pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Attend, Distill, Detect: Attention-aware Entropy Distillation for Anomaly Detection
Authors: Sushovan Jena, Vishwas Saini, Ujjwal Shaw, Pavitra Jain, Abhay Singh Raihal, Anoushka Banerjee, Sharad Joshi, Ananth Ganesh, Arnav Bhavsar
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Knowledge Distillation, Multi-class Anomaly Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection encompasses diverse applications in industrial settings where a high-throughput and precision is imperative. Early works were centered around one-class-one-model paradigm, which poses significant challenges in large-scale production environments. Knowledge-distillation based multi-class anomaly detection promises a low latency with a reasonably good performance but with a significant drop as compared to one-class version. We propose a DCAM (Distributed Convolutional Attention Module) which improves the distillation process between teacher and student networks when there is a high variance among multiple classes or objects. Integrated multi-scale feature matching strategy to utilise a mixture of multi-level knowledge from the feature pyramid of the two networks, intuitively helping in detecting anomalies of varying sizes which is also an inherent problem in the multi-class scenario. Briefly, our DCAM module consists of Convolutional Attention blocks distributed across the feature maps of the student network, which essentially learns to masks the irrelevant information during student learning alleviating the "cross-class interference" problem. This process is accompanied by minimizing the relative entropy using KL-Divergence in Spatial dimension and a Channel-wise Cosine Similarity between the same feature maps of teacher and student. The losses enables to achieve scale-invariance and capture non-linear relationships. We also highlight that the DCAM module would only be used during training and not during inference as we only need the learned feature maps and losses for anomaly scoring and hence, gaining a performance gain of 3.92% than the multi-class baseline with a preserved latency.
MRSegmentator: Multi-Modality Segmentation of 40 Classes in MRI and CT
Authors: Hartmut Häntze, Lina Xu, Christian J. Mertens, Felix J. Dorfner, Leonhard Donle, Felix Busch, Avan Kader, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Nadine Bayerl, Nassir Navab, Daniel Rueckert, Julia Schnabel, Hugo JWL Aerts, Daniel Truhn, Fabian Bamberg, Jakob Weiß, Christopher L. Schlett, Steffen Ringhof, Thoralf Niendorf, Tobias Pischon, Hans-Ulrich Kauczor, Tobias Nonnenmacher, Thomas Kröncke, Henry Völzke, Jeanette Schulz-Menger, Klaus Maier-Hein, Mathias Prokop, Bram van Ginneken, Alessa Hering, Marcus R. Makowski, Lisa C. Adams, Keno K. Bressem
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Optimization, Organ Segmentation, Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning model for multi-organ segmentation of MRI scans. Materials and Methods: The model was trained on 1,200 manually annotated 3D axial MRI scans from the UK Biobank, 221 in-house MRI scans, and 1228 CT scans from the TotalSegmentator dataset. A human-in-the-loop annotation workflow was employed, leveraging cross-modality transfer learning from an existing CT segmentation model to segment 40 anatomical structures. The annotation process began with a model based on transfer learning between CT and MR, which was iteratively refined based on manual corrections to predicted segmentations. The model's performance was evaluated on MRI examinations obtained from the German National Cohort (NAKO) study (n=900) from the AMOS22 dataset (n=60) and from the TotalSegmentator-MRI test data (n=29). The Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) and Hausdorff Distance (HD) were used to assess segmentation quality, stratified by organ and scan type. The model and its weights will be open-sourced. Results: MRSegmentator demonstrated high accuracy for well-defined organs (lungs: DSC 0.96, heart: DSC 0.94) and organs with anatomic variability (liver: DSC 0.96, kidneys: DSC 0.95). Smaller structures showed lower accuracy (portal/splenic veins: DSC 0.64, adrenal glands: DSC 0.69). On external validation using NAKO data, mean DSC ranged from 0.85 $\pm$ 0.08 for T2-HASTE to 0.91 $\pm$ 0.05 for in-phase sequences. The model generalized well to CT, achieving mean DSC of 0.84 $\pm$ 0.11 on AMOS CT data. Conclusion: MRSegmentator accurately segments 40 anatomical structures in MRI across diverse datasets and imaging protocols, with additional generalizability to CT images. This open-source model will provide a valuable tool for automated multi-organ segmentation in medical imaging research. It can be downloaded from https://github.com/hhaentze/MRSegmentator.
I3DGS: Improve 3D Gaussian Splatting from Multiple Dimensions
Authors: Jinwei Lin
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Rendering

3D Gaussian Splatting is a novel method for 3D view synthesis, which can gain an implicit neural learning rendering result than the traditional neural rendering technology but keep the more high-definition fast rendering speed. But it is still difficult to achieve a fast enough efficiency on 3D Gaussian Splatting for the practical applications. To Address this issue, we propose the I3DS, a synthetic model performance improvement evaluation solution and experiments test. From multiple and important levels or dimensions of the original 3D Gaussian Splatting, we made more than two thousand various kinds of experiments to test how the selected different items and components can make an impact on the training efficiency of the 3D Gaussian Splatting model. In this paper, we will share abundant and meaningful experiences and methods about how to improve the training, performance and the impacts caused by different items of the model. A special but normal Integer compression in base 95 and a floating-point compression in base 94 with ASCII encoding and decoding mechanism is presented. Many real and effective experiments and test results or phenomena will be recorded. After a series of reasonable fine-tuning, I3DS can gain excellent performance improvements than the previous one. The project code is available as open source.
How to Augment for Atmospheric Turbulence Effects on Thermal Adapted Object Detection Models?
Authors: Engin Uzun, Erdem Akagunduz
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Augmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Atmospheric turbulence poses a significant challenge to the performance of object detection models. Turbulence causes distortions, blurring, and noise in images by bending and scattering light rays due to variations in the refractive index of air. This results in non-rigid geometric distortions and temporal fluctuations in the electromagnetic radiation received by optical systems. This paper explores the effectiveness of turbulence image augmentation techniques in improving the accuracy and robustness of thermal-adapted and deep learning-based object detection models under atmospheric turbulence. Three distinct approximation-based turbulence simulators (geometric, Zernike-based, and P2S) are employed to generate turbulent training and test datasets. The performance of three state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection models: RTMDet-x, DINO-4scale, and YOLOv8-x, is employed on these turbulent datasets with and without turbulence augmentation during training. The results demonstrate that utilizing turbulence-specific augmentations during model training can significantly improve detection accuracy and robustness against distorted turbulent images. Turbulence augmentation enhances performance even for a non-turbulent test set.
Evaluating Adversarial Robustness in the Spatial Frequency Domain
Authors: Keng-Hsin Liao, Chin-Yuan Yeh, Hsi-Wen Chen, Ming-Syan Chen
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have dominated the majority of computer vision tasks. However, CNNs' vulnerability to adversarial attacks has raised concerns about deploying these models to safety-critical applications. In contrast, the Human Visual System (HVS), which utilizes spatial frequency channels to process visual signals, is immune to adversarial attacks. As such, this paper presents an empirical study exploring the vulnerability of CNN models in the frequency domain. Specifically, we utilize the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to construct the Spatial-Frequency (SF) layer to produce a block-wise frequency spectrum of an input image and formulate Spatial Frequency CNNs (SF-CNNs) by replacing the initial feature extraction layers of widely-used CNN backbones with the SF layer. Through extensive experiments, we observe that SF-CNN models are more robust than their CNN counterparts under both white-box and black-box attacks. To further explain the robustness of SF-CNNs, we compare the SF layer with a trainable convolutional layer with identical kernel sizes using two mixing strategies to show that the lower frequency components contribute the most to the adversarial robustness of SF-CNNs. We believe our observations can guide the future design of robust CNN models.
Compression-Realized Deep Structural Network for Video Quality Enhancement
Authors: Hanchi Sun, Xiaohong Liu, Xinyang Jiang, Yifei Shen, Dongsheng Li, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Motion Estimation, Quantization

This paper focuses on the task of quality enhancement for compressed videos. Although deep network-based video restorers achieve impressive progress, most of the existing methods lack a structured design to optimally leverage the priors within compression codecs. Since the quality degradation of the video is primarily induced by the compression algorithm, a new paradigm is urgently needed for a more ``conscious'' process of quality enhancement. As a result, we propose the Compression-Realized Deep Structural Network (CRDS), introducing three inductive biases aligned with the three primary processes in the classic compression codec, merging the strengths of classical encoder architecture with deep network capabilities. Inspired by the residual extraction and domain transformation process in the codec, a pre-trained Latent Degradation Residual Auto-Encoder is proposed to transform video frames into a latent feature space, and the mutual neighborhood attention mechanism is integrated for precise motion estimation and residual extraction. Furthermore, drawing inspiration from the quantization noise distribution of the codec, CRDS proposes a novel Progressive Denoising framework with intermediate supervision that decomposes the quality enhancement into a series of simpler denoising sub-tasks. Experimental results on datasets like LDV 2.0 and MFQE 2.0 indicate our approach surpasses state-of-the-art models.
Improving Transferable Targeted Adversarial Attack via Normalized Logit Calibration and Truncated Feature Mixing
Authors: Juanjuan Weng, Zhiming Luo, Shaozi Li
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

This paper aims to enhance the transferability of adversarial samples in targeted attacks, where attack success rates remain comparatively low. To achieve this objective, we propose two distinct techniques for improving the targeted transferability from the loss and feature aspects. First, in previous approaches, logit calibrations used in targeted attacks primarily focus on the logit margin between the targeted class and the untargeted classes among samples, neglecting the standard deviation of the logit. In contrast, we introduce a new normalized logit calibration method that jointly considers the logit margin and the standard deviation of logits. This approach effectively calibrates the logits, enhancing the targeted transferability. Second, previous studies have demonstrated that mixing the features of clean samples during optimization can significantly increase transferability. Building upon this, we further investigate a truncated feature mixing method to reduce the impact of the source training model, resulting in additional improvements. The truncated feature is determined by removing the Rank-1 feature associated with the largest singular value decomposed from the high-level convolutional layers of the clean sample. Extensive experiments conducted on the ImageNet-Compatible and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate the individual and mutual benefits of our proposed two components, which outperform the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in black-box targeted attacks.
Open Access Battle Damage Detection via Pixel-Wise T-Test on Sentinel-1 Imagery
Authors: Ollie Ballinger
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Humanitarian

In the context of recent, highly destructive conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, reliable estimates of building damage are essential for an informed public discourse, human rights monitoring, and humanitarian aid provision. Given the contentious nature of conflict damage assessment, these estimates must be fully reproducible, explainable, and derived from open access data. This paper introduces a new method for building damage detection-- the Pixel-Wise T-Test (PWTT)-- that satisfies these conditions. Using a combination of freely-available synthetic aperture radar imagery and statistical change detection, the PWTT generates accurate conflict damage estimates across a wide area at regular time intervals. Accuracy is assessed using an original dataset of over half a million labeled building footprints spanning 12 cities across Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. Despite being simple and lightweight, the algorithm achieves building-level accuracy statistics (AUC=0.88 across Ukraine, 0.81 in Gaza) rivalling state of the art methods that use deep learning and high resolution imagery. The workflow is open source and deployed entirely within the Google Earth Engine environment, allowing for the generation of interactive Battle Damage Dashboards for Ukraine and Gaza that update in near-real time, allowing the public and humanitarian practitioners to immediately get estimates of damaged buildings in a given area.
Decoding Emotions in Abstract Art: Cognitive Plausibility of CLIP in Recognizing Color-Emotion Associations
Authors: Hanna-Sophia Widhoelzl, Ece Takmaz
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Classification

This study investigates the cognitive plausibility of a pretrained multimodal model, CLIP, in recognizing emotions evoked by abstract visual art. We employ a dataset comprising images with associated emotion labels and textual rationales of these labels provided by human annotators. We perform linguistic analyses of rationales, zero-shot emotion classification of images and rationales, apply similarity-based prediction of emotion, and investigate color-emotion associations. The relatively low, yet above baseline, accuracy in recognizing emotion for abstract images and rationales suggests that CLIP decodes emotional complexities in a manner not well aligned with human cognitive processes. Furthermore, we explore color-emotion interactions in images and rationales. Expected color-emotion associations, such as red relating to anger, are identified in images and texts annotated with emotion labels by both humans and CLIP, with the latter showing even stronger interactions. Our results highlight the disparity between human processing and machine processing when connecting image features and emotions.
PCLMix: Weakly Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Pixel-Level Contrastive Learning and Dynamic Mix Augmentation
Authors: Yu Lei, Haolun Luo, Lituan Wang, Zhenwei Zhang, Lei Zhang
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Decoder, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In weakly supervised medical image segmentation, the absence of structural priors and the discreteness of class feature distribution present a challenge, i.e., how to accurately propagate supervision signals from local to global regions without excessively spreading them to other irrelevant regions? To address this, we propose a novel weakly supervised medical image segmentation framework named PCLMix, comprising dynamic mix augmentation, pixel-level contrastive learning, and consistency regularization strategies. Specifically, PCLMix is built upon a heterogeneous dual-decoder backbone, addressing the absence of structural priors through a strategy of dynamic mix augmentation during training. To handle the discrete distribution of class features, PCLMix incorporates pixel-level contrastive learning based on prediction uncertainty, effectively enhancing the model's ability to differentiate inter-class pixel differences and intra-class consistency. Furthermore, to reinforce segmentation consistency and robustness, PCLMix employs an auxiliary decoder for dual consistency regularization. In the inference phase, the auxiliary decoder will be dropped and no computation complexity is increased. Extensive experiments on the ACDC dataset demonstrate that PCLMix appropriately propagates local supervision signals to the global scale, further narrowing the gap between weakly supervised and fully supervised segmentation methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Torpedo2648/PCLMix.
A Joint Approach Towards Data-Driven Virtual Testing for Automated Driving: The AVEAS Project
Authors: Leon Eisemann, Mirjam Fehling-Kaschek, Silke Forkert, Andreas Forster, Henrik Gommel, Susanne Guenther, Stephan Hammer, David Hermann, Marvin Klemp, Benjamin Lickert, Florian Luettner, Robin Moss, Nicole Neis, Maria Pohle, Dominik Schreiber, Cathrina Sowa, Daniel Stadler, Janina Stompe, Michael Strobelt, David Unger, Jens Ziehn
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00

With growing complexity and responsibility of automated driving functions in road traffic and growing scope of their operational design domains, there is increasing demand for covering significant parts of development, validation, and verification via virtual environments and simulation models. If, however, simulations are meant not only to augment real-world experiments, but to replace them, quantitative approaches are required that measure to what degree and under which preconditions simulation models adequately represent reality, and thus allow their usage for virtual testing of driving functions. Especially in research and development areas related to the safety impacts of the "open world", there is a significant shortage of real-world data to parametrize and/or validate simulations - especially with respect to the behavior of human traffic participants, whom automated vehicles will meet in mixed traffic. This paper presents the intermediate results of the German AVEAS research project (www.aveas.org) which aims at developing methods and metrics for the harmonized, systematic, and scalable acquisition of real-world data for virtual verification and validation of advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving, and establishing an online database following the FAIR principles.
Modality-agnostic Domain Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation by Multi-Frequency in Multi-Scale Attention
Authors: Ju-Hyeon Nam, Nur Suriza Syazwany, Su Jung Kim, Sang-Chul Lee
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Generalizability in deep neural networks plays a pivotal role in medical image segmentation. However, deep learning-based medical image analyses tend to overlook the importance of frequency variance, which is critical element for achieving a model that is both modality-agnostic and domain-generalizable. Additionally, various models fail to account for the potential information loss that can arise from multi-task learning under deep supervision, a factor that can impair the model representation ability. To address these challenges, we propose a Modality-agnostic Domain Generalizable Network (MADGNet) for medical image segmentation, which comprises two key components: a Multi-Frequency in Multi-Scale Attention (MFMSA) block and Ensemble Sub-Decoding Module (E-SDM). The MFMSA block refines the process of spatial feature extraction, particularly in capturing boundary features, by incorporating multi-frequency and multi-scale features, thereby offering informative cues for tissue outline and anatomical structures. Moreover, we propose E-SDM to mitigate information loss in multi-task learning with deep supervision, especially during substantial upsampling from low resolution. We evaluate the segmentation performance of MADGNet across six modalities and fifteen datasets. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MADGNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models across various modalities, showcasing superior segmentation performance. This affirms MADGNet as a robust solution for medical image segmentation that excels in diverse imaging scenarios. Our MADGNet code is available in GitHub Link.
Novel Class Discovery for Ultra-Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
Authors: Yu Liu, Yaqi Cai, Qi Jia, Binglin Qiu, Weimin WANG, Nan Pu
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Fine-Grained Visual Categorization, Novel Class Discovery, Representation Learning, Transfer Learning

Ultra-fine-grained visual categorization (Ultra-FGVC) aims at distinguishing highly similar sub-categories within fine-grained objects, such as different soybean cultivars. Compared to traditional fine-grained visual categorization, Ultra-FGVC encounters more hurdles due to the small inter-class and large intra-class variation. Given these challenges, relying on human annotation for Ultra-FGVC is impractical. To this end, our work introduces a novel task termed Ultra-Fine-Grained Novel Class Discovery (UFG-NCD), which leverages partially annotated data to identify new categories of unlabeled images for Ultra-FGVC. To tackle this problem, we devise a Region-Aligned Proxy Learning (RAPL) framework, which comprises a Channel-wise Region Alignment (CRA) module and a Semi-Supervised Proxy Learning (SemiPL) strategy. The CRA module is designed to extract and utilize discriminative features from local regions, facilitating knowledge transfer from labeled to unlabeled classes. Furthermore, SemiPL strengthens representation learning and knowledge transfer with proxy-guided supervised learning and proxy-guided contrastive learning. Such techniques leverage class distribution information in the embedding space, improving the mining of subtle differences between labeled and unlabeled ultra-fine-grained classes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAPL significantly outperforms baselines across various datasets, indicating its effectiveness in handling the challenges of UFG-NCD. Code is available at https://github.com/SSDUT-Caiyq/UFG-NCD.
Benchmarking Classical and Learning-Based Multibeam Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Li Ling, Jun Zhang, Nils Bore, John Folkesson, Anna Wåhlin
Date: 2024-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Point Cloud Registration

Deep learning has shown promising results for multiple 3D point cloud registration datasets. However, in the underwater domain, most registration of multibeam echo-sounder (MBES) point cloud data are still performed using classical methods in the iterative closest point (ICP) family. In this work, we curate and release DotsonEast Dataset, a semi-synthetic MBES registration dataset constructed from an autonomous underwater vehicle in West Antarctica. Using this dataset, we systematically benchmark the performance of 2 classical and 4 learning-based methods. The experimental results show that the learning-based methods work well for coarse alignment, and are better at recovering rough transforms consistently at high overlap (20-50%). In comparison, GICP (a variant of ICP) performs well for fine alignment and is better across all metrics at extremely low overlap (10%). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to benchmark both learning-based and classical registration methods on an AUV-based MBES dataset. To facilitate future research, both the code and data are made available online.