pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Point Cloud Denoising via Gradient Fields
Authors: Qianjiang Hu, Wei Hu
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Denoising, Surface Reconstruction

3D dynamic point clouds provide a discrete representation of real-world objects or scenes in motion, which have been widely applied in immersive telepresence, autonomous driving, surveillance, etc. However, point clouds acquired from sensors are usually perturbed by noise, which affects downstream tasks such as surface reconstruction and analysis. Although many efforts have been made for static point cloud denoising, dynamic point cloud denoising remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose a novel gradient-field-based dynamic point cloud denoising method, exploiting the temporal correspondence via the estimation of gradient fields -- a fundamental problem in dynamic point cloud processing and analysis. The gradient field is the gradient of the log-probability function of the noisy point cloud, based on which we perform gradient ascent so as to converge each point to the underlying clean surface. We estimate the gradient of each surface patch and exploit the temporal correspondence, where the temporally corresponding patches are searched leveraging on rigid motion in classical mechanics. In particular, we treat each patch as a rigid object, which moves in the gradient field of an adjacent frame via force until reaching a balanced state, i.e., when the sum of gradients over the patch reaches 0. Since the gradient would be smaller when the point is closer to the underlying surface, the balanced patch would fit the underlying surface well, thus leading to the temporal correspondence. Finally, the position of each point in the patch is updated along the direction of the gradient averaged from corresponding patches in adjacent frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods under both synthetic noise and simulated real-world noise.
Multi-View Spatial-Temporal Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition
Authors: Ronghui Li, Lu Meng
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Sign Language Recognition

Sign language is a beautiful visual language and is also the primary language used by speaking and hearing-impaired people. However, sign language has many complex expressions, which are difficult for the public to understand and master. Sign language recognition algorithms will significantly facilitate communication between hearing-impaired people and normal people. Traditional continuous sign language recognition often uses a sequence learning method based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM). These methods can only learn spatial and temporal features separately, which cannot learn the complex spatial-temporal features of sign language. LSTM is also difficult to learn long-term dependencies. To alleviate these problems, this paper proposes a multi-view spatial-temporal continuous sign language recognition network. The network consists of three parts. The first part is a Multi-View Spatial-Temporal Feature Extractor Network (MSTN), which can directly extract the spatial-temporal features of RGB and skeleton data; the second is a sign language encoder network based on Transformer, which can learn long-term dependencies; the third is a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) decoder network, which is used to predict the whole meaning of the continuous sign language. Our algorithm is tested on two public sign language datasets SLR-100 and PHOENIX-Weather 2014T (RWTH). As a result, our method achieves excellent performance on both datasets. The word error rate on the SLR-100 dataset is 1.9%, and the word error rate on the RWTHPHOENIX-Weather dataset is 22.8%.
Augmentation of Atmospheric Turbulence Effects on Thermal Adapted Object Detection Models
Authors: Engin Uzun, Ahmet Anil Dursun, Erdem Akagunduz
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Atmospheric turbulence has a degrading effect on the image quality of long-range observation systems. As a result of various elements such as temperature, wind velocity, humidity, etc., turbulence is characterized by random fluctuations in the refractive index of the atmosphere. It is a phenomenon that may occur in various imaging spectra such as the visible or the infrared bands. In this paper, we analyze the effects of atmospheric turbulence on object detection performance in thermal imagery. We use a geometric turbulence model to simulate turbulence effects on a medium-scale thermal image set, namely "FLIR ADAS v2". We apply thermal domain adaptation to state-of-the-art object detectors and propose a data augmentation strategy to increase the performance of object detectors which utilizes turbulent images in different severity levels as training data. Our results show that the proposed data augmentation strategy yields an increase in performance for both turbulent and non-turbulent thermal test images.
Proposal-free Lidar Panoptic Segmentation with Pillar-level Affinity
Authors: Qi Chen, Sourabh Vora
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Clustering, object-detection, Object Detection, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We propose a simple yet effective proposal-free architecture for lidar panoptic segmentation. We jointly optimize both semantic segmentation and class-agnostic instance classification in a single network using a pillar-based bird's-eye view representation. The instance classification head learns pairwise affinity between pillars to determine whether the pillars belong to the same instance or not. We further propose a local clustering algorithm to propagate instance ids by merging semantic segmentation and affinity predictions. Our experiments on nuScenes dataset show that our approach outperforms previous proposal-free methods and is comparable to proposal-based methods which requires extra annotation from object detection.
Jacobian Ensembles Improve Robustness Trade-offs to Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Kenneth T. Co, David Martinez-Rego, Zhongyuan Hau, Emil C. Lupu
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00

Deep neural networks have become an integral part of our software infrastructure and are being deployed in many widely-used and safety-critical applications. However, their integration into many systems also brings with it the vulnerability to test time attacks in the form of Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs). UAPs are a class of perturbations that when applied to any input causes model misclassification. Although there is an ongoing effort to defend models against these adversarial attacks, it is often difficult to reconcile the trade-offs in model accuracy and robustness to adversarial attacks. Jacobian regularization has been shown to improve the robustness of models against UAPs, whilst model ensembles have been widely adopted to improve both predictive performance and model robustness. In this work, we propose a novel approach, Jacobian Ensembles-a combination of Jacobian regularization and model ensembles to significantly increase the robustness against UAPs whilst maintaining or improving model accuracy. Our results show that Jacobian Ensembles achieves previously unseen levels of accuracy and robustness, greatly improving over previous methods that tend to skew towards only either accuracy or robustness.
Multimodal Token Fusion for Vision Transformers
Authors: Yikai Wang, Xinghao Chen, Lele Cao, Wenbing Huang, Fuchun Sun, Yunhe Wang
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: journal 2022 7
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Image-to-Image Translation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Many adaptations of transformers have emerged to address the single-modal vision tasks, where self-attention modules are stacked to handle input sources like images. Intuitively, feeding multiple modalities of data to vision transformers could improve the performance, yet the inner-modal attentive weights may also be diluted, which could thus undermine the final performance. In this paper, we propose a multimodal token fusion method (TokenFusion), tailored for transformer-based vision tasks. To effectively fuse multiple modalities, TokenFusion dynamically detects uninformative tokens and substitutes these tokens with projected and aggregated inter-modal features. Residual positional alignment is also adopted to enable explicit utilization of the inter-modal alignments after fusion. The design of TokenFusion allows the transformer to learn correlations among multimodal features, while the single-modal transformer architecture remains largely intact. Extensive experiments are conducted on a variety of homogeneous and heterogeneous modalities and demonstrate that TokenFusion surpasses state-of-the-art methods in three typical vision tasks: multimodal image-to-image translation, RGB-depth semantic segmentation, and 3D object detection with point cloud and images. Our code is available at https://github.com/yikaiw/TokenFusion.
Shape-Aware Monocular 3D Object Detection
Authors: Wei Chen, Jie Zhao, Wan-Lei Zhao, Song-Yuan Wu
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Instance Segmentation, Monocular 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

The detection of 3D objects through a single perspective camera is a challenging issue. The anchor-free and keypoint-based models receive increasing attention recently due to their effectiveness and simplicity. However, most of these methods are vulnerable to occluded and truncated objects. In this paper, a single-stage monocular 3D object detection model is proposed. An instance-segmentation head is integrated into the model training, which allows the model to be aware of the visible shape of a target object. The detection largely avoids interference from irrelevant regions surrounding the target objects. In addition, we also reveal that the popular IoU-based evaluation metrics, which were originally designed for evaluating stereo or LiDAR-based detection methods, are insensitive to the improvement of monocular 3D object detection algorithms. A novel evaluation metric, namely average depth similarity (ADS) is proposed for the monocular 3D object detection models. Our method outperforms the baseline on both the popular and the proposed evaluation metrics while maintaining real-time efficiency.
NAFSSR: Stereo Image Super-Resolution Using NAFNet
Authors: Xiaojie Chu, Liangyu Chen, Wenqing Yu
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Stereo Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Stereo image super-resolution aims at enhancing the quality of super-resolution results by utilizing the complementary information provided by binocular systems. To obtain reasonable performance, most methods focus on finely designing modules, loss functions, and etc. to exploit information from another viewpoint. This has the side effect of increasing system complexity, making it difficult for researchers to evaluate new ideas and compare methods. This paper inherits a strong and simple image restoration model, NAFNet, for single-view feature extraction and extends it by adding cross attention modules to fuse features between views to adapt to binocular scenarios. The proposed baseline for stereo image super-resolution is noted as NAFSSR. Furthermore, training/testing strategies are proposed to fully exploit the performance of NAFSSR. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In particular, NAFSSR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, Middlebury, and Flickr1024 datasets. With NAFSSR, we won 1st place in the NTIRE 2022 Stereo Image Super-resolution Challenge. Codes and models will be released at https://github.com/megvii-research/NAFNet.
Unsupervised Contrastive Hashing for Cross-Modal Retrieval in Remote Sensing
Authors: Georgii Mikriukov, Mahdyar Ravanbakhsh, Begüm Demir
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Cross-Modal Retrieval, Image Retrieval, Retrieval

The development of cross-modal retrieval systems that can search and retrieve semantically relevant data across different modalities based on a query in any modality has attracted great attention in remote sensing (RS). In this paper, we focus our attention on cross-modal text-image retrieval, where queries from one modality (e.g., text) can be matched to archive entries from another (e.g., image). Most of the existing cross-modal text-image retrieval systems in RS require a high number of labeled training samples and also do not allow fast and memory-efficient retrieval. These issues limit the applicability of the existing cross-modal retrieval systems for large-scale applications in RS. To address this problem, in this paper we introduce a novel unsupervised cross-modal contrastive hashing (DUCH) method for text-image retrieval in RS. To this end, the proposed DUCH is made up of two main modules: 1) feature extraction module, which extracts deep representations of two modalities; 2) hashing module that learns to generate cross-modal binary hash codes from the extracted representations. We introduce a novel multi-objective loss function including: i) contrastive objectives that enable similarity preservation in intra- and inter-modal similarities; ii) an adversarial objective that is enforced across two modalities for cross-modal representation consistency; and iii) binarization objectives for generating hash codes. Experimental results show that the proposed DUCH outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://git.tu-berlin.de/rsim/duch.
Software Engineering Approaches for TinyML based IoT Embedded Vision: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Shashank Bangalore Lakshman, Nasir U. Eisty
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Systematic Literature Review

Internet of Things (IoT) has catapulted human ability to control our environments through ubiquitous sensing, communication, computation, and actuation. Over the past few years, IoT has joined forces with Machine Learning (ML) to embed deep intelligence at the far edge. TinyML (Tiny Machine Learning) has enabled the deployment of ML models for embedded vision on extremely lean edge hardware, bringing the power of IoT and ML together. However, TinyML powered embedded vision applications are still in a nascent stage, and they are just starting to scale to widespread real-world IoT deployment. To harness the true potential of IoT and ML, it is necessary to provide product developers with robust, easy-to-use software engineering (SE) frameworks and best practices that are customized for the unique challenges faced in TinyML engineering. Through this systematic literature review, we aggregated the key challenges reported by TinyML developers and identified state-of-art SE approaches in large-scale Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Embedded Systems that can help address key challenges in TinyML based IoT embedded vision. In summary, our study draws synergies between SE expertise that embedded systems developers and ML developers have independently developed to help address the unique challenges in the engineering of TinyML based IoT embedded vision.
CTCNet: A CNN-Transformer Cooperation Network for Face Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Guangwei Gao, Zixiang Xu, Juncheng Li, Jian Yang, Tieyong Zeng, Guo-Jun Qi
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recently, deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) steered face super-resolution methods have achieved great progress in restoring degraded facial details by jointly training with facial priors. However, these methods have some obvious limitations. On the one hand, multi-task joint learning requires additional marking on the dataset, and the introduced prior network will significantly increase the computational cost of the model. On the other hand, the limited receptive field of CNN will reduce the fidelity and naturalness of the reconstructed facial images, resulting in suboptimal reconstructed images. In this work, we propose an efficient CNN-Transformer Cooperation Network (CTCNet) for face super-resolution tasks, which uses the multi-scale connected encoder-decoder architecture as the backbone. Specifically, we first devise a novel Local-Global Feature Cooperation Module (LGCM), which is composed of a Facial Structure Attention Unit (FSAU) and a Transformer block, to promote the consistency of local facial detail and global facial structure restoration simultaneously. Then, we design an efficient Feature Refinement Module (FRM) to enhance the encoded features. Finally, to further improve the restoration of fine facial details, we present a Multi-scale Feature Fusion Unit (MFFU) to adaptively fuse the features from different stages in the encoder procedure. Extensive evaluations on various datasets have assessed that the proposed CTCNet can outperform other state-of-the-art methods significantly. Source code will be available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/CTCNet.
A Thin Format Vision-Based Tactile Sensor with A Micro Lens Array (MLA)
Authors: Xia Chen, Guanlan Zhang, Michael Yu Wang, Hongyu Yu
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00

Vision-based tactile sensors have been widely studied in the robotics field for high spatial resolution and compatibility with machine learning algorithms. However, the currently employed sensor's imaging system is bulky limiting its further application. Here we present a micro lens array (MLA) based vison system to achieve a low thickness format of the sensor package with high tactile sensing performance. Multiple micromachined micro lens units cover the whole elastic touching layer and provide a stitched clear tactile image, enabling high spatial resolution with a thin thickness of 5 mm. The thermal reflow and soft lithography method ensure the uniform spherical profile and smooth surface of micro lens. Both optical and mechanical characterization demonstrated the sensor's stable imaging and excellent tactile sensing, enabling precise 3D tactile information, such as displacement mapping and force distribution with an ultra compact-thin structure.
Not All Tokens Are Equal: Human-centric Visual Analysis via Token Clustering Transformer
Authors: Wang Zeng, Sheng Jin, Wentao Liu, Chen Qian, Ping Luo, Wanli Ouyang, Xiaogang Wang
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 2D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Human Pose Estimation, All, Clustering, Pose Estimation

Vision transformers have achieved great successes in many computer vision tasks. Most methods generate vision tokens by splitting an image into a regular and fixed grid and treating each cell as a token. However, not all regions are equally important in human-centric vision tasks, e.g., the human body needs a fine representation with many tokens, while the image background can be modeled by a few tokens. To address this problem, we propose a novel Vision Transformer, called Token Clustering Transformer (TCFormer), which merges tokens by progressive clustering, where the tokens can be merged from different locations with flexible shapes and sizes. The tokens in TCFormer can not only focus on important areas but also adjust the token shapes to fit the semantic concept and adopt a fine resolution for regions containing critical details, which is beneficial to capturing detailed information. Extensive experiments show that TCFormer consistently outperforms its counterparts on different challenging human-centric tasks and datasets, including whole-body pose estimation on COCO-WholeBody and 3D human mesh reconstruction on 3DPW. Code is available at https://github.com/zengwang430521/TCFormer.git
ActAR: Actor-Driven Pose Embeddings for Video Action Recognition
Authors: Soufiane Lamghari, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Nicolas Saunier
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Optical Flow Estimation, Temporal Action Localization, Video Understanding

Human action recognition (HAR) in videos is one of the core tasks of video understanding. Based on video sequences, the goal is to recognize actions performed by humans. While HAR has received much attention in the visible spectrum, action recognition in infrared videos is little studied. Accurate recognition of human actions in the infrared domain is a highly challenging task because of the redundant and indistinguishable texture features present in the sequence. Furthermore, in some cases, challenges arise from the irrelevant information induced by the presence of multiple active persons not contributing to the actual action of interest. Therefore, most existing methods consider a standard paradigm that does not take into account these challenges, which is in some part due to the ambiguous definition of the recognition task in some cases. In this paper, we propose a new method that simultaneously learns to recognize efficiently human actions in the infrared spectrum, while automatically identifying the key-actors performing the action without using any prior knowledge or explicit annotations. Our method is composed of three stages. In the first stage, optical flow-based key-actor identification is performed. Then for each key-actor, we estimate key-poses that will guide the frame selection process. A scale-invariant encoding process along with embedded pose filtering are performed in order to enhance the quality of action representations. Experimental results on InfAR dataset show that our proposed model achieves promising recognition performance and learns useful action representations.
Interaction-Aware Labeled Multi-Bernoulli Filter
Authors: Nida Ishtiaq, Amirali Khodadadian Gostar, Alireza Bab-Hadiashar, Reza Hoseinnezhad
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking

Tracking multiple objects through time is an important part of an intelligent transportation system. Random finite set (RFS)-based filters are one of the emerging techniques for tracking multiple objects. In multi-object tracking (MOT), a common assumption is that each object is moving independent of its surroundings. But in many real-world applications, target objects interact with one another and the environment. Such interactions, when considered for tracking, are usually modeled by an interactive motion model which is application specific. In this paper, we present a novel approach to incorporate target interactions within the prediction step of an RFS-based multi-target filter, i.e. labeled multi-Bernoulli (LMB) filter. The method has been developed for two practical applications of tracking a coordinated swarm and vehicles. The method has been tested for a complex vehicle tracking dataset and compared with the LMB filter through the OSPA and OSPA$^{(2)}$ metrics. The results demonstrate that the proposed interaction-aware method depicts considerable performance enhancement over the LMB filter in terms of the selected metrics.