pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Toward Open Vocabulary Aerial Object Detection with CLIP-Activated Student-Teacher Learning
Authors: Yan Li, Weiwei Guo, Xue Yang, Ning Liao, Dunyun He, Jiaqi Zhou, Wenxian Yu
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Detection In Aerial Images, Open-vocabulary object detection, Open Vocabulary Object Detection, Self-Learning

An increasingly massive number of remote-sensing images spurs the development of extensible object detectors that can detect objects beyond training categories without costly collecting new labeled data. In this paper, we aim to develop open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) technique in aerial images that scales up object vocabulary size beyond training data. The performance of OVD greatly relies on the quality of class-agnostic region proposals and pseudo-labels for novel object categories. To simultaneously generate high-quality proposals and pseudo-labels, we propose CastDet, a CLIP-activated student-teacher open-vocabulary object Detection framework. Our end-to-end framework following the student-teacher self-learning mechanism employs the RemoteCLIP model as an extra omniscient teacher with rich knowledge. By doing so, our approach boosts not only novel object proposals but also classification. Furthermore, we devise a dynamic label queue strategy to maintain high-quality pseudo labels during batch training. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple existing aerial object detection datasets, which are set up for the OVD task. Experimental results demonstrate our CastDet achieving superior open-vocabulary detection performance, e.g., reaching 46.5% mAP on VisDroneZSD novel categories, which outperforms the state-of-the-art open-vocabulary detectors by 21.0% mAP. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to apply and develop the open-vocabulary object detection technique for aerial images. The code is available at https://github.com/lizzy8587/CastDet.
Reti-Diff: Illumination Degradation Image Restoration with Retinex-based Latent Diffusion Model
Authors: Chunming He, Chengyu Fang, Yulun Zhang, Tian Ye, Kai Li, Longxiang Tang, Zhenhua Guo, Xiu Li, Sina Farsiu
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

Illumination degradation image restoration (IDIR) techniques aim to improve the visibility of degraded images and mitigate the adverse effects of deteriorated illumination. Among these algorithms, diffusion model (DM)-based methods have shown promising performance but are often burdened by heavy computational demands and pixel misalignment issues when predicting the image-level distribution. To tackle these problems, we propose to leverage DM within a compact latent space to generate concise guidance priors and introduce a novel solution called Reti-Diff for the IDIR task. Reti-Diff comprises two key components: the Retinex-based latent DM (RLDM) and the Retinex-guided transformer (RGformer). To ensure detailed reconstruction and illumination correction, RLDM is empowered to acquire Retinex knowledge and extract reflectance and illumination priors. These priors are subsequently utilized by RGformer to guide the decomposition of image features into their respective reflectance and illumination components. Following this, RGformer further enhances and consolidates the decomposed features, resulting in the production of refined images with consistent content and robustness to handle complex degradation scenarios. Extensive experiments show that Reti-Diff outperforms existing methods on three IDIR tasks, as well as downstream applications. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/ChunmingHe/Reti-Diff}.
Generating Realistic Counterfactuals for Retinal Fundus and OCT Images using Diffusion Models
Authors: Indu Ilanchezian, Valentyn Boreiko, Laura Kühlewein, Ziwei Huang, Murat Seçkin Ayhan, Matthias Hein, Lisa Koch, Philipp Berens
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning

Counterfactual reasoning is often used in clinical settings to explain decisions or weigh alternatives. Therefore, for imaging based specialties such as ophthalmology, it would be beneficial to be able to create counterfactual images, illustrating answers to questions like "If the subject had had diabetic retinopathy, how would the fundus image have looked?". Here, we demonstrate that using a diffusion model in combination with an adversarially robust classifier trained on retinal disease classification tasks enables the generation of highly realistic counterfactuals of retinal fundus images and optical coherence tomography (OCT) B-scans. The key to the realism of counterfactuals is that these classifiers encode salient features indicative for each disease class and can steer the diffusion model to depict disease signs or remove disease-related lesions in a realistic way. In a user study, domain experts also found the counterfactuals generated using our method significantly more realistic than counterfactuals generated from a previous method, and even indistinguishable from real images.
Semantic-Preserved Point-based Human Avatar
Authors: Lixiang Lin, Jianke Zhu
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Virtual Try-on

To enable realistic experience in AR/VR and digital entertainment, we present the first point-based human avatar model that embodies the entirety expressive range of digital humans. We employ two MLPs to model pose-dependent deformation and linear skinning (LBS) weights. The representation of appearance relies on a decoder and the features that attached to each point. In contrast to alternative implicit approaches, the oriented points representation not only provides a more intuitive way to model human avatar animation but also significantly reduces both training and inference time. Moreover, we propose a novel method to transfer semantic information from the SMPL-X model to the points, which enables to better understand human body movements. By leveraging the semantic information of points, we can facilitate virtual try-on and human avatar composition through exchanging the points of same category across different subjects. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our presented method.
CurriculumLoc: Enhancing Cross-Domain Geolocalization through Multi-Stage Refinement
Authors: Boni Hu, Lin Chen, Runjian Chen, Shuhui Bu, Pengcheng Han, Haowei Li
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, Keypoint Detection

Visual geolocalization is a cost-effective and scalable task that involves matching one or more query images, taken at some unknown location, to a set of geo-tagged reference images. Existing methods, devoted to semantic features representation, evolving towards robustness to a wide variety between query and reference, including illumination and viewpoint changes, as well as scale and seasonal variations. However, practical visual geolocalization approaches need to be robust in appearance changing and extreme viewpoint variation conditions, while providing accurate global location estimates. Therefore, inspired by curriculum design, human learn general knowledge first and then delve into professional expertise. We first recognize semantic scene and then measure geometric structure. Our approach, termed CurriculumLoc, involves a delicate design of multi-stage refinement pipeline and a novel keypoint detection and description with global semantic awareness and local geometric verification. We rerank candidates and solve a particular cross-domain perspective-n-point (PnP) problem based on these keypoints and corresponding descriptors, position refinement occurs incrementally. The extensive experimental results on our collected dataset, TerraTrack and a benchmark dataset, ALTO, demonstrate that our approach results in the aforementioned desirable characteristics of a practical visual geolocalization solution. Additionally, we achieve new high recall@1 scores of 62.6% and 94.5% on ALTO, with two different distances metrics, respectively. Dataset, code and trained models are publicly available on https://github.com/npupilab/CurriculumLoc.
Deep Equilibrium Diffusion Restoration with Parallel Sampling
Authors: JieZhang Cao, Yue Shi, Kai Zhang, Yulun Zhang, Radu Timofte, Luc van Gool
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Image Restoration

Diffusion model-based image restoration (IR) aims to use diffusion models to recover high-quality (HQ) images from degraded images, achieving promising performance. Due to the inherent property of diffusion models, most existing methods need long serial sampling chains to restore HQ images step-by-step, resulting in expensive sampling time and high computation costs. Moreover, such long sampling chains hinder understanding the relationship between inputs and restoration results since it is hard to compute the gradients in the whole chains. In this work, we aim to rethink the diffusion model-based IR models through a different perspective, i.e., a deep equilibrium (DEQ) fixed point system, called DeqIR. Specifically, we derive an analytical solution by modeling the entire sampling chain in these IR models as a joint multivariate fixed point system. Based on the analytical solution, we can conduct parallel sampling and restore HQ images without training. Furthermore, we compute fast gradients via DEQ inversion and found that initialization optimization can boost image quality and control the generation direction. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on typical IR tasks and real-world settings.
Predicting urban tree cover from incomplete point labels and limited background information
Authors: HUI ZHANG, Ankit Kariryaa, Venkanna Babu Guthula, Christian Igel, Stefan Oehmcke
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Trees inside cities are important for the urban microclimate, contributing positively to the physical and mental health of the urban dwellers. Despite their importance, often only limited information about city trees is available. Therefore in this paper, we propose a method for mapping urban trees in high-resolution aerial imagery using limited datasets and deep learning. Deep learning has become best-practice for this task, however, existing approaches rely on large and accurately labelled training datasets, which can be difficult and expensive to obtain. However, often noisy and incomplete data may be available that can be combined and utilized to solve more difficult tasks than those datasets were intended for. This paper studies how to combine accurate point labels of urban trees along streets with crowd-sourced annotations from an open geographic database to delineate city trees in remote sensing images, a task which is challenging even for humans. To that end, we perform semantic segmentation of very high resolution aerial imagery using a fully convolutional neural network. The main challenge is that our segmentation maps are sparsely annotated and incomplete. Small areas around the point labels of the street trees coming from official and crowd-sourced data are marked as foreground class. Crowd-sourced annotations of streets, buildings, etc. define the background class. Since the tree data is incomplete, we introduce a masking to avoid class confusion. Our experiments in Hamburg, Germany, showed that the system is able to produce tree cover maps, not limited to trees along streets, without providing tree delineations. We evaluated the method on manually labelled trees and show that performance drastically deteriorates if the open geographic database is not used.
LDConv: Linear deformable convolution for improving convolutional neural networks
Authors: Xin Zhang, Yingze Song, Tingting Song, Degang Yang, Yichen Ye, Jie zhou, Liming Zhang
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Neural networks based on convolutional operations have achieved remarkable results in the field of deep learning, but there are two inherent flaws in standard convolutional operations. On the one hand, the convolution operation is confined to a local window, so it cannot capture information from other locations, and its sampled shapes is fixed. On the other hand, the size of the convolutional kernel are fixed to k $\times$ k, which is a fixed square shape, and the number of parameters tends to grow squarely with size. Although Deformable Convolution (Deformable Conv) address the problem of fixed sampling of standard convolutions, the number of parameters also tends to grow in a squared manner. In response to the above questions, the Linear Deformable Convolution (LDConv) is explored in this work, which gives the convolution kernel an arbitrary number of parameters and arbitrary sampled shapes to provide richer options for the trade-off between network overhead and performance. In LDConv, a novel coordinate generation algorithm is defined to generate different initial sampled positions for convolutional kernels of arbitrary size. To adapt to changing targets, offsets are introduced to adjust the shape of the samples at each position. LDConv corrects the growth trend of the number of parameters for standard convolution and Deformable Conv to a linear growth. Moreover, it completes the process of efficient feature extraction by irregular convolutional operations and brings more exploration options for convolutional sampled shapes. Object detection experiments on representative datasets COCO2017, VOC 7+12, and VisDrone-DET2021 fully demonstrate the advantages of LDConv. LDConv is a plug-and-play convolutional operation that can replace the convolutional operation to improve network performance. The code for the relevant tasks can be found at https://github.com/CV-ZhangXin/LDConv.
SeaDSC: A video-based unsupervised method for dynamic scene change detection in unmanned surface vehicles
Authors: Linh Trinh, Ali Anwar, Siegfried Mercelis
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Motion Planning, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking, Scene Change Detection, Scene Understanding

Recently, there has been an upsurge in the research on maritime vision, where a lot of works are influenced by the application of computer vision for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). Various sensor modalities such as camera, radar, and lidar have been used to perform tasks such as object detection, segmentation, object tracking, and motion planning. A large subset of this research is focused on the video analysis, since most of the current vessel fleets contain the camera's onboard for various surveillance tasks. Due to the vast abundance of the video data, video scene change detection is an initial and crucial stage for scene understanding of USVs. This paper outlines our approach to detect dynamic scene changes in USVs. To the best of our understanding, this work represents the first investigation of scene change detection in the maritime vision application. Our objective is to identify significant changes in the dynamic scenes of maritime video data, particularly those scenes that exhibit a high degree of resemblance. In our system for dynamic scene change detection, we propose completely unsupervised learning method. In contrast to earlier studies, we utilize a modified cutting-edge generative picture model called VQ-VAE-2 to train on multiple marine datasets, aiming to enhance the feature extraction. Next, we introduce our innovative similarity scoring technique for directly calculating the level of similarity in a sequence of consecutive frames by utilizing grid calculation on retrieved features. The experiments were conducted using a nautical video dataset called RoboWhaler to showcase the efficient performance of our technique.
A 3D Multi-Style Cross-Modality Segmentation Framework for Segmenting Vestibular Schwannoma and Cochlea
Authors: Yuzhou Zhuang
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Translation

The crossMoDA2023 challenge aims to segment the vestibular schwannoma (sub-divided into intra- and extra-meatal components) and cochlea regions of unlabeled hrT2 scans by leveraging labeled ceT1 scans. In this work, we proposed a 3D multi-style cross-modality segmentation framework for the crossMoDA2023 challenge, including the multi-style translation and self-training segmentation phases. Considering heterogeneous distributions and various image sizes in multi-institutional scans, we first utilize the min-max normalization, voxel size resampling, and center cropping to obtain fixed-size sub-volumes from ceT1 and hrT2 scans for training. Then, we perform the multi-style image translation phase to overcome the intensity distribution discrepancy between unpaired multi-modal scans. Specifically, we design three different translation networks with 2D or 2.5D inputs to generate multi-style and realistic target-like volumes from labeled ceT1 volumes. Finally, we perform the self-training volumetric segmentation phase in the target domain, which employs the nnU-Net framework and iterative self-training method using pseudo-labels for training accurate segmentation models in the unlabeled target domain. On the crossMoDA2023 validation dataset, our method produces promising results and achieves the mean DSC values of 72.78% and 80.64% and ASSD values of 5.85 mm and 0.25 mm for VS tumor and cochlea regions, respectively. Moreover, for intra- and extra-meatal regions, our method achieves the DSC values of 59.77% and 77.14%, respectively.
InfiMM-Eval: Complex Open-Ended Reasoning Evaluation For Multi-Modal Large Language Models
Authors: Xiaotian Han, Quanzeng You, Yongfei Liu, Wentao Chen, Huangjie Zheng, Khalil Mrini, Xudong Lin, Yiqi Wang, Bohan Zhai, Jianbo Yuan, Heng Wang, Hongxia Yang
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly prominent in the field of artificial intelligence. These models not only excel in traditional vision-language tasks but also demonstrate impressive performance in contemporary multi-modal benchmarks. Although many of these benchmarks attempt to holistically evaluate MLLMs, they typically concentrate on basic reasoning tasks, often yielding only simple yes/no or multi-choice responses. These methods naturally lead to confusion and difficulties in conclusively determining the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. To mitigate this issue, we manually curate a benchmark dataset specifically designed for MLLMs, with a focus on complex reasoning tasks. Our benchmark comprises three key reasoning categories: deductive, abductive, and analogical reasoning. The queries in our dataset are intentionally constructed to engage the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs in the process of generating answers. For a fair comparison across various MLLMs, we incorporate intermediate reasoning steps into our evaluation criteria. In instances where an MLLM is unable to produce a definitive answer, its reasoning ability is evaluated by requesting intermediate reasoning steps. If these steps align with our manual annotations, appropriate scores are assigned. This evaluation scheme resembles methods commonly used in human assessments, such as exams or assignments, and represents what we consider a more effective assessment technique compared with existing benchmarks. We evaluate a selection of representative MLLMs using this rigorously developed open-ended multi-step elaborate reasoning benchmark, designed to challenge and accurately measure their reasoning capabilities. The code and data will be released at https://infimm.github.io/InfiMM-Eval/
Does complimentary information from multispectral imaging improve face presentation attack detection?
Authors: Narayan Vetrekar, Raghavendra Ramachandra, Sushma Venkatesh, Jyoti D. Pawar, R. S. Gad
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Presentation Attack Detection

Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) has been extensively studied, particularly in the visible spectrum. With the advancement of sensing technology beyond the visible range, multispectral imaging has gained significant attention in this direction. We present PAD based on multispectral images constructed for eight different presentation artifacts resulted from three different artifact species. In this work, we introduce Face Presentation Attack Multispectral (FPAMS) database to demonstrate the significance of employing multispectral imaging. The goal of this work is to study complementary information that can be combined in two different ways (image fusion and score fusion) from multispectral imaging to improve the face PAD. The experimental evaluation results present an extensive qualitative analysis of 61650 sample multispectral images collected for bonafide and artifacts. The PAD based on the score fusion and image fusion method presents superior performance, demonstrating the significance of employing multispectral imaging to detect presentation artifacts.
NePF: Neural Photon Field for Single-Stage Inverse Rendering
Authors: Tuen-Yue Tsui, Qin Zou
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Inverse Rendering

We present a novel single-stage framework, Neural Photon Field (NePF), to address the ill-posed inverse rendering from multi-view images. Contrary to previous methods that recover the geometry, material, and illumination in multiple stages and extract the properties from various multi-layer perceptrons across different neural fields, we question such complexities and introduce our method - a single-stage framework that uniformly recovers all properties. NePF achieves this unification by fully utilizing the physical implication behind the weight function of neural implicit surfaces and the view-dependent radiance. Moreover, we introduce an innovative coordinate-based illumination model for rapid volume physically-based rendering. To regularize this illumination, we implement the subsurface scattering model for diffuse estimation. We evaluate our method on both real and synthetic datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in recovering high-fidelity geometry and visual-plausible material attributes.
Unearthing Common Inconsistency for Generalisable Deepfake Detection
Authors: Beilin Chu, Xuan Xu, Weike You, Linna Zhou
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, Inductive Bias

Deepfake has emerged for several years, yet efficient detection techniques could generalize over different manipulation methods require further research. While current image-level detection method fails to generalize to unseen domains, owing to the domain-shift phenomenon brought by CNN's strong inductive bias towards Deepfake texture, video-level one shows its potential to have both generalization across multiple domains and robustness to compression. We argue that although distinct face manipulation tools have different inherent bias, they all disrupt the consistency between frames, which is a natural characteristic shared by authentic videos. Inspired by this, we proposed a detection approach by capturing frame inconsistency that broadly exists in different forgery techniques, termed unearthing-common-inconsistency (UCI). Concretely, the UCI network based on self-supervised contrastive learning can better distinguish temporal consistency between real and fake videos from multiple domains. We introduced a temporally-preserved module method to introduce spatial noise perturbations, directing the model's attention towards temporal information. Subsequently, leveraging a multi-view cross-correlation learning module, we extensively learn the disparities in temporal representations between genuine and fake samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization ability of our method on unseen Deepfake domains.