pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Data Quality Aware Approaches for Addressing Model Drift of Semantic Segmentation Models
Authors: Samiha Mirza, Vuong D. Nguyen, Pranav Mantini, Shishir K. Shah
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, Semantic Segmentation

In the midst of the rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into real world applications, one pressing challenge we confront is the phenomenon of model drift, wherein the performance of AI models gradually degrades over time, compromising their effectiveness in real-world, dynamic environments. Once identified, we need techniques for handling this drift to preserve the model performance and prevent further degradation. This study investigates two prominent quality aware strategies to combat model drift: data quality assessment and data conditioning based on prior model knowledge. The former leverages image quality assessment metrics to meticulously select high-quality training data, improving the model robustness, while the latter makes use of learned feature vectors from existing models to guide the selection of future data, aligning it with the model's prior knowledge. Through comprehensive experimentation, this research aims to shed light on the efficacy of these approaches in enhancing the performance and reliability of semantic segmentation models, thereby contributing to the advancement of computer vision capabilities in real-world scenarios.
American Sign Language Video to Text Translation
Authors: Parsheeta Roy, Ji-Eun Han, Srishti Chouhan, Bhaavanaa Thumu
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Translation

Sign language to text is a crucial technology that can break down communication barriers for individuals with hearing difficulties. We replicate and try to improve on a recently published study. We evaluate models using BLEU and rBLEU metrics to ensure translation quality. During our ablation study, we found that the model's performance is significantly influenced by optimizers, activation functions, and label smoothing. Further research aims to refine visual feature capturing, enhance decoder utilization, and integrate pre-trained decoders for better translation outcomes. Our source code is available to facilitate replication of our results and encourage future research.
Semi-Mamba-UNet: Pixel-Level Contrastive and Pixel-Level Cross-Supervised Visual Mamba-based UNet for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Chao Ma, Ziyang Wang
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Cardiac Segmentation, Contrastive Learning, Image Segmentation, Mamba, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is essential in diagnostics, treatment planning, and healthcare, with deep learning offering promising advancements. Notably, the convolutional neural network (CNN) excels in capturing local image features, whereas the Vision Transformer (ViT) adeptly models long-range dependencies through multi-head self-attention mechanisms. Despite their strengths, both the CNN and ViT face challenges in efficiently processing long-range dependencies in medical images, often requiring substantial computational resources. This issue, combined with the high cost and limited availability of expert annotations, poses significant obstacles to achieving precise segmentation. To address these challenges, this study introduces Semi-Mamba-UNet, which integrates a purely visual Mamba-based U-shaped encoder-decoder architecture with a conventional CNN-based UNet into a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework. This innovative SSL approach leverages both networks to generate pseudo-labels and cross-supervise one another at the pixel level simultaneously, drawing inspiration from consistency regularisation techniques. Furthermore, we introduce a self-supervised pixel-level contrastive learning strategy that employs a pair of projectors to enhance the feature learning capabilities further, especially on unlabelled data. Semi-Mamba-UNet was comprehensively evaluated on two publicly available segmentation dataset and compared with seven other SSL frameworks with both CNN- or ViT-based UNet as the backbone network, highlighting the superior performance of the proposed method. The source code of Semi-Mamba-Unet, all baseline SSL frameworks, the CNN- and ViT-based networks, and the two corresponding datasets are made publicly accessible.
PIVOT-Net: Heterogeneous Point-Voxel-Tree-based Framework for Point Cloud Compression
Authors: Jiahao Pang, Kevin Bui, Dong Tian
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00

The universality of the point cloud format enables many 3D applications, making the compression of point clouds a critical phase in practice. Sampled as discrete 3D points, a point cloud approximates 2D surface(s) embedded in 3D with a finite bit-depth. However, the point distribution of a practical point cloud changes drastically as its bit-depth increases, requiring different methodologies for effective consumption/analysis. In this regard, a heterogeneous point cloud compression (PCC) framework is proposed. We unify typical point cloud representations -- point-based, voxel-based, and tree-based representations -- and their associated backbones under a learning-based framework to compress an input point cloud at different bit-depth levels. Having recognized the importance of voxel-domain processing, we augment the framework with a proposed context-aware upsampling for decoding and an enhanced voxel transformer for feature aggregation. Extensive experimentation demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance of our proposal on a wide range of point clouds.
KVQ: Kwai Video Quality Assessment for Short-form Videos
Authors: Yiting Lu, Xin Li, Yajing Pei, Kun Yuan, Qizhi Xie, Yunpeng Qu, Ming Sun, Chao Zhou, Zhibo Chen
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Form, Video Quality Assessment, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Short-form UGC video platforms, like Kwai and TikTok, have been an emerging and irreplaceable mainstream media form, thriving on user-friendly engagement, and kaleidoscope creation, etc. However, the advancing content-generation modes, e.g., special effects, and sophisticated processing workflows, e.g., de-artifacts, have introduced significant challenges to recent UGC video quality assessment: (i) the ambiguous contents hinder the identification of quality-determined regions. (ii) the diverse and complicated hybrid distortions are hard to distinguish. To tackle the above challenges and assist in the development of short-form videos, we establish the first large-scale Kaleidoscope short Video database for Quality assessment, termed KVQ, which comprises 600 user-uploaded short videos and 3600 processed videos through the diverse practical processing workflows, including pre-processing, transcoding, and enhancement. Among them, the absolute quality score of each video and partial ranking score among indistinguishable samples are provided by a team of professional researchers specializing in image processing. Based on this database, we propose the first short-form video quality evaluator, i.e., KSVQE, which enables the quality evaluator to identify the quality-determined semantics with the content understanding of large vision language models (i.e., CLIP) and distinguish the distortions with the distortion understanding module. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of KSVQE on our KVQ database and popular VQA databases.
A novel spatial-frequency domain network for zero-shot incremental learning
Authors: Jie Ren, Yang Zhao, Weichuan Zhang, Changming Sun
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Incremental Learning, Translation

Zero-shot incremental learning aims to enable the model to generalize to new classes without forgetting previously learned classes. However, the semantic gap between old and new sample classes can lead to catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, existing algorithms lack capturing significant information from each sample image domain, impairing models' classification performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel Spatial-Frequency Domain Network (SFDNet) which contains a Spatial-Frequency Feature Extraction (SFFE) module and Attention Feature Alignment (AFA) module to improve the Zero-Shot Translation for Class Incremental algorithm. Firstly, SFFE module is designed which contains a dual attention mechanism for obtaining salient spatial-frequency feature information. Secondly, a novel feature fusion module is conducted for obtaining fused spatial-frequency domain features. Thirdly, the Nearest Class Mean classifier is utilized to select the most suitable category. Finally, iteration between tasks is performed using the Zero-Shot Translation model. The proposed SFDNet has the ability to effectively extract spatial-frequency feature representation from input images, improve the accuracy of image classification, and fundamentally alleviate catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on the CUB 200-2011 and CIFAR100 datasets demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art incremental learning algorithms.
GALA3D: Towards Text-to-3D Complex Scene Generation via Layout-guided Generative Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Xiaoyu Zhou, Xingjian Ran, Yajiao Xiong, Jinlin He, Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang, Deqing Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, Scene Generation, Text to 3D

We present GALA3D, generative 3D GAussians with LAyout-guided control, for effective compositional text-to-3D generation. We first utilize large language models (LLMs) to generate the initial layout and introduce a layout-guided 3D Gaussian representation for 3D content generation with adaptive geometric constraints. We then propose an instance-scene compositional optimization mechanism with conditioned diffusion to collaboratively generate realistic 3D scenes with consistent geometry, texture, scale, and accurate interactions among multiple objects while simultaneously adjusting the coarse layout priors extracted from the LLMs to align with the generated scene. Experiments show that GALA3D is a user-friendly, end-to-end framework for state-of-the-art scene-level 3D content generation and controllable editing while ensuring the high fidelity of object-level entities within the scene. The source codes and models will be available at gala3d.github.io.
Outlier-Aware Training for Low-Bit Quantization of Structural Re-Parameterized Networks
Authors: Muqun Niu, Yuan Ren, Boyu Li, Chenchen Ding
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Lightweight design of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) requires co-design efforts in the model architectures and compression techniques. As a novel design paradigm that separates training and inference, a structural re-parameterized (SR) network such as the representative RepVGG revitalizes the simple VGG-like network with a high accuracy comparable to advanced and often more complicated networks. However, the merging process in SR networks introduces outliers into weights, making their distribution distinct from conventional networks and thus heightening difficulties in quantization. To address this, we propose an operator-level improvement for training called Outlier Aware Batch Normalization (OABN). Additionally, to meet the demands of limited bitwidths while upkeeping the inference accuracy, we develop a clustering-based non-uniform quantization framework for Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) named ClusterQAT. Integrating OABN with ClusterQAT, the quantized performance of RepVGG is largely enhanced, particularly when the bitwidth falls below 8.
Spatio-spectral classification of hyperspectral images for brain cancer detection during surgical operations
Authors: H. Fabelo, S. Ortega, D. Ravi, B. R. Kiran, C. Sosa, D. Bulters, G. M. Callico, H. Bulstrode, A. Szolna, J. F. Pineiro, S. Kabwama, D. Madronal, R. Lazcano, A. J. OShanahan, S. Bisshopp, M. Hernandez, A. Baez-Quevedo, G. Z. Yang, B. Stanciulescu, R. Salvador, E. Juarez, R. Sarmiento
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification Of Hyperspectral Images, Medical Diagnosis

Surgery for brain cancer is a major problem in neurosurgery. The diffuse infiltration into the surrounding normal brain by these tumors makes their accurate identification by the naked eye difficult. Since surgery is the common treatment for brain cancer, an accurate radical resection of the tumor leads to improved survival rates for patients. However, the identification of the tumor boundaries during surgery is challenging. Hyperspectral imaging is a noncontact, non-ionizing and non-invasive technique suitable for medical diagnosis. This study presents the development of a novel classification method taking into account the spatial and spectral characteristics of the hyperspectral images to help neurosurgeons to accurately determine the tumor boundaries in surgical-time during the resection, avoiding excessive excision of normal tissue or unintentionally leaving residual tumor. The algorithm proposed in this study to approach an efficient solution consists of a hybrid framework that combines both supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods. To evaluate the proposed approach, five hyperspectral images of surface of the brain affected by glioblastoma tumor in vivo from five different patients have been used. The final classification maps obtained have been analyzed and validated by specialists. These preliminary results are promising, obtaining an accurate delineation of the tumor area.
3D Gaussian as a New Era: A Survey
Authors: Ben Fei, Jingyi Xu, Rui Zhang, Qingyuan Zhou, Weidong Yang, Ying He
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis, Survey

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has emerged as a significant advancement in the field of Computer Graphics, offering explicit scene representation and novel view synthesis without the reliance on neural networks, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). This technique has found diverse applications in areas such as robotics, urban mapping, autonomous navigation, and virtual reality/augmented reality, just name a few. Given the growing popularity and expanding research in 3D Gaussian Splatting, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of relevant papers from the past year. We organize the survey into taxonomies based on characteristics and applications, providing an introduction to the theoretical underpinnings of 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our goal through this survey is to acquaint new researchers with 3D Gaussian Splatting, serve as a valuable reference for seminal works in the field, and inspire future research directions, as discussed in our concluding section.
INSITE: labelling medical images using submodular functions and semi-supervised data programming
Authors: Akshat Gautam, Anurag Shandilya, Akshit Srivastava, Venkatapathy Subramanian, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Kshitij Jadhav
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00

The necessity of large amounts of labeled data to train deep models, especially in medical imaging creates an implementation bottleneck in resource-constrained settings. In Insite (labelINg medical imageS usIng submodular funcTions and sEmi-supervised data programming) we apply informed subset selection to identify a small number of most representative or diverse images from a huge pool of unlabelled data subsequently annotated by a domain expert. The newly annotated images are then used as exemplars to develop several data programming-driven labeling functions. These labelling functions output a predicted-label and a similarity score when given an unlabelled image as an input. A consensus is brought amongst the outputs of these labeling functions by using a label aggregator function to assign the final predicted label to each unlabelled data point. We demonstrate that informed subset selection followed by semi-supervised data programming methods using these images as exemplars perform better than other state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods. Further, for the first time we demonstrate that this can be achieved through a small set of images used as exemplars.
GeoFormer: A Vision and Sequence Transformer-based Approach for Greenhouse Gas Monitoring
Authors: Madhav Khirwar, Ankur Narang
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

Air pollution represents a pivotal environmental challenge globally, playing a major role in climate change via greenhouse gas emissions and negatively affecting the health of billions. However predicting the spatial and temporal patterns of pollutants remains challenging. The scarcity of ground-based monitoring facilities and the dependency of air pollution modeling on comprehensive datasets, often inaccessible for numerous areas, complicate this issue. In this work, we introduce GeoFormer, a compact model that combines a vision transformer module with a highly efficient time-series transformer module to predict surface-level nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations from Sentinel-5P satellite imagery. We train the proposed model to predict surface-level NO2 measurements using a dataset we constructed with Sentinel-5P images of ground-level monitoring stations, and their corresponding NO2 concentration readings. The proposed model attains high accuracy (MAE 5.65), demonstrating the efficacy of combining vision and time-series transformer architectures to harness satellite-derived data for enhanced GHG emission insights, proving instrumental in advancing climate change monitoring and emission regulation efforts globally.
Two-Stage Multi-task Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Binyan Hu, A. K. Qin
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Auxiliary Learning, Image Segmentation, Knowledge Distillation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Medical image segmentation has been significantly advanced by deep learning (DL) techniques, though the data scarcity inherent in medical applications poses a great challenge to DL-based segmentation methods. Self-supervised learning offers a solution by creating auxiliary learning tasks from the available dataset and then leveraging the knowledge acquired from solving auxiliary tasks to help better solve the target segmentation task. Different auxiliary tasks may have different properties and thus can help the target task to different extents. It is desired to leverage their complementary advantages to enhance the overall assistance to the target task. To achieve this, existing methods often adopt a joint training paradigm, which co-solves segmentation and auxiliary tasks by integrating their losses or intermediate gradients. However, direct coupling of losses or intermediate gradients risks undesirable interference because the knowledge acquired from solving each auxiliary task at every training step may not always benefit the target task. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage training approach. In the first stage, the target segmentation task will be independently co-solved with each auxiliary task in both joint training and pre-training modes, with the better model selected via validation performance. In the second stage, the models obtained with respect to each auxiliary task are converted into a single model using an ensemble knowledge distillation method. Our approach allows for making best use of each auxiliary task to create multiple elite segmentation models and then combine them into an even more powerful model. We employed five auxiliary tasks of different proprieties in our approach and applied it to train the U-Net model on an X-ray pneumothorax segmentation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over several existing methods.
Q-Bench+: A Benchmark for Multi-modal Foundation Models on Low-level Vision from Single Images to Pairs
Authors: ZiCheng Zhang, HaoNing Wu, Erli Zhang, Guangtao Zhai, Weisi Lin
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

The rapid development of Multi-modality Large Language Models (MLLMs) has navigated a paradigm shift in computer vision, moving towards versatile foundational models. However, evaluating MLLMs in low-level visual perception and understanding remains a yet-to-explore domain. To this end, we design benchmark settings to emulate human language responses related to low-level vision: the low-level visual perception (A1) via visual question answering related to low-level attributes (e.g. clarity, lighting); and the low-level visual description (A2), on evaluating MLLMs for low-level text descriptions. Furthermore, given that pairwise comparison can better avoid ambiguity of responses and has been adopted by many human experiments, we further extend the low-level perception-related question-answering and description evaluations of MLLMs from single images to image pairs. Specifically, for perception (A1), we carry out the LLVisionQA+ dataset, comprising 2,990 single images and 1,999 image pairs each accompanied by an open-ended question about its low-level features; for description (A2), we propose the LLDescribe+ dataset, evaluating MLLMs for low-level descriptions on 499 single images and 450 pairs. Additionally, we evaluate MLLMs on assessment (A3) ability, i.e. predicting score, by employing a softmax-based approach to enable all MLLMs to generate quantifiable quality ratings, tested against human opinions in 7 image quality assessment (IQA) datasets. With 24 MLLMs under evaluation, we demonstrate that several MLLMs have decent low-level visual competencies on single images, but only GPT-4V exhibits higher accuracy on pairwise comparisons than single image evaluations (like humans). We hope that our benchmark will motivate further research into uncovering and enhancing these nascent capabilities of MLLMs. Datasets will be available at https://github.com/Q-Future/Q-Bench.
A Highlight Removal Method for Capsule Endoscopy Images
Authors: Shaojie Zhang, Yinghui Wang, Peixuan Liu, Wei Li, Jinlong Yang, Tao Yan, Yukai Wang, Liangyi Huang, Mingfeng Wang, Ibragim R. Atadjanov
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: highlight removal

The images captured by Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) always exhibit specular reflections, and removing highlights while preserving the color and texture in the region remains a challenge. To address this issue, this paper proposes a highlight removal method for capsule endoscopy images. Firstly, the confidence and feature terms of the highlight region's edges are computed, where confidence is obtained by the ratio of known pixels in the RGB space's R channel to the B channel within a window centered on the highlight region's edge pixel, and feature terms are acquired by multiplying the gradient vector of the highlight region's edge pixel with the iso-intensity line. Subsequently, the confidence and feature terms are assigned different weights and summed to obtain the priority of all highlight region's edge pixels, and the pixel with the highest priority is identified. Then, the variance of the highlight region's edge pixels is used to adjust the size of the sample block window, and the best-matching block is searched in the known region based on the RGB color similarity and distance between the sample block and the window centered on the pixel with the highest priority. Finally, the pixels in the best-matching block are copied to the highest priority highlight removal region to achieve the goal of removing the highlight region. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively removes highlights from WCE images, with a lower coefficient of variation in the highlight removal region compared to the Crinimisi algorithm and DeepGin method. Additionally, the color and texture in the highlight removal region are similar to those in the surrounding areas, and the texture is continuous.