pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Generative Myocardial Motion Tracking via Latent Space Exploration with Biomechanics-informed Prior
Authors: Chen Qin, Shuo Wang, Chen Chen, Wenjia Bai, Daniel Rueckert
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

Myocardial motion and deformation are rich descriptors that characterize cardiac function. Image registration, as the most commonly used technique for myocardial motion tracking, is an ill-posed inverse problem which often requires prior assumptions on the solution space. In contrast to most existing approaches which impose explicit generic regularization such as smoothness, in this work we propose a novel method that can implicitly learn an application-specific biomechanics-informed prior and embed it into a neural network-parameterized transformation model. Particularly, the proposed method leverages a variational autoencoder-based generative model to learn a manifold for biomechanically plausible deformations. The motion tracking then can be performed via traversing the learnt manifold to search for the optimal transformations while considering the sequence information. The proposed method is validated on three public cardiac cine MRI datasets with comprehensive evaluations. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform other approaches, yielding higher motion tracking accuracy with reasonable volume preservation and better generalizability to varying data distributions. It also enables better estimates of myocardial strains, which indicates the potential of the method in characterizing spatiotemporal signatures for understanding cardiovascular diseases.
Towards Understanding Why Mask-Reconstruction Pretraining Helps in Downstream Tasks
Authors: Jiachun Pan, Pan Zhou, Shuicheng Yan
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

For unsupervised pretraining, mask-reconstruction pretraining (MRP) approaches, e.g. MAE and data2vec, randomly mask input patches and then reconstruct the pixels or semantic features of these masked patches via an auto-encoder. Then for a downstream task, supervised fine-tuning the pretrained encoder remarkably surpasses the conventional ``supervised learning'' (SL) trained from scratch. However, it is still unclear 1) how MRP performs semantic feature learning in the pretraining phase and 2) why it helps in downstream tasks. To solve these problems, we first theoretically show that on an auto-encoder of a two/one-layered convolution encoder/decoder, MRP can capture all discriminative features of each potential semantic class in the pretraining dataset. Then considering the fact that the pretraining dataset is of huge size and high diversity and thus covers most features in downstream dataset, in fine-tuning phase, the pretrained encoder can capture as much features as it can in downstream datasets, and would not lost these features with theoretical guarantees. In contrast, SL only randomly captures some features due to lottery ticket hypothesis. So MRP provably achieves better performance than SL on the classification tasks. Experimental results testify to our data assumptions and also our theoretical implications.
Dual Windows Are Significant: Learning from Mediastinal Window and Focusing on Lung Window
Authors: Qiuli Wang, Xin Tan, Chen Liu
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

Since the pandemic of COVID-19, several deep learning methods were proposed to analyze the chest Computed Tomography (CT) for diagnosis. In the current situation, the disease course classification is significant for medical personnel to decide the treatment. Most previous deep-learning-based methods extract features observed from the lung window. However, it has been proved that some appearances related to diagnosis can be observed better from the mediastinal window rather than the lung window, e.g., the pulmonary consolidation happens more in severe symptoms. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual Window RCNN Network (DWRNet), which mainly learns the distinctive features from the successive mediastinal window. Regarding the features extracted from the lung window, we introduce the Lung Window Attention Block (LWA Block) to pay additional attention to them for enhancing the mediastinal-window features. Moreover, instead of picking up specific slices from the whole CT slices, we use a Recurrent CNN and analyze successive slices as videos. Experimental results show that the fused and representative features improve the predictions of disease course by reaching the accuracy of 90.57%, against the baseline with an accuracy of 84.86%. Ablation studies demonstrate that combined dual window features are more efficient than lung-window features alone, while paying attention to lung-window features can improve the model's stability.
Dyna-DM: Dynamic Object-aware Self-supervised Monocular Depth Maps
Authors: Kieran Saunders, George Vogiatzis, Luis J. Manso
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Depth Estimation, GPU, Monocular Depth Estimation, Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has been a subject of intense study in recent years, because of its applications in robotics and autonomous driving. Much of the recent work focuses on improving depth estimation by increasing architecture complexity. This paper shows that state-of-the-art performance can also be achieved by improving the learning process rather than increasing model complexity. More specifically, we propose (i) disregarding small potentially dynamic objects when training, and (ii) employing an appearance-based approach to separately estimate object pose for truly dynamic objects. We demonstrate that these simplifications reduce GPU memory usage by 29% and result in qualitatively and quantitatively improved depth maps. The code is available at https://github.com/kieran514/Dyna-DM.
Language-Bridged Spatial-Temporal Interaction for Referring Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Zihan Ding, Tianrui Hui, Junshi Huang, Xiaoming Wei, Jizhong Han, Si Liu
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Denoising, Referring Video Object Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Referring video object segmentation aims to predict foreground labels for objects referred by natural language expressions in videos. Previous methods either depend on 3D ConvNets or incorporate additional 2D ConvNets as encoders to extract mixed spatial-temporal features. However, these methods suffer from spatial misalignment or false distractors due to delayed and implicit spatial-temporal interaction occurring in the decoding phase. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Language-Bridged Duplex Transfer (LBDT) module which utilizes language as an intermediary bridge to accomplish explicit and adaptive spatial-temporal interaction earlier in the encoding phase. Concretely, cross-modal attention is performed among the temporal encoder, referring words and the spatial encoder to aggregate and transfer language-relevant motion and appearance information. In addition, we also propose a Bilateral Channel Activation (BCA) module in the decoding phase for further denoising and highlighting the spatial-temporal consistent features via channel-wise activation. Extensive experiments show our method achieves new state-of-the-art performances on four popular benchmarks with 6.8% and 6.9% absolute AP gains on A2D Sentences and J-HMDB Sentences respectively, while consuming around 7x less computational overhead.
Learning Digital Terrain Models from Point Clouds: ALS2DTM Dataset and Rasterization-based GAN
Authors: Hoàng-Ân Lê, Florent Guiotte, Minh-Tan Pham, Sébastien Lefèvre, Thomas Corpetti
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00

Despite the popularity of deep neural networks in various domains, the extraction of digital terrain models (DTMs) from airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds is still challenging. This might be due to the lack of dedicated large-scale annotated dataset and the data-structure discrepancy between point clouds and DTMs. To promote data-driven DTM extraction, this paper collects from open sources a large-scale dataset of ALS point clouds and corresponding DTMs with various urban, forested, and mountainous scenes. A baseline method is proposed as the first attempt to train a Deep neural network to extract digital Terrain models directly from ALS point clouds via Rasterization techniques, coined DeepTerRa. Extensive studies with well-established methods are performed to benchmark the dataset and analyze the challenges in learning to extract DTM from point clouds. The experimental results show the interest of the agnostic data-driven approach, with sub-metric error level compared to methods designed for DTM extraction. The data and source code is provided at https://lhoangan.github.io/deepterra/ for reproducibility and further similar research.
PixSelect: Less but Reliable Pixels for Accurate and Efficient Localization
Authors: Mohammad Altillawi
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Camera Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Accurate camera pose estimation is a fundamental requirement for numerous applications, such as autonomous driving, mobile robotics, and augmented reality. In this work, we address the problem of estimating the global 6 DoF camera pose from a single RGB image in a given environment. Previous works consider every part of the image valuable for localization. However, many image regions such as the sky, occlusions, and repetitive non-distinguishable patterns cannot be utilized for localization. In addition to adding unnecessary computation efforts, extracting and matching features from such regions produce many wrong matches which in turn degrades the localization accuracy and efficiency. Our work addresses this particular issue and shows by exploiting an interesting concept of sparse 3D models that we can exploit discriminatory environment parts and avoid useless image regions for the sake of a single image localization. Interestingly, through avoiding selecting keypoints from non-reliable image regions such as trees, bushes, cars, pedestrians, and occlusions, our work acts naturally as an outlier filter. This makes our system highly efficient in that minimal set of correspondences is needed and highly accurate as the number of outliers is low. Our work exceeds state-ofthe-art methods on outdoor Cambridge Landmarks dataset. With only relying on single image at inference, it outweighs in terms of accuracy methods that exploit pose priors and/or reference 3D models while being much faster. By choosing as little as 100 correspondences, it surpasses similar methods that localize from thousands of correspondences, while being more efficient. In particular, it achieves, compared to these methods, an improvement of localization by 33% on OldHospital scene. Furthermore, It outstands direct pose regressors even those that learn from sequence of images
Task Agnostic Restoration of Natural Video Dynamics
Authors: Muhammad Kashif Ali, DongJin Kim, Tae Hyun Kim
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Translation, Video Restoration

In many video restoration/translation tasks, image processing operations are na\"ively extended to the video domain by processing each frame independently, disregarding the temporal connection of the video frames. This disregard for the temporal connection often leads to severe temporal inconsistencies. State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) techniques that address these inconsistencies rely on the availability of unprocessed videos to implicitly siphon and utilize consistent video dynamics to restore the temporal consistency of frame-wise processed videos which often jeopardizes the translation effect. We propose a general framework for this task that learns to infer and utilize consistent motion dynamics from inconsistent videos to mitigate the temporal flicker while preserving the perceptual quality for both the temporally neighboring and relatively distant frames without requiring the raw videos at test time. The proposed framework produces SOTA results on two benchmark datasets, DAVIS and videvo.net, processed by numerous image processing applications. The code and the trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/MKashifAli/TARONVD}.
Large Loss Matters in Weakly Supervised Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Youngwook Kim, Jae Myung Kim, Zeynep Akata, Jungwoo Lee
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Classification, Memorization, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Weakly supervised multi-label classification (WSML) task, which is to learn a multi-label classification using partially observed labels per image, is becoming increasingly important due to its huge annotation cost. In this work, we first regard unobserved labels as negative labels, casting the WSML task into noisy multi-label classification. From this point of view, we empirically observe that memorization effect, which was first discovered in a noisy multi-class setting, also occurs in a multi-label setting. That is, the model first learns the representation of clean labels, and then starts memorizing noisy labels. Based on this finding, we propose novel methods for WSML which reject or correct the large loss samples to prevent model from memorizing the noisy label. Without heavy and complex components, our proposed methods outperform previous state-of-the-art WSML methods on several partial label settings including Pascal VOC 2012, MS COCO, NUSWIDE, CUB, and OpenImages V3 datasets. Various analysis also show that our methodology actually works well, validating that treating large loss properly matters in a weakly supervised multi-label classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/snucml/LargeLossMatters.
Wavelet Regularization Benefits Adversarial Training
Authors: Jun Yan, Huilin Yin, Xiaoyang Deng, Ziming Zhao, Wancheng Ge, Hao Zhang, Gerhard Rigoll
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Adversarial training methods are state-of-the-art (SOTA) empirical defense methods against adversarial examples. Many regularization methods have been proven to be effective with the combination of adversarial training. Nevertheless, such regularization methods are implemented in the time domain. Since adversarial vulnerability can be regarded as a high-frequency phenomenon, it is essential to regulate the adversarially-trained neural network models in the frequency domain. Faced with these challenges, we make a theoretical analysis on the regularization property of wavelets which can enhance adversarial training. We propose a wavelet regularization method based on the Haar wavelet decomposition which is named Wavelet Average Pooling. This wavelet regularization module is integrated into the wide residual neural network so that a new WideWaveletResNet model is formed. On the datasets of CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, our proposed Adversarial Wavelet Training method realizes considerable robustness under different types of attacks. It verifies the assumption that our wavelet regularization method can enhance adversarial robustness especially in the deep wide neural networks. The visualization experiments of the Frequency Principle (F-Principle) and interpretability are implemented to show the effectiveness of our method. A detailed comparison based on different wavelet base functions is presented. The code is available at the repository: \url{https://github.com/momo1986/AdversarialWaveletTraining}.
Hypernetwork-based Personalized Federated Learning for Multi-Institutional CT Imaging
Authors: Ziyuan Yang, Wenjun Xia, Zexin Lu, Yingyu Chen, Xiaoxiao Li, Yi Zhang
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), CT Reconstruction, Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning

Computed tomography (CT) is of great importance in clinical practice due to its powerful ability to provide patients' anatomical information without any invasive inspection, but its potential radiation risk is raising people's concerns. Deep learning-based methods are considered promising in CT reconstruction, but these network models are usually trained with the measured data obtained from specific scanning protocol and need to centralizedly collect large amounts of data, which will lead to serious data domain shift, and privacy concerns. To relieve these problems, in this paper, we propose a hypernetwork-based federated learning method for personalized CT imaging, dubbed as HyperFed. The basic assumption of HyperFed is that the optimization problem for each institution can be divided into two parts: the local data adaption problem and the global CT imaging problem, which are implemented by an institution-specific hypernetwork and a global-sharing imaging network, respectively. The purpose of global-sharing imaging network is to learn stable and effective common features from different institutions. The institution-specific hypernetwork is carefully designed to obtain hyperparameters to condition the global-sharing imaging network for personalized local CT reconstruction. Experiments show that HyperFed achieves competitive performance in CT reconstruction compared with several other state-of-the-art methods. It is believed as a promising direction to improve CT imaging quality and achieve personalized demands of different institutions or scanners without privacy data sharing. The codes will be released at https://github.com/Zi-YuanYang/HyperFed.
What do we learn? Debunking the Myth of Unsupervised Outlier Detection
Authors: Cosmin I. Bercea, Daniel Rueckert, Julia A. Schnabel
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Outlier Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Even though auto-encoders (AEs) have the desirable property of learning compact representations without labels and have been widely applied to out-of-distribution (OoD) detection, they are generally still poorly understood and are used incorrectly in detecting outliers where the normal and abnormal distributions are strongly overlapping. In general, the learned manifold is assumed to contain key information that is only important for describing samples within the training distribution, and that the reconstruction of outliers leads to high residual errors. However, recent work suggests that AEs are likely to be even better at reconstructing some types of OoD samples. In this work, we challenge this assumption and investigate what auto-encoders actually learn when they are posed to solve two different tasks. First, we propose two metrics based on the Fr\'echet inception distance (FID) and confidence scores of a trained classifier to assess whether AEs can learn the training distribution and reliably recognize samples from other domains. Second, we investigate whether AEs are able to synthesize normal images from samples with abnormal regions, on a more challenging lung pathology detection task. We have found that state-of-the-art (SOTA) AEs are either unable to constrain the latent manifold and allow reconstruction of abnormal patterns, or they are failing to accurately restore the inputs from their latent distribution, resulting in blurred or misaligned reconstructions. We propose novel deformable auto-encoders (MorphAEus) to learn perceptually aware global image priors and locally adapt their morphometry based on estimated dense deformation fields. We demonstrate superior performance over unsupervised methods in detecting OoD and pathology.
Blind Face Restoration: Benchmark Datasets and a Baseline Model
Authors: Puyang Zhang, Kaihao Zhang, Wenhan Luo, Changsheng Li, Guoren Wang
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Face Restoration

Blind Face Restoration (BFR) aims to construct a high-quality (HQ) face image from its corresponding low-quality (LQ) input. Recently, many BFR methods have been proposed and they have achieved remarkable success. However, these methods are trained or evaluated on privately synthesized datasets, which makes it infeasible for the subsequent approaches to fairly compare with them. To address this problem, we first synthesize two blind face restoration benchmark datasets called EDFace-Celeb-1M (BFR128) and EDFace-Celeb-150K (BFR512). State-of-the-art methods are benchmarked on them under five settings including blur, noise, low resolution, JPEG compression artifacts, and the combination of them (full degradation). To make the comparison more comprehensive, five widely-used quantitative metrics and two task-driven metrics including Average Face Landmark Distance (AFLD) and Average Face ID Cosine Similarity (AFICS) are applied. Furthermore, we develop an effective baseline model called Swin Transformer U-Net (STUNet). The STUNet with U-net architecture applies an attention mechanism and a shifted windowing scheme to capture long-range pixel interactions and focus more on significant features while still being trained efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed baseline method performs favourably against the SOTA methods on various BFR tasks.
Robust Deep Ensemble Method for Real-world Image Denoising
Authors: Pengju Liu, Hongzhi Zhang, Jinghui Wang, Yuzhi Wang, Dongwei Ren, WangMeng Zuo
Date: 2022-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Denoising, Image Deblurring, Image Denoising, Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Rain Removal, Super-Resolution

Recently, deep learning-based image denoising methods have achieved promising performance on test data with the same distribution as training set, where various denoising models based on synthetic or collected real-world training data have been learned. However, when handling real-world noisy images, the denoising performance is still limited. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Bayesian deep ensemble (BDE) method for real-world image denoising, where several representative deep denoisers pre-trained with various training data settings can be fused to improve robustness. The foundation of BDE is that real-world image noises are highly signal-dependent, and heterogeneous noises in a real-world noisy image can be separately handled by different denoisers. In particular, we take well-trained CBDNet, NBNet, HINet, Uformer and GMSNet into denoiser pool, and a U-Net is adopted to predict pixel-wise weighting maps to fuse these denoisers. Instead of solely learning pixel-wise weighting maps, Bayesian deep learning strategy is introduced to predict weighting uncertainty as well as weighting map, by which prediction variance can be modeled for improving robustness on real-world noisy images. Extensive experiments have shown that real-world noises can be better removed by fusing existing denoisers instead of training a big denoiser with expensive cost. On DND dataset, our BDE achieves +0.28~dB PSNR gain over the state-of-the-art denoising method. Moreover, we note that our BDE denoiser based on different Gaussian noise levels outperforms state-of-the-art CBDNet when applying to real-world noisy images. Furthermore, our BDE can be extended to other image restoration tasks, and achieves +0.30dB, +0.18dB and +0.12dB PSNR gains on benchmark datasets for image deblurring, image deraining and single image super-resolution, respectively.