pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised crack detection on complex stone masonry surfaces
Authors: Panagiotis Agrafiotis, Anastastios Doulamis, Andreas Georgopoulos
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Computer vision for detecting building pathologies has interested researchers for quite some time. Vision-based crack detection is a non-destructive assessment technique, which can be useful especially for Cultural Heritage (CH) where strict regulations apply and, even simple, interventions are not permitted. Recently, shallow and deep machine learning architectures applied on various types of imagery are gaining ground. In this article a crack detection methodology for stone masonry walls is presented. In the proposed approach, crack detection is approached as an unsupervised anomaly detection problem on RGB (Red Green Blue) image patches. Towards this direction, some of the most popular state of the art CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) architectures are deployed and modified to binary classify the images or image patches by predicting a specific class for the tested imagery; 'Crack' or 'No crack', and detect and localize those cracks on the RGB imagery with high accuracy. Testing of the model was performed on various test sites and random images retrieved from the internet and collected by the authors and results suggested the high performance of specific networks compared to the rest, considering also the small numbers of epochs required for training. Those results met the accuracy delivered by more complex and computationally heavy approaches, requiring a large amount of data for training. Source code is available on GitHub https://github.com/pagraf/Crack-detection while datasets are available on Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6516913 .
Knowledge Distillation for Feature Extraction in Underwater VSLAM
Authors: Jinghe Yang, Mingming Gong, Girish Nair, Jung Hoon Lee, Jason Monty, Ye Pu
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Knowledge Distillation

In recent years, learning-based feature detection and matching have outperformed manually-designed methods in in-air cases. However, it is challenging to learn the features in the underwater scenario due to the absence of annotated underwater datasets. This paper proposes a cross-modal knowledge distillation framework for training an underwater feature detection and matching network (UFEN). In particular, we use in-air RGBD data to generate synthetic underwater images based on a physical underwater imaging formation model and employ these as the medium to distil knowledge from a teacher model SuperPoint pretrained on in-air images. We embed UFEN into the ORB-SLAM3 framework to replace the ORB feature by introducing an additional binarization layer. To test the effectiveness of our method, we built a new underwater dataset with groundtruth measurements named EASI (https://github.com/Jinghe-mel/UFEN-SLAM), recorded in an indoor water tank for different turbidity levels. The experimental results on the existing dataset and our new dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
VDN-NeRF: Resolving Shape-Radiance Ambiguity via View-Dependence Normalization
Authors: Bingfan Zhu, Yanchao Yang, Xulong Wang, Youyi Zheng, Leonidas Guibas
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: NeRF

We propose VDN-NeRF, a method to train neural radiance fields (NeRFs) for better geometry under non-Lambertian surface and dynamic lighting conditions that cause significant variation in the radiance of a point when viewed from different angles. Instead of explicitly modeling the underlying factors that result in the view-dependent phenomenon, which could be complex yet not inclusive, we develop a simple and effective technique that normalizes the view-dependence by distilling invariant information already encoded in the learned NeRFs. We then jointly train NeRFs for view synthesis with view-dependence normalization to attain quality geometry. Our experiments show that even though shape-radiance ambiguity is inevitable, the proposed normalization can minimize its effect on geometry, which essentially aligns the optimal capacity needed for explaining view-dependent variations. Our method applies to various baselines and significantly improves geometry without changing the volume rendering pipeline, even if the data is captured under a moving light source. Code is available at: https://github.com/BoifZ/VDN-NeRF.
Learning with Explicit Shape Priors for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Xin You, Junjun He, Jie Yang, Yun Gu
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a fundamental task for medical image analysis and surgical planning. In recent years, UNet-based networks have prevailed in the field of medical image segmentation. However, convolution-neural networks (CNNs) suffer from limited receptive fields, which fail to model the long-range dependency of organs or tumors. Besides, these models are heavily dependent on the training of the final segmentation head. And existing methods can not well address these two limitations at the same time. Hence, in our work, we proposed a novel shape prior module (SPM), which can explicitly introduce shape priors to promote the segmentation performance of UNet-based models. The explicit shape priors consist of global and local shape priors. The former with coarse shape representations provides networks with capabilities to model global contexts. The latter with finer shape information serves as additional guidance to boost the segmentation performance, which relieves the heavy dependence on the learnable prototype in the segmentation head. To evaluate the effectiveness of SPM, we conduct experiments on three challenging public datasets. And our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, SPM shows an outstanding generalization ability on classic CNNs and recent Transformer-based backbones, which can serve as a plug-and-play structure for the segmentation task of different datasets. Source codes are available at https://github.com/AlexYouXin/Explicit-Shape-Priors
Diffusion Action Segmentation
Authors: Daochang Liu, Qiyue Li, AnhDung Dinh, Tingting Jiang, Mubarak Shah, Chang Xu
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Action Segmentation, Denoising, Position, Segmentation, Temporal Action Segmentation

Temporal action segmentation is crucial for understanding long-form videos. Previous works on this task commonly adopt an iterative refinement paradigm by using multi-stage models. We propose a novel framework via denoising diffusion models, which nonetheless shares the same inherent spirit of such iterative refinement. In this framework, action predictions are iteratively generated from random noise with input video features as conditions. To enhance the modeling of three striking characteristics of human actions, including the position prior, the boundary ambiguity, and the relational dependency, we devise a unified masking strategy for the conditioning inputs in our framework. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast, are performed and the proposed method achieves superior or comparable results to state-of-the-art methods, showing the effectiveness of a generative approach for action segmentation.
Ensemble Methods for Multi-Organ Segmentation in CT Series
Authors: Leonardo Crespi, Paolo Roncaglioni, Damiano Dei, Ciro Franzese, Nicola Lambri, Daniele Loiacono, Pietro Mancosu, Marta Scorsetti
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Organ Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In the medical images field, semantic segmentation is one of the most important, yet difficult and time-consuming tasks to be performed by physicians. Thanks to the recent advancement in the Deep Learning models regarding Computer Vision, the promise to automate this kind of task is getting more and more realistic. However, many problems are still to be solved, like the scarce availability of data and the difficulty to extend the efficiency of highly specialised models to general scenarios. Organs at risk segmentation for radiotherapy treatment planning falls in this category, as the limited data available negatively affects the possibility to develop general-purpose models; in this work, we focus on the possibility to solve this problem by presenting three types of ensembles of single-organ models able to produce multi-organ masks exploiting the different specialisations of their components. The results obtained are promising and prove that this is a possible solution to finding efficient multi-organ segmentation methods.
CIMI4D: A Large Multimodal Climbing Motion Dataset under Human-scene Interactions
Authors: Ming Yan, Xin Wang, Yudi Dai, Siqi Shen, Chenglu Wen, Lan Xu, Yuexin Ma, Cheng Wang
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Pose Prediction

Motion capture is a long-standing research problem. Although it has been studied for decades, the majority of research focus on ground-based movements such as walking, sitting, dancing, etc. Off-grounded actions such as climbing are largely overlooked. As an important type of action in sports and firefighting field, the climbing movements is challenging to capture because of its complex back poses, intricate human-scene interactions, and difficult global localization. The research community does not have an in-depth understanding of the climbing action due to the lack of specific datasets. To address this limitation, we collect CIMI4D, a large rock \textbf{C}l\textbf{I}mbing \textbf{M}ot\textbf{I}on dataset from 12 persons climbing 13 different climbing walls. The dataset consists of around 180,000 frames of pose inertial measurements, LiDAR point clouds, RGB videos, high-precision static point cloud scenes, and reconstructed scene meshes. Moreover, we frame-wise annotate touch rock holds to facilitate a detailed exploration of human-scene interaction. The core of this dataset is a blending optimization process, which corrects for the pose as it drifts and is affected by the magnetic conditions. To evaluate the merit of CIMI4D, we perform four tasks which include human pose estimations (with/without scene constraints), pose prediction, and pose generation. The experimental results demonstrate that CIMI4D presents great challenges to existing methods and enables extensive research opportunities. We share the dataset with the research community in http://www.lidarhumanmotion.net/cimi4d/.
Benchmarking FedAvg and FedCurv for Image Classification Tasks
Authors: Bruno Casella, Roberto Esposito, Carlo Cavazzoni, Marco Aldinucci
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Classification, Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

Classic Machine Learning techniques require training on data available in a single data lake. However, aggregating data from different owners is not always convenient for different reasons, including security, privacy and secrecy. Data carry a value that might vanish when shared with others; the ability to avoid sharing the data enables industrial applications where security and privacy are of paramount importance, making it possible to train global models by implementing only local policies which can be run independently and even on air-gapped data centres. Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach which has emerged as an effective way to address privacy concerns by only sharing local AI models while keeping the data decentralized. Two critical challenges of Federated Learning are managing the heterogeneous systems in the same federated network and dealing with real data, which are often not independently and identically distributed (non-IID) among the clients. In this paper, we focus on the second problem, i.e., the problem of statistical heterogeneity of the data in the same federated network. In this setting, local models might be strayed far from the local optimum of the complete dataset, thus possibly hindering the convergence of the federated model. Several Federated Learning algorithms, such as FedAvg, FedProx and Federated Curvature (FedCurv), aiming at tackling the non-IID setting, have already been proposed. This work provides an empirical assessment of the behaviour of FedAvg and FedCurv in common non-IID scenarios. Results show that the number of epochs per round is an important hyper-parameter that, when tuned appropriately, can lead to significant performance gains while reducing the communication cost. As a side product of this work, we release the non-IID version of the datasets we used so to facilitate further comparisons from the FL community.
Comparing Adversarial and Supervised Learning for Organs at Risk Segmentation in CT images
Authors: Leonardo Crespi, Mattia Portanti, Daniele Loiacono
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Organ at Risk (OAR) segmentation from CT scans is a key component of the radiotherapy treatment workflow. In recent years, deep learning techniques have shown remarkable potential in automating this process. In this paper, we investigate the performance of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) compared to supervised learning approaches for segmenting OARs from CT images. We propose three GAN-based models with identical generator architectures but different discriminator networks. These models are compared with well-established CNN models, such as SE-ResUnet and DeepLabV3, using the StructSeg dataset, which consists of 50 annotated CT scans containing contours of six OARs. Our work aims to provide insight into the advantages and disadvantages of adversarial training in the context of OAR segmentation. The results are very promising and show that the proposed GAN-based approaches are similar or superior to their CNN-based counterparts, particularly when segmenting more challenging target organs.
STFAR: Improving Object Detection Robustness at Test-Time by Self-Training with Feature Alignment Regularization
Authors: Yijin Chen, Xun Xu, Yongyi Su, Kui Jia
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Test-time Adaptation

Domain adaptation helps generalizing object detection models to target domain data with distribution shift. It is often achieved by adapting with access to the whole target domain data. In a more realistic scenario, target distribution is often unpredictable until inference stage. This motivates us to explore adapting an object detection model at test-time, a.k.a. test-time adaptation (TTA). In this work, we approach test-time adaptive object detection (TTAOD) from two perspective. First, we adopt a self-training paradigm to generate pseudo labeled objects with an exponential moving average model. The pseudo labels are further used to supervise adapting source domain model. As self-training is prone to incorrect pseudo labels, we further incorporate aligning feature distributions at two output levels as regularizations to self-training. To validate the performance on TTAOD, we create benchmarks based on three standard object detection datasets and adapt generic TTA methods to object detection task. Extensive evaluations suggest our proposed method sets the state-of-the-art on test-time adaptive object detection task.
IC-FPS: Instance-Centroid Faster Point Sampling Module for 3D Point-base Object Detection
Authors: Hu Haotian, Wang Fanyi, Su Jingwen, Gao Shiyu, Zhang Zhiwang
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, object-detection, Object Detection

3D object detection is one of the most important tasks in autonomous driving and robotics. Our research focuses on tackling low efficiency issue of point-based methods on large-scale point clouds. Existing point-based methods adopt farthest point sampling (FPS) strategy for downsampling, which is computationally expensive in terms of inference time and memory consumption when the number of point cloud increases. In order to improve efficiency, we propose a novel Instance-Centroid Faster Point Sampling Module (IC-FPS) , which effectively replaces the first Set Abstraction (SA) layer that is extremely tedious. IC-FPS module is comprised of two methods, local feature diffusion based background point filter (LFDBF) and Centroid-Instance Sampling Strategy (CISS). LFDBF is constructed to exclude most invalid background points, while CISS substitutes FPS strategy by fast sampling centroids and instance points. IC-FPS module can be inserted to almost every point-based models. Extensive experiments on multiple public benchmarks have demonstrated the superiority of IC-FPS. On Waymo dataset, the proposed module significantly improves performance of baseline model and accelerates inference speed by 3.8 times. For the first time, real-time detection of point-based models in large-scale point cloud scenario is realized.
Multiple Instance Ensembling For Paranasal Anomaly Classification In The Maxillary Sinus
Authors: Debayan Bhattacharya, Finn Behrendt, Benjamin Tobias Becker, Dirk Beyersdorff, Elina Petersen, Marvin Petersen, Bastian Cheng, Dennis Eggert, Christian Betz, Anna Sophie Hoffmann, Alexander Schlaefer
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Classification, Classification

Paranasal anomalies are commonly discovered during routine radiological screenings and can present with a wide range of morphological features. This diversity can make it difficult for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to accurately classify these anomalies, especially when working with limited datasets. Additionally, current approaches to paranasal anomaly classification are constrained to identifying a single anomaly at a time. These challenges necessitate the need for further research and development in this area. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of using a 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify healthy maxillary sinuses (MS) and MS with polyps or cysts. The task of accurately identifying the relevant MS volume within larger head and neck Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans can be difficult, but we develop a straightforward strategy to tackle this challenge. Our end-to-end solution includes the use of a novel sampling technique that not only effectively localizes the relevant MS volume, but also increases the size of the training dataset and improves classification results. Additionally, we employ a multiple instance ensemble prediction method to further boost classification performance. Finally, we identify the optimal size of MS volumes to achieve the highest possible classification performance on our dataset. With our multiple instance ensemble prediction strategy and sampling strategy, our 3D CNNs achieve an F1 of 0.85 whereas without it, they achieve an F1 of 0.70. We demonstrate the feasibility of classifying anomalies in the MS. We propose a data enlarging strategy alongside a novel ensembling strategy that proves to be beneficial for paranasal anomaly classification in the MS.
CIRCLE: Capture In Rich Contextual Environments
Authors: Joao Pedro Araujo, Jiaman Li, Karthik Vetrivel, Rishi Agarwal, Deepak Gopinath, Jiajun Wu, Alexander Clegg, C. Karen Liu
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1

Synthesizing 3D human motion in a contextual, ecological environment is important for simulating realistic activities people perform in the real world. However, conventional optics-based motion capture systems are not suited for simultaneously capturing human movements and complex scenes. The lack of rich contextual 3D human motion datasets presents a roadblock to creating high-quality generative human motion models. We propose a novel motion acquisition system in which the actor perceives and operates in a highly contextual virtual world while being motion captured in the real world. Our system enables rapid collection of high-quality human motion in highly diverse scenes, without the concern of occlusion or the need for physical scene construction in the real world. We present CIRCLE, a dataset containing 10 hours of full-body reaching motion from 5 subjects across nine scenes, paired with ego-centric information of the environment represented in various forms, such as RGBD videos. We use this dataset to train a model that generates human motion conditioned on scene information. Leveraging our dataset, the model learns to use ego-centric scene information to achieve nontrivial reaching tasks in the context of complex 3D scenes. To download the data please visit https://stanford-tml.github.io/circle_dataset/.
Trade-offs in Fine-tuned Diffusion Models Between Accuracy and Interpretability
Authors: Mischa Dombrowski, Hadrien Reynaud, Johanna P. Müller, Matthew Baugh, Bernhard Kainz
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Image Generation, Object Localization, Phrase Grounding

Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly impacted the trajectory of generative machine learning research, with many adopting the strategy of fine-tuning pre-trained models using domain-specific text-to-image datasets. Notably, this method has been readily employed for medical applications, such as X-ray image synthesis, leveraging the plethora of associated radiology reports. Yet, a prevailing concern is the lack of assurance on whether these models genuinely comprehend their generated content. With the evolution of text-conditional image generation, these models have grown potent enough to facilitate object localization scrutiny. Our research underscores this advancement in the critical realm of medical imaging, emphasizing the crucial role of interpretability. We further unravel a consequential trade-off between image fidelity as gauged by conventional metrics and model interpretability in generative diffusion models. Specifically, the adoption of learnable text encoders when fine-tuning results in diminished interpretability. Our in-depth exploration uncovers the underlying factors responsible for this divergence. Consequently, we present a set of design principles for the development of truly interpretable generative models. Code is available at https://github.com/MischaD/chest-distillation.
3D-aware Image Generation using 2D Diffusion Models
Authors: Jianfeng Xiang, Jiaolong Yang, Binbin Huang, Xin Tong
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Image Generation

In this paper, we introduce a novel 3D-aware image generation method that leverages 2D diffusion models. We formulate the 3D-aware image generation task as multiview 2D image set generation, and further to a sequential unconditional-conditional multiview image generation process. This allows us to utilize 2D diffusion models to boost the generative modeling power of the method. Additionally, we incorporate depth information from monocular depth estimators to construct the training data for the conditional diffusion model using only still images. We train our method on a large-scale dataset, i.e., ImageNet, which is not addressed by previous methods. It produces high-quality images that significantly outperform prior methods. Furthermore, our approach showcases its capability to generate instances with large view angles, even though the training images are diverse and unaligned, gathered from "in-the-wild" real-world environments.