pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Reduction of rain-induced errors for wind speed estimation on SAR observations using convolutional neural networks
Authors: Aurélien Colin, Pierre Tandeo, Charles Peureux, Romain Husson, Ronan Fablet
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00

Synthetic Aperture Radar is known to be able to provide high-resolution estimates of surface wind speed. These estimates usually rely on a Geophysical Model Function (GMF) that has difficulties accounting for non-wind processes such as rain events. Convolutional neural network, on the other hand, have the capacity to use contextual information and have demonstrated their ability to delimit rainfall areas. By carefully building a large dataset of SAR observations from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, collocated with both GMF and atmospheric model wind speeds as well as rainfall estimates, we were able to train a wind speed estimator with reduced errors under rain. Collocations with in-situ wind speed measurements from buoys show a root mean square error that is reduced by 27% (resp. 45%) under rainfall estimated at more than 1 mm/h (resp. 3 mm/h). These results demonstrate the capacity of deep learning models to correct rain-related errors in SAR products.
A Generative Model for Digital Camera Noise Synthesis
Authors: Mingyang Song, Yang Zhang, Tunç O. Aydın, Elham Amin Mansour, Christopher Schroers
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, model

Noise synthesis is a challenging low-level vision task aiming to generate realistic noise given a clean image along with the camera settings. To this end, we propose an effective generative model which utilizes clean features as guidance followed by noise injections into the network. Specifically, our generator follows a UNet-like structure with skip connections but without downsampling and upsampling layers. Firstly, we extract deep features from a clean image as the guidance and concatenate a Gaussian noise map to the transition point between the encoder and decoder as the noise source. Secondly, we propose noise synthesis blocks in the decoder in each of which we inject Gaussian noise to model the noise characteristics. Thirdly, we propose to utilize an additional Style Loss and demonstrate that this allows better noise characteristics supervision in the generator. Through a number of new experiments, we evaluate the temporal variance and the spatial correlation of the generated noise which we hope can provide meaningful insights for future works. Finally, we show that our proposed approach outperforms existing methods for synthesizing camera noise.
Resolution Enhancement Processing on Low Quality Images Using Swin Transformer Based on Interval Dense Connection Strategy
Authors: Rui-Yang Ju, Chih-Chia Chen, Jen-Shiun Chiang, Yu-Shian Lin, Wei-Han Chen, Chun-Tse Chien
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Cropping, Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, object-detection, Object Detection, Real-Time Object Detection, Super-Resolution

The Transformer-based method has demonstrated remarkable performance for image super-resolution in comparison to the method based on the convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, using the self-attention mechanism like SwinIR (Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer) to extract feature information from images needs a significant amount of computational resources, which limits its application on low computing power platforms. To improve the model feature reuse, this research work proposes the Interval Dense Connection Strategy, which connects different blocks according to the newly designed algorithm. We apply this strategy to SwinIR and present a new model, which named SwinOIR (Object Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer). For image super-resolution, an ablation study is conducted to demonstrate the positive effect of the Interval Dense Connection Strategy on the model performance. Furthermore, we evaluate our model on various popular benchmark datasets, and compare it with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) lightweight models. For example, SwinOIR obtains a PSNR of 26.62 dB for x4 upscaling image super-resolution on Urban100 dataset, which is 0.15 dB higher than the SOTA model SwinIR. For real-life application, this work applies the lastest version of You Only Look Once (YOLOv8) model and the proposed model to perform object detection and real-life image super-resolution on low-quality images. This implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/Rubbbbbbbbby/SwinOIR.
Global Knowledge Calibration for Fast Open-Vocabulary Segmentation
Authors: Kunyang Han, Yong liu, Jun Hao Liew, Henghui Ding, Yunchao Wei, Jiajun Liu, Yitong Wang, Yansong Tang, Yujiu Yang, Jiashi Feng, Yao Zhao
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Open-Vocabulary Video Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Recent advancements in pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, have enabled the segmentation of arbitrary concepts solely from textual inputs, a process commonly referred to as open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVS). However, existing OVS techniques confront a fundamental challenge: the trained classifier tends to overfit on the base classes observed during training, resulting in suboptimal generalization performance to unseen classes. To mitigate this issue, recent studies have proposed the use of an additional frozen pre-trained CLIP for classification. Nonetheless, this approach incurs heavy computational overheads as the CLIP vision encoder must be repeatedly forward-passed for each mask, rendering it impractical for real-world applications. To address this challenge, our objective is to develop a fast OVS model that can perform comparably or better without the extra computational burden of the CLIP image encoder during inference. To this end, we propose a core idea of preserving the generalizable representation when fine-tuning on known classes. Specifically, we introduce a text diversification strategy that generates a set of synonyms for each training category, which prevents the learned representation from collapsing onto specific known category names. Additionally, we employ a text-guided knowledge distillation method to preserve the generalizable knowledge of CLIP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves robust generalization performance across various datasets. Furthermore, we perform a preliminary exploration of open-vocabulary video segmentation and present a benchmark that can facilitate future open-vocabulary research in the video domain.
Grab What You Need: Rethinking Complex Table Structure Recognition with Flexible Components Deliberation
Authors: Hao liu, Xin Li, Mingming Gong, Bing Liu, Yunfei Wu, Deqiang Jiang, Yinsong Liu, Xing Sun
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00

Recently, Table Structure Recognition (TSR) task, aiming at identifying table structure into machine readable formats, has received increasing interest in the community. While impressive success, most single table component-based methods can not perform well on unregularized table cases distracted by not only complicated inner structure but also exterior capture distortion. In this paper, we raise it as Complex TSR problem, where the performance degeneration of existing methods is attributable to their inefficient component usage and redundant post-processing. To mitigate it, we shift our perspective from table component extraction towards the efficient multiple components leverage, which awaits further exploration in the field. Specifically, we propose a seminal method, termed GrabTab, equipped with newly proposed Component Deliberator. Thanks to its progressive deliberation mechanism, our GrabTab can flexibly accommodate to most complex tables with reasonable components selected but without complicated post-processing involved. Quantitative experimental results on public benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, especially under more challenging scenes.
Empowering CAM-Based Methods with Capability to Generate Fine-Grained and High-Faithfulness Explanations
Authors: Changqing Qiu, Fusheng Jin, Yining Zhang
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Explanation Generation

Recently, the explanation of neural network models has garnered considerable research attention. In computer vision, CAM (Class Activation Map)-based methods and LRP (Layer-wise Relevance Propagation) method are two common explanation methods. However, since most CAM-based methods can only generate global weights, they can only generate coarse-grained explanations at a deep layer. LRP and its variants, on the other hand, can generate fine-grained explanations. But the faithfulness of the explanations is too low. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose FG-CAM (Fine-Grained CAM), which extends CAM-based methods to enable generating fine-grained and high-faithfulness explanations. FG-CAM uses the relationship between two adjacent layers of feature maps with resolution differences to gradually increase the explanation resolution, while finding the contributing pixels and filtering out the pixels that do not contribute. Our method not only solves the shortcoming of CAM-based methods without changing their characteristics, but also generates fine-grained explanations that have higher faithfulness than LRP and its variants. We also present FG-CAM with denoising, which is a variant of FG-CAM and is able to generate less noisy explanations with almost no change in explanation faithfulness. Experimental results show that the performance of FG-CAM is almost unaffected by the explanation resolution. FG-CAM outperforms existing CAM-based methods significantly in both shallow and intermediate layers, and outperforms LRP and its variants significantly in the input layer. Our code is available at https://github.com/dongmo-qcq/FG-CAM.
NLUT: Neural-based 3D Lookup Tables for Video Photorealistic Style Transfer
Authors: Yaosen Chen, Han Yang, Yuexin Yang, Yuegen Liu, Wei Wang, Xuming Wen, Chaoping Xie
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 8k, Style Transfer

Video photorealistic style transfer is desired to generate videos with a similar photorealistic style to the style image while maintaining temporal consistency. However, existing methods obtain stylized video sequences by performing frame-by-frame photorealistic style transfer, which is inefficient and does not ensure the temporal consistency of the stylized video. To address this issue, we use neural network-based 3D Lookup Tables (LUTs) for the photorealistic transfer of videos, achieving a balance between efficiency and effectiveness. We first train a neural network for generating photorealistic stylized 3D LUTs on a large-scale dataset; then, when performing photorealistic style transfer for a specific video, we select a keyframe and style image in the video as the data source and fine-turn the neural network; finally, we query the 3D LUTs generated by the fine-tuned neural network for the colors in the video, resulting in a super-fast photorealistic style transfer, even processing 8K video takes less than 2 millisecond per frame. The experimental results show that our method not only realizes the photorealistic style transfer of arbitrary style images but also outperforms the existing methods in terms of visual quality and consistency. Project page:https://semchan.github.io/NLUT_Project.
A New Benchmark: On the Utility of Synthetic Data with Blender for Bare Supervised Learning and Downstream Domain Adaptation
Authors: Hui Tang, Kui Jia
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification

Deep learning in computer vision has achieved great success with the price of large-scale labeled training data. However, exhaustive data annotation is impracticable for each task of all domains of interest, due to high labor costs and unguaranteed labeling accuracy. Besides, the uncontrollable data collection process produces non-IID training and test data, where undesired duplication may exist. All these nuisances may hinder the verification of typical theories and exposure to new findings. To circumvent them, an alternative is to generate synthetic data via 3D rendering with domain randomization. We in this work push forward along this line by doing profound and extensive research on bare supervised learning and downstream domain adaptation. Specifically, under the well-controlled, IID data setting enabled by 3D rendering, we systematically verify the typical, important learning insights, e.g., shortcut learning, and discover the new laws of various data regimes and network architectures in generalization. We further investigate the effect of image formation factors on generalization, e.g., object scale, material texture, illumination, camera viewpoint, and background in a 3D scene. Moreover, we use the simulation-to-reality adaptation as a downstream task for comparing the transferability between synthetic and real data when used for pre-training, which demonstrates that synthetic data pre-training is also promising to improve real test results. Lastly, to promote future research, we develop a new large-scale synthetic-to-real benchmark for image classification, termed S2RDA, which provides more significant challenges for transfer from simulation to reality. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/huitangtang/On_the_Utility_of_Synthetic_Data.
Multimodal Feature Extraction and Fusion for Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation and Expression Classification in Videos with Transformers
Authors: Jia Li, Yin Chen, Xuesong Zhang, Jiantao Nie, Ziqiang Li, Yangchen Yu, Yan Zhang, Richang Hong, Meng Wang
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

In this paper, we present our advanced solutions to the two sub-challenges of Affective Behavior Analysis in the wild (ABAW) 2023: the Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation Challenge and Expression (Expr) Classification Challenge. ABAW 2023 aims to tackle the challenge of affective behavior analysis in natural contexts, with the ultimate goal of creating intelligent machines and robots that possess the ability to comprehend human emotions, feelings, and behaviors. For the Expression Classification Challenge, we propose a streamlined approach that handles the challenges of classification effectively. However, our main contribution lies in our use of diverse models and tools to extract multimodal features such as audio and video cues from the Hume-Reaction dataset. By studying, analyzing, and combining these features, we significantly enhance the model's accuracy for sentiment prediction in a multimodal context. Furthermore, our method achieves outstanding results on the Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation Challenge, surpassing the baseline method by an impressive 84\% increase, as measured by the Pearson Coefficient, on the validation dataset.
EmotiEffNet Facial Features in Uni-task Emotion Recognition in Video at ABAW-5 competition
Authors: Andrey V. Savchenko
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Unit Detection, Arousal Estimation, Emotion Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition

In this article, the results of our team for the fifth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition are presented. The usage of the pre-trained convolutional networks from the EmotiEffNet family for frame-level feature extraction is studied. In particular, we propose an ensemble of a multi-layered perceptron and the LightAutoML-based classifier. The post-processing by smoothing the results for sequential frames is implemented. Experimental results for the large-scale Aff-Wild2 database demonstrate that our model achieves a much greater macro-averaged F1-score for facial expression recognition and action unit detection and concordance correlation coefficients for valence/arousal estimation when compared to baseline.
Facial Affect Recognition based on Transformer Encoder and Audiovisual Fusion for the ABAW5 Challenge
Authors: Ziyang Zhang, Liuwei An, Zishun Cui, Ao Xu, Tengteng Dong, Yueqi Jiang, Jingyi Shi, Xin Liu, Xiao Sun, Meng Wang
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00

In this paper, we present our solutions for the 5th Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW), which includes four sub-challenges of Valence-Arousal (VA) Estimation, Expression (Expr) Classification, Action Unit (AU) Detection and Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation. The 5th ABAW competition focuses on facial affect recognition utilizing different modalities and datasets. In our work, we extract powerful audio and visual features using a large number of sota models. These features are fused by Transformer Encoder and TEMMA. Besides, to avoid the possible impact of large dimensional differences between various features, we design an Affine Module to align different features to the same dimension. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the superiority of the proposed method. For the VA Estimation sub-challenge, our method obtains the mean Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of 0.6066. For the Expression Classification sub-challenge, the average F1 Score is 0.4055. For the AU Detection sub-challenge, the average F1 Score is 0.5296. For the Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation sub-challenge, the average pearson's correlations coefficient on the validation set is 0.3968. All of the results of four sub-challenges outperform the baseline with a large margin.
Reliable Image Dehazing by NeRF
Authors: Zheyan Jin, Shiqi Chen, Huajun Feng, Zhihai Xu, Qi Li, Yueting Chen
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing, NeRF

We present an image dehazing algorithm with high quality, wide application, and no data training or prior needed. We analyze the defects of the original dehazing model, and propose a new and reliable dehazing reconstruction and dehazing model based on the combination of optical scattering model and computer graphics lighting rendering model. Based on the new haze model and the images obtained by the cameras, we can reconstruct the three-dimensional space, accurately calculate the objects and haze in the space, and use the transparency relationship of haze to perform accurate haze removal. To obtain a 3D simulation dataset we used the Unreal 5 computer graphics rendering engine. In order to obtain real shot data in different scenes, we used fog generators, array cameras, mobile phones, underwater cameras and drones to obtain haze data. We use formula derivation, simulation data set and real shot data set result experimental results to prove the feasibility of the new method. Compared with various other methods, we are far ahead in terms of calculation indicators (4 dB higher quality average scene), color remains more natural, and the algorithm is more robust in different scenarios and best in the subjective perception.
Learning a Room with the Occ-SDF Hybrid: Signed Distance Function Mingled with Occupancy Aids Scene Representation
Authors: Xiaoyang Lyu, Peng Dai, Zizhang Li, Dongyu Yan, Yi Lin, Yifan Peng, Xiaojuan Qi
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Neural Rendering, Surface Reconstruction

Implicit neural rendering, which uses signed distance function (SDF) representation with geometric priors (such as depth or surface normal), has led to impressive progress in the surface reconstruction of large-scale scenes. However, applying this method to reconstruct a room-level scene from images may miss structures in low-intensity areas or small and thin objects. We conducted experiments on three datasets to identify limitations of the original color rendering loss and priors-embedded SDF scene representation. We found that the color rendering loss results in optimization bias against low-intensity areas, causing gradient vanishing and leaving these areas unoptimized. To address this issue, we propose a feature-based color rendering loss that utilizes non-zero feature values to bring back optimization signals. Additionally, the SDF representation can be influenced by objects along a ray path, disrupting the monotonic change of SDF values when a single object is present. To counteract this, we explore using the occupancy representation, which encodes each point separately and is unaffected by objects along a querying ray. Our experimental results demonstrate that the joint forces of the feature-based rendering loss and Occ-SDF hybrid representation scheme can provide high-quality reconstruction results, especially in challenging room-level scenarios. The code would be released.
Facial Affective Behavior Analysis Method for 5th ABAW Competition
Authors: Shangfei Wang, Yanan Chang, Yi Wu, Xiangyu Miao, Jiaqiang Wu, Zhouan Zhu, Jiahe Wang, Yufei Xiao
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Arousal Estimation

Facial affective behavior analysis is important for human-computer interaction. 5th ABAW competition includes three challenges from Aff-Wild2 database. Three common facial affective analysis tasks are involved, i.e. valence-arousal estimation, expression classification, action unit recognition. For the three challenges, we construct three different models to solve the corresponding problems to improve the results, such as data unbalance and data noise. For the experiments of three challenges, we train the models on the provided training data and validate the models on the validation data.
Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation
Authors: Lingting Zhu, Xian Liu, Xuanyu Liu, Rui Qian, Ziwei Liu, Lequan Yu
Date: 2023-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Diversity, Gesture Generation

Animating virtual avatars to make co-speech gestures facilitates various applications in human-machine interaction. The existing methods mainly rely on generative adversarial networks (GANs), which typically suffer from notorious mode collapse and unstable training, thus making it difficult to learn accurate audio-gesture joint distributions. In this work, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework, named Diffusion Co-Speech Gesture (DiffGesture), to effectively capture the cross-modal audio-to-gesture associations and preserve temporal coherence for high-fidelity audio-driven co-speech gesture generation. Specifically, we first establish the diffusion-conditional generation process on clips of skeleton sequences and audio to enable the whole framework. Then, a novel Diffusion Audio-Gesture Transformer is devised to better attend to the information from multiple modalities and model the long-term temporal dependency. Moreover, to eliminate temporal inconsistency, we propose an effective Diffusion Gesture Stabilizer with an annealed noise sampling strategy. Benefiting from the architectural advantages of diffusion models, we further incorporate implicit classifier-free guidance to trade off between diversity and gesture quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffGesture achieves state-of-theart performance, which renders coherent gestures with better mode coverage and stronger audio correlations. Code is available at https://github.com/Advocate99/DiffGesture.