pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Novel Dataset for Non-Destructive Inspection of Handwritten Documents
Authors: Eleonora Breci, Luca Guarnera, Sebastiano Battiato
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00

Forensic handwriting examination is a branch of Forensic Science that aims to examine handwritten documents in order to properly define or hypothesize the manuscript's author. These analysis involves comparing two or more (digitized) documents through a comprehensive comparison of intrinsic local and global features. If a correlation exists and specific best practices are satisfied, then it will be possible to affirm that the documents under analysis were written by the same individual. The need to create sophisticated tools capable of extracting and comparing significant features has led to the development of cutting-edge software with almost entirely automated processes, improving the forensic examination of handwriting and achieving increasingly objective evaluations. This is made possible by algorithmic solutions based on purely mathematical concepts. Machine Learning and Deep Learning models trained with specific datasets could turn out to be the key elements to best solve the task at hand. In this paper, we proposed a new and challenging dataset consisting of two subsets: the first consists of 21 documents written either by the classic ``pen and paper" approach (and later digitized) and directly acquired on common devices such as tablets; the second consists of 362 handwritten manuscripts by 124 different people, acquired following a specific pipeline. Our study pioneered a comparison between traditionally handwritten documents and those produced with digital tools (e.g., tablets). Preliminary results on the proposed datasets show that 90% classification accuracy can be achieved on the first subset (documents written on both paper and pen and later digitized and on tablets) and 96% on the second portion of the data. The datasets are available at https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/mfs/forensic-handwriting-analysis/novel-dataset-2023/.
Uncertainty-aware Sampling for Long-tailed Semi-supervised Learning
Authors: Kuo Yang, Duo Li, Menghan Hu, Guangtao Zhai, Xiaokang Yang, Xiao-Ping Zhang
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Pseudo Label

For semi-supervised learning with imbalance classes, the long-tailed distribution of data will increase the model prediction bias toward dominant classes, undermining performance on less frequent classes. Existing methods also face challenges in ensuring the selection of sufficiently reliable pseudo-labels for model training and there is a lack of mechanisms to adjust the selection of more reliable pseudo-labels based on different training stages. To mitigate this issue, we introduce uncertainty into the modeling process for pseudo-label sampling, taking into account that the model performance on the tailed classes varies over different training stages. For example, at the early stage of model training, the limited predictive accuracy of model results in a higher rate of uncertain pseudo-labels. To counter this, we propose an Uncertainty-Aware Dynamic Threshold Selection (UDTS) approach. This approach allows the model to perceive the uncertainty of pseudo-labels at different training stages, thereby adaptively adjusting the selection thresholds for different classes. Compared to other methods such as the baseline method FixMatch, UDTS achieves an increase in accuracy of at least approximately 5.26%, 1.75%, 9.96%, and 1.28% on the natural scene image datasets CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, STL-10-LT, and the medical image dataset TissueMNIST, respectively. The source code of UDTS is publicly available at: https://github.com/yangk/UDTS.
Meta-forests: Domain generalization on random forests with meta-learning
Authors: Yuyang Sun, Panagiotis Kosmas
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Meta-Learning, Object, Object Recognition

Domain generalization is a popular machine learning technique that enables models to perform well on the unseen target domain, by learning from multiple source domains. Domain generalization is useful in cases where data is limited, difficult, or expensive to collect, such as in object recognition and biomedicine. In this paper, we propose a novel domain generalization algorithm called "meta-forests", which builds upon the basic random forests model by incorporating the meta-learning strategy and maximum mean discrepancy measure. The aim of meta-forests is to enhance the generalization ability of classifiers by reducing the correlation among trees and increasing their strength. More specifically, meta-forests conducts meta-learning optimization during each meta-task, while also utilizing the maximum mean discrepancy as a regularization term to penalize poor generalization performance in the meta-test process. To evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm, we test it on two publicly object recognition datasets and a glucose monitoring dataset that we have used in a previous study. Our results show that meta-forests outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of generalization performance on both object recognition and glucose monitoring datasets.
MapAI: Precision in Building Segmentation
Authors: Sander Riisøen Jyhne, Morten Goodwin, Per Arne Andersen, Ivar Oveland, Alexander Salveson Nossum, Karianne Ormseth, Mathilde Ørstavik, Andrew C. Flatman
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

MapAI: Precision in Building Segmentation is a competition arranged with the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium (NORA) in collaboration with Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research at the University of Agder (CAIR), the Norwegian Mapping Authority, AI:Hub, Norkart, and the Danish Agency for Data Supply and Infrastructure. The competition will be held in the fall of 2022. It will be concluded at the Northern Lights Deep Learning conference focusing on the segmentation of buildings using aerial images and laser data. We propose two different tasks to segment buildings, where the first task can only utilize aerial images, while the second must use laser data (LiDAR) with or without aerial images. Furthermore, we use IoU and Boundary IoU to properly evaluate the precision of the models, with the latter being an IoU measure that evaluates the results' boundaries. We provide the participants with a training dataset and keep a test dataset for evaluation.
MST: Adaptive Multi-Scale Tokens Guided Interactive Segmentation
Authors: Long Xu, Shanghong Li, Yongquan Chen, Jun Luo, Shiwu Lai
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Interactive Segmentation, Segmentation

Interactive segmentation has gained significant attention for its application in human-computer interaction and data annotation. To address the target scale variation issue in interactive segmentation, a novel multi-scale token adaptation algorithm is proposed. By performing top-k operations across multi-scale tokens, the computational complexity is greatly simplified while ensuring performance. To enhance the robustness of multi-scale token selection, we also propose a token learning algorithm based on contrastive loss. This algorithm can effectively improve the performance of multi-scale token adaptation. Extensive benchmarking shows that the algorithm achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, compared to current methods. An interactive demo and all reproducible codes will be released at https://github.com/hahamyt/mst.
Learning with Noisy Labels: Interconnection of Two Expectation-Maximizations
Authors: Heewon Kim, Hyun Sung Chang, Kiho Cho, Jaeyun Lee, Bohyung Han
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning with noisy labels

Labor-intensive labeling becomes a bottleneck in developing computer vision algorithms based on deep learning. For this reason, dealing with imperfect labels has increasingly gained attention and has become an active field of study. We address learning with noisy labels (LNL) problem, which is formalized as a task of finding a structured manifold in the midst of noisy data. In this framework, we provide a proper objective function and an optimization algorithm based on two expectation-maximization (EM) cycles. The separate networks associated with the two EM cycles collaborate to optimize the objective function, where one model is for distinguishing clean labels from corrupted ones while the other is for refurbishing the corrupted labels. This approach results in a non-collapsing LNL-flywheel model in the end. Experiments show that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple standard benchmarks with substantial margins under various types of label noise.
Towards Real-World Aerial Vision Guidance with Categorical 6D Pose Tracker
Authors: Jingtao Sun, Yaonan Wang, Danwei Wang
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Tracking

Tracking the object 6-DoF pose is crucial for various downstream robot tasks and real-world applications. In this paper, we investigate the real-world robot task of aerial vision guidance for aerial robotics manipulation, utilizing category-level 6-DoF pose tracking. Aerial conditions inevitably introduce special challenges, such as rapid viewpoint changes in pitch and roll and inter-frame differences. To support these challenges in task, we firstly introduce a robust category-level 6-DoF pose tracker (Robust6DoF). This tracker leverages shape and temporal prior knowledge to explore optimal inter-frame keypoint pairs, generated under a priori structural adaptive supervision in a coarse-to-fine manner. Notably, our Robust6DoF employs a Spatial-Temporal Augmentation module to deal with the problems of the inter-frame differences and intra-class shape variations through both temporal dynamic filtering and shape-similarity filtering. We further present a Pose-Aware Discrete Servo strategy (PAD-Servo), serving as a decoupling approach to implement the final aerial vision guidance task. It contains two servo action policies to better accommodate the structural properties of aerial robotics manipulation. Exhaustive experiments on four well-known public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our Robust6DoF. Real-world tests directly verify that our Robust6DoF along with PAD-Servo can be readily used in real-world aerial robotic applications.
SoK: Systematization and Benchmarking of Deepfake Detectors in a Unified Framework
Authors: Binh M. Le, Jiwon Kim, Simon S. Woo, Kristen Moore, Alsharif Abuadbba, Shahroz Tariq
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

Deepfakes have rapidly emerged as a serious threat to society due to their ease of creation and dissemination, triggering the accelerated development of detection technologies. However, many existing detectors rely on labgenerated datasets for validation, which may not prepare them for novel, real-world deepfakes. This paper extensively reviews and analyzes state-of-the-art deepfake detectors, evaluating them against several critical criteria. These criteria categorize detectors into 4 high-level groups and 13 finegrained sub-groups, aligned with a unified conceptual framework we propose. This classification offers practical insights into the factors affecting detector efficacy. We evaluate the generalizability of 16 leading detectors across comprehensive attack scenarios, including black-box, white-box, and graybox settings. Our systematized analysis and experiments provide a deeper understanding of deepfake detectors and their generalizability, paving the way for future research and the development of more proactive defenses against deepfakes.
Knowledge-enhanced Multi-perspective Video Representation Learning for Scene Recognition
Authors: Xuzheng Yu, Chen Jiang, Wei zhang, Tian Gan, Linlin Chao, Jianan Zhao, Yuan Cheng, Qingpei Guo, Wei Chu
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Scene Recognition

With the explosive growth of video data in real-world applications, a comprehensive representation of videos becomes increasingly important. In this paper, we address the problem of video scene recognition, whose goal is to learn a high-level video representation to classify scenes in videos. Due to the diversity and complexity of video contents in realistic scenarios, this task remains a challenge. Most existing works identify scenes for videos only from visual or textual information in a temporal perspective, ignoring the valuable information hidden in single frames, while several earlier studies only recognize scenes for separate images in a non-temporal perspective. We argue that these two perspectives are both meaningful for this task and complementary to each other, meanwhile, externally introduced knowledge can also promote the comprehension of videos. We propose a novel two-stream framework to model video representations from multiple perspectives, i.e. temporal and non-temporal perspectives, and integrate the two perspectives in an end-to-end manner by self-distillation. Besides, we design a knowledge-enhanced feature fusion and label prediction method that contributes to naturally introducing knowledge into the task of video scene recognition. Experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Pre-trained Model Guided Fine-Tuning for Zero-Shot Adversarial Robustness
Authors: Sibo Wang, Jie Zhang, Zheng Yuan, Shiguang Shan
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Zero-shot Generalization

Large-scale pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks, and exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization capability, while they are also vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial examples. Existing works typically employ adversarial training (fine-tuning) as a defense method against adversarial examples. However, direct application to the CLIP model may result in overfitting, compromising the model's capacity for generalization. In this paper, we propose Pre-trained Model Guided Adversarial Fine-Tuning (PMG-AFT) method, which leverages supervision from the original pre-trained model by carefully designing an auxiliary branch, to enhance the model's zero-shot adversarial robustness. Specifically, PMG-AFT minimizes the distance between the features of adversarial examples in the target model and those in the pre-trained model, aiming to preserve the generalization features already captured by the pre-trained model. Extensive Experiments on 15 zero-shot datasets demonstrate that PMG-AFT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method, improving the top-1 robust accuracy by an average of 4.99%. Furthermore, our approach consistently improves clean accuracy by an average of 8.72%. Our code is available at https://github.com/serendipity1122/Pre-trained-Model-Guided-Fine-Tuning-for-Zero-Shot-Adversarial-Robustness.
RomniStereo: Recurrent Omnidirectional Stereo Matching
Authors: Hualie Jiang, Rui Xu, Minglang Tan, Wenjie Jiang
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Optical Flow Estimation, Stereo Matching

Omnidirectional stereo matching (OSM) is an essential and reliable means for $360^{\circ}$ depth sensing. However, following earlier works on conventional stereo matching, prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods rely on a 3D encoder-decoder block to regularize the cost volume, causing the whole system complicated and sub-optimal results. Recently, the Recurrent All-pairs Field Transforms (RAFT) based approach employs the recurrent update in 2D and has efficiently improved image-matching tasks, ie, optical flow, and stereo matching. To bridge the gap between OSM and RAFT, we mainly propose an opposite adaptive weighting scheme to seamlessly transform the outputs of spherical sweeping of OSM into the required inputs for the recurrent update, thus creating a recurrent omnidirectional stereo matching (RomniStereo) algorithm. Furthermore, we introduce two techniques, ie, grid embedding and adaptive context feature generation, which also contribute to RomniStereo's performance. Our best model improves the average MAE metric by 40.7\% over the previous SOTA baseline across five datasets. When visualizing the results, our models demonstrate clear advantages on both synthetic and realistic examples. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/HalleyJiang/RomniStereo}.
Mix-GENEO: A Flexible Filtration for Multiparameter Persistent Homology Detects Digital Images
Authors: Jiaxing He, Bingzhe Hou, Tieru Wu, Yue Xin
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Topological Data Analysis

Two important tasks in the field of Topological Data Analysis are building practical multifiltrations on objects and using TDA to detect the geometry. Motivated by the tasks, we build multiparameter filtrations by operators on images named multi-GENEO, multi-DGENEO and mix-GENEO, and we prove the stability of both the interleaving distance and multiparameter persistence landscape of multi-GENEO with respect to the pseudometric on bounded functions. We also give the estimations of upper bound for multi-DGENEO and mix-GENEO. In practical applications, we regard image as a discrete function space, and then we build multifiltrations on the discrete function space. Finally, we construct comparable experiment on MNIST dataset to demonstrate our bifiltrations are superior to 1-parameter filtrations including lower-star filtration and upper-star filtration. For instance, 6 and 9 can be distinguished by our bifiltrations, while they cannot be distinguished by 1-parameter filtrations. The experiment results demonstrate our bifiltrations have ability to detect geometric and topological differences of digital images.
RadarCam-Depth: Radar-Camera Fusion for Depth Estimation with Learned Metric Scale
Authors: Han Li, Yukai Ma, Yaqing Gu, Kewei Hu, Yong liu, Xingxing Zuo
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction

We present a novel approach for metric dense depth estimation based on the fusion of a single-view image and a sparse, noisy Radar point cloud. The direct fusion of heterogeneous Radar and image data, or their encodings, tends to yield dense depth maps with significant artifacts, blurred boundaries, and suboptimal accuracy. To circumvent this issue, we learn to augment versatile and robust monocular depth prediction with the dense metric scale induced from sparse and noisy Radar data. We propose a Radar-Camera framework for highly accurate and fine-detailed dense depth estimation with four stages, including monocular depth prediction, global scale alignment of monocular depth with sparse Radar points, quasi-dense scale estimation through learning the association between Radar points and image patches, and local scale refinement of dense depth using a scale map learner. Our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art Radar-Camera depth estimation methods by reducing the mean absolute error (MAE) of depth estimation by 25.6% and 40.2% on the challenging nuScenes dataset and our self-collected ZJU-4DRadarCam dataset, respectively. Our code and dataset will be released at \url{https://github.com/MMOCKING/RadarCam-Depth}.
Vision Reimagined: AI-Powered Breakthroughs in WiFi Indoor Imaging
Authors: Jianyang Shi, BoWen Zhang, Amartansh Dubey, Ross Murch, Liwen Jing
Date: 2024-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Indoor imaging is a critical task for robotics and internet-of-things. WiFi as an omnipresent signal is a promising candidate for carrying out passive imaging and synchronizing the up-to-date information to all connected devices. This is the first research work to consider WiFi indoor imaging as a multi-modal image generation task that converts the measured WiFi power into a high-resolution indoor image. Our proposed WiFi-GEN network achieves a shape reconstruction accuracy that is 275% of that achieved by physical model-based inversion methods. Additionally, the Frechet Inception Distance score has been significantly reduced by 82%. To examine the effectiveness of models for this task, the first large-scale dataset is released containing 80,000 pairs of WiFi signal and imaging target. Our model absorbs challenges for the model-based methods including the non-linearity, ill-posedness and non-certainty into massive parameters of our generative AI network. The network is also designed to best fit measured WiFi signals and the desired imaging output. For reproducibility, we will release the data and code upon acceptance.
Detecting Face Synthesis Using a Concealed Fusion Model
Authors: Roberto Leyva, Victor Sanchez, Gregory Epiphaniou, Carsten Maple
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computer Security, Face Generation, Image Generation, model, Quantization

Face image synthesis is gaining more attention in computer security due to concerns about its potential negative impacts, including those related to fake biometrics. Hence, building models that can detect the synthesized face images is an important challenge to tackle. In this paper, we propose a fusion-based strategy to detect face image synthesis while providing resiliency to several attacks. The proposed strategy uses a late fusion of the outputs computed by several undisclosed models by relying on random polynomial coefficients and exponents to conceal a new feature space. Unlike existing concealing solutions, our strategy requires no quantization, which helps to preserve the feature space. Our experiments reveal that our strategy achieves state-of-the-art performance while providing protection against poisoning, perturbation, backdoor, and reverse model attacks.
Spatio-Temporal Turbulence Mitigation: A Translational Perspective
Authors: Xingguang Zhang, Nicholas Chimitt, Yiheng Chi, Zhiyuan Mao, Stanley H. Chan
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Recovering images distorted by atmospheric turbulence is a challenging inverse problem due to the stochastic nature of turbulence. Although numerous turbulence mitigation (TM) algorithms have been proposed, their efficiency and generalization to real-world dynamic scenarios remain severely limited. Building upon the intuitions of classical TM algorithms, we present the Deep Atmospheric TUrbulence Mitigation network (DATUM). DATUM aims to overcome major challenges when transitioning from classical to deep learning approaches. By carefully integrating the merits of classical multi-frame TM methods into a deep network structure, we demonstrate that DATUM can efficiently perform long-range temporal aggregation using a recurrent fashion, while deformable attention and temporal-channel attention seamlessly facilitate pixel registration and lucky imaging. With additional supervision, tilt and blur degradation can be jointly mitigated. These inductive biases empower DATUM to significantly outperform existing methods while delivering a tenfold increase in processing speed. A large-scale training dataset, ATSyn, is presented as a co-invention to enable generalization in real turbulence. Our code and datasets are available at https://xg416.github.io/DATUM.
Data-Agnostic Face Image Synthesis Detection Using Bayesian CNNs
Authors: Roberto Leyva, Victor Sanchez, Gregory Epiphaniou, Carsten Maple
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Image Generation

Face image synthesis detection is considerably gaining attention because of the potential negative impact on society that this type of synthetic data brings. In this paper, we propose a data-agnostic solution to detect the face image synthesis process. Specifically, our solution is based on an anomaly detection framework that requires only real data to learn the inference process. It is therefore data-agnostic in the sense that it requires no synthetic face images. The solution uses the posterior probability with respect to the reference data to determine if new samples are synthetic or not. Our evaluation results using different synthesizers show that our solution is very competitive against the state-of-the-art, which requires synthetic data for training.