pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Effective Multiple-in-One Image Restoration: A Sequential and Prompt Learning Strategy
Authors: Xiangtao Kong, Chao Dong, Lei Zhang
Date: 2024-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration, Prompt Learning

While single task image restoration (IR) has achieved significant successes, it remains a challenging issue to train a single model which can tackle multiple IR tasks. In this work, we investigate in-depth the multiple-in-one (MiO) IR problem, which comprises seven popular IR tasks. We point out that MiO IR faces two pivotal challenges: the optimization of diverse objectives and the adaptation to multiple tasks. To tackle these challenges, we present two simple yet effective strategies. The first strategy, referred to as sequential learning, attempts to address how to optimize the diverse objectives, which guides the network to incrementally learn individual IR tasks in a sequential manner rather than mixing them together. The second strategy, i.e., prompt learning, attempts to address how to adapt to the different IR tasks, which assists the network to understand the specific task and improves the generalization ability. By evaluating on 19 test sets, we demonstrate that the sequential and prompt learning strategies can significantly enhance the MiO performance of commonly used CNN and Transformer backbones. Our experiments also reveal that the two strategies can supplement each other to learn better degradation representations and enhance the model robustness. It is expected that our proposed MiO IR formulation and strategies could facilitate the research on how to train IR models with higher generalization capabilities.
Spatiotemporally adaptive compression for scientific dataset with feature preservation -- a case study on simulation data with extreme climate events analysis
Authors: Qian Gong, Chengzhu Zhang, Xin Liang, Viktor Reshniak, Jieyang Chen, Anand Rangarajan, Sanjay Ranka, Nicolas Vidal, Lipeng Wan, Paul Ullrich, Norbert Podhorszki, Robert Jacob, Scott Klasky
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Compression

Scientific discoveries are increasingly constrained by limited storage space and I/O capacities. For time-series simulations and experiments, their data often need to be decimated over timesteps to accommodate storage and I/O limitations. In this paper, we propose a technique that addresses storage costs while improving post-analysis accuracy through spatiotemporal adaptive, error-controlled lossy compression. We investigate the trade-off between data precision and temporal output rates, revealing that reducing data precision and increasing timestep frequency lead to more accurate analysis outcomes. Additionally, we integrate spatiotemporal feature detection with data compression and demonstrate that performing adaptive error-bounded compression in higher dimensional space enables greater compression ratios, leveraging the error propagation theory of a transformation-based compressor. To evaluate our approach, we conduct experiments using the well-known E3SM climate simulation code and apply our method to compress variables used for cyclone tracking. Our results show a significant reduction in storage size while enhancing the quality of cyclone tracking analysis, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in comparison to the prevalent timestep decimation approach. Compared to three state-of-the-art lossy compressors lacking feature preservation capabilities, our adaptive compression framework improves perfectly matched cases in TC tracking by 26.4-51.3% at medium compression ratios and by 77.3-571.1% at large compression ratios, with a merely 5-11% computational overhead.
ENSTRECT: A Stage-based Approach to 2.5D Structural Damage Detection
Authors: Christian Benz, Volker Rodehorst
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

To effectively assess structural damage, it is essential to localize the instances of damage in the physical world of a civil structure. ENSTRECT is a stage-based approach designed to accomplish 2.5D structural damage detection. The method requires an image collection, the relative orientation, and a point cloud. Using these inputs, surface damages are segmented at the image level and then mapped into the point cloud space, resulting in a segmented point cloud. To enable further quantitative analyses, the segmented point cloud is transformed into measurable damage instances: cracks are extracted by contracting the clustered point cloud into a corresponding medial axis. For areal damages, such as spalling and corrosion, a procedure is proposed to compute the bounding polygon based on PCA and alpha shapes. With a localization tolerance of 4cm, ENSTRECT can achieve IoUs of over 90% for cracks, 82% for corrosion, and 41% for spalling. Detection at the instance level yields an AP50 of about 45% (cracks, spalling) and 56% (corrosion).
Analysis and Validation of Image Search Engines in Histopathology
Authors: Isaiah Lahr, Saghir Alfasly, Peyman Nejat, Jibran Khan, Luke Kottom, Vaishnavi Kumbhar, Areej Alsaafin, Abubakr Shafique, Sobhan Hemati, Ghazal Alabtah, Nneka Comfere, Dennis Murphee, Aaron Mangold, Saba Yasir, Chady Meroueh, Lisa Boardman, Vijay H. Shah, Joaquin J. Garcia, H. R. Tizhoosh
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Prognosis, whole slide images

Searching for similar images in archives of histology and histopathology images is a crucial task that may aid in patient matching for various purposes, ranging from triaging and diagnosis to prognosis and prediction. Whole slide images (WSIs) are highly detailed digital representations of tissue specimens mounted on glass slides. Matching WSI to WSI can serve as the critical method for patient matching. In this paper, we report extensive analysis and validation of four search methods bag of visual words (BoVW), Yottixel, SISH, RetCCL, and some of their potential variants. We analyze their algorithms and structures and assess their performance. For this evaluation, we utilized four internal datasets ($1269$ patients) and three public datasets ($1207$ patients), totaling more than $200,000$ patches from $38$ different classes/subtypes across five primary sites. Certain search engines, for example, BoVW, exhibit notable efficiency and speed but suffer from low accuracy. Conversely, search engines like Yottixel demonstrate efficiency and speed, providing moderately accurate results. Recent proposals, including SISH, display inefficiency and yield inconsistent outcomes, while alternatives like RetCCL prove inadequate in both accuracy and efficiency. Further research is imperative to address the dual aspects of accuracy and minimal storage requirements in histopathological image search.
Group Activity Recognition using Unreliable Tracked Pose
Authors: Haritha Thilakarathne, Aiden Nibali, Zhen He, Stuart Morgan
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, All, Group Activity Recognition, Optical Flow Estimation

Group activity recognition in video is a complex task due to the need for a model to recognise the actions of all individuals in the video and their complex interactions. Recent studies propose that optimal performance is achieved by individually tracking each person and subsequently inputting the sequence of poses or cropped images/optical flow into a model. This helps the model to recognise what actions each person is performing before they are merged to arrive at the group action class. However, all previous models are highly reliant on high quality tracking and have only been evaluated using ground truth tracking information. In practice it is almost impossible to achieve highly reliable tracking information for all individuals in a group activity video. We introduce an innovative deep learning-based group activity recognition approach called Rendered Pose based Group Activity Recognition System (RePGARS) which is designed to be tolerant of unreliable tracking and pose information. Experimental results confirm that RePGARS outperforms all existing group activity recognition algorithms tested which do not use ground truth detection and tracking information.
RustNeRF: Robust Neural Radiance Field with Low-Quality Images
Authors: Mengfei Li, Ming Lu, Xiaofang Li, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

Recent work on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) exploits multi-view 3D consistency, achieving impressive results in 3D scene modeling and high-fidelity novel-view synthesis. However, there are limitations. First, existing methods assume enough high-quality images are available for training the NeRF model, ignoring real-world image degradation. Second, previous methods struggle with ambiguity in the training set due to unmodeled inconsistencies among different views. In this work, we present RustNeRF for real-world high-quality NeRF. To improve NeRF's robustness under real-world inputs, we train a 3D-aware preprocessing network that incorporates real-world degradation modeling. We propose a novel implicit multi-view guidance to address information loss during image degradation and restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate RustNeRF's advantages over existing approaches under real-world degradation. The code will be released.
VLLaVO: Mitigating Visual Gap through LLMs
Authors: Shuhao Chen, Yulong Zhang, Weisen Jiang, Jiangang Lu, Yu Zhang
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Recent advances achieved by deep learning models rely on the independent and identically distributed assumption, hindering their applications in real-world scenarios with domain shifts. To tackle this issue, cross-domain learning aims at extracting domain-invariant knowledge to reduce the domain shift between training and testing data. However, in visual cross-domain learning, traditional methods concentrate solely on the image modality, disregarding the potential benefits of incorporating the text modality. In this work, we propose VLLaVO, combining Vision language models and Large Language models as Visual cross-dOmain learners. VLLaVO uses vision-language models to convert images into detailed textual descriptions. A large language model is then finetuned on textual descriptions of the source/target domain generated by a designed instruction template. Extensive experimental results under domain generalization and unsupervised domain adaptation settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Interpersonal Relationship Analysis with Dyadic EEG Signals via Learning Spatial-Temporal Patterns
Authors: Wenqi Ji, Fang Liu, Xinxin Du, Niqi Liu, Chao Zhou, Mingjin Yu, Guozhen Zhao, Yong-Jin Liu
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Triplet

Interpersonal relationship quality is pivotal in social and occupational contexts. Existing analysis of interpersonal relationships mostly rely on subjective self-reports, whereas objective quantification remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel social relationship analysis framework using spatio-temporal patterns derived from dyadic EEG signals, which can be applied to quantitatively measure team cooperation in corporate team building, and evaluate interpersonal dynamics between therapists and patients in psychiatric therapy. First, we constructed a dyadic-EEG dataset from 72 pairs of participants with two relationships (stranger or friend) when watching emotional videos simultaneously. Then we proposed a deep neural network on dyadic-subject EEG signals, in which we combine the dynamic graph convolutional neural network for characterizing the interpersonal relationships among the EEG channels and 1-dimension convolution for extracting the information from the time sequence. To obtain the feature vectors from two EEG recordings that well represent the relationship of two subjects, we integrate deep canonical correlation analysis and triplet loss for training the network. Experimental results show that the social relationship type (stranger or friend) between two individuals can be effectively identified through their EEG data.
MetaISP -- Exploiting Global Scene Structure for Accurate Multi-Device Color Rendition
Authors: Matheus Souza, Wolfgang Heidrich
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00

Image signal processors (ISPs) are historically grown legacy software systems for reconstructing color images from noisy raw sensor measurements. Each smartphone manufacturer has developed its ISPs with its own characteristic heuristics for improving the color rendition, for example, skin tones and other visually essential colors. The recent interest in replacing the historically grown ISP systems with deep-learned pipelines to match DSLR's image quality improves structural features in the image. However, these works ignore the superior color processing based on semantic scene analysis that distinguishes mobile phone ISPs from DSLRs. Here, we present MetaISP, a single model designed to learn how to translate between the color and local contrast characteristics of different devices. MetaISP takes the RAW image from device A as input and translates it to RGB images that inherit the appearance characteristics of devices A, B, and C. We achieve this result by employing a lightweight deep learning technique that conditions its output appearance based on the device of interest. In this approach, we leverage novel attention mechanisms inspired by cross-covariance to learn global scene semantics. Additionally, we use the metadata that typically accompanies RAW images and estimate scene illuminants when they are unavailable.
Hi-Map: Hierarchical Factorized Radiance Field for High-Fidelity Monocular Dense Mapping
Authors: Tongyan Hua, Haotian Bai, Zidong Cao, Ming Liu, DaCheng Tao, Lin Wang
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, NeRF

In this paper, we introduce Hi-Map, a novel monocular dense mapping approach based on Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). Hi-Map is exceptional in its capacity to achieve efficient and high-fidelity mapping using only posed RGB inputs. Our method eliminates the need for external depth priors derived from e.g., a depth estimation model. Our key idea is to represent the scene as a hierarchical feature grid that encodes the radiance and then factorizes it into feature planes and vectors. As such, the scene representation becomes simpler and more generalizable for fast and smooth convergence on new observations. This allows for efficient computation while alleviating noise patterns by reducing the complexity of the scene representation. Buttressed by the hierarchical factorized representation, we leverage the Sign Distance Field (SDF) as a proxy of rendering for inferring the volume density, demonstrating high mapping fidelity. Moreover, we introduce a dual-path encoding strategy to strengthen the photometric cues and further boost the mapping quality, especially for the distant and textureless regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's superiority in geometric and textural accuracy over the state-of-the-art NeRF-based monocular mapping methods.
3DMIT: 3D Multi-modal Instruction Tuning for Scene Understanding
Authors: Zeju Li, Chao Zhang, Xiaoyan Wang, Ruilong Ren, Yifan Xu, Ruifei Ma, Xiangde Liu
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

The remarkable potential of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in comprehending both vision and language information has been widely acknowledged. However, the scarcity of 3D scenes-language pairs in comparison to their 2D counterparts, coupled with the inadequacy of existing approaches in understanding of 3D scenes by LLMs, poses a significant challenge. In response, we collect and construct an extensive dataset comprising 75K instruction-response pairs tailored for 3D scenes. This dataset addresses tasks related to 3D VQA, 3D grounding, and 3D conversation. To further enhance the integration of 3D spatial information into LLMs, we introduce a novel and efficient prompt tuning paradigm, 3DMIT. This paradigm eliminates the alignment stage between 3D scenes and language and extends the instruction prompt with the 3D modality information including the entire scene and segmented objects. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method across diverse tasks in the 3D scene domain and find that our approach serves as a strategic means to enrich LLMs' comprehension of the 3D world. Our code is available at https://github.com/staymylove/3DMIT.
Efficient Bitrate Ladder Construction using Transfer Learning and Spatio-Temporal Features
Authors: Ali Falahati, Mohammad Karim Safavi, Ardavan Elahi, Farhad Pakdaman, Moncef Gabbouj
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Providing high-quality video with efficient bitrate is a main challenge in video industry. The traditional one-size-fits-all scheme for bitrate ladders is inefficient and reaching the best content-aware decision computationally impractical due to extensive encodings required. To mitigate this, we propose a bitrate and complexity efficient bitrate ladder prediction method using transfer learning and spatio-temporal features. We propose: (1) using feature maps from well-known pre-trained DNNs to predict rate-quality behavior with limited training data; and (2) improving highest quality rung efficiency by predicting minimum bitrate for top quality and using it for the top rung. The method tested on 102 video scenes demonstrates 94.1% reduction in complexity versus brute-force at 1.71% BD-Rate expense. Additionally, transfer learning was thoroughly studied through four networks and ablation studies.
DistFormer: Enhancing Local and Global Features for Monocular Per-Object Distance Estimation
Authors: Aniello Panariello, Gianluca Mancusi, Fedy Haj Ali, Angelo Porrello, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decoder, Distance regression, Object

Accurate per-object distance estimation is crucial in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, surveillance, and robotics. Existing approaches rely on two scales: local information (i.e., the bounding box proportions) or global information, which encodes the semantics of the scene as well as the spatial relations with neighboring objects. However, these approaches may struggle with long-range objects and in the presence of strong occlusions or unusual visual patterns. In this respect, our work aims to strengthen both local and global cues. Our architecture -- named DistFormer -- builds upon three major components acting jointly: i) a robust context encoder extracting fine-grained per-object representations; ii) a masked encoder-decoder module exploiting self-supervision to promote the learning of useful per-object features; iii) a global refinement module that aggregates object representations and computes a joint, spatially-consistent estimation. To evaluate the effectiveness of DistFormer, we conduct experiments on the standard KITTI dataset and the large-scale NuScenes and MOTSynth datasets. Such datasets cover various indoor/outdoor environments, changing weather conditions, appearances, and camera viewpoints. Our comprehensive analysis shows that DistFormer outperforms existing methods. Moreover, we further delve into its generalization capabilities, showing its regularization benefits in zero-shot synth-to-real transfer.
Distribution-aware Interactive Attention Network and Large-scale Cloud Recognition Benchmark on FY-4A Satellite Image
Authors: Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Weiying Xie, Kai Jiang, Mingxiang Cao, Yunsong Li
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Specificity, Weather Forecasting

Accurate cloud recognition and warning are crucial for various applications, including in-flight support, weather forecasting, and climate research. However, recent deep learning algorithms have predominantly focused on detecting cloud regions in satellite imagery, with insufficient attention to the specificity required for accurate cloud recognition. This limitation inspired us to develop the novel FY-4A-Himawari-8 (FYH) dataset, which includes nine distinct cloud categories and uses precise domain adaptation methods to align 70,419 image-label pairs in terms of projection, temporal resolution, and spatial resolution, thereby facilitating the training of supervised deep learning networks. Given the complexity and diversity of cloud formations, we have thoroughly analyzed the challenges inherent to cloud recognition tasks, examining the intricate characteristics and distribution of the data. To effectively address these challenges, we designed a Distribution-aware Interactive-Attention Network (DIAnet), which preserves pixel-level details through a high-resolution branch and a parallel multi-resolution cross-branch. We also integrated a distribution-aware loss (DAL) to mitigate the imbalance across cloud categories. An Interactive Attention Module (IAM) further enhances the robustness of feature extraction combined with spatial and channel information. Empirical evaluations on the FYH dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms other cloud recognition networks, achieving superior performance in terms of mean Intersection over Union (mIoU). The code for implementing DIAnet is available at https://github.com/icey-zhang/DIAnet.
Multimodal Informative ViT: Information Aggregation and Distribution for Hyperspectral and LiDAR Classification
Authors: Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Weiying Xie, Geng Yang, Daixun Li, Yunsong Li
Date: 2024-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Land Cover Classification

In multimodal land cover classification (MLCC), a common challenge is the redundancy in data distribution, where irrelevant information from multiple modalities can hinder the effective integration of their unique features. To tackle this, we introduce the Multimodal Informative Vit (MIVit), a system with an innovative information aggregate-distributing mechanism. This approach redefines redundancy levels and integrates performance-aware elements into the fused representation, facilitating the learning of semantics in both forward and backward directions. MIVit stands out by significantly reducing redundancy in the empirical distribution of each modality's separate and fused features. It employs oriented attention fusion (OAF) for extracting shallow local features across modalities in horizontal and vertical dimensions, and a Transformer feature extractor for extracting deep global features through long-range attention. We also propose an information aggregation constraint (IAC) based on mutual information, designed to remove redundant information and preserve complementary information within embedded features. Additionally, the information distribution flow (IDF) in MIVit enhances performance-awareness by distributing global classification information across different modalities' feature maps. This architecture also addresses missing modality challenges with lightweight independent modality classifiers, reducing the computational load typically associated with Transformers. Our results show that MIVit's bidirectional aggregate-distributing mechanism between modalities is highly effective, achieving an average overall accuracy of 95.56% across three multimodal datasets. This performance surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in MLCC. The code for MIVit is accessible at https://github.com/icey-zhang/MIViT.