pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Increasing Melanoma Diagnostic Confidence: Forcing the Convolutional Network to Learn from the Lesion
Authors: Norsang Lama, R. Joe Stanley, Anand Nambisan, Akanksha Maurya, Jason Hagerty, William V. Stoecker
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Deep learning implemented with convolutional network architectures can exceed specialists' diagnostic accuracy. However, whole-image deep learning trained on a given dataset may not generalize to other datasets. The problem arises because extra-lesional features - ruler marks, ink marks, and other melanoma correlates - may serve as information leaks. These extra-lesional features, discoverable by heat maps, degrade melanoma diagnostic performance and cause techniques learned on one data set to fail to generalize. We propose a novel technique to improve melanoma recognition by an EfficientNet model. The model trains the network to detect the lesion and learn features from the detected lesion. A generalizable elliptical segmentation model for lesions was developed, with an ellipse enclosing a lesion and the ellipse enclosed by an extended rectangle (bounding box). The minimal bounding box was extended by 20% to allow some background around the lesion. The publicly available International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) 2020 skin lesion image dataset was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our test results show that the proposed method improved diagnostic accuracy by increasing the mean area under receiver operating characteristic curve (mean AUC) score from 0.9 to 0.922. Additionally, correctly diagnosed scores are also improved, providing better separation of scores, thereby increasing melanoma diagnostic confidence. The proposed lesion-focused convolutional technique warrants further study.
Learning Higher-order Object Interactions for Keypoint-based Video Understanding
Authors: Yi Huang, Asim Kadav, Farley Lai, Deep Patel, Hans Peter Graf
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Action Recognition, Object, Video Understanding

Action recognition is an important problem that requires identifying actions in video by learning complex interactions across scene actors and objects. However, modern deep-learning based networks often require significant computation, and may capture scene context using various modalities that further increases compute costs. Efficient methods such as those used for AR/VR often only use human-keypoint information but suffer from a loss of scene context that hurts accuracy. In this paper, we describe an action-localization method, KeyNet, that uses only the keypoint data for tracking and action recognition. Specifically, KeyNet introduces the use of object based keypoint information to capture context in the scene. Our method illustrates how to build a structured intermediate representation that allows modeling higher-order interactions in the scene from object and human keypoints without using any RGB information. We find that KeyNet is able to track and classify human actions at just 5 FPS. More importantly, we demonstrate that object keypoints can be modeled to recover any loss in context from using keypoint information over AVA action and Kinetics datasets.
NightHazeFormer: Single Nighttime Haze Removal Using Prior Query Transformer
Authors: Yun Liu, Zhongsheng Yan, Sixiang Chen, Tian Ye, Wenqi Ren, ErKang Chen
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Dehazing

Nighttime image dehazing is a challenging task due to the presence of multiple types of adverse degrading effects including glow, haze, blurry, noise, color distortion, and so on. However, most previous studies mainly focus on daytime image dehazing or partial degradations presented in nighttime hazy scenes, which may lead to unsatisfactory restoration results. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end transformer-based framework for nighttime haze removal, called NightHazeFormer. Our proposed approach consists of two stages: supervised pre-training and semi-supervised fine-tuning. During the pre-training stage, we introduce two powerful priors into the transformer decoder to generate the non-learnable prior queries, which guide the model to extract specific degradations. For the fine-tuning, we combine the generated pseudo ground truths with input real-world nighttime hazy images as paired images and feed into the synthetic domain to fine-tune the pre-trained model. This semi-supervised fine-tuning paradigm helps improve the generalization to real domain. In addition, we also propose a large-scale synthetic dataset called UNREAL-NH, to simulate the real-world nighttime haze scenarios comprehensively. Extensive experiments on several synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our NightHazeFormer over state-of-the-art nighttime haze removal methods in terms of both visually and quantitatively.
Learning Correspondence Uncertainty via Differentiable Nonlinear Least Squares
Authors: Dominik Muhle, Lukas Koestler, Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Daniel Cremers
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Camera Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

We propose a differentiable nonlinear least squares framework to account for uncertainty in relative pose estimation from feature correspondences. Specifically, we introduce a symmetric version of the probabilistic normal epipolar constraint, and an approach to estimate the covariance of feature positions by differentiating through the camera pose estimation procedure. We evaluate our approach on synthetic, as well as the KITTI and EuRoC real-world datasets. On the synthetic dataset, we confirm that our learned covariances accurately approximate the true noise distribution. In real world experiments, we find that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art non-probabilistic and probabilistic approaches, regardless of the feature extraction algorithm of choice.
SCTracker: Multi-object tracking with shape and confidence constraints
Authors: Huan Mao, Yulin Chen, ZongTan Li, Feng Chen, Pingping Chen
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

Detection-based tracking is one of the main methods of multi-object tracking. It can obtain good tracking results when using excellent detectors but it may associate wrong targets when facing overlapping and low-confidence detections. To address this issue, this paper proposes a multi-object tracker based on shape constraint and confidence named SCTracker. In the data association stage, an Intersection of Union distance with shape constraints is applied to calculate the cost matrix between tracks and detections, which can effectively avoid the track tracking to the wrong target with the similar position but inconsistent shape, so as to improve the accuracy of data association. Additionally, the Kalman Filter based on the detection confidence is used to update the motion state to improve the tracking performance when the detection has low confidence. Experimental results on MOT 17 dataset show that the proposed method can effectively improve the tracking performance of multi-object tracking.
Light-VQA: A Multi-Dimensional Quality Assessment Model for Low-Light Video Enhancement
Authors: Yunlong Dong, Xiaohong Liu, Yixuan Gao, Xunchu Zhou, Tao Tan, Guangtao Zhai
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Enhancement, Video Quality Assessment, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Recently, Users Generated Content (UGC) videos becomes ubiquitous in our daily lives. However, due to the limitations of photographic equipments and techniques, UGC videos often contain various degradations, in which one of the most visually unfavorable effects is the underexposure. Therefore, corresponding video enhancement algorithms such as Low-Light Video Enhancement (LLVE) have been proposed to deal with the specific degradation. However, different from video enhancement algorithms, almost all existing Video Quality Assessment (VQA) models are built generally rather than specifically, which measure the quality of a video from a comprehensive perspective. To the best of our knowledge, there is no VQA model specially designed for videos enhanced by LLVE algorithms. To this end, we first construct a Low-Light Video Enhancement Quality Assessment (LLVE-QA) dataset in which 254 original low-light videos are collected and then enhanced by leveraging 8 LLVE algorithms to obtain 2,060 videos in total. Moreover, we propose a quality assessment model specialized in LLVE, named Light-VQA. More concretely, since the brightness and noise have the most impact on low-light enhanced VQA, we handcraft corresponding features and integrate them with deep-learning-based semantic features as the overall spatial information. As for temporal information, in addition to deep-learning-based motion features, we also investigate the handcrafted brightness consistency among video frames, and the overall temporal information is their concatenation. Subsequently, spatial and temporal information is fused to obtain the quality-aware representation of a video. Extensive experimental results show that our Light-VQA achieves the best performance against the current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) on LLVE-QA and public dataset. Dataset and Codes can be found at https://github.com/wenzhouyidu/Light-VQA.
Content-Adaptive Downsampling in Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Robin Hesse, Simone Schaub-Meyer, Stefan Roth
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00

Many convolutional neural networks (CNNs) rely on progressive downsampling of their feature maps to increase the network's receptive field and decrease computational cost. However, this comes at the price of losing granularity in the feature maps, limiting the ability to correctly understand images or recover fine detail in dense prediction tasks. To address this, common practice is to replace the last few downsampling operations in a CNN with dilated convolutions, allowing to retain the feature map resolution without reducing the receptive field, albeit increasing the computational cost. This allows to trade off predictive performance against cost, depending on the output feature resolution. By either regularly downsampling or not downsampling the entire feature map, existing work implicitly treats all regions of the input image and subsequent feature maps as equally important, which generally does not hold. We propose an adaptive downsampling scheme that generalizes the above idea by allowing to process informative regions at a higher resolution than less informative ones. In a variety of experiments, we demonstrate the versatility of our adaptive downsampling strategy and empirically show that it improves the cost-accuracy trade-off of various established CNNs.
Multi-Level Global Context Cross Consistency Model for Semi-Supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation with Diffusion Model
Authors: Fenghe Tang, Jianrui Ding, Lingtao Wang, Min Xian, Chunping Ning
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, model, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Medical image segmentation is a critical step in computer-aided diagnosis, and convolutional neural networks are popular segmentation networks nowadays. However, the inherent local operation characteristics make it difficult to focus on the global contextual information of lesions with different positions, shapes, and sizes. Semi-supervised learning can be used to learn from both labeled and unlabeled samples, alleviating the burden of manual labeling. However, obtaining a large number of unlabeled images in medical scenarios remains challenging. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-level Global Context Cross-consistency (MGCC) framework that uses images generated by a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) as unlabeled images for semi-supervised learning. The framework involves of two stages. In the first stage, a LDM is used to generate synthetic medical images, which reduces the workload of data annotation and addresses privacy concerns associated with collecting medical data. In the second stage, varying levels of global context noise perturbation are added to the input of the auxiliary decoder, and output consistency is maintained between decoders to improve the representation ability. Experiments conducted on open-source breast ultrasound and private thyroid ultrasound datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in bridging the probability distribution and the semantic representation of the medical image. Our approach enables the effective transfer of probability distribution knowledge to the segmentation network, resulting in improved segmentation accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/FengheTan9/Multi-Level-Global-Context-Cross-Consistency.
Leaf Only SAM: A Segment Anything Pipeline for Zero-Shot Automated Leaf Segmentation
Authors: Dominic Williams, Fraser MacFarlane, Avril Britten
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Plant Phenotyping, Semantic Segmentation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a new foundation model that can be used as a zero-shot object segmentation method with the use of either guide prompts such as bounding boxes, polygons, or points. Alternatively, additional post processing steps can be used to identify objects of interest after segmenting everything in an image. Here we present a method using segment anything together with a series of post processing steps to segment potato leaves, called Leaf Only SAM. The advantage of this proposed method is that it does not require any training data to produce its results so has many applications across the field of plant phenotyping where there is limited high quality annotated data available. We compare the performance of Leaf Only SAM to a Mask R-CNN model which has been fine-tuned on our small novel potato leaf dataset. On the evaluation dataset, Leaf Only SAM finds an average recall of 63.2 and an average precision of 60.3, compared to recall of 78.7 and precision of 74.7 for Mask R-CNN. Leaf Only SAM does not perform better than the fine-tuned Mask R-CNN model on our data, but the SAM based model does not require any extra training or annotation of our new dataset. This shows there is potential to use SAM as a zero-shot classifier with the addition of post processing steps.
A Novel Strategy for Improving Robustness in Computer Vision Manufacturing Defect Detection
Authors: Ahmad Mohamad Mezher, Andrew E. Marble
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Defect Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Visual quality inspection in high performance manufacturing can benefit from automation, due to cost savings and improved rigor. Deep learning techniques are the current state of the art for generic computer vision tasks like classification and object detection. Manufacturing data can pose a challenge for deep learning because data is highly repetitive and there are few images of defects or deviations to learn from. Deep learning models trained with such data can be fragile and sensitive to context, and can under-detect new defects not found in the training data. In this work, we explore training defect detection models to learn specific defects out of context, so that they are more likely to be detected in new situations. We demonstrate how models trained on diverse images containing a common defect type can pick defects out in new circumstances. Such generic models could be more robust to new defects not found data collected for training, and can reduce data collection impediments to implementing visual inspection on production lines. Additionally, we demonstrate that object detection models trained to predict a label and bounding box outperform classifiers that predict a label only on held out test data typical of manufacturing inspection tasks. Finally, we studied the factors that affect generalization in order to train models that work under a wider range of conditions.
EXPRESSNET: An Explainable Residual Slim Network for Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection
Authors: Anuj Rai, Somnath Dey
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Presentation attack is a challenging issue that persists in the security of automatic fingerprint recognition systems. This paper proposes a novel explainable residual slim network that detects the presentation attack by representing the visual features in the input fingerprint sample. The encoder-decoder of this network along with the channel attention block converts the input sample into its heatmap representation while the modified residual convolutional neural network classifier discriminates between live and spoof fingerprints. The entire architecture of the heatmap generator block and modified ResNet classifier works together in an end-to-end manner. The performance of the proposed model is validated on benchmark liveness detection competition databases i.e. Livdet 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019 and the classification accuracy of 96.86\%, 99.84\%, 96.45\%, 96.07\%, 96.27\% are achieved on them, respectively. The performance of the proposed model is compared with the state-of-the-art techniques, and the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in benchmark protocols of presentation attack detection in terms of classification accuracy.
Multi-task convolutional neural network for image aesthetic assessment
Authors: Derya Soydaner, Johan Wagemans
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

As people's aesthetic preferences for images are far from understood, image aesthetic assessment is a challenging artificial intelligence task. The range of factors underlying this task is almost unlimited, but we know that some aesthetic attributes affect those preferences. In this study, we present a multi-task convolutional neural network that takes into account these attributes. The proposed neural network jointly learns the attributes along with the overall aesthetic scores of images. This multi-task learning framework allows for effective generalization through the utilization of shared representations. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in predicting overall aesthetic scores for images in one benchmark of image aesthetics. We achieve near-human performance in terms of overall aesthetic scores when considering the Spearman's rank correlations. Moreover, our model pioneers the application of multi-tasking in another benchmark, serving as a new baseline for future research. Notably, our approach achieves this performance while using fewer parameters compared to existing multi-task neural networks in the literature, and consequently makes our method more efficient in terms of computational complexity.
Blind Image Quality Assessment via Transformer Predicted Error Map and Perceptual Quality Token
Authors: Jinsong Shi, Pan Gao, Aljosa Smolic
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Image quality assessment is a fundamental problem in the field of image processing, and due to the lack of reference images in most practical scenarios, no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), has gained increasing attention recently. With the development of deep learning technology, many deep neural network-based NR-IQA methods have been developed, which try to learn the image quality based on the understanding of database information. Currently, Transformer has achieved remarkable progress in various vision tasks. Since the characteristics of the attention mechanism in Transformer fit the global perceptual impact of artifacts perceived by a human, Transformer is thus well suited for image quality assessment tasks. In this paper, we propose a Transformer based NR-IQA model using a predicted objective error map and perceptual quality token. Specifically, we firstly generate the predicted error map by pre-training one model consisting of a Transformer encoder and decoder, in which the objective difference between the distorted and the reference images is used as supervision. Then, we freeze the parameters of the pre-trained model and design another branch using the vision Transformer to extract the perceptual quality token for feature fusion with the predicted error map. Finally, the fused features are regressed to the final image quality score. Extensive experiments have shown that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in both authentic and synthetic image databases. Moreover, the attentional map extracted by the perceptual quality token also does conform to the characteristics of the human visual system.
Improved Type III solar radio burst detection using congruent deep learning models
Authors: Jeremiah Scully, Ronan Flynn, Peter Gallagher, Eoin Carley, Mark Daly
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Generative Adversarial Network, object-detection, Object Detection

Solar flares are energetic events in the solar atmosphere that are often linked with solar radio bursts (SRBs). SRBs are observed at metric to decametric wavelengths and are classified into five spectral classes (Type I--V) based on their signature in dynamic spectra. The automatic detection and classification of SRBs is a challenge due to their heterogeneous form. Near-realtime detection and classification of SRBs has become a necessity in recent years due to large data rates generated by advanced radio telescopes such as the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR). In this study, we implement congruent deep learning models to automatically detect and classify Type III SRBs. We generated simulated Type III SRBs, which were comparable to Type IIIs seen in real observations, using a deep learning method known as Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). This simulated data was combined with observations from LOFAR to produce a training set that was used to train an object detection model known as YOLOv2 (You Only Look Once). Using this congruent deep learning model system, we can accurately detect Type III SRBs at a mean Average Precision (mAP) value of 77.71%.
Releasing Inequality Phenomena in $L_{\infty}$-Adversarial Training via Input Gradient Distillation
Authors: Junxi Chen, Junhao Dong, Xiaohua Xie
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense, Adversarial Robustness

Since adversarial examples appeared and showed the catastrophic degradation they brought to DNN, many adversarial defense methods have been devised, among which adversarial training is considered the most effective. However, a recent work showed the inequality phenomena in $l_{\infty}$-adversarial training and revealed that the $l_{\infty}$-adversarially trained model is vulnerable when a few important pixels are perturbed by i.i.d. noise or occluded. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method called Input Gradient Distillation (IGD) to release the inequality phenomena in $l_{\infty}$-adversarial training. Experiments show that while preserving the model's adversarial robustness, compared to PGDAT, IGD decreases the $l_{\infty}$-adversarially trained model's error rate to inductive noise and inductive occlusion by up to 60\% and 16.53\%, and to noisy images in Imagenet-C by up to 21.11\%. Moreover, we formally explain why the equality of the model's saliency map can improve such robustness.