pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Synthetic Data for the Mitigation of Demographic Biases in Face Recognition
Authors: Pietro Melzi, Christian Rathgeb, Ruben Tolosana, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Aythami Morales, Dominik Lawatsch, Florian Domin, Maxim Schaubert
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Fairness

This study investigates the possibility of mitigating the demographic biases that affect face recognition technologies through the use of synthetic data. Demographic biases have the potential to impact individuals from specific demographic groups, and can be identified by observing disparate performance of face recognition systems across demographic groups. They primarily arise from the unequal representations of demographic groups in the training data. In recent times, synthetic data have emerged as a solution to some problems that affect face recognition systems. In particular, during the generation process it is possible to specify the desired demographic and facial attributes of images, in order to control the demographic distribution of the synthesized dataset, and fairly represent the different demographic groups. We propose to fine-tune with synthetic data existing face recognition systems that present some demographic biases. We use synthetic datasets generated with GANDiffFace, a novel framework able to synthesize datasets for face recognition with controllable demographic distribution and realistic intra-class variations. We consider multiple datasets representing different demographic groups for training and evaluation. Also, we fine-tune different face recognition systems, and evaluate their demographic fairness with different metrics. Our results support the proposed approach and the use of synthetic data to mitigate demographic biases in face recognition.
Scaled 360 layouts: Revisiting non-central panoramas
Authors: Bruno Berenguel-Baeta, Jesus Bermudez-Cameo, Jose J. Guerrero
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00

From a non-central panorama, 3D lines can be recovered by geometric reasoning. However, their sensitivity to noise and the complex geometric modeling required has led these panoramas being very little investigated. In this work we present a novel approach for 3D layout recovery of indoor environments using single non-central panoramas. We obtain the boundaries of the structural lines of the room from a non-central panorama using deep learning and exploit the properties of non-central projection systems in a new geometrical processing to recover the scaled layout. We solve the problem for Manhattan environments, handling occlusions, and also for Atlanta environments in an unified method. The experiments performed improve the state-of-the-art methods for 3D layout recovery from a single panorama. Our approach is the first work using deep learning with non-central panoramas and recovering the scale of single panorama layouts.
3D Vertebrae Measurements: Assessing Vertebral Dimensions in Human Spine Mesh Models Using Local Anatomical Vertebral Axes
Authors: Ivanna Kramer, Vinzent Rittel, Lara Blomenkamp, Sabine Bauer, Dietrich Paulus
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00

Vertebral morphological measurements are important across various disciplines, including spinal biomechanics and clinical applications, pre- and post-operatively. These measurements also play a crucial role in anthropological longitudinal studies, where spinal metrics are repeatedly documented over extended periods. Traditionally, such measurements have been manually conducted, a process that is time-consuming. In this study, we introduce a novel, fully automated method for measuring vertebral morphology using 3D meshes of lumbar and thoracic spine models.Our experimental results demonstrate the method's capability to accurately measure low-resolution patient-specific vertebral meshes with mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.09 mm and those derived from artificially created lumbar spines, where the average MAE value was 0.7 mm. Our qualitative analysis indicates that measurements obtained using our method on 3D spine models can be accurately reprojected back onto the original medical images if these images are available.
Visual Gyroscope: Combination of Deep Learning Features and Direct Alignment for Panoramic Stabilization
Authors: Bruno Berenguel-Baeta, Antoine N. Andre, Guillaume Caron, Jesus Bermudez-Cameo, Jose J. Guerrero
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00

In this article we present a visual gyroscope based on equirectangular panoramas. We propose a new pipeline where we take advantage of combining three different methods to obtain a robust and accurate estimation of the attitude of the camera. We quantitatively and qualitatively validate our method on two image sequences taken with a $360^\circ$ dual-fisheye camera mounted on different aerial vehicles.
GaMeS: Mesh-Based Adapting and Modification of Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Joanna Waczyńska, Piotr Borycki, Sławomir Tadeja, Jacek Tabor, Przemysław Spurek
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00

Gaussian Splatting (GS) is a novel, state-of-the-art technique for rendering points in a 3D scene by approximating their contribution to image pixels through Gaussian distributions, warranting fast training and real-time rendering. The main drawback of GS is the absence of a well-defined approach for its conditioning due to the necessity of conditioning several hundred thousand Gaussian components. To solve this, we introduce the Gaussian Mesh Splatting (GaMeS) model, which allows modification of Gaussian components in a similar way as meshes. We parameterize each Gaussian component by the vertices of the mesh face. Furthermore, our model needs mesh initialization on input or estimated mesh during training. We also define Gaussian splats solely based on their location on the mesh, allowing for automatic adjustments in position, scale, and rotation during animation. As a result, we obtain a real-time rendering of editable GS.
Convolution kernel adaptation to calibrated fisheye
Authors: Bruno Berenguel-Baeta, Maria Santos-Villafranca, Jesus Bermudez-Cameo, Alejandro Perez-Yus, Jose J. Guerrero
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Convolution kernels are the basic structural component of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In the last years there has been a growing interest in fisheye cameras for many applications. However, the radially symmetric projection model of these cameras produces high distortions that affect the performance of CNNs, especially when the field of view is very large. In this work, we tackle this problem by proposing a method that leverages the calibration of cameras to deform the convolution kernel accordingly and adapt to the distortion. That way, the receptive field of the convolution is similar to standard convolutions in perspective images, allowing us to take advantage of pre-trained networks in large perspective datasets. We show how, with just a brief fine-tuning stage in a small dataset, we improve the performance of the network for the calibrated fisheye with respect to standard convolutions in depth estimation and semantic segmentation.
EmoSpeaker: One-shot Fine-grained Emotion-Controlled Talking Face Generation
Authors: Guanwen Feng, Haoran Cheng, Yunan Li, Zhiyuan Ma, Chaoneng Li, Zhihao Qian, Qiguang Miao, Chi-Man Pun
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Face Generation, Talking Face Generation

Implementing fine-grained emotion control is crucial for emotion generation tasks because it enhances the expressive capability of the generative model, allowing it to accurately and comprehensively capture and express various nuanced emotional states, thereby improving the emotional quality and personalization of generated content. Generating fine-grained facial animations that accurately portray emotional expressions using only a portrait and an audio recording presents a challenge. In order to address this challenge, we propose a visual attribute-guided audio decoupler. This enables the obtention of content vectors solely related to the audio content, enhancing the stability of subsequent lip movement coefficient predictions. To achieve more precise emotional expression, we introduce a fine-grained emotion coefficient prediction module. Additionally, we propose an emotion intensity control method using a fine-grained emotion matrix. Through these, effective control over emotional expression in the generated videos and finer classification of emotion intensity are accomplished. Subsequently, a series of 3DMM coefficient generation networks are designed to predict 3D coefficients, followed by the utilization of a rendering network to generate the final video. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method, EmoSpeaker, outperforms existing emotional talking face generation methods in terms of expression variation and lip synchronization. Project page: https://peterfanfan.github.io/EmoSpeaker/
ALERT-Transformer: Bridging Asynchronous and Synchronous Machine Learning for Real-Time Event-based Spatio-Temporal Data
Authors: Carmen Martin-Turrero, Maxence Bouvier, Manuel Breitenstein, Pietro Zanuttigh, Vincent Parret
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition

We seek to enable classic processing of continuous ultra-sparse spatiotemporal data generated by event-based sensors with dense machine learning models. We propose a novel hybrid pipeline composed of asynchronous sensing and synchronous processing that combines several ideas: (1) an embedding based on PointNet models -- the ALERT module -- that can continuously integrate new and dismiss old events thanks to a leakage mechanism, (2) a flexible readout of the embedded data that allows to feed any downstream model with always up-to-date features at any sampling rate, (3) exploiting the input sparsity in a patch-based approach inspired by Vision Transformer to optimize the efficiency of the method. These embeddings are then processed by a transformer model trained for object and gesture recognition. Using this approach, we achieve performances at the state-of-the-art with a lower latency than competitors. We also demonstrate that our asynchronous model can operate at any desired sampling rate.
SiMA-Hand: Boosting 3D Hand-Mesh Reconstruction by Single-to-Multi-View Adaptation
Authors: Yinqiao Wang, Hao Xu, Pheng-Ann Heng, Chi-Wing Fu
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00

Estimating 3D hand mesh from RGB images is a longstanding track, in which occlusion is one of the most challenging problems. Existing attempts towards this task often fail when the occlusion dominates the image space. In this paper, we propose SiMA-Hand, aiming to boost the mesh reconstruction performance by Single-to-Multi-view Adaptation. First, we design a multi-view hand reconstructor to fuse information across multiple views by holistically adopting feature fusion at image, joint, and vertex levels. Then, we introduce a single-view hand reconstructor equipped with SiMA. Though taking only one view as input at inference, the shape and orientation features in the single-view reconstructor can be enriched by learning non-occluded knowledge from the extra views at training, enhancing the reconstruction precision on the occluded regions. We conduct experiments on the Dex-YCB and HanCo benchmarks with challenging object- and self-caused occlusion cases, manifesting that SiMA-Hand consistently achieves superior performance over the state of the arts. Code will be released on https://github.com/JoyboyWang/SiMA-Hand Pytorch.
Efficient Dynamic-NeRF Based Volumetric Video Coding with Rate Distortion Optimization
Authors: ZhiYu Zhang, Guo Lu, Huanxiong Liang, Anni Tang, Qiang Hu, Li Song
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Video Compression

Volumetric videos, benefiting from immersive 3D realism and interactivity, hold vast potential for various applications, while the tremendous data volume poses significant challenges for compression. Recently, NeRF has demonstrated remarkable potential in volumetric video compression thanks to its simple representation and powerful 3D modeling capabilities, where a notable work is ReRF. However, ReRF separates the modeling from compression process, resulting in suboptimal compression efficiency. In contrast, in this paper, we propose a volumetric video compression method based on dynamic NeRF in a more compact manner. Specifically, we decompose the NeRF representation into the coefficient fields and the basis fields, incrementally updating the basis fields in the temporal domain to achieve dynamic modeling. Additionally, we perform end-to-end joint optimization on the modeling and compression process to further improve the compression efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves higher compression efficiency compared to ReRF on various datasets.
On the Multi-modal Vulnerability of Diffusion Models
Authors: Dingcheng Yang, Yang Bai, Xiaojun Jia, Yang Liu, Xiaochun Cao, Wenjian Yu
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Image Generation

Diffusion models have been widely deployed in various image generation tasks, demonstrating an extraordinary connection between image and text modalities. Although prior studies have explored the vulnerability of diffusion models from the perspectives of text and image modalities separately, the current research landscape has not yet thoroughly investigated the vulnerabilities that arise from the integration of multiple modalities, specifically through the joint analysis of textual and visual features. In this paper, we are the first to visualize both text and image feature space embedded by diffusion models and observe a significant difference. The prompts are embedded chaotically in the text feature space, while in the image feature space they are clustered according to their subjects. These fascinating findings may underscore a potential misalignment in robustness between the two modalities that exists within diffusion models. Based on this observation, we propose MMP-Attack, which leverages multi-modal priors (MMP) to manipulate the generation results of diffusion models by appending a specific suffix to the original prompt. Specifically, our goal is to induce diffusion models to generate a specific object while simultaneously eliminating the original object. Our MMP-Attack shows a notable advantage over existing studies with superior manipulation capability and efficiency. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/ydc123/MMP-Attack}.
LIR: A Lightweight Baseline for Image Restoration
Authors: Dongqi Fan, Ting Yue, Xin Zhao, Renjing Xu, Liang Chang
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Denoising, Image Restoration, Rain Removal, SSIM

Recently, there have been significant advancements in Image Restoration based on CNN and transformer. However, the inherent characteristics of the Image Restoration task are often overlooked in many works. They, instead, tend to focus on the basic block design and stack numerous such blocks to the model, leading to parameters redundant and computations unnecessary. Thus, the efficiency of the image restoration is hindered. In this paper, we propose a Lightweight Baseline network for Image Restoration called LIR to efficiently restore the image and remove degradations. First of all, through an ingenious structural design, LIR removes the degradations existing in the local and global residual connections that are ignored by modern networks. Then, a Lightweight Adaptive Attention (LAA) Block is introduced which is mainly composed of proposed Adaptive Filters and Attention Blocks. The proposed Adaptive Filter is used to adaptively extract high-frequency information and enhance object contours in various IR tasks, and Attention Block involves a novel Patch Attention module to approximate the self-attention part of the transformer. On the deraining task, our LIR achieves the state-of-the-art Structure Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and comparable performance to state-of-the-art models on Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). For denoising, dehazing, and deblurring tasks, LIR also achieves a comparable performance to state-of-the-art models with a parameter size of about 30\%. In addition, it is worth noting that our LIR produces better visual results that are more in line with the human aesthetic.
A general framework for rotation invariant point cloud analysis
Authors: Shuqing Luo, Wei Gao
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00

We propose a general method for deep learning based point cloud analysis, which is invariant to rotation on the inputs. Classical methods are vulnerable to rotation, as they usually take aligned point clouds as input. Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is a practical approach to achieve rotation invariance. However, there are still some gaps between theory and practical algorithms. In this work, we present a thorough study on designing rotation invariant algorithms for point cloud analysis. We first formulate it as a permutation invariant problem, then propose a general framework which can be combined with any backbones. Our method is beneficial for further research such as 3D pre-training and multi-modal learning. Experiments show that our method has considerable or better performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches on common benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/luoshuqing2001/RI_framework.
AutoGCN -- Towards Generic Human Activity Recognition with Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Felix Tempel, Inga Strümke, Espen Alexander F. Ihlen
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition, Neural Architecture Search, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

This paper introduces AutoGCN, a generic Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm for Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs). HAR has gained attention due to advances in deep learning, increased data availability, and enhanced computational capabilities. At the same time, GCNs have shown promising results in modeling relationships between body key points in a skeletal graph. While domain experts often craft dataset-specific GCN-based methods, their applicability beyond this specific context is severely limited. AutoGCN seeks to address this limitation by simultaneously searching for the ideal hyperparameters and architecture combination within a versatile search space using a reinforcement controller while balancing optimal exploration and exploitation behavior with a knowledge reservoir during the search process. We conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets focused on skeleton-based action recognition to assess the proposed algorithm's performance. Our experimental results underscore the effectiveness of AutoGCN in constructing optimal GCN architectures for HAR, outperforming conventional NAS and GCN methods, as well as random search. These findings highlight the significance of a diverse search space and an expressive input representation to enhance the network performance and generalizability.
Deep Multimodal Fusion of Data with Heterogeneous Dimensionality via Projective Networks
Authors: José Morano, Guilherme Aresta, Christoph Grechenig, Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth, Hrvoje Bogunović
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

The use of multimodal imaging has led to significant improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of many diseases. Similar to clinical practice, some works have demonstrated the benefits of multimodal fusion for automatic segmentation and classification using deep learning-based methods. However, current segmentation methods are limited to fusion of modalities with the same dimensionality (e.g., 3D+3D, 2D+2D), which is not always possible, and the fusion strategies implemented by classification methods are incompatible with localization tasks. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning-based framework for the fusion of multimodal data with heterogeneous dimensionality (e.g., 3D+2D) that is compatible with localization tasks. The proposed framework extracts the features of the different modalities and projects them into the common feature subspace. The projected features are then fused and further processed to obtain the final prediction. The framework was validated on the following tasks: segmentation of geographic atrophy (GA), a late-stage manifestation of age-related macular degeneration, and segmentation of retinal blood vessels (RBV) in multimodal retinal imaging. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art monomodal methods on GA and RBV segmentation by up to 3.10% and 4.64% Dice, respectively.
Phrase Grounding-based Style Transfer for Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection
Authors: Hao Li, Wei Wang, Cong Wang, Zhigang Luo, Xinwang Liu, Kenli Li, Xiaochun Cao
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Phrase Grounding, Style Transfer

Single-domain generalized object detection aims to enhance a model's generalizability to multiple unseen target domains using only data from a single source domain during training. This is a practical yet challenging task as it requires the model to address domain shift without incorporating target domain data into training. In this paper, we propose a novel phrase grounding-based style transfer (PGST) approach for the task. Specifically, we first define textual prompts to describe potential objects for each unseen target domain. Then, we leverage the grounded language-image pre-training (GLIP) model to learn the style of these target domains and achieve style transfer from the source to the target domain. The style-transferred source visual features are semantically rich and could be close to imaginary counterparts in the target domain. Finally, we employ these style-transferred visual features to fine-tune GLIP. By introducing imaginary counterparts, the detector could be effectively generalized to unseen target domains using only a single source domain for training. Extensive experimental results on five diverse weather driving benchmarks demonstrate our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, even surpassing some domain adaptive methods that incorporate target domain images into the training process.The source codes and pre-trained models will be made available.
AGILE: Approach-based Grasp Inference Learned from Element Decomposition
Authors: MohammadHossein Koosheshi, Hamed Hosseini, Mehdi Tale Masouleh, Ahmad Kalhor, Mohammad Reza Hairi Yazdi
Date: 2024-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Robotic Grasping

Humans, this species expert in grasp detection, can grasp objects by taking into account hand-object positioning information. This work proposes a method to enable a robot manipulator to learn the same, grasping objects in the most optimal way according to how the gripper has approached the object. Built on deep learning, the proposed method consists of two main stages. In order to generalize the network on unseen objects, the proposed Approach-based Grasping Inference involves an element decomposition stage to split an object into its main parts, each with one or more annotated grasps for a particular approach of the gripper. Subsequently, a grasp detection network utilizes the decomposed elements by Mask R-CNN and the information on the approach of the gripper in order to detect the element the gripper has approached and the most optimal grasp. In order to train the networks, the study introduces a robotic grasping dataset collected in the Coppeliasim simulation environment. The dataset involves 10 different objects with annotated element decomposition masks and grasp rectangles. The proposed method acquires a 90% grasp success rate on seen objects and 78% on unseen objects in the Coppeliasim simulation environment. Lastly, simulation-to-reality domain adaptation is performed by applying transformations on the training set collected in simulation and augmenting the dataset, which results in a 70% physical grasp success performance using a Delta parallel robot and a 2 -fingered gripper.