pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RenderIH: A Large-scale Synthetic Dataset for 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation
Authors: Lijun Li, Linrui Tian, Xindi Zhang, Qi Wang, Bang Zhang, Mengyuan Liu, Chen Chen
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation, Diversity, Hand Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

The current interacting hand (IH) datasets are relatively simplistic in terms of background and texture, with hand joints being annotated by a machine annotator, which may result in inaccuracies, and the diversity of pose distribution is limited. However, the variability of background, pose distribution, and texture can greatly influence the generalization ability. Therefore, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset RenderIH for interacting hands with accurate and diverse pose annotations. The dataset contains 1M photo-realistic images with varied backgrounds, perspectives, and hand textures. To generate natural and diverse interacting poses, we propose a new pose optimization algorithm. Additionally, for better pose estimation accuracy, we introduce a transformer-based pose estimation network, TransHand, to leverage the correlation between interacting hands and verify the effectiveness of RenderIH in improving results. Our dataset is model-agnostic and can improve more accuracy of any hand pose estimation method in comparison to other real or synthetic datasets. Experiments have shown that pretraining on our synthetic data can significantly decrease the error from 6.76mm to 5.79mm, and our Transhand surpasses contemporary methods. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/adwardlee/RenderIH.
Chasing Day and Night: Towards Robust and Efficient All-Day Object Detection Guided by an Event Camera
Authors: Jiahang Cao, Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Jiaxu Wang, Renjing Xu, Lin Wang
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Novel Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Flow Estimation

The ability to detect objects in all lighting (i.e., normal-, over-, and under-exposed) conditions is crucial for real-world applications, such as self-driving.Traditional RGB-based detectors often fail under such varying lighting conditions.Therefore, recent works utilize novel event cameras to supplement or guide the RGB modality; however, these methods typically adopt asymmetric network structures that rely predominantly on the RGB modality, resulting in limited robustness for all-day detection. In this paper, we propose EOLO, a novel object detection framework that achieves robust and efficient all-day detection by fusing both RGB and event modalities. Our EOLO framework is built based on a lightweight spiking neural network (SNN) to efficiently leverage the asynchronous property of events. Buttressed by it, we first introduce an Event Temporal Attention (ETA) module to learn the high temporal information from events while preserving crucial edge information. Secondly, as different modalities exhibit varying levels of importance under diverse lighting conditions, we propose a novel Symmetric RGB-Event Fusion (SREF) module to effectively fuse RGB-Event features without relying on a specific modality, thus ensuring a balanced and adaptive fusion for all-day detection. In addition, to compensate for the lack of paired RGB-Event datasets for all-day training and evaluation, we propose an event synthesis approach based on the randomized optical flow that allows for directly generating the event frame from a single exposure image. We further build two new datasets, E-MSCOCO and E-VOC based on the popular benchmarks MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EOLO outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors,e.g.,RENet,by a substantial margin (+3.74% mAP50) in all lighting conditions.Our code and datasets will be available at https://vlislab22.github.io/EOLO/
LivelySpeaker: Towards Semantic-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation
Authors: YiHao Zhi, Xiaodong Cun, Xuelin Chen, Xi Shen, Wen Guo, Shaoli Huang, Shenghua Gao
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Gesture Generation, Rhythm

Gestures are non-verbal but important behaviors accompanying people's speech. While previous methods are able to generate speech rhythm-synchronized gestures, the semantic context of the speech is generally lacking in the gesticulations. Although semantic gestures do not occur very regularly in human speech, they are indeed the key for the audience to understand the speech context in a more immersive environment. Hence, we introduce LivelySpeaker, a framework that realizes semantics-aware co-speech gesture generation and offers several control handles. In particular, our method decouples the task into two stages: script-based gesture generation and audio-guided rhythm refinement. Specifically, the script-based gesture generation leverages the pre-trained CLIP text embeddings as the guidance for generating gestures that are highly semantically aligned with the script. Then, we devise a simple but effective diffusion-based gesture generation backbone simply using pure MLPs, that is conditioned on only audio signals and learns to gesticulate with realistic motions. We utilize such powerful prior to rhyme the script-guided gestures with the audio signals, notably in a zero-shot setting. Our novel two-stage generation framework also enables several applications, such as changing the gesticulation style, editing the co-speech gestures via textual prompting, and controlling the semantic awareness and rhythm alignment with guided diffusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework over competing methods. In addition, our core diffusion-based generative model also achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks. The code and model will be released to facilitate future research.
MVP: Meta Visual Prompt Tuning for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification
Authors: Junjie Zhu, Yiying Li, Chunping Qiu, Ke Yang, Naiyang Guan, Xiaodong Yi
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Domain Adaptation, Few-Shot Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Meta-Learning, Scene Classification, Visual Prompt Tuning

Vision Transformer (ViT) models have recently emerged as powerful and versatile models for various visual tasks. Recently, a work called PMF has achieved promising results in few-shot image classification by utilizing pre-trained vision transformer models. However, PMF employs full fine-tuning for learning the downstream tasks, leading to significant overfitting and storage issues, especially in the remote sensing domain. In order to tackle these issues, we turn to the recently proposed parameter-efficient tuning methods, such as VPT, which updates only the newly added prompt parameters while keeping the pre-trained backbone frozen. Inspired by VPT, we propose the Meta Visual Prompt Tuning (MVP) method. Specifically, we integrate the VPT method into the meta-learning framework and tailor it to the remote sensing domain, resulting in an efficient framework for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Scene Classification (FS-RSSC). Furthermore, we introduce a novel data augmentation strategy based on patch embedding recombination to enhance the representation and diversity of scenes for classification purposes. Experiment results on the FS-RSSC benchmark demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed MVP over existing methods in various settings, such as various-way-various-shot, various-way-one-shot, and cross-domain adaptation.
LiDAR Data Synthesis with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Authors: Kazuto Nakashima, Ryo Kurazume
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Completion, Point Cloud Generation

Generative modeling of 3D LiDAR data is an emerging task with promising applications for autonomous mobile robots, such as scalable simulation, scene manipulation, and sparse-to-dense completion of LiDAR point clouds. While existing approaches have demonstrated the feasibility of image-based LiDAR data generation using deep generative models, they still struggle with fidelity and training stability. In this work, we present R2DM, a novel generative model for LiDAR data that can generate diverse and high-fidelity 3D scene point clouds based on the image representation of range and reflectance intensity. Our method is built upon denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs), which have shown impressive results among generative model frameworks in recent years. To effectively train DDPMs in the LiDAR domain, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of data representation, loss functions, and spatial inductive biases. Leveraging our R2DM model, we also introduce a flexible LiDAR completion pipeline based on the powerful capabilities of DDPMs. We demonstrate that our method surpasses existing methods in generating tasks on the KITTI-360 and KITTI-Raw datasets, as well as in the completion task on the KITTI-360 dataset. Our project page can be found at https://kazuto1011.github.io/r2dm.
Convex Latent-Optimized Adversarial Regularizers for Imaging Inverse Problems
Authors: Huayu Wang, Chen Luo, Taofeng Xie, Qiyu Jin, Guoqing Chen, Zhuo-Xu Cui, Dong Liang
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI Reconstruction

Recently, data-driven techniques have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in addressing challenges related to MR imaging inverse problems. However, these methods still exhibit certain limitations in terms of interpretability and robustness. In response, we introduce Convex Latent-Optimized Adversarial Regularizers (CLEAR), a novel and interpretable data-driven paradigm. CLEAR represents a fusion of deep learning (DL) and variational regularization. Specifically, we employ a latent optimization technique to adversarially train an input convex neural network, and its set of minima can fully represent the real data manifold. We utilize it as a convex regularizer to formulate a CLEAR-informed variational regularization model that guides the solution of the imaging inverse problem on the real data manifold. Leveraging its inherent convexity, we have established the convergence of the projected subgradient descent algorithm for the CLEAR-informed regularization model. This convergence guarantees the attainment of a unique solution to the imaging inverse problem, subject to certain assumptions. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the robustness of our CLEAR-informed model, explicitly showcasing its capacity to achieve stable reconstruction even in the presence of measurement interference. Finally, we illustrate the superiority of our approach using MRI reconstruction as an example. Our method consistently outperforms conventional data-driven techniques and traditional regularization approaches, excelling in both reconstruction quality and robustness.
LiteTrack: Layer Pruning with Asynchronous Feature Extraction for Lightweight and Efficient Visual Tracking
Authors: Qingmao Wei, Bi Zeng, Jianqi Liu, Li He, Guotian Zeng
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Visual Tracking

The recent advancements in transformer-based visual trackers have led to significant progress, attributed to their strong modeling capabilities. However, as performance improves, running latency correspondingly increases, presenting a challenge for real-time robotics applications, especially on edge devices with computational constraints. In response to this, we introduce LiteTrack, an efficient transformer-based tracking model optimized for high-speed operations across various devices. It achieves a more favorable trade-off between accuracy and efficiency than the other lightweight trackers. The main innovations of LiteTrack encompass: 1) asynchronous feature extraction and interaction between the template and search region for better feature fushion and cutting redundant computation, and 2) pruning encoder layers from a heavy tracker to refine the balnace between performance and speed. As an example, our fastest variant, LiteTrack-B4, achieves 65.2% AO on the GOT-10k benchmark, surpassing all preceding efficient trackers, while running over 100 fps with ONNX on the Jetson Orin NX edge device. Moreover, our LiteTrack-B9 reaches competitive 72.2% AO on GOT-10k and 82.4% AUC on TrackingNet, and operates at 171 fps on an NVIDIA 2080Ti GPU. The code and demo materials will be available at https://github.com/TsingWei/LiteTrack.
Image-level supervision and self-training for transformer-based cross-modality tumor segmentation
Authors: Malo de Boisredon, Eugene Vorontsov, William Trung Le, Samuel Kadoury
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Image Segmentation, Image-to-Image Translation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Translation, Tumor Segmentation

Deep neural networks are commonly used for automated medical image segmentation, but models will frequently struggle to generalize well across different imaging modalities. This issue is particularly problematic due to the limited availability of annotated data, making it difficult to deploy these models on a larger scale. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new semi-supervised training strategy called MoDATTS. Our approach is designed for accurate cross-modality 3D tumor segmentation on unpaired bi-modal datasets. An image-to-image translation strategy between imaging modalities is used to produce annotated pseudo-target volumes and improve generalization to the unannotated target modality. We also use powerful vision transformer architectures and introduce an iterative self-training procedure to further close the domain gap between modalities. MoDATTS additionally allows the possibility to extend the training to unannotated target data by exploiting image-level labels with an unsupervised objective that encourages the model to perform 3D diseased-to-healthy translation by disentangling tumors from the background. The proposed model achieves superior performance compared to other methods from participating teams in the CrossMoDA 2022 challenge, as evidenced by its reported top Dice score of 0.87+/-0.04 for the VS segmentation. MoDATTS also yields consistent improvements in Dice scores over baselines on a cross-modality brain tumor segmentation task composed of four different contrasts from the BraTS 2020 challenge dataset, where 95% of a target supervised model performance is reached. We report that 99% and 100% of this maximum performance can be attained if 20% and 50% of the target data is additionally annotated, which further demonstrates that MoDATTS can be leveraged to reduce the annotation burden.
CryoAlign: feature-based method for global and local 3D alignment of EM density maps
Authors: Bintao He, Fa Zhang, Chenjie Feng, Jianyi Yang, Xin Gao, Renmin Han
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00

Advances on cryo-electron imaging technologies have led to a rapidly increasing number of density maps. Alignment and comparison of density maps play a crucial role in interpreting structural information, such as conformational heterogeneity analysis using global alignment and atomic model assembly through local alignment. Here, we propose a fast and accurate global and local cryo-electron microscopy density map alignment method CryoAlign, which leverages local density feature descriptors to capture spatial structure similarities. CryoAlign is the first feature-based EM map alignment tool, in which the employment of feature-based architecture enables the rapid establishment of point pair correspondences and robust estimation of alignment parameters. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of CryoAlign over the existing methods in both alignment accuracy and speed.
All-optical image denoising using a diffractive visual processor
Authors: Cagatay Isil, Tianyi Gan, F. Onuralp Ardic, Koray Mentesoglu, Jagrit Digani, Huseyin Karaca, Hanlong Chen, Jingxi Li, Deniz Mengu, Mona Jarrahi, Kaan Akşit, Aydogan Ozcan
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Denoising, Image Denoising

Image denoising, one of the essential inverse problems, targets to remove noise/artifacts from input images. In general, digital image denoising algorithms, executed on computers, present latency due to several iterations implemented in, e.g., graphics processing units (GPUs). While deep learning-enabled methods can operate non-iteratively, they also introduce latency and impose a significant computational burden, leading to increased power consumption. Here, we introduce an analog diffractive image denoiser to all-optically and non-iteratively clean various forms of noise and artifacts from input images - implemented at the speed of light propagation within a thin diffractive visual processor. This all-optical image denoiser comprises passive transmissive layers optimized using deep learning to physically scatter the optical modes that represent various noise features, causing them to miss the output image Field-of-View (FoV) while retaining the object features of interest. Our results show that these diffractive denoisers can efficiently remove salt and pepper noise and image rendering-related spatial artifacts from input phase or intensity images while achieving an output power efficiency of ~30-40%. We experimentally demonstrated the effectiveness of this analog denoiser architecture using a 3D-printed diffractive visual processor operating at the terahertz spectrum. Owing to their speed, power-efficiency, and minimal computational overhead, all-optical diffractive denoisers can be transformative for various image display and projection systems, including, e.g., holographic displays.
Neural Gradient Learning and Optimization for Oriented Point Normal Estimation
Authors: Qing Li, Huifang Feng, Kanle Shi, Yi Fang, Yu-Shen Liu, Zhizhong Han
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00

We propose Neural Gradient Learning (NGL), a deep learning approach to learn gradient vectors with consistent orientation from 3D point clouds for normal estimation. It has excellent gradient approximation properties for the underlying geometry of the data. We utilize a simple neural network to parameterize the objective function to produce gradients at points using a global implicit representation. However, the derived gradients usually drift away from the ground-truth oriented normals due to the lack of local detail descriptions. Therefore, we introduce Gradient Vector Optimization (GVO) to learn an angular distance field based on local plane geometry to refine the coarse gradient vectors. Finally, we formulate our method with a two-phase pipeline of coarse estimation followed by refinement. Moreover, we integrate two weighting functions, i.e., anisotropic kernel and inlier score, into the optimization to improve the robust and detail-preserving performance. Our method efficiently conducts global gradient approximation while achieving better accuracy and generalization ability of local feature description. This leads to a state-of-the-art normal estimator that is robust to noise, outliers and point density variations. Extensive evaluations show that our method outperforms previous works in both unoriented and oriented normal estimation on widely used benchmarks. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/LeoQLi/NGLO.
Differentiable SLAM Helps Deep Learning-based LiDAR Perception Tasks
Authors: Prashant Kumar, Dheeraj Vattikonda, Vedang Bhupesh Shenvi Nadkarni, Erqun Dong, Sabyasachi Sahoo
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We investigate a new paradigm that uses differentiable SLAM architectures in a self-supervised manner to train end-to-end deep learning models in various LiDAR based applications. To the best of our knowledge there does not exist any work that leverages SLAM as a training signal for deep learning based models. We explore new ways to improve the efficiency, robustness, and adaptability of LiDAR systems with deep learning techniques. We focus on the potential benefits of differentiable SLAM architectures for improving performance of deep learning tasks such as classification, regression as well as SLAM. Our experimental results demonstrate a non-trivial increase in the performance of two deep learning applications - Ground Level Estimation and Dynamic to Static LiDAR Translation, when used with differentiable SLAM architectures. Overall, our findings provide important insights that enhance the performance of LiDAR based navigation systems. We demonstrate that this new paradigm of using SLAM Loss signal while training LiDAR based models can be easily adopted by the community.
Efficient Pyramid Channel Attention Network for Pathological Myopia Recognition
Authors: Xiaoqing Zhang, Jilu Zhao, Yan Li, Hao Wu, Xiangtian Zhou, Jiang Liu
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00

Pathological myopia (PM) is the leading ocular disease for impaired vision worldwide. Clinically, the characteristic of pathology distribution in PM is global-local on the fundus image, which plays a significant role in assisting clinicians in diagnosing PM. However, most existing deep neural networks focused on designing complex architectures but rarely explored the pathology distribution prior of PM. To tackle this issue, we propose an efficient pyramid channel attention (EPCA) module, which fully leverages the potential of the clinical pathology prior of PM with pyramid pooling and multi-scale context fusion. Then, we construct EPCA-Net for automatic PM recognition based on fundus images by stacking a sequence of EPCA modules. Moreover, motivated by the recent pretraining-and-finetuning paradigm, we attempt to adapt pre-trained natural image models for PM recognition by freezing them and treating the EPCA and other attention modules as adapters. In addition, we construct a PM recognition benchmark termed PM-fundus by collecting fundus images of PM from publicly available datasets. The comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our EPCA-Net over state-of-the-art methods in the PM recognition task. The results also show that our method based on the pretraining-and-finetuning paradigm achieves competitive performance through comparisons to part of previous methods based on traditional fine-tuning paradigm with fewer tunable parameters, which has the potential to leverage more natural image foundation models to address the PM recognition task in limited medical data regime.
CLIPUNetr: Assisting Human-robot Interface for Uncalibrated Visual Servoing Control with CLIP-driven Referring Expression Segmentation
Authors: Chen Jiang, Yuchen Yang, Martin Jagersand
Date: 2023-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Referring Expression, Referring Expression Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The classical human-robot interface in uncalibrated image-based visual servoing (UIBVS) relies on either human annotations or semantic segmentation with categorical labels. Both methods fail to match natural human communication and convey rich semantics in manipulation tasks as effectively as natural language expressions. In this paper, we tackle this problem by using referring expression segmentation, which is a prompt-based approach, to provide more in-depth information for robot perception. To generate high-quality segmentation predictions from referring expressions, we propose CLIPUNetr - a new CLIP-driven referring expression segmentation network. CLIPUNetr leverages CLIP's strong vision-language representations to segment regions from referring expressions, while utilizing its ``U-shaped'' encoder-decoder architecture to generate predictions with sharper boundaries and finer structures. Furthermore, we propose a new pipeline to integrate CLIPUNetr into UIBVS and apply it to control robots in real-world environments. In experiments, our method improves boundary and structure measurements by an average of 120% and can successfully assist real-world UIBVS control in an unstructured manipulation environment.