pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enabling Cross-Camera Collaboration for Video Analytics on Distributed Smart Cameras
Authors: Chulhong Min, Juheon Yi, Utku Gunay Acer, Fahim Kawsar
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Overlapping cameras offer exciting opportunities to view a scene from different angles, allowing for more advanced, comprehensive and robust analysis. However, existing visual analytics systems for multi-camera streams are mostly limited to (i) per-camera processing and aggregation and (ii) workload-agnostic centralized processing architectures. In this paper, we present Argus, a distributed video analytics system with cross-camera collaboration on smart cameras. We identify multi-camera, multi-target tracking as the primary task of multi-camera video analytics and develop a novel technique that avoids redundant, processing-heavy identification tasks by leveraging object-wise spatio-temporal association in the overlapping fields of view across multiple cameras. We further develop a set of techniques to perform these operations across distributed cameras without cloud support at low latency by (i) dynamically ordering the camera and object inspection sequence and (ii) flexibly distributing the workload across smart cameras, taking into account network transmission and heterogeneous computational capacities. Evaluation of three real-world overlapping camera datasets with two Nvidia Jetson devices shows that Argus reduces the number of object identifications and end-to-end latency by up to 7.13x and 2.19x (4.86x and 1.60x compared to the state-of-the-art), while achieving comparable tracking quality.
Attention-based Efficient Classification for 3D MRI Image of Alzheimer's Disease
Authors: Yihao Lin, Ximeng Li, Yan Zhang, Jinshan Tang
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Alzheimer's Disease Detection, Deep Learning, Diagnostic, Medical Diagnosis

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer Diagnostics (AD) is a challenging task due to its subtle and complex clinical symptoms. Deep learning-assisted medical diagnosis using image recognition techniques has become an important research topic in this field. The features have to accurately capture main variations of anatomical brain structures. However, time-consuming is expensive for feature extraction by deep learning training. This study proposes a novel Alzheimer's disease detection model based on Convolutional Neural Networks. The model utilizes a pre-trained ResNet network as the backbone, incorporating post-fusion algorithm for 3D medical images and attention mechanisms. The experimental results indicate that the employed 2D fusion algorithm effectively improves the model's training expense. And the introduced attention mechanism accurately weights important regions in images, further enhancing the model's diagnostic accuracy.
Incorporating Test-Time Optimization into Training with Dual Networks for Human Mesh Recovery
Authors: Yongwei Nie, Mingxian Fan, Chengjiang Long, Qing Zhang, Jian Zhu, Xuemiao Xu
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Mesh Recovery, Meta-Learning, regression

Human Mesh Recovery (HMR) is the task of estimating a parameterized 3D human mesh from an image. There is a kind of methods first training a regression model for this problem, then further optimizing the pretrained regression model for any specific sample individually at test time. However, the pretrained model may not provide an ideal optimization starting point for the test-time optimization. Inspired by meta-learning, we incorporate the test-time optimization into training, performing a step of test-time optimization for each sample in the training batch before really conducting the training optimization over all the training samples. In this way, we obtain a meta-model, the meta-parameter of which is friendly to the test-time optimization. At test time, after several test-time optimization steps starting from the meta-parameter, we obtain much higher HMR accuracy than the test-time optimization starting from the simply pretrained regression model. Furthermore, we find test-time HMR objectives are different from training-time objectives, which reduces the effectiveness of the learning of the meta-model. To solve this problem, we propose a dual-network architecture that unifies the training-time and test-time objectives. Our method, armed with meta-learning and the dual networks, outperforms state-of-the-art regression-based and optimization-based HMR approaches, as validated by the extensive experiments. The codes are available at https://github.com/fmx789/Meta-HMR.
MIFI: MultI-camera Feature Integration for Roust 3D Distracted Driver Activity Recognition
Authors: Jian Kuang, Wenjing Li, Fang Li, Jun Zhang, Zhongcheng Wu
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition

Distracted driver activity recognition plays a critical role in risk aversion-particularly beneficial in intelligent transportation systems. However, most existing methods make use of only the video from a single view and the difficulty-inconsistent issue is neglected. Different from them, in this work, we propose a novel MultI-camera Feature Integration (MIFI) approach for 3D distracted driver activity recognition by jointly modeling the data from different camera views and explicitly re-weighting examples based on their degree of difficulty. Our contributions are two-fold: (1) We propose a simple but effective multi-camera feature integration framework and provide three types of feature fusion techniques. (2) To address the difficulty-inconsistent problem in distracted driver activity recognition, a periodic learning method, named example re-weighting that can jointly learn the easy and hard samples, is presented. The experimental results on the 3MDAD dataset demonstrate that the proposed MIFI can consistently boost performance compared to single-view models.
Image Synthesis with Graph Conditioning: CLIP-Guided Diffusion Models for Scene Graphs
Authors: Rameshwar Mishra, A V Subramanyam
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Advancements in generative models have sparked significant interest in generating images while adhering to specific structural guidelines. Scene graph to image generation is one such task of generating images which are consistent with the given scene graph. However, the complexity of visual scenes poses a challenge in accurately aligning objects based on specified relations within the scene graph. Existing methods approach this task by first predicting a scene layout and generating images from these layouts using adversarial training. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to generate images from scene graphs which eliminates the need of predicting intermediate layouts. We leverage pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models and CLIP guidance to translate graph knowledge into images. Towards this, we first pre-train our graph encoder to align graph features with CLIP features of corresponding images using a GAN based training. Further, we fuse the graph features with CLIP embedding of object labels present in the given scene graph to create a graph consistent CLIP guided conditioning signal. In the conditioning input, object embeddings provide coarse structure of the image and graph features provide structural alignment based on relationships among objects. Finally, we fine tune a pre-trained diffusion model with the graph consistent conditioning signal with reconstruction and CLIP alignment loss. Elaborate experiments reveal that our method outperforms existing methods on standard benchmarks of COCO-stuff and Visual Genome dataset.
Double Trouble? Impact and Detection of Duplicates in Face Image Datasets
Authors: Torsten Schlett, Christian Rathgeb, Juan Tapia, Christoph Busch
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Image Quality, Face Image Quality Assessment, Face Recognition, Image Quality Assessment

Various face image datasets intended for facial biometrics research were created via web-scraping, i.e. the collection of images publicly available on the internet. This work presents an approach to detect both exactly and nearly identical face image duplicates, using file and image hashes. The approach is extended through the use of face image preprocessing. Additional steps based on face recognition and face image quality assessment models reduce false positives, and facilitate the deduplication of the face images both for intra- and inter-subject duplicate sets. The presented approach is applied to five datasets, namely LFW, TinyFace, Adience, CASIA-WebFace, and C-MS-Celeb (a cleaned MS-Celeb-1M variant). Duplicates are detected within every dataset, with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of duplicates for all except LFW. Face recognition and quality assessment experiments indicate a minor impact on the results through the duplicate removal. The final deduplication data is publicly available.
ProCNS: Progressive Prototype Calibration and Noise Suppression for Weakly-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Y. Liu, L. Lin, K. K. Y. Wong, X. Tang
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised segmentation

Weakly-supervised segmentation (WSS) has emerged as a solution to mitigate the conflict between annotation cost and model performance by adopting sparse annotation formats (e.g., point, scribble, block, etc.). Typical approaches attempt to exploit anatomy and topology priors to directly expand sparse annotations into pseudo-labels. However, due to a lack of attention to the ambiguous edges in medical images and insufficient exploration of sparse supervision, existing approaches tend to generate erroneous and overconfident pseudo proposals in noisy regions, leading to cumulative model error and performance degradation. In this work, we propose a novel WSS approach, named ProCNS, encompassing two synergistic modules devised with the principles of progressive prototype calibration and noise suppression. Specifically, we design a Prototype-based Regional Spatial Affinity (PRSA) loss to maximize the pair-wise affinities between spatial and semantic elements, providing our model of interest with more reliable guidance. The affinities are derived from the input images and the prototype-refined predictions. Meanwhile, we propose an Adaptive Noise Perception and Masking (ANPM) module to obtain more enriched and representative prototype representations, which adaptively identifies and masks noisy regions within the pseudo proposals, reducing potential erroneous interference during prototype computation. Furthermore, we generate specialized soft pseudo-labels for the noisy regions identified by ANPM, providing supplementary supervision. Extensive experiments on six medical image segmentation tasks involving different modalities demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms representative state-of-the-art methods.
A real-time rendering method for high albedo anisotropic materials with multiple scattering
Authors: Shun Fang, Xing Feng, Ming Cui
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00

We propose a neural network-based real-time volume rendering method for realistic and efficient rendering of volumetric media. The traditional volume rendering method uses path tracing to solve the radiation transfer equation, which requires a huge amount of calculation and cannot achieve real-time rendering. Therefore, this paper uses neural networks to simulate the iterative integration process of solving the radiative transfer equation to speed up the volume rendering of volume media. Specifically, the paper first performs data processing on the volume medium to generate a variety of sampling features, including density features, transmittance features and phase features. The hierarchical transmittance fields are fed into a 3D-CNN network to compute more important transmittance features. Secondly, the diffuse reflection sampling template and the highlight sampling template are used to layer the three types of sampling features into the network. This method can pay more attention to light scattering, highlights and shadows, and then select important channel features through the attention module. Finally, the scattering distribution of the center points of all sampling templates is predicted through the backbone neural network. This method can achieve realistic volumetric media rendering effects and greatly increase the rendering speed while maintaining rendering quality, which is of great significance for real-time rendering applications. Experimental results indicate that our method outperforms previous methods.
Deep Clustering with Diffused Sampling and Hardness-aware Self-distillation
Authors: Hai-Xin Zhang, Dong Huang
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Contrastive Learning, Deep Clustering, Knowledge Distillation, Self-Knowledge Distillation, Self-Supervised Learning

Deep clustering has gained significant attention due to its capability in learning clustering-friendly representations without labeled data. However, previous deep clustering methods tend to treat all samples equally, which neglect the variance in the latent distribution and the varying difficulty in classifying or clustering different samples. To address this, this paper proposes a novel end-to-end deep clustering method with diffused sampling and hardness-aware self-distillation (HaDis). Specifically, we first align one view of instances with another view via diffused sampling alignment (DSA), which helps improve the intra-cluster compactness. To alleviate the sampling bias, we present the hardness-aware self-distillation (HSD) mechanism to mine the hardest positive and negative samples and adaptively adjust their weights in a self-distillation fashion, which is able to deal with the potential imbalance in sample contributions during optimization. Further, the prototypical contrastive learning is incorporated to simultaneously enhance the inter-cluster separability and intra-cluster compactness. Experimental results on five challenging image datasets demonstrate the superior clustering performance of our HaDis method over the state-of-the-art. Source code is available at https://github.com/Regan-Zhang/HaDis.
Diverse and Lifespan Facial Age Transformation Synthesis with Identity Variation Rationality Metric
Authors: Jiu-Cheng Xie, Jun Yang, Wenqing Wang, Feng Xu, Jiang Xiong, Hao Gao
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Diversity

Face aging has received continuous research attention over the past two decades. Although previous works on this topic have achieved impressive success, two longstanding problems remain unsettled: 1) generating diverse and plausible facial aging patterns at the target age stage; 2) measuring the rationality of identity variation between the original portrait and its syntheses with age progression or regression. In this paper, we introduce ${\rm{DLAT}}^{\boldsymbol{+}}$ to realize Diverse and Lifespan Age Transformation on human faces, where the diversity jointly manifests in the transformation of facial textures and shapes. Apart from the diversity mechanism embedded in the model, multiple consistency restrictions are leveraged to keep it away from counterfactual aging syntheses. Moreover, we propose a new metric to assess the rationality of Identity Deviation under Age Gaps (IDAG) between the input face and its series of age-transformed generations, which is based on statistical laws summarized from plenty of genuine face-aging data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the uniqueness and effectiveness of our method in synthesizing diverse and perceptually reasonable faces across the whole lifetime.
Unsupervised Spatial-Temporal Feature Enrichment and Fidelity Preservation Network for Skeleton based Action Recognition
Authors: Chuankun Li, Shuai Li, Yanbo Gao, Ping Chen, Jian Li, Wanqing Li
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Unsupervised Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Unsupervised skeleton based action recognition has achieved remarkable progress recently. Existing unsupervised learning methods suffer from severe overfitting problem, and thus small networks are used, significantly reducing the representation capability. To address this problem, the overfitting mechanism behind the unsupervised learning for skeleton based action recognition is first investigated. It is observed that the skeleton is already a relatively high-level and low-dimension feature, but not in the same manifold as the features for action recognition. Simply applying the existing unsupervised learning method may tend to produce features that discriminate the different samples instead of action classes, resulting in the overfitting problem. To solve this problem, this paper presents an Unsupervised spatial-temporal Feature Enrichment and Fidelity Preservation framework (U-FEFP) to generate rich distributed features that contain all the information of the skeleton sequence. A spatial-temporal feature transformation subnetwork is developed using spatial-temporal graph convolutional network and graph convolutional gate recurrent unit network as the basic feature extraction network. The unsupervised Bootstrap Your Own Latent based learning is used to generate rich distributed features and the unsupervised pretext task based learning is used to preserve the information of the skeleton sequence. The two unsupervised learning ways are collaborated as U-FEFP to produce robust and discriminative representations. Experimental results on three widely used benchmarks, namely NTU-RGB+D-60, NTU-RGB+D-120 and PKU-MMD dataset, demonstrate that the proposed U-FEFP achieves the best performance compared with the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning methods. t-SNE illustrations further validate that U-FEFP can learn more discriminative features for unsupervised skeleton based action recognition.
Sparse and Transferable Universal Singular Vectors Attack
Authors: Kseniia Kuvshinova, Olga Tsymboi, Ivan Oseledets
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

The research in the field of adversarial attacks and models' vulnerability is one of the fundamental directions in modern machine learning. Recent studies reveal the vulnerability phenomenon, and understanding the mechanisms behind this is essential for improving neural network characteristics and interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse universal white-box adversarial attack. Our approach is based on truncated power iteration providing sparsity to $(p,q)$-singular vectors of the hidden layers of Jacobian matrices. Using the ImageNet benchmark validation subset, we analyze the proposed method in various settings, achieving results comparable to dense baselines with more than a 50% fooling rate while damaging only 5% of pixels and utilizing 256 samples for perturbation fitting. We also show that our algorithm admits higher attack magnitude without affecting the human ability to solve the task. Furthermore, we investigate that the constructed perturbations are highly transferable among different models without significantly decreasing the fooling rate. Our findings demonstrate the vulnerability of state-of-the-art models to sparse attacks and highlight the importance of developing robust machine learning systems.
PLCNet: Patch-wise Lane Correction Network for Automatic Lane Correction in High-definition Maps
Authors: Haiyang Peng, Yi Zhan, Benkang Wang, Hongtao Zhang
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Lane Detection

In High-definition (HD) maps, lane elements constitute the majority of components and demand stringent localization requirements to ensure safe vehicle navigation. Vision lane detection with LiDAR position assignment is a prevalent method to acquire initial lanes for HD maps. However, due to incorrect vision detection and coarse camera-LiDAR calibration, initial lanes may deviate from their true positions within an uncertain range. To mitigate the need for manual lane correction, we propose a patch-wise lane correction network (PLCNet) to automatically correct the positions of initial lane points in local LiDAR images that are transformed from point clouds. PLCNet first extracts multi-scale image features and crops patch (ROI) features centered at each initial lane point. By applying ROIAlign, the fix-sized ROI features are flattened into 1D features. Then, a 1D lane attention module is devised to compute instance-level lane features with adaptive weights. Finally, lane correction offsets are inferred by a multi-layer perceptron and used to correct the initial lane positions. Considering practical applications, our automatic method supports merging local corrected lanes into global corrected lanes. Through extensive experiments on a self-built dataset, we demonstrate that PLCNet achieves fast and effective initial lane correction.
WAL-Net: Weakly supervised auxiliary task learning network for carotid plaques classification
Authors: Haitao Gan, Lingchao Fu, Ran Zhou, Weiyan Gan, Furong Wang, Xiaoyan Wu, Zhi Yang, Zhongwei Huang
Date: 2024-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Segmentation, Weakly-supervised Learning

The classification of carotid artery ultrasound images is a crucial means for diagnosing carotid plaques, holding significant clinical relevance for predicting the risk of stroke. Recent research suggests that utilizing plaque segmentation as an auxiliary task for classification can enhance performance by leveraging the correlation between segmentation and classification tasks. However, this approach relies on obtaining a substantial amount of challenging-to-acquire segmentation annotations. This paper proposes a novel weakly supervised auxiliary task learning network model (WAL-Net) to explore the interdependence between carotid plaque classification and segmentation tasks. The plaque classification task is primary task, while the plaque segmentation task serves as an auxiliary task, providing valuable information to enhance the performance of the primary task. Weakly supervised learning is adopted in the auxiliary task to completely break away from the dependence on segmentation annotations. Experiments and evaluations are conducted on a dataset comprising 1270 carotid plaque ultrasound images from Wuhan University Zhongnan Hospital. Results indicate that the proposed method achieved an approximately 1.3% improvement in carotid plaque classification accuracy compared to the baseline network. Specifically, the accuracy of mixed-echoic plaques classification increased by approximately 3.3%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.