pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PointCaps: Raw Point Cloud Processing using Capsule Networks with Euclidean Distance Routing
Authors: Dishanika Denipitiyage, Vinoj Jayasundara, Ranga Rodrigo, Chamira U. S. Edussooriya
Date: 2021-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Raw point cloud processing using capsule networks is widely adopted in classification, reconstruction, and segmentation due to its ability to preserve spatial agreement of the input data. However, most of the existing capsule based network approaches are computationally heavy and fail at representing the entire point cloud as a single capsule. We address these limitations in existing capsule network based approaches by proposing PointCaps, a novel convolutional capsule architecture with parameter sharing. Along with PointCaps, we propose a novel Euclidean distance routing algorithm and a class-independent latent representation. The latent representation captures physically interpretable geometric parameters of the point cloud, with dynamic Euclidean routing, PointCaps well-represents the spatial (point-to-part) relationships of points. PointCaps has a significantly lower number of parameters and requires a significantly lower number of FLOPs while achieving better reconstruction with comparable classification and segmentation accuracy for raw point clouds compared to state-of-the-art capsule networks.
JVLDLoc: a Joint Optimization of Visual-LiDAR Constraints and Direction Priors for Localization in Driving Scenario
Authors: Longrui Dong, Gang Zeng
Date: 2022-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, global-optimization

The ability for a moving agent to localize itself in environment is the basic demand for emerging applications, such as autonomous driving, etc. Many existing methods based on multiple sensors still suffer from drift. We propose a scheme that fuses map prior and vanishing points from images, which can establish an energy term that is only constrained on rotation, called the direction projection error. Then we embed these direction priors into a visual-LiDAR SLAM system that integrates camera and LiDAR measurements in a tightly-coupled way at backend. Specifically, our method generates visual reprojection error and point to Implicit Moving Least Square(IMLS) surface of scan constraints, and solves them jointly along with direction projection error at global optimization. Experiments on KITTI, KITTI-360 and Oxford Radar Robotcar show that we achieve lower localization error or Absolute Pose Error (APE) than prior map, which validates our method is effective.
A Multi-Head Model for Continual Learning via Out-of-Distribution Replay
Authors: Gyuhak Kim, Zixuan Ke, Bing Liu
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Continual Learning, Incremental Learning, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

This paper studies class incremental learning (CIL) of continual learning (CL). Many approaches have been proposed to deal with catastrophic forgetting (CF) in CIL. Most methods incrementally construct a single classifier for all classes of all tasks in a single head network. To prevent CF, a popular approach is to memorize a small number of samples from previous tasks and replay them during training of the new task. However, this approach still suffers from serious CF as the parameters learned for previous tasks are updated or adjusted with only the limited number of saved samples in the memory. This paper proposes an entirely different approach that builds a separate classifier (head) for each task (called a multi-head model) using a transformer network, called MORE. Instead of using the saved samples in memory to update the network for previous tasks/classes in the existing approach, MORE leverages the saved samples to build a task specific classifier (adding a new classification head) without updating the network learned for previous tasks/classes. The model for the new task in MORE is trained to learn the classes of the task and also to detect samples that are not from the same data distribution (i.e., out-of-distribution (OOD)) of the task. This enables the classifier for the task to which the test instance belongs to produce a high score for the correct class and the classifiers of other tasks to produce low scores because the test instance is not from the data distributions of these classifiers. Experimental results show that MORE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and is also naturally capable of performing OOD detection in the continual learning setting.
SnowFormer: Context Interaction Transformer with Scale-awareness for Single Image Desnowing
Authors: Sixiang Chen, Tian Ye, Yun Liu, ErKang Chen
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration, Single Image Desnowing, Snow Removal

Due to various and complicated snow degradations, single image desnowing is a challenging image restoration task. As prior arts can not handle it ideally, we propose a novel transformer, SnowFormer, which explores efficient cross-attentions to build local-global context interaction across patches and surpasses existing works that employ local operators or vanilla transformers. Compared to prior desnowing methods and universal image restoration methods, SnowFormer has several benefits. Firstly, unlike the multi-head self-attention in recent image restoration Vision Transformers, SnowFormer incorporates the multi-head cross-attention mechanism to perform local-global context interaction between scale-aware snow queries and local-patch embeddings. Second, the snow queries in SnowFormer are generated by the query generator from aggregated scale-aware features, which are rich in potential clean cues, leading to superior restoration results. Third, SnowFormer outshines advanced state-of-the-art desnowing networks and the prevalent universal image restoration transformers on six synthetic and real-world datasets. The code is released in \url{https://github.com/Ephemeral182/SnowFormer}.
Effectiveness of Function Matching in Driving Scene Recognition
Authors: Shingo Yashima
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Scene Recognition, Structured Prediction

Knowledge distillation is an effective approach for training compact recognizers required in autonomous driving. Recent studies on image classification have shown that matching student and teacher on a wide range of data points is critical for improving performance in distillation. This concept (called function matching) is suitable for driving scene recognition, where generally an almost infinite amount of unlabeled data are available. In this study, we experimentally investigate the impact of using such a large amount of unlabeled data for distillation on the performance of student models in structured prediction tasks for autonomous driving. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the performance of the compact student model can be improved dramatically and even match the performance of the large-scale teacher by knowledge distillation with massive unlabeled data.
Learning Sub-Pixel Disparity Distribution for Light Field Depth Estimation
Authors: Wentao Chao, Xuechun Wang, Yingqian Wang, Guanghui Wang, Fuqing Duan
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation

Light field (LF) depth estimation plays a crucial role in many LF-based applications. Existing LF depth estimation methods consider depth estimation as a regression problem, where a pixel-wise L1 loss is employed to supervise the training process. However, the disparity map is only a sub-space projection (i.e., an expectation) of the disparity distribution, which is essential for models to learn. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to learn the sub-pixel disparity distribution by fully utilizing the power of deep networks, especially for LF of narrow baselines. We construct the cost volume at the sub-pixel level to produce a finer disparity distribution and design an uncertainty-aware focal loss to supervise the predicted disparity distribution toward the ground truth. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.Our method significantly outperforms recent state-of-the-art LF depth algorithms on the HCI 4D LF Benchmark in terms of all four accuracy metrics (i.e., BadPix 0.01, BadPix 0.03, BadPix 0.07, and MSE $\times$100). The code and model of the proposed method are available at \url{https://github.com/chaowentao/SubFocal}.
YOLOV: Making Still Image Object Detectors Great at Video Object Detection
Authors: Yuheng Shi, Naiyan Wang, Xiaojie Guo
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Video Object Detection

Video object detection (VID) is challenging because of the high variation of object appearance as well as the diverse deterioration in some frames. On the positive side, the detection in a certain frame of a video, compared with that in a still image, can draw support from other frames. Hence, how to aggregate features across different frames is pivotal to VID problem. Most of existing aggregation algorithms are customized for two-stage detectors. However, these detectors are usually computationally expensive due to their two-stage nature. This work proposes a simple yet effective strategy to address the above concerns, which costs marginal overheads with significant gains in accuracy. Concretely, different from traditional two-stage pipeline, we select important regions after the one-stage detection to avoid processing massive low-quality candidates. Besides, we evaluate the relationship between a target frame and reference frames to guide the aggregation. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies to verify the efficacy of our design, and reveal its superiority over other state-of-the-art VID approaches in both effectiveness and efficiency. Our YOLOX-based model can achieve promising performance (\emph{e.g.}, 87.5\% AP50 at over 30 FPS on the ImageNet VID dataset on a single 2080Ti GPU), making it attractive for large-scale or real-time applications. The implementation is simple, we have made the demo codes and models available at \url{https://github.com/YuHengsss/YOLOV}.
Finding Emotions in Faces: A Meta-Classifier
Authors: Siddartha Dalal, Sierra Vo, Michael Lesk, Wesley Yuan
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00

Machine learning has been used to recognize emotions in faces, typically by looking for 8 different emotional states (neutral, happy, sad, surprise, fear, disgust, anger and contempt). We consider two approaches: feature recognition based on facial landmarks and deep learning on all pixels; each produced 58% overall accuracy. However, they produced different results on different images and thus we propose a new meta-classifier combining these approaches. It produces far better results with 77% accuracy
Generalised Co-Salient Object Detection
Authors: Jiawei Liu, Jing Zhang, Ruikai Cui, Kaihao Zhang, Weihao Li, Nick Barnes
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Co-Salient Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection, Self-Supervised Learning

We propose a new setting that relaxes an assumption in the conventional Co-Salient Object Detection (CoSOD) setting by allowing the presence of "noisy images" which do not show the shared co-salient object. We call this new setting Generalised Co-Salient Object Detection (GCoSOD). We propose a novel random sampling based Generalised CoSOD Training (GCT) strategy to distill the awareness of inter-image absence of co-salient objects into CoSOD models. It employs a Diverse Sampling Self-Supervised Learning (DS3L) that, in addition to the provided supervised co-salient label, introduces additional self-supervised labels for noisy images (being null, that no co-salient object is present). Further, the random sampling process inherent in GCT enables the generation of a high-quality uncertainty map highlighting potential false-positive predictions at instance level. To evaluate the performance of CoSOD models under the GCoSOD setting, we propose two new testing datasets, namely CoCA-Common and CoCA-Zero, where a common salient object is partially present in the former and completely absent in the latter. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the performance of CoSOD models in terms of the performance under the GCoSOD setting as well as the model calibration degrees.
Modeling, Quantifying, and Predicting Subjectivity of Image Aesthetics
Authors: Hyeongnam Jang, Yeejin Lee, Jong-Seok Lee
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00

Assessing image aesthetics is a challenging computer vision task. One reason is that aesthetic preference is highly subjective and may vary significantly among people for certain images. Thus, it is important to properly model and quantify such \textit{subjectivity}, but there has not been much effort to resolve this issue. In this paper, we propose a novel unified probabilistic framework that can model and quantify subjective aesthetic preference based on the subjective logic. In this framework, the rating distribution is modeled as a beta distribution, from which the probabilities of being definitely pleasing, being definitely unpleasing, and being uncertain can be obtained. We use the probability of being uncertain to define an intuitive metric of subjectivity. Furthermore, we present a method to learn deep neural networks for prediction of image aesthetics, which is shown to be effective in improving the performance of subjectivity prediction via experiments. We also present an application scenario where the framework is beneficial for aesthetics-based image recommendation.
Offline Handwritten Mathematical Recognition using Adversarial Learning and Transformers
Authors: Ujjwal Thakur, Anuj Sharma
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Offline Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) is a major area in the field of mathematical expression recognition. Offline HMER is often viewed as a much harder problem as compared to online HMER due to a lack of temporal information and variability in writing style. In this paper, we purpose a encoder-decoder model that uses paired adversarial learning. Semantic-invariant features are extracted from handwritten mathematical expression images and their printed mathematical expression counterpart in the encoder. Learning of semantic-invariant features combined with the DenseNet encoder and transformer decoder, helped us to improve the expression rate from previous studies. Evaluated on the CROHME dataset, we have been able to improve latest CROHME 2019 test set results by 4% approx.
Is Medieval Distant Viewing Possible? : Extending and Enriching Annotation of Legacy Image Collections using Visual Analytics
Authors: Christofer Meinecke, Estelle Guéville, David Joseph Wrisley, Stefan Jänicke
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

Distant viewing approaches have typically used image datasets close to the contemporary image data used to train machine learning models. To work with images from other historical periods requires expert annotated data, and the quality of labels is crucial for the quality of results. Especially when working with cultural heritage collections that contain myriad uncertainties, annotating data, or re-annotating, legacy data is an arduous task. In this paper, we describe working with two pre-annotated sets of medieval manuscript images that exhibit conflicting and overlapping metadata. Since a manual reconciliation of the two legacy ontologies would be very expensive, we aim (1) to create a more uniform set of descriptive labels to serve as a "bridge" in the combined dataset, and (2) to establish a high quality hierarchical classification that can be used as a valuable input for subsequent supervised machine learning. To achieve these goals, we developed visualization and interaction mechanisms, enabling medievalists to combine, regularize and extend the vocabulary used to describe these, and other cognate, image datasets. The visual interfaces provide experts an overview of relationships in the data going beyond the sum total of the metadata. Word and image embeddings as well as co-occurrences of labels across the datasets, enable batch re-annotation of images, recommendation of label candidates and support composing a hierarchical classification of labels.
PARSE challenge 2022: Pulmonary Arteries Segmentation using Swin U-Net Transformer(Swin UNETR) and U-Net
Authors: Akansh Maurya, Kunal Dashrath Patil, Rohan Padhy, Kalluri Ramakrishna, Ganapathy Krishnamurthi
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00

In this work, we present our proposed method to segment the pulmonary arteries from the CT scans using Swin UNETR and U-Net-based deep neural network architecture. Six models, three models based on Swin UNETR, and three models based on 3D U-net with residual units were ensemble using a weighted average to make the final segmentation masks. Our team achieved a multi-level dice score of 84.36 percent through this method. The code of our work is available on the following link: https://github.com/akansh12/parse2022. This work is part of the MICCAI PARSE 2022 challenge.
Persuasion Strategies in Advertisements
Authors: Yaman Kumar Singla, Rajat Jha, Arunim Gupta, Milan Aggarwal, Aditya Garg, Tushar Malyan, Ayush Bhardwaj, Rajiv Ratn Shah, Balaji Krishnamurthy, Changyou Chen
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Marketing, Persuasion Strategies, Semantic Segmentation

Modeling what makes an advertisement persuasive, i.e., eliciting the desired response from consumer, is critical to the study of propaganda, social psychology, and marketing. Despite its importance, computational modeling of persuasion in computer vision is still in its infancy, primarily due to the lack of benchmark datasets that can provide persuasion-strategy labels associated with ads. Motivated by persuasion literature in social psychology and marketing, we introduce an extensive vocabulary of persuasion strategies and build the first ad image corpus annotated with persuasion strategies. We then formulate the task of persuasion strategy prediction with multi-modal learning, where we design a multi-task attention fusion model that can leverage other ad-understanding tasks to predict persuasion strategies. Further, we conduct a real-world case study on 1600 advertising campaigns of 30 Fortune-500 companies where we use our model's predictions to analyze which strategies work with different demographics (age and gender). The dataset also provides image segmentation masks, which labels persuasion strategies in the corresponding ad images on the test split. We publicly release our code and dataset https://midas-research.github.io/persuasion-advertisements/.
Exploring Adversarial Robustness of Vision Transformers in the Spectral Perspective
Authors: Gihyun Kim, Juyeop Kim, Jong-Seok Lee
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, image-classification, Image Classification

The Vision Transformer has emerged as a powerful tool for image classification tasks, surpassing the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Recently, many researchers have attempted to understand the robustness of Transformers against adversarial attacks. However, previous researches have focused solely on perturbations in the spatial domain. This paper proposes an additional perspective that explores the adversarial robustness of Transformers against frequency-selective perturbations in the spectral domain. To facilitate comparison between these two domains, an attack framework is formulated as a flexible tool for implementing attacks on images in the spatial and spectral domains. The experiments reveal that Transformers rely more on phase and low frequency information, which can render them more vulnerable to frequency-selective attacks than CNNs. This work offers new insights into the properties and adversarial robustness of Transformers.
Vision-Language Matching for Text-to-Image Synthesis via Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Qingrong Cheng, Keyu Wen, Xiaodong Gu
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Text-to-image synthesis aims to generate a photo-realistic and semantic consistent image from a specific text description. The images synthesized by off-the-shelf models usually contain limited components compared with the corresponding image and text description, which decreases the image quality and the textual-visual consistency. To address this issue, we propose a novel Vision-Language Matching strategy for text-to-image synthesis, named VLMGAN*, which introduces a dual vision-language matching mechanism to strengthen the image quality and semantic consistency. The dual vision-language matching mechanism considers textual-visual matching between the generated image and the corresponding text description, and visual-visual consistent constraints between the synthesized image and the real image. Given a specific text description, VLMGAN* firstly encodes it into textual features and then feeds them to a dual vision-language matching-based generative model to synthesize a photo-realistic and textual semantic consistent image. Besides, the popular evaluation metrics for text-to-image synthesis are borrowed from simple image generation, which mainly evaluates the reality and diversity of the synthesized images. Therefore, we introduce a metric named Vision-Language Matching Score (VLMS) to evaluate the performance of text-to-image synthesis which can consider both the image quality and the semantic consistency between synthesized image and the description. The proposed dual multi-level vision-language matching strategy can be applied to other text-to-image synthesis methods. We implement this strategy on two popular baselines, which are marked with ${\text{VLMGAN}_{+\text{AttnGAN}}}$ and ${\text{VLMGAN}_{+\text{DFGAN}}}$. The experimental results on two widely-used datasets show that the model achieves significant improvements over other state-of-the-art methods.
Transforming the Interactive Segmentation for Medical Imaging
Authors: Wentao Liu, Chaofan Ma, Yuhuan Yang, Weidi Xie, Ya zhang
Date: 2022-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Interactive Segmentation, Segmentation

The goal of this paper is to interactively refine the automatic segmentation on challenging structures that fall behind human performance, either due to the scarcity of available annotations or the difficulty nature of the problem itself, for example, on segmenting cancer or small organs. Specifically, we propose a novel Transformer-based architecture for Interactive Segmentation (TIS), that treats the refinement task as a procedure for grouping pixels with similar features to those clicks given by the end users. Our proposed architecture is composed of Transformer Decoder variants, which naturally fulfills feature comparison with the attention mechanisms. In contrast to existing approaches, our proposed TIS is not limited to binary segmentations, and allows the user to edit masks for arbitrary number of categories. To validate the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three challenging datasets and demonstrate superior performance over the existing state-of-the-art methods. The project page is: https://wtliu7.github.io/tis/.