pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Alternating Objectives Generates Stronger PGD-Based Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Nikolaos Antoniou, Efthymios Georgiou, Alexandros Potamianos
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Designing powerful adversarial attacks is of paramount importance for the evaluation of $\ell_p$-bounded adversarial defenses. Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) is one of the most effective and conceptually simple algorithms to generate such adversaries. The search space of PGD is dictated by the steepest ascent directions of an objective. Despite the plethora of objective function choices, there is no universally superior option and robustness overestimation may arise from ill-suited objective selection. Driven by this observation, we postulate that the combination of different objectives through a simple loss alternating scheme renders PGD more robust towards design choices. We experimentally verify this assertion on a synthetic-data example and by evaluating our proposed method across 25 different $\ell_{\infty}$-robust models and 3 datasets. The performance improvement is consistent, when compared to the single loss counterparts. In the CIFAR-10 dataset, our strongest adversarial attack outperforms all of the white-box components of AutoAttack (AA) ensemble, as well as the most powerful attacks existing on the literature, achieving state-of-the-art results in the computational budget of our study ($T=100$, no restarts).
Vision Transformers are Parameter-Efficient Audio-Visual Learners
Authors: Yan-Bo Lin, Yi-Lin Sung, Jie Lei, Mohit Bansal, Gedas Bertasius
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Audio-visual Question Answering, AUDIO-VISUAL QUESTION ANSWERING (MUSIC-AVQA-v2.0)

Vision transformers (ViTs) have achieved impressive results on various computer vision tasks in the last several years. In this work, we study the capability of frozen ViTs, pretrained only on visual data, to generalize to audio-visual data without finetuning any of its original parameters. To do so, we propose a latent audio-visual hybrid (LAVISH) adapter that adapts pretrained ViTs to audio-visual tasks by injecting a small number of trainable parameters into every layer of a frozen ViT. To efficiently fuse visual and audio cues, our LAVISH adapter uses a small set of latent tokens, which form an attention bottleneck, thus, eliminating the quadratic cost of standard cross-attention. Compared to the existing modality-specific audio-visual methods, our approach achieves competitive or even better performance on various audio-visual tasks while using fewer tunable parameters and without relying on costly audio pretraining or external audio encoders. Our code is available at https://genjib.github.io/project_page/LAVISH/
The Effects of Character-Level Data Augmentation on Style-Based Dating of Historical Manuscripts
Authors: Lisa Koopmans, Maruf A. Dhali, Lambert Schomaker
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Identifying the production dates of historical manuscripts is one of the main goals for paleographers when studying ancient documents. Automatized methods can provide paleographers with objective tools to estimate dates more accurately. Previously, statistical features have been used to date digitized historical manuscripts based on the hypothesis that handwriting styles change over periods. However, the sparse availability of such documents poses a challenge in obtaining robust systems. Hence, the research of this article explores the influence of data augmentation on the dating of historical manuscripts. Linear Support Vector Machines were trained with k-fold cross-validation on textural and grapheme-based features extracted from historical manuscripts of different collections, including the Medieval Paleographical Scale, early Aramaic manuscripts, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Results show that training models with augmented data improve the performance of historical manuscripts dating by 1% - 3% in cumulative scores. Additionally, this indicates further enhancement possibilities by considering models specific to the features and the documents' scripts.
Urban Scene Semantic Segmentation with Low-Cost Coarse Annotation
Authors: Anurag Das, Yongqin Xian, Yang He, Zeynep Akata, Bernt Schiele
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Scene Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

For best performance, today's semantic segmentation methods use large and carefully labeled datasets, requiring expensive annotation budgets. In this work, we show that coarse annotation is a low-cost but highly effective alternative for training semantic segmentation models. Considering the urban scene segmentation scenario, we leverage cheap coarse annotations for real-world captured data, as well as synthetic data to train our model and show competitive performance compared with finely annotated real-world data. Specifically, we propose a coarse-to-fine self-training framework that generates pseudo labels for unlabeled regions of the coarsely annotated data, using synthetic data to improve predictions around the boundaries between semantic classes, and using cross-domain data augmentation to increase diversity. Our extensive experimental results on Cityscapes and BDD100k datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a significantly better performance vs annotation cost tradeoff, yielding a comparable performance to fully annotated data with only a small fraction of the annotation budget. Also, when used as pretraining, our framework performs better compared to the standard fully supervised setting.
Automatic vehicle trajectory data reconstruction at scale
Authors: Yanbing Wang, Derek Gloudemans, Junyi Ji, Zi Nean Teoh, Lisa Liu, Gergely Zachár, William Barbour, Daniel Work
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, vehicle detection

In this paper we propose an automatic trajectory data reconciliation to correct common errors in vision-based vehicle trajectory data. Given "raw" vehicle detection and tracking information from automatic video processing algorithms, we propose a pipeline including (a) an online data association algorithm to match fragments that describe the same object (vehicle), which is formulated as a min-cost network circulation problem of a graph, and (b) a one-step trajectory rectification procedure formulated as a quadratic program to enhance raw detection data. The pipeline leverages vehicle dynamics and physical constraints to associate tracked objects when they become fragmented, remove measurement noises and outliers and impute missing data due to fragmentations. We assess the capability of the proposed two-step pipeline to reconstruct three benchmarking datasets: (1) a microsimulation dataset that is artificially downgraded to replicate upstream errors, (2) a 15-min NGSIM data that is manually perturbed, and (3) tracking data consists of 3 scenes from collections of video data recorded from 16-17 cameras on a section of the I-24 MOTION system, and compare with the corresponding manually-labeled ground truth vehicle bounding boxes. All of the experiments show that the reconciled trajectories improve the accuracy on all the tested input data for a wide range of measures. Lastly, we show the design of a software architecture that is currently deployed on the full-scale I-24 MOTION system consisting of 276 cameras that covers 4.2 miles of I-24. We demonstrate the scalability of the proposed reconciliation pipeline to process high-volume data on a daily basis.
EVAL: Explainable Video Anomaly Localization
Authors: Ashish Singh, Michael J. Jones, Erik Learned-Miller
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Anomaly Localization, Video Anomaly Detection

We develop a novel framework for single-scene video anomaly localization that allows for human-understandable reasons for the decisions the system makes. We first learn general representations of objects and their motions (using deep networks) and then use these representations to build a high-level, location-dependent model of any particular scene. This model can be used to detect anomalies in new videos of the same scene. Importantly, our approach is explainable - our high-level appearance and motion features can provide human-understandable reasons for why any part of a video is classified as normal or anomalous. We conduct experiments on standard video anomaly detection datasets (Street Scene, CUHK Avenue, ShanghaiTech and UCSD Ped1, Ped2) and show significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art.
Full Contextual Attention for Multi-resolution Transformers in Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Loic Themyr, Clement Rambour, Nicolas Thome, Toby Collins, Alexandre Hostettler
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Transformers have proved to be very effective for visual recognition tasks. In particular, vision transformers construct compressed global representations through self-attention and learnable class tokens. Multi-resolution transformers have shown recent successes in semantic segmentation but can only capture local interactions in high-resolution feature maps. This paper extends the notion of global tokens to build GLobal Attention Multi-resolution (GLAM) transformers. GLAM is a generic module that can be integrated into most existing transformer backbones. GLAM includes learnable global tokens, which unlike previous methods can model interactions between all image regions, and extracts powerful representations during training. Extensive experiments show that GLAM-Swin or GLAM-Swin-UNet exhibit substantially better performances than their vanilla counterparts on ADE20K and Cityscapes. Moreover, GLAM can be used to segment large 3D medical images, and GLAM-nnFormer achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the BCV dataset.
Meta-Learned Kernel For Blind Super-Resolution Kernel Estimation
Authors: Royson Lee, Rui Li, Stylianos I. Venieris, Timothy Hospedales, Ferenc Huszár, Nicholas D. Lane
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Super-Resolution, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recent image degradation estimation methods have enabled single-image super-resolution (SR) approaches to better upsample real-world images. Among these methods, explicit kernel estimation approaches have demonstrated unprecedented performance at handling unknown degradations. Nonetheless, a number of limitations constrain their efficacy when used by downstream SR models. Specifically, this family of methods yields i) excessive inference time due to long per-image adaptation times and ii) inferior image fidelity due to kernel mismatch. In this work, we introduce a learning-to-learn approach that meta-learns from the information contained in a distribution of images, thereby enabling significantly faster adaptation to new images with substantially improved performance in both kernel estimation and image fidelity. Specifically, we meta-train a kernel-generating GAN, named MetaKernelGAN, on a range of tasks, such that when a new image is presented, the generator starts from an informed kernel estimate and the discriminator starts with a strong capability to distinguish between patch distributions. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our experiments show that MetaKernelGAN better estimates the magnitude and covariance of the kernel, leading to state-of-the-art blind SR results within a similar computational regime when combined with a non-blind SR model. Through supervised learning of an unsupervised learner, our method maintains the generalizability of the unsupervised learner, improves the optimization stability of kernel estimation, and hence image adaptation, and leads to a faster inference with a speedup between 14.24 to 102.1x over existing methods.
Localizing Scan Targets from Human Pose for Autonomous Lung Ultrasound Imaging
Authors: Jianzhi Long, Jicang Cai, Abdullah Al-Battal, Shiwei Jin, Jing Zhang, DaCheng Tao, Truong Nguyen
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

Ultrasound is progressing toward becoming an affordable and versatile solution to medical imaging. With the advent of COVID-19 global pandemic, there is a need to fully automate ultrasound imaging as it requires trained operators in close proximity to patients for a long period of time, therefore increasing risk of infection. In this work, we investigate the important yet seldom-studied problem of scan target localization, under the setting of lung ultrasound imaging. We propose a purely vision-based, data driven method that incorporates learning-based computer vision techniques. We combine a human pose estimation model with a specially designed regression model to predict the lung ultrasound scan targets, and deploy multiview stereo vision to enhance the consistency of 3D target localization. While related works mostly focus on phantom experiments, we collect data from 30 human subjects for testing. Our method attains an accuracy level of 16.00(9.79) mm for probe positioning and 4.44(3.75) degree for probe orientation, with a success rate above 80% under an error threshold of 25mm for all scan targets. Moreover, our approach can serve as a general solution to other types of ultrasound modalities. The code for implementation has been released.
QueryPose: Sparse Multi-Person Pose Regression via Spatial-Aware Part-Level Query
Authors: Yabo Xiao, Kai Su, Xiaojuan Wang, Dongdong Yu, Lei Jin, Mingshu He, Zehuan Yuan
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We propose a sparse end-to-end multi-person pose regression framework, termed QueryPose, which can directly predict multi-person keypoint sequences from the input image. The existing end-to-end methods rely on dense representations to preserve the spatial detail and structure for precise keypoint localization. However, the dense paradigm introduces complex and redundant post-processes during inference. In our framework, each human instance is encoded by several learnable spatial-aware part-level queries associated with an instance-level query. First, we propose the Spatial Part Embedding Generation Module (SPEGM) that considers the local spatial attention mechanism to generate several spatial-sensitive part embeddings, which contain spatial details and structural information for enhancing the part-level queries. Second, we introduce the Selective Iteration Module (SIM) to adaptively update the sparse part-level queries via the generated spatial-sensitive part embeddings stage-by-stage. Based on the two proposed modules, the part-level queries are able to fully encode the spatial details and structural information for precise keypoint regression. With the bipartite matching, QueryPose avoids the hand-designed post-processes and surpasses the existing dense end-to-end methods with 73.6 AP on MS COCO mini-val set and 72.7 AP on CrowdPose test set. Code is available at https://github.com/buptxyb666/QueryPose.
DETR4D: Direct Multi-View 3D Object Detection with Sparse Attention
Authors: Zhipeng Luo, Changqing Zhou, Gongjie Zhang, Shijian Lu
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

3D object detection with surround-view images is an essential task for autonomous driving. In this work, we propose DETR4D, a Transformer-based framework that explores sparse attention and direct feature query for 3D object detection in multi-view images. We design a novel projective cross-attention mechanism for query-image interaction to address the limitations of existing methods in terms of geometric cue exploitation and information loss for cross-view objects. In addition, we introduce a heatmap generation technique that bridges 3D and 2D spaces efficiently via query initialization. Furthermore, unlike the common practice of fusing intermediate spatial features for temporal aggregation, we provide a new perspective by introducing a novel hybrid approach that performs cross-frame fusion over past object queries and image features, enabling efficient and robust modeling of temporal information. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed DETR4D.
TeTIm-Eval: a novel curated evaluation data set for comparing text-to-image models
Authors: Federico A. Galatolo, Mario G. C. A. Cimino, Edoardo Cogotti
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00

Evaluating and comparing text-to-image models is a challenging problem. Significant advances in the field have recently been made, piquing interest of various industrial sectors. As a consequence, a gold standard in the field should cover a variety of tasks and application contexts. In this paper a novel evaluation approach is experimented, on the basis of: (i) a curated data set, made by high-quality royalty-free image-text pairs, divided into ten categories; (ii) a quantitative metric, the CLIP-score, (iii) a human evaluation task to distinguish, for a given text, the real and the generated images. The proposed method has been applied to the most recent models, i.e., DALLE2, Latent Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, GLIDE and Craiyon. Early experimental results show that the accuracy of the human judgement is fully coherent with the CLIP-score. The dataset has been made available to the public.
Unsupervised Object Localization: Observing the Background to Discover Objects
Authors: Oriane Siméoni, Chloé Sekkat, Gilles Puy, Antonin Vobecky, Éloi Zablocki, Patrick Pérez
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, Object Discovery, Object Localization, Representation Learning, Retrieval, Saliency Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Object Localization, Unsupervised Saliency Detection, Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation

Recent advances in self-supervised visual representation learning have paved the way for unsupervised methods tackling tasks such as object discovery and instance segmentation. However, discovering objects in an image with no supervision is a very hard task; what are the desired objects, when to separate them into parts, how many are there, and of what classes? The answers to these questions depend on the tasks and datasets of evaluation. In this work, we take a different approach and propose to look for the background instead. This way, the salient objects emerge as a by-product without any strong assumption on what an object should be. We propose FOUND, a simple model made of a single $conv1\times1$ initialized with coarse background masks extracted from self-supervised patch-based representations. After fast training and refining these seed masks, the model reaches state-of-the-art results on unsupervised saliency detection and object discovery benchmarks. Moreover, we show that our approach yields good results in the unsupervised semantic segmentation retrieval task. The code to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/valeoai/FOUND.
Efficient Visual Computing with Camera RAW Snapshots
Authors: Zhihao LI, Ming Lu, Xu Zhang, Xin Feng, M. Salman Asif, Zhan Ma
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Image Compression, object-detection, Object Detection

Conventional cameras capture image irradiance on a sensor and convert it to RGB images using an image signal processor (ISP). The images can then be used for photography or visual computing tasks in a variety of applications, such as public safety surveillance and autonomous driving. One can argue that since RAW images contain all the captured information, the conversion of RAW to RGB using an ISP is not necessary for visual computing. In this paper, we propose a novel $\rho$-Vision framework to perform high-level semantic understanding and low-level compression using RAW images without the ISP subsystem used for decades. Considering the scarcity of available RAW image datasets, we first develop an unpaired CycleR2R network based on unsupervised CycleGAN to train modular unrolled ISP and inverse ISP (invISP) models using unpaired RAW and RGB images. We can then flexibly generate simulated RAW images (simRAW) using any existing RGB image dataset and finetune different models originally trained for the RGB domain to process real-world camera RAW images. We demonstrate object detection and image compression capabilities in RAW-domain using RAW-domain YOLOv3 and RAW image compressor (RIC) on snapshots from various cameras. Quantitative results reveal that RAW-domain task inference provides better detection accuracy and compression compared to RGB-domain processing. Furthermore, the proposed \r{ho}-Vision generalizes across various camera sensors and different task-specific models. Additional advantages of the proposed $\rho$-Vision that eliminates the ISP are the potential reductions in computations and processing times.
Enhancing Indic Handwritten Text Recognition Using Global Semantic Information
Authors: Ajoy Mondal, C. V. Jawahar
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Handwritten Text Recognition, HTR, Language Modelling

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is more interesting and challenging than printed text due to uneven variations in the handwriting style of the writers, content, and time. HTR becomes more challenging for the Indic languages because of (i) multiple characters combined to form conjuncts which increase the number of characters of respective languages, and (ii) near to 100 unique basic Unicode characters in each Indic script. Recently, many recognition methods based on the encoder-decoder framework have been proposed to handle such problems. They still face many challenges, such as image blur and incomplete characters due to varying writing styles and ink density. We argue that most encoder-decoder methods are based on local visual features without explicit global semantic information. In this work, we enhance the performance of Indic handwritten text recognizers using global semantic information. We use a semantic module in an encoder-decoder framework for extracting global semantic information to recognize the Indic handwritten texts. The semantic information is used in both the encoder for supervision and the decoder for initialization. The semantic information is predicted from the word embedding of a pre-trained language model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on handwritten texts of ten Indic languages.
DeepLSD: Line Segment Detection and Refinement with Deep Image Gradients
Authors: Rémi Pautrat, Daniel Barath, Viktor Larsson, Martin R. Oswald, Marc Pollefeys
Date: 2022-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Line Detection, Line Segment Detection

Line segments are ubiquitous in our human-made world and are increasingly used in vision tasks. They are complementary to feature points thanks to their spatial extent and the structural information they provide. Traditional line detectors based on the image gradient are extremely fast and accurate, but lack robustness in noisy images and challenging conditions. Their learned counterparts are more repeatable and can handle challenging images, but at the cost of a lower accuracy and a bias towards wireframe lines. We propose to combine traditional and learned approaches to get the best of both worlds: an accurate and robust line detector that can be trained in the wild without ground truth lines. Our new line segment detector, DeepLSD, processes images with a deep network to generate a line attraction field, before converting it to a surrogate image gradient magnitude and angle, which is then fed to any existing handcrafted line detector. Additionally, we propose a new optimization tool to refine line segments based on the attraction field and vanishing points. This refinement improves the accuracy of current deep detectors by a large margin. We demonstrate the performance of our method on low-level line detection metrics, as well as on several downstream tasks using multiple challenging datasets. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/cvg/DeepLSD.