pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Cascade Network with Guided Loss and Hybrid Attention for Finding Good Correspondences
Authors: Zhi Chen, Fan Yang, Wenbing Tao
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00

Finding good correspondences is a critical prerequisite in many feature based tasks. Given a putative correspondence set of an image pair, we propose a neural network which finds correct correspondences by a binary-class classifier and estimates relative pose through classified correspondences. First, we analyze that due to the imbalance in the number of correct and wrong correspondences, the loss function has a great impact on the classification results. Thus, we propose a new Guided Loss that can directly use evaluation criterion (Fn-measure) as guidance to dynamically adjust the objective function during training. We theoretically prove that the perfect negative correlation between the Guided Loss and Fn-measure, so that the network is always trained towards the direction of increasing Fn-measure to maximize it. We then propose a hybrid attention block to extract feature, which integrates the Bayesian attentive context normalization (BACN) and channel-wise attention (CA). BACN can mine the prior information to better exploit global context and CA can capture complex channel context to enhance the channel awareness of the network. Finally, based on our Guided Loss and hybrid attention block, a cascade network is designed to gradually optimize the result for more superior performance. Experiments have shown that our network achieves the state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Our code will be available in https://github.com/wenbingtao/GLHA.
Admix: Enhancing the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Xiaosen Wang, Xuanran He, Jingdong Wang, Kun He
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10

Deep neural networks are known to be extremely vulnerable to adversarial examples under white-box setting. Moreover, the malicious adversaries crafted on the surrogate (source) model often exhibit black-box transferability on other models with the same learning task but having different architectures. Recently, various methods are proposed to boost the adversarial transferability, among which the input transformation is one of the most effective approaches. We investigate in this direction and observe that existing transformations are all applied on a single image, which might limit the adversarial transferability. To this end, we propose a new input transformation based attack method called Admix that considers the input image and a set of images randomly sampled from other categories. Instead of directly calculating the gradient on the original input, Admix calculates the gradient on the input image admixed with a small portion of each add-in image while using the original label of the input to craft more transferable adversaries. Empirical evaluations on standard ImageNet dataset demonstrate that Admix could achieve significantly better transferability than existing input transformation methods under both single model setting and ensemble-model setting. By incorporating with existing input transformations, our method could further improve the transferability and outperforms the state-of-the-art combination of input transformations by a clear margin when attacking nine advanced defense models under ensemble-model setting. Code is available at https://github.com/JHL-HUST/Admix.
M2FN: Multi-step Modality Fusion for Advertisement Image Assessment
Authors: Kyung-Wha Park, Jung-Woo Ha, Junghoon Lee, Sunyoung Kwon, Kyung-Min Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

Assessing advertisements, specifically on the basis of user preferences and ad quality, is crucial to the marketing industry. Although recent studies have attempted to use deep neural networks for this purpose, these studies have not utilized image-related auxiliary attributes, which include embedded text frequently found in ad images. We, therefore, investigated the influence of these attributes on ad image preferences. First, we analyzed large-scale real-world ad log data and, based on our findings, proposed a novel multi-step modality fusion network (M2FN) that determines advertising images likely to appeal to user preferences. Our method utilizes auxiliary attributes through multiple steps in the network, which include conditional batch normalization-based low-level fusion and attention-based high-level fusion. We verified M2FN on the AVA dataset, which is widely used for aesthetic image assessment, and then demonstrated that M2FN can achieve state-of-the-art performance in preference prediction using a real-world ad dataset with rich auxiliary attributes.
Meta ordinal weighting net for improving lung nodule classification
Authors: Yiming Lei, Hongming Shan, Junping Zhang
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Lung Nodule Classification, Meta-Learning, regression

The progression of lung cancer implies the intrinsic ordinal relationship of lung nodules at different stages-from benign to unsure then to malignant. This problem can be solved by ordinal regression methods, which is between classification and regression due to its ordinal label. However, existing convolutional neural network (CNN)-based ordinal regression methods only focus on modifying classification head based on a randomly sampled mini-batch of data, ignoring the ordinal relationship resided in the data itself. In this paper, we propose a Meta Ordinal Weighting Network (MOW-Net) to explicitly align each training sample with a meta ordinal set (MOS) containing a few samples from all classes. During the training process, the MOW-Net learns a mapping from samples in MOS to the corresponding class-specific weight. In addition, we further propose a meta cross-entropy (MCE) loss to optimize the network in a meta-learning scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that the MOW-Net achieves better accuracy than the state-of-the-art ordinal regression methods, especially for the unsure class.
PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Shaoshuai Shi, Li Jiang, Jiajun Deng, Zhe Wang, Chaoxu Guo, Jianping Shi, Xiaogang Wang, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

3D object detection is receiving increasing attention from both industry and academia thanks to its wide applications in various fields. In this paper, we propose Point-Voxel Region-based Convolution Neural Networks (PV-RCNNs) for 3D object detection on point clouds. First, we propose a novel 3D detector, PV-RCNN, which boosts the 3D detection performance by deeply integrating the feature learning of both point-based set abstraction and voxel-based sparse convolution through two novel steps, i.e., the voxel-to-keypoint scene encoding and the keypoint-to-grid RoI feature abstraction. Second, we propose an advanced framework, PV-RCNN++, for more efficient and accurate 3D object detection. It consists of two major improvements: sectorized proposal-centric sampling for efficiently producing more representative keypoints, and VectorPool aggregation for better aggregating local point features with much less resource consumption. With these two strategies, our PV-RCNN++ is about $3\times$ faster than PV-RCNN, while also achieving better performance. The experiments demonstrate that our proposed PV-RCNN++ framework achieves state-of-the-art 3D detection performance on the large-scale and highly-competitive Waymo Open Dataset with 10 FPS inference speed on the detection range of 150m * 150m.
Nonlinear Evolutionary PDE-Based Refinement of Optical Flow
Authors: Hirak Doshi, N. Uday Kiran
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation

The goal of this paper is to propose two nonlinear variational models for obtaining a refined motion estimation from an image sequence. Both the proposed models can be considered as a part of a generalized framework for an accurate estimation of physics-based flow fields such as rotational and fluid flow. The first model is novel in the sense that it is divided into two phases: the first phase obtains a crude estimate of the optical flow and then the second phase refines this estimate using additional constraints. The correctness of this model is proved using an evolutionary PDE approach. The second model achieves the same refinement as the first model, but in a standard manner, using a single functional. A special feature of our models is that they permit us to provide efficient numerical implementations through the first-order primal-dual Chambolle-Pock scheme. Both the models are compared in the context of accurate estimation of angle by performing an anisotropic regularization of the divergence and curl of the flow respectively. We observe that, although both the models obtain the same level of accuracy, the two-phase model is more efficient. In fact, we empirically demonstrate that the single-phase and the two-phase models have convergence rates of order $O(1/N^2)$ and $O(1/N)$ respectively.
CyclingNet: Detecting cycling near misses from video streams in complex urban scenes with deep learning
Authors: Mohamed R. Ibrahim, James Haworth, Nicola Christie, Tao Cheng
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Cycling is a promising sustainable mode for commuting and leisure in cities, however, the fear of getting hit or fall reduces its wide expansion as a commuting mode. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called CyclingNet for detecting cycling near misses from video streams generated by a mounted frontal camera on a bike regardless of the camera position, the conditions of the built, the visual conditions and without any restrictions on the riding behaviour. CyclingNet is a deep computer vision model based on convolutional structure embedded with self-attention bidirectional long-short term memory (LSTM) blocks that aim to understand near misses from both sequential images of scenes and their optical flows. The model is trained on scenes of both safe rides and near misses. After 42 hours of training on a single GPU, the model shows high accuracy on the training, testing and validation sets. The model is intended to be used for generating information that can draw significant conclusions regarding cycling behaviour in cities and elsewhere, which could help planners and policy-makers to better understand the requirement of safety measures when designing infrastructure or drawing policies. As for future work, the model can be pipelined with other state-of-the-art classifiers and object detectors simultaneously to understand the causality of near misses based on factors related to interactions of road-users, the built and the natural environments.
Box Re-Ranking: Unsupervised False Positive Suppression for Domain Adaptive Pedestrian Detection
Authors: WeiJie Chen, Yilu Guo, Shicai Yang, Zhaoyang Li, Zhenxin Ma, Binbin Chen, Long Zhao, Di Xie, ShiLiang Pu, Yueting Zhuang
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Pedestrian Detection, Re-Ranking

False positive is one of the most serious problems brought by agnostic domain shift in domain adaptive pedestrian detection. However, it is impossible to label each box in countless target domains. Therefore, it yields our attention to suppress false positive in each target domain in an unsupervised way. In this paper, we model an object detection task into a ranking task among positive and negative boxes innovatively, and thus transform a false positive suppression problem into a box re-ranking problem elegantly, which makes it feasible to solve without manual annotation. An attached problem during box re-ranking appears that no labeled validation data is available for cherrypicking. Considering we aim to keep the detection of true positive unchanged, we propose box number alignment, a self-supervised evaluation metric, to prevent the optimized model from capacity degeneration. Extensive experiments conducted on cross-domain pedestrian detection datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Furthermore, the extension to two general unsupervised domain adaptive object detection benchmarks also supports our superiority to other state-of-the-arts.
RoutingGAN: Routing Age Progression and Regression with Disentangled Learning
Authors: Zhizhong Huang, Junping Zhang, Hongming Shan
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Although impressive results have been achieved for age progression and regression, there remain two major issues in generative adversarial networks (GANs)-based methods: 1) conditional GANs (cGANs)-based methods can learn various effects between any two age groups in a single model, but are insufficient to characterize some specific patterns due to completely shared convolutions filters; and 2) GANs-based methods can, by utilizing several models to learn effects independently, learn some specific patterns, however, they are cumbersome and require age label in advance. To address these deficiencies and have the best of both worlds, this paper introduces a dropout-like method based on GAN~(RoutingGAN) to route different effects in a high-level semantic feature space. Specifically, we first disentangle the age-invariant features from the input face, and then gradually add the effects to the features by residual routers that assign the convolution filters to different age groups by dropping out the outputs of others. As a result, the proposed RoutingGAN can simultaneously learn various effects in a single model, with convolution filters being shared in part to learn some specific effects. Experimental results on two benchmarked datasets demonstrate superior performance over existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Bridging Unpaired Facial Photos And Sketches By Line-drawings
Authors: Meimei Shang, Fei Gao, Xiang Li, Jingjie Zhu, Lingna Dai
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Sketch Synthesis, Image-to-Image Translation, Style Transfer, Translation

In this paper, we propose a novel method to learn face sketch synthesis models by using unpaired data. Our main idea is bridging the photo domain $\mathcal{X}$ and the sketch domain $Y$ by using the line-drawing domain $\mathcal{Z}$. Specially, we map both photos and sketches to line-drawings by using a neural style transfer method, i.e. $F: \mathcal{X}/\mathcal{Y} \mapsto \mathcal{Z}$. Consequently, we obtain \textit{pseudo paired data} $(\mathcal{Z}, \mathcal{Y})$, and can learn the mapping $G:\mathcal{Z} \mapsto \mathcal{Y}$ in a supervised learning manner. In the inference stage, given a facial photo, we can first transfer it to a line-drawing and then to a sketch by $G \circ F$. Additionally, we propose a novel stroke loss for generating different types of strokes. Our method, termed sRender, accords well with human artists' rendering process. Experimental results demonstrate that sRender can generate multi-style sketches, and significantly outperforms existing unpaired image-to-image translation methods.
An End-to-End Food Image Analysis System
Authors: Jiangpeng He, Runyu Mao, Zeman Shao, Janine L. Wright, Deborah A. Kerr, Carol J. Boushey, Fengqing Zhu
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Food Recognition, Nutrition

Modern deep learning techniques have enabled advances in image-based dietary assessment such as food recognition and food portion size estimation. Valuable information on the types of foods and the amount consumed are crucial for prevention of many chronic diseases. However, existing methods for automated image-based food analysis are neither end-to-end nor are capable of processing multiple tasks (e.g., recognition and portion estimation) together, making it difficult to apply to real life applications. In this paper, we propose an image-based food analysis framework that integrates food localization, classification and portion size estimation. Our proposed framework is end-to-end, i.e., the input can be an arbitrary food image containing multiple food items and our system can localize each single food item with its corresponding predicted food type and portion size. We also improve the single food portion estimation by consolidating localization results with a food energy distribution map obtained by conditional GAN to generate a four-channel RGB-Distribution image. Our end-to-end framework is evaluated on a real life food image dataset collected from a nutrition feeding study.
Rescuing Deep Hashing from Dead Bits Problem
Authors: Shu Zhao, Dayan Wu, Yucan Zhou, Bo Li, Weiping Wang
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Hashing, Image Retrieval, Quantization, Retrieval

Deep hashing methods have shown great retrieval accuracy and efficiency in large-scale image retrieval. How to optimize discrete hash bits is always the focus in deep hashing methods. A common strategy in these methods is to adopt an activation function, e.g. $\operatorname{sigmoid}(\cdot)$ or $\operatorname{tanh}(\cdot)$, and minimize a quantization loss to approximate discrete values. However, this paradigm may make more and more hash bits stuck into the wrong saturated area of the activation functions and never escaped. We call this problem "Dead Bits Problem~(DBP)". Besides, the existing quantization loss will aggravate DBP as well. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective gradient amplifier which acts before activation functions to alleviate DBP. Moreover, we devise an error-aware quantization loss to further alleviate DBP. It avoids the negative effect of quantization loss based on the similarity between two images. The proposed gradient amplifier and error-aware quantization loss are compatible with a variety of deep hashing methods. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed gradient amplifier and the error-aware quantization loss.
Forecasting Action through Contact Representations from First Person Video
Authors: Eadom Dessalene, Chinmaya Devaraj, Michael Maynord, Cornelia Fermuller, Yiannis Aloimonos
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Anticipation, Object

Human actions involving hand manipulations are structured according to the making and breaking of hand-object contact, and human visual understanding of action is reliant on anticipation of contact as is demonstrated by pioneering work in cognitive science. Taking inspiration from this, we introduce representations and models centered on contact, which we then use in action prediction and anticipation. We annotate a subset of the EPIC Kitchens dataset to include time-to-contact between hands and objects, as well as segmentations of hands and objects. Using these annotations we train the Anticipation Module, a module producing Contact Anticipation Maps and Next Active Object Segmentations - novel low-level representations providing temporal and spatial characteristics of anticipated near future action. On top of the Anticipation Module we apply Egocentric Object Manipulation Graphs (Ego-OMG), a framework for action anticipation and prediction. Ego-OMG models longer term temporal semantic relations through the use of a graph modeling transitions between contact delineated action states. Use of the Anticipation Module within Ego-OMG produces state-of-the-art results, achieving 1st and 2nd place on the unseen and seen test sets, respectively, of the EPIC Kitchens Action Anticipation Challenge, and achieving state-of-the-art results on the tasks of action anticipation and action prediction over EPIC Kitchens. We perform ablation studies over characteristics of the Anticipation Module to evaluate their utility.
Underwater Image Enhancement via Learning Water Type Desensitized Representations
Authors: Zhenqi Fu, Xiaopeng Lin, Wu Wang, Yue Huang, Xinghao Ding
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Diversity, Image Enhancement, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

We present a novel underwater image enhancement method termed SCNet to improve the image quality meanwhile cope with the degradation diversity caused by the water. SCNet is based on normalization schemes across both spatial and channel dimensions with the key idea of learning water type desensitized features. Specifically, we apply whitening to de-correlate activations across spatial dimensions for each instance in a mini-batch. We also eliminate channel-wise correlation by standardizing and re-injecting the first two moments of the activations across channels. The normalization schemes of spatial and channel dimensions are performed at each scale of the U-Net to obtain multi-scale representations. With such water type irrelevant encodings, the decoder can easily reconstruct the clean signal and be unaffected by the distortion types. Experimental results on two real-world underwater image datasets show that our approach can successfully enhance images with diverse water types, and achieves competitive performance in visual quality improvement.
A NIR-to-VIS face recognition via part adaptive and relation attention module
Authors: Rushuang Xu, MyeongAh Cho, Sangyoun Lee
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Heterogeneous Face Recognition, Relation, Triplet

In the face recognition application scenario, we need to process facial images captured in various conditions, such as at night by near-infrared (NIR) surveillance cameras. The illumination difference between NIR and visible-light (VIS) causes a domain gap between facial images, and the variations in pose and emotion also make facial matching more difficult. Heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) has difficulties in domain discrepancy, and many studies have focused on extracting domain-invariant features, such as facial part relational information. However, when pose variation occurs, the facial component position changes, and a different part relation is extracted. In this paper, we propose a part relation attention module that crops facial parts obtained through a semantic mask and performs relational modeling using each of these representative features. Furthermore, we suggest component adaptive triplet loss function using adaptive weights for each part to reduce the intra-class identity regardless of the domain as well as pose. Finally, our method exhibits a performance improvement in the CASIA NIR-VIS 2.0 and achieves superior result in the BUAA-VisNir with large pose and emotion variations.
Ground-aware Monocular 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Yuxuan Liu, Yuan Yixuan, Ming Liu
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Autonomous Driving, Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Efficient Neural Network, Monocular 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Pose Estimation

Estimating the 3D position and orientation of objects in the environment with a single RGB camera is a critical and challenging task for low-cost urban autonomous driving and mobile robots. Most of the existing algorithms are based on the geometric constraints in 2D-3D correspondence, which stems from generic 6D object pose estimation. We first identify how the ground plane provides additional clues in depth reasoning in 3D detection in driving scenes. Based on this observation, we then improve the processing of 3D anchors and introduce a novel neural network module to fully utilize such application-specific priors in the framework of deep learning. Finally, we introduce an efficient neural network embedded with the proposed module for 3D object detection. We further verify the power of the proposed module with a neural network designed for monocular depth prediction. The two proposed networks achieve state-of-the-art performances on the KITTI 3D object detection and depth prediction benchmarks, respectively. The code will be published in https://www.github.com/Owen-Liuyuxuan/visualDet3D