pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Splicing Detection and Localization In Satellite Imagery Using Conditional GANs
Authors: Emily R. Bartusiak, Sri Kalyan Yarlagadda, David Güera, Paolo Bestagini, Stefano Tubaro, Fengqing M. Zhu, Edward J. Delp
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Manipulation

The widespread availability of image editing tools and improvements in image processing techniques allow image manipulation to be very easy. Oftentimes, easy-to-use yet sophisticated image manipulation tools yields distortions/changes imperceptible to the human observer. Distribution of forged images can have drastic ramifications, especially when coupled with the speed and vastness of the Internet. Therefore, verifying image integrity poses an immense and important challenge to the digital forensic community. Satellite images specifically can be modified in a number of ways, including the insertion of objects to hide existing scenes and structures. In this paper, we describe the use of a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) to identify the presence of such spliced forgeries within satellite images. Additionally, we identify their locations and shapes. Trained on pristine and falsified images, our method achieves high success on these detection and localization objectives.
Synthesized Speech Detection Using Convolutional Transformer-Based Spectrogram Analysis
Authors: Emily R. Bartusiak, Edward J. Delp
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00

Synthesized speech is common today due to the prevalence of virtual assistants, easy-to-use tools for generating and modifying speech signals, and remote work practices. Synthesized speech can also be used for nefarious purposes, including creating a purported speech signal and attributing it to someone who did not speak the content of the signal. We need methods to detect if a speech signal is synthesized. In this paper, we analyze speech signals in the form of spectrograms with a Compact Convolutional Transformer (CCT) for synthesized speech detection. A CCT utilizes a convolutional layer that introduces inductive biases and shared weights into a network, allowing a transformer architecture to perform well with fewer data samples used for training. The CCT uses an attention mechanism to incorporate information from all parts of a signal under analysis. Trained on both genuine human voice signals and synthesized human voice signals, we demonstrate that our CCT approach successfully differentiates between genuine and synthesized speech signals.
Deep Multi-Scale U-Net Architecture and Label-Noise Robust Training Strategies for Histopathological Image Segmentation
Authors: Nikhil Cherian Kurian, Amit Lohan, Gregory Verghese, Nimish Dharamshi, Swati Meena, Mengyuan Li, Fangfang Liu, Cheryl Gillet, Swapnil Rane, Anita Grigoriadis, Amit Sethi
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Although the U-Net architecture has been extensively used for segmentation of medical images, we address two of its shortcomings in this work. Firstly, the accuracy of vanilla U-Net degrades when the target regions for segmentation exhibit significant variations in shape and size. Even though the U-Net already possesses some capability to analyze features at various scales, we propose to explicitly add multi-scale feature maps in each convolutional module of the U-Net encoder to improve segmentation of histology images. Secondly, the accuracy of a U-Net model also suffers when the annotations for supervised learning are noisy or incomplete. This can happen due to the inherent difficulty for a human expert to identify and delineate all instances of specific pathology very precisely and accurately. We address this challenge by introducing auxiliary confidence maps that emphasize less on the boundaries of the given target regions. Further, we utilize the bootstrapping properties of the deep network to address the missing annotation problem intelligently. In our experiments on a private dataset of breast cancer lymph nodes, where the primary task was to segment germinal centres and sinus histiocytosis, we observed substantial improvement over a U-Net baseline based on the two proposed augmentations.
Data-Consistent Non-Cartesian Deep Subspace Learning for Efficient Dynamic MR Image Reconstruction
Authors: Zihao Chen, Yuhua Chen, Yibin Xie, Debiao Li, Anthony G. Christodoulou
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

Non-Cartesian sampling with subspace-constrained image reconstruction is a popular approach to dynamic MRI, but slow iterative reconstruction limits its clinical application. Data-consistent (DC) deep learning can accelerate reconstruction with good image quality, but has not been formulated for non-Cartesian subspace imaging. In this study, we propose a DC non-Cartesian deep subspace learning framework for fast, accurate dynamic MR image reconstruction. Four novel DC formulations are developed and evaluated: two gradient decent approaches, a directly solved approach, and a conjugate gradient approach. We applied a U-Net model with and without DC layers to reconstruct T1-weighted images for cardiac MR Multitasking (an advanced multidimensional imaging method), comparing our results to the iteratively reconstructed reference. Experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly improves reconstruction accuracy over the U-Net model without DC, while significantly accelerating the reconstruction over conventional iterative reconstruction.
Comparison of CoModGANs, LaMa and GLIDE for Art Inpainting- Completing M.C Escher's Print Gallery
Authors: Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Simone Caenazzo, Gaston Mazzei
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00

Digital art restoration has benefited from inpainting models to correct the degradation or missing sections of a painting. This work compares three current state-of-the art models for inpainting of large missing regions. We provide qualitative and quantitative comparison of the performance by CoModGANs, LaMa and GLIDE in inpainting of blurry and missing sections of images. We use Escher's incomplete painting Print Gallery as our test study since it presents several of the challenges commonly present in restorative inpainting.
Application of belief functions to medical image segmentation: A review
Authors: Ling Huang, Su Ruan, Thierry Denoeux
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The investigation of uncertainty is of major importance in risk-critical applications, such as medical image segmentation. Belief function theory, a formal framework for uncertainty analysis and multiple evidence fusion, has made significant contributions to medical image segmentation, especially since the development of deep learning. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of medical image segmentation methods using belief function theory. We classify the methods according to the fusion step and explain how information with uncertainty or imprecision is modeled and fused with belief function theory. In addition, we discuss the challenges and limitations of present belief function-based medical image segmentation and propose orientations for future research. Future research could investigate both belief function theory and deep learning to achieve more promising and reliable segmentation results.
License Plate Privacy in Collaborative Visual Analysis of Traffic Scenes
Authors: Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Korcan Uyanik, Ivan V. Bajić
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Management

Traffic scene analysis is important for emerging technologies such as smart traffic management and autonomous vehicles. However, such analysis also poses potential privacy threats. For example, a system that can recognize license plates may construct patterns of behavior of the corresponding vehicles' owners and use that for various illegal purposes. In this paper we present a system that enables traffic scene analysis while at the same time preserving license plate privacy. The system is based on a multi-task model whose latent space is selectively compressed depending on the amount of information the specific features carry about analysis tasks and private information. Effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by experiments on the Cityscapes dataset, for which we also provide license plate annotations.
In Defense of Image Pre-Training for Spatiotemporal Recognition
Authors: Xianhang Li, Huiyu Wang, Chen Wei, Jieru Mei, Alan Yuille, Yuyin Zhou, Cihang Xie
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, STS, Video Recognition

Image pre-training, the current de-facto paradigm for a wide range of visual tasks, is generally less favored in the field of video recognition. By contrast, a common strategy is to directly train with spatiotemporal convolutional neural networks (CNNs) from scratch. Nonetheless, interestingly, by taking a closer look at these from-scratch learned CNNs, we note there exist certain 3D kernels that exhibit much stronger appearance modeling ability than others, arguably suggesting appearance information is already well disentangled in learning. Inspired by this observation, we hypothesize that the key to effectively leveraging image pre-training lies in the decomposition of learning spatial and temporal features, and revisiting image pre-training as the appearance prior to initializing 3D kernels. In addition, we propose Spatial-Temporal Separable (STS) convolution, which explicitly splits the feature channels into spatial and temporal groups, to further enable a more thorough decomposition of spatiotemporal features for fine-tuning 3D CNNs. Our experiments show that simply replacing 3D convolution with STS notably improves a wide range of 3D CNNs without increasing parameters and computation on both Kinetics-400 and Something-Something V2. Moreover, this new training pipeline consistently achieves better results on video recognition with significant speedup. For instance, we achieve +0.6% top-1 of Slowfast on Kinetics-400 over the strong 256-epoch 128-GPU baseline while fine-tuning for only 50 epochs with 4 GPUs. The code and models are available at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/Image-Pretraining-for-Video.
End2End Multi-View Feature Matching with Differentiable Pose Optimization
Authors: Barbara Roessle, Matthias Nießner
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Camera Pose Estimation, Graph Attention, Pose Estimation

Erroneous feature matches have severe impact on subsequent camera pose estimation and often require additional, time-costly measures, like RANSAC, for outlier rejection. Our method tackles this challenge by addressing feature matching and pose optimization jointly. To this end, we propose a graph attention network to predict image correspondences along with confidence weights. The resulting matches serve as weighted constraints in a differentiable pose estimation. Training feature matching with gradients from pose optimization naturally learns to down-weight outliers and boosts pose estimation on image pairs compared to SuperGlue by 6.7% on ScanNet. At the same time, it reduces the pose estimation time by over 50% and renders RANSAC iterations unnecessary. Moreover, we integrate information from multiple views by spanning the graph across multiple frames to predict the matches all at once. Multi-view matching combined with end-to-end training improves the pose estimation metrics on Matterport3D by 18.5% compared to SuperGlue.
Smart City Intersections: Intelligence Nodes for Future Metropolises
Authors: Zoran Kostić, Alex Angus, Zhengye Yang, Zhuoxu Duan, Ivan Seskar, Gil Zussman, Dipankar Raychaudhuri
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Management

Traffic intersections are the most suitable locations for the deployment of computing, communications, and intelligence services for smart cities of the future. The abundance of data to be collected and processed, in combination with privacy and security concerns, motivates the use of the edge-computing paradigm which aligns well with physical intersections in metropolises. This paper focuses on high-bandwidth, low-latency applications, and in that context it describes: (i) system design considerations for smart city intersection intelligence nodes; (ii) key technological components including sensors, networking, edge computing, low latency design, and AI-based intelligence; and (iii) applications such as privacy preservation, cloud-connected vehicles, a real-time "radar-screen", traffic management, and monitoring of pedestrian behavior during pandemics. The results of the experimental studies performed on the COSMOS testbed located in New York City are illustrated. Future challenges in designing human-centered smart city intersections are summarized.
Effect of Random Histogram Equalization on Breast Calcification Analysis Using Deep Learning
Authors: Adarsh Bhandary Panambur, Prathmesh Madhu, Andreas Maier
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Management, Prognosis

Early detection and analysis of calcifications in mammogram images is crucial in a breast cancer diagnosis workflow. Management of calcifications that require immediate follow-up and further analyzing its benignancy or malignancy can result in a better prognosis. Recent studies have shown that deep learning-based algorithms can learn robust representations to analyze suspicious calcifications in mammography. In this work, we demonstrate that randomly equalizing the histograms of calcification patches as a data augmentation technique can significantly improve the classification performance for analyzing suspicious calcifications. We validate our approach by using the CBIS-DDSM dataset for two classification tasks. The results on both the tasks show that the proposed methodology gains more than 1% mean accuracy and F1-score when equalizing the data with a probability of 0.4 when compared to not using histogram equalization. This is further supported by the t-tests, where we obtain a p-value of p<0.0001, thus showing the statistical significance of our approach.
SpineNetV2: Automated Detection, Labelling and Radiological Grading Of Clinical MR Scans
Authors: Rhydian Windsor, Amir Jamaludin, Timor Kadir, Andrew Zisserman
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Body Detection

This technical report presents SpineNetV2, an automated tool which: (i) detects and labels vertebral bodies in clinical spinal magnetic resonance (MR) scans across a range of commonly used sequences; and (ii) performs radiological grading of lumbar intervertebral discs in T2-weighted scans for a range of common degenerative changes. SpineNetV2 improves over the original SpineNet software in two ways: (1) The vertebral body detection stage is significantly faster, more accurate and works across a range of fields-of-view (as opposed to just lumbar scans). (2) Radiological grading adopts a more powerful architecture, adding several new grading schemes without loss in performance. A demo of the software is available at the project website: http://zeus.robots.ox.ac.uk/spinenet2/.
Physics to the Rescue: Deep Non-line-of-sight Reconstruction for High-speed Imaging
Authors: Fangzhou Mu, Sicheng Mo, Jiayong Peng, Xiaochun Liu, Ji Hyun Nam, Siddeshwar Raghavan, Andreas Velten, Yin Li
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Computational approach to imaging around the corner, or non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging, is becoming a reality thanks to major advances in imaging hardware and reconstruction algorithms. A recent development towards practical NLOS imaging, Nam et al. demonstrated a high-speed non-confocal imaging system that operates at 5Hz, 100x faster than the prior art. This enormous gain in acquisition rate, however, necessitates numerous approximations in light transport, breaking many existing NLOS reconstruction methods that assume an idealized image formation model. To bridge the gap, we present a novel deep model that incorporates the complementary physics priors of wave propagation and volume rendering into a neural network for high-quality and robust NLOS reconstruction. This orchestrated design regularizes the solution space by relaxing the image formation model, resulting in a deep model that generalizes well on real captures despite being exclusively trained on synthetic data. Further, we devise a unified learning framework that enables our model to be flexibly trained using diverse supervision signals, including target intensity images or even raw NLOS transient measurements. Once trained, our model renders both intensity and depth images at inference time in a single forward pass, capable of processing more than 5 captures per second on a high-end GPU. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, we show that our method outperforms prior physics and learning based approaches on both synthetic and real measurements. We anticipate that our method along with the fast capturing system will accelerate future development of NLOS imaging for real world applications that require high-speed imaging.
FundusQ-Net: a Regression Quality Assessment Deep Learning Algorithm for Fundus Images Quality Grading
Authors: Or Abramovich, Hadas Pizem, Jan Van Eijgen, Ilan Oren, Joshua Melamed, Ingeborg Stalmans, Eytan Z. Blumenthal, Joachim A. Behar
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Image Quality Assessment, regression

Objective: Ophthalmological pathologies such as glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration are major causes of blindness and vision impairment. There is a need for novel decision support tools that can simplify and speed up the diagnosis of these pathologies. A key step in this process is to automatically estimate the quality of the fundus images to make sure these are interpretable by a human operator or a machine learning model. We present a novel fundus image quality scale and deep learning (DL) model that can estimate fundus image quality relative to this new scale. Methods: A total of 1,245 images were graded for quality by two ophthalmologists within the range 1-10, with a resolution of 0.5. A DL regression model was trained for fundus image quality assessment. The architecture used was Inception-V3. The model was developed using a total of 89,947 images from 6 databases, of which 1,245 were labeled by the specialists and the remaining 88,702 images were used for pre-training and semi-supervised learning. The final DL model was evaluated on an internal test set (n=209) as well as an external test set (n=194). Results: The final DL model, denoted FundusQ-Net, achieved a mean absolute error of 0.61 (0.54-0.68) on the internal test set. When evaluated as a binary classification model on the public DRIMDB database as an external test set the model obtained an accuracy of 99%. Significance: the proposed algorithm provides a new robust tool for automated quality grading of fundus images.
Deep Learning Framework for Real-time Fetal Brain Segmentation in MRI
Authors: Razieh Faghihpirayesh, Davood Karimi, Deniz Erdogmus, Ali Gholipour
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Segmentation, Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Segmentation

Fetal brain segmentation is an important first step for slice-level motion correction and slice-to-volume reconstruction in fetal MRI. Fast and accurate segmentation of the fetal brain on fetal MRI is required to achieve real-time fetal head pose estimation and motion tracking for slice re-acquisition and steering. To address this critical unmet need, in this work we analyzed the speed-accuracy performance of a variety of deep neural network models, and devised a symbolically small convolutional neural network that combines spatial details at high resolution with context features extracted at lower resolutions. We used multiple branches with skip connections to maintain high accuracy while devising a parallel combination of convolution and pooling operations as an input downsampling module to further reduce inference time. We trained our model as well as eight alternative, state-of-the-art networks with manually-labeled fetal brain MRI slices and tested on two sets of normal and challenging test cases. Experimental results show that our network achieved the highest accuracy and lowest inference time among all of the compared state-of-the-art real-time segmentation methods. We achieved average Dice scores of 97.99\% and 84.04\% on the normal and challenging test sets, respectively, with an inference time of 3.36 milliseconds per image on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Code, data, and the trained models are available at https://github.com/bchimagine/real_time_fetal_brain_segmentation.
MIRST-DM: Multi-Instance RST with Drop-Max Layer for Robust Classification of Breast Cancer
Authors: Shoukun Sun, Min Xian, Aleksandar Vakanski, Hossny Ghanem
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, image-classification, Image Classification, Robust classification

Robust self-training (RST) can augment the adversarial robustness of image classification models without significantly sacrificing models' generalizability. However, RST and other state-of-the-art defense approaches failed to preserve the generalizability and reproduce their good adversarial robustness on small medical image sets. In this work, we propose the Multi-instance RST with a drop-max layer, namely MIRST-DM, which involves a sequence of iteratively generated adversarial instances during training to learn smoother decision boundaries on small datasets. The proposed drop-max layer eliminates unstable features and helps learn representations that are robust to image perturbations. The proposed approach was validated using a small breast ultrasound dataset with 1,190 images. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art adversarial robustness against three prevalent attacks.
A Deep Learning-based Integrated Framework for Quality-aware Undersampled Cine Cardiac MRI Reconstruction and Analysis
Authors: Inês P. Machado, Esther Puyol-Antón, Kerstin Hammernik, Gastão Cruz, Devran Ugurlu, Ihsane Olakorede, Ilkay Oksuz, Bram Ruijsink, Miguel Castelo-Branco, Alistair A. Young, Claudia Prieto, Julia A. Schnabel, Andrew P. King
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI Reconstruction

Cine cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is considered the gold standard for cardiac function evaluation. However, cine CMR acquisition is inherently slow and in recent decades considerable effort has been put into accelerating scan times without compromising image quality or the accuracy of derived results. In this paper, we present a fully-automated, quality-controlled integrated framework for reconstruction, segmentation and downstream analysis of undersampled cine CMR data. The framework enables active acquisition of radial k-space data, in which acquisition can be stopped as soon as acquired data are sufficient to produce high quality reconstructions and segmentations. This results in reduced scan times and automated analysis, enabling robust and accurate estimation of functional biomarkers. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we perform realistic simulations of radial k-space acquisitions on a dataset of subjects from the UK Biobank and present results on in-vivo cine CMR k-space data collected from healthy subjects. The results demonstrate that our method can produce quality-controlled images in a mean scan time reduced from 12 to 4 seconds per slice, and that image quality is sufficient to allow clinically relevant parameters to be automatically estimated to within 5% mean absolute difference.