pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Accurate and Robust Lesion RECIST Diameter Prediction and Segmentation with Transformers
Authors: YouBao Tang, Ning Zhang, Yirui Wang, Shenghua He, Mei Han, Jing Xiao, Ruei-Sung Lin
Date: 2022-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Lesion Segmentation, Prediction, regression, Segmentation

Automatically measuring lesion/tumor size with RECIST (Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors) diameters and segmentation is important for computer-aided diagnosis. Although it has been studied in recent years, there is still space to improve its accuracy and robustness, such as (1) enhancing features by incorporating rich contextual information while keeping a high spatial resolution and (2) involving new tasks and losses for joint optimization. To reach this goal, this paper proposes a transformer-based network (MeaFormer, Measurement transFormer) for lesion RECIST diameter prediction and segmentation (LRDPS). It is formulated as three correlative and complementary tasks: lesion segmentation, heatmap prediction, and keypoint regression. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to use keypoint regression for RECIST diameter prediction. MeaFormer can enhance high-resolution features by employing transformers to capture their long-range dependencies. Two consistency losses are introduced to explicitly build relationships among these tasks for better optimization. Experiments show that MeaFormer achieves the state-of-the-art performance of LRDPS on the large-scale DeepLesion dataset and produces promising results of two downstream clinic-relevant tasks, i.e., 3D lesion segmentation and RECIST assessment in longitudinal studies.
Minimal Feature Analysis for Isolated Digit Recognition for varying encoding rates in noisy environments
Authors: Muskan Garg, Naveen Aggarwal
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This research work is about recent development made in speech recognition. In this research work, analysis of isolated digit recognition in the presence of different bit rates and at different noise levels has been performed. This research work has been carried using audacity and HTK toolkit. Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is the recognition model which was used to perform this experiment. The feature extraction techniques used are Mel Frequency Cepstrum coefficient (MFCC), Linear Predictive Coding (LPC), perceptual linear predictive (PLP), mel spectrum (MELSPEC), filter bank (FBANK). There were three types of different noise levels which have been considered for testing of data. These include random noise, fan noise and random noise in real time environment. This was done to analyse the best environment which can used for real time applications. Further, five different types of commonly used bit rates at different sampling rates were considered to find out the most optimum bit rate.
Self-Supervised Face Presentation Attack Detection with Dynamic Grayscale Snippets
Authors: Usman Muhammad, Mourad Oussalah
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Presentation Attack Detection, Face Recognition, motion prediction, Representation Learning

Face presentation attack detection (PAD) plays an important role in defending face recognition systems against presentation attacks. The success of PAD largely relies on supervised learning that requires a huge number of labeled data, which is especially challenging for videos and often requires expert knowledge. To avoid the costly collection of labeled data, this paper presents a novel method for self-supervised video representation learning via motion prediction. To achieve this, we exploit the temporal consistency based on three RGB frames which are acquired at three different times in the video sequence. The obtained frames are then transformed into grayscale images where each image is specified to three different channels such as R(red), G(green), and B(blue) to form a dynamic grayscale snippet (DGS). Motivated by this, the labels are automatically generated to increase the temporal diversity based on DGS by using the different temporal lengths of the videos, which prove to be very helpful for the downstream task. Benefiting from the self-supervised nature of our method, we report the results that outperform existing methods on four public benchmarks, namely, Replay-Attack, MSU-MFSD, CASIA-FASD, and OULU-NPU. Explainability analysis has been carried out through LIME and Grad-CAM techniques to visualize the most important features used in the DGS.
Lossy Image Compression with Quantized Hierarchical VAEs
Authors: Zhihao Duan, Ming Lu, Zhan Ma, Fengqing Zhu
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Quantization

Recent research has shown a strong theoretical connection between variational autoencoders (VAEs) and the rate-distortion theory. Motivated by this, we consider the problem of lossy image compression from the perspective of generative modeling. Starting with ResNet VAEs, which are originally designed for data (image) distribution modeling, we redesign their latent variable model using a quantization-aware posterior and prior, enabling easy quantization and entropy coding at test time. Along with improved neural network architecture, we present a powerful and efficient model that outperforms previous methods on natural image lossy compression. Our model compresses images in a coarse-to-fine fashion and supports parallel encoding and decoding, leading to fast execution on GPUs. Code is available at https://github.com/duanzhiihao/lossy-vae.
CrackSeg9k: A Collection and Benchmark for Crack Segmentation Datasets and Frameworks
Authors: Shreyas Kulkarni, Shreyas Singh, Dhananjay Balakrishnan, Siddharth Sharma, Saipraneeth Devunuri, Sai Chowdeswara Rao Korlapati
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Crack Segmentation

The detection of cracks is a crucial task in monitoring structural health and ensuring structural safety. The manual process of crack detection is time-consuming and subjective to the inspectors. Several researchers have tried tackling this problem using traditional Image Processing or learning-based techniques. However, their scope of work is limited to detecting cracks on a single type of surface (walls, pavements, glass, etc.). The metrics used to evaluate these methods are also varied across the literature, making it challenging to compare techniques. This paper addresses these problems by combining previously available datasets and unifying the annotations by tackling the inherent problems within each dataset, such as noise and distortions. We also present a pipeline that combines Image Processing and Deep Learning models. Finally, we benchmark the results of proposed models on these metrics on our new dataset and compare them with state-of-the-art models in the literature.
YOLOX-PAI: An Improved YOLOX, Stronger and Faster than YOLOv6
Authors: Ziheng Wu, Xinyi Zou, Wenmeng Zhou, Jun Huang
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, object-detection, Object Detection

We develop an all-in-one computer vision toolbox named EasyCV to facilitate the use of various SOTA computer vision methods. Recently, we add YOLOX-PAI, an improved version of YOLOX, into EasyCV. We conduct ablation studies to investigate the influence of some detection methods on YOLOX. We also provide an easy use for PAI-Blade which is used to accelerate the inference process based on BladeDISC and TensorRT. Finally, we receive 42.8 mAP on COCO dateset within 1.0 ms on a single NVIDIA V100 GPU, which is a bit faster than YOLOv6. A simple but efficient predictor api is also designed in EasyCV to conduct end2end object detection. Codes and models are now available at: https://github.com/alibaba/EasyCV.
LAB-Net: LAB Color-Space Oriented Lightweight Network for Shadow Removal
Authors: Hong Yang, Gongrui Nan, Mingbao Lin, Fei Chao, Yunhang Shen, Ke Li, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Shadow Removal

This paper focuses on the limitations of current over-parameterized shadow removal models. We present a novel lightweight deep neural network that processes shadow images in the LAB color space. The proposed network termed "LAB-Net", is motivated by the following three observations: First, the LAB color space can well separate the luminance information and color properties. Second, sequentially-stacked convolutional layers fail to take full use of features from different receptive fields. Third, non-shadow regions are important prior knowledge to diminish the drastic color difference between shadow and non-shadow regions. Consequently, we design our LAB-Net by involving a two-branch structure: L and AB branches. Thus the shadow-related luminance information can well be processed in the L branch, while the color property is well retained in the AB branch. In addition, each branch is composed of several Basic Blocks, local spatial attention modules (LSA), and convolutional filters. Each Basic Block consists of multiple parallelized dilated convolutions of divergent dilation rates to receive different receptive fields that are operated with distinct network widths to save model parameters and computational costs. Then, an enhanced channel attention module (ECA) is constructed to aggregate features from different receptive fields for better shadow removal. Finally, the LSA modules are further developed to fully use the prior information in non-shadow regions to cleanse the shadow regions. We perform extensive experiments on the both ISTD and SRD datasets. Experimental results show that our LAB-Net well outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Also, our model's parameters and computational costs are reduced by several orders of magnitude. Our code is available at https://github.com/ngrxmu/LAB-Net.
Multi-Outputs Is All You Need For Deblur
Authors: Sidun Liu, Peng Qiao, Yong Dou
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Deblurring, Image Deblurring

Image deblurring task is an ill-posed one, where exists infinite feasible solutions for blurry image. Modern deep learning approaches usually discard the learning of blur kernels and directly employ end-to-end supervised learning. Popular deblurring datasets define the label as one of the feasible solutions. However, we argue that it's not reasonable to specify a label directly, especially when the label is sampled from a random distribution. Therefore, we propose to make the network learn the distribution of feasible solutions, and design based on this consideration a novel multi-head output architecture and corresponding loss function for distribution learning. Our approach enables the model to output multiple feasible solutions to approximate the target distribution. We further propose a novel parameter multiplexing method that reduces the number of parameters and computational effort while improving performance. We evaluated our approach on multiple image-deblur models, including the current state-of-the-art NAFNet. The improvement of best overall (pick the highest score among multiple heads for each validation image) PSNR outperforms the compared baselines up to 0.11~0.18dB. The improvement of the best single head (pick the best-performed head among multiple heads on validation set) PSNR outperforms the compared baselines up to 0.04~0.08dB. The codes are available at https://github.com/Liu-SD/multi-output-deblur.
AesUST: Towards Aesthetic-Enhanced Universal Style Transfer
Authors: Zhizhong Wang, Zhanjie Zhang, Lei Zhao, Zhiwen Zuo, Ailin Li, Wei Xing, Dongming Lu
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

Recent studies have shown remarkable success in universal style transfer which transfers arbitrary visual styles to content images. However, existing approaches suffer from the aesthetic-unrealistic problem that introduces disharmonious patterns and evident artifacts, making the results easy to spot from real paintings. To address this limitation, we propose AesUST, a novel Aesthetic-enhanced Universal Style Transfer approach that can generate aesthetically more realistic and pleasing results for arbitrary styles. Specifically, our approach introduces an aesthetic discriminator to learn the universal human-delightful aesthetic features from a large corpus of artist-created paintings. Then, the aesthetic features are incorporated to enhance the style transfer process via a novel Aesthetic-aware Style-Attention (AesSA) module. Such an AesSA module enables our AesUST to efficiently and flexibly integrate the style patterns according to the global aesthetic channel distribution of the style image and the local semantic spatial distribution of the content image. Moreover, we also develop a new two-stage transfer training strategy with two aesthetic regularizations to train our model more effectively, further improving stylization performance. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our approach synthesizes aesthetically more harmonious and realistic results than state of the art, greatly narrowing the disparity with real artist-created paintings. Our code is available at https://github.com/EndyWon/AesUST.
Weakly and Semi-Supervised Detection, Segmentation and Tracking of Table Grapes with Limited and Noisy Data
Authors: Thomas A. Ciarfuglia, Ionut M. Motoi, Leonardo Saraceni, Mulham Fawakherji, Alberto Sanfeliu, Daniele Nardi
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Detection, segmentation and tracking of fruits and vegetables are three fundamental tasks for precision agriculture, enabling robotic harvesting and yield estimation applications. However, modern algorithms are data hungry and it is not always possible to gather enough data to apply the best performing supervised approaches. Since data collection is an expensive and cumbersome task, the enabling technologies for using computer vision in agriculture are often out of reach for small businesses. Following previous work in this context, where we proposed an initial weakly supervised solution to reduce the data needed to get state-of-the-art detection and segmentation in precision agriculture applications, here we improve that system and explore the problem of tracking fruits in orchards. We present the case of vineyards of table grapes in southern Lazio (Italy) since grapes are a difficult fruit to segment due to occlusion, color and general illumination conditions. We consider the case in which there is some initial labelled data that could work as source data (\eg wine grape data), but it is considerably different from the target data (e.g. table grape data). To improve detection and segmentation on the target data, we propose to train the segmentation algorithm with a weak bounding box label, while for tracking we leverage 3D Structure from Motion algorithms to generate new labels from already labelled samples. Finally, the two systems are combined in a full semi-supervised approach. Comparisons with state-of-the-art supervised solutions show how our methods are able to train new models that achieve high performances with few labelled images and with very simple labelling.
A Federated Learning-enabled Smart Street Light Monitoring Application: Benefits and Future Challenges
Authors: Diya Anand, Ioannis Mavromatis, Pietro Carnelli, Aftab Khan
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Data-enabled cities are recently accelerated and enhanced with automated learning for improved Smart Cities applications. In the context of an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, the data communication is frequently costly, inefficient, not scalable and lacks security. Federated Learning (FL) plays a pivotal role in providing privacy-preserving and communication efficient Machine Learning (ML) frameworks. In this paper we evaluate the feasibility of FL in the context of a Smart Cities Street Light Monitoring application. FL is evaluated against benchmarks of centralised and (fully) personalised machine learning techniques for the classification task of the lampposts operation. Incorporating FL in such a scenario shows minimal performance reduction in terms of the classification task, but huge improvements in the communication cost and the privacy preserving. These outcomes strengthen FL's viability and potential for IoT applications.
6D Robotic Assembly Based on RGB-only Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Bowen Fu, Sek Kun Leong, Xiaocong Lian, Xiangyang Ji
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Pose Estimation

Vision-based robotic assembly is a crucial yet challenging task as the interaction with multiple objects requires high levels of precision. In this paper, we propose an integrated 6D robotic system to perceive, grasp, manipulate and assemble blocks with tight tolerances. Aiming to provide an off-the-shelf RGB-only solution, our system is built upon a monocular 6D object pose estimation network trained solely with synthetic images leveraging physically-based rendering. Subsequently, pose-guided 6D transformation along with collision-free assembly is proposed to construct any designed structure with arbitrary initial poses. Our novel 3-axis calibration operation further enhances the precision and robustness by disentangling 6D pose estimation and robotic assembly. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed 6D robotic assembly system.
Anti-Retroactive Interference for Lifelong Learning
Authors: Runqi Wang, Yuxiang Bao, Baochang Zhang, Jianzhuang Liu, Wentao Zhu, Guodong Guo
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning, Meta-Learning

Humans can continuously learn new knowledge. However, machine learning models suffer from drastic dropping in performance on previous tasks after learning new tasks. Cognitive science points out that the competition of similar knowledge is an important cause of forgetting. In this paper, we design a paradigm for lifelong learning based on meta-learning and associative mechanism of the brain. It tackles the problem from two aspects: extracting knowledge and memorizing knowledge. First, we disrupt the sample's background distribution through a background attack, which strengthens the model to extract the key features of each task. Second, according to the similarity between incremental knowledge and base knowledge, we design an adaptive fusion of incremental knowledge, which helps the model allocate capacity to the knowledge of different difficulties. It is theoretically analyzed that the proposed learning paradigm can make the models of different tasks converge to the same optimum. The proposed method is validated on the MNIST, CIFAR100, CUB200 and ImageNet100 datasets.
Actor-identified Spatiotemporal Action Detection --- Detecting Who Is Doing What in Videos
Authors: Fan Yang, Norimichi Ukita, Sakriani Sakti, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Detection, Action Recognition, Multiple Object Tracking, Object Tracking, Temporal Action Localization

The success of deep learning on video Action Recognition (AR) has motivated researchers to progressively promote related tasks from the coarse level to the fine-grained level. Compared with conventional AR which only predicts an action label for the entire video, Temporal Action Detection (TAD) has been investigated for estimating the start and end time for each action in videos. Taking TAD a step further, Spatiotemporal Action Detection (SAD) has been studied for localizing the action both spatially and temporally in videos. However, who performs the action, is generally ignored in SAD, while identifying the actor could also be important. To this end, we propose a novel task, Actor-identified Spatiotemporal Action Detection (ASAD), to bridge the gap between SAD and actor identification. In ASAD, we not only detect the spatiotemporal boundary for instance-level action but also assign the unique ID to each actor. To approach ASAD, Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) and Action Classification (AC) are two fundamental elements. By using MOT, the spatiotemporal boundary of each actor is obtained and assigned to a unique actor identity. By using AC, the action class is estimated within the corresponding spatiotemporal boundary. Since ASAD is a new task, it poses many new challenges that cannot be addressed by existing methods: i) no dataset is specifically created for ASAD, ii) no evaluation metrics are designed for ASAD, iii) current MOT performance is the bottleneck to obtain satisfactory ASAD results. To address those problems, we contribute to i) annotate a new ASAD dataset, ii) propose ASAD evaluation metrics by considering multi-label actions and actor identification, iii) improve the data association strategies in MOT to boost the MOT performance, which leads to better ASAD results. The code is available at https://github.com/fandulu/ASAD.
xCloth: Extracting Template-free Textured 3D Clothes from a Monocular Image
Authors: Astitva Srivastava, Chandradeep Pokhariya, Sai Sagar Jinka, Avinash Sharma
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Garment Reconstruction

Existing approaches for 3D garment reconstruction either assume a predefined template for the garment geometry (restricting them to fixed clothing styles) or yield vertex colored meshes (lacking high-frequency textural details). Our novel framework co-learns geometric and semantic information of garment surface from the input monocular image for template-free textured 3D garment digitization. More specifically, we propose to extend PeeledHuman representation to predict the pixel-aligned, layered depth and semantic maps to extract 3D garments. The layered representation is further exploited to UV parametrize the arbitrary surface of the extracted garment without any human intervention to form a UV atlas. The texture is then imparted on the UV atlas in a hybrid fashion by first projecting pixels from the input image to UV space for the visible region, followed by inpainting the occluded regions. Thus, we are able to digitize arbitrarily loose clothing styles while retaining high-frequency textural details from a monocular image. We achieve high-fidelity 3D garment reconstruction results on three publicly available datasets and generalization on internet images.
RepParser: End-to-End Multiple Human Parsing with Representative Parts
Authors: Xiaojia Chen, Xuanhan Wang, Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song
Date: 2022-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection, Human Parsing

Existing methods of multiple human parsing usually adopt a two-stage strategy (typically top-down and bottom-up), which suffers from either strong dependence on prior detection or highly computational redundancy during post-grouping. In this work, we present an end-to-end multiple human parsing framework using representative parts, termed RepParser. Different from mainstream methods, RepParser solves the multiple human parsing in a new single-stage manner without resorting to person detection or post-grouping.To this end, RepParser decouples the parsing pipeline into instance-aware kernel generation and part-aware human parsing, which are responsible for instance separation and instance-specific part segmentation, respectively. In particular, we empower the parsing pipeline by representative parts, since they are characterized by instance-aware keypoints and can be utilized to dynamically parse each person instance. Specifically, representative parts are obtained by jointly localizing centers of instances and estimating keypoints of body part regions. After that, we dynamically predict instance-aware convolution kernels through representative parts, thus encoding person-part context into each kernel responsible for casting an image feature as an instance-specific representation.Furthermore, a multi-branch structure is adopted to divide each instance-specific representation into several part-aware representations for separate part segmentation.In this way, RepParser accordingly focuses on person instances with the guidance of representative parts and directly outputs parsing results for each person instance, thus eliminating the requirement of the prior detection or post-grouping.Extensive experiments on two challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed RepParser is a simple yet effective framework and achieves very competitive performance.