pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PDT: Uav Target Detection Dataset for Pests and Diseases Tree
Authors: Mingle Zhou, Rui Xing, Delong Han, Zhiyong Qi, Gang Li
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, SENTS

UAVs emerge as the optimal carriers for visual weed iden?tification and integrated pest and disease management in crops. How?ever, the absence of specialized datasets impedes the advancement of model development in this domain. To address this, we have developed the Pests and Diseases Tree dataset (PDT dataset). PDT dataset repre?sents the first high-precision UAV-based dataset for targeted detection of tree pests and diseases, which is collected in real-world operational environments and aims to fill the gap in available datasets for this field. Moreover, by aggregating public datasets and network data, we further introduced the Common Weed and Crop dataset (CWC dataset) to ad?dress the challenge of inadequate classification capabilities of test models within datasets for this field. Finally, we propose the YOLO-Dense Pest (YOLO-DP) model for high-precision object detection of weed, pest, and disease crop images. We re-evaluate the state-of-the-art detection models with our proposed PDT dataset and CWC dataset, showing the completeness of the dataset and the effectiveness of the YOLO-DP. The proposed PDT dataset, CWC dataset, and YOLO-DP model are pre?sented at https://github.com/RuiXing123/PDT_CWC_YOLO-DP.
Autonomous Hiking Trail Navigation via Semantic Segmentation and Geometric Analysis
Authors: Camndon Reed, Christopher Tatsch, Jason N. Gross, Yu Gu
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Robot Navigation, Semantic Segmentation

Natural environments pose significant challenges for autonomous robot navigation, particularly due to their unstructured and ever-changing nature. Hiking trails, with their dynamic conditions influenced by weather, vegetation, and human traffic, represent one such challenge. This work introduces a novel approach to autonomous hiking trail navigation that balances trail adherence with the flexibility to adapt to off-trail routes when necessary. The solution is a Traversability Analysis module that integrates semantic data from camera images with geometric information from LiDAR to create a comprehensive understanding of the surrounding terrain. A planner uses this traversability map to navigate safely, adhering to trails while allowing off-trail movement when necessary to avoid on-trail hazards or for safe off-trail shortcuts. The method is evaluated through simulation to determine the balance between semantic and geometric information in traversability estimation. These simulations tested various weights to assess their impact on navigation performance across different trail scenarios. Weights were then validated through field tests at the West Virginia University Core Arboretum, demonstrating the method's effectiveness in a real-world environment.
ImPoster: Text and Frequency Guidance for Subject Driven Action Personalization using Diffusion Models
Authors: Divya Kothandaraman, Kuldeep Kulkarni, Sumit Shekhar, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

We present ImPoster, a novel algorithm for generating a target image of a 'source' subject performing a 'driving' action. The inputs to our algorithm are a single pair of a source image with the subject that we wish to edit and a driving image with a subject of an arbitrary class performing the driving action, along with the text descriptions of the two images. Our approach is completely unsupervised and does not require any access to additional annotations like keypoints or pose. Our approach builds on a pretrained text-to-image latent diffusion model and learns the characteristics of the source and the driving image by finetuning the diffusion model for a small number of iterations. At inference time, ImPoster performs step-wise text prompting i.e. it denoises by first moving in the direction of the image manifold corresponding to the driving image followed by the direction of the image manifold corresponding to the text description of the desired target image. We propose a novel diffusion guidance formulation, image frequency guidance, to steer the generation towards the manifold of the source subject and the driving action at every step of the inference denoising. Our frequency guidance formulations are derived from the frequency domain properties of images. We extensively evaluate ImPoster on a diverse set of source-driving image pairs to demonstrate improvements over baselines. To the best of our knowledge, ImPoster is the first approach towards achieving both subject-driven as well as action-driven image personalization. Code and data is available at https://github.com/divyakraman/ImPosterDiffusion2024.
KISS-Matcher: Fast and Robust Point Cloud Registration Revisited
Authors: Hyungtae Lim, Daebeom Kim, Gunhee Shin, Jingnan Shi, Ignacio Vizzo, Hyun Myung, Jaesik Park, Luca Carlone
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration

While global point cloud registration systems have advanced significantly in all aspects, many studies have focused on specific components, such as feature extraction, graph-theoretic pruning, or pose solvers. In this paper, we take a holistic view on the registration problem and develop an open-source and versatile C++ library for point cloud registration, called \textit{KISS-Matcher}. KISS-Matcher combines a novel feature detector, \textit{Faster-PFH}, that improves over the classical fast point feature histogram (FPFH). Moreover, it adopts a $k$-core-based graph-theoretic pruning to reduce the time complexity of rejecting outlier correspondences. Finally, it combines these modules in a complete, user-friendly, and ready-to-use pipeline. As verified by extensive experiments, KISS-Matcher has superior scalability and broad applicability, achieving a substantial speed-up compared to state-of-the-art outlier-robust registration pipelines while preserving accuracy. Our code will be available at \href{https://github.com/MIT-SPARK/KISS-Matcher}{\texttt{https://github.com/MIT-SPARK/KISS-Matcher}}.
Assessment of Submillimeter Precision via Structure from Motion Technique in Close-Range Capture Environments
Authors: Francisco Roza de Moraes, Irineu da Silva
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration

Creating 3D models through the Structure from Motion technique is a recognized, efficient, cost-effective structural monitoring strategy. This technique is applied in several engineering fields, particularly for creating models of large structures from photographs taken a few tens of meters away. However, discussions about its usability and the procedures for conducting laboratory analysis, such as structural tests, are rarely addressed. This study investigates the potential of the SfM method to create submillimeter-quality models for structural tests, with short-distance captures. A series of experiments was carried out, with photographic captures at a 1-meter distance, using different quality settings: camera calibration model, Scale Bars dispersion, overlapping rates, and the use of vertical and oblique images. Employing a calibration model with images taken over a test board and a set of Scale Bars (SB) appropriately distributed over the test area, an overlap rate of 80 percent, and the integration of vertical and oblique images, RMSE values of approximately 0.1 mm were obtained. This result indicates the potential application of the technique for 3D modeling with submillimeter positional quality, as required for structural tests in laboratory environments.
MapEx: Indoor Structure Exploration with Probabilistic Information Gain from Global Map Predictions
Authors: Cherie Ho, Seungchan Kim, Brady Moon, Aditya Parandekar, Narek Harutyunyan, Chen Wang, Katia Sycara, Graeme Best, Sebastian Scherer
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00

Exploration is a critical challenge in robotics, centered on understanding unknown environments. In this work, we focus on robots exploring structured indoor environments which are often predictable and composed of repeating patterns. Most existing approaches, such as conventional frontier approaches, have difficulty leveraging the predictability and explore with simple heuristics such as `closest first'. Recent works use deep learning techniques to predict unknown regions of the map, using these predictions for information gain calculation. However, these approaches are often sensitive to the predicted map quality or do not reason over sensor coverage. To overcome these issues, our key insight is to jointly reason over what the robot can observe and its uncertainty to calculate probabilistic information gain. We introduce MapEx, a new exploration framework that uses predicted maps to form probabilistic sensor model for information gain estimation. MapEx generates multiple predicted maps based on observed information, and takes into consideration both the computed variances of predicted maps and estimated visible area to estimate the information gain of a given viewpoint. Experiments on the real-world KTH dataset showed on average 12.4% improvement than representative map-prediction based exploration and 25.4% improvement than nearest frontier approach.
Mixing Data-driven and Geometric Models for Satellite Docking Port State Estimation using an RGB or Event Camera
Authors: Cedric Le Gentil, Jack Naylor, Nuwan Munasinghe, Jasprabhjit Mehami, Benny Dai, Mikhail Asavkin, Donald G. Dansereau, Teresa Vidal-Calleja
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

In-orbit automated servicing is a promising path towards lowering the cost of satellite operations and reducing the amount of orbital debris. For this purpose, we present a pipeline for automated satellite docking port detection and state estimation using monocular vision data from standard RGB sensing or an event camera. Rather than taking snapshots of the environment, an event camera has independent pixels that asynchronously respond to light changes, offering advantages such as high dynamic range, low power consumption and latency, etc. This work focuses on satellite-agnostic operations (only a geometric knowledge of the actual port is required) using the recently released Lockheed Martin Mission Augmentation Port (LM-MAP) as the target. By leveraging shallow data-driven techniques to preprocess the incoming data to highlight the LM-MAP's reflective navigational aids and then using basic geometric models for state estimation, we present a lightweight and data-efficient pipeline that can be used independently with either RGB or event cameras. We demonstrate the soundness of the pipeline and perform a quantitative comparison of the two modalities based on data collected with a photometrically accurate test bench that includes a robotic arm to simulate the target satellite's uncontrolled motion.
Clinical-grade Multi-Organ Pathology Report Generation for Multi-scale Whole Slide Images via a Semantically Guided Medical Text Foundation Model
Authors: Jing Wei Tan, SeungKyu Kim, Eunsu Kim, Sung Hak Lee, Sangjeong Ahn, Won-Ki Jeong
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: whole slide images

Vision language models (VLM) have achieved success in both natural language comprehension and image recognition tasks. However, their use in pathology report generation for whole slide images (WSIs) is still limited due to the huge size of multi-scale WSIs and the high cost of WSI annotation. Moreover, in most of the existing research on pathology report generation, sufficient validation regarding clinical efficacy has not been conducted. Herein, we propose a novel Patient-level Multi-organ Pathology Report Generation (PMPRG) model, which utilizes the multi-scale WSI features from our proposed multi-scale regional vision transformer (MR-ViT) model and their real pathology reports to guide VLM training for accurate pathology report generation. The model then automatically generates a report based on the provided key features attended regional features. We assessed our model using a WSI dataset consisting of multiple organs, including the colon and kidney. Our model achieved a METEOR score of 0.68, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. This model allows pathologists to efficiently generate pathology reports for patients, regardless of the number of WSIs involved.
Critic Loss for Image Classification
Authors: Brendan Hogan Rappazzo, Aaron Ferber, Carla Gomes
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Modern neural network classifiers achieve remarkable performance across a variety of tasks; however, they frequently exhibit overconfidence in their predictions due to the cross-entropy loss. Inspired by this problem, we propose the \textbf{Cr}i\textbf{t}ic Loss for Image \textbf{Cl}assification (CrtCl, pronounced Critical). CrtCl formulates image classification training in a generator-critic framework, with a base classifier acting as a generator, and a correctness critic imposing a loss on the classifier. The base classifier, acting as the generator, given images, generates the probability distribution over classes and intermediate embeddings. The critic model, given the image, intermediate embeddings, and output predictions of the base model, predicts the probability that the base model has produced the correct classification, which then can be back propagated as a self supervision signal. Notably, the critic does not use the label as input, meaning that the critic can train the base model on both labeled and unlabeled data in semi-supervised learning settings. CrtCl represents a learned loss method for accuracy, alleviating the negative side effects of using cross-entropy loss. Additionally, CrtCl provides a powerful way to select data to be labeled in an active learning setting, by estimating the classification ability of the base model on unlabeled data. We study the effectiveness of CrtCl in low-labeled data regimes, and in the context of active learning. In classification, we find that CrtCl, compared to recent baselines, increases classifier generalization and calibration with various amounts of labeled data. In active learning, we show our method outperforms baselines in accuracy and calibration. We observe consistent results across three image classification datasets.
QUB-PHEO: A Visual-Based Dyadic Multi-View Dataset for Intention Inference in Collaborative Assembly
Authors: Samuel Adebayo, Seán McLoone, Joost C. Dessing
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Localization

QUB-PHEO introduces a visual-based, dyadic dataset with the potential of advancing human-robot interaction (HRI) research in assembly operations and intention inference. This dataset captures rich multimodal interactions between two participants, one acting as a 'robot surrogate,' across a variety of assembly tasks that are further broken down into 36 distinct subtasks. With rich visual annotations, such as facial landmarks, gaze, hand movements, object localization, and more for 70 participants, QUB-PHEO offers two versions: full video data for 50 participants and visual cues for all 70. Designed to improve machine learning models for HRI, QUB-PHEO enables deeper analysis of subtle interaction cues and intentions, promising contributions to the field. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/exponentialR/QUB-PHEO subject to an End-User License Agreement (EULA).
Mixture of Efficient Diffusion Experts Through Automatic Interval and Sub-Network Selection
Authors: Alireza Ganjdanesh, Yan Kang, Yuchen Liu, Richard Zhang, Zhe Lin, Heng Huang
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Diffusion probabilistic models can generate high-quality samples. Yet, their sampling process requires numerous denoising steps, making it slow and computationally intensive. We propose to reduce the sampling cost by pruning a pretrained diffusion model into a mixture of efficient experts. First, we study the similarities between pairs of denoising timesteps, observing a natural clustering, even across different datasets. This suggests that rather than having a single model for all time steps, separate models can serve as ``experts'' for their respective time intervals. As such, we separately fine-tune the pretrained model on each interval, with elastic dimensions in depth and width, to obtain experts specialized in their corresponding denoising interval. To optimize the resource usage between experts, we introduce our Expert Routing Agent, which learns to select a set of proper network configurations. By doing so, our method can allocate the computing budget between the experts in an end-to-end manner without requiring manual heuristics. Finally, with a selected configuration, we fine-tune our pruned experts to obtain our mixture of efficient experts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, DiffPruning, across several datasets, LSUN-Church, LSUN-Beds, FFHQ, and ImageNet, on the Latent Diffusion Model architecture.
SOFI: Multi-Scale Deformable Transformer for Camera Calibration with Enhanced Line Queries
Authors: Sebastian Janampa, Marios Pattichis
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration

Camera calibration consists of estimating camera parameters such as the zenith vanishing point and horizon line. Estimating the camera parameters allows other tasks like 3D rendering, artificial reality effects, and object insertion in an image. Transformer-based models have provided promising results; however, they lack cross-scale interaction. In this work, we introduce \textit{multi-Scale defOrmable transFormer for camera calibratIon with enhanced line queries}, SOFI. SOFI improves the line queries used in CTRL-C and MSCC by using both line content and line geometric features. Moreover, SOFI's line queries allow transformer models to adopt the multi-scale deformable attention mechanism to promote cross-scale interaction between the feature maps produced by the backbone. SOFI outperforms existing methods on the \textit {Google Street View}, \textit {Horizon Line in the Wild}, and \textit {Holicity} datasets while keeping a competitive inference speed.
A Novel Framework for the Automated Characterization of Gram-Stained Blood Culture Slides Using a Large-Scale Vision Transformer
Authors: Jack McMahon, Naofumi Tomita, Elizabeth S. Tatishev, Adrienne A. Workman, Cristina R Costales, Niaz Banaei, Isabella W. Martin, Saeed Hassanpour
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, whole slide images

This study introduces a new framework for the artificial intelligence-assisted characterization of Gram-stained whole-slide images (WSIs). As a test for the diagnosis of bloodstream infections, Gram stains provide critical early data to inform patient treatment. Rapid and reliable analysis of Gram stains has been shown to be positively associated with better clinical outcomes, underscoring the need for improved tools to automate Gram stain analysis. In this work, we developed a novel transformer-based model for Gram-stained WSI classification, which is more scalable to large datasets than previous convolutional neural network (CNN) -based methods as it does not require patch-level manual annotations. We also introduce a large Gram stain dataset from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA) to evaluate our model, exploring the classification of five major categories of Gram-stained WSIs: Gram-positive cocci in clusters, Gram-positive cocci in pairs/chains, Gram-positive rods, Gram-negative rods, and slides with no bacteria. Our model achieves a classification accuracy of 0.858 (95% CI: 0.805, 0.905) and an AUC of 0.952 (95% CI: 0.922, 0.976) using five-fold nested cross-validation on our 475-slide dataset, demonstrating the potential of large-scale transformer models for Gram stain classification. We further demonstrate the generalizability of our trained model, which achieves strong performance on external datasets without additional fine-tuning.
VaLID: Verification as Late Integration of Detections for LiDAR-Camera Fusion
Authors: Vanshika Vats, Marzia Binta Nizam, James Davis
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, valid

Vehicle object detection benefits from both LiDAR and camera data, with LiDAR offering superior performance in many scenarios. Fusion of these modalities further enhances accuracy, but existing methods often introduce complexity or dataset-specific dependencies. In our study, we propose a model-adaptive late-fusion method, VaLID, which validates whether each predicted bounding box is acceptable or not. Our method verifies the higher-performing, yet overly optimistic LiDAR model detections using camera detections that are obtained from either specially trained, general, or open-vocabulary models. VaLID uses a simple multi-layer perceptron trained with a high recall bias to reduce the false predictions made by the LiDAR detector, while still preserving the true ones. Evaluating with multiple combinations of LiDAR and camera detectors on the KITTI dataset, we reduce false positives by an average of 63.9%, thus outperforming the individual detectors on 3D average precision (3DAP). Our approach is model-adaptive and demonstrates state-of-the-art competitive performance even when using generic camera detectors that were not trained specifically for this dataset.
Speech2rtMRI: Speech-Guided Diffusion Model for Real-time MRI Video of the Vocal Tract during Speech
Authors: Hong Nguyen, Sean Foley, Kevin Huang, Xuan Shi, Tiantian Feng, Shrikanth Narayanan
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00

Understanding speech production both visually and kinematically can inform second language learning system designs, as well as the creation of speaking characters in video games and animations. In this work, we introduce a data-driven method to visually represent articulator motion in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) videos of the human vocal tract during speech based on arbitrary audio or speech input. We leverage large pre-trained speech models, which are embedded with prior knowledge, to generalize the visual domain to unseen data using a speech-to-video diffusion model. Our findings demonstrate that the visual generation significantly benefits from the pre-trained speech representations. We also observed that evaluating phonemes in isolation is challenging but becomes more straightforward when assessed within the context of spoken words. Limitations of the current results include the presence of unsmooth tongue motion and video distortion when the tongue contacts the palate.
MATCH POLICY: A Simple Pipeline from Point Cloud Registration to Manipulation Policies
Authors: Haojie Huang, Haotian Liu, Dian Wang, Robin Walters, Robert Platt
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration

Many manipulation tasks require the robot to rearrange objects relative to one another. Such tasks can be described as a sequence of relative poses between parts of a set of rigid bodies. In this work, we propose MATCH POLICY, a simple but novel pipeline for solving high-precision pick and place tasks. Instead of predicting actions directly, our method registers the pick and place targets to the stored demonstrations. This transfers action inference into a point cloud registration task and enables us to realize nontrivial manipulation policies without any training. MATCH POLICY is designed to solve high-precision tasks with a key-frame setting. By leveraging the geometric interaction and the symmetries of the task, it achieves extremely high sample efficiency and generalizability to unseen configurations. We demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across various tasks on RLBench benchmark compared with several strong baselines and test it on a real robot with six tasks.