pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RIDE: Self-Supervised Learning of Rotation-Equivariant Keypoint Detection and Invariant Description for Endoscopy
Authors: Mert Asim Karaoglu, Viktoria Markova, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam, Alexander Ladikos
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Keypoint Detection, Pose Estimation, Self-Supervised Learning

Unlike in natural images, in endoscopy there is no clear notion of an up-right camera orientation. Endoscopic videos therefore often contain large rotational motions, which require keypoint detection and description algorithms to be robust to these conditions. While most classical methods achieve rotation-equivariant detection and invariant description by design, many learning-based approaches learn to be robust only up to a certain degree. At the same time learning-based methods under moderate rotations often outperform classical approaches. In order to address this shortcoming, in this paper we propose RIDE, a learning-based method for rotation-equivariant detection and invariant description. Following recent advancements in group-equivariant learning, RIDE models rotation-equivariance implicitly within its architecture. Trained in a self-supervised manner on a large curation of endoscopic images, RIDE requires no manual labeling of training data. We test RIDE in the context of surgical tissue tracking on the SuPeR dataset as well as in the context of relative pose estimation on a repurposed version of the SCARED dataset. In addition we perform explicit studies showing its robustness to large rotations. Our comparison against recent learning-based and classical approaches shows that RIDE sets a new state-of-the-art performance on matching and relative pose estimation tasks and scores competitively on surgical tissue tracking.
Selective Volume Mixup for Video Action Recognition
Authors: Yi Tan, Zhaofan Qiu, Yanbin Hao, Ting Yao, Tao Mei
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Image Augmentation, Temporal Action Localization

The recent advances in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers have convincingly demonstrated high learning capability for video action recognition on large datasets. Nevertheless, deep models often suffer from the overfitting effect on small-scale datasets with a limited number of training videos. A common solution is to exploit the existing image augmentation strategies for each frame individually including Mixup, Cutmix, and RandAugment, which are not particularly optimized for video data. In this paper, we propose a novel video augmentation strategy named Selective Volume Mixup (SV-Mix) to improve the generalization ability of deep models with limited training videos. SV-Mix devises a learnable selective module to choose the most informative volumes from two videos and mixes the volumes up to achieve a new training video. Technically, we propose two new modules, i.e., a spatial selective module to select the local patches for each spatial position, and a temporal selective module to mix the entire frames for each timestamp and maintain the spatial pattern. At each time, we randomly choose one of the two modules to expand the diversity of training samples. The selective modules are jointly optimized with the video action recognition framework to find the optimal augmentation strategy. We empirically demonstrate the merits of the SV-Mix augmentation on a wide range of video action recognition benchmarks and consistently boot the performances of both CNN-based and transformer-based models.
Decompose Semantic Shifts for Composed Image Retrieval
Authors: Xingyu Yang, Daqing Liu, Heng Zhang, Yong Luo, Chaoyue Wang, Jing Zhang
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Composed image retrieval is a type of image retrieval task where the user provides a reference image as a starting point and specifies a text on how to shift from the starting point to the desired target image. However, most existing methods focus on the composition learning of text and reference images and oversimplify the text as a description, neglecting the inherent structure and the user's shifting intention of the texts. As a result, these methods typically take shortcuts that disregard the visual cue of the reference images. To address this issue, we reconsider the text as instructions and propose a Semantic Shift network (SSN) that explicitly decomposes the semantic shifts into two steps: from the reference image to the visual prototype and from the visual prototype to the target image. Specifically, SSN explicitly decomposes the instructions into two components: degradation and upgradation, where the degradation is used to picture the visual prototype from the reference image, while the upgradation is used to enrich the visual prototype into the final representations to retrieve the desired target image. The experimental results show that the proposed SSN demonstrates a significant improvement of 5.42% and 1.37% on the CIRR and FashionIQ datasets, respectively, and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance. Codes will be publicly available.
NOMAD: A Natural, Occluded, Multi-scale Aerial Dataset, for Emergency Response Scenarios
Authors: Arturo Miguel Russell Bernal, Walter Scheirer, Jane Cleland-Huang
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection

With the increasing reliance on small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) for Emergency Response Scenarios, such as Search and Rescue, the integration of computer vision capabilities has become a key factor in mission success. Nevertheless, computer vision performance for detecting humans severely degrades when shifting from ground to aerial views. Several aerial datasets have been created to mitigate this problem, however, none of them has specifically addressed the issue of occlusion, a critical component in Emergency Response Scenarios. Natural, Occluded, Multi-scale Aerial Dataset (NOMAD) presents a benchmark for human detection under occluded aerial views, with five different aerial distances and rich imagery variance. NOMAD is composed of 100 different Actors, all performing sequences of walking, laying and hiding. It includes 42,825 frames, extracted from 5.4k resolution videos, and manually annotated with a bounding box and a label describing 10 different visibility levels, categorized according to the percentage of the human body visible inside the bounding box. This allows computer vision models to be evaluated on their detection performance across different ranges of occlusion. NOMAD is designed to improve the effectiveness of aerial search and rescue and to enhance collaboration between sUAS and humans, by providing a new benchmark dataset for human detection under occluded aerial views. Full dataset can be found at: https://github.com/ArtRuss/NOMAD.
Sparse and Privacy-enhanced Representation for Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Ting-Ying Lin, Lin-Yung Hsieh, Fu-En Wang, Wen-Shen Wuen, Min Sun
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Pose Estimation

We propose a sparse and privacy-enhanced representation for Human Pose Estimation (HPE). Given a perspective camera, we use a proprietary motion vector sensor(MVS) to extract an edge image and a two-directional motion vector image at each time frame. Both edge and motion vector images are sparse and contain much less information (i.e., enhancing human privacy). We advocate that edge information is essential for HPE, and motion vectors complement edge information during fast movements. We propose a fusion network leveraging recent advances in sparse convolution used typically for 3D voxels to efficiently process our proposed sparse representation, which achieves about 13x speed-up and 96% reduction in FLOPs. We collect an in-house edge and motion vector dataset with 16 types of actions by 40 users using the proprietary MVS. Our method outperforms individual modalities using only edge or motion vector images. Finally, we validate the privacy-enhanced quality of our sparse representation through face recognition on CelebA (a large face dataset) and a user study on our in-house dataset.
PanoMixSwap Panorama Mixing via Structural Swapping for Indoor Scene Understanding
Authors: Yu-Cheng Hsieh, Cheng Sun, Suraj Dengale, Min Sun
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

The volume and diversity of training data are critical for modern deep learningbased methods. Compared to the massive amount of labeled perspective images, 360 panoramic images fall short in both volume and diversity. In this paper, we propose PanoMixSwap, a novel data augmentation technique specifically designed for indoor panoramic images. PanoMixSwap explicitly mixes various background styles, foreground furniture, and room layouts from the existing indoor panorama datasets and generates a diverse set of new panoramic images to enrich the datasets. We first decompose each panoramic image into its constituent parts: background style, foreground furniture, and room layout. Then, we generate an augmented image by mixing these three parts from three different images, such as the foreground furniture from one image, the background style from another image, and the room structure from the third image. Our method yields high diversity since there is a cubical increase in image combinations. We also evaluate the effectiveness of PanoMixSwap on two indoor scene understanding tasks: semantic segmentation and layout estimation. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art methods trained with PanoMixSwap outperform their original setting on both tasks consistently.
Learning Parallax for Stereo Event-based Motion Deblurring
Authors: Mingyuan Lin, Chi Zhang, Chu He, Lei Yu
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Stereo Matching

Due to the extremely low latency, events have been recently exploited to supplement lost information for motion deblurring. Existing approaches largely rely on the perfect pixel-wise alignment between intensity images and events, which is not always fulfilled in the real world. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine framework, named NETwork of Event-based motion Deblurring with STereo event and intensity cameras (St-EDNet), to recover high-quality images directly from the misaligned inputs, consisting of a single blurry image and the concurrent event streams. Specifically, the coarse spatial alignment of the blurry image and the event streams is first implemented with a cross-modal stereo matching module without the need for ground-truth depths. Then, a dual-feature embedding architecture is proposed to gradually build the fine bidirectional association of the coarsely aligned data and reconstruct the sequence of the latent sharp images. Furthermore, we build a new dataset with STereo Event and Intensity Cameras (StEIC), containing real-world events, intensity images, and dense disparity maps. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed network over state-of-the-art methods.
LayoutNUWA: Revealing the Hidden Layout Expertise of Large Language Models
Authors: Zecheng Tang, Chenfei Wu, Juntao Li, Nan Duan
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Completion, Code Generation, Layout Generation

Graphic layout generation, a growing research field, plays a significant role in user engagement and information perception. Existing methods primarily treat layout generation as a numerical optimization task, focusing on quantitative aspects while overlooking the semantic information of layout, such as the relationship between each layout element. In this paper, we propose LayoutNUWA, the first model that treats layout generation as a code generation task to enhance semantic information and harness the hidden layout expertise of large language models~(LLMs). More concretely, we develop a Code Instruct Tuning (CIT) approach comprising three interconnected modules: 1) the Code Initialization (CI) module quantifies the numerical conditions and initializes them as HTML code with strategically placed masks; 2) the Code Completion (CC) module employs the formatting knowledge of LLMs to fill in the masked portions within the HTML code; 3) the Code Rendering (CR) module transforms the completed code into the final layout output, ensuring a highly interpretable and transparent layout generation procedure that directly maps code to a visualized layout. We attain significant state-of-the-art performance (even over 50\% improvements) on multiple datasets, showcasing the strong capabilities of LayoutNUWA. Our code is available at https://github.com/ProjectNUWA/LayoutNUWA.
RenderOcc: Vision-Centric 3D Occupancy Prediction with 2D Rendering Supervision
Authors: Mingjie Pan, Jiaming Liu, Renrui Zhang, Peixiang Huang, Xiaoqi Li, Bing Wang, Hongwei Xie, Li Liu, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, NeRF

3D occupancy prediction holds significant promise in the fields of robot perception and autonomous driving, which quantifies 3D scenes into grid cells with semantic labels. Recent works mainly utilize complete occupancy labels in 3D voxel space for supervision. However, the expensive annotation process and sometimes ambiguous labels have severely constrained the usability and scalability of 3D occupancy models. To address this, we present RenderOcc, a novel paradigm for training 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels. Specifically, we extract a NeRF-style 3D volume representation from multi-view images, and employ volume rendering techniques to establish 2D renderings, thus enabling direct 3D supervision from 2D semantics and depth labels. Additionally, we introduce an Auxiliary Ray method to tackle the issue of sparse viewpoints in autonomous driving scenarios, which leverages sequential frames to construct comprehensive 2D rendering for each object. To our best knowledge, RenderOcc is the first attempt to train multi-view 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels, reducing the dependence on costly 3D occupancy annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RenderOcc achieves comparable performance to models fully supervised with 3D labels, underscoring the significance of this approach in real-world applications.
Discovering Sounding Objects by Audio Queries for Audio Visual Segmentation
Authors: Shaofei Huang, Han Li, Yuqing Wang, Hongji Zhu, Jiao Dai, Jizhong Han, Wenge Rong, Si Liu
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Semantic correspondence

Audio visual segmentation (AVS) aims to segment the sounding objects for each frame of a given video. To distinguish the sounding objects from silent ones, both audio-visual semantic correspondence and temporal interaction are required. The previous method applies multi-frame cross-modal attention to conduct pixel-level interactions between audio features and visual features of multiple frames simultaneously, which is both redundant and implicit. In this paper, we propose an Audio-Queried Transformer architecture, AQFormer, where we define a set of object queries conditioned on audio information and associate each of them to particular sounding objects. Explicit object-level semantic correspondence between audio and visual modalities is established by gathering object information from visual features with predefined audio queries. Besides, an Audio-Bridged Temporal Interaction module is proposed to exchange sounding object-relevant information among multiple frames with the bridge of audio features. Extensive experiments are conducted on two AVS benchmarks to show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performances, especially 7.1% M_J and 7.6% M_F gains on the MS3 setting.
Target-aware Bi-Transformer for Few-shot Segmentation
Authors: Xianglin Wang, Xiaoliu Luo, Taiping Zhang
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Traditional semantic segmentation tasks require a large number of labels and are difficult to identify unlearned categories. Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to use limited labeled support images to identify the segmentation of new classes of objects, which is very practical in the real world. Previous researches were primarily based on prototypes or correlations. Due to colors, textures, and styles are similar in the same image, we argue that the query image can be regarded as its own support image. In this paper, we proposed the Target-aware Bi-Transformer Network (TBTNet) to equivalent treat of support images and query image. A vigorous Target-aware Transformer Layer (TTL) also be designed to distill correlations and force the model to focus on foreground information. It treats the hypercorrelation as a feature, resulting a significant reduction in the number of feature channels. Benefit from this characteristic, our model is the lightest up to now with only 0.4M learnable parameters. Futhermore, TBTNet converges in only 10% to 25% of the training epochs compared to traditional methods. The excellent performance on standard FSS benchmarks of PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i proves the efficiency of our method. Extensive ablation studies were also carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of Bi-Transformer architecture and TTL.
Self-supervised TransUNet for Ultrasound regional segmentation of the distal radius in children
Authors: Yuyue Zhou, Jessica Knight, Banafshe Felfeliyan, Christopher Keen, Abhilash Rakkunedeth Hareendranathan, Jacob L. Jaremko
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Supervised deep learning offers great promise to automate analysis of medical images from segmentation to diagnosis. However, their performance highly relies on the quality and quantity of the data annotation. Meanwhile, curating large annotated datasets for medical images requires a high level of expertise, which is time-consuming and expensive. Recently, to quench the thirst for large data sets with high-quality annotation, self-supervised learning (SSL) methods using unlabeled domain-specific data, have attracted attention. Therefore, designing an SSL method that relies on minimal quantities of labeled data has far-reaching significance in medical images. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying the Masked Autoencoder for SSL (SSL-MAE) of TransUNet, for segmenting bony regions from children's wrist ultrasound scans. We found that changing the embedding and loss function in SSL-MAE can produce better downstream results compared to the original SSL-MAE. In addition, we determined that only pretraining TransUNet embedding and encoder with SSL-MAE does not work as well as TransUNet without SSL-MAE pretraining on downstream segmentation tasks.
Distributional Estimation of Data Uncertainty for Surveillance Face Anti-spoofing
Authors: Mouxiao Huang
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Anti-Spoofing, Face Recognition

Face recognition systems have become increasingly vulnerable to security threats in recent years, prompting the use of Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) to protect against various types of attacks, such as phone unlocking, face payment, and self-service security inspection. While FAS has demonstrated its effectiveness in traditional settings, securing it in long-distance surveillance scenarios presents a significant challenge. These scenarios often feature low-quality face images, necessitating the modeling of data uncertainty to improve stability under extreme conditions. To address this issue, this work proposes Distributional Estimation (DisE), a method that converts traditional FAS point estimation to distributional estimation by modeling data uncertainty during training, including feature (mean) and uncertainty (variance). By adjusting the learning strength of clean and noisy samples for stability and accuracy, the learned uncertainty enhances DisE's performance. The method is evaluated on SuHiFiMask [1], a large-scale and challenging FAS dataset in surveillance scenarios. Results demonstrate that DisE achieves comparable performance on both ACER and AUC metrics.
An Accurate and Efficient Neural Network for OCTA Vessel Segmentation and a New Dataset
Authors: Haojian Ning, Chengliang Wang, Xinrun Chen, Shiying Li
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Neural Network, Retinal Vessel Segmentation

Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) is a noninvasive imaging technique that can reveal high-resolution retinal vessels. In this work, we propose an accurate and efficient neural network for retinal vessel segmentation in OCTA images. The proposed network achieves accuracy comparable to other SOTA methods, while having fewer parameters and faster inference speed (e.g. 110x lighter and 1.3x faster than U-Net), which is very friendly for industrial applications. This is achieved by applying the modified Recurrent ConvNeXt Block to a full resolution convolutional network. In addition, we create a new dataset containing 918 OCTA images and their corresponding vessel annotations. The data set is semi-automatically annotated with the help of Segment Anything Model (SAM), which greatly improves the annotation speed. For the benefit of the community, our code and dataset can be obtained from https://github.com/nhjydywd/OCTA-FRNet.
Spatio-temporal Co-attention Fusion Network for Video Splicing Localization
Authors: Man Lin, Gang Cao, Zijie Lou
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Digital video splicing has become easy and ubiquitous. Malicious users copy some regions of a video and paste them to another video for creating realistic forgeries. It is significant to blindly detect such forgery regions in videos. In this paper, a spatio-temporal co-attention fusion network (SCFNet) is proposed for video splicing localization. Specifically, a three-stream network is used as an encoder to capture manipulation traces across multiple frames. The deep interaction and fusion of spatio-temporal forensic features are achieved by the novel parallel and cross co-attention fusion modules. A lightweight multilayer perceptron (MLP) decoder is adopted to yield a pixel-level tampering localization map. A new large-scale video splicing dataset is created for training the SCFNet. Extensive tests on benchmark datasets show that the localization and generalization performances of our SCFNet outperform the state-of-the-art. Code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/SCFNet.
Stealthy Physical Masked Face Recognition Attack via Adversarial Style Optimization
Authors: Huihui Gong, Minjing Dong, Siqi Ma, Seyit Camtepe, Surya Nepal, Chang Xu
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on face recognition (FR) tasks in the last decade. In real scenarios, the deployment of DNNs requires taking various face accessories into consideration, like glasses, hats, and masks. In the COVID-19 pandemic era, wearing face masks is one of the most effective ways to defend against the novel coronavirus. However, DNNs are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples with a small but elaborated perturbation. Thus, a facial mask with adversarial perturbations may pose a great threat to the widely used deep learning-based FR models. In this paper, we consider a challenging adversarial setting: targeted attack against FR models. We propose a new stealthy physical masked FR attack via adversarial style optimization. Specifically, we train an adversarial style mask generator that hides adversarial perturbations inside style masks. Moreover, to ameliorate the phenomenon of sub-optimization with one fixed style, we propose to discover the optimal style given a target through style optimization in a continuous relaxation manner. We simultaneously optimize the generator and the style selection for generating strong and stealthy adversarial style masks. We evaluated the effectiveness and transferability of our proposed method via extensive white-box and black-box digital experiments. Furthermore, we also conducted physical attack experiments against local FR models and online platforms.