the BEV, they contain sparser point cloud features. This fact weakens BEV feature extraction using shared-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In order to address this challenge, we propose Range-Aware Attention Network (RAANet), which extracts effective BEV features and generates superior 3D object detection outputs. The range-aware attention (RAA) convolutions significantly improve feature extraction for near as well as far objects. Moreover, we propose a novel auxiliary loss for point density estimation to further enhance the detection accuracy of RAANet for occluded objects. It is worth to note that our proposed RAA convolution is lightweight and compatible to be integrated into any CNN architecture used for detection from a BEV. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for LiDAR-based 3D object detection, with real-time inference speed of 16 Hz for the full version and 22 Hz for the lite version tested on nuScenes lidar frames. The code is publicly available at our Github repository https://github.com/erbloo/RAAN.
Blind VQA on 360° Video via Progressively Learning from Pixels, Frames and Video
Authors: Li Yang, Mai Xu, Shengxi Li, Yichen Guo, Zulin Wang
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Blind visual quality assessment (BVQA) on 360{\textdegree} video plays a key role in optimizing immersive multimedia systems. When assessing the quality of 360{\textdegree} video, human tends to perceive its quality degradation from the viewport-based spatial distortion of each spherical frame to motion artifact across adjacent frames, ending with the video-level quality score, i.e., a progressive quality assessment paradigm. However, the existing BVQA approaches for 360{\textdegree} video neglect this paradigm. In this paper, we take into account the progressive paradigm of human perception towards spherical video quality, and thus propose a novel BVQA approach (namely ProVQA) for 360{\textdegree} video via progressively learning from pixels, frames and video. Corresponding to the progressive learning of pixels, frames and video, three sub-nets are designed in our ProVQA approach, i.e., the spherical perception aware quality prediction (SPAQ), motion perception aware quality prediction (MPAQ) and multi-frame temporal non-local (MFTN) sub-nets. The SPAQ sub-net first models the spatial quality degradation based on spherical perception mechanism of human. Then, by exploiting motion cues across adjacent frames, the MPAQ sub-net properly incorporates motion contextual information for quality assessment on 360{\textdegree} video. Finally, the MFTN sub-net aggregates multi-frame quality degradation to yield the final quality score, via exploring long-term quality correlation from multiple frames. The experiments validate that our approach significantly advances the state-of-the-art BVQA performance on 360{\textdegree} video over two datasets, the code of which has been public in \url{https://github.com/yanglixiaoshen/ProVQA.}
Dynamically pruning segformer for efficient semantic segmentation
Authors: Haoli Bai, Hongda Mao, Dinesh Nair
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

As one of the successful Transformer-based models in computer vision tasks, SegFormer demonstrates superior performance in semantic segmentation. Nevertheless, the high computational cost greatly challenges the deployment of SegFormer on edge devices. In this paper, we seek to design a lightweight SegFormer for efficient semantic segmentation. Based on the observation that neurons in SegFormer layers exhibit large variances across different images, we propose a dynamic gated linear layer, which prunes the most uninformative set of neurons based on the input instance. To improve the dynamically pruned SegFormer, we also introduce two-stage knowledge distillation to transfer the knowledge within the original teacher to the pruned student network. Experimental results show that our method can significantly reduce the computation overhead of SegFormer without an apparent performance drop. For instance, we can achieve 36.9% mIoU with only 3.3G FLOPs on ADE20K, saving more than 60% computation with the drop of only 0.5% in mIoU
Lidar with Velocity: Correcting Moving Objects Point Cloud Distortion from Oscillating Scanning Lidars by Fusion with Camera
Authors: Wen Yang, Zheng Gong, Baifu Huang, Xiaoping Hong
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Object

Lidar point cloud distortion from moving object is an important problem in autonomous driving, and recently becomes even more demanding with the emerging of newer lidars, which feature back-and-forth scanning patterns. Accurately estimating moving object velocity would not only provide a tracking capability but also correct the point cloud distortion with more accurate description of the moving object. Since lidar measures the time-of-flight distance but with a sparse angular resolution, the measurement is precise in the radial measurement but lacks angularly. Camera on the other hand provides a dense angular resolution. In this paper, Gaussian-based lidar and camera fusion is proposed to estimate the full velocity and correct the lidar distortion. A probabilistic Kalman-filter framework is provided to track the moving objects, estimate their velocities and simultaneously correct the point clouds distortions. The framework is evaluated on real road data and the fusion method outperforms the traditional ICP-based and point-cloud only method. The complete working framework is open-sourced (https://github.com/ISEE-Technology/lidar-with-velocity) to accelerate the adoption of the emerging lidars.
Developing a Machine Learning Algorithm-Based Classification Models for the Detection of High-Energy Gamma Particles
Authors: Emmanuel Dadzie, Kelvin Kwakye
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00

Cherenkov gamma telescope observes high energy gamma rays, taking advantage of the radiation emitted by charged particles produced inside the electromagnetic showers initiated by the gammas, and developing in the atmosphere. The detector records and allows for the reconstruction of the shower parameters. The reconstruction of the parameter values was achieved using a Monte Carlo simulation algorithm called CORSIKA. The present study developed multiple machine-learning-based classification models and evaluated their performance. Different data transformation and feature extraction techniques were applied to the dataset to assess the impact on two separate performance metrics. The results of the proposed application reveal that the different data transformations did not significantly impact (p = 0.3165) the performance of the models. A pairwise comparison indicates that the performance from each transformed data was not significantly different from the performance of the raw data. Additionally, the SVM algorithm produced the highest performance score on the standardized dataset. In conclusion, this study suggests that high-energy gamma particles can be predicted with sufficient accuracy using SVM on a standardized dataset than the other algorithms with the various data transformations.
Reference-based Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction Using Texture Transformer
Authors: Pengfei Guo, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, MRI Reconstruction

Deep Learning (DL) based methods for magnetic resonance (MR) image reconstruction have been shown to produce superior performance in recent years. However, these methods either only leverage under-sampled data or require a paired fully-sampled auxiliary modality to perform multi-modal reconstruction. Consequently, existing approaches neglect to explore attention mechanisms that can transfer textures from reference fully-sampled data to under-sampled data within a single modality, which limits these approaches in challenging cases. In this paper, we propose a novel Texture Transformer Module (TTM) for accelerated MRI reconstruction, in which we formulate the under-sampled data and reference data as queries and keys in a transformer. The TTM facilitates joint feature learning across under-sampled and reference data, so the feature correspondences can be discovered by attention and accurate texture features can be leveraged during reconstruction. Notably, the proposed TTM can be stacked on prior MRI reconstruction approaches to further improve their performance. Extensive experiments show that TTM can significantly improve the performance of several popular DL-based MRI reconstruction methods.
3D Lip Event Detection via Interframe Motion Divergence at Multiple Temporal Resolutions
Authors: Jie Zhang, Robert B. Fisher
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, Motion Detection

The lip is a dominant dynamic facial unit when a person is speaking. Detecting lip events is beneficial to speech analysis and support for the hearing impaired. This paper proposes a 3D lip event detection pipeline that automatically determines the lip events from a 3D speaking lip sequence. We define a motion divergence measure using 3D lip landmarks to quantify the interframe dynamics of a 3D speaking lip. Then, we cast the interframe motion detection in a multi-temporal-resolution framework that allows the detection to be applicable to different speaking speeds. The experiments on the S3DFM Dataset investigate the overall 3D lip dynamics based on the proposed motion divergence. The proposed 3D pipeline is able to detect opening and closing lip events across 100 sequences, achieving a state-of-the-art performance.
Self-Attending Task Generative Adversarial Network for Realistic Satellite Image Creation
Authors: Nathan Toner, Justin Fletcher
Date: 2021-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

We introduce a self-attending task generative adversarial network (SATGAN) and apply it to the problem of augmenting synthetic high contrast scientific imagery of resident space objects with realistic noise patterns and sensor characteristics learned from collected data. Augmenting these synthetic data is challenging due to the highly localized nature of semantic content in the data that must be preserved. Real collected images are used to train a network what a given class of sensor's images should look like. The trained network then acts as a filter on noiseless context images and outputs realistic-looking fakes with semantic content unaltered. The architecture is inspired by conditional GANs but is modified to include a task network that preserves semantic information through augmentation. Additionally, the architecture is shown to reduce instances of hallucinatory objects or obfuscation of semantic content in context images representing space observation scenes.