pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HistoPerm: A Permutation-Based View Generation Approach for Improving Histopathologic Feature Representation Learning
Authors: Joseph DiPalma, Lorenzo Torresani, Saeed Hassanpour
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Representation Learning

Deep learning has been effective for histology image analysis in digital pathology. However, many current deep learning approaches require large, strongly- or weakly-labeled images and regions of interest, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive to obtain. To address this challenge, we present HistoPerm, a view generation method for representation learning using joint embedding architectures that enhances representation learning for histology images. HistoPerm permutes augmented views of patches extracted from whole-slide histology images to improve classification performance. We evaluated the effectiveness of HistoPerm on two histology image datasets for Celiac disease and Renal Cell Carcinoma, using three widely used joint embedding architecture-based representation learning methods: BYOL, SimCLR, and VICReg. Our results show that HistoPerm consistently improves patch- and slide-level classification performance in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and AUC. Specifically, for patch-level classification accuracy on the Celiac disease dataset, HistoPerm boosts BYOL and VICReg by 8% and SimCLR by 3%. On the Renal Cell Carcinoma dataset, patch-level classification accuracy is increased by 2% for BYOL and VICReg, and by 1% for SimCLR. In addition, on the Celiac disease dataset, models with HistoPerm outperform the fully-supervised baseline model by 6%, 5%, and 2% for BYOL, SimCLR, and VICReg, respectively. For the Renal Cell Carcinoma dataset, HistoPerm lowers the classification accuracy gap for the models up to 10% relative to the fully-supervised baseline. These findings suggest that HistoPerm can be a valuable tool for improving representation learning of histopathology features when access to labeled data is limited and can lead to whole-slide classification results that are comparable to or superior to fully-supervised methods.
Comparative analysis of segmentation and generative models for fingerprint retrieval task
Authors: Megh Patel, Devarsh Patel, Sarthak Patel
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Segmentation

Biometric Authentication like Fingerprints has become an integral part of the modern technology for authentication and verification of users. It is pervasive in more ways than most of us are aware of. However, these fingerprint images deteriorate in quality if the fingers are dirty, wet, injured or when sensors malfunction. Therefore, extricating the original fingerprint by removing the noise and inpainting it to restructure the image is crucial for its authentication. Hence, this paper proposes a deep learning approach to address these issues using Generative (GAN) and Segmentation models. Qualitative and Quantitative comparison has been done between pix2pixGAN and cycleGAN (generative models) as well as U-net (segmentation model). To train the model, we created our own dataset NFD - Noisy Fingerprint Dataset meticulously with different backgrounds along with scratches in some images to make it more realistic and robust. In our research, the u-net model performed better than the GAN networks
PET image denoising based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models
Authors: Kuang Gong, Keith A. Johnson, Georges El Fakhri, Quanzheng Li, Tinsu Pan
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Due to various physical degradation factors and limited counts received, PET image quality needs further improvements. The denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) are distribution learning-based models, which try to transform a normal distribution into a specific data distribution based on iterative refinements. In this work, we proposed and evaluated different DDPM-based methods for PET image denoising. Under the DDPM framework, one way to perform PET image denoising is to provide the PET image and/or the prior image as the network input. Another way is to supply the prior image as the input with the PET image included in the refinement steps, which can fit for scenarios of different noise levels. 120 18F-FDG datasets and 140 18F-MK-6240 datasets were utilized to evaluate the proposed DDPM-based methods. Quantification show that the DDPM-based frameworks with PET information included can generate better results than the nonlocal mean and Unet-based denoising methods. Adding additional MR prior in the model can help achieve better performance and further reduce the uncertainty during image denoising. Solely relying on MR prior while ignoring the PET information can result in large bias. Regional and surface quantification shows that employing MR prior as the network input while embedding PET image as a data-consistency constraint during inference can achieve the best performance. In summary, DDPM-based PET image denoising is a flexible framework, which can efficiently utilize prior information and achieve better performance than the nonlocal mean and Unet-based denoising methods.
On the Optimal Combination of Cross-Entropy and Soft Dice Losses for Lesion Segmentation with Out-of-Distribution Robustness
Authors: Adrian Galdran, Gustavo Carneiro, Miguel Ángel González Ballester
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We study the impact of different loss functions on lesion segmentation from medical images. Although the Cross-Entropy (CE) loss is the most popular option when dealing with natural images, for biomedical image segmentation the soft Dice loss is often preferred due to its ability to handle imbalanced scenarios. On the other hand, the combination of both functions has also been successfully applied in this kind of tasks. A much less studied problem is the generalization ability of all these losses in the presence of Out-of-Distribution (OoD) data. This refers to samples appearing in test time that are drawn from a different distribution than training images. In our case, we train our models on images that always contain lesions, but in test time we also have lesion-free samples. We analyze the impact of the minimization of different loss functions on in-distribution performance, but also its ability to generalize to OoD data, via comprehensive experiments on polyp segmentation from endoscopic images and ulcer segmentation from diabetic feet images. Our findings are surprising: CE-Dice loss combinations that excel in segmenting in-distribution images have a poor performance when dealing with OoD data, which leads us to recommend the adoption of the CE loss for this kind of problems, due to its robustness and ability to generalize to OoD samples. Code associated to our experiments can be found at https://github.com/agaldran/lesion_losses_ood .
DOMINO: Domain-aware Model Calibration in Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Skylar E. Stolte, Kyle Volle, Aprinda Indahlastari, Alejandro Albizu, Adam J. Woods, Kevin Brink, Matthew Hale, Ruogu Fang
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Model calibration measures the agreement between the predicted probability estimates and the true correctness likelihood. Proper model calibration is vital for high-risk applications. Unfortunately, modern deep neural networks are poorly calibrated, compromising trustworthiness and reliability. Medical image segmentation particularly suffers from this due to the natural uncertainty of tissue boundaries. This is exasperated by their loss functions, which favor overconfidence in the majority classes. We address these challenges with DOMINO, a domain-aware model calibration method that leverages the semantic confusability and hierarchical similarity between class labels. Our experiments demonstrate that our DOMINO-calibrated deep neural networks outperform non-calibrated models and state-of-the-art morphometric methods in head image segmentation. Our results show that our method can consistently achieve better calibration, higher accuracy, and faster inference times than these methods, especially on rarer classes. This performance is attributed to our domain-aware regularization to inform semantic model calibration. These findings show the importance of semantic ties between class labels in building confidence in deep learning models. The framework has the potential to improve the trustworthiness and reliability of generic medical image segmentation models. The code for this article is available at: https://github.com/lab-smile/DOMINO.
Generalised Automatic Anatomy Finder (GAAF): A general framework for 3D location-finding in CT scans
Authors: Edward G. A. Henderson, Eliana M. Vasquez Osorio, Marcel van Herk, Andrew F. Green
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy

We present GAAF, a Generalised Automatic Anatomy Finder, for the identification of generic anatomical locations in 3D CT scans. GAAF is an end-to-end pipeline, with dedicated modules for data pre-processing, model training, and inference. At it's core, GAAF uses a custom a localisation convolutional neural network (CNN). The CNN model is small, lightweight and can be adjusted to suit the particular application. The GAAF framework has so far been tested in the head and neck, and is able to find anatomical locations such as the centre-of-mass of the brainstem. GAAF was evaluated in an open-access dataset and is capable of accurate and robust localisation performance. All our code is open source and available at https://github.com/rrr-uom-projects/GAAF.
DMTNet: Dynamic Multi-scale Network for Dual-pixel Images Defocus Deblurring with Transformer
Authors: Dafeng Zhang, Xiaobing Wang
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Defocus Deblurring, Inductive Bias

Recent works achieve excellent results in defocus deblurring task based on dual-pixel data using convolutional neural network (CNN), while the scarcity of data limits the exploration and attempt of vision transformer in this task. In addition, the existing works use fixed parameters and network architecture to deblur images with different distribution and content information, which also affects the generalization ability of the model. In this paper, we propose a dynamic multi-scale network, named DMTNet, for dual-pixel images defocus deblurring. DMTNet mainly contains two modules: feature extraction module and reconstruction module. The feature extraction module is composed of several vision transformer blocks, which uses its powerful feature extraction capability to obtain richer features and improve the robustness of the model. The reconstruction module is composed of several Dynamic Multi-scale Sub-reconstruction Module (DMSSRM). DMSSRM can restore images by adaptively assigning weights to features from different scales according to the blur distribution and content information of the input images. DMTNet combines the advantages of transformer and CNN, in which the vision transformer improves the performance ceiling of CNN, and the inductive bias of CNN enables transformer to extract more robust features without relying on a large amount of data. DMTNet might be the first attempt to use vision transformer to restore the blurring images to clarity. By combining with CNN, the vision transformer may achieve better performance on small datasets. Experimental results on the popular benchmarks demonstrate that our DMTNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Two-Step Color-Polarization Demosaicking Network
Authors: Vy Nguyen, Masayuki Tanaka, Yusuke Monno, Masatoshi Okutomi
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Demosaicking, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Polarization information of light in a scene is valuable for various image processing and computer vision tasks. A division-of-focal-plane polarimeter is a promising approach to capture the polarization images of different orientations in one shot, while it requires color-polarization demosaicking. In this paper, we propose a two-step color-polarization demosaicking network~(TCPDNet), which consists of two sub-tasks of color demosaicking and polarization demosaicking. We also introduce a reconstruction loss in the YCbCr color space to improve the performance of TCPDNet. Experimental comparisons demonstrate that TCPDNet outperforms existing methods in terms of the image quality of polarization images and the accuracy of Stokes parameters.
Virtual Underwater Datasets for Autonomous Inspections
Authors: Ioannis Polymenis, Maryam Haroutunian, Rose Norman, David Trodden
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Object Detection

Underwater Vehicles have become more sophisticated, driven by the off-shore sector and the scientific community's rapid advancements in underwater operations. Notably, many underwater tasks, including the assessment of subsea infrastructure, are performed with the assistance of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). There have been recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, notably, Deep Learning (DL) models and applications, which have widespread usage in a variety of fields, including aerial unmanned vehicles, autonomous car navigation, and other applications. However, they are not as prevalent in underwater applications due to the difficulty of obtaining underwater datasets for a specific application. In this sense, the current study utilises recent advancements in the area of DL to construct a bespoke dataset generated from photographs of items captured in a laboratory environment. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) were utilised to translate the laboratory object dataset into the underwater domain by combining the collected images with photographs containing the underwater environment. The findings demonstrated the feasibility of creating such a dataset, since the resulting images closely resembled the real underwater environment when compared with real-world underwater ship hull images. Therefore, the artificial datasets of the underwater environment can overcome the difficulties arising from the limited access to real-world underwater images and are used to enhance underwater operations through underwater object image classification and detection.
M$^2$-3DLaneNet: Exploring Multi-Modal 3D Lane Detection
Authors: Yueru Luo, Xu Yan, Chaoda Zheng, Chao Zheng, Shuqi Mei, Tang Kun, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Lane Detection, Depth Completion, Lane Detection

Estimating accurate lane lines in 3D space remains challenging due to their sparse and slim nature. Previous works mainly focused on using images for 3D lane detection, leading to inherent projection error and loss of geometry information. To address these issues, we explore the potential of leveraging LiDAR for 3D lane detection, either as a standalone method or in combination with existing monocular approaches. In this paper, we propose M$^2$-3DLaneNet to integrate complementary information from multiple sensors. Specifically, M$^2$-3DLaneNet lifts 2D features into 3D space by incorporating geometry information from LiDAR data through depth completion. Subsequently, the lifted 2D features are further enhanced with LiDAR features through cross-modality BEV fusion. Extensive experiments on the large-scale OpenLane dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of M$^2$-3DLaneNet, regardless of the range (75m or 100m).
Weakly-Supervised Stitching Network for Real-World Panoramic Image Generation
Authors: Dae-Young Song, Geonsoo Lee, HeeKyung Lee, Gi-Mun Um, Donghyeon Cho
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Generation, SSIM, Weakly-supervised Learning

Recently, there has been growing attention on an end-to-end deep learning-based stitching model. However, the most challenging point in deep learning-based stitching is to obtain pairs of input images with a narrow field of view and ground truth images with a wide field of view captured from real-world scenes. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a weakly-supervised learning mechanism to train the stitching model without requiring genuine ground truth images. In addition, we propose a stitching model that takes multiple real-world fisheye images as inputs and creates a 360 output image in an equirectangular projection format. In particular, our model consists of color consistency corrections, warping, and blending, and is trained by perceptual and SSIM losses. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified on two real-world stitching datasets.
SVNet: Where SO(3) Equivariance Meets Binarization on Point Cloud Representation
Authors: Zhuo Su, Max Welling, Matti Pietikäinen, Li Liu
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Binarization, Computational Efficiency

Efficiency and robustness are increasingly needed for applications on 3D point clouds, with the ubiquitous use of edge devices in scenarios like autonomous driving and robotics, which often demand real-time and reliable responses. The paper tackles the challenge by designing a general framework to construct 3D learning architectures with SO(3) equivariance and network binarization. However, a naive combination of equivariant networks and binarization either causes sub-optimal computational efficiency or geometric ambiguity. We propose to locate both scalar and vector features in our networks to avoid both cases. Precisely, the presence of scalar features makes the major part of the network binarizable, while vector features serve to retain rich structural information and ensure SO(3) equivariance. The proposed approach can be applied to general backbones like PointNet and DGCNN. Meanwhile, experiments on ModelNet40, ShapeNet, and the real-world dataset ScanObjectNN, demonstrated that the method achieves a great trade-off between efficiency, rotation robustness, and accuracy. The codes are available at https://github.com/zhuoinoulu/svnet.
Dual-Scale Single Image Dehazing Via Neural Augmentation
Authors: Zhengguo Li, Chaobing Zheng, Haiyan Shu, Shiqian Wu
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing, SSIM

Model-based single image dehazing algorithms restore haze-free images with sharp edges and rich details for real-world hazy images at the expense of low PSNR and SSIM values for synthetic hazy images. Data-driven ones restore haze-free images with high PSNR and SSIM values for synthetic hazy images but with low contrast, and even some remaining haze for real world hazy images. In this paper, a novel single image dehazing algorithm is introduced by combining model-based and data-driven approaches. Both transmission map and atmospheric light are first estimated by the model-based methods, and then refined by dual-scale generative adversarial networks (GANs) based approaches. The resultant algorithm forms a neural augmentation which converges very fast while the corresponding data-driven approach might not converge. Haze-free images are restored by using the estimated transmission map and atmospheric light as well as the Koschmiederlaw. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can remove haze well from real-world and synthetic hazy images.
Computer vision based vehicle tracking as a complementary and scalable approach to RFID tagging
Authors: Pranav Kant Gaur, Abhilash Bhardwaj, Pritam Shete, Mohini Laghate, Dinesh M Sarode
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Logging of incoming/outgoing vehicles serves as a piece of critical information for root-cause analysis to combat security breach incidents in various sensitive organizations. RFID tagging hampers the scalability of vehicle tracking solutions on both logistics as well as technical fronts. For instance, requiring each incoming vehicle(departmental or private) to be RFID tagged is a severe constraint and coupling video analytics with RFID to detect abnormal vehicle movement is non-trivial. We leverage publicly available implementations of computer vision algorithms to develop an interpretable vehicle tracking algorithm using finite-state machine formalism. The state-machine consumes input from the cascaded object detection and optical character recognition(OCR) models for state transitions. We evaluated the proposed method on 75 video clips of 285 vehicles from our system deployment site. We observed that the detection rate is most affected by the speed and the type of vehicle. The highest detection rate is achieved when the vehicle movement is restricted to follow a movement restrictions(SOP) at the checkpoint similar to RFID tagging. We further analyzed 700 vehicle tracking predictions on live-data and identified that the majority of vehicle number prediction errors are due to illegible-text, image-blur, text occlusion and out-of-vocab letters in vehicle numbers. Towards system deployment and performance enhancement, we expect our ongoing system monitoring to provide evidences to establish a higher vehicle-throughput SOP at the security checkpoint as well as to drive the fine-tuning of the deployed computer-vision models and the state-machine to establish the proposed approach as a promising alternative to RFID-tagging.
Binaural Signal Representations for Joint Sound Event Detection and Acoustic Scene Classification
Authors: Daniel Aleksander Krause, Annamaria Mesaros
Date: 2022-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic Scene Classification, Event Detection, Scene Classification, Sound Event Detection

Sound event detection (SED) and Acoustic scene classification (ASC) are two widely researched audio tasks that constitute an important part of research on acoustic scene analysis. Considering shared information between sound events and acoustic scenes, performing both tasks jointly is a natural part of a complex machine listening system. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of several spatial audio features in training a joint deep neural network (DNN) model performing SED and ASC. Experiments are performed for two different datasets containing binaural recordings and synchronous sound event and acoustic scene labels to analyse the differences between performing SED and ASC separately or jointly. The presented results show that the use of specific binaural features, mainly the Generalized Cross Correlation with Phase Transform (GCC-phat) and sines and cosines of phase differences, result in a better performing model in both separate and joint tasks as compared with baseline methods based on logmel energies only.