pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RankDNN: Learning to Rank for Few-shot Learning
Authors: Qianyu Guo, Hongtong Gong, Xujun Wei, Yanwei Fu, Weifeng Ge, Yizhou Yu, Wenqiang Zhang
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Retrieval, Learning-To-Rank, Relation Classification, Retrieval, Triplet

This paper introduces a new few-shot learning pipeline that casts relevance ranking for image retrieval as binary ranking relation classification. In comparison to image classification, ranking relation classification is sample efficient and domain agnostic. Besides, it provides a new perspective on few-shot learning and is complementary to state-of-the-art methods. The core component of our deep neural network is a simple MLP, which takes as input an image triplet encoded as the difference between two vector-Kronecker products, and outputs a binary relevance ranking order. The proposed RankMLP can be built on top of any state-of-the-art feature extractors, and our entire deep neural network is called the ranking deep neural network, or RankDNN. Meanwhile, RankDNN can be flexibly fused with other post-processing methods. During the meta test, RankDNN ranks support images according to their similarity with the query samples, and each query sample is assigned the class label of its nearest neighbor. Experiments demonstrate that RankDNN can effectively improve the performance of its baselines based on a variety of backbones and it outperforms previous state-of-the-art algorithms on multiple few-shot learning benchmarks, including miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, Caltech-UCSD Birds, and CIFAR-FS. Furthermore, experiments on the cross-domain challenge demonstrate the superior transferability of RankDNN.The code is available at: https://github.com/guoqianyu-alberta/RankDNN.
NeuralMPS: Non-Lambertian Multispectral Photometric Stereo via Spectral Reflectance Decomposition
Authors: Jipeng Lv, Heng Guo, GuanYing Chen, Jinxiu Liang, Boxin Shi
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00

Multispectral photometric stereo(MPS) aims at recovering the surface normal of a scene from a single-shot multispectral image captured under multispectral illuminations. Existing MPS methods adopt the Lambertian reflectance model to make the problem tractable, but it greatly limits their application to real-world surfaces. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network named NeuralMPS to solve the MPS problem under general non-Lambertian spectral reflectances. Specifically, we present a spectral reflectance decomposition(SRD) model to disentangle the spectral reflectance into geometric components and spectral components. With this decomposition, we show that the MPS problem for surfaces with a uniform material is equivalent to the conventional photometric stereo(CPS) with unknown light intensities. In this way, NeuralMPS reduces the difficulty of the non-Lambertian MPS problem by leveraging the well-studied non-Lambertian CPS methods. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Tuning-free Plug-and-Play Hyperspectral Image Deconvolution with Deep Priors
Authors: Xiuheng Wang, Jie Chen, Cédric Richard
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Deconvolution

Deconvolution is a widely used strategy to mitigate the blurring and noisy degradation of hyperspectral images~(HSI) generated by the acquisition devices. This issue is usually addressed by solving an ill-posed inverse problem. While investigating proper image priors can enhance the deconvolution performance, it is not trivial to handcraft a powerful regularizer and to set the regularization parameters. To address these issues, in this paper we introduce a tuning-free Plug-and-Play (PnP) algorithm for HSI deconvolution. Specifically, we use the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to decompose the optimization problem into two iterative sub-problems. A flexible blind 3D denoising network (B3DDN) is designed to learn deep priors and to solve the denoising sub-problem with different noise levels. A measure of 3D residual whiteness is then investigated to adjust the penalty parameters when solving the quadratic sub-problems, as well as a stopping criterion. Experimental results on both simulated and real-world data with ground-truth demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
Conditional Progressive Generative Adversarial Network for satellite image generation
Authors: Renato Cardoso, Sofia Vallecorsa, Edoardo Nemni
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation

Image generation and image completion are rapidly evolving fields, thanks to machine learning algorithms that are able to realistically replace missing pixels. However, generating large high resolution images, with a large level of details, presents important computational challenges. In this work, we formulate the image generation task as completion of an image where one out of three corners is missing. We then extend this approach to iteratively build larger images with the same level of detail. Our goal is to obtain a scalable methodology to generate high resolution samples typically found in satellite imagery data sets. We introduce a conditional progressive Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), that generates the missing tile in an image, using as input three initial adjacent tiles encoded in a latent vector by a Wasserstein auto-encoder. We focus on a set of images used by the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) to train flood detection tools, and validate the quality of synthetic images in a realistic setup.
Topologically faithful image segmentation via induced matching of persistence barcodes
Authors: Nico Stucki, Johannes C. Paetzold, Suprosanna Shit, Bjoern Menze, Ulrich Bauer
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Image segmentation is a largely researched field where neural networks find vast applications in many facets of technology. Some of the most popular approaches to train segmentation networks employ loss functions optimizing pixel-overlap, an objective that is insufficient for many segmentation tasks. In recent years, their limitations fueled a growing interest in topology-aware methods, which aim to recover the correct topology of the segmented structures. However, so far, none of the existing approaches achieve a spatially correct matching between the topological features of ground truth and prediction. In this work, we propose the first topologically and feature-wise accurate metric and loss function for supervised image segmentation, which we term Betti matching. We show how induced matchings guarantee the spatially correct matching between barcodes in a segmentation setting. Furthermore, we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the Betti matching of images. We show that the Betti matching error is an interpretable metric to evaluate the topological correctness of segmentations, which is more sensitive than the well-established Betti number error. Moreover, the differentiability of the Betti matching loss enables its use as a loss function. It improves the topological performance of segmentation networks across six diverse datasets while preserving the volumetric performance. Our code is available in https://github.com/nstucki/Betti-matching.
Assessing Bias in Face Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Žiga Babnik, Vitomir Štruc
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Image Quality, Face Image Quality Assessment, Face Recognition, Image Quality Assessment

Face image quality assessment (FIQA) attempts to improve face recognition (FR) performance by providing additional information about sample quality. Because FIQA methods attempt to estimate the utility of a sample for face recognition, it is reasonable to assume that these methods are heavily influenced by the underlying face recognition system. Although modern face recognition systems are known to perform well, several studies have found that such systems often exhibit problems with demographic bias. It is therefore likely that such problems are also present with FIQA techniques. To investigate the demographic biases associated with FIQA approaches, this paper presents a comprehensive study involving a variety of quality assessment methods (general-purpose image quality assessment, supervised face quality assessment, and unsupervised face quality assessment methods) and three diverse state-of-theart FR models. Our analysis on the Balanced Faces in the Wild (BFW) dataset shows that all techniques considered are affected more by variations in race than sex. While the general-purpose image quality assessment methods appear to be less biased with respect to the two demographic factors considered, the supervised and unsupervised face image quality assessment methods both show strong bias with a tendency to favor white individuals (of either sex). In addition, we found that methods that are less racially biased perform worse overall. This suggests that the observed bias in FIQA methods is to a significant extent related to the underlying face recognition system.
A Call to Reflect on Evaluation Practices for Failure Detection in Image Classification
Authors: Paul F. Jaeger, Carsten T. Lüth, Lukas Klein, Till J. Bungert
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, image-classification, Image Classification

Reliable application of machine learning-based decision systems in the wild is one of the major challenges currently investigated by the field. A large portion of established approaches aims to detect erroneous predictions by means of assigning confidence scores. This confidence may be obtained by either quantifying the model's predictive uncertainty, learning explicit scoring functions, or assessing whether the input is in line with the training distribution. Curiously, while these approaches all state to address the same eventual goal of detecting failures of a classifier upon real-life application, they currently constitute largely separated research fields with individual evaluation protocols, which either exclude a substantial part of relevant methods or ignore large parts of relevant failure sources. In this work, we systematically reveal current pitfalls caused by these inconsistencies and derive requirements for a holistic and realistic evaluation of failure detection. To demonstrate the relevance of this unified perspective, we present a large-scale empirical study for the first time enabling benchmarking confidence scoring functions w.r.t all relevant methods and failure sources. The revelation of a simple softmax response baseline as the overall best performing method underlines the drastic shortcomings of current evaluation in the abundance of publicized research on confidence scoring. Code and trained models are at https://github.com/IML-DKFZ/fd-shifts.
DeepAngle: Fast calculation of contact angles in tomography images using deep learning
Authors: Arash Rabbani, Chenhao Sun, Masoud Babaei, Vahid J. Niasar, Ryan T. Armstrong, Peyman Mostaghimi
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00

DeepAngle is a machine learning-based method to determine the contact angles of different phases in the tomography images of porous materials. Measurement of angles in 3--D needs to be done within the surface perpendicular to the angle planes, and it could become inaccurate when dealing with the discretized space of the image voxels. A computationally intensive solution is to correlate and vectorize all surfaces using an adaptable grid, and then measure the angles within the desired planes. On the contrary, the present study provides a rapid and low-cost technique powered by deep learning to estimate the interfacial angles directly from images. DeepAngle is tested on both synthetic and realistic images against the direct measurement technique and found to improve the r-squared by 5 to 16% while lowering the computational cost 20 times. This rapid method is especially applicable for processing large tomography data and time-resolved images, which is computationally intensive. The developed code and the dataset are available at an open repository on GitHub (https://www.github.com/ArashRabbani/DeepAngle).
Reducing Domain Gap in Frequency and Spatial domain for Cross-modality Domain Adaptation on Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Shaolei Liu, Siqi Yin, Linhao Qu, Manning Wang
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to learn a model trained on source domain and performs well on unlabeled target domain. In medical image segmentation field, most existing UDA methods depend on adversarial learning to address the domain gap between different image modalities, which is ineffective due to its complicated training process. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective UDA method based on frequency and spatial domain transfer uner multi-teacher distillation framework. In the frequency domain, we first introduce non-subsampled contourlet transform for identifying domain-invariant and domain-variant frequency components (DIFs and DVFs), and then keep the DIFs unchanged while replacing the DVFs of the source domain images with that of the target domain images to narrow the domain gap. In the spatial domain, we propose a batch momentum update-based histogram matching strategy to reduce the domain-variant image style bias. Experiments on two cross-modality medical image segmentation datasets (cardiac, abdominal) show that our proposed method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Meet-in-the-middle: Multi-scale upsampling and matching for cross-resolution face recognition
Authors: Klemen Grm, Berk Kemal Özata, Vitomir Štruc, Hazim Kemal Ekenel
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Identification, Face Recognition, Super-Resolution

In this paper, we aim to address the large domain gap between high-resolution face images, e.g., from professional portrait photography, and low-quality surveillance images, e.g., from security cameras. Establishing an identity match between disparate sources like this is a classical surveillance face identification scenario, which continues to be a challenging problem for modern face recognition techniques. To that end, we propose a method that combines face super-resolution, resolution matching, and multi-scale template accumulation to reliably recognize faces from long-range surveillance footage, including from low quality sources. The proposed approach does not require training or fine-tuning on the target dataset of real surveillance images. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method is able to outperform even existing methods fine-tuned to the SCFace dataset.
Application of the YOLOv5 Model for the Detection of Microobjects in the Marine Environment
Authors: Aleksandr N. Grekov, Yurii E. Shishkin, Sergei S. Peliushenko, Aleksandr S. Mavrin
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00

The efficiency of using the YOLOV5 machine learning model for solving the problem of automatic de-tection and recognition of micro-objects in the marine environment is studied. Samples of microplankton and microplastics were prepared, according to which a database of classified images was collected for training an image recognition neural network. The results of experiments using a trained network to find micro-objects in photo and video images in real time are presented. Experimental studies have shown high efficiency, comparable to manual recognition, of the proposed model in solving problems of detect-ing micro-objects in the marine environment.
Progressive Learning without Forgetting
Authors: Tao Feng, Hangjie Yuan, Mang Wang, Ziyuan Huang, Ang Bian, Jianzhou Zhang
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Learning from changing tasks and sequential experience without forgetting the obtained knowledge is a challenging problem for artificial neural networks. In this work, we focus on two challenging problems in the paradigm of Continual Learning (CL) without involving any old data: (i) the accumulation of catastrophic forgetting caused by the gradually fading knowledge space from which the model learns the previous knowledge; (ii) the uncontrolled tug-of-war dynamics to balance the stability and plasticity during the learning of new tasks. In order to tackle these problems, we present Progressive Learning without Forgetting (PLwF) and a credit assignment regime in the optimizer. PLwF densely introduces model functions from previous tasks to construct a knowledge space such that it contains the most reliable knowledge on each task and the distribution information of different tasks, while credit assignment controls the tug-of-war dynamics by removing gradient conflict through projection. Extensive ablative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PLwF and credit assignment. In comparison with other CL methods, we report notably better results even without relying on any raw data.
What's Behind the Mask: Estimating Uncertainty in Image-to-Image Problems
Authors: Gilad Kutiel, Regev Cohen, Michael Elad, Daniel Freedman
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Colorization, Image Colorization, Super-Resolution

Estimating uncertainty in image-to-image networks is an important task, particularly as such networks are being increasingly deployed in the biological and medical imaging realms. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to this problem based on masking. Given an existing image-to-image network, our approach computes a mask such that the distance between the masked reconstructed image and the masked true image is guaranteed to be less than a specified threshold, with high probability. The mask thus identifies the more certain regions of the reconstructed image. Our approach is agnostic to the underlying image-to-image network, and only requires triples of the input (degraded), reconstructed and true images for training. Furthermore, our method is agnostic to the distance metric used. As a result, one can use $L_p$-style distances or perceptual distances like LPIPS, which contrasts with interval-based approaches to uncertainty. Our theoretical guarantees derive from a conformal calibration procedure. We evaluate our mask-based approach to uncertainty on image colorization, image completion, and super-resolution tasks, demonstrating high quality performance on each.
Metric Learning as a Service with Covariance Embedding
Authors: Imam Mustafa Kamal, Hyerim Bae, Ling Liu
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Metric Learning, Object Recognition, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

With the emergence of deep learning, metric learning has gained significant popularity in numerous machine learning tasks dealing with complex and large-scale datasets, such as information retrieval, object recognition and recommendation systems. Metric learning aims to maximize and minimize inter- and intra-class similarities. However, existing models mainly rely on distance measures to obtain a separable embedding space and implicitly maximize the intra-class similarity while neglecting the inter-class relationship. We argue that to enable metric learning as a service for high-performance deep learning applications, we should also wisely deal with inter-class relationships to obtain a more advanced and meaningful embedding space representation. In this paper, a novel metric learning is presented as a service methodology that incorporates covariance to signify the direction of the linear relationship between data points in an embedding space. Unlike conventional metric learning, our covariance-embedding-enhanced approach enables metric learning as a service to be more expressive for computing similar or dissimilar measures and can capture positive, negative, or neutral relationships. Extensive experiments conducted using various benchmark datasets, including natural, biomedical, and facial images, demonstrate that the proposed model as a service with covariance-embedding optimizations can obtain higher-quality, more separable, and more expressive embedding representations than existing models.
Forged Image Detection using SOTA Image Classification Deep Learning Methods for Image Forensics with Error Level Analysis
Authors: Raunak Joshi, Abhishek Gupta, Nandan Kanvinde, Pandharinath Ghonge
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Forensics, Transfer Learning

The advancement in the area of computer vision has been brought using deep learning mechanisms. Image Forensics is one of the major areas of computer vision application. Forgery of images is sub-category of image forensics and can be detected using Error Level Analysis. Using such images as an input, this can turn out to be a binary classification problem which can be leveraged using variations of convolutional neural networks. In this paper we perform transfer learning with state-of-the-art image classification models over error level analysis induced CASIA ITDE v.2 dataset. The algorithms used are VGG-19, Inception-V3, ResNet-152-V2, XceptionNet and EfficientNet-V2L with their respective methodologies and results.
Deep Grading based on Collective Artificial Intelligence for AD Diagnosis and Prognosis
Authors: Huy-Dung Nguyen, Michaël Clément, Boris Mansencal, Pierrick Coupé
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

Accurate diagnosis and prognosis of Alzheimer's disease are crucial to develop new therapies and reduce the associated costs. Recently, with the advances of convolutional neural networks, methods have been proposed to automate these two tasks using structural MRI. However, these methods often suffer from lack of interpretability, generalization, and can be limited in terms of performance. In this paper, we propose a novel deep framework designed to overcome these limitations. Our framework consists of two stages. In the first stage, we propose a deep grading model to extract meaningful features. To enhance the robustness of these features against domain shift, we introduce an innovative collective artificial intelligence strategy for training and evaluating steps. In the second stage, we use a graph convolutional neural network to better capture AD signatures. Our experiments based on 2074 subjects show the competitive performance of our deep framework compared to state-of-the-art methods on different datasets for both AD diagnosis and prognosis.
MixFairFace: Towards Ultimate Fairness via MixFair Adapter in Face Recognition
Authors: Fu-En Wang, Chien-Yi Wang, Min Sun, Shang-Hong Lai
Date: 2022-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Face Recognition, Fairness

Although significant progress has been made in face recognition, demographic bias still exists in face recognition systems. For instance, it usually happens that the face recognition performance for a certain demographic group is lower than the others. In this paper, we propose MixFairFace framework to improve the fairness in face recognition models. First of all, we argue that the commonly used attribute-based fairness metric is not appropriate for face recognition. A face recognition system can only be considered fair while every person has a close performance. Hence, we propose a new evaluation protocol to fairly evaluate the fairness performance of different approaches. Different from previous approaches that require sensitive attribute labels such as race and gender for reducing the demographic bias, we aim at addressing the identity bias in face representation, i.e., the performance inconsistency between different identities, without the need for sensitive attribute labels. To this end, we propose MixFair Adapter to determine and reduce the identity bias of training samples. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our MixFairFace approach achieves state-of-the-art fairness performance on all benchmark datasets.