pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Detect-and-describe: Joint learning framework for detection and description of objects
Authors: Addel Zafar, Umar Khalid
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Traditional object detection answers two questions; "what" (what the object is?) and "where" (where the object is?). "what" part of the object detection can be fine-grained further i.e. "what type", "what shape" and "what material" etc. This results in the shifting of the object detection tasks to the object description paradigm. Describing an object provides additional detail that enables us to understand the characteristics and attributes of the object ("plastic boat" not just boat, "glass bottle" not just bottle). This additional information can implicitly be used to gain insight into unseen objects (e.g. unknown object is "metallic", "has wheels"), which is not possible in traditional object detection. In this paper, we present a new approach to simultaneously detect objects and infer their attributes, we call it Detect and Describe (DaD) framework. DaD is a deep learning-based approach that extends object detection to object attribute prediction as well. We train our model on aPascal train set and evaluate our approach on aPascal test set. We achieve 97.0% in Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) for object attributes prediction on aPascal test set. We also show qualitative results for object attribute prediction on unseen objects, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for describing unknown objects.
Semi-supervised 3D shape segmentation with multilevel consistency and part substitution
Authors: Chun-Yu Sun, Yu-Qi Yang, Hao-Xiang Guo, Peng-Shuai Wang, Xin Tong, Yang Liu, Heung-Yeung Shum
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation on ScanNet, Unsupervised Pre-training

The lack of fine-grained 3D shape segmentation data is the main obstacle to developing learning-based 3D segmentation techniques. We propose an effective semi-supervised method for learning 3D segmentations from a few labeled 3D shapes and a large amount of unlabeled 3D data. For the unlabeled data, we present a novel multilevel consistency loss to enforce consistency of network predictions between perturbed copies of a 3D shape at multiple levels: point-level, part-level, and hierarchical level. For the labeled data, we develop a simple yet effective part substitution scheme to augment the labeled 3D shapes with more structural variations to enhance training. Our method has been extensively validated on the task of 3D object semantic segmentation on PartNet and ShapeNetPart, and indoor scene semantic segmentation on ScanNet. It exhibits superior performance to existing semi-supervised and unsupervised pre-training 3D approaches. Our code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/isunchy/semi_supervised_3d_segmentation.
An Efficient Domain-Incremental Learning Approach to Drive in All Weather Conditions
Authors: M. Jehanzeb Mirza, Marc Masana, Horst Possegger, Horst Bischof
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Autonomous Driving, Incremental Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

Although deep neural networks enable impressive visual perception performance for autonomous driving, their robustness to varying weather conditions still requires attention. When adapting these models for changed environments, such as different weather conditions, they are prone to forgetting previously learned information. This catastrophic forgetting is typically addressed via incremental learning approaches which usually re-train the model by either keeping a memory bank of training samples or keeping a copy of the entire model or model parameters for each scenario. While these approaches show impressive results, they can be prone to scalability issues and their applicability for autonomous driving in all weather conditions has not been shown. In this paper we propose DISC -- Domain Incremental through Statistical Correction -- a simple online zero-forgetting approach which can incrementally learn new tasks (i.e weather conditions) without requiring re-training or expensive memory banks. The only information we store for each task are the statistical parameters as we categorize each domain by the change in first and second order statistics. Thus, as each task arrives, we simply 'plug and play' the statistical vectors for the corresponding task into the model and it immediately starts to perform well on that task. We show the efficacy of our approach by testing it for object detection in a challenging domain-incremental autonomous driving scenario where we encounter different adverse weather conditions, such as heavy rain, fog, and snow.
UID2021: An Underwater Image Dataset for Evaluation of No-reference Quality Assessment Metrics
Authors: Guojia Hou, YuXuan Li, Huan Yang, Kunqian Li, Zhenkuan Pan
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Achieving subjective and objective quality assessment of underwater images is of high significance in underwater visual perception and image/video processing. However, the development of underwater image quality assessment (UIQA) is limited for the lack of comprehensive human subjective user study with publicly available dataset and reliable objective UIQA metric. To address this issue, we establish a large-scale underwater image dataset, dubbed UID2021, for evaluating no-reference UIQA metrics. The constructed dataset contains 60 multiply degraded underwater images collected from various sources, covering six common underwater scenes (i.e. bluish scene, bluish-green scene, greenish scene, hazy scene, low-light scene, and turbid scene), and their corresponding 900 quality improved versions generated by employing fifteen state-of-the-art underwater image enhancement and restoration algorithms. Mean opinion scores (MOS) for UID2021 are also obtained by using the pair comparison sorting method with 52 observers. Both in-air NR-IQA and underwater-specific algorithms are tested on our constructed dataset to fairly compare the performance and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Our proposed UID2021 dataset enables ones to evaluate NR UIQA algorithms comprehensively and paves the way for further research on UIQA. Our UID2021 will be a free download and utilized for research purposes at: https://github.com/Hou-Guojia/UID2021.
SePiCo: Semantic-Guided Pixel Contrast for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Binhui Xie, Shuang Li, Mingjia Li, Chi Harold Liu, Gao Huang, Guoren Wang
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image-to-Image Translation, Semantic Segmentation, Synthetic-to-Real Translation

Domain adaptive semantic segmentation attempts to make satisfactory dense predictions on an unlabeled target domain by utilizing the supervised model trained on a labeled source domain. In this work, we propose Semantic-Guided Pixel Contrast (SePiCo), a novel one-stage adaptation framework that highlights the semantic concepts of individual pixels to promote learning of class-discriminative and class-balanced pixel representations across domains, eventually boosting the performance of self-training methods. Specifically, to explore proper semantic concepts, we first investigate a centroid-aware pixel contrast that employs the category centroids of the entire source domain or a single source image to guide the learning of discriminative features. Considering the possible lack of category diversity in semantic concepts, we then blaze a trail of distributional perspective to involve a sufficient quantity of instances, namely distribution-aware pixel contrast, in which we approximate the true distribution of each semantic category from the statistics of labeled source data. Moreover, such an optimization objective can derive a closed-form upper bound by implicitly involving an infinite number of (dis)similar pairs, making it computationally efficient. Extensive experiments show that SePiCo not only helps stabilize training but also yields discriminative representations, making significant progress on both synthetic-to-real and daytime-to-nighttime adaptation scenarios.
An Energy-Based Prior for Generative Saliency
Authors: Jing Zhang, Jianwen Xie, Nick Barnes, Ping Li
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, RGB-D Salient Object Detection, Saliency Prediction, Salient Object Detection, Variational Inference

We propose a novel generative saliency prediction framework that adopts an informative energy-based model as a prior distribution. The energy-based prior model is defined on the latent space of a saliency generator network that generates the saliency map based on a continuous latent variables and an observed image. Both the parameters of saliency generator and the energy-based prior are jointly trained via Markov chain Monte Carlo-based maximum likelihood estimation, in which the sampling from the intractable posterior and prior distributions of the latent variables are performed by Langevin dynamics. With the generative saliency model, we can obtain a pixel-wise uncertainty map from an image, indicating model confidence in the saliency prediction. Different from existing generative models, which define the prior distribution of the latent variables as a simple isotropic Gaussian distribution, our model uses an energy-based informative prior which can be more expressive in capturing the latent space of the data. With the informative energy-based prior, we extend the Gaussian distribution assumption of generative models to achieve a more representative distribution of the latent space, leading to more reliable uncertainty estimation. We apply the proposed frameworks to both RGB and RGB-D salient object detection tasks with both transformer and convolutional neural network backbones. We further propose an adversarial learning algorithm and a variational inference algorithm as alternatives to train the proposed generative framework. Experimental results show that our generative saliency model with an energy-based prior can achieve not only accurate saliency predictions but also reliable uncertainty maps that are consistent with human perception. Results and code are available at \url{https://github.com/JingZhang617/EBMGSOD}.
Two-Stream Graph Convolutional Network for Intra-oral Scanner Image Segmentation
Authors: Yue Zhao, Lingming Zhang, Yang Liu, Deyu Meng, Zhiming Cui, Chenqiang Gao, Xinbo Gao, Chunfeng Lian, Dinggang Shen
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Precise segmentation of teeth from intra-oral scanner images is an essential task in computer-aided orthodontic surgical planning. The state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods often simply concatenate the raw geometric attributes (i.e., coordinates and normal vectors) of mesh cells to train a single-stream network for automatic intra-oral scanner image segmentation. However, since different raw attributes reveal completely different geometric information, the naive concatenation of different raw attributes at the (low-level) input stage may bring unnecessary confusion in describing and differentiating between mesh cells, thus hampering the learning of high-level geometric representations for the segmentation task. To address this issue, we design a two-stream graph convolutional network (i.e., TSGCN), which can effectively handle inter-view confusion between different raw attributes to more effectively fuse their complementary information and learn discriminative multi-view geometric representations. Specifically, our TSGCN adopts two input-specific graph-learning streams to extract complementary high-level geometric representations from coordinates and normal vectors, respectively. Then, these single-view representations are further fused by a self-attention module to adaptively balance the contributions of different views in learning more discriminative multi-view representations for accurate and fully automatic tooth segmentation. We have evaluated our TSGCN on a real-patient dataset of dental (mesh) models acquired by 3D intraoral scanners. Experimental results show that our TSGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 3D tooth (surface) segmentation. Github: https://github.com/ZhangLingMing1/TSGCNet.
A qualitative investigation of optical flow algorithms for video denoising
Authors: Hannes Fassold
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Denoising

A good optical flow estimation is crucial in many video analysis and restoration algorithms employed in application fields like media industry, industrial inspection and automotive. In this work, we investigate how well optical flow algorithms perform qualitatively when integrated into a state of the art video denoising algorithm. Both classic optical flow algorithms (e.g. TV-L1) as well as recent deep learning based algorithm (like RAFT or BMBC) will be taken into account. For the qualitative investigation, we will employ realistic content with challenging characteristic (noisy content, large motion etc.) instead of the standard images used in most publications.
ELEVATER: A Benchmark and Toolkit for Evaluating Language-Augmented Visual Models
Authors: Chunyuan Li, Haotian Liu, Liunian Harold Li, Pengchuan Zhang, Jyoti Aneja, Jianwei Yang, Ping Jin, Houdong Hu, Zicheng Liu, Yong Jae Lee, Jianfeng Gao
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Few-Shot Image Classification, Few-Shot Object Detection, image-classification, Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection, Zero-Shot Image Classification, Zero-Shot Object Detection

Learning visual representations from natural language supervision has recently shown great promise in a number of pioneering works. In general, these language-augmented visual models demonstrate strong transferability to a variety of datasets and tasks. However, it remains challenging to evaluate the transferablity of these models due to the lack of easy-to-use evaluation toolkits and public benchmarks. To tackle this, we build ELEVATER (Evaluation of Language-augmented Visual Task-level Transfer), the first benchmark and toolkit for evaluating(pre-trained) language-augmented visual models. ELEVATER is composed of three components. (i) Datasets. As downstream evaluation suites, it consists of 20 image classification datasets and 35 object detection datasets, each of which is augmented with external knowledge. (ii) Toolkit. An automatic hyper-parameter tuning toolkit is developed to facilitate model evaluation on downstream tasks. (iii) Metrics. A variety of evaluation metrics are used to measure sample-efficiency (zero-shot and few-shot) and parameter-efficiency (linear probing and full model fine-tuning). ELEVATER is a platform for Computer Vision in the Wild (CVinW), and is publicly released at at https://computer-vision-in-the-wild.github.io/ELEVATER/
Sensor Data Fusion in Top-View Grid Maps using Evidential Reasoning with Advanced Conflict Resolution
Authors: Sven Richter, Frank Bieder, Sascha Wirges, Christoph Stiller
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00

We present a new method to combine evidential top-view grid maps estimated based on heterogeneous sensor sources. Dempster's combination rule that is usually applied in this context provides undesired results with highly conflicting inputs. Therefore, we use more advanced evidential reasoning techniques and improve the conflict resolution by modeling the reliability of the evidence sources. We propose a data-driven reliability estimation to optimize the fusion quality using the Kitti-360 dataset. We apply the proposed method to the fusion of LiDAR and stereo camera data and evaluate the results qualitatively and quantitatively. The results demonstrate that our proposed method robustly combines measurements from heterogeneous sensors and successfully resolves sensor conflicts.
GroupNet: Multiscale Hypergraph Neural Networks for Trajectory Prediction with Relational Reasoning
Authors: Chenxin Xu, Maosen Li, Zhenyang Ni, Ya zhang, Siheng Chen
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Prediction, Relational Reasoning, Representation Learning, Trajectory Prediction

Demystifying the interactions among multiple agents from their past trajectories is fundamental to precise and interpretable trajectory prediction. However, previous works only consider pair-wise interactions with limited relational reasoning. To promote more comprehensive interaction modeling for relational reasoning, we propose GroupNet, a multiscale hypergraph neural network, which is novel in terms of both interaction capturing and representation learning. From the aspect of interaction capturing, we propose a trainable multiscale hypergraph to capture both pair-wise and group-wise interactions at multiple group sizes. From the aspect of interaction representation learning, we propose a three-element format that can be learnt end-to-end and explicitly reason some relational factors including the interaction strength and category. We apply GroupNet into both CVAE-based prediction system and previous state-of-the-art prediction systems for predicting socially plausible trajectories with relational reasoning. To validate the ability of relational reasoning, we experiment with synthetic physics simulations to reflect the ability to capture group behaviors, reason interaction strength and interaction category. To validate the effectiveness of prediction, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world trajectory prediction datasets, including NBA, SDD and ETH-UCY; and we show that with GroupNet, the CVAE-based prediction system outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also show that adding GroupNet will further improve the performance of previous state-of-the-art prediction systems.
Binary Multi Channel Morphological Neural Network
Authors: Theodore Aouad, Hugues Talbot
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00

Neural networks and particularly Deep learning have been comparatively little studied from the theoretical point of view. Conversely, Mathematical Morphology is a discipline with solid theoretical foundations. We combine these domains to propose a new type of neural architecture that is theoretically more explainable. We introduce a Binary Morphological Neural Network (BiMoNN) built upon the convolutional neural network. We design it for learning morphological networks with binary inputs and outputs. We demonstrate an equivalence between BiMoNNs and morphological operators that we can use to binarize entire networks. These can learn classical morphological operators and show promising results on a medical imaging application.
Modeling Missing Annotations for Incremental Learning in Object Detection
Authors: Fabio Cermelli, Antonino Geraci, Dario Fontanel, Barbara Caputo
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, Instance Segmentation, Knowledge Distillation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Despite the recent advances in the field of object detection, common architectures are still ill-suited to incrementally detect new categories over time. They are vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting: they forget what has been already learned while updating their parameters in absence of the original training data. Previous works extended standard classification methods in the object detection task, mainly adopting the knowledge distillation framework. However, we argue that object detection introduces an additional problem, which has been overlooked. While objects belonging to new classes are learned thanks to their annotations, if no supervision is provided for other objects that may still be present in the input, the model learns to associate them to background regions. We propose to handle these missing annotations by revisiting the standard knowledge distillation framework. Our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in every setting of the Pascal-VOC dataset. We further propose an extension to instance segmentation, outperforming the other baselines. Code can be found here: https://github.com/fcdl94/MMA
Incorporating Semi-Supervised and Positive-Unlabeled Learning for Boosting Full Reference Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Yue Cao, Zhaolin Wan, Dongwei Ren, Zifei Yan, WangMeng Zuo
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Full reference image quality assessment, Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment, Image Quality Assessment

Full-reference (FR) image quality assessment (IQA) evaluates the visual quality of a distorted image by measuring its perceptual difference with pristine-quality reference, and has been widely used in low-level vision tasks. Pairwise labeled data with mean opinion score (MOS) are required in training FR-IQA model, but is time-consuming and cumbersome to collect. In contrast, unlabeled data can be easily collected from an image degradation or restoration process, making it encouraging to exploit unlabeled training data to boost FR-IQA performance. Moreover, due to the distribution inconsistency between labeled and unlabeled data, outliers may occur in unlabeled data, further increasing the training difficulty. In this paper, we suggest to incorporate semi-supervised and positive-unlabeled (PU) learning for exploiting unlabeled data while mitigating the adverse effect of outliers. Particularly, by treating all labeled data as positive samples, PU learning is leveraged to identify negative samples (i.e., outliers) from unlabeled data. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is further deployed to exploit positive unlabeled data by dynamically generating pseudo-MOS. We adopt a dual-branch network including reference and distortion branches. Furthermore, spatial attention is introduced in the reference branch to concentrate more on the informative regions, and sliced Wasserstein distance is used for robust difference map computation to address the misalignment issues caused by images recovered by GAN models. Extensive experiments show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-arts on the benchmark datasets PIPAL, KADID-10k, TID2013, LIVE and CSIQ.
Edge-enhanced Feature Distillation Network for Efficient Super-Resolution
Authors: Yan Wang
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

With the recently massive development in convolution neural networks, numerous lightweight CNN-based image super-resolution methods have been proposed for practical deployments on edge devices. However, most existing methods focus on one specific aspect: network or loss design, which leads to the difficulty of minimizing the model size. To address the issue, we conclude block devising, architecture searching, and loss design to obtain a more efficient SR structure. In this paper, we proposed an edge-enhanced feature distillation network, named EFDN, to preserve the high-frequency information under constrained resources. In detail, we build an edge-enhanced convolution block based on the existing reparameterization methods. Meanwhile, we propose edge-enhanced gradient loss to calibrate the reparameterized path training. Experimental results show that our edge-enhanced strategies preserve the edge and significantly improve the final restoration quality. Code is available at https://github.com/icandle/EFDN.