pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Transformer-based Detection of Microorganisms on High-Resolution Petri Dish Images
Authors: Nikolas Ebert, Didier Stricker, Oliver Wasenmüller
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Many medical or pharmaceutical processes have strict guidelines regarding continuous hygiene monitoring. This often involves the labor-intensive task of manually counting microorganisms in Petri dishes by trained personnel. Automation attempts often struggle due to major challenges: significant scaling differences, low separation, low contrast, etc. To address these challenges, we introduce AttnPAFPN, a high-resolution detection pipeline that leverages a novel transformer variation, the efficient-global self-attention mechanism. Our streamlined approach can be easily integrated in almost any multi-scale object detection pipeline. In a comprehensive evaluation on the publicly available AGAR dataset, we demonstrate the superior accuracy of our network over the current state-of-the-art. In order to demonstrate the task-independent performance of our approach, we perform further experiments on COCO and LIVECell datasets.
Can ultrasound confidence maps predict sonographers' labeling variability?
Authors: Vanessa Gonzalez Duque, Leonhard Zirus, Yordanka Velikova, Nassir Navab, Diana Mateus
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Measuring cross-sectional areas in ultrasound images is a standard tool to evaluate disease progress or treatment response. Often addressed today with supervised deep-learning segmentation approaches, existing solutions highly depend upon the quality of experts' annotations. However, the annotation quality in ultrasound is anisotropic and position-variant due to the inherent physical imaging principles, including attenuation, shadows, and missing boundaries, commonly exacerbated with depth. This work proposes a novel approach that guides ultrasound segmentation networks to account for sonographers' uncertainties and generate predictions with variability similar to the experts. We claim that realistic variability can reduce overconfident predictions and improve physicians' acceptance of deep-learning cross-sectional segmentation solutions. Our method provides CM's certainty for each pixel for minimal computational overhead as it can be precalculated directly from the image. We show that there is a correlation between low values in the confidence maps and expert's label uncertainty. Therefore, we propose to give the confidence maps as additional information to the networks. We study the effect of the proposed use of ultrasound CMs in combination with four state-of-the-art neural networks and in two configurations: as a second input channel and as part of the loss. We evaluate our method on 3D ultrasound datasets of the thyroid and lower limb muscles. Our results show ultrasound CMs increase the Dice score, improve the Hausdorff and Average Surface Distances, and decrease the number of isolated pixel predictions. Furthermore, our findings suggest that ultrasound CMs improve the penalization of uncertain areas in the ground truth data, thereby improving problematic interpolations. Our code and example data will be made public at https://github.com/IFL-CAMP/Confidence-segmentation.
Self-Supervised Single-Image Deconvolution with Siamese Neural Networks
Authors: Mikhail Papkov, Kaupo Palo, Leopold Parts
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Deconvolution, Image Reconstruction

Inverse problems in image reconstruction are fundamentally complicated by unknown noise properties. Classical iterative deconvolution approaches amplify noise and require careful parameter selection for an optimal trade-off between sharpness and grain. Deep learning methods allow for flexible parametrization of the noise and learning its properties directly from the data. Recently, self-supervised blind-spot neural networks were successfully adopted for image deconvolution by including a known point-spread function in the end-to-end training. However, their practical application has been limited to 2D images in the biomedical domain because it implies large kernels that are poorly optimized. We tackle this problem with Fast Fourier Transform convolutions that provide training speed-up in 3D microscopy deconvolution tasks. Further, we propose to adopt a Siamese invariance loss for deconvolution and empirically identify its optimal position in the neural network between blind-spot and full image branches. The experimental results show that our improved framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art deconvolution methods with a known point spread function.
MonoNeRD: NeRF-like Representations for Monocular 3D Object Detection
Authors: Junkai Xu, Liang Peng, Haoran Cheng, Hao Li, Wei Qian, Ke Li, Wenxiao Wang, Deng Cai
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: 3D geometry, 3D Object Detection, Monocular 3D Object Detection, NeRF, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In the field of monocular 3D detection, it is common practice to utilize scene geometric clues to enhance the detector's performance. However, many existing works adopt these clues explicitly such as estimating a depth map and back-projecting it into 3D space. This explicit methodology induces sparsity in 3D representations due to the increased dimensionality from 2D to 3D, and leads to substantial information loss, especially for distant and occluded objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose MonoNeRD, a novel detection framework that can infer dense 3D geometry and occupancy. Specifically, we model scenes with Signed Distance Functions (SDF), facilitating the production of dense 3D representations. We treat these representations as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and then employ volume rendering to recover RGB images and depth maps. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to introduce volume rendering for M3D, and demonstrates the potential of implicit reconstruction for image-based 3D perception. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI-3D benchmark and Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of MonoNeRD. Codes are available at https://github.com/cskkxjk/MonoNeRD.
Metadata Improves Segmentation Through Multitasking Elicitation
Authors: Iaroslav Plutenko, Mikhail Papkov, Kaupo Palo, Leopold Parts, Dmytro Fishman
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Metainformation is a common companion to biomedical images. However, this potentially powerful additional source of signal from image acquisition has had limited use in deep learning methods, for semantic segmentation in particular. Here, we incorporate metadata by employing a channel modulation mechanism in convolutional networks and study its effect on semantic segmentation tasks. We demonstrate that metadata as additional input to a convolutional network can improve segmentation results while being inexpensive in implementation as a nimble add-on to popular models. We hypothesize that this benefit of metadata can be attributed to facilitating multitask switching. This aspect of metadata-driven systems is explored and discussed in detail.
Generalizable Decision Boundaries: Dualistic Meta-Learning for Open Set Domain Generalization
Authors: Xiran Wang, Jian Zhang, Lei Qi, Yinghuan Shi
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Meta-Learning

Domain generalization (DG) is proposed to deal with the issue of domain shift, which occurs when statistical differences exist between source and target domains. However, most current methods do not account for a common realistic scenario where the source and target domains have different classes. To overcome this deficiency, open set domain generalization (OSDG) then emerges as a more practical setting to recognize unseen classes in unseen domains. An intuitive approach is to use multiple one-vs-all classifiers to define decision boundaries for each class and reject the outliers as unknown. However, the significant class imbalance between positive and negative samples often causes the boundaries biased towards positive ones, resulting in misclassification for known samples in the unseen target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning-based framework called dualistic MEta-learning with joint DomaIn-Class matching (MEDIC), which considers gradient matching towards inter-domain and inter-class splits simultaneously to find a generalizable boundary balanced for all tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that MEDIC not only outperforms previous methods in open set scenarios, but also maintains competitive close set generalization ability at the same time. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzwdx/MEDIC.
Diffusion Models for Image Restoration and Enhancement -- A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Xin Li, Yulin Ren, Xin Jin, Cuiling Lan, Xingrui Wang, Wenjun Zeng, Xinchao Wang, Zhibo Chen
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Model Compression, Super-Resolution

Image restoration (IR) has been an indispensable and challenging task in the low-level vision field, which strives to improve the subjective quality of images distorted by various forms of degradation. Recently, the diffusion model has achieved significant advancements in the visual generation of AIGC, thereby raising an intuitive question, "whether diffusion model can boost image restoration". To answer this, some pioneering studies attempt to integrate diffusion models into the image restoration task, resulting in superior performances than previous GAN-based methods. Despite that, a comprehensive and enlightening survey on diffusion model-based image restoration remains scarce. In this paper, we are the first to present a comprehensive review of recent diffusion model-based methods on image restoration, encompassing the learning paradigm, conditional strategy, framework design, modeling strategy, and evaluation. Concretely, we first introduce the background of the diffusion model briefly and then present two prevalent workflows that exploit diffusion models in image restoration. Subsequently, we classify and emphasize the innovative designs using diffusion models for both IR and blind/real-world IR, intending to inspire future development. To evaluate existing methods thoroughly, we summarize the commonly-used dataset, implementation details, and evaluation metrics. Additionally, we present the objective comparison for open-sourced methods across three tasks, including image super-resolution, deblurring, and inpainting. Ultimately, informed by the limitations in existing works, we propose five potential and challenging directions for the future research of diffusion model-based IR, including sampling efficiency, model compression, distortion simulation and estimation, distortion invariant learning, and framework design.
DReg-NeRF: Deep Registration for Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Yu Chen, Gim Hee Lee
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: NeRF, Novel View Synthesis, Point Cloud Registration, RTE

Although Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is popular in the computer vision community recently, registering multiple NeRFs has yet to gain much attention. Unlike the existing work, NeRF2NeRF, which is based on traditional optimization methods and needs human annotated keypoints, we propose DReg-NeRF to solve the NeRF registration problem on object-centric scenes without human intervention. After training NeRF models, our DReg-NeRF first extracts features from the occupancy grid in NeRF. Subsequently, our DReg-NeRF utilizes a transformer architecture with self-attention and cross-attention layers to learn the relations between pairwise NeRF blocks. In contrast to state-of-the-art (SOTA) point cloud registration methods, the decoupled correspondences are supervised by surface fields without any ground truth overlapping labels. We construct a novel view synthesis dataset with 1,700+ 3D objects obtained from Objaverse to train our network. When evaluated on the test set, our proposed method beats the SOTA point cloud registration methods by a large margin, with a mean $\text{RPE}=9.67^{\circ}$ and a mean $\text{RTE}=0.038$. Our code is available at https://github.com/AIBluefisher/DReg-NeRF.
Label-Free Event-based Object Recognition via Joint Learning with Image Reconstruction from Events
Authors: Hoonhee Cho, Hyeonseong Kim, Yujeong Chae, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Object, Object Recognition

Recognizing objects from sparse and noisy events becomes extremely difficult when paired images and category labels do not exist. In this paper, we study label-free event-based object recognition where category labels and paired images are not available. To this end, we propose a joint formulation of object recognition and image reconstruction in a complementary manner. Our method first reconstructs images from events and performs object recognition through Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), enabling better recognition through a rich context of images. Since the category information is essential in reconstructing images, we propose category-guided attraction loss and category-agnostic repulsion loss to bridge the textual features of predicted categories and the visual features of reconstructed images using CLIP. Moreover, we introduce a reliable data sampling strategy and local-global reconstruction consistency to boost joint learning of two tasks. To enhance the accuracy of prediction and quality of reconstruction, we also propose a prototype-based approach using unpaired images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method and its extensibility for zero-shot object recognition. Our project code is available at \url{https://github.com/Chohoonhee/Ev-LaFOR}.
Image Processing and Machine Learning for Hyperspectral Unmixing: An Overview and the HySUPP Python Package
Authors: Behnood Rasti, Alexandre Zouaoui, Julien Mairal, Jocelyn Chanussot
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperspectral Unmixing

Spectral pixels are often a mixture of the pure spectra of the materials, called endmembers, due to the low spatial resolution of hyperspectral sensors, double scattering, and intimate mixtures of materials in the scenes. Unmixing estimates the fractional abundances of the endmembers within the pixel. Depending on the prior knowledge of endmembers, linear unmixing can be divided into three main groups: supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised (blind) linear unmixing. Advances in Image processing and machine learning substantially affected unmixing. This paper provides an overview of advanced and conventional unmixing approaches. Additionally, we draw a critical comparison between advanced and conventional techniques from the three categories. We compare the performance of the unmixing techniques on three simulated and two real datasets. The experimental results reveal the advantages of different unmixing categories for different unmixing scenarios. Moreover, we provide an open-source Python-based package available at https://github.com/BehnoodRasti/HySUPP to reproduce the results.
Single Frame Semantic Segmentation Using Multi-Modal Spherical Images
Authors: Suresh Guttikonda, Jason Rambach
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, the research community has shown a lot of interest to panoramic images that offer a 360-degree directional perspective. Multiple data modalities can be fed, and complimentary characteristics can be utilized for more robust and rich scene interpretation based on semantic segmentation, to fully realize the potential. Existing research, however, mostly concentrated on pinhole RGB-X semantic segmentation. In this study, we propose a transformer-based cross-modal fusion architecture to bridge the gap between multi-modal fusion and omnidirectional scene perception. We employ distortion-aware modules to address extreme object deformations and panorama distortions that result from equirectangular representation. Additionally, we conduct cross-modal interactions for feature rectification and information exchange before merging the features in order to communicate long-range contexts for bi-modal and tri-modal feature streams. In thorough tests using combinations of four different modality types in three indoor panoramic-view datasets, our technique achieved state-of-the-art mIoU performance: 60.60% on Stanford2D3DS (RGB-HHA), 71.97% Structured3D (RGB-D-N), and 35.92% Matterport3D (RGB-D). We plan to release all codes and trained models soon.
A tailored Handwritten-Text-Recognition System for Medieval Latin
Authors: Philipp Koch, Gilary Vera Nuñez, Esteban Garces Arias, Christian Heumann, Matthias Schöffel, Alexander Häberlin, Matthias Aßenmacher
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decoder, Handwritten Text Recognition, HTR, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities aims to digitize its Medieval Latin Dictionary. This dictionary entails record cards referring to lemmas in medieval Latin, a low-resource language. A crucial step of the digitization process is the Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) of the handwritten lemmas found on these record cards. In our work, we introduce an end-to-end pipeline, tailored to the medieval Latin dictionary, for locating, extracting, and transcribing the lemmas. We employ two state-of-the-art (SOTA) image segmentation models to prepare the initial data set for the HTR task. Furthermore, we experiment with different transformer-based models and conduct a set of experiments to explore the capabilities of different combinations of vision encoders with a GPT-2 decoder. Additionally, we also apply extensive data augmentation resulting in a highly competitive model. The best-performing setup achieved a Character Error Rate (CER) of 0.015, which is even superior to the commercial Google Cloud Vision model, and shows more stable performance.
Overlap Bias Matching is Necessary for Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Pengcheng Shi, Jie Zhang, Haozhe Cheng, Junyang Wang, Yiyang Zhou, Chenlin Zhao, Jihua Zhu
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration is a fundamental problem in many domains. Practically, the overlap between point clouds to be registered may be relatively small. Most unsupervised methods lack effective initial evaluation of overlap, leading to suboptimal registration accuracy. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised network Overlap Bias Matching Network (OBMNet) for partial point cloud registration. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play Overlap Bias Matching Module (OBMM) comprising two integral components, overlap sampling module and bias prediction module. These two components are utilized to capture the distribution of overlapping regions and predict bias coefficients of point cloud common structures, respectively. Then, we integrate OBMM with the neighbor map matching module to robustly identify correspondences by precisely merging matching scores of points within the neighborhood, which addresses the ambiguities in single-point features. OBMNet can maintain efficacy even in pair-wise registration scenarios with low overlap ratios. Experimental results on extensive datasets demonstrate that our approach's performance achieves a significant improvement compared to the state-of-the-art registration approach.
Open-vocabulary Video Question Answering: A New Benchmark for Evaluating the Generalizability of Video Question Answering Models
Authors: Dohwan Ko, Ji Soo Lee, Miso Choi, Jaewon Chu, Jihwan Park, Hyunwoo J. Kim
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Question Answering, TGIF-Frame, Video Question Answering, Visu, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a challenging task that entails complex multi-modal reasoning. In contrast to multiple-choice VideoQA which aims to predict the answer given several options, the goal of open-ended VideoQA is to answer questions without restricting candidate answers. However, the majority of previous VideoQA models formulate open-ended VideoQA as a classification task to classify the video-question pairs into a fixed answer set, i.e., closed-vocabulary, which contains only frequent answers (e.g., top-1000 answers). This leads the model to be biased toward only frequent answers and fail to generalize on out-of-vocabulary answers. We hence propose a new benchmark, Open-vocabulary Video Question Answering (OVQA), to measure the generalizability of VideoQA models by considering rare and unseen answers. In addition, in order to improve the model's generalization power, we introduce a novel GNN-based soft verbalizer that enhances the prediction on rare and unseen answers by aggregating the information from their similar words. For evaluation, we introduce new baselines by modifying the existing (closed-vocabulary) open-ended VideoQA models and improve their performances by further taking into account rare and unseen answers. Our ablation studies and qualitative analyses demonstrate that our GNN-based soft verbalizer further improves the model performance, especially on rare and unseen answers. We hope that our benchmark OVQA can serve as a guide for evaluating the generalizability of VideoQA models and inspire future research. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/OVQA.
Multi-scale Target-Aware Framework for Constrained Image Splicing Detection and Localization
Authors: Yuxuan Tan, Yuanman Li, Limin Zeng, Jiaxiong Ye, Wei Wang, Xia Li
Date: 2023-08-18 00:00:00

Constrained image splicing detection and localization (CISDL) is a fundamental task of multimedia forensics, which detects splicing operation between two suspected images and localizes the spliced region on both images. Recent works regard it as a deep matching problem and have made significant progress. However, existing frameworks typically perform feature extraction and correlation matching as separate processes, which may hinder the model's ability to learn discriminative features for matching and can be susceptible to interference from ambiguous background pixels. In this work, we propose a multi-scale target-aware framework to couple feature extraction and correlation matching in a unified pipeline. In contrast to previous methods, we design a target-aware attention mechanism that jointly learns features and performs correlation matching between the probe and donor images. Our approach can effectively promote the collaborative learning of related patches, and perform mutual promotion of feature learning and correlation matching. Additionally, in order to handle scale transformations, we introduce a multi-scale projection method, which can be readily integrated into our target-aware framework that enables the attention process to be conducted between tokens containing information of varying scales. Our experiments demonstrate that our model, which uses a unified pipeline, outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmark datasets and is robust against scale transformations.