pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ST-MFNet: A Spatio-Temporal Multi-Flow Network for Frame Interpolation
Authors: Duolikun Danier, Fan Zhang, David Bull
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Texture Synthesis, Video Frame Interpolation

Video frame interpolation (VFI) is currently a very active research topic, with applications spanning computer vision, post production and video encoding. VFI can be extremely challenging, particularly in sequences containing large motions, occlusions or dynamic textures, where existing approaches fail to offer perceptually robust interpolation performance. In this context, we present a novel deep learning based VFI method, ST-MFNet, based on a Spatio-Temporal Multi-Flow architecture. ST-MFNet employs a new multi-scale multi-flow predictor to estimate many-to-one intermediate flows, which are combined with conventional one-to-one optical flows to capture both large and complex motions. In order to enhance interpolation performance for various textures, a 3D CNN is also employed to model the content dynamics over an extended temporal window. Moreover, ST-MFNet has been trained within an ST-GAN framework, which was originally developed for texture synthesis, with the aim of further improving perceptual interpolation quality. Our approach has been comprehensively evaluated -- compared with fourteen state-of-the-art VFI algorithms -- clearly demonstrating that ST-MFNet consistently outperforms these benchmarks on varied and representative test datasets, with significant gains up to 1.09dB in PSNR for cases including large motions and dynamic textures. Project page: https://danielism97.github.io/ST-MFNet.
FENeRF: Face Editing in Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Jingxiang Sun, Xuan Wang, Yong Zhang, Xiaoyu Li, Qi Zhang, Yebin Liu, Jue Wang
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D-Aware Image Synthesis, Image Generation

Previous portrait image generation methods roughly fall into two categories: 2D GANs and 3D-aware GANs. 2D GANs can generate high fidelity portraits but with low view consistency. 3D-aware GAN methods can maintain view consistency but their generated images are not locally editable. To overcome these limitations, we propose FENeRF, a 3D-aware generator that can produce view-consistent and locally-editable portrait images. Our method uses two decoupled latent codes to generate corresponding facial semantics and texture in a spatial aligned 3D volume with shared geometry. Benefiting from such underlying 3D representation, FENeRF can jointly render the boundary-aligned image and semantic mask and use the semantic mask to edit the 3D volume via GAN inversion. We further show such 3D representation can be learned from widely available monocular image and semantic mask pairs. Moreover, we reveal that joint learning semantics and texture helps to generate finer geometry. Our experiments demonstrate that FENeRF outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various face editing tasks.
PolyWorld: Polygonal Building Extraction with Graph Neural Networks in Satellite Images
Authors: Stefano Zorzi, Shabab Bazrafkan, Stefan Habenschuss, Friedrich Fraundorfer
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

While most state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods produce binary segmentation masks, geographic and cartographic applications typically require precise vector polygons of extracted objects instead of rasterized output. This paper introduces PolyWorld, a neural network that directly extracts building vertices from an image and connects them correctly to create precise polygons. The model predicts the connection strength between each pair of vertices using a graph neural network and estimates the assignments by solving a differentiable optimal transport problem. Moreover, the vertex positions are optimized by minimizing a combined segmentation and polygonal angle difference loss. PolyWorld significantly outperforms the state of the art in building polygonization and achieves not only notable quantitative results, but also produces visually pleasing building polygons. Code and trained weights are publicly available at https://github.com/zorzi-s/PolyWorldPretrainedNetwork.
Regularized directional representations for medical image registration
Authors: Vincent Jaouen, Pierre-Henri Conze, Guillaume Dardenne, Julien Bert, Dimitris Visvikis
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

In image registration, many efforts have been devoted to the development of alternatives to the popular normalized mutual information criterion. Concurrently to these efforts, an increasing number of works have demonstrated that substantial gains in registration accuracy can also be achieved by aligning structural representations of images rather than images themselves. Following this research path, we propose a new method for mono- and multimodal image registration based on the alignment of regularized vector fields derived from structural information such as gradient vector flow fields, a technique we call \textit{vector field similarity}. Our approach can be combined in a straightforward fashion with any existing registration framework by substituting vector field similarity to intensity-based registration. In our experiments, we show that the proposed approach compares favourably with conventional image alignment on several public image datasets using a diversity of imaging modalities and anatomical locations.
ESL: Event-based Structured Light
Authors: Manasi Muglikar, Guillermo Gallego, Davide Scaramuzza
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors providing significant advantages over standard cameras such as low latency, high temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. We propose a novel structured-light system using an event camera to tackle the problem of accurate and high-speed depth sensing. Our setup consists of an event camera and a laser-point projector that uniformly illuminates the scene in a raster scanning pattern during 16 ms. Previous methods match events independently of each other, and so they deliver noisy depth estimates at high scanning speeds in the presence of signal latency and jitter. In contrast, we optimize an energy function designed to exploit event correlations, called spatio-temporal consistency. The resulting method is robust to event jitter and therefore performs better at higher scanning speeds. Experiments demonstrate that our method can deal with high-speed motion and outperform state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction methods based on event cameras, reducing the RMSE by 83% on average, for the same acquisition time.
RADU: Ray-Aligned Depth Update Convolutions for ToF Data Denoising
Authors: Michael Schelling, Pedro Hermosilla, Timo Ropinski
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Denoising

Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras are subject to high levels of noise and distortions due to Multi-Path-Interference (MPI). While recent research showed that 2D neural networks are able to outperform previous traditional State-of-the-Art (SOTA) methods on denoising ToF-Data, little research on learning-based approaches has been done to make direct use of the 3D information present in depth images. In this paper, we propose an iterative denoising approach operating in 3D space, that is designed to learn on 2.5D data by enabling 3D point convolutions to correct the points' positions along the view direction. As labeled real world data is scarce for this task, we further train our network with a self-training approach on unlabeled real world data to account for real world statistics. We demonstrate that our method is able to outperform SOTA methods on several datasets, including two real world datasets and a new large-scale synthetic data set introduced in this paper.
Nonlinear Intensity Underwater Sonar Image Matching Method Based on Phase Information and Deep Convolution Features
Authors: Xiaoteng Zhou, Changli Yu, Xin Yuan, Haijun Feng, Yang Xu
Date: 2021-11-29 00:00:00

In the field of deep-sea exploration, sonar is presently the only efficient long-distance sensing device. The complicated underwater environment, such as noise interference, low target intensity or background dynamics, has brought many negative effects on sonar imaging. Among them, the problem of nonlinear intensity is extremely prevalent. It is also known as the anisotropy of acoustic sensor imaging, that is, when autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) carry sonar to detect the same target from different angles, the intensity variation between image pairs is sometimes very large, which makes the traditional matching algorithm almost ineffective. However, image matching is the basis of comprehensive tasks such as navigation, positioning, and mapping. Therefore, it is very valuable to obtain robust and accurate matching results. This paper proposes a combined matching method based on phase information and deep convolution features. It has two outstanding advantages: one is that the deep convolution features could be used to measure the similarity of the local and global positions of the sonar image; the other is that local feature matching could be performed at the key target position of the sonar image. This method does not need complex manual designs, and completes the matching task of nonlinear intensity sonar images in a close end-to-end manner. Feature matching experiments are carried out on the deep-sea sonar images captured by AUVs, and the results show that our proposal has preeminent matching accuracy and robustness.
NeuSample: Neural Sample Field for Efficient View Synthesis
Authors: Jiemin Fang, Lingxi Xie, Xinggang Wang, Xiaopeng Zhang, Wenyu Liu, Qi Tian
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great potentials in representing 3D scenes and synthesizing novel views, but the computational overhead of NeRF at the inference stage is still heavy. To alleviate the burden, we delve into the coarse-to-fine, hierarchical sampling procedure of NeRF and point out that the coarse stage can be replaced by a lightweight module which we name a neural sample field. The proposed sample field maps rays into sample distributions, which can be transformed into point coordinates and fed into radiance fields for volume rendering. The overall framework is named as NeuSample. We perform experiments on Realistic Synthetic 360$^{\circ}$ and Real Forward-Facing, two popular 3D scene sets, and show that NeuSample achieves better rendering quality than NeRF while enjoying a faster inference speed. NeuSample is further compressed with a proposed sample field extraction method towards a better trade-off between quality and speed.
Low-light Image Enhancement via Breaking Down the Darkness
Authors: Qiming Hu, Xiaojie Guo
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Low-Light Image Enhancement

Images captured in low-light environment often suffer from complex degradation. Simply adjusting light would inevitably result in burst of hidden noise and color distortion. To seek results with satisfied lighting, cleanliness, and realism from degraded inputs, this paper presents a novel framework inspired by the divide-and-rule principle, greatly alleviating the degradation entanglement. Assuming that an image can be decomposed into texture (with possible noise) and color components, one can specifically execute noise removal and color correction along with light adjustment. Towards this purpose, we propose to convert an image from the RGB space into a luminance-chrominance one. An adjustable noise suppression network is designed to eliminate noise in the brightened luminance, having the illumination map estimated to indicate noise boosting levels. The enhanced luminance further serves as guidance for the chrominance mapper to generate realistic colors. Extensive experiments are conducted to reveal the effectiveness of our design, and demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art alternatives both quantitatively and qualitatively on several benchmark datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/mingcv/Bread.
Automated Damage Inspection of Power Transmission Towers from UAV Images
Authors: Aleixo Cambeiro Barreiro, Clemens Seibold, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00

Infrastructure inspection is a very costly task, requiring technicians to access remote or hard-to-reach places. This is the case for power transmission towers, which are sparsely located and require trained workers to climb them to search for damages. Recently, the use of drones or helicopters for remote recording is increasing in the industry, sparing the technicians this perilous task. This, however, leaves the problem of analyzing big amounts of images, which has great potential for automation. This is a challenging task for several reasons. First, the lack of freely available training data and the difficulty to collect it complicate this problem. Additionally, the boundaries of what constitutes a damage are fuzzy, introducing a degree of subjectivity in the labelling of the data. The unbalanced class distribution in the images also plays a role in increasing the difficulty of the task. This paper tackles the problem of structural damage detection in transmission towers, addressing these issues. Our main contributions are the development of a system for damage detection on remotely acquired drone images, applying techniques to overcome the issue of data scarcity and ambiguity, as well as the evaluation of the viability of such an approach to solve this particular problem.
MapReader: A Computer Vision Pipeline for the Semantic Exploration of Maps at Scale
Authors: Kasra Hosseini, Daniel C. S. Wilson, Kaspar Beelen, Katherine McDonough
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 16k, Image Classification

We present MapReader, a free, open-source software library written in Python for analyzing large map collections (scanned or born-digital). This library transforms the way historians can use maps by turning extensive, homogeneous map sets into searchable primary sources. MapReader allows users with little or no computer vision expertise to i) retrieve maps via web-servers; ii) preprocess and divide them into patches; iii) annotate patches; iv) train, fine-tune, and evaluate deep neural network models; and v) create structured data about map content. We demonstrate how MapReader enables historians to interpret a collection of $\approx$16K nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey map sheets ($\approx$30.5M patches), foregrounding the challenge of translating visual markers into machine-readable data. We present a case study focusing on British rail infrastructure and buildings as depicted on these maps. We also show how the outputs from the MapReader pipeline can be linked to other, external datasets, which we use to evaluate as well as enrich and interpret the results. We release $\approx$62K manually annotated patches used here for training and evaluating the models.
Human Imperceptible Attacks and Applications to Improve Fairness
Authors: Xinru Hua, Huanzhong Xu, Jose Blanchet, Viet Nguyen
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation, Image Quality Assessment

Modern neural networks are able to perform at least as well as humans in numerous tasks involving object classification and image generation. However, small perturbations which are imperceptible to humans may significantly degrade the performance of well-trained deep neural networks. We provide a Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) framework which integrates human-based image quality assessment methods to design optimal attacks that are imperceptible to humans but significantly damaging to deep neural networks. Through extensive experiments, we show that our attack algorithm generates better-quality (less perceptible to humans) attacks than other state-of-the-art human imperceptible attack methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that DRO training using our optimally designed human imperceptible attacks can improve group fairness in image classification. Towards the end, we provide an algorithmic implementation to speed up DRO training significantly, which could be of independent interest.
Robust Partial-to-Partial Point Cloud Registration in a Full Range
Authors: Liang Pan, Zhongang Cai, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Matching, Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration for 3D objects is a challenging task due to sparse and noisy measurements, incomplete observations and large transformations. In this work, we propose \textbf{G}raph \textbf{M}atching \textbf{C}onsensus \textbf{Net}work (\textbf{GMCNet}), which estimates pose-invariant correspondences for full-range Partial-to-Partial point cloud Registration (PPR) in the object-level registration scenario. To encode robust point descriptors, \textbf{1)} we first comprehensively investigate transformation-robustness and noise-resilience of various geometric features. \textbf{2)} Then, we employ a novel {T}ransformation-robust {P}oint {T}ransformer (\textbf{TPT}) module to adaptively aggregate local features regarding the structural relations, which takes advantage from both handcrafted rotation-invariant ({\textit{RI}}) features and noise-resilient spatial coordinates. \textbf{3)} Based on a synergy of hierarchical graph networks and graphical modeling, we propose the {H}ierarchical {G}raphical {M}odeling (\textbf{HGM}) architecture to encode robust descriptors consisting of i) a unary term learned from {\textit{RI}} features; and ii) multiple smoothness terms encoded from neighboring point relations at different scales through our TPT modules. Moreover, we construct a challenging PPR dataset (\textbf{MVP-RG}) based on the recent MVP dataset that features high-quality scans. Extensive experiments show that GMCNet outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods for PPR. Notably, GMCNet encodes point descriptors for each point cloud individually without using cross-contextual information, or ground truth correspondences for training. Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/paul007pl/GMCNet.
The MIS Check-Dam Dataset for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation Tasks
Authors: Chintan Tundia, Rajiv Kumar, Om Damani, G. Sivakumar
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning has led to many recent advances in object detection and instance segmentation, among other computer vision tasks. These advancements have led to wide application of deep learning based methods and related methodologies in object detection tasks for satellite imagery. In this paper, we introduce MIS Check-Dam, a new dataset of check-dams from satellite imagery for building an automated system for the detection and mapping of check-dams, focusing on the importance of irrigation structures used for agriculture. We review some of the most recent object detection and instance segmentation methods and assess their performance on our new dataset. We evaluate several single stage, two-stage and attention based methods under various network configurations and backbone architectures. The dataset and the pre-trained models are available at https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/gramdrishti/.
Semi-Local Convolutions for LiDAR Scan Processing
Authors: Larissa T. Triess, David Peter, J. Marius Zöllner
Date: 2021-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop ICBINB 2021 12

A number of applications, such as mobile robots or automated vehicles, use LiDAR sensors to obtain detailed information about their three-dimensional surroundings. Many methods use image-like projections to efficiently process these LiDAR measurements and use deep convolutional neural networks to predict semantic classes for each point in the scan. The spatial stationary assumption enables the usage of convolutions. However, LiDAR scans exhibit large differences in appearance over the vertical axis. Therefore, we propose semi local convolution (SLC), a convolution layer with reduced amount of weight-sharing along the vertical dimension. We are first to investigate the usage of such a layer independent of any other model changes. Our experiments did not show any improvement over traditional convolution layers in terms of segmentation IoU or accuracy.
Image Style Transfer and Content-Style Disentanglement
Authors: Sailun Xu, Jiazhi Zhang, Jiamei Liu
Date: 2021-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Style Transfer, Triplet

We propose a way of learning disentangled content-style representation of image, allowing us to extrapolate images to any style as well as interpolate between any pair of styles. By augmenting data set in a supervised setting and imposing triplet loss, we ensure the separation of information encoded by content and style representation. We also make use of cycle-consistency loss to guarantee that images could be reconstructed faithfully by their representation.
Building extraction with vision transformer
Authors: Libo Wang, Shenghui Fang, Rui Li, Xiaoliang Meng
Date: 2021-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Image Classification, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

As an important carrier of human productive activities, the extraction of buildings is not only essential for urban dynamic monitoring but also necessary for suburban construction inspection. Nowadays, accurate building extraction from remote sensing images remains a challenge due to the complex background and diverse appearances of buildings. The convolutional neural network (CNN) based building extraction methods, although increased the accuracy significantly, are criticized for their inability for modelling global dependencies. Thus, this paper applies the Vision Transformer for building extraction. However, the actual utilization of the Vision Transformer often comes with two limitations. First, the Vision Transformer requires more GPU memory and computational costs compared to CNNs. This limitation is further magnified when encountering large-sized inputs like fine-resolution remote sensing images. Second, spatial details are not sufficiently preserved during the feature extraction of the Vision Transformer, resulting in the inability for fine-grained building segmentation. To handle these issues, we propose a novel Vision Transformer (BuildFormer), with a dual-path structure. Specifically, we design a spatial-detailed context path to encode rich spatial details and a global context path to capture global dependencies. Besides, we develop a window-based linear multi-head self-attention to make the complexity of the multi-head self-attention linear with the window size, which strengthens the global context extraction by using large windows and greatly improves the potential of the Vision Transformer in processing large-sized remote sensing images. The proposed method yields state-of-the-art performance (75.74% IoU) on the Massachusetts building dataset. Code will be available.
DeDUCE: Generating Counterfactual Explanations Efficiently
Authors: Benedikt Höltgen, Lisa Schut, Jan M. Brauner, Yarin Gal
Date: 2021-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

When an image classifier outputs a wrong class label, it can be helpful to see what changes in the image would lead to a correct classification. This is the aim of algorithms generating counterfactual explanations. However, there is no easily scalable method to generate such counterfactuals. We develop a new algorithm providing counterfactual explanations for large image classifiers trained with spectral normalisation at low computational cost. We empirically compare this algorithm against baselines from the literature; our novel algorithm consistently finds counterfactuals that are much closer to the original inputs. At the same time, the realism of these counterfactuals is comparable to the baselines. The code for all experiments is available at https://github.com/benedikthoeltgen/DeDUCE.