pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improving Pixel-Level Contrastive Learning by Leveraging Exogenous Depth Information
Authors: Ahmed Ben Saad, Kristina Prokopetc, Josselin Kherroubi, Axel Davy, Adrien Courtois, Gabriele Facciolo
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Depth Estimation, Representation Learning, Scene Segmentation

Self-supervised representation learning based on Contrastive Learning (CL) has been the subject of much attention in recent years. This is due to the excellent results obtained on a variety of subsequent tasks (in particular classification), without requiring a large amount of labeled samples. However, most reference CL algorithms (such as SimCLR and MoCo, but also BYOL and Barlow Twins) are not adapted to pixel-level downstream tasks. One existing solution known as PixPro proposes a pixel-level approach that is based on filtering of pairs of positive/negative image crops of the same image using the distance between the crops in the whole image. We argue that this idea can be further enhanced by incorporating semantic information provided by exogenous data as an additional selection filter, which can be used (at training time) to improve the selection of the pixel-level positive/negative samples. In this paper we will focus on the depth information, which can be obtained by using a depth estimation network or measured from available data (stereovision, parallax motion, LiDAR, etc.). Scene depth can provide meaningful cues to distinguish pixels belonging to different objects based on their depth. We show that using this exogenous information in the contrastive loss leads to improved results and that the learned representations better follow the shapes of objects. In addition, we introduce a multi-scale loss that alleviates the issue of finding the training parameters adapted to different object sizes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our ideas on the Breakout Segmentation on Borehole Images where we achieve an improvement of 1.9\% over PixPro and nearly 5\% over the supervised baseline. We further validate our technique on the indoor scene segmentation tasks with ScanNet and outdoor scenes with CityScapes ( 1.6\% and 1.1\% improvement over PixPro respectively).
Joint nnU-Net and Radiomics Approaches for Segmentation and Prognosis of Head and Neck Cancers with PET/CT images
Authors: Hui Xu, Yihao Li, Wei Zhao, Gwenolé Quellec, Lijun Lu, Mathieu Hatt
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis, Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of head and neck cancer (HNC) tumors and lymph nodes plays a crucial role in the optimization treatment strategy and prognosis analysis. This study aims to employ nnU-Net for automatic segmentation and radiomics for recurrence-free survival (RFS) prediction using pretreatment PET/CT images in multi-center HNC cohort. A multi-center HNC dataset with 883 patients (524 patients for training, 359 for testing) was provided in HECKTOR 2022. A bounding box of the extended oropharyngeal region was retrieved for each patient with fixed size of 224 x 224 x 224 $mm^{3}$. Then 3D nnU-Net architecture was adopted to automatic segmentation of primary tumor and lymph nodes synchronously.Based on predicted segmentation, ten conventional features and 346 standardized radiomics features were extracted for each patient. Three prognostic models were constructed containing conventional and radiomics features alone, and their combinations by multivariate CoxPH modelling. The statistical harmonization method, ComBat, was explored towards reducing multicenter variations. Dice score and C-index were used as evaluation metrics for segmentation and prognosis task, respectively. For segmentation task, we achieved mean dice score around 0.701 for primary tumor and lymph nodes by 3D nnU-Net. For prognostic task, conventional and radiomics models obtained the C-index of 0.658 and 0.645 in the test set, respectively, while the combined model did not improve the prognostic performance with the C-index of 0.648.
Spatio-Temporal Feedback Control of Small Target Motion Detection Visual System
Authors: Hongxin Wang, Zhiyan Zhong, Fang Lei, Xiaohua Jing, Jigen Peng, Shigang Yue
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Detection

Feedback is crucial to motion perception in animals' visual systems where its spatial and temporal dynamics are often shaped by movement patterns of surrounding environments. However, such spatio-temporal feedback has not been deeply explored in designing neural networks to detect small moving targets that cover only one or a few pixels in image while presenting extremely limited visual features. In this paper, we address small target motion detection problem by developing a visual system with spatio-temporal feedback loop, and further reveal its important roles in suppressing false positive background movement while enhancing network responses to small targets. Specifically, the proposed visual system is composed of two complementary subnetworks. The first subnetwork is designed to extract spatial and temporal motion patterns of cluttered backgrounds by neuronal ensemble coding. The second subnetwork is developed to capture small target motion information and integrate the spatio-temporal feedback signal from the first subnetwork to inhibit background false positives. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed spatio-temporal feedback visual system is more competitive than existing methods in discriminating small moving targets from complex dynamic environment.
Mixture Domain Adaptation to Improve Semantic Segmentation in Real-World Surveillance
Authors: Sébastien Piérard, Anthony Cioppa, Anaïs Halin, Renaud Vandeghen, Maxime Zanella, Benoît Macq, Saïd Mahmoudi, Marc Van Droogenbroeck
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Domain Adaptation, Semantic Segmentation

Various tasks encountered in real-world surveillance can be addressed by determining posteriors (e.g. by Bayesian inference or machine learning), based on which critical decisions must be taken. However, the surveillance domain (acquisition device, operating conditions, etc.) is often unknown, which prevents any possibility of scene-specific optimization. In this paper, we define a probabilistic framework and present a formal proof of an algorithm for the unsupervised many-to-infinity domain adaptation of posteriors. Our proposed algorithm is applicable when the probability measure associated with the target domain is a convex combination of the probability measures of the source domains. It makes use of source models and a domain discriminator model trained off-line to compute posteriors adapted on the fly to the target domain. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our algorithm for the task of semantic segmentation in real-world surveillance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/rvandeghen/MDA.
$α$ DARTS Once More: Enhancing Differentiable Architecture Search by Masked Image Modeling
Authors: Bicheng Guo, Shuxuan Guo, Miaojing Shi, Peng Chen, Shibo He, Jiming Chen, Kaicheng Yu
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) has been a mainstream direction in automatic machine learning. Since the discovery that original DARTS will inevitably converge to poor architectures, recent works alleviate this by either designing rule-based architecture selection techniques or incorporating complex regularization techniques, abandoning the simplicity of the original DARTS that selects architectures based on the largest parametric value, namely $\alpha$. Moreover, we find that all the previous attempts only rely on classification labels, hence learning only single modal information and limiting the representation power of the shared network. To this end, we propose to additionally inject semantic information by formulating a patch recovery approach. Specifically, we exploit the recent trending masked image modeling and do not abandon the guidance from the downstream tasks during the search phase. Our method surpasses all previous DARTS variants and achieves state-of-the-art results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet without complex manual-designed strategies.
Stereo Image Rain Removal via Dual-View Mutual Attention
Authors: Yanyan Wei, Zhao Zhang, ZhongQiu Zhao, Yang Zhao, Richang Hong, Yi Yang
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Disparity Estimation, Image Restoration, Rain Removal, Super-Resolution

Stereo images, containing left and right view images with disparity, are utilized in solving low-vision tasks recently, e.g., rain removal and super-resolution. Stereo image restoration methods usually obtain better performance than monocular methods by learning the disparity between dual views either implicitly or explicitly. However, existing stereo rain removal methods still cannot make full use of the complementary information between two views, and we find it is because: 1) the rain streaks have more complex distributions in directions and densities, which severely damage the complementary information and pose greater challenges; 2) the disparity estimation is not accurate enough due to the imperfect fusion mechanism for the features between two views. To overcome such limitations, we propose a new \underline{Stereo} \underline{I}mage \underline{R}ain \underline{R}emoval method (StereoIRR) via sufficient interaction between two views, which incorporates: 1) a new Dual-view Mutual Attention (DMA) mechanism which generates mutual attention maps by taking left and right views as key information for each other to facilitate cross-view feature fusion; 2) a long-range and cross-view interaction, which is constructed with basic blocks and dual-view mutual attention, can alleviate the adverse effect of rain on complementary information to help the features of stereo images to get long-range and cross-view interaction and fusion. Notably, StereoIRR outperforms other related monocular and stereo image rain removal methods on several datasets. Our codes and datasets will be released.
Let's Enhance: A Deep Learning Approach to Extreme Deblurring of Text Images
Authors: Theophil Trippe, Martin Genzel, Jan Macdonald, Maximilian März
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Deblurring, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

This work presents a novel deep-learning-based pipeline for the inverse problem of image deblurring, leveraging augmentation and pre-training with synthetic data. Our results build on our winning submission to the recent Helsinki Deblur Challenge 2021, whose goal was to explore the limits of state-of-the-art deblurring algorithms in a real-world data setting. The task of the challenge was to deblur out-of-focus images of random text, thereby in a downstream task, maximizing an optical-character-recognition-based score function. A key step of our solution is the data-driven estimation of the physical forward model describing the blur process. This enables a stream of synthetic data, generating pairs of ground-truth and blurry images on-the-fly, which is used for an extensive augmentation of the small amount of challenge data provided. The actual deblurring pipeline consists of an approximate inversion of the radial lens distortion (determined by the estimated forward model) and a U-Net architecture, which is trained end-to-end. Our algorithm was the only one passing the hardest challenge level, achieving over $70\%$ character recognition accuracy. Our findings are well in line with the paradigm of data-centric machine learning, and we demonstrate its effectiveness in the context of inverse problems. Apart from a detailed presentation of our methodology, we also analyze the importance of several design choices in a series of ablation studies. The code of our challenge submission is available under https://github.com/theophil-trippe/HDC_TUBerlin_version_1.
UnconFuse: Avatar Reconstruction from Unconstrained Images
Authors: Han Huang, Liliang Chen, Xihao Wang
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00

The report proposes an effective solution about 3D human body reconstruction from multiple unconstrained frames for ECCV 2022 WCPA Challenge: From Face, Body and Fashion to 3D Virtual avatars I (track1: Multi-View Based 3D Human Body Reconstruction). We reproduce the reconstruction method presented in MVP-Human as our baseline, and make some improvements for the particularity of this challenge. We finally achieve the score 0.93 on the official testing set, getting the 1st place on the leaderboard.
Contrastive Losses Are Natural Criteria for Unsupervised Video Summarization
Authors: Zongshang Pang, Yuta Nakashima, Mayu Otani, Hajime Nagahara
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, image-classification, Image Classification, Representation Learning, Unsupervised Video Summarization, Video Summarization

Video summarization aims to select the most informative subset of frames in a video to facilitate efficient video browsing. Unsupervised methods usually rely on heuristic training objectives such as diversity and representativeness. However, such methods need to bootstrap the online-generated summaries to compute the objectives for importance score regression. We consider such a pipeline inefficient and seek to directly quantify the frame-level importance with the help of contrastive losses in the representation learning literature. Leveraging the contrastive losses, we propose three metrics featuring a desirable key frame: local dissimilarity, global consistency, and uniqueness. With features pre-trained on the image classification task, the metrics can already yield high-quality importance scores, demonstrating competitive or better performance than past heavily-trained methods. We show that by refining the pre-trained features with a lightweight contrastively learned projection module, the frame-level importance scores can be further improved, and the model can also leverage a large number of random videos and generalize to test videos with decent performance. Code available at https://github.com/pangzss/pytorch-CTVSUM.
Pedestrian Spatio-Temporal Information Fusion For Video Anomaly Detection
Authors: Chao Hu, Liqiang Zhu
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Decoder, Video Anomaly Detection

Aiming at the problem that the current video anomaly detection cannot fully use the temporal information and ignore the diversity of normal behavior, an anomaly detection method is proposed to integrate the spatiotemporal information of pedestrians. Based on the convolutional autoencoder, the input frame is compressed and restored through the encoder and decoder. Anomaly detection is realized according to the difference between the output frame and the true value. In order to strengthen the characteristic information connection between continuous video frames, the residual temporal shift module and the residual channel attention module are introduced to improve the modeling ability of the network on temporal information and channel information, respectively. Due to the excessive generalization of convolutional neural networks, in the memory enhancement modules, the hopping connections of each codec layer are added to limit autoencoders' ability to represent abnormal frames too vigorously and improve the anomaly detection accuracy of the network. In addition, the objective function is modified by a feature discretization loss, which effectively distinguishes different normal behavior patterns. The experimental results on the CUHK Avenue and ShanghaiTech datasets show that the proposed method is superior to the current mainstream video anomaly detection methods while meeting the real-time requirements.
DGD-cGAN: A Dual Generator for Image Dewatering and Restoration
Authors: Salma Gonzalez-Sabbagh, Antonio Robles-Kelly, Shang Gao
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Enhancement

Underwater images are usually covered with a blue-greenish colour cast, making them distorted, blurry or low in contrast. This phenomenon occurs due to the light attenuation given by the scattering and absorption in the water column. In this paper, we present an image enhancement approach for dewatering which employs a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) with two generators. Our Dual Generator Dewatering cGAN (DGD-cGAN) removes the haze and colour cast induced by the water column and restores the true colours of underwater scenes whereby the effects of various attenuation and scattering phenomena that occur in underwater images are tackled by the two generators. The first generator takes at input the underwater image and predicts the dewatered scene, while the second generator learns the underwater image formation process by implementing a custom loss function based upon the transmission and the veiling light components of the image formation model. Our experiments show that DGD-cGAN consistently delivers a margin of improvement as compared with the state-of-the-art methods on several widely available datasets.
LiSnowNet: Real-time Snow Removal for LiDAR Point Cloud
Authors: Ming-Yuan Yu, Ram Vasudevan, Matthew Johnson-Roberson
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Snow Removal

LiDARs have been widely adopted to modern self-driving vehicles, providing 3D information of the scene and surrounding objects. However, adverser weather conditions still pose significant challenges to LiDARs since point clouds captured during snowfall can easily be corrupted. The resulting noisy point clouds degrade downstream tasks such as mapping. Existing works in de-noising point clouds corrupted by snow are based on nearest-neighbor search, and thus do not scale well with modern LiDARs which usually capture $100k$ or more points at 10Hz. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised de-noising algorithm, LiSnowNet, running 52$\times$ faster than the state-of-the-art methods while achieving superior performance in de-noising. Unlike previous methods, the proposed algorithm is based on a deep convolutional neural network and can be easily deployed to hardware accelerators such as GPUs. In addition, we demonstrate how to use the proposed method for mapping even with corrupted point clouds.
3d human motion generation from the text via gesture action classification and the autoregressive model
Authors: Gwantae Kim, Youngsuk Ryu, Junyeop Lee, David K. Han, Jeongmin Bae, Hanseok Ko
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition, Classification, Data Augmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Motion Generation, text-classification, Text Classification

In this paper, a deep learning-based model for 3D human motion generation from the text is proposed via gesture action classification and an autoregressive model. The model focuses on generating special gestures that express human thinking, such as waving and nodding. To achieve the goal, the proposed method predicts expression from the sentences using a text classification model based on a pretrained language model and generates gestures using the gate recurrent unit-based autoregressive model. Especially, we proposed the loss for the embedding space for restoring raw motions and generating intermediate motions well. Moreover, the novel data augmentation method and stop token are proposed to generate variable length motions. To evaluate the text classification model and 3D human motion generation model, a gesture action classification dataset and action-based gesture dataset are collected. With several experiments, the proposed method successfully generates perceptually natural and realistic 3D human motion from the text. Moreover, we verified the effectiveness of the proposed method using a public-available action recognition dataset to evaluate cross-dataset generalization performance.
Contrastive Positive Sample Propagation along the Audio-Visual Event Line
Authors: Jinxing Zhou, Dan Guo, Meng Wang
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning

Visual and audio signals often coexist in natural environments, forming audio-visual events (AVEs). Given a video, we aim to localize video segments containing an AVE and identify its category. It is pivotal to learn the discriminative features for each video segment. Unlike existing work focusing on audio-visual feature fusion, in this paper, we propose a new contrastive positive sample propagation (CPSP) method for better deep feature representation learning. The contribution of CPSP is to introduce the available full or weak label as a prior that constructs the exact positive-negative samples for contrastive learning. Specifically, the CPSP involves comprehensive contrastive constraints: pair-level positive sample propagation (PSP), segment-level and video-level positive sample activation (PSA$_S$ and PSA$_V$). Three new contrastive objectives are proposed (\emph{i.e.}, $\mathcal{L}_{\text{avpsp}}$, $\mathcal{L}_\text{spsa}$, and $\mathcal{L}_\text{vpsa}$) and introduced into both the fully and weakly supervised AVE localization. To draw a complete picture of the contrastive learning in AVE localization, we also study the self-supervised positive sample propagation (SSPSP). As a result, CPSP is more helpful to obtain the refined audio-visual features that are distinguishable from the negatives, thus benefiting the classifier prediction. Extensive experiments on the AVE and the newly collected VGGSound-AVEL100k datasets verify the effectiveness and generalization ability of our method.
Comparison between EM and FCM algorithms in skin tone extraction
Authors: Elham Ravanbakhsh, Mosab Rezaei, Ehsan Namjoo, Padideh Choobdar
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00

This study aims to investigate implementing EM and FCM algorithms for skin color extraction. The capabilities of three well-known color spaces, namely, RGB, HSV, and YCbCr for skin-tone extraction are assessed by using statistical modeling of skin tones using EM and FCM algorithms. The results show that utilizing a Gaussian mixture model for parametric modeling of skin tones using EM algorithm works well in HSV color space when all three components of the color vector are used. In spite of discarding the luminance components in YCbCr and HSV color spaces, EM algorithm provides the best results. The results of the detailed comparisons are explained in the conclusion.
The Runner-up Solution for YouTube-VIS Long Video Challenge 2022
Authors: Junfeng Wu, Yi Jiang, Qihao Liu, Xiang Bai, Song Bai
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Instance Segmentation

This technical report describes our 2nd-place solution for the ECCV 2022 YouTube-VIS Long Video Challenge. We adopt the previously proposed online video instance segmentation method IDOL for this challenge. In addition, we use pseudo labels to further help contrastive learning, so as to obtain more temporally consistent instance embedding to improve tracking performance between frames. The proposed method obtains 40.2 AP on the YouTube-VIS 2022 long video dataset and was ranked second place in this challenge. We hope our simple and effective method could benefit further research.
AVATAR submission to the Ego4D AV Transcription Challenge
Authors: Paul Hongsuck Seo, Arsha Nagrani, Cordelia Schmid
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

In this report, we describe our submission to the Ego4D AudioVisual (AV) Speech Transcription Challenge 2022. Our pipeline is based on AVATAR, a state of the art encoder-decoder model for AV-ASR that performs early fusion of spectrograms and RGB images. We describe the datasets, experimental settings and ablations. Our final method achieves a WER of 68.40 on the challenge test set, outperforming the baseline by 43.7%, and winning the challenge.