pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Object Detection with Spiking Neural Networks on Automotive Event Data
Authors: Loïc Cordone, Benoît Miramond, Philippe Thierion
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, object-detection, Object Detection

Automotive embedded algorithms have very high constraints in terms of latency, accuracy and power consumption. In this work, we propose to train spiking neural networks (SNNs) directly on data coming from event cameras to design fast and efficient automotive embedded applications. Indeed, SNNs are more biologically realistic neural networks where neurons communicate using discrete and asynchronous spikes, a naturally energy-efficient and hardware friendly operating mode. Event data, which are binary and sparse in space and time, are therefore the ideal input for spiking neural networks. But to date, their performance was insufficient for automotive real-world problems, such as detecting complex objects in an uncontrolled environment. To address this issue, we took advantage of the latest advancements in matter of spike backpropagation - surrogate gradient learning, parametric LIF, SpikingJelly framework - and of our new \textit{voxel cube} event encoding to train 4 different SNNs based on popular deep learning networks: SqueezeNet, VGG, MobileNet, and DenseNet. As a result, we managed to increase the size and the complexity of SNNs usually considered in the literature. In this paper, we conducted experiments on two automotive event datasets, establishing new state-of-the-art classification results for spiking neural networks. Based on these results, we combined our SNNs with SSD to propose the first spiking neural networks capable of performing object detection on the complex GEN1 Automotive Detection event dataset.
Panoptic Neural Fields: A Semantic Object-Aware Neural Scene Representation
Authors: Abhijit Kundu, Kyle Genova, Xiaoqi Yin, Alireza Fathi, Caroline Pantofaru, Leonidas Guibas, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Frank Dellaert, Thomas Funkhouser
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 2D Panoptic Segmentation, 3D scene Editing, Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Novel View Synthesis, Object, Panoptic Segmentation

We present Panoptic Neural Fields (PNF), an object-aware neural scene representation that decomposes a scene into a set of objects (things) and background (stuff). Each object is represented by an oriented 3D bounding box and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) that takes position, direction, and time and outputs density and radiance. The background stuff is represented by a similar MLP that additionally outputs semantic labels. Each object MLPs are instance-specific and thus can be smaller and faster than previous object-aware approaches, while still leveraging category-specific priors incorporated via meta-learned initialization. Our model builds a panoptic radiance field representation of any scene from just color images. We use off-the-shelf algorithms to predict camera poses, object tracks, and 2D image semantic segmentations. Then we jointly optimize the MLP weights and bounding box parameters using analysis-by-synthesis with self-supervision from color images and pseudo-supervision from predicted semantic segmentations. During experiments with real-world dynamic scenes, we find that our model can be used effectively for several tasks like novel view synthesis, 2D panoptic segmentation, 3D scene editing, and multiview depth prediction.
SAN-Net: Learning Generalization to Unseen Sites for Stroke Lesion Segmentation with Self-Adaptive Normalization
Authors: Weiyi Yu, Zhizhong Huang, Junping Zhang, Hongming Shan
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Lesion Segmentation

There are considerable interests in automatic stroke lesion segmentation on magnetic resonance (MR) images in the medical imaging field, as stroke is an important cerebrovascular disease. Although deep learning-based models have been proposed for this task, generalizing these models to unseen sites is difficult due to not only the large inter-site discrepancy among different scanners, imaging protocols, and populations, but also the variations in stroke lesion shape, size, and location. To tackle this issue, we introduce a self-adaptive normalization network, termed SAN-Net, to achieve adaptive generalization on unseen sites for stroke lesion segmentation. Motivated by traditional z-score normalization and dynamic network, we devise a masked adaptive instance normalization (MAIN) to minimize inter-site discrepancies, which standardizes input MR images from different sites into a site-unrelated style by dynamically learning affine parameters from the input; \ie, MAIN can affinely transform the intensity values. Then, we leverage a gradient reversal layer to force the U-net encoder to learn site-invariant representation with a site classifier, which further improves the model generalization in conjunction with MAIN. Finally, inspired by the ``pseudosymmetry'' of the human brain, we introduce a simple yet effective data augmentation technique, termed symmetry-inspired data augmentation (SIDA), that can be embedded within SAN-Net to double the sample size while halving memory consumption. Experimental results on the benchmark Anatomical Tracings of Lesions After Stroke (ATLAS) v1.2 dataset, which includes MR images from 9 different sites, demonstrate that under the ``leave-one-site-out'' setting, the proposed SAN-Net outperforms recently published methods in terms of quantitative metrics and qualitative comparisons.
Anatomy-aware Self-supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection in Chest Radiographs
Authors: Junya Sato, Yuki Suzuki, Tomohiro Wataya, Daiki Nishigaki, Kosuke Kita, Kazuki Yamagata, Noriyuki Tomiyama, Shoji Kido
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Anomaly Detection, Self-Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Large numbers of labeled medical images are essential for the accurate detection of anomalies, but manual annotation is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a training method to learn data-specific features without manual annotation. Several SSL-based models have been employed in medical image anomaly detection. These SSL methods effectively learn representations in several field-specific images, such as natural and industrial product images. However, owing to the requirement of medical expertise, typical SSL-based models are inefficient in medical image anomaly detection. We present an SSL-based model that enables anatomical structure-based unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD). The model employs the anatomy-aware pasting (AnatPaste) augmentation tool. AnatPaste employs a threshold-based lung segmentation pretext task to create anomalies in normal chest radiographs, which are used for model pretraining. These anomalies are similar to real anomalies and help the model recognize them. We evaluate our model on three opensource chest radiograph datasets. Our model exhibit area under curves (AUC) of 92.1%, 78.7%, and 81.9%, which are the highest among existing UAD models. This is the first SSL model to employ anatomical information as a pretext task. AnatPaste can be applied in various deep learning models and downstream tasks. It can be employed for other modalities by fixing appropriate segmentation. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/jun-sato/AnatPaste.
TGANet: Text-guided attention for improved polyp segmentation
Authors: Nikhil Kumar Tomar, Debesh Jha, Ulas Bagci, Sharib Ali
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Medical Image Segmentation, Polyp Segmentation

Colonoscopy is a gold standard procedure but is highly operator-dependent. Automated polyp segmentation, a precancerous precursor, can minimize missed rates and timely treatment of colon cancer at an early stage. Even though there are deep learning methods developed for this task, variability in polyp size can impact model training, thereby limiting it to the size attribute of the majority of samples in the training dataset that may provide sub-optimal results to differently sized polyps. In this work, we exploit size-related and polyp number-related features in the form of text attention during training. We introduce an auxiliary classification task to weight the text-based embedding that allows network to learn additional feature representations that can distinctly adapt to differently sized polyps and can adapt to cases with multiple polyps. Our experimental results demonstrate that these added text embeddings improve the overall performance of the model compared to state-of-the-art segmentation methods. We explore four different datasets and provide insights for size-specific improvements. Our proposed text-guided attention network (TGANet) can generalize well to variable-sized polyps in different datasets.
SwinIQA: Learned Swin Distance for Compressed Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Jianzhao Liu, Xin Li, Yanding Peng, Tao Yu, Zhibo Chen
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressed Image Quality Assessment, Full reference image quality assessment, Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment, Image Compression, Image Quality Assessment

Image compression has raised widespread interest recently due to its significant importance for multimedia storage and transmission. Meanwhile, a reliable image quality assessment (IQA) for compressed images can not only help to verify the performance of various compression algorithms but also help to guide the compression optimization in turn. In this paper, we design a full-reference image quality assessment metric SwinIQA to measure the perceptual quality of compressed images in a learned Swin distance space. It is known that the compression artifacts are usually non-uniformly distributed with diverse distortion types and degrees. To warp the compressed images into the shared representation space while maintaining the complex distortion information, we extract the hierarchical feature representations from each stage of the Swin Transformer. Besides, we utilize cross attention operation to map the extracted feature representations into a learned Swin distance space. Experimental results show that the proposed metric achieves higher consistency with human's perceptual judgment compared with both traditional methods and learning-based methods on CLIC datasets.
CoCoLoT: Combining Complementary Trackers in Long-Term Visual Tracking
Authors: Matteo Dunnhofer, Christian Micheloni
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking, Visual Tracking

How to combine the complementary capabilities of an ensemble of different algorithms has been of central interest in visual object tracking. A significant progress on such a problem has been achieved, but considering short-term tracking scenarios. Instead, long-term tracking settings have been substantially ignored by the solutions. In this paper, we explicitly consider long-term tracking scenarios and provide a framework, named CoCoLoT, that combines the characteristics of complementary visual trackers to achieve enhanced long-term tracking performance. CoCoLoT perceives whether the trackers are following the target object through an online learned deep verification model, and accordingly activates a decision policy which selects the best performing tracker as well as it corrects the performance of the failing one. The proposed methodology is evaluated extensively and the comparison with several other solutions reveals that it competes favourably with the state-of-the-art on the most popular long-term visual tracking benchmarks.
Improved Evaluation and Generation of Grid Layouts using Distance Preservation Quality and Linear Assignment Sorting
Authors: Kai Uwe Barthel, Nico Hezel, Klaus Jung, Konstantin Schall
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Images sorted by similarity enables more images to be viewed simultaneously, and can be very useful for stock photo agencies or e-commerce applications. Visually sorted grid layouts attempt to arrange images so that their proximity on the grid corresponds as closely as possible to their similarity. Various metrics exist for evaluating such arrangements, but there is low experimental evidence on correlation between human perceived quality and metric value. We propose Distance Preservation Quality (DPQ) as a new metric to evaluate the quality of an arrangement. Extensive user testing revealed stronger correlation of DPQ with user-perceived quality and performance in image retrieval tasks compared to other metrics. In addition, we introduce Fast Linear Assignment Sorting (FLAS) as a new algorithm for creating visually sorted grid layouts. FLAS achieves very good sorting qualities while improving run time and computational resources.
An Effective Scheme for Maize Disease Recognition based on Deep Networks
Authors: Saeedeh Osouli, Behrouz Bolourian Haghighi, Ehsan Sadrossadat
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Transfer Learning

In the last decades, the area under cultivation of maize products has increased because of its essential role in the food cycle for humans, livestock, and poultry. Moreover, the diseases of plants impact food safety and can significantly reduce both the quality and quantity of agricultural products. There are many challenges to accurate and timely diagnosis of the disease. This research presents a novel scheme based on a deep neural network to overcome the mentioned challenges. Due to the limited number of data, the transfer learning technique is employed with the help of two well-known architectures. In this way, a new effective model is adopted by a combination of pre-trained MobileNetV2 and Inception Networks due to their effective performance on object detection problems. The convolution layers of MoblieNetV2 and Inception modules are parallelly arranged as earlier layers to extract crucial features. In addition, the imbalance problem of classes has been solved by an augmentation strategy. The proposed scheme has a superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art models published in recent years. The accuracy of the model reaches 97%, approximately. In summary, experimental results prove the method's validity and significant performance in diagnosing disease in plant leaves.
Alternative Data Augmentation for Industrial Monitoring using Adversarial Learning
Authors: Silvan Mertes, Andreas Margraf, Steffen Geinitz, Elisabeth André
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image-to-Image Translation, Semantic Segmentation, Translation

Visual inspection software has become a key factor in the manufacturing industry for quality control and process monitoring. Semantic segmentation models have gained importance since they allow for more precise examination. These models, however, require large image datasets in order to achieve a fair accuracy level. In some cases, training data is sparse or lacks of sufficient annotation, a fact that especially applies to highly specialized production environments. Data augmentation represents a common strategy to extend the dataset. Still, it only varies the image within a narrow range. In this article, a novel strategy is proposed to augment small image datasets. The approach is applied to surface monitoring of carbon fibers, a specific industry use case. We apply two different methods to create binary labels: a problem-tailored trigonometric function and a WGAN model. Afterwards, the labels are translated into color images using pix2pix and used to train a U-Net. The results suggest that the trigonometric function is superior to the WGAN model. However, a precise examination of the resulting images indicate that WGAN and image-to-image translation achieve good segmentation results and only deviate to a small degree from traditional data augmentation. In summary, this study examines an industry application of data synthesization using generative adversarial networks and explores its potential for monitoring systems of production environments. \keywords{Image-to-Image Translation, Carbon Fiber, Data Augmentation, Computer Vision, Industrial Monitoring, Adversarial Learning.
Joint learning of object graph and relation graph for visual question answering
Authors: Hao Li, Xu Li, Belhal Karimi, Jie Chen, Mingming Sun
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Graph Neural Network, Question Answering, Relation, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Modeling visual question answering(VQA) through scene graphs can significantly improve the reasoning accuracy and interpretability. However, existing models answer poorly for complex reasoning questions with attributes or relations, which causes false attribute selection or missing relation in Figure 1(a). It is because these models cannot balance all kinds of information in scene graphs, neglecting relation and attribute information. In this paper, we introduce a novel Dual Message-passing enhanced Graph Neural Network (DM-GNN), which can obtain a balanced representation by properly encoding multi-scale scene graph information. Specifically, we (i)transform the scene graph into two graphs with diversified focuses on objects and relations; Then we design a dual structure to encode them, which increases the weights from relations (ii)fuse the encoder output with attribute features, which increases the weights from attributes; (iii)propose a message-passing mechanism to enhance the information transfer between objects, relations and attributes. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets including GQA, VG, motif-VG and achieve new state of the art.
Attracting and Dispersing: A Simple Approach for Source-free Domain Adaptation
Authors: Shiqi Yang, Yaxing Wang, Kai Wang, Shangling Jui, Joost Van de Weijer
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Diversity, Domain Adaptation, Source-Free Domain Adaptation

We propose a simple but effective source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) method. Treating SFDA as an unsupervised clustering problem and following the intuition that local neighbors in feature space should have more similar predictions than other features, we propose to optimize an objective of prediction consistency. This objective encourages local neighborhood features in feature space to have similar predictions while features farther away in feature space have dissimilar predictions, leading to efficient feature clustering and cluster assignment simultaneously. For efficient training, we seek to optimize an upper-bound of the objective resulting in two simple terms. Furthermore, we relate popular existing methods in domain adaptation, source-free domain adaptation and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity. The experimental results prove the superiority of our method, and our method can be adopted as a simple but strong baseline for future research in SFDA. Our method can be also adapted to source-free open-set and partial-set DA which further shows the generalization ability of our method. Code is available in https://github.com/Albert0147/AaD_SFDA.
NeuralHDHair: Automatic High-fidelity Hair Modeling from a Single Image Using Implicit Neural Representations
Authors: Keyu Wu, Yifan Ye, Lingchen Yang, Hongbo Fu, Kun Zhou, Youyi Zheng
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1

Undoubtedly, high-fidelity 3D hair plays an indispensable role in digital humans. However, existing monocular hair modeling methods are either tricky to deploy in digital systems (e.g., due to their dependence on complex user interactions or large databases) or can produce only a coarse geometry. In this paper, we introduce NeuralHDHair, a flexible, fully automatic system for modeling high-fidelity hair from a single image. The key enablers of our system are two carefully designed neural networks: an IRHairNet (Implicit representation for hair using neural network) for inferring high-fidelity 3D hair geometric features (3D orientation field and 3D occupancy field) hierarchically and a GrowingNet(Growing hair strands using neural network) to efficiently generate 3D hair strands in parallel. Specifically, we perform a coarse-to-fine manner and propose a novel voxel-aligned implicit function (VIFu) to represent the global hair feature, which is further enhanced by the local details extracted from a hair luminance map. To improve the efficiency of a traditional hair growth algorithm, we adopt a local neural implicit function to grow strands based on the estimated 3D hair geometric features. Extensive experiments show that our method is capable of constructing a high-fidelity 3D hair model from a single image, both efficiently and effectively, and achieves the-state-of-the-art performance.
Improved-Flow Warp Module for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yinjie Zhang, Yi Liu, Wei Guo
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Remote sensing semantic segmentation aims to assign automatically each pixel on aerial images with specific label. In this letter, we proposed a new module, called improved-flow warp module (IFWM), to adjust semantic feature maps across different scales for remote sensing semantic segmentation. The improved-flow warp module is applied along with the feature extraction process in the convolutional neural network. First, IFWM computes the offsets of pixels by a learnable way, which can alleviate the misalignment of the multi-scale features. Second, the offsets help with the low-resolution deep feature up-sampling process to improve the feature accordance, which boosts the accuracy of semantic segmentation. We validate our method on several remote sensing datasets, and the results prove the effectiveness of our method..
Scaling up sign spotting through sign language dictionaries
Authors: Gül Varol, Liliane Momeni, Samuel Albanie, Triantafyllos Afouras, Andrew Zisserman
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple Instance Learning

The focus of this work is $\textit{sign spotting}$ - given a video of an isolated sign, our task is to identify $\textit{whether}$ and $\textit{where}$ it has been signed in a continuous, co-articulated sign language video. To achieve this sign spotting task, we train a model using multiple types of available supervision by: (1) $\textit{watching}$ existing footage which is sparsely labelled using mouthing cues; (2) $\textit{reading}$ associated subtitles (readily available translations of the signed content) which provide additional $\textit{weak-supervision}$; (3) $\textit{looking up}$ words (for which no co-articulated labelled examples are available) in visual sign language dictionaries to enable novel sign spotting. These three tasks are integrated into a unified learning framework using the principles of Noise Contrastive Estimation and Multiple Instance Learning. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on low-shot sign spotting benchmarks. In addition, we contribute a machine-readable British Sign Language (BSL) dictionary dataset of isolated signs, BSLDict, to facilitate study of this task. The dataset, models and code are available at our project page.