pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RADAM: Texture Recognition through Randomized Aggregated Encoding of Deep Activation Maps
Authors: Leonardo Scabini, Kallil M. Zielinski, Lucas C. Ribas, Wesley N. Gonçalves, Bernard De Baets, Odemir M. Bruno
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Texture Classification

Texture analysis is a classical yet challenging task in computer vision for which deep neural networks are actively being applied. Most approaches are based on building feature aggregation modules around a pre-trained backbone and then fine-tuning the new architecture on specific texture recognition tasks. Here we propose a new method named \textbf{R}andom encoding of \textbf{A}ggregated \textbf{D}eep \textbf{A}ctivation \textbf{M}aps (RADAM) which extracts rich texture representations without ever changing the backbone. The technique consists of encoding the output at different depths of a pre-trained deep convolutional network using a Randomized Autoencoder (RAE). The RAE is trained locally to each image using a closed-form solution, and its decoder weights are used to compose a 1-dimensional texture representation that is fed into a linear SVM. This means that no fine-tuning or backpropagation is needed. We explore RADAM on several texture benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art results with different computational budgets. Our results suggest that pre-trained backbones may not require additional fine-tuning for texture recognition if their learned representations are better encoded.
Continuity-Aware Latent Interframe Information Mining for Reliable UAV Tracking
Authors: Changhong Fu, Mutian Cai, Sihang Li, Kunhan Lu, Haobo Zuo, Chongjun Liu
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking is crucial for autonomous navigation and has broad applications in robotic automation fields. However, reliable UAV tracking remains a challenging task due to various difficulties like frequent occlusion and aspect ratio change. Additionally, most of the existing work mainly focuses on explicit information to improve tracking performance, ignoring potential interframe connections. To address the above issues, this work proposes a novel framework with continuity-aware latent interframe information mining for reliable UAV tracking, i.e., ClimRT. Specifically, a new efficient continuity-aware latent interframe information mining network (ClimNet) is proposed for UAV tracking, which can generate highly-effective latent frame between two adjacent frames. Besides, a novel location-continuity Transformer (LCT) is designed to fully explore continuity-aware spatial-temporal information, thereby markedly enhancing UAV tracking. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on three authoritative aerial benchmarks strongly validate the robustness and reliability of ClimRT in UAV tracking performance. Furthermore, real-world tests on the aerial platform validate its practicability and effectiveness. The code and demo materials are released at https://github.com/vision4robotics/ClimRT.
InFusionSurf: Refining Neural RGB-D Surface Reconstruction Using Per-Frame Intrinsic Refinement and TSDF Fusion Prior Learning
Authors: Seunghwan Lee, Gwanmo Park, Hyewon Son, Jiwon Ryu, Han Joo Chae
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, NeRF, Surface Reconstruction

We introduce InFusionSurf, an innovative enhancement for neural radiance field (NeRF) frameworks in 3D surface reconstruction using RGB-D video frames. Building upon previous methods that have employed feature encoding to improve optimization speed, we further improve the reconstruction quality with minimal impact on optimization time by refining depth information. InFusionSurf addresses camera motion-induced blurs in each depth frame through a per-frame intrinsic refinement scheme. It incorporates the truncated signed distance field (TSDF) Fusion, a classical real-time 3D surface reconstruction method, as a pretraining tool for the feature grid, enhancing reconstruction details and training speed. Comparative quantitative and qualitative analyses show that InFusionSurf reconstructs scenes with high accuracy while maintaining optimization efficiency. The effectiveness of our intrinsic refinement and TSDF Fusion-based pretraining is further validated through an ablation study.
Radio astronomical images object detection and segmentation: A benchmark on deep learning methods
Authors: Renato Sortino, Daniel Magro, Giuseppe Fiameni, Eva Sciacca, Simone Riggi, Andrea DeMarco, Concetto Spampinato, Andrew M. Hopkins, Filomena Bufano, Francesco Schillirò, Cristobal Bordiu, Carmelo Pino
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy, Computational Efficiency, Deep Learning, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, deep learning has been successfully applied in various scientific domains. Following these promising results and performances, it has recently also started being evaluated in the domain of radio astronomy. In particular, since radio astronomy is entering the Big Data era, with the advent of the largest telescope in the world - the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the task of automatic object detection and instance segmentation is crucial for source finding and analysis. In this work, we explore the performance of the most affirmed deep learning approaches, applied to astronomical images obtained by radio interferometric instrumentation, to solve the task of automatic source detection. This is carried out by applying models designed to accomplish two different kinds of tasks: object detection and semantic segmentation. The goal is to provide an overview of existing techniques, in terms of prediction performance and computational efficiency, to scientists in the astrophysics community who would like to employ machine learning in their research.
Immune Defense: A Novel Adversarial Defense Mechanism for Preventing the Generation of Adversarial Examples
Authors: Jinwei Wang, Hao Wu, Haihua Wang, Jiawei Zhang, Xiangyang Luo, Bin Ma
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense

The vulnerability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to adversarial examples has been confirmed. Existing adversarial defenses primarily aim at preventing adversarial examples from attacking DNNs successfully, rather than preventing their generation. If the generation of adversarial examples is unregulated, images within reach are no longer secure and pose a threat to non-robust DNNs. Although gradient obfuscation attempts to address this issue, it has been shown to be circumventable. Therefore, we propose a novel adversarial defense mechanism, which is referred to as immune defense and is the example-based pre-defense. This mechanism applies carefully designed quasi-imperceptible perturbations to the raw images to prevent the generation of adversarial examples for the raw images, and thereby protecting both images and DNNs. These perturbed images are referred to as Immune Examples (IEs). In the white-box immune defense, we provide a gradient-based and an optimization-based approach, respectively. Additionally, the more complex black-box immune defense is taken into consideration. We propose Masked Gradient Sign Descent (MGSD) to reduce approximation error and stabilize the update to improve the transferability of IEs and thereby ensure their effectiveness against black-box adversarial attacks. The experimental results demonstrate that the optimization-based approach has superior performance and better visual quality in white-box immune defense. In contrast, the gradient-based approach has stronger transferability and the proposed MGSD significantly improve the transferability of baselines.
Exploiting the Textual Potential from Vision-Language Pre-training for Text-based Person Search
Authors: Guanshuo Wang, Fufu Yu, Junjie Li, Qiong Jia, Shouhong Ding
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Person Search, Text based Person Search, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Text-based Person Search (TPS), is targeted on retrieving pedestrians to match text descriptions instead of query images. Recent Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models can bring transferable knowledge to downstream TPS tasks, resulting in more efficient performance gains. However, existing TPS methods improved by VLP only utilize pre-trained visual encoders, neglecting the corresponding textual representation and breaking the significant modality alignment learned from large-scale pre-training. In this paper, we explore the full utilization of textual potential from VLP in TPS tasks. We build on the proposed VLP-TPS baseline model, which is the first TPS model with both pre-trained modalities. We propose the Multi-Integrity Description Constraints (MIDC) to enhance the robustness of the textual modality by incorporating different components of fine-grained corpus during training. Inspired by the prompt approach for zero-shot classification with VLP models, we propose the Dynamic Attribute Prompt (DAP) to provide a unified corpus of fine-grained attributes as language hints for the image modality. Extensive experiments show that our proposed TPS framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, exceeding the previous best method by a margin.
DANet: Density Adaptive Convolutional Network with Interactive Attention for 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Yong He, Hongshan Yu, Zhengeng Yang, Wei Sun, Mingtao Feng, Ajmal Mian
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Local features and contextual dependencies are crucial for 3D point cloud analysis. Many works have been devoted to designing better local convolutional kernels that exploit the contextual dependencies. However, current point convolutions lack robustness to varying point cloud density. Moreover, contextual modeling is dominated by non-local or self-attention models which are computationally expensive. To solve these problems, we propose density adaptive convolution, coined DAConv. The key idea is to adaptively learn the convolutional weights from geometric connections obtained from the point density and position. To extract precise context dependencies with fewer computations, we propose an interactive attention module (IAM) that embeds spatial information into channel attention along different spatial directions. DAConv and IAM are integrated in a hierarchical network architecture to achieve local density and contextual direction-aware learning for point cloud analysis. Experiments show that DAConv is significantly more robust to point density compared to existing methods and extensive comparisons on challenging 3D point cloud datasets show that our network achieves state-of-the-art classification results of 93.6% on ModelNet40, competitive semantic segmentation results of 68.71% mIoU on S3DIS and part segmentation results of 86.7% mIoU on ShapeNet.
Full Point Encoding for Local Feature Aggregation in 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Yong He, Hongshan Yu, Zhengeng Yang, Xiaoyan Liu, Wei Sun, Ajmal Mian
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Position, Semantic Segmentation

Point cloud processing methods exploit local point features and global context through aggregation which does not explicity model the internal correlations between local and global features. To address this problem, we propose full point encoding which is applicable to convolution and transformer architectures. Specifically, we propose Full Point Convolution (FPConv) and Full Point Transformer (FPTransformer) architectures. The key idea is to adaptively learn the weights from local and global geometric connections, where the connections are established through local and global correlation functions respectively. FPConv and FPTransformer simultaneously model the local and global geometric relationships as well as their internal correlations, demonstrating strong generalization ability and high performance. FPConv is incorporated in classical hierarchical network architectures to achieve local and global shape-aware learning. In FPTransformer, we introduce full point position encoding in self-attention, that hierarchically encodes each point position in the global and local receptive field. We also propose a shape aware downsampling block which takes into account the local shape and the global context. Experimental comparison to existing methods on benchmark datasets show the efficacy of FPConv and FPTransformer for semantic segmentation, object detection, classification, and normal estimation tasks. In particular, we achieve state-of-the-art semantic segmentation results of 76% mIoU on S3DIS 6-fold and 72.2% on S3DIS Area5.
RM-Depth: Unsupervised Learning of Recurrent Monocular Depth in Dynamic Scenes
Authors: Tak-Wai Hui
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Decoder, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Unsupervised methods have showed promising results on monocular depth estimation. However, the training data must be captured in scenes without moving objects. To push the envelope of accuracy, recent methods tend to increase their model parameters. In this paper, an unsupervised learning framework is proposed to jointly predict monocular depth and complete 3D motion including the motions of moving objects and camera. (1) Recurrent modulation units are used to adaptively and iteratively fuse encoder and decoder features. This not only improves the single-image depth inference but also does not overspend model parameters. (2) Instead of using a single set of filters for upsampling, multiple sets of filters are devised for the residual upsampling. This facilitates the learning of edge-preserving filters and leads to the improved performance. (3) A warping-based network is used to estimate a motion field of moving objects without using semantic priors. This breaks down the requirement of scene rigidity and allows to use general videos for the unsupervised learning. The motion field is further regularized by an outlier-aware training loss. Despite the depth model just uses a single image in test time and 2.97M parameters, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the KITTI and Cityscapes benchmarks.
HyT-NAS: Hybrid Transformers Neural Architecture Search for Edge Devices
Authors: Lotfi Abdelkrim Mecharbat, Hadjer Benmeziane, Hamza Ouarnoughi, Smail Niar
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Hardware Aware Neural Architecture Search, image-classification, Image Classification, Neural Architecture Search, object-detection, Object Detection

Vision Transformers have enabled recent attention-based Deep Learning (DL) architectures to achieve remarkable results in Computer Vision (CV) tasks. However, due to the extensive computational resources required, these architectures are rarely implemented on resource-constrained platforms. Current research investigates hybrid handcrafted convolution-based and attention-based models for CV tasks such as image classification and object detection. In this paper, we propose HyT-NAS, an efficient Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (HW-NAS) including hybrid architectures targeting vision tasks on tiny devices. HyT-NAS improves state-of-the-art HW-NAS by enriching the search space and enhancing the search strategy as well as the performance predictors. Our experiments show that HyT-NAS achieves a similar hypervolume with less than ~5x training evaluations. Our resulting architecture outperforms MLPerf MobileNetV1 by 6.3% accuracy improvement with 3.5x less number of parameters on Visual Wake Words.
A Light Weight Model for Active Speaker Detection
Authors: Junhua Liao, Haihan Duan, Kanghui Feng, Wanbing Zhao, Yanbing Yang, Liangyin Chen
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Active Speaker Detection, Audio-Visual Active Speaker Detection, model, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization, Video Editing

Active speaker detection is a challenging task in audio-visual scenario understanding, which aims to detect who is speaking in one or more speakers scenarios. This task has received extensive attention as it is crucial in applications such as speaker diarization, speaker tracking, and automatic video editing. The existing studies try to improve performance by inputting multiple candidate information and designing complex models. Although these methods achieved outstanding performance, their high consumption of memory and computational power make them difficult to be applied in resource-limited scenarios. Therefore, we construct a lightweight active speaker detection architecture by reducing input candidates, splitting 2D and 3D convolutions for audio-visual feature extraction, and applying gated recurrent unit (GRU) with low computational complexity for cross-modal modeling. Experimental results on the AVA-ActiveSpeaker dataset show that our framework achieves competitive mAP performance (94.1% vs. 94.2%), while the resource costs are significantly lower than the state-of-the-art method, especially in model parameters (1.0M vs. 22.5M, about 23x) and FLOPs (0.6G vs. 2.6G, about 4x). In addition, our framework also performs well on the Columbia dataset showing good robustness. The code and model weights are available at https://github.com/Junhua-Liao/Light-ASD.
Self-Supervised Learning for Group Equivariant Neural Networks
Authors: Yusuke Mukuta, Tatsuya Harada
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

This paper proposes a method to construct pretext tasks for self-supervised learning on group equivariant neural networks. Group equivariant neural networks are the models whose structure is restricted to commute with the transformations on the input. Therefore, it is important to construct pretext tasks for self-supervised learning that do not contradict this equivariance. To ensure that training is consistent with the equivariance, we propose two concepts for self-supervised tasks: equivariant pretext labels and invariant contrastive loss. Equivariant pretext labels use a set of labels on which we can define the transformations that correspond to the input change. Invariant contrastive loss uses a modified contrastive loss that absorbs the effect of transformations on each input. Experiments on standard image recognition benchmarks demonstrate that the equivariant neural networks exploit the proposed equivariant self-supervised tasks.
FUSQA: Fetal Ultrasound Segmentation Quality Assessment
Authors: Sevim Cengiz, Ibrahim Almakky, Mohammad Yaqub
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Segmentation

Deep learning models have been effective for various fetal ultrasound segmentation tasks. However, generalization to new unseen data has raised questions about their effectiveness for clinical adoption. Normally, a transition to new unseen data requires time-consuming and costly quality assurance processes to validate the segmentation performance post-transition. Segmentation quality assessment efforts have focused on natural images, where the problem has been typically formulated as a dice score regression task. In this paper, we propose a simplified Fetal Ultrasound Segmentation Quality Assessment (FUSQA) model to tackle the segmentation quality assessment when no masks exist to compare with. We formulate the segmentation quality assessment process as an automated classification task to distinguish between good and poor-quality segmentation masks for more accurate gestational age estimation. We validate the performance of our proposed approach on two datasets we collect from two hospitals using different ultrasound machines. We compare different architectures, with our best-performing architecture achieving over 90% classification accuracy on distinguishing between good and poor-quality segmentation masks from an unseen dataset. Additionally, there was only a 1.45-day difference between the gestational age reported by doctors and estimated based on CRL measurements using well-segmented masks. On the other hand, this difference increased and reached up to 7.73 days when we calculated CRL from the poorly segmented masks. As a result, AI-based approaches can potentially aid fetal ultrasound segmentation quality assessment and might detect poor segmentation in real-time screening in the future.
PL-UNeXt: Per-stage Edge Detail and Line Feature Guided Segmentation for Power Line Detection
Authors: Yang Cheng, Zhen Chen, Daming Liu
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Line Detection, Segmentation

Power line detection is a critical inspection task for electricity companies and is also useful in avoiding drone obstacles. Accurately separating power lines from the surrounding area in the aerial image is still challenging due to the intricate background and low pixel ratio. In order to properly capture the guidance of the spatial edge detail prior and line features, we offer PL-UNeXt, a power line segmentation model with a booster training strategy. We design edge detail heads computing the loss in edge space to guide the lower-level detail learning and line feature heads generating auxiliary segmentation masks to supervise higher-level line feature learning. Benefited from this design, our model can reach 70.6 F1 score (+1.9%) on TTPLA and 68.41 mIoU (+5.2%) on VITL (without utilizing IR images), while preserving a real-time performance due to few inference parameters.
Intermediate and Future Frame Prediction of Geostationary Satellite Imagery With Warp and Refine Network
Authors: Minseok Seo, Yeji Choi, Hyungon Ry, Heesun Park, Hyungkun Bae, Hyesook Lee, Wanseok Seo
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Weather Forecasting

Geostationary satellite imagery has applications in climate and weather forecasting, planning natural energy resources, and predicting extreme weather events. For precise and accurate prediction, higher spatial and temporal resolution of geostationary satellite imagery is important. Although recent geostationary satellite resolution has improved, the long-term analysis of climate applications is limited to using multiple satellites from the past to the present due to the different resolutions. To solve this problem, we proposed warp and refine network (WR-Net). WR-Net is divided into an optical flow warp component and a warp image refinement component. We used the TV-L1 algorithm instead of deep learning-based approaches to extract the optical flow warp component. The deep-learning-based model is trained on the human-centric view of the RGB channel and does not work on geostationary satellites, which is gray-scale one-channel imagery. The refinement network refines the warped image through a multi-temporal fusion layer. We evaluated WR-Net by interpolation of temporal resolution at 4 min intervals to 2 min intervals in large-scale GK2A geostationary meteorological satellite imagery. Furthermore, we applied WR-Net to the future frame prediction task and showed that the explicit use of optical flow can help future frame prediction.