pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Action Quality Assessment with Temporal Parsing Transformer
Authors: Yang Bai, Desen Zhou, Songyang Zhang, Jian Wang, Errui Ding, Yu Guan, Yang Long, Jingdong Wang
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Quality Assessment, Action Understanding, Decoder, regression

Action Quality Assessment(AQA) is important for action understanding and resolving the task poses unique challenges due to subtle visual differences. Existing state-of-the-art methods typically rely on the holistic video representations for score regression or ranking, which limits the generalization to capture fine-grained intra-class variation. To overcome the above limitation, we propose a temporal parsing transformer to decompose the holistic feature into temporal part-level representations. Specifically, we utilize a set of learnable queries to represent the atomic temporal patterns for a specific action. Our decoding process converts the frame representations to a fixed number of temporally ordered part representations. To obtain the quality score, we adopt the state-of-the-art contrastive regression based on the part representations. Since existing AQA datasets do not provide temporal part-level labels or partitions, we propose two novel loss functions on the cross attention responses of the decoder: a ranking loss to ensure the learnable queries to satisfy the temporal order in cross attention and a sparsity loss to encourage the part representations to be more discriminative. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method outperforms prior work on three public AQA benchmarks by a considerable margin.
Exploiting Inter-Sample Affinity for Knowability-Aware Universal Domain Adaptation
Authors: Yifan Wang, Lin Zhang, Ran Song, Hongliang Li, Paul L. Rosin, Wei zhang
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Universal Domain Adaptation

Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer the knowledge of common classes from the source domain to the target domain without any prior knowledge on the label set, which requires distinguishing in the target domain the unknown samples from the known ones. Recent methods usually focused on categorizing a target sample into one of the source classes rather than distinguishing known and unknown samples, which ignores the inter-sample affinity between known and unknown samples and may lead to suboptimal performance. Aiming at this issue, we propose a novel UDA framework where such inter-sample affinity is exploited. Specifically, we introduce a knowability-based labeling scheme which can be divided into two steps: 1) Knowability-guided detection of known and unknown samples based on the intrinsic structure of the neighborhoods of samples, where we leverage the first singular vectors of the affinity matrices to obtain the knowability of every target sample. 2) Label refinement based on neighborhood consistency to relabel the target samples, where we refine the labels of each target sample based on its neighborhood consistency of predictions. Then, auxiliary losses based on the two steps are used to reduce the inter-sample affinity between the unknown and the known target samples. Finally, experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
3D Room Layout Estimation from a Cubemap of Panorama Image via Deep Manhattan Hough Transform
Authors: Yining Zhao, Chao Wen, Zhou Xue, Yue Gao
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Room Layouts From A Single RGB Panorama, Room Layout Estimation

Significant geometric structures can be compactly described by global wireframes in the estimation of 3D room layout from a single panoramic image. Based on this observation, we present an alternative approach to estimate the walls in 3D space by modeling long-range geometric patterns in a learnable Hough Transform block. We transform the image feature from a cubemap tile to the Hough space of a Manhattan world and directly map the feature to the geometric output. The convolutional layers not only learn the local gradient-like line features, but also utilize the global information to successfully predict occluded walls with a simple network structure. Unlike most previous work, the predictions are performed individually on each cubemap tile, and then assembled to get the layout estimation. Experimental results show that we achieve comparable results with recent state-of-the-art in prediction accuracy and performance. Code is available at https://github.com/Starrah/DMH-Net.
The Caltech Fish Counting Dataset: A Benchmark for Multiple-Object Tracking and Counting
Authors: Justin Kay, Peter Kulits, Suzanne Stathatos, Siqi Deng, Erik Young, Sara Beery, Grant van Horn, Pietro Perona
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Multiple Object Tracking, Object Tracking

We present the Caltech Fish Counting Dataset (CFC), a large-scale dataset for detecting, tracking, and counting fish in sonar videos. We identify sonar videos as a rich source of data for advancing low signal-to-noise computer vision applications and tackling domain generalization in multiple-object tracking (MOT) and counting. In comparison to existing MOT and counting datasets, which are largely restricted to videos of people and vehicles in cities, CFC is sourced from a natural-world domain where targets are not easily resolvable and appearance features cannot be easily leveraged for target re-identification. With over half a million annotations in over 1,500 videos sourced from seven different sonar cameras, CFC allows researchers to train MOT and counting algorithms and evaluate generalization performance at unseen test locations. We perform extensive baseline experiments and identify key challenges and opportunities for advancing the state of the art in generalization in MOT and counting.
Deep Semantic Statistics Matching (D2SM) Denoising Network
Authors: Kangfu Mei, Vishal M. Patel, Rui Huang
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Restoration, Semantic Segmentation, Super-Resolution

The ultimate aim of image restoration like denoising is to find an exact correlation between the noisy and clear image domains. But the optimization of end-to-end denoising learning like pixel-wise losses is performed in a sample-to-sample manner, which ignores the intrinsic correlation of images, especially semantics. In this paper, we introduce the Deep Semantic Statistics Matching (D2SM) Denoising Network. It exploits semantic features of pretrained classification networks, then it implicitly matches the probabilistic distribution of clear images at the semantic feature space. By learning to preserve the semantic distribution of denoised images, we empirically find our method significantly improves the denoising capabilities of networks, and the denoised results can be better understood by high-level vision tasks. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the noisy Cityscapes dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method on both the denoising performance and semantic segmentation accuracy. Moreover, the performance improvement observed on our extended tasks including super-resolution and dehazing experiments shows its potentiality as a new general plug-and-play component.
DH-AUG: DH Forward Kinematics Model Driven Augmentation for 3D Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Linzhi Huang, Jiahao Liang, Weihong Deng
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Diversity, Pose Estimation

Due to the lack of diversity of datasets, the generalization ability of the pose estimator is poor. To solve this problem, we propose a pose augmentation solution via DH forward kinematics model, which we call DH-AUG. We observe that the previous work is all based on single-frame pose augmentation, if it is directly applied to video pose estimator, there will be several previously ignored problems: (i) angle ambiguity in bone rotation (multiple solutions); (ii) the generated skeleton video lacks movement continuity. To solve these problems, we propose a special generator based on DH forward kinematics model, which is called DH-generator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DH-AUG can greatly increase the generalization ability of the video pose estimator. In addition, when applied to a single-frame 3D pose estimator, our method outperforms the previous best pose augmentation method. The source code has been released at https://github.com/hlz0606/DH-AUG-DH-Forward-Kinematics-Model-Driven-Augmentation-for-3D-Human-Pose-Estimation.
Content-aware Scalable Deep Compressed Sensing
Authors: Bin Chen, Jian Zhang
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Blocking, compressed sensing, Image Compressed Sensing, RTE

To more efficiently address image compressed sensing (CS) problems, we present a novel content-aware scalable network dubbed CASNet which collectively achieves adaptive sampling rate allocation, fine granular scalability and high-quality reconstruction. We first adopt a data-driven saliency detector to evaluate the importances of different image regions and propose a saliency-based block ratio aggregation (BRA) strategy for sampling rate allocation. A unified learnable generating matrix is then developed to produce sampling matrix of any CS ratio with an ordered structure. Being equipped with the optimization-inspired recovery subnet guided by saliency information and a multi-block training scheme preventing blocking artifacts, CASNet jointly reconstructs the image blocks sampled at various sampling rates with one single model. To accelerate training convergence and improve network robustness, we propose an SVD-based initialization scheme and a random transformation enhancement (RTE) strategy, which are extensible without introducing extra parameters. All the CASNet components can be combined and learned end-to-end. We further provide a four-stage implementation for evaluation and practical deployments. Experiments demonstrate that CASNet outperforms other CS networks by a large margin, validating the collaboration and mutual supports among its components and strategies. Codes are available at https://github.com/Guaishou74851/CASNet.
Rethinking IoU-based Optimization for Single-stage 3D Object Detection
Authors: Hualian Sheng, Sijia Cai, Na Zhao, Bing Deng, Jianqiang Huang, Xian-Sheng Hua, Min-Jian Zhao, Gim Hee Lee
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, Object Detection, regression

Since Intersection-over-Union (IoU) based optimization maintains the consistency of the final IoU prediction metric and losses, it has been widely used in both regression and classification branches of single-stage 2D object detectors. Recently, several 3D object detection methods adopt IoU-based optimization and directly replace the 2D IoU with 3D IoU. However, such a direct computation in 3D is very costly due to the complex implementation and inefficient backward operations. Moreover, 3D IoU-based optimization is sub-optimal as it is sensitive to rotation and thus can cause training instability and detection performance deterioration. In this paper, we propose a novel Rotation-Decoupled IoU (RDIoU) method that can mitigate the rotation-sensitivity issue, and produce more efficient optimization objectives compared with 3D IoU during the training stage. Specifically, our RDIoU simplifies the complex interactions of regression parameters by decoupling the rotation variable as an independent term, yet preserving the geometry of 3D IoU. By incorporating RDIoU into both the regression and classification branches, the network is encouraged to learn more precise bounding boxes and concurrently overcome the misalignment issue between classification and regression. Extensive experiments on the benchmark KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset validate that our RDIoU method can bring substantial improvement for the single-stage 3D object detection.
Vision Transformers: From Semantic Segmentation to Dense Prediction
Authors: Li Zhang, Jiachen Lu, Sixiao Zheng, Xinxuan Zhao, Xiatian Zhu, Yanwei Fu, Tao Xiang, Jianfeng Feng, Philip H. S. Torr
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Prediction, Representation Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The emergence of vision transformers (ViTs) in image classification has shifted the methodologies for visual representation learning. In particular, ViTs learn visual representation at full receptive field per layer across all the image patches, in comparison to the increasing receptive fields of CNNs across layers and other alternatives (e.g., large kernels and atrous convolution). In this work, for the first time we explore the global context learning potentials of ViTs for dense visual prediction (e.g., semantic segmentation). Our motivation is that through learning global context at full receptive field layer by layer, ViTs may capture stronger long-range dependency information, critical for dense prediction tasks. We first demonstrate that encoding an image as a sequence of patches, a vanilla ViT without local convolution and resolution reduction can yield stronger visual representation for semantic segmentation. For example, our model, termed as SEgmentation TRansformer (SETR), excels on ADE20K (50.28% mIoU, the first position in the test leaderboard on the day of submission) and performs competitively on Cityscapes. However, the basic ViT architecture falls short in broader dense prediction applications, such as object detection and instance segmentation, due to its lack of a pyramidal structure, high computational demand, and insufficient local context. For tackling general dense visual prediction tasks in a cost-effective manner, we further formulate a family of Hierarchical Local-Global (HLG) Transformers, characterized by local attention within windows and global-attention across windows in a pyramidal architecture. Extensive experiments show that our methods achieve appealing performance on a variety of dense prediction tasks (e.g., object detection and instance segmentation and semantic segmentation) as well as image classification.
Computer Vision to the Rescue: Infant Postural Symmetry Estimation from Incongruent Annotations
Authors: Xiaofei Huang, Michael Wan, Lingfei Luan, Bethany Tunik, Sarah Ostadabbas
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Survey

Bilateral postural symmetry plays a key role as a potential risk marker for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and as a symptom of congenital muscular torticollis (CMT) in infants, but current methods of assessing symmetry require laborious clinical expert assessments. In this paper, we develop a computer vision based infant symmetry assessment system, leveraging 3D human pose estimation for infants. Evaluation and calibration of our system against ground truth assessments is complicated by our findings from a survey of human ratings of angle and symmetry, that such ratings exhibit low inter-rater reliability. To rectify this, we develop a Bayesian estimator of the ground truth derived from a probabilistic graphical model of fallible human raters. We show that the 3D infant pose estimation model can achieve 68% area under the receiver operating characteristic curve performance in predicting the Bayesian aggregate labels, compared to only 61% from a 2D infant pose estimation model and 60% from a 3D adult pose estimation model, highlighting the importance of 3D poses and infant domain knowledge in assessing infant body symmetry. Our survey analysis also suggests that human ratings are susceptible to higher levels of bias and inconsistency, and hence our final 3D pose-based symmetry assessment system is calibrated but not directly supervised by Bayesian aggregate human ratings, yielding higher levels of consistency and lower levels of inter-limb assessment bias.
Cycle Encoding of a StyleGAN Encoder for Improved Reconstruction and Editability
Authors: Xudong Mao, Liujuan Cao, Aurele T. Gnanha, Zhenguo Yang, Qing Li, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00

GAN inversion aims to invert an input image into the latent space of a pre-trained GAN. Despite the recent advances in GAN inversion, there remain challenges to mitigate the tradeoff between distortion and editability, i.e. reconstructing the input image accurately and editing the inverted image with a small visual quality drop. The recently proposed pivotal tuning model makes significant progress towards reconstruction and editability, by using a two-step approach that first inverts the input image into a latent code, called pivot code, and then alters the generator so that the input image can be accurately mapped into the pivot code. Here, we show that both reconstruction and editability can be improved by a proper design of the pivot code. We present a simple yet effective method, named cycle encoding, for a high-quality pivot code. The key idea of our method is to progressively train an encoder in varying spaces according to a cycle scheme: W->W+->W. This training methodology preserves the properties of both W and W+ spaces, i.e. high editability of W and low distortion of W+. To further decrease the distortion, we also propose to refine the pivot code with an optimization-based method, where a regularization term is introduced to reduce the degradation in editability. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons to several state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach.
Multi-Task Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in-the-wild
Authors: Tenggan Zhang, Chuanhe Liu, Xiaolong Liu, Yuchen Liu, Liyu Meng, Lei Sun, Wenqiang Jiang, Fengyuan Zhang, Jinming Zhao, Qin Jin
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Multi-Task Learning, Representation Learning

This paper presents our system for the Multi-Task Learning (MTL) Challenge in the 4th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition. We explore the research problems of this challenge from three aspects: 1) For obtaining efficient and robust visual feature representations, we propose MAE-based unsupervised representation learning and IResNet/DenseNet-based supervised representation learning methods; 2) Considering the importance of temporal information in videos, we explore three types of sequential encoders to capture the temporal information, including the encoder based on transformer, the encoder based on LSTM, and the encoder based on GRU; 3) For modeling the correlation between these different tasks (i.e., valence, arousal, expression, and AU) for multi-task affective analysis, we first explore the dependency between these different tasks and propose three multi-task learning frameworks to model the correlations effectively. Our system achieves the performance of $1.7607$ on the validation dataset and $1.4361$ on the test dataset, ranking first in the MTL Challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/AIM3-RUC/ABAW4.
RCLane: Relay Chain Prediction for Lane Detection
Authors: Shenghua Xu, Xinyue Cai, Bin Zhao, Li Zhang, Hang Xu, Yanwei Fu, xiangyang xue
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Lane Detection, Prediction

Lane detection is an important component of many real-world autonomous systems. Despite a wide variety of lane detection approaches have been proposed, reporting steady benchmark improvements over time, lane detection remains a largely unsolved problem. This is because most of the existing lane detection methods either treat the lane detection as a dense prediction or a detection task, few of them consider the unique topologies (Y-shape, Fork-shape, nearly horizontal lane) of the lane markers, which leads to sub-optimal solution. In this paper, we present a new method for lane detection based on relay chain prediction. Specifically, our model predicts a segmentation map to classify the foreground and background region. For each pixel point in the foreground region, we go through the forward branch and backward branch to recover the whole lane. Each branch decodes a transfer map and a distance map to produce the direction moving to the next point, and how many steps to progressively predict a relay station (next point). As such, our model is able to capture the keypoints along the lanes. Despite its simplicity, our strategy allows us to establish new state-of-the-art on four major benchmarks including TuSimple, CULane, CurveLanes and LLAMAS.
Det6D: A Ground-Aware Full-Pose 3D Object Detector for Improving Terrain Robustness
Authors: Junyuan Ouyang, Haoyao Chen
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, object-detection, Object Detection

Accurate 3D object detection with LiDAR is critical for autonomous driving. Existing research is all based on the flat-world assumption. However, the actual road can be complex with steep sections, which breaks the premise. Current methods suffer from performance degradation in this case due to difficulty correctly detecting objects on sloped terrain. In this work, we propose Det6D, the first full-degree-of-freedom 3D object detector without spatial and postural limitations, to improve terrain robustness. We choose the point-based framework by founding their capability of detecting objects in the entire spatial range. To predict full-degree poses, including pitch and roll, we design a ground-aware orientation branch that leverages the local ground constraints. Given the difficulty of long-tail non-flat scene data collection and 6D pose annotation, we present Slope-Aug, a data augmentation method for synthesizing non-flat terrain from existing datasets recorded in flat scenes. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method in different terrains. We further conducted an extended experiment to explore how the network predicts the two extra poses. The proposed modules are plug-and-play for existing point-based frameworks. The code is available at https://github.com/HITSZ-NRSL/De6D.
Geometric Features Informed Multi-person Human-object Interaction Recognition in Videos
Authors: Tanqiu Qiao, Qianhui Men, Frederick W. B. Li, Yoshiki Kubotani, Shigeo Morishima, Hubert P. H. Shum
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) recognition in videos is important for analyzing human activity. Most existing work focusing on visual features usually suffer from occlusion in the real-world scenarios. Such a problem will be further complicated when multiple people and objects are involved in HOIs. Consider that geometric features such as human pose and object position provide meaningful information to understand HOIs, we argue to combine the benefits of both visual and geometric features in HOI recognition, and propose a novel Two-level Geometric feature-informed Graph Convolutional Network (2G-GCN). The geometric-level graph models the interdependency between geometric features of humans and objects, while the fusion-level graph further fuses them with visual features of humans and objects. To demonstrate the novelty and effectiveness of our method in challenging scenarios, we propose a new multi-person HOI dataset (MPHOI-72). Extensive experiments on MPHOI-72 (multi-person HOI), CAD-120 (single-human HOI) and Bimanual Actions (two-hand HOI) datasets demonstrate our superior performance compared to state-of-the-arts.