pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Understanding the hand-gestures using Convolutional Neural Networks and Generative Adversial Networks
Authors: Arpita Vats
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition, Hand Gesture Recognition, Hand-Gesture Recognition

In this paper, it is introduced a hand gesture recognition system to recognize the characters in the real time. The system consists of three modules: real time hand tracking, training gesture and gesture recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks. Camshift algorithm and hand blobs analysis for hand tracking are being used to obtain motion descriptors and hand region. It is fairy robust to background cluster and uses skin color for hand gesture tracking and recognition. Furthermore, the techniques have been proposed to improve the performance of the recognition and the accuracy using the approaches like selection of the training images and the adaptive threshold gesture to remove non-gesture pattern that helps to qualify an input pattern as a gesture. In the experiments, it has been tested to the vocabulary of 36 gestures including the alphabets and digits, and results effectiveness of the approach.
On Efficient and Robust Metrics for RANSAC Hypotheses and 3D Rigid Registration
Authors: Jiaqi Yang, Zhiqiang Huang, Siwen Quan, Qian Zhang, Yanning Zhang, Zhiguo Cao
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00

This paper focuses on developing efficient and robust evaluation metrics for RANSAC hypotheses to achieve accurate 3D rigid registration. Estimating six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose from feature correspondences remains a popular approach to 3D rigid registration, where random sample consensus (RANSAC) is a de-facto choice to this problem. However, existing metrics for RANSAC hypotheses are either time-consuming or sensitive to common nuisances, parameter variations, and different application scenarios, resulting in performance deterioration in overall registration accuracy and speed. We alleviate this problem by first analyzing the contributions of inliers and outliers, and then proposing several efficient and robust metrics with different designing motivations for RANSAC hypotheses. Comparative experiments on four standard datasets with different nuisances and application scenarios verify that the proposed metrics can significantly improve the registration performance and are more robust than several state-of-the-art competitors, making them good gifts to practical applications. This work also draws an interesting conclusion, i.e., not all inliers are equal while all outliers should be equal, which may shed new light on this research problem.
STCNet: Spatio-Temporal Cross Network for Industrial Smoke Detection
Authors: Yichao Cao, Qingfei Tang, Xiaobo Lu, Fan Li, Jinde Cao
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00

Industrial smoke emissions present a serious threat to natural ecosystems and human health. Prior works have shown that using computer vision techniques to identify smoke is a low cost and convenient method. However, industrial smoke detection is a challenging task because industrial emission particles are often decay rapidly outside the stacks or facilities and steam is very similar to smoke. To overcome these problems, a novel Spatio-Temporal Cross Network (STCNet) is proposed to recognize industrial smoke emissions. The proposed STCNet involves a spatial pathway to extract texture features and a temporal pathway to capture smoke motion information. We assume that spatial and temporal pathway could guide each other. For example, the spatial path can easily recognize the obvious interference such as trees and buildings, and the temporal path can highlight the obscure traces of smoke movement. If the two pathways could guide each other, it will be helpful for the smoke detection performance. In addition, we design an efficient and concise spatio-temporal dual pyramid architecture to ensure better fusion of multi-scale spatiotemporal information. Finally, extensive experiments on public dataset show that our STCNet achieves clear improvements on the challenging RISE industrial smoke detection dataset against the best competitors by 6.2%. The code will be available at: https://github.com/Caoyichao/STCNet.
A low latency ASR-free end to end spoken language understanding system
Authors: Mohamed Mhiri, Samuel Myer, Vikrant Singh Tomar
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech-to-Text, Spoken Language Understanding

In recent years, developing a speech understanding system that classifies a waveform to structured data, such as intents and slots, without first transcribing the speech to text has emerged as an interesting research problem. This work proposes such as system with an additional constraint of designing a system that has a small enough footprint to run on small micro-controllers and embedded systems with minimal latency. Given a streaming input speech signal, the proposed system can process it segment-by-segment without the need to have the entire stream at the moment of processing. The proposed system is evaluated on the publicly available Fluent Speech Commands dataset. Experiments show that the proposed system yields state-of-the-art performance with the advantage of low latency and a much smaller model when compared to other published works on the same task.
CoADNet: Collaborative Aggregation-and-Distribution Networks for Co-Salient Object Detection
Authors: Qijian Zhang, Runmin Cong, Junhui Hou, Chongyi Li, Yao Zhao
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Co-Salient Object Detection, Decoder, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Co-Salient Object Detection (CoSOD) aims at discovering salient objects that repeatedly appear in a given query group containing two or more relevant images. One challenging issue is how to effectively capture co-saliency cues by modeling and exploiting inter-image relationships. In this paper, we present an end-to-end collaborative aggregation-and-distribution network (CoADNet) to capture both salient and repetitive visual patterns from multiple images. First, we integrate saliency priors into the backbone features to suppress the redundant background information through an online intra-saliency guidance structure. After that, we design a two-stage aggregate-and-distribute architecture to explore group-wise semantic interactions and produce the co-saliency features. In the first stage, we propose a group-attentional semantic aggregation module that models inter-image relationships to generate the group-wise semantic representations. In the second stage, we propose a gated group distribution module that adaptively distributes the learned group semantics to different individuals in a dynamic gating mechanism. Finally, we develop a group consistency preserving decoder tailored for the CoSOD task, which maintains group constraints during feature decoding to predict more consistent full-resolution co-saliency maps. The proposed CoADNet is evaluated on four prevailing CoSOD benchmark datasets, which demonstrates the remarkable performance improvement over ten state-of-the-art competitors.
Effective Model Compression via Stage-wise Pruning
Authors: Mingyang Zhang, Xinyi Yu, Jingtao Rong, Linlin Ou
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model Compression

Automated Machine Learning(Auto-ML) pruning methods aim at searching a pruning strategy automatically to reduce the computational complexity of deep Convolutional Neural Networks(deep CNNs). However, some previous work found that the results of many Auto-ML pruning methods cannot even surpass the results of the uniformly pruning method. In this paper, the ineffectiveness of Auto-ML pruning which is caused by unfull and unfair training of the supernet is shown. A deep supernet suffers from unfull training because it contains too many candidates. To overcome the unfull training, a stage-wise pruning(SWP) method is proposed, which splits a deep supernet into several stage-wise supernets to reduce the candidate number and utilize inplace distillation to supervise the stage training. Besides, A wide supernet is hit by unfair training since the sampling probability of each channel is unequal. Therefore, the fullnet and the tinynet are sampled in each training iteration to ensure each channel can be overtrained. Remarkably, the proxy performance of the subnets trained with SWP is closer to the actual performance than that of most of the previous Auto-ML pruning work. Experiments show that SWP achieves the state-of-the-art on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet under the mobile setting.
Simple means Faster: Real-Time Human Motion Forecasting in Monocular First Person Videos on CPU
Authors: Junaid Ahmed Ansari, Brojeshwar Bhowmick
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Motion Forecasting

We present a simple, fast, and light-weight RNN based framework for forecasting future locations of humans in first person monocular videos. The primary motivation for this work was to design a network which could accurately predict future trajectories at a very high rate on a CPU. Typical applications of such a system would be a social robot or a visual assistance system for all, as both cannot afford to have high compute power to avoid getting heavier, less power efficient, and costlier. In contrast to many previous methods which rely on multiple type of cues such as camera ego-motion or 2D pose of the human, we show that a carefully designed network model which relies solely on bounding boxes can not only perform better but also predicts trajectories at a very high rate while being quite low in size of approximately 17 MB. Specifically, we demonstrate that having an auto-encoder in the encoding phase of the past information and a regularizing layer in the end boosts the accuracy of predictions with negligible overhead. We experiment with three first person video datasets: CityWalks, FPL and JAAD. Our simple method trained on CityWalks surpasses the prediction accuracy of state-of-the-art method (STED) while being 9.6x faster on a CPU (STED runs on a GPU). We also demonstrate that our model can transfer zero-shot or after just 15% fine-tuning to other similar datasets and perform on par with the state-of-the-art methods on such datasets (FPL and DTP). To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to accurately forecast trajectories at a very high prediction rate of 78 trajectories per second on CPU.
Multi-modal Fusion for Single-Stage Continuous Gesture Recognition
Authors: Harshala Gammulle, Simon Denman, Sridha Sridharan, Clinton Fookes
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition

Gesture recognition is a much studied research area which has myriad real-world applications including robotics and human-machine interaction. Current gesture recognition methods have focused on recognising isolated gestures, and existing continuous gesture recognition methods are limited to two-stage approaches where independent models are required for detection and classification, with the performance of the latter being constrained by detection performance. In contrast, we introduce a single-stage continuous gesture recognition framework, called Temporal Multi-Modal Fusion (TMMF), that can detect and classify multiple gestures in a video via a single model. This approach learns the natural transitions between gestures and non-gestures without the need for a pre-processing segmentation step to detect individual gestures. To achieve this, we introduce a multi-modal fusion mechanism to support the integration of important information that flows from multi-modal inputs, and is scalable to any number of modes. Additionally, we propose Unimodal Feature Mapping (UFM) and Multi-modal Feature Mapping (MFM) models to map uni-modal features and the fused multi-modal features respectively. To further enhance performance, we propose a mid-point based loss function that encourages smooth alignment between the ground truth and the prediction, helping the model to learn natural gesture transitions. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed framework, which can handle variable-length input videos, and outperforms the state-of-the-art on three challenging datasets: EgoGesture, IPN hand, and ChaLearn LAP Continuous Gesture Dataset (ConGD). Furthermore, ablation experiments show the importance of different components of the proposed framework.
Unsupervised Contrastive Photo-to-Caricature Translation based on Auto-distortion
Authors: Yuhe Ding, Xin Ma, Mandi Luo, Aihua Zheng, Ran He
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Caricature, Photo-To-Caricature Translation, Translation

Photo-to-caricature translation aims to synthesize the caricature as a rendered image exaggerating the features through sketching, pencil strokes, or other artistic drawings. Style rendering and geometry deformation are the most important aspects in photo-to-caricature translation task. To take both into consideration, we propose an unsupervised contrastive photo-to-caricature translation architecture. Considering the intuitive artifacts in the existing methods, we propose a contrastive style loss for style rendering to enforce the similarity between the style of rendered photo and the caricature, and simultaneously enhance its discrepancy to the photos. To obtain an exaggerating deformation in an unpaired/unsupervised fashion, we propose a Distortion Prediction Module (DPM) to predict a set of displacements vectors for each input image while fixing some controlling points, followed by the thin plate spline interpolation for warping. The model is trained on unpaired photo and caricature while can offer bidirectional synthesizing via inputting either a photo or a caricature. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model is effective to generate hand-drawn like caricatures compared with existing competitors.
Detecting Human-Object Interaction with Mixed Supervision
Authors: Suresh Kirthi Kumaraswamy, Miaojing Shi, Ewa Kijak
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object, Triplet, Weakly-supervised Learning

Human object interaction (HOI) detection is an important task in image understanding and reasoning. It is in a form of HOI triplet <human; verb; object>, requiring bounding boxes for human and object, and action between them for the task completion. In other words, this task requires strong supervision for training that is however hard to procure. A natural solution to overcome this is to pursue weakly-supervised learning, where we only know the presence of certain HOI triplets in images but their exact location is unknown. Most weakly-supervised learning methods do not make provision for leveraging data with strong supervision, when they are available; and indeed a na\"ive combination of this two paradigms in HOI detection fails to make contributions to each other. In this regard we propose a mixed-supervised HOI detection pipeline: thanks to a specific design of momentum-independent learning that learns seamlessly across these two types of supervision. Moreover, in light of the annotation insufficiency in mixed supervision, we introduce an HOI element swapping technique to synthesize diverse and hard negatives across images and improve the robustness of the model. Our method is evaluated on the challenging HICO-DET dataset. It performs close to or even better than many fully-supervised methods by using a mixed amount of strong and weak annotations; furthermore, it outperforms representative state of the art weakly and fully-supervised methods under the same supervision.
Conceptual Compression via Deep Structure and Texture Synthesis
Authors: Jianhui Chang, Zhenghui Zhao, Chuanmin Jia, Shiqi Wang, Lingbo Yang, Qi Mao, Jian Zhang, Siwei Ma
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Texture Synthesis

Existing compression methods typically focus on the removal of signal-level redundancies, while the potential and versatility of decomposing visual data into compact conceptual components still lack further study. To this end, we propose a novel conceptual compression framework that encodes visual data into compact structure and texture representations, then decodes in a deep synthesis fashion, aiming to achieve better visual reconstruction quality, flexible content manipulation, and potential support for various vision tasks. In particular, we propose to compress images by a dual-layered model consisting of two complementary visual features: 1) structure layer represented by structural maps and 2) texture layer characterized by low-dimensional deep representations. At the encoder side, the structural maps and texture representations are individually extracted and compressed, generating the compact, interpretable, inter-operable bitstreams. During the decoding stage, a hierarchical fusion GAN (HF-GAN) is proposed to learn the synthesis paradigm where the textures are rendered into the decoded structural maps, leading to high-quality reconstruction with remarkable visual realism. Extensive experiments on diverse images have demonstrated the superiority of our framework with lower bitrates, higher reconstruction quality, and increased versatility towards visual analysis and content manipulation tasks.
SelfDeco: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Completion in Challenging Indoor Environments
Authors: Jaehoon Choi, Dongki Jung, Yonghan Lee, Deokhwa Kim, Dinesh Manocha, Donghwan Lee
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Completion

We present a novel algorithm for self-supervised monocular depth completion. Our approach is based on training a neural network that requires only sparse depth measurements and corresponding monocular video sequences without dense depth labels. Our self-supervised algorithm is designed for challenging indoor environments with textureless regions, glossy and transparent surface, non-Lambertian surfaces, moving people, longer and diverse depth ranges and scenes captured by complex ego-motions. Our novel architecture leverages both deep stacks of sparse convolution blocks to extract sparse depth features and pixel-adaptive convolutions to fuse image and depth features. We compare with existing approaches in NYUv2, KITTI, and NAVERLABS indoor datasets, and observe 5-34 % improvements in root-means-square error (RMSE) reduction.
AIM 2020 Challenge on Learned Image Signal Processing Pipeline
Authors: Andrey Ignatov, Radu Timofte, Zhilu Zhang, Ming Liu, Haolin Wang, WangMeng Zuo, Jiawei Zhang, Ruimao Zhang, Zhanglin Peng, Sijie Ren, Linhui Dai, Xiaohong Liu, Chengqi Li, Jun Chen, Yuichi Ito, Bhavya Vasudeva, Puneesh Deora, Umapada Pal, Zhenyu Guo, Yu Zhu, Tian Liang, Chenghua Li, Cong Leng, Zhihong Pan, Baopu Li, Byung-Hoon Kim, Joonyoung Song, Jong Chul Ye, JaeHyun Baek, Magauiya Zhussip, Yeskendir Koishekenov, Hwechul Cho Ye, Xin Liu, Xueying Hu, Jun Jiang, Jinwei Gu, Kai Li, Pengliang Tan, Bingxin Hou
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Demosaicking, Denoising, SSIM

This paper reviews the second AIM learned ISP challenge and provides the description of the proposed solutions and results. The participating teams were solving a real-world RAW-to-RGB mapping problem, where to goal was to map the original low-quality RAW images captured by the Huawei P20 device to the same photos obtained with the Canon 5D DSLR camera. The considered task embraced a number of complex computer vision subtasks, such as image demosaicing, denoising, white balancing, color and contrast correction, demoireing, etc. The target metric used in this challenge combined fidelity scores (PSNR and SSIM) with solutions' perceptual results measured in a user study. The proposed solutions significantly improved the baseline results, defining the state-of-the-art for practical image signal processing pipeline modeling.
Joint Super-Resolution and Rectification for Solar Cell Inspection
Authors: Mathis Hoffmann, Thomas Köhler, Bernd Doll, Frank Schebesch, Florian Talkenberg, Ian Marius Peters, Christoph J. Brabec, Andreas Maier, Vincent Christlein
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Crack Segmentation, Motion Estimation, Multi-Frame Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Visual inspection of solar modules is an important monitoring facility in photovoltaic power plants. Since a single measurement of fast CMOS sensors is limited in spatial resolution and often not sufficient to reliably detect small defects, we apply multi-frame super-resolution (MFSR) to a sequence of low resolution measurements. In addition, the rectification and removal of lens distortion simplifies subsequent analysis. Therefore, we propose to fuse this pre-processing with standard MFSR algorithms. This is advantageous, because we omit a separate processing step, the motion estimation becomes more stable and the spacing of high-resolution (HR) pixels on the rectified module image becomes uniform w. r. t. the module plane, regardless of perspective distortion. We present a comprehensive user study showing that MFSR is beneficial for defect recognition by human experts and that the proposed method performs better than the state of the art. Furthermore, we apply automated crack segmentation and show that the proposed method performs 3x better than bicubic upsampling and 2x better than the state of the art for automated inspection.
Residual Pose: A Decoupled Approach for Depth-based 3D Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Angel Martínez-González, Michael Villamizar, Olivier Canévet, Jean-Marc Odobez
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Pose Estimation, 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

We propose to leverage recent advances in reliable 2D pose estimation with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to estimate the 3D pose of people from depth images in multi-person Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. Our method is based on the observation that using the depth information to obtain 3D lifted points from 2D body landmark detections provides a rough estimate of the true 3D human pose, thus requiring only a refinement step. In that line our contributions are threefold. (i) we propose to perform 3D pose estimation from depth images by decoupling 2D pose estimation and 3D pose refinement; (ii) we propose a deep-learning approach that regresses the residual pose between the lifted 3D pose and the true 3D pose; (iii) we show that despite its simplicity, our approach achieves very competitive results both in accuracy and speed on two public datasets and is therefore appealing for multi-person HRI compared to recent state-of-the-art methods.
Point Cloud Registration Based on Consistency Evaluation of Rigid Transformation in Parameter Space
Authors: Masaki Yoshii, Ikuko Shimizu
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration, Triplet

We can use a method called registration to integrate some point clouds that represent the shape of the real world. In this paper, we propose highly accurate and stable registration method. Our method detects keypoints from point clouds and generates triplets using multiple descriptors. Furthermore, our method evaluates the consistency of rigid transformation parameters of each triplet with histograms and obtains the rigid transformation between the point clouds. In the experiment of this paper, our method had minimul errors and no major failures. As a result, we obtained sufficiently accurate and stable registration results compared to the comparative methods.