pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FedVMR: A New Federated Learning method for Video Moment Retrieval
Authors: Yan Wang, Xin Luo, Zhen-Duo Chen, Peng-Fei Zhang, Meng Liu, Xin-Shun Xu
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Moment Retrieval, Retrieval

Despite the great success achieved, existing video moment retrieval (VMR) methods are developed under the assumption that data are centralizedly stored. However, in real-world applications, due to the inherent nature of data generation and privacy concerns, data are often distributed on different silos, bringing huge challenges to effective large-scale training. In this work, we try to overcome above limitation by leveraging the recent success of federated learning. As the first that is explored in VMR field, the new task is defined as video moment retrieval with distributed data. Then, a novel federated learning method named FedVMR is proposed to facilitate large-scale and secure training of VMR models in decentralized environment. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate its effectiveness. This work is the very first attempt to enable safe and efficient VMR training in decentralized scene, which is hoped to pave the way for further study in the related research field.
Contextual Learning in Fourier Complex Field for VHR Remote Sensing Images
Authors: Yan Zhang, Xiyuan Gao, Qingyan Duan, Jiaxu Leng, Xiao Pu, Xinbo Gao
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing (RS) image classification is the fundamental task for RS image analysis and understanding. Recently, transformer-based models demonstrated outstanding potential for learning high-order contextual relationships from natural images with general resolution (224x224 pixels) and achieved remarkable results on general image classification tasks. However, the complexity of the naive transformer grows quadratically with the increase in image size, which prevents transformer-based models from VHR RS image (500x500 pixels) classification and other computationally expensive downstream tasks. To this end, we propose to decompose the expensive self-attention (SA) into real and imaginary parts via discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and therefore propose an efficient complex self-attention (CSA) mechanism. Benefiting from the conjugated symmetric property of DFT, CSA is capable to model the high-order contextual information with less than half computations of naive SA. To overcome the gradient explosion in Fourier complex field, we replace the Softmax function with the carefully designed Logmax function to normalize the attention map of CSA and stabilize the gradient propagation. By stacking various layers of CSA blocks, we propose the Fourier Complex Transformer (FCT) model to learn global contextual information from VHR aerial images following the hierarchical manners. Universal experiments conducted on commonly used RS classification data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of FCT, especially on very high-resolution RS images.
LBF:Learnable Bilateral Filter For Point Cloud Denoising
Authors: Huajian Si, Zeyong Wei, Zhe Zhu, Honghua Chen, Dong Liang, Weiming Wang, Mingqiang Wei
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Bilateral filter (BF) is a fast, lightweight and effective tool for image denoising and well extended to point cloud denoising. However, it often involves continual yet manual parameter adjustment; this inconvenience discounts the efficiency and user experience to obtain satisfied denoising results. We propose LBF, an end-to-end learnable bilateral filtering network for point cloud denoising; to our knowledge, this is the first time. Unlike the conventional BF and its variants that receive the same parameters for a whole point cloud, LBF learns adaptive parameters for each point according its geometric characteristic (e.g., corner, edge, plane), avoiding remnant noise, wrongly-removed geometric details, and distorted shapes. Besides the learnable paradigm of BF, we have two cores to facilitate LBF. First, different from the local BF, LBF possesses a global-scale feature perception ability by exploiting multi-scale patches of each point. Second, LBF formulates a geometry-aware bi-directional projection loss, leading the denoising results to being faithful to their underlying surfaces. Users can apply our LBF without any laborious parameter tuning to achieve the optimal denoising results. Experiments show clear improvements of LBF over its competitors on both synthetic and real-scanned datasets.
IB-U-Nets: Improving medical image segmentation tasks with 3D Inductive Biased kernels
Authors: Shrajan Bhandary, Zahra Babaiee, Dejan Kostyszyn, Tobias Fechter, Constantinos Zamboglou, Anca-Ligia Grosu, Radu Grosu
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Inductive Bias, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Despite the success of convolutional neural networks for 3D medical-image segmentation, the architectures currently used are still not robust enough to the protocols of different scanners, and the variety of image properties they produce. Moreover, access to large-scale datasets with annotated regions of interest is scarce, and obtaining good results is thus difficult. To overcome these challenges, we introduce IB-U-Nets, a novel architecture with inductive bias, inspired by the visual processing in vertebrates. With the 3D U-Net as the base, we add two 3D residual components to the second encoder blocks. They provide an inductive bias, helping U-Nets to segment anatomical structures from 3D images with increased robustness and accuracy. We compared IB-U-Nets with state-of-the-art 3D U-Nets on multiple modalities and organs, such as the prostate and spleen, using the same training and testing pipeline, including data processing, augmentation and cross-validation. Our results demonstrate the superior robustness and accuracy of IB-U-Nets, especially on small datasets, as is typically the case in medical-image analysis. IB-U-Nets source code and models are publicly available.
Matching entropy based disparity estimation from light field
Authors: Ligen Shi, Chang Liu, Di He, Xing Zhao, Jun Qiu
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Disparity Estimation

A major challenge for matching-based depth estimation is to prevent mismatches in occlusion and smooth regions. An effective matching window satisfying three characteristics: texture richness, disparity consistency and anti-occlusion should be able to prevent mismatches to some extent. According to these characteristics, we propose matching entropy in the spatial domain of light field to measure the amount of correct information in a matching window, which provides the criterion for matching window selection. Based on matching entropy regularization, we establish an optimization model for depth estimation with a matching cost fidelity term. To find the optimum, we propose a two-step adaptive matching algorithm. First, the region type is adaptively determined to identify occluding, occluded, smooth and textured regions. Then, the matching entropy criterion is used to adaptively select the size and shape of matching windows, as well as the visible viewpoints. The two-step process can reduce mismatches and redundant calculations by selecting effective matching windows. The experimental results on synthetic and real data show that the proposed method can effectively improve the accuracy of depth estimation in occlusion and smooth regions and has strong robustness for different noise levels. Therefore, high-precision depth estimation from 4D light field data is achieved.
NeRFPlayer: A Streamable Dynamic Scene Representation with Decomposed Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Liangchen Song, Anpei Chen, Zhong Li, Zhang Chen, Lele Chen, Junsong Yuan, Yi Xu, Andreas Geiger
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00

Visually exploring in a real-world 4D spatiotemporal space freely in VR has been a long-term quest. The task is especially appealing when only a few or even single RGB cameras are used for capturing the dynamic scene. To this end, we present an efficient framework capable of fast reconstruction, compact modeling, and streamable rendering. First, we propose to decompose the 4D spatiotemporal space according to temporal characteristics. Points in the 4D space are associated with probabilities of belonging to three categories: static, deforming, and new areas. Each area is represented and regularized by a separate neural field. Second, we propose a hybrid representations based feature streaming scheme for efficiently modeling the neural fields. Our approach, coined NeRFPlayer, is evaluated on dynamic scenes captured by single hand-held cameras and multi-camera arrays, achieving comparable or superior rendering performance in terms of quality and speed comparable to recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving reconstruction in 10 seconds per frame and interactive rendering.
Grafting Vision Transformers
Authors: Jongwoo Park, Kumara Kahatapitiya, Donghyun Kim, Shivchander Sudalairaj, Quanfu Fan, Michael S. Ryoo
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently become the state-of-the-art across many computer vision tasks. In contrast to convolutional networks (CNNs), ViTs enable global information sharing even within shallow layers of a network, i.e., among high-resolution features. However, this perk was later overlooked with the success of pyramid architectures such as Swin Transformer, which show better performance-complexity trade-offs. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient add-on component (termed GrafT) that considers global dependencies and multi-scale information throughout the network, in both high- and low-resolution features alike. It has the flexibility of branching out at arbitrary depths and shares most of the parameters and computations of the backbone. GrafT shows consistent gains over various well-known models which includes both hybrid and pure Transformer types, both homogeneous and pyramid structures, and various self-attention methods. In particular, it largely benefits mobile-size models by providing high-level semantics. On the ImageNet-1k dataset, GrafT delivers +3.9%, +1.4%, and +1.9% top-1 accuracy improvement to DeiT-T, Swin-T, and MobileViT-XXS, respectively. Our code and models will be made available.
PSFormer: Point Transformer for 3D Salient Object Detection
Authors: Baian Chen, Lipeng Gu, Xin Zhuang, Yiyang Shen, Weiming Wang, Mingqiang Wei
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

We propose PSFormer, an effective point transformer model for 3D salient object detection. PSFormer is an encoder-decoder network that takes full advantage of transformers to model the contextual information in both multi-scale point- and scene-wise manners. In the encoder, we develop a Point Context Transformer (PCT) module to capture region contextual features at the point level; PCT contains two different transformers to excavate the relationship among points. In the decoder, we develop a Scene Context Transformer (SCT) module to learn context representations at the scene level; SCT contains both Upsampling-and-Transformer blocks and Multi-context Aggregation units to integrate the global semantic and multi-level features from the encoder into the global scene context. Experiments show clear improvements of PSFormer over its competitors and validate that PSFormer is more robust to challenging cases such as small objects, multiple objects, and objects with complex structures.
Comparison of Stereo Matching Algorithms for the Development of Disparity Map
Authors: Hamid Fsian, Vahid Mohammadi, Pierre Gouton, Saeid Minaei
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Stereo Matching

Stereo Matching is one of the classical problems in computer vision for the extraction of 3D information but still controversial for accuracy and processing costs. The use of matching techniques and cost functions is crucial in the development of the disparity map. This paper presents a comparative study of six different stereo matching algorithms including Block Matching (BM), Block Matching with Dynamic Programming (BMDP), Belief Propagation (BP), Gradient Feature Matching (GF), Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG), and the proposed method. Also three cost functions namely Mean Squared Error (MSE), Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD), Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC) were used and compared. The stereo images used in this study were from the Middlebury Stereo Datasets provided with perfect and imperfect calibrations. Results show that the selection of matching function is quite important and also depends on the images properties. Results showed that the BP algorithm in most cases provided better results getting accuracies over 95%.
GeoGCN: Geometric Dual-domain Graph Convolution Network for Point Cloud Denoising
Authors: Zhaowei Chen, Peng Li, Zeyong Wei, Honghua Chen, Haoran Xie, Mingqiang Wei, Fu Lee Wang
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

We propose GeoGCN, a novel geometric dual-domain graph convolution network for point cloud denoising (PCD). Beyond the traditional wisdom of PCD, to fully exploit the geometric information of point clouds, we define two kinds of surface normals, one is called Real Normal (RN), and the other is Virtual Normal (VN). RN preserves the local details of noisy point clouds while VN avoids the global shape shrinkage during denoising. GeoGCN is a new PCD paradigm that, 1) first regresses point positions by spatialbased GCN with the help of VNs, 2) then estimates initial RNs by performing Principal Component Analysis on the regressed points, and 3) finally regresses fine RNs by normalbased GCN. Unlike existing PCD methods, GeoGCN not only exploits two kinds of geometry expertise (i.e., RN and VN) but also benefits from training data. Experiments validate that GeoGCN outperforms SOTAs in terms of both noise-robustness and local-and-global feature preservation.
Subsidiary Prototype Alignment for Universal Domain Adaptation
Authors: Jogendra Nath Kundu, Suvaansh Bhambri, Akshay Kulkarni, Hiran Sarkar, Varun Jampani, R. Venkatesh Babu
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Object Recognition, Single Particle Analysis, Transfer Learning, Universal Domain Adaptation

Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA) deals with the problem of knowledge transfer between two datasets with domain-shift as well as category-shift. The goal is to categorize unlabeled target samples, either into one of the "known" categories or into a single "unknown" category. A major problem in UniDA is negative transfer, i.e. misalignment of "known" and "unknown" classes. To this end, we first uncover an intriguing tradeoff between negative-transfer-risk and domain-invariance exhibited at different layers of a deep network. It turns out we can strike a balance between these two metrics at a mid-level layer. Towards designing an effective framework based on this insight, we draw motivation from Bag-of-visual-Words (BoW). Word-prototypes in a BoW-like representation of a mid-level layer would represent lower-level visual primitives that are likely to be unaffected by the category-shift in the high-level features. We develop modifications that encourage learning of word-prototypes followed by word-histogram based classification. Following this, subsidiary prototype-space alignment (SPA) can be seen as a closed-set alignment problem, thereby avoiding negative transfer. We realize this with a novel word-histogram-related pretext task to enable closed-set SPA, operating in conjunction with goal task UniDA. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on top of existing UniDA techniques, yielding state-of-the-art performance across three standard UniDA and Open-Set DA object recognition benchmarks.
Long-HOT: A Modular Hierarchical Approach for Long-Horizon Object Transport
Authors: Sriram Narayanan, Dinesh Jayaraman, Manmohan Chandraker
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning

We address key challenges in long-horizon embodied exploration and navigation by proposing a new object transport task and a novel modular framework for temporally extended navigation. Our first contribution is the design of a novel Long-HOT environment focused on deep exploration and long-horizon planning where the agent is required to efficiently find and pick up target objects to be carried and dropped at a goal location, with load constraints and optional access to a container if it finds one. Further, we propose a modular hierarchical transport policy (HTP) that builds a topological graph of the scene to perform exploration with the help of weighted frontiers. Our hierarchical approach uses a combination of motion planning algorithms to reach point goals within explored locations and object navigation policies for moving towards semantic targets at unknown locations. Experiments on both our proposed Habitat transport task and on MultiOn benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms baselines and prior works. Further, we validate the effectiveness of our modular approach for long-horizon transport by demonstrating meaningful generalization to much harder transport scenes with training only on simpler versions of the task.
Learning to Immunize Images for Tamper Localization and Self-Recovery
Authors: Qichao Ying, Hang Zhou, Zhenxing Qian, Sheng Li, Xinpeng Zhang
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00

Digital images are vulnerable to nefarious tampering attacks such as content addition or removal that severely alter the original meaning. It is somehow like a person without protection that is open to various kinds of viruses. Image immunization (Imuge) is a technology of protecting the images by introducing trivial perturbation, so that the protected images are immune to the viruses in that the tampered contents can be auto-recovered. This paper presents Imuge+, an enhanced scheme for image immunization. By observing the invertible relationship between image immunization and the corresponding self-recovery, we employ an invertible neural network to jointly learn image immunization and recovery respectively in the forward and backward pass. We also introduce an efficient attack layer that involves both malicious tamper and benign image post-processing, where a novel distillation-based JPEG simulator is proposed for improved JPEG robustness. Our method achieves promising results in real-world tests where experiments show accurate tamper localization as well as high-fidelity content recovery. Additionally, we show superior performance on tamper localization compared to state-of-the-art schemes based on passive forensics.
Single-Image HDR Reconstruction by Multi-Exposure Generation
Authors: Phuoc-Hieu Le, Quynh Le, Rang Nguyen, Binh-Son Hua
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: HDR Reconstruction, Tone Mapping, Weakly-supervised Learning

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging is an indispensable technique in modern photography. Traditional methods focus on HDR reconstruction from multiple images, solving the core problems of image alignment, fusion, and tone mapping, yet having a perfect solution due to ghosting and other visual artifacts in the reconstruction. Recent attempts at single-image HDR reconstruction show a promising alternative: by learning to map pixel values to their irradiance using a neural network, one can bypass the align-and-merge pipeline completely yet still obtain a high-quality HDR image. In this work, we propose a weakly supervised learning method that inverts the physical image formation process for HDR reconstruction via learning to generate multiple exposures from a single image. Our neural network can invert the camera response to reconstruct pixel irradiance before synthesizing multiple exposures and hallucinating details in under- and over-exposed regions from a single input image. To train the network, we propose a representation loss, a reconstruction loss, and a perceptual loss applied on pairs of under- and over-exposure images and thus do not require HDR images for training. Our experiments show that our proposed model can effectively reconstruct HDR images. Our qualitative and quantitative results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DrTMO dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/single_image_hdr.
Exploring Spatial-Temporal Features for Deepfake Detection and Localization
Authors: Wu Haiwei, Zhou Jiantao, Zhang Shile, Tian Jinyu
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, Optical Flow Estimation

With the continuous research on Deepfake forensics, recent studies have attempted to provide the fine-grained localization of forgeries, in addition to the coarse classification at the video-level. However, the detection and localization performance of existing Deepfake forensic methods still have plenty of room for further improvement. In this work, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Deepfake Detection and Localization (ST-DDL) network that simultaneously explores spatial and temporal features for detecting and localizing forged regions. Specifically, we design a new Anchor-Mesh Motion (AMM) algorithm to extract temporal (motion) features by modeling the precise geometric movements of the facial micro-expression. Compared with traditional motion extraction methods (e.g., optical flow) designed to simulate large-moving objects, our proposed AMM could better capture the small-displacement facial features. The temporal features and the spatial features are then fused in a Fusion Attention (FA) module based on a Transformer architecture for the eventual Deepfake forensic tasks. The superiority of our ST-DDL network is verified by experimental comparisons with several state-of-the-art competitors, in terms of both video- and pixel-level detection and localization performance. Furthermore, to impel the future development of Deepfake forensics, we build a public forgery dataset consisting of 6000 videos, with many new features such as using widely-used commercial software (e.g., After Effects) for the production, providing online social networks transmitted versions, and splicing multi-source videos. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/HighwayWu/ST-DDL.
VLT: Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation
Authors: Henghui Ding, Chang Liu, Suchen Wang, Xudong Jiang
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Referring Expression Segmentation, Referring Video Object Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation

We propose a Vision-Language Transformer (VLT) framework for referring segmentation to facilitate deep interactions among multi-modal information and enhance the holistic understanding to vision-language features. There are different ways to understand the dynamic emphasis of a language expression, especially when interacting with the image. However, the learned queries in existing transformer works are fixed after training, which cannot cope with the randomness and huge diversity of the language expressions. To address this issue, we propose a Query Generation Module, which dynamically produces multiple sets of input-specific queries to represent the diverse comprehensions of language expression. To find the best among these diverse comprehensions, so as to generate a better mask, we propose a Query Balance Module to selectively fuse the corresponding responses of the set of queries. Furthermore, to enhance the model's ability in dealing with diverse language expressions, we consider inter-sample learning to explicitly endow the model with knowledge of understanding different language expressions to the same object. We introduce masked contrastive learning to narrow down the features of different expressions for the same target object while distinguishing the features of different objects. The proposed approach is lightweight and achieves new state-of-the-art referring segmentation results consistently on five datasets.