pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Scaling Neural Face Synthesis to High FPS and Low Latency by Neural Caching
Authors: Frank Yu, Sid Fels, Helge Rhodin
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, Neural Rendering

Recent neural rendering approaches greatly improve image quality, reaching near photorealism. However, the underlying neural networks have high runtime, precluding telepresence and virtual reality applications that require high resolution at low latency. The sequential dependency of layers in deep networks makes their optimization difficult. We break this dependency by caching information from the previous frame to speed up the processing of the current one with an implicit warp. The warping with a shallow network reduces latency and the caching operations can further be parallelized to improve the frame rate. In contrast to existing temporal neural networks, ours is tailored for the task of rendering novel views of faces by conditioning on the change of the underlying surface mesh. We test the approach on view-dependent rendering of 3D portrait avatars, as needed for telepresence, on established benchmark sequences. Warping reduces latency by 70$\%$ (from 49.4ms to 14.9ms on commodity GPUs) and scales frame rates accordingly over multiple GPUs while reducing image quality by only 1$\%$, making it suitable as part of end-to-end view-dependent 3D teleconferencing applications. Our project page can be found at: https://yu-frank.github.io/lowlatency/.
Efficient brain age prediction from 3D MRI volumes using 2D projections
Authors: Johan Jönemo, Muhammad Usman Akbar, Robin Kämpe, J Paul Hamilton, Anders Eklund
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Using 3D CNNs on high resolution medical volumes is very computationally demanding, especially for large datasets like the UK Biobank which aims to scan 100,000 subjects. Here we demonstrate that using 2D CNNs on a few 2D projections (representing mean and standard deviation across axial, sagittal and coronal slices) of the 3D volumes leads to reasonable test accuracy when predicting the age from brain volumes. Using our approach, one training epoch with 20,324 subjects takes 20 - 50 seconds using a single GPU, which two orders of magnitude faster compared to a small 3D CNN. These results are important for researchers who do not have access to expensive GPU hardware for 3D CNNs.
AnimeRun: 2D Animation Visual Correspondence from Open Source 3D Movies
Authors: Li SiYao, Yuhang Li, Bo Li, Chao Dong, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Existing correspondence datasets for two-dimensional (2D) cartoon suffer from simple frame composition and monotonic movements, making them insufficient to simulate real animations. In this work, we present a new 2D animation visual correspondence dataset, AnimeRun, by converting open source three-dimensional (3D) movies to full scenes in 2D style, including simultaneous moving background and interactions of multiple subjects. Our analyses show that the proposed dataset not only resembles real anime more in image composition, but also possesses richer and more complex motion patterns compared to existing datasets. With this dataset, we establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating several existing optical flow and segment matching methods, and analyze shortcomings of these methods on animation data. Data, code and other supplementary materials are available at https://lisiyao21.github.io/projects/AnimeRun.
Normal reconstruction from specularity in the endoscopic setting
Authors: Karim Makki, Adrien Bartoli
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00

We show that for a plane imaged by an endoscope the specular isophotes are concentric circles on the scene plane, which appear as nested ellipses in the image. We show that these ellipses can be detected and used to estimate the plane's normal direction, forming a normal reconstruction method, which we validate on simulated data. In practice, the anatomical surfaces visible in endoscopic images are locally planar. We use our method to show that the surface normal can thus be reconstructed for each of the numerous specularities typically visible on moist tissues. We show results on laparoscopic and colonoscopic images.
InstantGroup: Instant Template Generation for Scalable Group of Brain MRI Registration
Authors: Ziyi He, Albert C. S. Chung
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Template generation is a critical step in groupwise image registration, which involves aligning a group of subjects into a common space. While existing methods can generate high-quality template images, they often incur substantial time costs or are limited by fixed group scales. In this paper, we present InstantGroup, an efficient groupwise template generation framework based on variational autoencoder (VAE) models that leverage latent representations' arithmetic properties, enabling scalability to groups of any size. InstantGroup features a Dual VAEs backbone with shared-weight twin networks to handle pairs of inputs and incorporates a Displacement Inversion Module (DIM) to maintain template unbiasedness and a Subject-Template Alignment Module (STAM) to improve template quality and registration accuracy. Experiments on 3D brain MRI scans from the OASIS and ADNI datasets reveal that InstantGroup dramatically reduces runtime, generating templates within seconds for various group sizes while maintaining superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines on quantitative metrics, including unbiasedness and registration accuracy.
Watching the News: Towards VideoQA Models that can Read
Authors: Soumya Jahagirdar, Minesh Mathew, Dimosthenis Karatzas, C. V. Jawahar
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Video Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Video Question Answering methods focus on commonsense reasoning and visual cognition of objects or persons and their interactions over time. Current VideoQA approaches ignore the textual information present in the video. Instead, we argue that textual information is complementary to the action and provides essential contextualisation cues to the reasoning process. To this end, we propose a novel VideoQA task that requires reading and understanding the text in the video. To explore this direction, we focus on news videos and require QA systems to comprehend and answer questions about the topics presented by combining visual and textual cues in the video. We introduce the ``NewsVideoQA'' dataset that comprises more than $8,600$ QA pairs on $3,000+$ news videos obtained from diverse news channels from around the world. We demonstrate the limitations of current Scene Text VQA and VideoQA methods and propose ways to incorporate scene text information into VideoQA methods.
Hyperbolic Cosine Transformer for LiDAR 3D Object Detection
Authors: Jigang Tong, Fanhang Yang, Sen yang, Enzeng Dong, Shengzhi Du, Xing Wang, Xianlin Yi
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Recently, Transformer has achieved great success in computer vision. However, it is constrained because the spatial and temporal complexity grows quadratically with the number of large points in 3D object detection applications. Previous point-wise methods are suffering from time consumption and limited receptive fields to capture information among points. In this paper, we propose a two-stage hyperbolic cosine transformer (ChTR3D) for 3D object detection from LiDAR point clouds. The proposed ChTR3D refines proposals by applying cosh-attention in linear computation complexity to encode rich contextual relationships among points. The cosh-attention module reduces the space and time complexity of the attention operation. The traditional softmax operation is replaced by non-negative ReLU activation and hyperbolic-cosine-based operator with re-weighting mechanism. Extensive experiments on the widely used KITTI dataset demonstrate that, compared with vanilla attention, the cosh-attention significantly improves the inference speed with competitive performance. Experiment results show that, among two-stage state-of-the-art methods using point-level features, the proposed ChTR3D is the fastest one.
Unbiased Supervised Contrastive Learning
Authors: Carlo Alberto Barbano, Benoit Dufumier, Enzo Tartaglione, Marco Grangetto, Pietro Gori
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Many datasets are biased, namely they contain easy-to-learn features that are highly correlated with the target class only in the dataset but not in the true underlying distribution of the data. For this reason, learning unbiased models from biased data has become a very relevant research topic in the last years. In this work, we tackle the problem of learning representations that are robust to biases. We first present a margin-based theoretical framework that allows us to clarify why recent contrastive losses (InfoNCE, SupCon, etc.) can fail when dealing with biased data. Based on that, we derive a novel formulation of the supervised contrastive loss (epsilon-SupInfoNCE), providing more accurate control of the minimal distance between positive and negative samples. Furthermore, thanks to our theoretical framework, we also propose FairKL, a new debiasing regularization loss, that works well even with extremely biased data. We validate the proposed losses on standard vision datasets including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet, and we assess the debiasing capability of FairKL with epsilon-SupInfoNCE, reaching state-of-the-art performance on a number of biased datasets, including real instances of biases in the wild.
Computer Vision on X-ray Data in Industrial Production and Security Applications: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Mehdi Rafiei, Jenni Raitoharju, Alexandros Iosifidis
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

X-ray imaging technology has been used for decades in clinical tasks to reveal the internal condition of different organs, and in recent years, it has become more common in other areas such as industry, security, and geography. The recent development of computer vision and machine learning techniques has also made it easier to automatically process X-ray images and several machine learning-based object (anomaly) detection, classification, and segmentation methods have been recently employed in X-ray image analysis. Due to the high potential of deep learning in related image processing applications, it has been used in most of the studies. This survey reviews the recent research on using computer vision and machine learning for X-ray analysis in industrial production and security applications and covers the applications, techniques, evaluation metrics, datasets, and performance comparison of those techniques on publicly available datasets. We also highlight some drawbacks in the published research and give recommendations for future research in computer vision-based X-ray analysis.
Robust Federated Learning against both Data Heterogeneity and Poisoning Attack via Aggregation Optimization
Authors: Yueqi Xie, Weizhong Zhang, Renjie Pi, Fangzhao Wu, Qifeng Chen, Xing Xie, Sunghun Kim
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Non-IID data distribution across clients and poisoning attacks are two main challenges in real-world federated learning (FL) systems. While both of them have attracted great research interest with specific strategies developed, no known solution manages to address them in a unified framework. To universally overcome both challenges, we propose SmartFL, a generic approach that optimizes the server-side aggregation process with a small amount of proxy data collected by the service provider itself via a subspace training technique. Specifically, the aggregation weight of each participating client at each round is optimized using the server-collected proxy data, which is essentially the optimization of the global model in the convex hull spanned by client models. Since at each round, the number of tunable parameters optimized on the server side equals the number of participating clients (thus independent of the model size), we are able to train a global model with massive parameters using only a small amount of proxy data (e.g., around one hundred samples). With optimized aggregation, SmartFL ensures robustness against both heterogeneous and malicious clients, which is desirable in real-world FL where either or both problems may occur. We provide theoretical analyses of the convergence and generalization capacity for SmartFL. Empirically, SmartFL achieves state-of-the-art performance on both FL with non-IID data distribution and FL with malicious clients. The source code will be released.
Near-infrared and visible-light periocular recognition with Gabor features using frequency-adaptive automatic eye detection
Authors: Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Josef Bigun
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00

Periocular recognition has gained attention recently due to demands of increased robustness of face or iris in less controlled scenarios. We present a new system for eye detection based on complex symmetry filters, which has the advantage of not needing training. Also, separability of the filters allows faster detection via one-dimensional convolutions. This system is used as input to a periocular algorithm based on retinotopic sampling grids and Gabor spectrum decomposition. The evaluation framework is composed of six databases acquired both with near-infrared and visible sensors. The experimental setup is complemented with four iris matchers, used for fusion experiments. The eye detection system presented shows very high accuracy with near-infrared data, and a reasonable good accuracy with one visible database. Regarding the periocular system, it exhibits great robustness to small errors in locating the eye centre, as well as to scale changes of the input image. The density of the sampling grid can also be reduced without sacrificing accuracy. Lastly, despite the poorer performance of the iris matchers with visible data, fusion with the periocular system can provide an improvement of more than 20%. The six databases used have been manually annotated, with the annotation made publicly available.
SWTF: Sparse Weighted Temporal Fusion for Drone-Based Activity Recognition
Authors: Santosh Kumar Yadav, Esha Pahwa, Achleshwar Luthra, Kamlesh Tiwari, Hari Mohan Pandey, Peter Corcoran
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition, Optical Flow Estimation

Drone-camera based human activity recognition (HAR) has received significant attention from the computer vision research community in the past few years. A robust and efficient HAR system has a pivotal role in fields like video surveillance, crowd behavior analysis, sports analysis, and human-computer interaction. What makes it challenging are the complex poses, understanding different viewpoints, and the environmental scenarios where the action is taking place. To address such complexities, in this paper, we propose a novel Sparse Weighted Temporal Fusion (SWTF) module to utilize sparsely sampled video frames for obtaining global weighted temporal fusion outcome. The proposed SWTF is divided into two components. First, a temporal segment network that sparsely samples a given set of frames. Second, weighted temporal fusion, that incorporates a fusion of feature maps derived from optical flow, with raw RGB images. This is followed by base-network, which comprises a convolutional neural network module along with fully connected layers that provide us with activity recognition. The SWTF network can be used as a plug-in module to the existing deep CNN architectures, for optimizing them to learn temporal information by eliminating the need for a separate temporal stream. It has been evaluated on three publicly available benchmark datasets, namely Okutama, MOD20, and Drone-Action. The proposed model has received an accuracy of 72.76%, 92.56%, and 78.86% on the respective datasets thereby surpassing the previous state-of-the-art performances by a significant margin.
Zero-shot Visual Commonsense Immorality Prediction
Authors: Yujin Jeong, Seongbeom Park, Suhong Moon, Jinkyu Kim
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Prediction

Artificial intelligence is currently powering diverse real-world applications. These applications have shown promising performance, but raise complicated ethical issues, i.e. how to embed ethics to make AI applications behave morally. One way toward moral AI systems is by imitating human prosocial behavior and encouraging some form of good behavior in systems. However, learning such normative ethics (especially from images) is challenging mainly due to a lack of data and labeling complexity. Here, we propose a model that predicts visual commonsense immorality in a zero-shot manner. We train our model with an ETHICS dataset (a pair of text and morality annotation) via a CLIP-based image-text joint embedding. In a testing phase, the immorality of an unseen image is predicted. We evaluate our model with existing moral/immoral image datasets and show fair prediction performance consistent with human intuitions. Further, we create a visual commonsense immorality benchmark with more general and extensive immoral visual contents. Codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/ku-vai/Zero-shot-Visual-Commonsense-Immorality-Prediction. Note that this paper might contain images and descriptions that are offensive in nature.
Experimental analysis regarding the influence of iris segmentation on the recognition rate
Authors: Heinz Hofbauer, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Josef Bigun, Andreas Uhl
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Iris Segmentation, Segmentation

In this study the authors will look at the detection and segmentation of the iris and its influence on the overall performance of the iris-biometric tool chain. The authors will examine whether the segmentation accuracy, based on conformance with a ground truth, can serve as a predictor for the overall performance of the iris-biometric tool chain. That is: If the segmentation accuracy is improved will this always improve the overall performance? Furthermore, the authors will systematically evaluate the influence of segmentation parameters, pupillary and limbic boundary and normalisation centre (based on Daugman's rubbersheet model), on the rest of the iris-biometric tool chain. The authors will investigate if accurately finding these parameters is important and how consistency, that is, extracting the same exact region of the iris during segmenting, influences the overall performance.
ClassPruning: Speed Up Image Restoration Networks by Dynamic N:M Pruning
Authors: Yang Zhou, Yuda Song, Hui Qian, Xin Du
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

Image restoration tasks have achieved tremendous performance improvements with the rapid advancement of deep neural networks. However, most prevalent deep learning models perform inference statically, ignoring that different images have varying restoration difficulties and lightly degraded images can be well restored by slimmer subnetworks. To this end, we propose a new solution pipeline dubbed ClassPruning that utilizes networks with different capabilities to process images with varying restoration difficulties. In particular, we use a lightweight classifier to identify the image restoration difficulty, and then the sparse subnetworks with different capabilities can be sampled based on predicted difficulty by performing dynamic N:M fine-grained structured pruning on base restoration networks. We further propose a novel training strategy along with two additional loss terms to stabilize training and improve performance. Experiments demonstrate that ClassPruning can help existing methods save approximately 40% FLOPs while maintaining performance.
HSGNet: Object Re-identification with Hierarchical Similarity Graph Network
Authors: Fei Shen, Mengwan Wei, Junchi Ren
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Object re-identification method is made up of backbone network, feature aggregation, and loss function. However, most backbone networks lack a special mechanism to handle rich scale variations and mine discriminative feature representations. In this paper, we firstly design a hierarchical similarity graph module (HSGM) to reduce the conflict of backbone and re-identification networks. The designed HSGM builds a rich hierarchical graph to mine the mapping relationships between global-local and local-local. Secondly, we divide the feature map along with the spatial and channel directions in each hierarchical graph. The HSGM applies the spatial features and channel features extracted from different locations as nodes, respectively, and utilizes the similarity scores between nodes to construct spatial and channel similarity graphs. During the learning process of HSGM, we utilize a learnable parameter to re-optimize the importance of each position, as well as evaluate the correlation between different nodes. Thirdly, we develop a novel hierarchical similarity graph network (HSGNet) by embedding the HSGM in the backbone network. Furthermore, HSGM can be easily embedded into backbone networks of any depth to improve object re-identification ability. Finally, extensive experiments on three large-scale object datasets demonstrate that the proposed HSGNet is superior to state-of-the-art object re-identification approaches.
Unsupervised Deep Learning-based clustering for Human Activity Recognition
Authors: Hamza Amrani, Daniela Micucci, Paolo Napoletano
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Clustering, Deep Clustering, Deep Learning, Human Activity Recognition

One of the main problems in applying deep learning techniques to recognize activities of daily living (ADLs) based on inertial sensors is the lack of appropriately large labelled datasets to train deep learning-based models. A large amount of data would be available due to the wide spread of mobile devices equipped with inertial sensors that can collect data to recognize human activities. Unfortunately, this data is not labelled. The paper proposes DISC (Deep Inertial Sensory Clustering), a DL-based clustering architecture that automatically labels multi-dimensional inertial signals. In particular, the architecture combines a recurrent AutoEncoder and a clustering criterion to predict unlabelled human activities-related signals. The proposed architecture is evaluated on three publicly available HAR datasets and compared with four well-known end-to-end deep clustering approaches. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DISC on both clustering accuracy and normalized mutual information metrics.
DrawMon: A Distributed System for Detection of Atypical Sketch Content in Concurrent Pictionary Games
Authors: Nikhil Bansal, Kartik Gupta, Kiruthika Kannan, Sivani Pentapati, Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla
Date: 2022-11-10 00:00:00

Pictionary, the popular sketch-based guessing game, provides an opportunity to analyze shared goal cooperative game play in restricted communication settings. However, some players occasionally draw atypical sketch content. While such content is occasionally relevant in the game context, it sometimes represents a rule violation and impairs the game experience. To address such situations in a timely and scalable manner, we introduce DrawMon, a novel distributed framework for automatic detection of atypical sketch content in concurrently occurring Pictionary game sessions. We build specialized online interfaces to collect game session data and annotate atypical sketch content, resulting in AtyPict, the first ever atypical sketch content dataset. We use AtyPict to train CanvasNet, a deep neural atypical content detection network. We utilize CanvasNet as a core component of DrawMon. Our analysis of post deployment game session data indicates DrawMon's effectiveness for scalable monitoring and atypical sketch content detection. Beyond Pictionary, our contributions also serve as a design guide for customized atypical content response systems involving shared and interactive whiteboards. Code and datasets are available at https://drawm0n.github.io.