pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Instance Segmentation of Dislocations in TEM Images
Authors: Karina Ruzaeva, Kishan Govind, Marc Legros, Stefan Sandfeld
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Quantitative Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) during in-situ straining experiment is able to reveal the motion of dislocations -- linear defects in the crystal lattice of metals. In the domain of materials science, the knowledge about the location and movement of dislocations is important for creating novel materials with superior properties. A long-standing problem, however, is to identify the position and extract the shape of dislocations, which would ultimately help to create a digital twin of such materials. In this work, we quantitatively compare state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods, including Mask R-CNN and YOLOv8. The dislocation masks as the results of the instance segmentation are converted to mathematical lines, enabling quantitative analysis of dislocation length and geometry -- important information for the domain scientist, which we then propose to include as a novel length-aware quality metric for estimating the network performance. Our segmentation pipeline shows a high accuracy suitable for all domain-specific, further post-processing. Additionally, our physics-based metric turns out to perform much more consistently than typically used pixel-wise metrics.
DetermiNet: A Large-Scale Diagnostic Dataset for Complex Visually-Grounded Referencing using Determiners
Authors: Clarence Lee, M Ganesh Kumar, Cheston Tan
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Diagnostic, Visual Grounding

State-of-the-art visual grounding models can achieve high detection accuracy, but they are not designed to distinguish between all objects versus only certain objects of interest. In natural language, in order to specify a particular object or set of objects of interest, humans use determiners such as "my", "either" and "those". Determiners, as an important word class, are a type of schema in natural language about the reference or quantity of the noun. Existing grounded referencing datasets place much less emphasis on determiners, compared to other word classes such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. This makes it difficult to develop models that understand the full variety and complexity of object referencing. Thus, we have developed and released the DetermiNet dataset , which comprises 250,000 synthetically generated images and captions based on 25 determiners. The task is to predict bounding boxes to identify objects of interest, constrained by the semantics of the given determiner. We find that current state-of-the-art visual grounding models do not perform well on the dataset, highlighting the limitations of existing models on reference and quantification tasks.
TSI-Net: A Timing Sequence Image Segmentation Network for Intracranial Artery Segmentation in Digital Subtraction Angiography
Authors: Lemeng Wang, Wentao Liu, Weijin Xu, Haoyuan Li, Huihua Yang, Feng Gao
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Cerebrovascular disease is one of the major diseases facing the world today. Automatic segmentation of intracranial artery (IA) in digital subtraction angiography (DSA) sequences is an important step in the diagnosis of vascular related diseases and in guiding neurointerventional procedures. While, a single image can only show part of the IA within the contrast medium according to the imaging principle of DSA technology. Therefore, 2D DSA segmentation methods are unable to capture the complete IA information and treatment of cerebrovascular diseases. We propose A timing sequence image segmentation network with U-shape, called TSI-Net, which incorporates a bi-directional ConvGRU module (BCM) in the encoder. The network incorporates a bi-directional ConvGRU module (BCM) in the encoder, which can input variable-length DSA sequences, retain past and future information, segment them into 2D images. In addition, we introduce a sensitive detail branch (SDB) at the end for supervising fine vessels. Experimented on the DSA sequence dataset DIAS, the method performs significantly better than state-of-the-art networks in recent years. In particular, it achieves a Sen evaluation metric of 0.797, which is a 3% improvement compared to other methods.
Temporal Collection and Distribution for Referring Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Jiajin Tang, Ge Zheng, Sibei Yang
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Object, Referring Video Object Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Referring video object segmentation aims to segment a referent throughout a video sequence according to a natural language expression. It requires aligning the natural language expression with the objects' motions and their dynamic associations at the global video level but segmenting objects at the frame level. To achieve this goal, we propose to simultaneously maintain a global referent token and a sequence of object queries, where the former is responsible for capturing video-level referent according to the language expression, while the latter serves to better locate and segment objects with each frame. Furthermore, to explicitly capture object motions and spatial-temporal cross-modal reasoning over objects, we propose a novel temporal collection-distribution mechanism for interacting between the global referent token and object queries. Specifically, the temporal collection mechanism collects global information for the referent token from object queries to the temporal motions to the language expression. In turn, the temporal distribution first distributes the referent token to the referent sequence across all frames and then performs efficient cross-frame reasoning between the referent sequence and object queries in every frame. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all benchmarks consistently and significantly.
Perceptual Quality Assessment of 360$^\circ$ Images Based on Generative Scanpath Representation
Authors: Xiangjie Sui, Hanwei Zhu, Xuelin Liu, Yuming Fang, Shiqi Wang, Zhou Wang
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment

Despite substantial efforts dedicated to the design of heuristic models for omnidirectional (i.e., 360$^\circ$) image quality assessment (OIQA), a conspicuous gap remains due to the lack of consideration for the diversity of viewing behaviors that leads to the varying perceptual quality of 360$^\circ$ images. Two critical aspects underline this oversight: the neglect of viewing conditions that significantly sway user gaze patterns and the overreliance on a single viewport sequence from the 360$^\circ$ image for quality inference. To address these issues, we introduce a unique generative scanpath representation (GSR) for effective quality inference of 360$^\circ$ images, which aggregates varied perceptual experiences of multi-hypothesis users under a predefined viewing condition. More specifically, given a viewing condition characterized by the starting point of viewing and exploration time, a set of scanpaths consisting of dynamic visual fixations can be produced using an apt scanpath generator. Following this vein, we use the scanpaths to convert the 360$^\circ$ image into the unique GSR, which provides a global overview of gazed-focused contents derived from scanpaths. As such, the quality inference of the 360$^\circ$ image is swiftly transformed to that of GSR. We then propose an efficient OIQA computational framework by learning the quality maps of GSR. Comprehensive experimental results validate that the predictions of the proposed framework are highly consistent with human perception in the spatiotemporal domain, especially in the challenging context of locally distorted 360$^\circ$ images under varied viewing conditions. The code will be released at https://github.com/xiangjieSui/GSR
DMKD: Improving Feature-based Knowledge Distillation for Object Detection Via Dual Masking Augmentation
Authors: Guang Yang, Yin Tang, Zhijian Wu, Jun Li, Jianhua Xu, Xili Wan
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection

Recent mainstream masked distillation methods function by reconstructing selectively masked areas of a student network from the feature map of its teacher counterpart. In these methods, the masked regions need to be properly selected, such that reconstructed features encode sufficient discrimination and representation capability like the teacher feature. However, previous masked distillation methods only focus on spatial masking, making the resulting masked areas biased towards spatial importance without encoding informative channel clues. In this study, we devise a Dual Masked Knowledge Distillation (DMKD) framework which can capture both spatially important and channel-wise informative clues for comprehensive masked feature reconstruction. More specifically, we employ dual attention mechanism for guiding the respective masking branches, leading to reconstructed feature encoding dual significance. Furthermore, fusing the reconstructed features is achieved by self-adjustable weighting strategy for effective feature distillation. Our experiments on object detection task demonstrate that the student networks achieve performance gains of 4.1% and 4.3% with the help of our method when RetinaNet and Cascade Mask R-CNN are respectively used as the teacher networks, while outperforming the other state-of-the-art distillation methods.
Bandwidth-efficient Inference for Neural Image Compression
Authors: Shanzhi Yin, Tongda Xu, Yongsheng Liang, Yuanyuan Wang, Yanghao Li, Yan Wang, Jingjing Liu
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Compression, Image Compression, Quantization

With neural networks growing deeper and feature maps growing larger, limited communication bandwidth with external memory (or DRAM) and power constraints become a bottleneck in implementing network inference on mobile and edge devices. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end differentiable bandwidth efficient neural inference method with the activation compressed by neural data compression method. Specifically, we propose a transform-quantization-entropy coding pipeline for activation compression with symmetric exponential Golomb coding and a data-dependent Gaussian entropy model for arithmetic coding. Optimized with existing model quantization methods, low-level task of image compression can achieve up to 19x bandwidth reduction with 6.21x energy saving.
Exploring the Robustness of Human Parsers Towards Common Corruptions
Authors: Sanyi Zhang, Xiaochun Cao, Rui Wang, Guo-Jun Qi, Jie zhou
Date: 2023-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Human Parsing, Semantic Segmentation

Human parsing aims to segment each pixel of the human image with fine-grained semantic categories. However, current human parsers trained with clean data are easily confused by numerous image corruptions such as blur and noise. To improve the robustness of human parsers, in this paper, we construct three corruption robustness benchmarks, termed LIP-C, ATR-C, and Pascal-Person-Part-C, to assist us in evaluating the risk tolerance of human parsing models. Inspired by the data augmentation strategy, we propose a novel heterogeneous augmentation-enhanced mechanism to bolster robustness under commonly corrupted conditions. Specifically, two types of data augmentations from different views, i.e., image-aware augmentation and model-aware image-to-image transformation, are integrated in a sequential manner for adapting to unforeseen image corruptions. The image-aware augmentation can enrich the high diversity of training images with the help of common image operations. The model-aware augmentation strategy that improves the diversity of input data by considering the model's randomness. The proposed method is model-agnostic, and it can plug and play into arbitrary state-of-the-art human parsing frameworks. The experimental results show that the proposed method demonstrates good universality which can improve the robustness of the human parsing models and even the semantic segmentation models when facing various image common corruptions. Meanwhile, it can still obtain approximate performance on clean data.
Multimodal Guidance Network for Missing-Modality Inference in Content Moderation
Authors: Zhuokai Zhao, Harish Palani, Tianyi Liu, Lena Evans, Ruth Toner
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Deep Learning

Multimodal deep learning, especially vision-language models, have gained significant traction in recent years, greatly improving performance on many downstream tasks, including content moderation and violence detection. However, standard multimodal approaches often assume consistent modalities between training and inference, limiting applications in many real-world use cases, as some modalities may not be available during inference. While existing research mitigates this problem through reconstructing the missing modalities, they unavoidably increase unnecessary computational cost, which could be just as critical, especially for large, deployed infrastructures in industry. To this end, we propose a novel guidance network that promotes knowledge sharing during training, taking advantage of the multimodal representations to train better single-modality models to be used for inference. Real-world experiments in violence detection shows that our proposed framework trains single-modality models that significantly outperform traditionally trained counterparts, while avoiding increases in computational cost for inference.
Implicit Neural Image Stitching
Authors: Minsu Kim, Jaewon Lee, Byeonghun Lee, Sunghoon Im, Kyong Hwan Jin
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Stitching, Super-Resolution

Existing frameworks for image stitching often provide visually reasonable stitchings. However, they suffer from blurry artifacts and disparities in illumination, depth level, etc. Although the recent learning-based stitchings relax such disparities, the required methods impose sacrifice of image qualities failing to capture high-frequency details for stitched images. To address the problem, we propose a novel approach, implicit Neural Image Stitching (NIS) that extends arbitrary-scale super-resolution. Our method estimates Fourier coefficients of images for quality-enhancing warps. Then, the suggested model blends color mismatches and misalignment in the latent space and decodes the features into RGB values of stitched images. Our experiments show that our approach achieves improvement in resolving the low-definition imaging of the previous deep image stitching with favorable accelerated image-enhancing methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/minshu-kim/NIS.
Learning Residual Elastic Warps for Image Stitching under Dirichlet Boundary Condition
Authors: Minsu Kim, Yongjun Lee, Woo Kyoung Han, Kyong Hwan Jin
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting, Image Stitching

Trendy suggestions for learning-based elastic warps enable the deep image stitchings to align images exposed to large parallax errors. Despite the remarkable alignments, the methods struggle with occasional holes or discontinuity between overlapping and non-overlapping regions of a target image as the applied training strategy mostly focuses on overlap region alignment. As a result, they require additional modules such as seam finder and image inpainting for hiding discontinuity and filling holes, respectively. In this work, we suggest Recurrent Elastic Warps (REwarp) that address the problem with Dirichlet boundary condition and boost performances by residual learning for recurrent misalign correction. Specifically, REwarp predicts a homography and a Thin-plate Spline (TPS) under the boundary constraint for discontinuity and hole-free image stitching. Our experiments show the favorable aligns and the competitive computational costs of REwarp compared to the existing stitching methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/minshu-kim/REwarp.
Punctate White Matter Lesion Segmentation in Preterm Infants Powered by Counterfactually Generative Learning
Authors: Zehua Ren, Yongheng Sun, Miaomiao Wang, Yuying Feng, Xianjun Li, Chao Jin, Jian Yang, Chunfeng Lian, Fan Wang
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning, Lesion Segmentation, Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of punctate white matter lesions (PWMLs) are fundamental for the timely diagnosis and treatment of related developmental disorders. Automated PWMLs segmentation from infant brain MR images is challenging, considering that the lesions are typically small and low-contrast, and the number of lesions may dramatically change across subjects. Existing learning-based methods directly apply general network architectures to this challenging task, which may fail to capture detailed positional information of PWMLs, potentially leading to severe under-segmentations. In this paper, we propose to leverage the idea of counterfactual reasoning coupled with the auxiliary task of brain tissue segmentation to learn fine-grained positional and morphological representations of PWMLs for accurate localization and segmentation. A simple and easy-to-implement deep-learning framework (i.e., DeepPWML) is accordingly designed. It combines the lesion counterfactual map with the tissue probability map to train a lightweight PWML segmentation network, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on a real-clinical dataset of infant T1w MR images. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/ladderlab-xjtu/DeepPWML}{https://github.com/ladderlab-xjtu/DeepPWML}.
Reasonable Anomaly Detection in Long Sequences
Authors: Yalong Jiang, Changkang Li
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Video Anomaly Detection

Video anomaly detection is a challenging task due to the lack in approaches for representing samples. The visual representations of most existing approaches are limited by short-term sequences of observations which cannot provide enough clues for achieving reasonable detections. In this paper, we propose to completely represent the motion patterns of objects by learning from long-term sequences. Firstly, a Stacked State Machine (SSM) model is proposed to represent the temporal dependencies which are consistent across long-range observations. Then SSM model functions in predicting future states based on past ones, the divergence between the predictions with inherent normal patterns and observed ones determines anomalies which violate normal motion patterns. Extensive experiments are carried out to evaluate the proposed approach on the dataset and existing ones. Improvements over state-of-the-art methods can be observed. Our code is available at https://github.com/AllenYLJiang/Anomaly-Detection-in-Sequences.
A novel method for iris recognition using BP neural network and parallel computing by the aid of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units)
Authors: Farahnaz Hosseini, Hossein Ebrahimpour, Samaneh Askari
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Iris Recognition

In this paper, we seek a new method in designing an iris recognition system. In this method, first the Haar wavelet features are extracted from iris images. The advantage of using these features is the high-speed extraction, as well as being unique to each iris. Then the back propagation neural network (BPNN) is used as a classifier. In this system, the BPNN parallel algorithms and their implementation on GPUs have been used by the aid of CUDA in order to speed up the learning process. Finally, the system performance and the speeding outcomes in a way that this algorithm is done in series are presented.
Kidney abnormality segmentation in thorax-abdomen CT scans
Authors: Gabriel Efrain Humpire Mamani, Nikolas Lessmann, Ernst Th. Scholten, Mathias Prokop, Colin Jacobs, Bram van Ginneken
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

In this study, we introduce a deep learning approach for segmenting kidney parenchyma and kidney abnormalities to support clinicians in identifying and quantifying renal abnormalities such as cysts, lesions, masses, metastases, and primary tumors. Our end-to-end segmentation method was trained on 215 contrast-enhanced thoracic-abdominal CT scans, with half of these scans containing one or more abnormalities. We began by implementing our own version of the original 3D U-Net network and incorporated four additional components: an end-to-end multi-resolution approach, a set of task-specific data augmentations, a modified loss function using top-$k$, and spatial dropout. Furthermore, we devised a tailored post-processing strategy. Ablation studies demonstrated that each of the four modifications enhanced kidney abnormality segmentation performance, while three out of four improved kidney parenchyma segmentation. Subsequently, we trained the nnUNet framework on our dataset. By ensembling the optimized 3D U-Net and the nnUNet with our specialized post-processing, we achieved marginally superior results. Our best-performing model attained Dice scores of 0.965 and 0.947 for segmenting kidney parenchyma in two test sets (20 scans without abnormalities and 30 with abnormalities), outperforming an independent human observer who scored 0.944 and 0.925, respectively. In segmenting kidney abnormalities within the 30 test scans containing them, the top-performing method achieved a Dice score of 0.585, while an independent second human observer reached a score of 0.664, suggesting potential for further improvement in computerized methods. All training data is available to the research community under a CC-BY 4.0 license on https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8014289
Active shooter detection and robust tracking utilizing supplemental synthetic data
Authors: Joshua R. Waite, Jiale Feng, Riley Tavassoli, Laura Harris, Sin Yong Tan, Subhadeep Chakraborty, Soumik Sarkar
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

The increasing concern surrounding gun violence in the United States has led to a focus on developing systems to improve public safety. One approach to developing such a system is to detect and track shooters, which would help prevent or mitigate the impact of violent incidents. In this paper, we proposed detecting shooters as a whole, rather than just guns, which would allow for improved tracking robustness, as obscuring the gun would no longer cause the system to lose sight of the threat. However, publicly available data on shooters is much more limited and challenging to create than a gun dataset alone. Therefore, we explore the use of domain randomization and transfer learning to improve the effectiveness of training with synthetic data obtained from Unreal Engine environments. This enables the model to be trained on a wider range of data, increasing its ability to generalize to different situations. Using these techniques with YOLOv8 and Deep OC-SORT, we implemented an initial version of a shooter tracking system capable of running on edge hardware, including both a Raspberry Pi and a Jetson Nano.