pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ARTIC3D: Learning Robust Articulated 3D Shapes from Noisy Web Image Collections
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Estimating 3D articulated shapes like animal bodies from monocular images is inherently challenging due to the ambiguities of camera viewpoint, pose, texture, lighting, etc. We propose ARTIC3D, a self-supervised framework to reconstruct per-instance 3D shapes from a sparse image collection in-the-wild. Specifically, ARTIC3D is built upon a skeleton-based surface representation and is further guided by 2D diffusion priors from Stable Diffusion. First, we enhance the input images with occlusions/truncation via 2D diffusion to obtain cleaner mask estimates and semantic features. Second, we perform diffusion-guided 3D optimization to estimate shape and texture that are of high-fidelity and faithful to input images. We also propose a novel technique to calculate more stable image-level gradients via diffusion models compared to existing alternatives. Finally, we produce realistic animations by fine-tuning the rendered shape and texture under rigid part transformations. Extensive evaluations on multiple existing datasets as well as newly introduced noisy web image collections with occlusions and truncation demonstrate that ARTIC3D outputs are more robust to noisy images, higher quality in terms of shape and texture details, and more realistic when animated. Project page: https://chhankyao.github.io/artic3d/
ICON$^2$: Reliably Benchmarking Predictive Inequity in Object Detection
Authors: Sruthi Sudhakar, Viraj Prabhu, Olga Russakovsky, Judy Hoffman
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Autonomous Driving, Benchmarking, Fairness, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

As computer vision systems are being increasingly deployed at scale in high-stakes applications like autonomous driving, concerns about social bias in these systems are rising. Analysis of fairness in real-world vision systems, such as object detection in driving scenes, has been limited to observing predictive inequity across attributes such as pedestrian skin tone, and lacks a consistent methodology to disentangle the role of confounding variables e.g. does my model perform worse for a certain skin tone, or are such scenes in my dataset more challenging due to occlusion and crowds? In this work, we introduce ICON$^2$, a framework for robustly answering this question. ICON$^2$ leverages prior knowledge on the deficiencies of object detection systems to identify performance discrepancies across sub-populations, compute correlations between these potential confounders and a given sensitive attribute, and control for the most likely confounders to obtain a more reliable estimate of model bias. Using our approach, we conduct an in-depth study on the performance of object detection with respect to income from the BDD100K driving dataset, revealing useful insights.
A Dataset for Deep Learning-based Bone Structure Analyses in Total Hip Arthroplasty
Authors: Kaidong Zhang, Ziyang Gan, Dong Liu, Xifu Shang
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Anatomy, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Total hip arthroplasty (THA) is a widely used surgical procedure in orthopedics. For THA, it is of clinical significance to analyze the bone structure from the CT images, especially to observe the structure of the acetabulum and femoral head, before the surgical procedure. For such bone structure analyses, deep learning technologies are promising but require high-quality labeled data for the learning, while the data labeling is costly. We address this issue and propose an efficient data annotation pipeline for producing a deep learning-oriented dataset. Our pipeline consists of non-learning-based bone extraction (BE) and acetabulum and femoral head segmentation (AFS) and active-learning-based annotation refinement (AAR). For BE we use the classic graph-cut algorithm. For AFS we propose an improved algorithm, including femoral head boundary localization using first-order and second-order gradient regularization, line-based non-maximum suppression, and anatomy prior-based femoral head extraction. For AAR, we refine the algorithm-produced pseudo labels with the help of trained deep models: we measure the uncertainty based on the disagreement between the original pseudo labels and the deep model predictions, and then find out the samples with the largest uncertainty to ask for manual labeling. Using the proposed pipeline, we construct a large-scale bone structure analyses dataset from more than 300 clinical and diverse CT scans. We perform careful manual labeling for the test set of our data. We then benchmark multiple state-of-the art deep learning-based methods of medical image segmentation using the training and test sets of our data. The extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of the proposed data annotation pipeline. The dataset, related codes and models will be publicly available at https://github.com/hitachinsk/THA.
PhenoBench -- A Large Dataset and Benchmarks for Semantic Image Interpretation in the Agricultural Domain
Authors: Jan Weyler, Federico Magistri, Elias Marks, Yue Linn Chong, Matteo Sodano, Gianmarco Roggiolani, Nived Chebrolu, Cyrill Stachniss, Jens Behley
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The production of food, feed, fiber, and fuel is a key task of agriculture, which has to cope with many challenges in the upcoming decades, e.g., a higher demand, climate change, lack of workers, and the availability of arable land. Vision systems can support making better and more sustainable field management decisions, but also support the breeding of new crop varieties by allowing temporally dense and reproducible measurements. Recently, agricultural robotics got an increasing interest in the vision and robotics communities since it is a promising avenue for coping with the aforementioned lack of workers and enabling more sustainable production. While large datasets and benchmarks in other domains are readily available and enable significant progress, agricultural datasets and benchmarks are comparably rare. We present an annotated dataset and benchmarks for the semantic interpretation of real agricultural fields. Our dataset recorded with a UAV provides high-quality, pixel-wise annotations of crops and weeds, but also crop leaf instances at the same time. Furthermore, we provide benchmarks for various tasks on a hidden test set comprised of different fields: known fields covered by the training data and a completely unseen field. Our dataset, benchmarks, and code are available at \url{https://www.phenobench.org}.
NeMO: Neural Map Growing System for Spatiotemporal Fusion in Bird's-Eye-View and BDD-Map Benchmark
Authors: Xi Zhu, Xiya Cao, Zhiwei Dong, Caifa Zhou, Qiangbo Liu, Wei Li, Yongliang Wang
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Time Series

Vision-centric Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation is essential for autonomous driving systems (ADS). Multi-frame temporal fusion which leverages historical information has been demonstrated to provide more comprehensive perception results. While most research focuses on ego-centric maps of fixed settings, long-range local map generation remains less explored. This work outlines a new paradigm, named NeMO, for generating local maps through the utilization of a readable and writable big map, a learning-based fusion module, and an interaction mechanism between the two. With an assumption that the feature distribution of all BEV grids follows an identical pattern, we adopt a shared-weight neural network for all grids to update the big map. This paradigm supports the fusion of longer time series and the generation of long-range BEV local maps. Furthermore, we release BDD-Map, a BDD100K-based dataset incorporating map element annotations, including lane lines, boundaries, and pedestrian crossing. Experiments on the NuScenes and BDD-Map datasets demonstrate that NeMO outperforms state-of-the-art map segmentation methods. We also provide a new scene-level BEV map evaluation setting along with the corresponding baseline for a more comprehensive comparison.
ContriMix: Scalable stain color augmentation for domain generalization without domain labels in digital pathology
Authors: Tan H. Nguyen, Dinkar Juyal, Jin Li, Aaditya Prakash, Shima Nofallah, Chintan Shah, Sai Chowdary Gullapally, Limin Yu, Michael Griffin, Anand Sampat, John Abel, Justin Lee, Amaro Taylor-Weiner
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Disentanglement, Domain Generalization, Style Transfer

Differences in staining and imaging procedures can cause significant color variations in histopathology images, leading to poor generalization when deploying deep-learning models trained from a different data source. Various color augmentation methods have been proposed to generate synthetic images during training to make models more robust, eliminating the need for stain normalization during test time. Many color augmentation methods leverage domain labels to generate synthetic images. This approach causes three significant challenges to scaling such a model. Firstly, incorporating data from a new domain into deep-learning models trained on existing domain labels is not straightforward. Secondly, dependency on domain labels prevents the use of pathology images without domain labels to improve model performance. Finally, implementation of these methods becomes complicated when multiple domain labels (e.g., patient identification, medical center, etc) are associated with a single image. We introduce ContriMix, a novel domain label free stain color augmentation method based on DRIT++, a style-transfer method. Contrimix leverages sample stain color variation within a training minibatch and random mixing to extract content and attribute information from pathology images. This information can be used by a trained ContriMix model to create synthetic images to improve the performance of existing classifiers. ContriMix outperforms competing methods on the Camelyon17-WILDS dataset. Its performance is consistent across different slides in the test set while being robust to the color variation from rare substances in pathology images. We make our code and trained ContriMix models available for research use. The code for ContriMix can be found at https://gitlab.com/huutan86/contrimix
Cross-attention learning enables real-time nonuniform rotational distortion correction in OCT
Authors: Haoran Zhang, Jianlong Yang, Jingqian Zhang, Shiqing Zhao, Aili Zhang
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: distortion correction

Nonuniform rotational distortion (NURD) correction is vital for endoscopic optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging and its functional extensions, such as angiography and elastography. Current NURD correction methods require time-consuming feature tracking or cross-correlation calculations and thus sacrifice temporal resolution. Here we propose a cross-attention learning method for the NURD correction in OCT. Our method is inspired by the recent success of the self-attention mechanism in natural language processing and computer vision. By leveraging its ability to model long-range dependencies, we can directly obtain the correlation between OCT A-lines at any distance, thus accelerating the NURD correction. We develop an end-to-end stacked cross-attention network and design three types of optimization constraints. We compare our method with two traditional feature-based methods and a CNN-based method, on two publicly-available endoscopic OCT datasets and a private dataset collected on our home-built endoscopic OCT system. Our method achieved a $\sim3\times$ speedup to real time ($26\pm 3$ fps), and superior correction performance.
Defocus to focus: Photo-realistic bokeh rendering by fusing defocus and radiance priors
Authors: Xianrui Luo, Juewen Peng, Ke Xian, Zijin Wu, Zhiguo Cao
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

We consider the problem of realistic bokeh rendering from a single all-in-focus image. Bokeh rendering mimics aesthetic shallow depth-of-field (DoF) in professional photography, but these visual effects generated by existing methods suffer from simple flat background blur and blurred in-focus regions, giving rise to unrealistic rendered results. In this work, we argue that realistic bokeh rendering should (i) model depth relations and distinguish in-focus regions, (ii) sustain sharp in-focus regions, and (iii) render physically accurate Circle of Confusion (CoC). To this end, we present a Defocus to Focus (D2F) framework to learn realistic bokeh rendering by fusing defocus priors with the all-in-focus image and by implementing radiance priors in layered fusion. Since no depth map is provided, we introduce defocus hallucination to integrate depth by learning to focus. The predicted defocus map implies the blur amount of bokeh and is used to guide weighted layered rendering. In layered rendering, we fuse images blurred by different kernels based on the defocus map. To increase the reality of the bokeh, we adopt radiance virtualization to simulate scene radiance. The scene radiance used in weighted layered rendering reassigns weights in the soft disk kernel to produce the CoC. To ensure the sharpness of in-focus regions, we propose to fuse upsampled bokeh images and original images. We predict the initial fusion mask from our defocus map and refine the mask with a deep network. We evaluate our model on a large-scale bokeh dataset. Extensive experiments show that our approach is capable of rendering visually pleasing bokeh effects in complex scenes. In particular, our solution receives the runner-up award in the AIM 2020 Rendering Realistic Bokeh Challenge.
FoSp: Focus and Separation Network for Early Smoke Segmentation
Authors: Lujian Yao, Haitao Zhao, Jingchao Peng, Zhongze Wang, Kaijie Zhao
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Early smoke segmentation (ESS) enables the accurate identification of smoke sources, facilitating the prompt extinguishing of fires and preventing large-scale gas leaks. But ESS poses greater challenges than conventional object and regular smoke segmentation due to its small scale and transparent appearance, which can result in high miss detection rate and low precision. To address these issues, a Focus and Separation Network (FoSp) is proposed. We first introduce a Focus module employing bidirectional cascade which guides low-resolution and high-resolution features towards mid-resolution to locate and determine the scope of smoke, reducing the miss detection rate. Next, we propose a Separation module that separates smoke images into a pure smoke foreground and a smoke-free background, enhancing the contrast between smoke and background fundamentally, improving segmentation precision. Finally, a Domain Fusion module is developed to integrate the distinctive features of the two modules which can balance recall and precision to achieve high F_beta. Futhermore, to promote the development of ESS, we introduce a high-quality real-world dataset called SmokeSeg, which contains more small and transparent smoke than the existing datasets. Experimental results show that our model achieves the best performance on three available datasets: SYN70K (mIoU: 83.00%), SMOKE5K (F_beta: 81.6%) and SmokeSeg (F_beta: 72.05%). Especially, our FoSp outperforms SegFormer by 7.71% (F_beta) for early smoke segmentation on SmokeSeg.
SF-FSDA: Source-Free Few-Shot Domain Adaptive Object Detection with Efficient Labeled Data Factory
Authors: Han Sun, Rui Gong, Konrad Schindler, Luc van Gool
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Pseudo Label, Robust Object Detection

Domain adaptive object detection aims to leverage the knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to improve the performance on an unlabeled target domain. Prior works typically require the access to the source domain data for adaptation, and the availability of sufficient data on the target domain. However, these assumptions may not hold due to data privacy and rare data collection. In this paper, we propose and investigate a more practical and challenging domain adaptive object detection problem under both source-free and few-shot conditions, named as SF-FSDA. To overcome this problem, we develop an efficient labeled data factory based approach. Without accessing the source domain, the data factory renders i) infinite amount of synthesized target-domain like images, under the guidance of the few-shot image samples and text description from the target domain; ii) corresponding bounding box and category annotations, only demanding minimum human effort, i.e., a few manually labeled examples. On the one hand, the synthesized images mitigate the knowledge insufficiency brought by the few-shot condition. On the other hand, compared to the popular pseudo-label technique, the generated annotations from data factory not only get rid of the reliance on the source pretrained object detection model, but also alleviate the unavoidably pseudo-label noise due to domain shift and source-free condition. The generated dataset is further utilized to adapt the source pretrained object detection model, realizing the robust object detection under SF-FSDA. The experiments on different settings showcase that our proposed approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on SF-FSDA problem. Our codes and models will be made publicly available.
ViDA: Homeostatic Visual Domain Adapter for Continual Test Time Adaptation
Authors: Jiaming Liu, Senqiao Yang, Peidong Jia, Renrui Zhang, Ming Lu, Yandong Guo, Wei Xue, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Test-time Adaptation

Since real-world machine systems are running in non-stationary environments, Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) task is proposed to adapt the pre-trained model to continually changing target domains. Recently, existing methods mainly focus on model-based adaptation, which aims to leverage a self-training manner to extract the target domain knowledge. However, pseudo labels can be noisy and the updated model parameters are unreliable under dynamic data distributions, leading to error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting in the continual adaptation process. To tackle these challenges and maintain the model plasticity, we design a Visual Domain Adapter (ViDA) for CTTA, explicitly handling both domain-specific and domain-shared knowledge. Specifically, we first comprehensively explore the different domain representations of the adapters with trainable high-rank or low-rank embedding spaces. Then we inject ViDAs into the pre-trained model, which leverages high-rank and low-rank features to adapt the current domain distribution and maintain the continual domain-shared knowledge, respectively. To exploit the low-rank and high-rank ViDAs more effectively, we further propose a Homeostatic Knowledge Allotment (HKA) strategy, which adaptively combines different knowledge from each ViDA. Extensive experiments conducted on four widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both classification and segmentation CTTA tasks. Note that, our method can be regarded as a novel transfer paradigm for large-scale models, delivering promising results in adaptation to continually changing distributions. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/iclr2024-vida/home.
CorrMatch: Label Propagation via Correlation Matching for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Boyuan Sun, YuQi Yang, Le Zhang, Ming-Ming Cheng, Qibin Hou
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents a simple but performant semi-supervised semantic segmentation approach, called CorrMatch. Previous approaches mostly employ complicated training strategies to leverage unlabeled data but overlook the role of correlation maps in modeling the relationships between pairs of locations. We observe that the correlation maps not only enable clustering pixels of the same category easily but also contain good shape information, which previous works have omitted. Motivated by these, we aim to improve the use efficiency of unlabeled data by designing two novel label propagation strategies. First, we propose to conduct pixel propagation by modeling the pairwise similarities of pixels to spread the high-confidence pixels and dig out more. Then, we perform region propagation to enhance the pseudo labels with accurate class-agnostic masks extracted from the correlation maps. CorrMatch achieves great performance on popular segmentation benchmarks. Taking the DeepLabV3+ with ResNet-101 backbone as our segmentation model, we receive a 76%+ mIoU score on the Pascal VOC 2012 dataset with only 92 annotated images. Code is available at https://github.com/BBBBchan/CorrMatch.
Revising deep learning methods in parking lot occupancy detection
Authors: Anastasia Martynova, Mikhail Kuznetsov, Vadim Porvatov, Vladislav Tishin, Andrey Kuznetsov, Natalia Semenova, Ksenia Kuznetsova
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Classification, Object Detection, Parking Space Occupancy

Parking guidance systems have recently become a popular trend as a part of the smart cities' paradigm of development. The crucial part of such systems is the algorithm allowing drivers to search for available parking lots across regions of interest. The classic approach to this task is based on the application of neural network classifiers to camera records. However, existing systems demonstrate a lack of generalization ability and appropriate testing regarding specific visual conditions. In this study, we extensively evaluate state-of-the-art parking lot occupancy detection algorithms, compare their prediction quality with the recently emerged vision transformers, and propose a new pipeline based on EfficientNet architecture. Performed computational experiments have demonstrated the performance increase in the case of our model, which was evaluated on 5 different datasets.
On the Generalization of Multi-modal Contrastive Learning
Authors: Qi Zhang, Yifei Wang, Yisen Wang
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Multi-modal contrastive learning (MMCL) has recently garnered considerable interest due to its superior performance in visual tasks, achieved by embedding multi-modal data, such as visual-language pairs. However, there still lack theoretical understandings of how MMCL extracts useful visual representation from multi-modal pairs, and particularly, how MMCL outperforms previous approaches like self-supervised contrastive learning (SSCL). In this paper, by drawing an intrinsic connection between MMCL and asymmetric matrix factorization, we establish the first generalization guarantees of MMCL for visual downstream tasks. Based on this framework, we further unify MMCL and SSCL by showing that MMCL implicitly performs SSCL with (pseudo) positive pairs induced by text pairs. Through this unified perspective, we characterize the advantage of MMCL by showing that text pairs induce more semantically consistent and diverse positive pairs, which, according to our analysis, provably benefit downstream generalization. Inspired by this finding, we propose CLIP-guided resampling methods to significantly improve the downstream performance of SSCL on ImageNet by leveraging multi-modal information. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ML/CLIP-Help-SimCLR.