pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
VA-DepthNet: A Variational Approach to Single Image Depth Prediction
Authors: Ce Liu, Suryansh Kumar, Shuhang Gu, Radu Timofte, Luc van Gool
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Monocular Depth Estimation

We introduce VA-DepthNet, a simple, effective, and accurate deep neural network approach for the single-image depth prediction (SIDP) problem. The proposed approach advocates using classical first-order variational constraints for this problem. While state-of-the-art deep neural network methods for SIDP learn the scene depth from images in a supervised setting, they often overlook the invaluable invariances and priors in the rigid scene space, such as the regularity of the scene. The paper's main contribution is to reveal the benefit of classical and well-founded variational constraints in the neural network design for the SIDP task. It is shown that imposing first-order variational constraints in the scene space together with popular encoder-decoder-based network architecture design provides excellent results for the supervised SIDP task. The imposed first-order variational constraint makes the network aware of the depth gradient in the scene space, i.e., regularity. The paper demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed approach via extensive evaluation and ablation analysis over several benchmark datasets, such as KITTI, NYU Depth V2, and SUN RGB-D. The VA-DepthNet at test time shows considerable improvements in depth prediction accuracy compared to the prior art and is accurate also at high-frequency regions in the scene space. At the time of writing this paper, our method -- labeled as VA-DepthNet, when tested on the KITTI depth-prediction evaluation set benchmarks, shows state-of-the-art results, and is the top-performing published approach.
Between Generating Noise and Generating Images: Noise in the Correct Frequency Improves the Quality of Synthetic Histopathology Images for Digital Pathology
Authors: Nati Daniel, Eliel Aknin, Ariel Larey, Yoni Peretz, Guy Sela, Yael Fisher, Yonatan Savir
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques have the promise to revolutionize the field of digital pathology. However, these models demand considerable amounts of data, while the availability of unbiased training data is limited. Synthetic images can augment existing datasets, to improve and validate AI algorithms. Yet, controlling the exact distribution of cellular features within them is still challenging. One of the solutions is harnessing conditional generative adversarial networks that take a semantic mask as an input rather than a random noise. Unlike other domains, outlining the exact cellular structure of tissues is hard, and most of the input masks depict regions of cell types. However, using polygon-based masks introduce inherent artifacts within the synthetic images - due to the mismatch between the polygon size and the single-cell size. In this work, we show that introducing random single-pixel noise with the appropriate spatial frequency into a polygon semantic mask can dramatically improve the quality of the synthetic images. We used our platform to generate synthetic images of immunohistochemistry-treated lung biopsies. We test the quality of the images using a three-fold validation procedure. First, we show that adding the appropriate noise frequency yields 87% of the similarity metrics improvement that is obtained by adding the actual single-cell features. Second, we show that the synthetic images pass the Turing test. Finally, we show that adding these synthetic images to the train set improves AI performance in terms of PD-L1 semantic segmentation performances. Our work suggests a simple and powerful approach for generating synthetic data on demand to unbias limited datasets to improve the algorithms' accuracy and validate their robustness.
Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation in Dyadic Interaction Settings: What, Why and How?
Authors: Siyang Song, Micol Spitale, Yiming Luo, Batuhan Bal, Hatice Gunes
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00

According to the Stimulus Organism Response (SOR) theory, all human behavioral reactions are stimulated by context, where people will process the received stimulus and produce an appropriate reaction. This implies that in a specific context for a given input stimulus, a person can react differently according to their internal state and other contextual factors. Analogously, in dyadic interactions, humans communicate using verbal and nonverbal cues, where a broad spectrum of listeners' non-verbal reactions might be appropriate for responding to a specific speaker behaviour. There already exists a body of work that investigated the problem of automatically generating an appropriate reaction for a given input. However, none attempted to automatically generate multiple appropriate reactions in the context of dyadic interactions and evaluate the appropriateness of those reactions using objective measures. This paper starts by defining the facial Multiple Appropriate Reaction Generation (fMARG) task for the first time in the literature and proposes a new set of objective evaluation metrics to evaluate the appropriateness of the generated reactions. The paper subsequently introduces a framework to predict, generate, and evaluate multiple appropriate facial reactions.
DEPAS: De-novo Pathology Semantic Masks using a Generative Model
Authors: Ariel Larey, Nati Daniel, Eliel Aknin, Yael Fisher, Yonatan Savir
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, Translation

The integration of artificial intelligence into digital pathology has the potential to automate and improve various tasks, such as image analysis and diagnostic decision-making. Yet, the inherent variability of tissues, together with the need for image labeling, lead to biased datasets that limit the generalizability of algorithms trained on them. One of the emerging solutions for this challenge is synthetic histological images. However, debiasing real datasets require not only generating photorealistic images but also the ability to control the features within them. A common approach is to use generative methods that perform image translation between semantic masks that reflect prior knowledge of the tissue and a histological image. However, unlike other image domains, the complex structure of the tissue prevents a simple creation of histology semantic masks that are required as input to the image translation model, while semantic masks extracted from real images reduce the process's scalability. In this work, we introduce a scalable generative model, coined as DEPAS, that captures tissue structure and generates high-resolution semantic masks with state-of-the-art quality. We demonstrate the ability of DEPAS to generate realistic semantic maps of tissue for three types of organs: skin, prostate, and lung. Moreover, we show that these masks can be processed using a generative image translation model to produce photorealistic histology images of two types of cancer with two different types of staining techniques. Finally, we harness DEPAS to generate multi-label semantic masks that capture different cell types distributions and use them to produce histological images with on-demand cellular features. Overall, our work provides a state-of-the-art solution for the challenging task of generating synthetic histological images while controlling their semantic information in a scalable way.
Preconditioned Score-based Generative Models
Authors: Hengyuan Ma, Li Zhang, Xiatian Zhu, Jianfeng Feng
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, parameter estimation

Score-based generative models (SGMs) have recently emerged as a promising class of generative models. However, a fundamental limitation is that their sampling process is slow due to a need for many (\eg, $2000$) iterations of sequential computations. An intuitive acceleration method is to reduce the sampling iterations which however causes severe performance degradation. We assault this problem to the ill-conditioned issues of the Langevin dynamics and reverse diffusion in the sampling process. Under this insight, we propose a model-agnostic {\bf\em preconditioned diffusion sampling} (PDS) method that leverages matrix preconditioning to alleviate the aforementioned problem. PDS alters the sampling process of a vanilla SGM at marginal extra computation cost, and without model retraining. Theoretically, we prove that PDS preserves the output distribution of the SGM, no risk of inducing systematical bias to the original sampling process. We further theoretically reveal a relation between the parameter of PDS and the sampling iterations,easing the parameter estimation under varying sampling iterations. Extensive experiments on various image datasets with a variety of resolutions and diversity validate that our PDS consistently accelerates off-the-shelf SGMs whilst maintaining the synthesis quality. In particular, PDS can accelerate by up to $29\times$ on more challenging high resolution (1024$\times$1024) image generation. Compared with the latest generative models (\eg, CLD-SGM, DDIM, and Analytic-DDIM), PDS can achieve the best sampling quality on CIFAR-10 at a FID score of 1.99. Our code is made publicly available to foster any further research https://github.com/fudan-zvg/PDS.
Explicit3D: Graph Network with Spatial Inference for Single Image 3D Object Detection
Authors: Yanjun Liu, Wenming Yang
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Graph Generation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Graph Generation, Scene Understanding, Visual Reasoning

Indoor 3D object detection is an essential task in single image scene understanding, impacting spatial cognition fundamentally in visual reasoning. Existing works on 3D object detection from a single image either pursue this goal through independent predictions of each object or implicitly reason over all possible objects, failing to harness relational geometric information between objects. To address this problem, we propose a dynamic sparse graph pipeline named Explicit3D based on object geometry and semantics features. Taking the efficiency into consideration, we further define a relatedness score and design a novel dynamic pruning algorithm followed by a cluster sampling method for sparse scene graph generation and updating. Furthermore, our Explicit3D introduces homogeneous matrices and defines new relative loss and corner loss to model the spatial difference between target pairs explicitly. Instead of using ground-truth labels as direct supervision, our relative and corner loss are derived from the homogeneous transformation, which renders the model to learn the geometric consistency between objects. The experimental results on the SUN RGB-D dataset demonstrate that our Explicit3D achieves better performance balance than the-state-of-the-art.
Optical flow estimation from event-based cameras and spiking neural networks
Authors: Javier Cuadrado, Ulysse Rançon, Benoît Cottereau, Francisco Barranco, Timothée Masquelier
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Event-based cameras are raising interest within the computer vision community. These sensors operate with asynchronous pixels, emitting events, or "spikes", when the luminance change at a given pixel since the last event surpasses a certain threshold. Thanks to their inherent qualities, such as their low power consumption, low latency and high dynamic range, they seem particularly tailored to applications with challenging temporal constraints and safety requirements. Event-based sensors are an excellent fit for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), since the coupling of an asynchronous sensor with neuromorphic hardware can yield real-time systems with minimal power requirements. In this work, we seek to develop one such system, using both event sensor data from the DSEC dataset and spiking neural networks to estimate optical flow for driving scenarios. We propose a U-Net-like SNN which, after supervised training, is able to make dense optical flow estimations. To do so, we encourage both minimal norm for the error vector and minimal angle between ground-truth and predicted flow, training our model with back-propagation using a surrogate gradient. In addition, the use of 3d convolutions allows us to capture the dynamic nature of the data by increasing the temporal receptive fields. Upsampling after each decoding stage ensures that each decoder's output contributes to the final estimation. Thanks to separable convolutions, we have been able to develop a light model (when compared to competitors) that can nonetheless yield reasonably accurate optical flow estimates.
ContrasInver: Ultra-Sparse Label Semi-supervised Regression for Multi-dimensional Seismic Inversion
Authors: YiMin Dou, Kewen Li, Wenjun Lv, Timing Li, Hongjie Duan, Zhifeng Xu
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Pseudo Label, regression, Seismic Inversion, SSIM

The automated interpretation and inversion of seismic data have advanced significantly with the development of Deep Learning (DL) methods. However, these methods often require numerous costly well logs, limiting their application only to mature or synthetic data. This paper presents ContrasInver, a method that achieves seismic inversion using as few as two or three well logs, significantly reducing current requirements. In ContrasInver, we propose three key innovations to address the challenges of applying semi-supervised learning to regression tasks with ultra-sparse labels. The Multi-dimensional Sample Generation (MSG) technique pioneers a paradigm for sample generation in multi-dimensional inversion. It produces a large number of diverse samples from a single well, while establishing lateral continuity in seismic data. MSG yields substantial improvements over current techniques, even without the use of semi-supervised learning. The Region-Growing Training (RGT) strategy leverages the inherent continuity of seismic data, effectively propagating accuracy from closer to more distant regions based on the proximity of well logs. The Impedance Vectorization Projection (IVP) vectorizes impedance values and performs semi-supervised learning in a compressed space. We demonstrated that the Jacobian matrix derived from this space can filter out some outlier components in pseudo-label vectors, thereby solving the value confusion issue in semi-supervised regression learning. In the experiments, ContrasInver achieved state-of-the-art performance in the synthetic data SEAM I. In the field data with two or three well logs, only the methods based on the components proposed in this paper were able to achieve reasonable results. It's the first data-driven approach yielding reliable results on the Netherlands F3 and Delft, using only three and two well logs respectively.
Geometric Constraints Enable Self-Supervised Sinogram Inpainting in Sparse-View Tomography
Authors: Fabian Wagner, Mareike Thies, Noah Maul, Laura Pfaff, Oliver Aust, Sabrina Pechmann, Christopher Syben, Andreas Maier
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), CT Reconstruction, Diagnostic, SSIM

The diagnostic quality of computed tomography (CT) scans is usually restricted by the induced patient dose, scan speed, and image quality. Sparse-angle tomographic scans reduce radiation exposure and accelerate data acquisition, but suffer from image artifacts and noise. Existing image processing algorithms can restore CT reconstruction quality but often require large training data sets or can not be used for truncated objects. This work presents a self-supervised projection inpainting method that allows optimizing missing projective views via gradient-based optimization. By reconstructing independent stacks of projection data, a self-supervised loss is calculated in the CT image domain and used to directly optimize projection image intensities to match the missing tomographic views constrained by the projection geometry. Our experiments on real X-ray microscope (XRM) tomographic mouse tibia bone scans show that our method improves reconstructions by 3.1-7.4%/7.7-17.6% in terms of PSNR/SSIM with respect to the interpolation baseline. Our approach is applicable as a flexible self-supervised projection inpainting tool for tomographic applications.
A Deep Learning-based Global and Segmentation-based Semantic Feature Fusion Approach for Indoor Scene Classification
Authors: Ricardo Pereira, Tiago Barros, Luis Garrote, Ana Lopes, Urbano J. Nunes
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Scene Classification, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This work proposes a novel approach that uses a semantic segmentation mask to obtain a 2D spatial layout of the segmentation-categories across the scene, designated by segmentation-based semantic features (SSFs). These features represent, per segmentation-category, the pixel count, as well as the 2D average position and respective standard deviation values. Moreover, a two-branch network, GS2F2App, that exploits CNN-based global features extracted from RGB images and the segmentation-based features extracted from the proposed SSFs, is also proposed. GS2F2App was evaluated in two indoor scene benchmark datasets: the SUN RGB-D and the NYU Depth V2, achieving state-of-the-art results on both datasets.
Self-supervised phase unwrapping in fringe projection profilometry
Authors: Xiaomin Gao, Wanzhong Song, Chunqian Tan, Junzhe Lei
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00

Fast-speed and high-accuracy three-dimensional (3D) shape measurement has been the goal all along in fringe projection profilometry (FPP). The dual-frequency temporal phase unwrapping method (DF-TPU) is one of the prominent technologies to achieve this goal. However, the period number of the high-frequency pattern of existing DF-TPU approaches is usually limited by the inevitable phase errors, setting a limit to measurement accuracy. Deep-learning-based phase unwrapping methods for single-camera FPP usually require labeled data for training. In this letter, a novel self-supervised phase unwrapping method for single-camera FPP systems is proposed. The trained network can retrieve the absolute fringe order from one phase map of 64-period and overperform DF-TPU approaches in terms of depth accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the validation of the proposed method on real scenes of motion blur, isolated objects, low reflectivity, and phase discontinuity.
Semantic Image Segmentation: Two Decades of Research
Authors: Gabriela Csurka, Riccardo Volpi, Boris Chidlovskii
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Segmentation, Incremental Learning, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Source-Free Domain Adaptation, Survey, Test-time Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Semantic image segmentation (SiS) plays a fundamental role in a broad variety of computer vision applications, providing key information for the global understanding of an image. This survey is an effort to summarize two decades of research in the field of SiS, where we propose a literature review of solutions starting from early historical methods followed by an overview of more recent deep learning methods including the latest trend of using transformers. We complement the review by discussing particular cases of the weak supervision and side machine learning techniques that can be used to improve the semantic segmentation such as curriculum, incremental or self-supervised learning. State-of-the-art SiS models rely on a large amount of annotated samples, which are more expensive to obtain than labels for tasks such as image classification. Since unlabeled data is instead significantly cheaper to obtain, it is not surprising that Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) reached a broad success within the semantic segmentation community. Therefore, a second core contribution of this book is to summarize five years of a rapidly growing field, Domain Adaptation for Semantic Image Segmentation (DASiS) which embraces the importance of semantic segmentation itself and a critical need of adapting segmentation models to new environments. In addition to providing a comprehensive survey on DASiS techniques, we unveil also newer trends such as multi-domain learning, domain generalization, domain incremental learning, test-time adaptation and source-free domain adaptation. Finally, we conclude this survey by describing datasets and benchmarks most widely used in SiS and DASiS and briefly discuss related tasks such as instance and panoptic image segmentation, as well as applications such as medical image segmentation.
Anticipating Next Active Objects for Egocentric Videos
Authors: Sanket Thakur, Cigdem Beyan, Pietro Morerio, Vittorio Murino, Alessio Del Bue
Date: 2023-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

This paper addresses the problem of anticipating the next-active-object location in the future, for a given egocentric video clip where the contact might happen, before any action takes place. The problem is considerably hard, as we aim at estimating the position of such objects in a scenario where the observed clip and the action segment are separated by the so-called ``time to contact'' (TTC) segment. Many methods have been proposed to anticipate the action of a person based on previous hand movements and interactions with the surroundings. However, there have been no attempts to investigate the next possible interactable object, and its future location with respect to the first-person's motion and the field-of-view drift during the TTC window. We define this as the task of Anticipating the Next ACTive Object (ANACTO). To this end, we propose a transformer-based self-attention framework to identify and locate the next-active-object in an egocentric clip. We benchmark our method on three datasets: EpicKitchens-100, EGTEA+ and Ego4D. We also provide annotations for the first two datasets. Our approach performs best compared to relevant baseline methods. We also conduct ablation studies to understand the effectiveness of the proposed and baseline methods on varying conditions. Code and ANACTO task annotations will be made available upon paper acceptance.