pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning heuristics for A*
Authors: Danilo Numeroso, Davide Bacciu, Petar Veličković
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Path finding in graphs is one of the most studied classes of problems in computer science. In this context, search algorithms are often extended with heuristics for a more efficient search of target nodes. In this work we combine recent advancements in Neural Algorithmic Reasoning to learn efficient heuristic functions for path finding problems on graphs. At training time, we exploit multi-task learning to learn jointly the Dijkstra's algorithm and a consistent heuristic function for the A* search algorithm. At inference time, we plug our learnt heuristics into the A* algorithm. Results show that running A* over the learnt heuristics value can greatly speed up target node searching compared to Dijkstra, while still finding minimal-cost paths.
Unsupervised detection of ash dieback disease (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) using diffusion-based hyperspectral image clustering
Authors: Sam L. Polk, Aland H. Y. Chan, Kangning Cui, Robert J. Plemmons, David A. Coomes, James M. Murphy
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, hyperspectral image clustering, Image Clustering, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) is an introduced fungal disease that is causing the widespread death of ash trees across Europe. Remote sensing hyperspectral images encode rich structure that has been exploited for the detection of dieback disease in ash trees using supervised machine learning techniques. However, to understand the state of forest health at landscape-scale, accurate unsupervised approaches are needed. This article investigates the use of the unsupervised Diffusion and VCA-Assisted Image Segmentation (D-VIS) clustering algorithm for the detection of ash dieback disease in a forest site near Cambridge, United Kingdom. The unsupervised clustering presented in this work has high overlap with the supervised classification of previous work on this scene (overall accuracy = 71%). Thus, unsupervised learning may be used for the remote detection of ash dieback disease without the need for expert labeling.
Dual-Domain Image Synthesis using Segmentation-Guided GAN
Authors: Dena Bazazian, Andrew Calway, Dima Damen
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Caricature, Image Generation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We introduce a segmentation-guided approach to synthesise images that integrate features from two distinct domains. Images synthesised by our dual-domain model belong to one domain within the semantic mask, and to another in the rest of the image - smoothly integrated. We build on the successes of few-shot StyleGAN and single-shot semantic segmentation to minimise the amount of training required in utilising two domains. The method combines a few-shot cross-domain StyleGAN with a latent optimiser to achieve images containing features of two distinct domains. We use a segmentation-guided perceptual loss, which compares both pixel-level and activations between domain-specific and dual-domain synthetic images. Results demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively that our model is capable of synthesising dual-domain images on a variety of objects (faces, horses, cats, cars), domains (natural, caricature, sketches) and part-based masks (eyes, nose, mouth, hair, car bonnet). The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/denabazazian/Dual-Domain-Synthesis.
Real-Time Face Recognition System
Authors: Adarsh Ghimire, Naoufel Werghi, Sajid Javed, Jorge Dias
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Over the past few decades, interest in algorithms for face recognition has been growing rapidly and has even surpassed human-level performance. Despite their accomplishments, their practical integration with a real-time performance-hungry system is not feasible due to high computational costs. So in this paper, we explore the recent, fast, and accurate face recognition system that can be easily integrated with real-time devices, and tested the algorithms on robot hardware platforms to confirm their robustness and speed.
A comparison of different atmospheric turbulence simulation methods for image restoration
Authors: Nithin Gopalakrishnan Nair, Kangfu Mei, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Image Restoration

Atmospheric turbulence deteriorates the quality of images captured by long-range imaging systems by introducing blur and geometric distortions to the captured scene. This leads to a drastic drop in performance when computer vision algorithms like object/face recognition and detection are performed on these images. In recent years, various deep learning-based atmospheric turbulence mitigation methods have been proposed in the literature. These methods are often trained using synthetically generated images and tested on real-world images. Hence, the performance of these restoration methods depends on the type of simulation used for training the network. In this paper, we systematically evaluate the effectiveness of various turbulence simulation methods on image restoration. In particular, we evaluate the performance of two state-or-the-art restoration networks using six simulations method on a real-world LRFID dataset consisting of face images degraded by turbulence. This paper will provide guidance to the researchers and practitioners working in this field to choose the suitable data generation models for training deep models for turbulence mitigation. The implementation codes for the simulation methods, source codes for the networks, and the pre-trained models will be publicly made available.
Shallow camera pipeline for night photography rendering
Authors: Simone Zini, Claudio Rota, Marco Buzzelli, Simone Bianco, Raimondo Schettini
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

We introduce a camera pipeline for rendering visually pleasing photographs in low light conditions, as part of the NTIRE2022 Night Photography Rendering challenge. Given the nature of the task, where the objective is verbally defined by an expert photographer instead of relying on explicit ground truth images, we design an handcrafted solution, characterized by a shallow structure and by a low parameter count. Our pipeline exploits a local light enhancer as a form of high dynamic range correction, followed by a global adjustment of the image histogram to prevent washed-out results. We proportionally apply image denoising to darker regions, where it is more easily perceived, without losing details on brighter regions. The solution reached the fifth place in the competition, with a preference vote count comparable to those of other entries, based on deep convolutional neural networks. Code is available at www.github.com/AvailableAfterAcceptance.
Rendering Nighttime Image Via Cascaded Color and Brightness Compensation
Authors: Zhihao LI, Si Yi, Zhan Ma
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Tone Mapping

Image signal processing (ISP) is crucial for camera imaging, and neural networks (NN) solutions are extensively deployed for daytime scenes. The lack of sufficient nighttime image dataset and insights on nighttime illumination characteristics poses a great challenge for high-quality rendering using existing NN ISPs. To tackle it, we first built a high-resolution nighttime RAW-RGB (NR2R) dataset with white balance and tone mapping annotated by expert professionals. Meanwhile, to best capture the characteristics of nighttime illumination light sources, we develop the CBUnet, a two-stage NN ISP to cascade the compensation of color and brightness attributes. Experiments show that our method has better visual quality compared to traditional ISP pipeline, and is ranked at the second place in the NTIRE 2022 Night Photography Rendering Challenge for two tracks by respective People's and Professional Photographer's choices. The code and relevant materials are avaiable on our website: https://njuvision.github.io/CBUnet.
MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Sidi Yang, Tianhe Wu, Shuwei Shi, Shanshan Lao, Yuan Gong, Mingdeng Cao, Jiahao Wang, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) aims to assess the perceptual quality of images in accordance with human subjective perception. Unfortunately, existing NR-IQA methods are far from meeting the needs of predicting accurate quality scores on GAN-based distortion images. To this end, we propose Multi-dimension Attention Network for no-reference Image Quality Assessment (MANIQA) to improve the performance on GAN-based distortion. We firstly extract features via ViT, then to strengthen global and local interactions, we propose the Transposed Attention Block (TAB) and the Scale Swin Transformer Block (SSTB). These two modules apply attention mechanisms across the channel and spatial dimension, respectively. In this multi-dimensional manner, the modules cooperatively increase the interaction among different regions of images globally and locally. Finally, a dual branch structure for patch-weighted quality prediction is applied to predict the final score depending on the weight of each patch's score. Experimental results demonstrate that MANIQA outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four standard datasets (LIVE, TID2013, CSIQ, and KADID-10K) by a large margin. Besides, our method ranked first place in the final testing phase of the NTIRE 2022 Perceptual Image Quality Assessment Challenge Track 2: No-Reference. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/IIGROUP/MANIQA.
Revisiting Vicinal Risk Minimization for Partially Supervised Multi-Label Classification Under Data Scarcity
Authors: Nanqing Dong, Jiayi Wang, Irina Voiculescu
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Open-Ended Question Answering, Partially Labeled Datasets

Due to the high human cost of annotation, it is non-trivial to curate a large-scale medical dataset that is fully labeled for all classes of interest. Instead, it would be convenient to collect multiple small partially labeled datasets from different matching sources, where the medical images may have only been annotated for a subset of classes of interest. This paper offers an empirical understanding of an under-explored problem, namely partially supervised multi-label classification (PSMLC), where a multi-label classifier is trained with only partially labeled medical images. In contrast to the fully supervised counterpart, the partial supervision caused by medical data scarcity has non-trivial negative impacts on the model performance. A potential remedy could be augmenting the partial labels. Though vicinal risk minimization (VRM) has been a promising solution to improve the generalization ability of the model, its application to PSMLC remains an open question. To bridge the methodological gap, we provide the first VRM-based solution to PSMLC. The empirical results also provide insights into future research directions on partially supervised learning under data scarcity.
Global-and-Local Collaborative Learning for Co-Salient Object Detection
Authors: Runmin Cong, Ning Yang, Chongyi Li, Huazhu Fu, Yao Zhao, Qingming Huang, Sam Kwong
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 8k, Co-Salient Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

The goal of co-salient object detection (CoSOD) is to discover salient objects that commonly appear in a query group containing two or more relevant images. Therefore, how to effectively extract inter-image correspondence is crucial for the CoSOD task. In this paper, we propose a global-and-local collaborative learning architecture, which includes a global correspondence modeling (GCM) and a local correspondence modeling (LCM) to capture comprehensive inter-image corresponding relationship among different images from the global and local perspectives. Firstly, we treat different images as different time slices and use 3D convolution to integrate all intra features intuitively, which can more fully extract the global group semantics. Secondly, we design a pairwise correlation transformation (PCT) to explore similarity correspondence between pairwise images and combine the multiple local pairwise correspondences to generate the local inter-image relationship. Thirdly, the inter-image relationships of the GCM and LCM are integrated through a global-and-local correspondence aggregation (GLA) module to explore more comprehensive inter-image collaboration cues. Finally, the intra- and inter-features are adaptively integrated by an intra-and-inter weighting fusion (AEWF) module to learn co-saliency features and predict the co-saliency map. The proposed GLNet is evaluated on three prevailing CoSOD benchmark datasets, demonstrating that our model trained on a small dataset (about 3k images) still outperforms eleven state-of-the-art competitors trained on some large datasets (about 8k-200k images).
Self-Calibrated Efficient Transformer for Lightweight Super-Resolution
Authors: Wenbin Zou, Tian Ye, Weixin Zheng, Yunchen Zhang, Liang Chen, Yi Wu
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recently, deep learning has been successfully applied to the single-image super-resolution (SISR) with remarkable performance. However, most existing methods focus on building a more complex network with a large number of layers, which can entail heavy computational costs and memory storage. To address this problem, we present a lightweight Self-Calibrated Efficient Transformer (SCET) network to solve this problem. The architecture of SCET mainly consists of the self-calibrated module and efficient transformer block, where the self-calibrated module adopts the pixel attention mechanism to extract image features effectively. To further exploit the contextual information from features, we employ an efficient transformer to help the network obtain similar features over long distances and thus recover sufficient texture details. We provide comprehensive results on different settings of the overall network. Our proposed method achieves more remarkable performance than baseline methods. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AlexZou14/SCET.
Photorealistic Monocular 3D Reconstruction of Humans Wearing Clothing
Authors: Thiemo Alldieck, Mihai Zanfir, Cristian Sminchisescu
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D geometry, 3D Human Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction

We present PHORHUM, a novel, end-to-end trainable, deep neural network methodology for photorealistic 3D human reconstruction given just a monocular RGB image. Our pixel-aligned method estimates detailed 3D geometry and, for the first time, the unshaded surface color together with the scene illumination. Observing that 3D supervision alone is not sufficient for high fidelity color reconstruction, we introduce patch-based rendering losses that enable reliable color reconstruction on visible parts of the human, and detailed and plausible color estimation for the non-visible parts. Moreover, our method specifically addresses methodological and practical limitations of prior work in terms of representing geometry, albedo, and illumination effects, in an end-to-end model where factors can be effectively disentangled. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate the versatility and robustness of our approach. Our state-of-the-art results validate the method qualitatively and for different metrics, for both geometric and color reconstruction.
Towards Efficient Single Image Dehazing and Desnowing
Authors: Tian Ye, Sixiang Chen, Yun Liu, ErKang Chen, Yuche Li
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing, Image Restoration, Mixture-of-Experts, Single Image Dehazing

Removing adverse weather conditions like rain, fog, and snow from images is a challenging problem. Although the current recovery algorithms targeting a specific condition have made impressive progress, it is not flexible enough to deal with various degradation types. We propose an efficient and compact image restoration network named DAN-Net (Degradation-Adaptive Neural Network) to address this problem, which consists of multiple compact expert networks with one adaptive gated neural. A single expert network efficiently addresses specific degradation in nasty winter scenes relying on the compact architecture and three novel components. Based on the Mixture of Experts strategy, DAN-Net captures degradation information from each input image to adaptively modulate the outputs of task-specific expert networks to remove various adverse winter weather conditions. Specifically, it adopts a lightweight Adaptive Gated Neural Network to estimate gated attention maps of the input image, while different task-specific experts with the same topology are jointly dispatched to process the degraded image. Such novel image restoration pipeline handles different types of severe weather scenes effectively and efficiently. It also enjoys the benefit of coordinate boosting in which the whole network outperforms each expert trained without coordination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the presented manner outperforms the state-of-the-art single-task methods on image quality and has better inference efficiency. Furthermore, we have collected the first real-world winter scenes dataset to evaluate winter image restoration methods, which contains various hazy and snowy images snapped in winter. Both the dataset and source code will be publicly available.
Less than Few: Self-Shot Video Instance Segmentation
Authors: Pengwan Yang, Yuki M. Asano, Pascal Mettes, Cees G. M. Snoek
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Instance Segmentation, Retrieval, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Video Instance Segmentation, Video Understanding

The goal of this paper is to bypass the need for labelled examples in few-shot video understanding at run time. While proven effective, in many practical video settings even labelling a few examples appears unrealistic. This is especially true as the level of details in spatio-temporal video understanding and with it, the complexity of annotations continues to increase. Rather than performing few-shot learning with a human oracle to provide a few densely labelled support videos, we propose to automatically learn to find appropriate support videos given a query. We call this self-shot learning and we outline a simple self-supervised learning method to generate an embedding space well-suited for unsupervised retrieval of relevant samples. To showcase this novel setting, we tackle, for the first time, video instance segmentation in a self-shot (and few-shot) setting, where the goal is to segment instances at the pixel-level across the spatial and temporal domains. We provide strong baseline performances that utilize a novel transformer-based model and show that self-shot learning can even surpass few-shot and can be positively combined for further performance gains. Experiments on new benchmarks show that our approach achieves strong performance, is competitive to oracle support in some settings, scales to large unlabelled video collections, and can be combined in a semi-supervised setting.
OpenGlue: Open Source Graph Neural Net Based Pipeline for Image Matching
Authors: Ostap Viniavskyi, Mariia Dobko, Dmytro Mishkin, Oles Dobosevych
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

We present OpenGlue: a free open-source framework for image matching, that uses a Graph Neural Network-based matcher inspired by SuperGlue \cite{sarlin20superglue}. We show that including additional geometrical information, such as local feature scale, orientation, and affine geometry, when available (e.g. for SIFT features), significantly improves the performance of the OpenGlue matcher. We study the influence of the various attention mechanisms on accuracy and speed. We also present a simple architectural improvement by combining local descriptors with context-aware descriptors. The code and pretrained OpenGlue models for the different local features are publicly available.
Core Box Image Recognition and its Improvement with a New Augmentation Technique
Authors: E. E. Baraboshkin, A. E. Demidov, D. M. Orlov, D. A. Koroteev
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00

Most methods for automated full-bore rock core image analysis (description, colour, properties distribution, etc.) are based on separate core column analyses. The core is usually imaged in a box because of the significant amount of time taken to get an image for each core column. The work presents an innovative method and algorithm for core columns extraction from core boxes. The conditions for core boxes imaging may differ tremendously. Such differences are disastrous for machine learning algorithms which need a large dataset describing all possible data variations. Still, such images have some standard features - a box and core. Thus, we can emulate different environments with a unique augmentation described in this work. It is called template-like augmentation (TLA). The method is described and tested on various environments, and results are compared on an algorithm trained on both 'traditional' data and a mix of traditional and TLA data. The algorithm trained with TLA data provides better metrics and can detect core on most new images, unlike the algorithm trained on data without TLA. The algorithm for core column extraction implemented in an automated core description system speeds up the core box processing by a factor of 20.
Unsupervised Learning of Efficient Geometry-Aware Neural Articulated Representations
Authors: Atsuhiro Noguchi, Xiao Sun, Stephen Lin, Tatsuya Harada
Date: 2022-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Representation Learning

We propose an unsupervised method for 3D geometry-aware representation learning of articulated objects, in which no image-pose pairs or foreground masks are used for training. Though photorealistic images of articulated objects can be rendered with explicit pose control through existing 3D neural representations, these methods require ground truth 3D pose and foreground masks for training, which are expensive to obtain. We obviate this need by learning the representations with GAN training. The generator is trained to produce realistic images of articulated objects from random poses and latent vectors by adversarial training. To avoid a high computational cost for GAN training, we propose an efficient neural representation for articulated objects based on tri-planes and then present a GAN-based framework for its unsupervised training. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our method and show that GAN-based training enables the learning of controllable 3D representations without paired supervision.