pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Vehicle Detection and Classification without Residual Calculation: Accelerating HEVC Image Decoding with Random Perturbation Injection
Authors: Muhammet Sebul Beratoğlu, Behçet Uğur Töreyin
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, vehicle detection, Video Understanding

In the field of video analytics, particularly traffic surveillance, there is a growing need for efficient and effective methods for processing and understanding video data. Traditional full video decoding techniques can be computationally intensive and time-consuming, leading researchers to explore alternative approaches in the compressed domain. This study introduces a novel random perturbation-based compressed domain method for reconstructing images from High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) bitstreams, specifically designed for traffic surveillance applications. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose substituting random perturbations for residual values, creating a condensed representation of the original image while retaining information relevant to video understanding tasks, particularly focusing on vehicle detection and classification as key use cases. By not using residual data, our proposed method significantly reduces the data needed in the image reconstruction process, allowing for more efficient storage and transmission of information. This is particularly important when considering the vast amount of video data involved in surveillance applications. Applied to the public BIT-Vehicle dataset, we demonstrate a significant increase in the reconstruction speed compared to the traditional full decoding approach, with our proposed method being approximately 56% faster than the pixel domain method. Additionally, we achieve a detection accuracy of 99.9%, on par with the pixel domain method, and a classification accuracy of 96.84%, only 0.98% lower than the pixel domain method. Furthermore, we showcase the significant reduction in data size, leading to more efficient storage and transmission. Our research establishes the potential of compressed domain methods in traffic surveillance applications, where speed and data size are critical factors.
Combining geolocation and height estimation of objects from street level imagery
Authors: Matej Ulicny, Vladimir A. Krylov, Julie Connelly, Rozenn Dahyot
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

We propose a pipeline for combined multi-class object geolocation and height estimation from street level RGB imagery, which is considered as a single available input data modality. Our solution is formulated via Markov Random Field optimization with deterministic output. The proposed technique uses image metadata along with coordinates of objects detected in the image plane as found by a custom-trained Convolutional Neural Network. Computing the object height using our methodology, in addition to object geolocation, has negligible effect on the overall computational cost. Accuracy is demonstrated experimentally for water drains and road signs on which we achieve average elevation estimation error lower than 20cm.
A Hybrid 3D Eddy Detection Technique Based on Sea Surface Height and Velocity Field
Authors: Weiping Hua, Karen Bemis, Dujuan Kang, Sedat Ozer, Deborah Silver
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00

Eddy detection is a critical task for ocean scientists to understand and analyze ocean circulation. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid eddy detection approach that combines sea surface height (SSH) and velocity fields with geometric criteria defining eddy behavior. Our approach searches for SSH minima and maxima, which oceanographers expect to find at the center of eddies. Geometric criteria are used to verify expected velocity field properties, such as net rotation and symmetry, by tracing velocity components along a circular path surrounding each eddy center. Progressive searches outward and into deeper layers yield each eddy's 3D region of influence. Isolation of each eddy structure from the dataset, using it's cylindrical footprint, facilitates visualization of internal eddy structures using horizontal velocity, vertical velocity, temperature and salinity. A quantitative comparison of Okubo-Weiss vorticity (OW) thresholding, the standard winding angle, and this new SSH-velocity hybrid methods of eddy detection as applied to the Red Sea dataset suggests that detection results are highly dependent on the choices of method, thresholds, and criteria. Our new SSH-velocity hybrid detection approach has the advantages of providing eddy structures with verified rotation properties, 3D visualization of the internal structure of physical properties, and rapid efficient estimations of eddy footprints without calculating streamlines. Our approach combines visualization of internal structure and tracking overall movement to support the study of the transport mechanisms key to understanding the interaction of nutrient distribution and ocean circulation. Our method is applied to three different datasets to showcase the generality of its application.
Skeleton Graph-based Ultrasound-CT Non-rigid Registration
Authors: Zhongliang Jiang, Xuesong Li, Chenyu Zhang, Yuan Bi, Walter Stechele, Nassir Navab
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00

Autonomous ultrasound (US) scanning has attracted increased attention, and it has been seen as a potential solution to overcome the limitations of conventional US examinations, such as inter-operator variations. However, it is still challenging to autonomously and accurately transfer a planned scan trajectory on a generic atlas to the current setup for different patients, particularly for thorax applications with limited acoustic windows. To address this challenge, we proposed a skeleton graph-based non-rigid registration to adapt patient-specific properties using subcutaneous bone surface features rather than the skin surface. To this end, the self-organization mapping is successively used twice to unify the input point cloud and extract the key points, respectively. Afterward, the minimal spanning tree is employed to generate a tree graph to connect all extracted key points. To appropriately characterize the rib cartilage outline to match the source and target point cloud, the path extracted from the tree graph is optimized by maximally maintaining continuity throughout each rib. To validate the proposed approach, we manually extract the US cartilage point cloud from one volunteer and seven CT cartilage point clouds from different patients. The results demonstrate that the proposed graph-based registration is more effective and robust in adapting to the inter-patient variations than the ICP (distance error mean/SD: 5.0/1.9 mm vs 8.6/6.7 mm on seven CTs).
Learning Structure Aware Deep Spectral Embedding
Authors: Hira Yaseen, Arif Mahmood
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Spectral Embedding (SE) has often been used to map data points from non-linear manifolds to linear subspaces for the purpose of classification and clustering. Despite significant advantages, the subspace structure of data in the original space is not preserved in the embedding space. To address this issue subspace clustering has been proposed by replacing the SE graph affinity with a self-expression matrix. It works well if the data lies in a union of linear subspaces however, the performance may degrade in real-world applications where data often spans non-linear manifolds. To address this problem we propose a novel structure-aware deep spectral embedding by combining a spectral embedding loss and a structure preservation loss. To this end, a deep neural network architecture is proposed that simultaneously encodes both types of information and aims to generate structure-aware spectral embedding. The subspace structure of the input data is encoded by using attention-based self-expression learning. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on six publicly available real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the excellent clustering performance of the proposed algorithm compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. The proposed algorithm has also exhibited better generalization to unseen data points and it is scalable to larger datasets without requiring significant computational resources.
Diffusion Models for Imperceptible and Transferable Adversarial Attack
Authors: Jianqi Chen, Hao Chen, Keyan Chen, Yilan Zhang, Zhengxia Zou, Zhenwei Shi
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Many existing adversarial attacks generate $L_p$-norm perturbations on image RGB space. Despite some achievements in transferability and attack success rate, the crafted adversarial examples are easily perceived by human eyes. Towards visual imperceptibility, some recent works explore unrestricted attacks without $L_p$-norm constraints, yet lacking transferability of attacking black-box models. In this work, we propose a novel imperceptible and transferable attack by leveraging both the generative and discriminative power of diffusion models. Specifically, instead of direct manipulation in pixel space, we craft perturbations in the latent space of diffusion models. Combined with well-designed content-preserving structures, we can generate human-insensitive perturbations embedded with semantic clues. For better transferability, we further "deceive" the diffusion model which can be viewed as an implicit recognition surrogate, by distracting its attention away from the target regions. To our knowledge, our proposed method, DiffAttack, is the first that introduces diffusion models into the adversarial attack field. Extensive experiments on various model structures, datasets, and defense methods have demonstrated the superiority of our attack over the existing attack methods.
Is end-to-end learning enough for fitness activity recognition?
Authors: Antoine Mercier, Guillaume Berger, Sunny Panchal, Florian Letsch, Cornelius Boehm, Nahua Kang, Ingo Bax, Roland Memisevic
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Activity Recognition, Pose Estimation

End-to-end learning has taken hold of many computer vision tasks, in particular, related to still images, with task-specific optimization yielding very strong performance. Nevertheless, human-centric action recognition is still largely dominated by hand-crafted pipelines, and only individual components are replaced by neural networks that typically operate on individual frames. As a testbed to study the relevance of such pipelines, we present a new fully annotated video dataset of fitness activities. Any recognition capabilities in this domain are almost exclusively a function of human poses and their temporal dynamics, so pose-based solutions should perform well. We show that, with this labelled data, end-to-end learning on raw pixels can compete with state-of-the-art action recognition pipelines based on pose estimation. We also show that end-to-end learning can support temporally fine-grained tasks such as real-time repetition counting.
TSGN: Temporal Scene Graph Neural Networks with Projected Vectorized Representation for Multi-Agent Motion Prediction
Authors: Yunong Wu, Thomas Gilles, Bogdan Stanciulescu, Fabien Moutarde
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Forecasting, motion prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Predicting future motions of nearby agents is essential for an autonomous vehicle to take safe and effective actions. In this paper, we propose TSGN, a framework using Temporal Scene Graph Neural Networks with projected vectorized representations for multi-agent trajectory prediction. Projected vectorized representation models the traffic scene as a graph which is constructed by a set of vectors. These vectors represent agents, road network, and their spatial relative relationships. All relative features under this representation are both translationand rotation-invariant. Based on this representation, TSGN captures the spatial-temporal features across agents, road network, interactions among them, and temporal dependencies of temporal traffic scenes. TSGN can predict multimodal future trajectories for all agents simultaneously, plausibly, and accurately. Meanwhile, we propose a Hierarchical Lane Transformer for capturing interactions between agents and road network, which filters the surrounding road network and only keeps the most probable lane segments which could have an impact on the future behavior of the target agent. Without sacrificing the prediction performance, this greatly reduces the computational burden. Experiments show TSGN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse motion forecasting benchmar.
Altered Topological Properties of Functional Brain Network Associated with Alzheimer's Disease
Authors: Yongcheng Yao
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is commonly utilized to study human brain activity, including abnormal functional properties related to neurodegenerative diseases. This study aims to investigate the differences in the topological properties of functional brain networks between individuals with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and normal controls. A total of 590 subjects, consisting of 175 with AD dementia and 415 age-, gender-, and handedness-matched controls, were included. The topological properties of the brain network were quantified using graph-theory-based analyses. The results indicate abnormal network integration and segregation in the AD group. These findings enhance our understanding of AD pathophysiology from a functional brain network structure perspective and may aid in identifying AD biomarkers. Supplementary data to aid in the validation of this research are available at https://github.com/YongchengYAO/AD-FunctionalBrainNetwork.
MBQuant: A Novel Multi-Branch Topology Method for Arbitrary Bit-width Network Quantization
Authors: Yunshan Zhong, Yuyao Zhou, Fei Chao, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Arbitrary bit-width network quantization has received significant attention due to its high adaptability to various bit-width requirements during runtime. However, in this paper, we investigate existing methods and observe a significant accumulation of quantization errors caused by switching weight and activations bit-widths, leading to limited performance. To address this issue, we propose MBQuant, a novel method that utilizes a multi-branch topology for arbitrary bit-width quantization. MBQuant duplicates the network body into multiple independent branches, where the weights of each branch are quantized to a fixed 2-bit and the activations remain in the input bit-width. The computation of a desired bit-width is completed by selecting an appropriate number of branches that satisfy the original computational constraint. By fixing the weight bit-width, this approach substantially reduces quantization errors caused by switching weight bit-widths. Additionally, we introduce an amortization branch selection strategy to distribute quantization errors caused by switching activation bit-widths among branches to improve performance. Finally, we adopt an in-place distillation strategy that facilitates guidance between branches to further enhance MBQuant's performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MBQuant achieves significant performance gains compared to existing arbitrary bit-width quantization methods. Code is at https://github.com/zysxmu/MultiQuant.
A Theory of General Difference in Continuous and Discrete Domain
Authors: Linmi Tao, Ruiyang Liu, Donglai Tao, Wu Xia, Feilong Ma, Yu Cheng, Jingmao Cui
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00

Though a core element of the digital age, numerical difference algorithms struggle with noise susceptibility. This stems from a key disconnect between the infinitesimal quantities in continuous differentiation and the finite intervals in its discrete counterpart. This disconnect violates the fundamental definition of differentiation (Leibniz and Cauchy). To bridge this gap, we build a novel general difference (Tao General Difference, TGD). Departing from derivative-by-integration, TGD generalizes differentiation to finite intervals in continuous domains through three key constraints. This allows us to calculate the general difference of a sequence in discrete domain via the continuous step function constructed from the sequence. Two construction methods, the rotational construction and the orthogonal construction, are proposed to construct the operators of TGD. The construction TGD operators take same convolution mode in calculation for continuous functions, discrete sequences, and arrays across any dimension. Our analysis with example operations showcases TGD's capability in both continuous and discrete domains, paving the way for accurate and noise-resistant differentiation in the digital era.
Meta-DM: Applications of Diffusion Models on Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Wentao Hu, Xiurong Jiang, Jiarun Liu, YuQi Yang, Hui Tian
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Unsupervised Few-Shot Image Classification

In the field of few-shot learning (FSL), extensive research has focused on improving network structures and training strategies. However, the role of data processing modules has not been fully explored. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Meta-DM, a generalized data processing module for FSL problems based on diffusion models. Meta-DM is a simple yet effective module that can be easily integrated with existing FSL methods, leading to significant performance improvements in both supervised and unsupervised settings. We provide a theoretical analysis of Meta-DM and evaluate its performance on several algorithms. Our experiments show that combining Meta-DM with certain methods achieves state-of-the-art results.
Supervised Domain Adaptation for Recognizing Retinal Diseases from Wide-Field Fundus Images
Authors: Qijie Wei, Jingyuan Yang, Bo wang, Jinrui Wang, Jianchun Zhao, Xinyu Zhao, Sheng Yang, Niranchana Manivannan, Youxin Chen, Dayong Ding, Jing Zhou, Xirong Li
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

This paper addresses the emerging task of recognizing multiple retinal diseases from wide-field (WF) and ultra-wide-field (UWF) fundus images. For an effective use of existing large amount of labeled color fundus photo (CFP) data and the relatively small amount of WF and UWF data, we propose a supervised domain adaptation method named Cross-domain Collaborative Learning (CdCL). Inspired by the success of fixed-ratio based mixup in unsupervised domain adaptation, we re-purpose this strategy for the current task. Due to the intrinsic disparity between the field-of-view of CFP and WF/UWF images, a scale bias naturally exists in a mixup sample that the anatomic structure from a CFP image will be considerably larger than its WF/UWF counterpart. The CdCL method resolves the issue by Scale-bias Correction, which employs Transformers for producing scale-invariant features. As demonstrated by extensive experiments on multiple datasets covering both WF and UWF images, the proposed method compares favorably against a number of competitive baselines.
Improving Defensive Distillation using Teacher Assistant
Authors: Maniratnam Mandal, Suna Gao
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Knowledge Distillation, Self-Driving Cars

Adversarial attacks pose a significant threat to the security and safety of deep neural networks being applied to modern applications. More specifically, in computer vision-based tasks, experts can use the knowledge of model architecture to create adversarial samples imperceptible to the human eye. These attacks can lead to security problems in popular applications such as self-driving cars, face recognition, etc. Hence, building networks which are robust to such attacks is highly desirable and essential. Among the various methods present in literature, defensive distillation has shown promise in recent years. Using knowledge distillation, researchers have been able to create models robust against some of those attacks. However, more attacks have been developed exposing weakness in defensive distillation. In this project, we derive inspiration from teacher assistant knowledge distillation and propose that introducing an assistant network can improve the robustness of the distilled model. Through a series of experiments, we evaluate the distilled models for different distillation temperatures in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and robustness. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed hypothesis can improve robustness in most cases. Additionally, we show that multi-step distillation can further improve robustness with very little impact on model accuracy.
Analyzing Compression Techniques for Computer Vision
Authors: Maniratnam Mandal, Imran Khan
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Quantization

Compressing deep networks is highly desirable for practical use-cases in computer vision applications. Several techniques have been explored in the literature, and research has been done in finding efficient strategies for combining them. For this project, we aimed to explore three different basic compression techniques - knowledge distillation, pruning, and quantization for small-scale recognition tasks. Along with the basic methods, we also test the efficacy of combining them in a sequential manner. We analyze them using MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets and present the results along with few observations inferred from them.
Instance-Aware Repeat Factor Sampling for Long-Tailed Object Detection
Authors: Burhaneddin Yaman, Tanvir Mahmud, Chun-Hao Liu
Date: 2023-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Long-tailed Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

We propose an embarrassingly simple method -- instance-aware repeat factor sampling (IRFS) to address the problem of imbalanced data in long-tailed object detection. Imbalanced datasets in real-world object detection often suffer from a large disparity in the number of instances for each class. To improve the generalization performance of object detection models on rare classes, various data sampling techniques have been proposed. Repeat factor sampling (RFS) has shown promise due to its simplicity and effectiveness. Despite its efficiency, RFS completely neglects the instance counts and solely relies on the image count during re-sampling process. However, instance count may immensely vary for different classes with similar image counts. Such variation highlights the importance of both image and instance for addressing the long-tail distributions. Thus, we propose IRFS which unifies instance and image counts for the re-sampling process to be aware of different perspectives of the imbalance in long-tailed datasets. Our method shows promising results on the challenging LVIS v1.0 benchmark dataset over various architectures and backbones, demonstrating their effectiveness in improving the performance of object detection models on rare classes with a relative $+50\%$ average precision (AP) improvement over counterpart RFS. IRFS can serve as a strong baseline and be easily incorporated into existing long-tailed frameworks.