pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Impact of Blur and Resolution on Demographic Disparities in 1-to-Many Facial Identification
Authors: Aman Bhatta, Gabriella Pangelinan, Michael C. King, Kevin W. Bowyer
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Most studies to date that have examined demographic variations in face recognition accuracy have analyzed 1-to-1 matching accuracy, using images that could be described as "government ID quality". This paper analyzes the accuracy of 1-to-many facial identification across demographic groups, and in the presence of blur and reduced resolution in the probe image as might occur in "surveillance camera quality" images. Cumulative match characteristic curves (CMC) are not appropriate for comparing propensity for rank-one recognition errors across demographics, and so we use three metrics for our analysis: (1) the well-known d' metric between mated and non-mated score distributions, and introduced in this work, (2) absolute score difference between thresholds in the high-similarity tail of the non-mated and the low-similarity tail of the mated distribution, and (3) distribution of (mated - non-mated rank-one scores) across the set of probe images. We find that demographic variation in 1-to-many accuracy does not entirely follow what has been observed in 1-to-1 matching accuracy. Also, different from 1-to-1 accuracy, demographic comparison of 1-to-many accuracy can be affected by different numbers of identities and images across demographics. More importantly, we show that increased blur in the probe image, or reduced resolution of the face in the probe image, can significantly increase the false positive identification rate. And we show that the demographic variation in these high blur or low resolution conditions is much larger for male / female than for African-American / Caucasian. The point that 1-to-many accuracy can potentially collapse in the context of processing "surveillance camera quality" probe images against a "government ID quality" gallery is an important one.
Comparative Study of Visual SLAM-Based Mobile Robot Localization Using Fiducial Markers
Authors: Jongwon Lee, Su Yeon Choi, David Hanley, Timothy Bretl
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00

This paper presents a comparative study of three modes for mobile robot localization based on visual SLAM using fiducial markers (i.e., square-shaped artificial landmarks with a black-and-white grid pattern): SLAM, SLAM with a prior map, and localization with a prior map. The reason for comparing the SLAM-based approaches leveraging fiducial markers is because previous work has shown their superior performance over feature-only methods, with less computational burden compared to methods that use both feature and marker detection without compromising the localization performance. The evaluation is conducted using indoor image sequences captured with a hand-held camera containing multiple fiducial markers in the environment. The performance metrics include absolute trajectory error and runtime for the optimization process per frame. In particular, for the last two modes (SLAM and localization with a prior map), we evaluate their performances by perturbing the quality of prior map to study the extent to which each mode is tolerant to such perturbations. Hardware experiments show consistent trajectory error levels across the three modes, with the localization mode exhibiting the shortest runtime among them. Yet, with map perturbations, SLAM with a prior map maintains performance, while localization mode degrades in both aspects.
Single View Refractive Index Tomography with Neural Fields
Authors: Brandon Zhao, Aviad Levis, Liam Connor, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Katherine L. Bouman
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Refractive Index Tomography is the inverse problem of reconstructing the continuously-varying 3D refractive index in a scene using 2D projected image measurements. Although a purely refractive field is not directly visible, it bends light rays as they travel through space, thus providing a signal for reconstruction. The effects of such fields appear in many scientific computer vision settings, ranging from refraction due to transparent cells in microscopy to the lensing of distant galaxies caused by dark matter in astrophysics. Reconstructing these fields is particularly difficult due to the complex nonlinear effects of the refractive field on observed images. Furthermore, while standard 3D reconstruction and tomography settings typically have access to observations of the scene from many viewpoints, many refractive index tomography problem settings only have access to images observed from a single viewpoint. We introduce a method that leverages prior knowledge of light sources scattered throughout the refractive medium to help disambiguate the single-view refractive index tomography problem. We differentiably trace curved rays through a neural field representation of the refractive field, and optimize its parameters to best reproduce the observed image. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by reconstructing simulated refractive fields, analyze the effects of light source distribution on the recovered field, and test our method on a simulated dark matter mapping problem where we successfully recover the 3D refractive field caused by a realistic dark matter distribution.
Video Task Decathlon: Unifying Image and Video Tasks in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Thomas E. Huang, Yifan Liu, Luc van Gool, Fisher Yu
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: All, Autonomous Driving, Representation Learning, Video Recognition

Performing multiple heterogeneous visual tasks in dynamic scenes is a hallmark of human perception capability. Despite remarkable progress in image and video recognition via representation learning, current research still focuses on designing specialized networks for singular, homogeneous, or simple combination of tasks. We instead explore the construction of a unified model for major image and video recognition tasks in autonomous driving with diverse input and output structures. To enable such an investigation, we design a new challenge, Video Task Decathlon (VTD), which includes ten representative image and video tasks spanning classification, segmentation, localization, and association of objects and pixels. On VTD, we develop our unified network, VTDNet, that uses a single structure and a single set of weights for all ten tasks. VTDNet groups similar tasks and employs task interaction stages to exchange information within and between task groups. Given the impracticality of labeling all tasks on all frames, and the performance degradation associated with joint training of many tasks, we design a Curriculum training, Pseudo-labeling, and Fine-tuning (CPF) scheme to successfully train VTDNet on all tasks and mitigate performance loss. Armed with CPF, VTDNet significantly outperforms its single-task counterparts on most tasks with only 20% overall computations. VTD is a promising new direction for exploring the unification of perception tasks in autonomous driving.
DeformToon3D: Deformable 3D Toonification from Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Junzhe Zhang, Yushi Lan, Shuai Yang, Fangzhou Hong, Quan Wang, Chai Kiat Yeo, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, NeRF

In this paper, we address the challenging problem of 3D toonification, which involves transferring the style of an artistic domain onto a target 3D face with stylized geometry and texture. Although fine-tuning a pre-trained 3D GAN on the artistic domain can produce reasonable performance, this strategy has limitations in the 3D domain. In particular, fine-tuning can deteriorate the original GAN latent space, which affects subsequent semantic editing, and requires independent optimization and storage for each new style, limiting flexibility and efficient deployment. To overcome these challenges, we propose DeformToon3D, an effective toonification framework tailored for hierarchical 3D GAN. Our approach decomposes 3D toonification into subproblems of geometry and texture stylization to better preserve the original latent space. Specifically, we devise a novel StyleField that predicts conditional 3D deformation to align a real-space NeRF to the style space for geometry stylization. Thanks to the StyleField formulation, which already handles geometry stylization well, texture stylization can be achieved conveniently via adaptive style mixing that injects information of the artistic domain into the decoder of the pre-trained 3D GAN. Due to the unique design, our method enables flexible style degree control and shape-texture-specific style swap. Furthermore, we achieve efficient training without any real-world 2D-3D training pairs but proxy samples synthesized from off-the-shelf 2D toonification models.
MaskDiffusion: Boosting Text-to-Image Consistency with Conditional Mask
Authors: Yupeng Zhou, Daquan Zhou, Zuo-Liang Zhu, Yaxing Wang, Qibin Hou, Jiashi Feng
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00

Recent advancements in diffusion models have showcased their impressive capacity to generate visually striking images. Nevertheless, ensuring a close match between the generated image and the given prompt remains a persistent challenge. In this work, we identify that a crucial factor leading to the text-image mismatch issue is the inadequate cross-modality relation learning between the prompt and the output image. To better align the prompt and image content, we advance the cross-attention with an adaptive mask, which is conditioned on the attention maps and the prompt embeddings, to dynamically adjust the contribution of each text token to the image features. This mechanism explicitly diminishes the ambiguity in semantic information embedding from the text encoder, leading to a boost of text-to-image consistency in the synthesized images. Our method, termed MaskDiffusion, is training-free and hot-pluggable for popular pre-trained diffusion models. When applied to the latent diffusion models, our MaskDiffusion can significantly improve the text-to-image consistency with negligible computation overhead compared to the original diffusion models.
Evaluating Deep Learning-based Melanoma Classification using Immunohistochemistry and Routine Histology: A Three Center Study
Authors: Christoph Wies, Lucas Schneider, Sarah Haggenmueller, Tabea-Clara Bucher, Sarah Hobelsberger, Markus V. Heppt, Gerardo Ferrara, Eva I. Krieghoff-Henning, Titus J. Brinker
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Pathologists routinely use immunohistochemical (IHC)-stained tissue slides against MelanA in addition to hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained slides to improve their accuracy in diagnosing melanomas. The use of diagnostic Deep Learning (DL)-based support systems for automated examination of tissue morphology and cellular composition has been well studied in standard H&E-stained tissue slides. In contrast, there are few studies that analyze IHC slides using DL. Therefore, we investigated the separate and joint performance of ResNets trained on MelanA and corresponding H&E-stained slides. The MelanA classifier achieved an area under receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC) of 0.82 and 0.74 on out of distribution (OOD)-datasets, similar to the H&E-based benchmark classification of 0.81 and 0.75, respectively. A combined classifier using MelanA and H&E achieved AUROCs of 0.85 and 0.81 on the OOD datasets. DL MelanA-based assistance systems show the same performance as the benchmark H&E classification and may be improved by multi stain classification to assist pathologists in their clinical routine.
Language Prompt for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Dongming Wu, Wencheng Han, Yingfei Liu, Tiancai Wang, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Xiangyu Zhang, Jianbing Shen
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Object

A new trend in the computer vision community is to capture objects of interest following flexible human command represented by a natural language prompt. However, the progress of using language prompts in driving scenarios is stuck in a bottleneck due to the scarcity of paired prompt-instance data. To address this challenge, we propose the first object-centric language prompt set for driving scenes within 3D, multi-view, and multi-frame space, named NuPrompt. It expands nuScenes dataset by constructing a total of 40,147 language descriptions, each referring to an average of 7.4 object tracklets. Based on the object-text pairs from the new benchmark, we formulate a novel prompt-based driving task, \ie, employing a language prompt to predict the described object trajectory across views and frames. Furthermore, we provide a simple end-to-end baseline model based on Transformer, named PromptTrack. Experiments show that our PromptTrack achieves impressive performance on NuPrompt. We hope this work can provide some new insights for the self-driving community. The data and code have been released at https://github.com/wudongming97/Prompt4Driving.
MoEController: Instruction-based Arbitrary Image Manipulation with Mixture-of-Expert Controllers
Authors: Sijia Li, Chen Chen, Haonan Lu
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Generation, Image Manipulation

Diffusion-model-based text-guided image generation has recently made astounding progress, producing fascinating results in open-domain image manipulation tasks. Few models, however, currently have complete zero-shot capabilities for both global and local image editing due to the complexity and diversity of image manipulation tasks. In this work, we propose a method with a mixture-of-expert (MOE) controllers to align the text-guided capacity of diffusion models with different kinds of human instructions, enabling our model to handle various open-domain image manipulation tasks with natural language instructions. First, we use large language models (ChatGPT) and conditional image synthesis models (ControlNet) to generate a large number of global image transfer dataset in addition to the instruction-based local image editing dataset. Then, using an MOE technique and task-specific adaptation training on a large-scale dataset, our conditional diffusion model can edit images globally and locally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs surprisingly well on various image manipulation tasks when dealing with open-domain images and arbitrary human instructions. Please refer to our project page: [https://oppo-mente-lab.github.io/moe_controller/]
CNN Injected Transformer for Image Exposure Correction
Authors: Shuning Xu, Xiangyu Chen, Binbin Song, Jiantao Zhou
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Blocking, Exposure Correction

Capturing images with incorrect exposure settings fails to deliver a satisfactory visual experience. Only when the exposure is properly set, can the color and details of the images be appropriately preserved. Previous exposure correction methods based on convolutions often produce exposure deviation in images as a consequence of the restricted receptive field of convolutional kernels. This issue arises because convolutions are not capable of capturing long-range dependencies in images accurately. To overcome this challenge, we can apply the Transformer to address the exposure correction problem, leveraging its capability in modeling long-range dependencies to capture global representation. However, solely relying on the window-based Transformer leads to visually disturbing blocking artifacts due to the application of self-attention in small patches. In this paper, we propose a CNN Injected Transformer (CIT) to harness the individual strengths of CNN and Transformer simultaneously. Specifically, we construct the CIT by utilizing a window-based Transformer to exploit the long-range interactions among different regions in the entire image. Within each CIT block, we incorporate a channel attention block (CAB) and a half-instance normalization block (HINB) to assist the window-based self-attention to acquire the global statistics and refine local features. In addition to the hybrid architecture design for exposure correction, we apply a set of carefully formulated loss functions to improve the spatial coherence and rectify potential color deviations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our image exposure correction method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both quantitative and qualitative metrics.
SSIG: A Visually-Guided Graph Edit Distance for Floor Plan Similarity
Authors: Casper van Engelenburg, Seyran Khademi, Jan van Gemert
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Matching, Metric Learning, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

We propose a simple yet effective metric that measures structural similarity between visual instances of architectural floor plans, without the need for learning. Qualitatively, our experiments show that the retrieval results are similar to deeply learned methods. Effectively comparing instances of floor plan data is paramount to the success of machine understanding of floor plan data, including the assessment of floor plan generative models and floor plan recommendation systems. Comparing visual floor plan images goes beyond a sole pixel-wise visual examination and is crucially about similarities and differences in the shapes and relations between subdivisions that compose the layout. Currently, deep metric learning approaches are used to learn a pair-wise vector representation space that closely mimics the structural similarity, in which the models are trained on similarity labels that are obtained by Intersection-over-Union (IoU). To compensate for the lack of structural awareness in IoU, graph-based approaches such as Graph Matching Networks (GMNs) are used, which require pairwise inference for comparing data instances, making GMNs less practical for retrieval applications. In this paper, an effective evaluation metric for judging the structural similarity of floor plans, coined SSIG (Structural Similarity by IoU and GED), is proposed based on both image and graph distances. In addition, an efficient algorithm is developed that uses SSIG to rank a large-scale floor plan database. Code will be openly available.
Mobile V-MoEs: Scaling Down Vision Transformers via Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: Erik Daxberger, Floris Weers, BoWen Zhang, Tom Gunter, Ruoming Pang, Marcin Eichner, Michael Emmersberger, Yinfei Yang, Alexander Toshev, Xianzhi Du
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models (MoEs) have recently gained popularity due to their ability to decouple model size from inference efficiency by only activating a small subset of the model parameters for any given input token. As such, sparse MoEs have enabled unprecedented scalability, resulting in tremendous successes across domains such as natural language processing and computer vision. In this work, we instead explore the use of sparse MoEs to scale-down Vision Transformers (ViTs) to make them more attractive for resource-constrained vision applications. To this end, we propose a simplified and mobile-friendly MoE design where entire images rather than individual patches are routed to the experts. We also propose a stable MoE training procedure that uses super-class information to guide the router. We empirically show that our sparse Mobile Vision MoEs (V-MoEs) can achieve a better trade-off between performance and efficiency than the corresponding dense ViTs. For example, for the ViT-Tiny model, our Mobile V-MoE outperforms its dense counterpart by 3.39% on ImageNet-1k. For an even smaller ViT variant with only 54M FLOPs inference cost, our MoE achieves an improvement of 4.66%.
Revealing the preference for correcting separated aberrations in joint optic-image design
Authors: Jingwen Zhou, Shiqi Chen, Zheng Ren, Wenguan Zhang, Jiapu Yan, Huajun Feng, Qi Li, Yueting Chen
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00

The joint design of the optical system and the downstream algorithm is a challenging and promising task. Due to the demand for balancing the global optimal of imaging systems and the computational cost of physical simulation, existing methods cannot achieve efficient joint design of complex systems such as smartphones and drones. In this work, starting from the perspective of the optical design, we characterize the optics with separated aberrations. Additionally, to bridge the hardware and software without gradients, an image simulation system is presented to reproduce the genuine imaging procedure of lenses with large field-of-views. As for aberration correction, we propose a network to perceive and correct the spatially varying aberrations and validate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Comprehensive experiments reveal that the preference for correcting separated aberrations in joint design is as follows: longitudinal chromatic aberration, lateral chromatic aberration, spherical aberration, field curvature, and coma, with astigmatism coming last. Drawing from the preference, a 10% reduction in the total track length of the consumer-level mobile phone lens module is accomplished. Moreover, this procedure spares more space for manufacturing deviations, realizing extreme-quality enhancement of computational photography. The optimization paradigm provides innovative insight into the practical joint design of sophisticated optical systems and post-processing algorithms.
AMLP:Adaptive Masking Lesion Patches for Self-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Xiangtao Wang, Ruizhi Wang, Jie zhou, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Zhenghua Xu
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Representation Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Self-supervised masked image modeling has shown promising results on natural images. However, directly applying such methods to medical images remains challenging. This difficulty stems from the complexity and distinct characteristics of lesions compared to natural images, which impedes effective representation learning. Additionally, conventional high fixed masking ratios restrict reconstructing fine lesion details, limiting the scope of learnable information. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised medical image segmentation framework, Adaptive Masking Lesion Patches (AMLP). Specifically, we design a Masked Patch Selection (MPS) strategy to identify and focus learning on patches containing lesions. Lesion regions are scarce yet critical, making their precise reconstruction vital. To reduce misclassification of lesion and background patches caused by unsupervised clustering in MPS, we introduce an Attention Reconstruction Loss (ARL) to focus on hard-to-reconstruct patches likely depicting lesions. We further propose a Category Consistency Loss (CCL) to refine patch categorization based on reconstruction difficulty, strengthening distinction between lesions and background. Moreover, we develop an Adaptive Masking Ratio (AMR) strategy that gradually increases the masking ratio to expand reconstructible information and improve learning. Extensive experiments on two medical segmentation datasets demonstrate AMLP's superior performance compared to existing self-supervised approaches. The proposed strategies effectively address limitations in applying masked modeling to medical images, tailored to capturing fine lesion details vital for segmentation tasks.