pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Variational Diffusion Auto-encoder: Latent Space Extraction from Pre-trained Diffusion Models
Authors: Georgios Batzolis, Jan Stanczuk, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

As a widely recognized approach to deep generative modeling, Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) still face challenges with the quality of generated images, often presenting noticeable blurriness. This issue stems from the unrealistic assumption that approximates the conditional data distribution, $p(\textbf{x} | \textbf{z})$, as an isotropic Gaussian. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to address these issues. We illustrate how one can extract a latent space from a pre-existing diffusion model by optimizing an encoder to maximize the marginal data log-likelihood. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a decoder can be analytically derived post encoder-training, employing the Bayes rule for scores. This leads to a VAE-esque deep latent variable model, which discards the need for Gaussian assumptions on $p(\textbf{x} | \textbf{z})$ or the training of a separate decoder network. Our method, which capitalizes on the strengths of pre-trained diffusion models and equips them with latent spaces, results in a significant enhancement to the performance of VAEs.
ComGAN: Toward GANs Exploiting Multiple Samples
Authors: Haeone Lee
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose ComGAN(ComparativeGAN) which allows the generator in GANs to refer to the semantics of comparative samples(e.g. real data) by comparison. ComGAN generalizes relativistic GANs by using arbitrary architecture and mostly outperforms relativistic GANs in simple input-concatenation architecture. To train the discriminator in ComGAN, we also propose equality regularization, which fits the discriminator to a neutral label for equally real or fake samples. Equality regularization highly boosts the performance of ComGAN including WGAN while being exceptionally simple compared to existing regularizations. Finally, we generalize comparative samples fixed to real data in relativistic GANs toward fake data and show that such objectives are sound in both theory and practice. Our experiments demonstrate superior performances of ComGAN and equality regularization, achieving the best FIDs in 7 out of 8 cases of different losses and data against ordinary GANs and relativistic GANs.
Occlusion Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation with StridedPoseGraphFormer and Data Augmentation
Authors: Soubarna Banik, Patricia Gschoßmann, Alejandro Mendoza Garcia, Alois Knoll
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Data Augmentation, Occlusion Handling, Pose Estimation

Occlusion is an omnipresent challenge in 3D human pose estimation (HPE). In spite of the large amount of research dedicated to 3D HPE, only a limited number of studies address the problem of occlusion explicitly. To fill this gap, we propose to combine exploitation of spatio-temporal features with synthetic occlusion augmentation during training to deal with occlusion. To this end, we build a spatio-temporal 3D HPE model, StridedPoseGraphFormer based on graph convolution and transformers, and train it using occlusion augmentation. Unlike the existing occlusion-aware methods, that are only tested for limited occlusion, we extensively evaluate our method for varying degrees of occlusion. We show that our proposed method compares favorably with the state-of-the-art (SoA). Our experimental results also reveal that in the absence of any occlusion handling mechanism, the performance of SoA 3D HPE methods degrades significantly when they encounter occlusion.
VR Facial Animation for Immersive Telepresence Avatars
Authors: Andre Rochow, Max Schwarz, Michael Schreiber, Sven Behnke
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00

VR Facial Animation is necessary in applications requiring clear view of the face, even though a VR headset is worn. In our case, we aim to animate the face of an operator who is controlling our robotic avatar system. We propose a real-time capable pipeline with very fast adaptation for specific operators. In a quick enrollment step, we capture a sequence of source images from the operator without the VR headset which contain all the important operator-specific appearance information. During inference, we then use the operator keypoint information extracted from a mouth camera and two eye cameras to estimate the target expression and head pose, to which we map the appearance of a source still image. In order to enhance the mouth expression accuracy, we dynamically select an auxiliary expression frame from the captured sequence. This selection is done by learning to transform the current mouth keypoints into the source camera space, where the alignment can be determined accurately. We, furthermore, demonstrate an eye tracking pipeline that can be trained in less than a minute, a time efficient way to train the whole pipeline given a dataset that includes only complete faces, show exemplary results generated by our method, and discuss performance at the ANA Avatar XPRIZE semifinals.
MixPro: Data Augmentation with MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling for Vision Transformer
Authors: QiHao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Wei Hu, Fan Zhang, Jun Liu
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Augmentation, Image ClassiData Augmentationfication, Image Classification, Image Cropping, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

The recently proposed data augmentation TransMix employs attention labels to help visual transformers (ViT) achieve better robustness and performance. However, TransMix is deficient in two aspects: 1) The image cropping method of TransMix may not be suitable for ViTs. 2) At the early stage of training, the model produces unreliable attention maps. TransMix uses unreliable attention maps to compute mixed attention labels that can affect the model. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling (PAL) in image and label space, respectively. In detail, from the perspective of image space, we design MaskMix, which mixes two images based on a patch-like grid mask. In particular, the size of each mask patch is adjustable and is a multiple of the image patch size, which ensures each image patch comes from only one image and contains more global contents. From the perspective of label space, we design PAL, which utilizes a progressive factor to dynamically re-weight the attention weights of the mixed attention label. Finally, we combine MaskMix and Progressive Attention Labeling as our new data augmentation method, named MixPro. The experimental results show that our method can improve various ViT-based models at scales on ImageNet classification (73.8\% top-1 accuracy based on DeiT-T for 300 epochs). After being pre-trained with MixPro on ImageNet, the ViT-based models also demonstrate better transferability to semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance segmentation. Furthermore, compared to TransMix, MixPro also shows stronger robustness on several benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/fistyee/MixPro.
GRIG: Few-Shot Generative Residual Image Inpainting
Authors: Wanglong Lu, Xianta Jiang, Xiaogang Jin, Yong-Liang Yang, Minglun Gong, Tao Wang, Kaijie Shi, Hanli Zhao
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting

Image inpainting is the task of filling in missing or masked region of an image with semantically meaningful contents. Recent methods have shown significant improvement in dealing with large-scale missing regions. However, these methods usually require large training datasets to achieve satisfactory results and there has been limited research into training these models on a small number of samples. To address this, we present a novel few-shot generative residual image inpainting method that produces high-quality inpainting results. The core idea is to propose an iterative residual reasoning method that incorporates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for feature extraction and Transformers for global reasoning within generative adversarial networks, along with image-level and patch-level discriminators. We also propose a novel forgery-patch adversarial training strategy to create faithful textures and detailed appearances. Extensive evaluations show that our method outperforms previous methods on the few-shot image inpainting task, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
D2NT: A High-Performing Depth-to-Normal Translator
Authors: Yi Feng, Bohuan Xue, Ming Liu, Qijun Chen, Rui Fan
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Surface Normal Estimation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Surface normal holds significant importance in visual environmental perception, serving as a source of rich geometric information. However, the state-of-the-art (SoTA) surface normal estimators (SNEs) generally suffer from an unsatisfactory trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. To resolve this dilemma, this paper first presents a superfast depth-to-normal translator (D2NT), which can directly translate depth images into surface normal maps without calculating 3D coordinates. We then propose a discontinuity-aware gradient (DAG) filter, which adaptively generates gradient convolution kernels to improve depth gradient estimation. Finally, we propose a surface normal refinement module that can easily be integrated into any depth-to-normal SNEs, substantially improving the surface normal estimation accuracy. Our proposed algorithm demonstrates the best accuracy among all other existing real-time SNEs and achieves the SoTA trade-off between efficiency and accuracy.
Diabetic Foot Ulcer Grand Challenge 2022 Summary
Authors: Connah Kendrick, Bill Cassidy, Neil D. Reeves, Joseph M. Pappachan, Claire O'Shea, Vishnu Chandrabalan, Moi Hoon Yap
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00

The Diabetic Foot Ulcer Challenge 2022 focused on the task of diabetic foot ulcer segmentation, based on the work completed in previous DFU challenges. The challenge provided 4000 images of full-view foot ulcer images together with corresponding delineation of ulcer regions. This paper provides an overview of the challenge, a summary of the methods proposed by the challenge participants, the results obtained from each technique, and a comparison of the challenge results. The best-performing network was a modified HarDNet-MSEG, with a Dice score of 0.7287.
MMC: Multi-Modal Colorization of Images using Textual Descriptions
Authors: Subhankar Ghosh, Saumik Bhattacharya, Prasun Roy, Umapada Pal, Michael Blumenstein
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Colorization, Image Colorization

Handling various objects with different colors is a significant challenge for image colorization techniques. Thus, for complex real-world scenes, the existing image colorization algorithms often fail to maintain color consistency. In this work, we attempt to integrate textual descriptions as an auxiliary condition, along with the grayscale image that is to be colorized, to improve the fidelity of the colorization process. To do so, we have proposed a deep network that takes two inputs (grayscale image and the respective encoded text description) and tries to predict the relevant color components. Also, we have predicted each object in the image and have colorized them with their individual description to incorporate their specific attributes in the colorization process. After that, a fusion model fuses all the image objects (segments) to generate the final colorized image. As the respective textual descriptions contain color information of the objects present in the image, text encoding helps to improve the overall quality of predicted colors. In terms of performance, the proposed method outperforms existing colorization techniques in terms of LPIPS, PSNR and SSIM metrics.
MRSN: Multi-Relation Support Network for Video Action Detection
Authors: Yin-Dong Zheng, Guo Chen, Minglei Yuan, Tong Lu
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Relation, Video Action Detection, Video Understanding

Action detection is a challenging video understanding task, requiring modeling spatio-temporal and interaction relations. Current methods usually model actor-actor and actor-context relations separately, ignoring their complementarity and mutual support. To solve this problem, we propose a novel network called Multi-Relation Support Network (MRSN). In MRSN, Actor-Context Relation Encoder (ACRE) and Actor-Actor Relation Encoder (AARE) model the actor-context and actor-actor relation separately. Then Relation Support Encoder (RSE) computes the supports between the two relations and performs relation-level interactions. Finally, Relation Consensus Module (RCM) enhances two relations with the long-term relations from the Long-term Relation Bank (LRB) and yields a consensus. Our experiments demonstrate that modeling relations separately and performing relation-level interactions can achieve and outperformer state-of-the-art results on two challenging video datasets: AVA and UCF101-24.
gSDF: Geometry-Driven Signed Distance Functions for 3D Hand-Object Reconstruction
Authors: Zerui Chen, ShiZhe Chen, Cordelia Schmid, Ivan Laptev
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: 3D geometry, 3D Reconstruction, 3D Shape Reconstruction, hand-object pose, Object Reconstruction

Signed distance functions (SDFs) is an attractive framework that has recently shown promising results for 3D shape reconstruction from images. SDFs seamlessly generalize to different shape resolutions and topologies but lack explicit modelling of the underlying 3D geometry. In this work, we exploit the hand structure and use it as guidance for SDF-based shape reconstruction. In particular, we address reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects from monocular RGB images. To this end, we estimate poses of hands and objects and use them to guide 3D reconstruction. More specifically, we predict kinematic chains of pose transformations and align SDFs with highly-articulated hand poses. We improve the visual features of 3D points with geometry alignment and further leverage temporal information to enhance the robustness to occlusion and motion blurs. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging ObMan and DexYCB benchmarks and demonstrate significant improvements of the proposed method over the state of the art.
Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos
Authors: Jinyu Yang, Mingqi Gao, Zhe Li, Shang Gao, Fangjing Wang, Feng Zheng
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Object Tracking, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Tracking

Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) gains lots of attention rapidly due to its impressive segmentation performance on images. Regarding its strong ability on image segmentation and high interactivity with different prompts, we found that it performs poorly on consistent segmentation in videos. Therefore, in this report, we propose Track Anything Model (TAM), which achieves high-performance interactive tracking and segmentation in videos. To be detailed, given a video sequence, only with very little human participation, i.e., several clicks, people can track anything they are interested in, and get satisfactory results in one-pass inference. Without additional training, such an interactive design performs impressively on video object tracking and segmentation. All resources are available on {https://github.com/gaomingqi/Track-Anything}. We hope this work can facilitate related research.
ICDAR 2023 Competition on Reading the Seal Title
Authors: Wenwen Yu, MingYu Liu, Mingrui Chen, Ning Lu, Yinlong Wen, Yuliang Liu, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Xiang Bai
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Task 2, Text Detection

Reading seal title text is a challenging task due to the variable shapes of seals, curved text, background noise, and overlapped text. However, this important element is commonly found in official and financial scenarios, and has not received the attention it deserves in the field of OCR technology. To promote research in this area, we organized ICDAR 2023 competition on reading the seal title (ReST), which included two tasks: seal title text detection (Task 1) and end-to-end seal title recognition (Task 2). We constructed a dataset of 10,000 real seal data, covering the most common classes of seals, and labeled all seal title texts with text polygons and text contents. The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 20th March, 2023. The competition attracted 53 participants from academia and industry including 28 submissions for Task 1 and 25 submissions for Task 2, which demonstrated significant interest in this challenging task. In this report, we present an overview of the competition, including the organization, challenges, and results. We describe the dataset and tasks, and summarize the submissions and evaluation results. The results show that significant progress has been made in the field of seal title text reading, and we hope that this competition will inspire further research and development in this important area of OCR technology.
3rd Place Solution to Meta AI Video Similarity Challenge
Authors: Shuhei Yokoo, Peifei Zhu, Junki Ishikawa, Rintaro Hasegawa
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Copy Detection, Video Similarity

This paper presents our 3rd place solution in both Descriptor Track and Matching Track of the Meta AI Video Similarity Challenge (VSC2022), a competition aimed at detecting video copies. Our approach builds upon existing image copy detection techniques and incorporates several strategies to exploit on the properties of video data, resulting in a simple yet powerful solution. By employing our proposed method, we achieved substantial improvements in accuracy compared to the baseline results (Descriptor Track: 38% improvement, Matching Track: 60% improvement). Our code is publicly available here: https://github.com/line/Meta-AI-Video-Similarity-Challenge-3rd-Place-Solution
UTSGAN: Unseen Transition Suss GAN for Transition-Aware Image-to-image Translation
Authors: Yaxin Shi, Xiaowei Zhou, Ping Liu, Ivor W. Tsang
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

In the field of Image-to-Image (I2I) translation, ensuring consistency between input images and their translated results is a key requirement for producing high-quality and desirable outputs. Previous I2I methods have relied on result consistency, which enforces consistency between the translated results and the ground truth output, to achieve this goal. However, result consistency is limited in its ability to handle complex and unseen attribute changes in translation tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a transition-aware approach to I2I translation, where the data translation mapping is explicitly parameterized with a transition variable, allowing for the modelling of unobserved translations triggered by unseen transitions. Furthermore, we propose the use of transition consistency, defined on the transition variable, to enable regularization of consistency on unobserved translations, which is omitted in previous works. Based on these insights, we present Unseen Transition Suss GAN (UTSGAN), a generative framework that constructs a manifold for the transition with a stochastic transition encoder and coherently regularizes and generalizes result consistency and transition consistency on both training and unobserved translations with tailor-designed constraints. Extensive experiments on four different I2I tasks performed on five different datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed UTSGAN in performing consistent translations.
Improving Knowledge Distillation via Transferring Learning Ability
Authors: Long Liu, Tong Li, Hui Cheng
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Existing knowledge distillation methods generally use a teacher-student approach, where the student network solely learns from a well-trained teacher. However, this approach overlooks the inherent differences in learning abilities between the teacher and student networks, thus causing the capacity-gap problem. To address this limitation, we propose a novel method called SLKD.
Transformer-based stereo-aware 3D object detection from binocular images
Authors: Hanqing Sun, Yanwei Pang, Jiale Cao, Jin Xie, Xuelong Li
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Transformers have shown promising progress in various visual object detection tasks, including monocular 2D/3D detection and surround-view 3D detection. More importantly, the attention mechanism in the Transformer model and the 3D information extraction in binocular stereo are both similarity-based. However, directly applying existing Transformer-based detectors to binocular stereo 3D object detection leads to slow convergence and significant precision drops. We argue that a key cause of that defect is that existing Transformers ignore the binocular-stereo-specific image correspondence information. In this paper, we explore the model design of Transformers in binocular 3D object detection, focusing particularly on extracting and encoding task-specific image correspondence information. To achieve this goal, we present TS3D, a Transformer-based Stereo-aware 3D object detector. In the TS3D, a Disparity-Aware Positional Encoding (DAPE) module is proposed to embed the image correspondence information into stereo features. The correspondence is encoded as normalized sub-pixel-level disparity and is used in conjunction with sinusoidal 2D positional encoding to provide the 3D location information of the scene. To enrich multi-scale stereo features, we propose a Stereo Preserving Feature Pyramid Network (SPFPN). The SPFPN is designed to preserve the correspondence information while fusing intra-scale and aggregating cross-scale stereo features. Our proposed TS3D achieves a 41.29% Moderate Car detection average precision on the KITTI test set and takes 88 ms to detect objects from each binocular image pair. It is competitive with advanced counterparts in terms of both precision and inference speed.
Learning Visibility Field for Detailed 3D Human Reconstruction and Relighting
Authors: Ruichen Zheng, Peng Li, Haoqian Wang, Tao Yu
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Human Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction

Detailed 3D reconstruction and photo-realistic relighting of digital humans are essential for various applications. To this end, we propose a novel sparse-view 3d human reconstruction framework that closely incorporates the occupancy field and albedo field with an additional visibility field--it not only resolves occlusion ambiguity in multiview feature aggregation, but can also be used to evaluate light attenuation for self-shadowed relighting. To enhance its training viability and efficiency, we discretize visibility onto a fixed set of sample directions and supply it with coupled geometric 3D depth feature and local 2D image feature. We further propose a novel rendering-inspired loss, namely TransferLoss, to implicitly enforce the alignment between visibility and occupancy field, enabling end-to-end joint training. Results and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, as it surpasses state-of-the-art in terms of reconstruction accuracy while achieving comparably accurate relighting to ray-traced ground truth.