pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Plug-and-Play Tri-Branch Invertible Block for Image Rescaling
Authors: Jingwei Bao, Jinhua Hao, Pengcheng Xu, Ming Sun, Chao Zhou, Shuyuan Zhu
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressed Image Super-resolution, Image Reconstruction, Image Rescaling, Image Super-Resolution

High-resolution (HR) images are commonly downscaled to low-resolution (LR) to reduce bandwidth, followed by upscaling to restore their original details. Recent advancements in image rescaling algorithms have employed invertible neural networks (INNs) to create a unified framework for downscaling and upscaling, ensuring a one-to-one mapping between LR and HR images. Traditional methods, utilizing dual-branch based vanilla invertible blocks, process high-frequency and low-frequency information separately, often relying on specific distributions to model high-frequency components. However, processing the low-frequency component directly in the RGB domain introduces channel redundancy, limiting the efficiency of image reconstruction. To address these challenges, we propose a plug-and-play tri-branch invertible block (T-InvBlocks) that decomposes the low-frequency branch into luminance (Y) and chrominance (CbCr) components, reducing redundancy and enhancing feature processing. Additionally, we adopt an all-zero mapping strategy for high-frequency components during upscaling, focusing essential rescaling information within the LR image. Our T-InvBlocks can be seamlessly integrated into existing rescaling models, improving performance in both general rescaling tasks and scenarios involving lossy compression. Extensive experiments confirm that our method advances the state of the art in HR image reconstruction.
Novel AI Camera Camouflage: Face Cloaking Without Full Disguise
Authors: David Noever, Forrest McKee
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00

This study demonstrates a novel approach to facial camouflage that combines targeted cosmetic perturbations and alpha transparency layer manipulation to evade modern facial recognition systems. Unlike previous methods -- such as CV dazzle, adversarial patches, and theatrical disguises -- this work achieves effective obfuscation through subtle modifications to key-point regions, particularly the brow, nose bridge, and jawline. Empirical testing with Haar cascade classifiers and commercial systems like BetaFaceAPI and Microsoft Bing Visual Search reveals that vertical perturbations near dense facial key points significantly disrupt detection without relying on overt disguises. Additionally, leveraging alpha transparency attacks in PNG images creates a dual-layer effect: faces remain visible to human observers but disappear in machine-readable RGB layers, rendering them unidentifiable during reverse image searches. The results highlight the potential for creating scalable, low-visibility facial obfuscation strategies that balance effectiveness and subtlety, opening pathways for defeating surveillance while maintaining plausible anonymity.
Urban Air Temperature Prediction using Conditional Diffusion Models
Authors: Siyang Dai, Jun Liu, Ngai-Man Cheung
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Urbanization as a global trend has led to many environmental challenges, including the urban heat island (UHI) effect. The increase in temperature has a significant impact on the well-being of urban residents. Air temperature ($T_a$) at 2m above the surface is a key indicator of the UHI effect. How land use land cover (LULC) affects $T_a$ is a critical research question which requires high-resolution (HR) $T_a$ data at neighborhood scale. However, weather stations providing $T_a$ measurements are sparsely distributed e.g. more than 10km apart; and numerical models are impractically slow and computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a novel method to predict HR $T_a$ at 100m ground separation distance (gsd) using land surface temperature (LST) and other LULC related features which can be easily obtained from satellite imagery. Our method leverages diffusion models for the first time to generate accurate and visually realistic HR $T_a$ maps, which outperforms prior methods. We pave the way for meteorological research using computer vision techniques by providing a dataset of an extended spatial and temporal coverage, and a high spatial resolution as a benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we show that our model can be applied to urban planning by simulating the impact of different urban designs on $T_a$.
Level-Set Parameters: Novel Representation for 3D Shape Analysis
Authors: Huan Lei, Hongdong Li, Andreas Geiger, Anthony Dick
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Pose Estimation

3D shape analysis has been largely focused on traditional 3D representations of point clouds and meshes, but the discrete nature of these data makes the analysis susceptible to variations in input resolutions. Recent development of neural fields brings in level-set parameters from signed distance functions as a novel, continuous, and numerical representation of 3D shapes, where the shape surfaces are defined as zero-level-sets of those functions. This motivates us to extend shape analysis from the traditional 3D data to these novel parameter data. Since the level-set parameters are not Euclidean like point clouds, we establish correlations across different shapes by formulating them as a pseudo-normal distribution, and learn the distribution prior from the respective dataset. To further explore the level-set parameters with shape transformations, we propose to condition a subset of these parameters on rotations and translations, and generate them with a hypernetwork. This simplifies the pose-related shape analysis compared to using traditional data. We demonstrate the promise of the novel representations through applications in shape classification (arbitrary poses), retrieval, and 6D object pose estimation. Code and data in this research are provided at https://github.com/EnyaHermite/LevelSetParamData.
QueryCDR: Query-Based Controllable Distortion Rectification Network for Fisheye Images
Authors: Pengbo Guo, Chengxu Liu, Xingsong Hou, Xueming Qian
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00

Fisheye image rectification aims to correct distortions in images taken with fisheye cameras. Although current models show promising results on images with a similar degree of distortion as the training data, they will produce sub-optimal results when the degree of distortion changes and without retraining. The lack of generalization ability for dealing with varying degrees of distortion limits their practical application. In this paper, we take one step further to enable effective distortion rectification for images with varying degrees of distortion without retraining. We propose a novel Query-Based Controllable Distortion Rectification network for fisheye images (QueryCDR). In particular, we first present the Distortion-aware Learnable Query Mechanism (DLQM), which defines the latent spatial relationships for different distortion degrees as a series of learnable queries. Each query can be learned to obtain position-dependent rectification control conditions, providing control over the rectification process. Then, we propose two kinds of controllable modulating blocks to enable the control conditions to guide the modulation of the distortion features better. These core components cooperate with each other to effectively boost the generalization ability of the model at varying degrees of distortion. Extensive experiments on fisheye image datasets with different distortion degrees demonstrate our approach achieves high-quality and controllable distortion rectification.
Comparative Analysis of YOLOv9, YOLOv10 and RT-DETR for Real-Time Weed Detection
Authors: Ahmet Oğuz Saltık, Alicia Allmendinger, Anthony Stein
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Management, object-detection, Object Detection

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art object detection models, including YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and RT-DETR, for the task of weed detection in smart-spraying applications focusing on three classes: Sugarbeet, Monocot, and Dicot. The performance of these models is compared based on mean Average Precision (mAP) scores and inference times on different GPU and CPU devices. We consider various model variations, such as nano, small, medium, large alongside different image resolutions (320px, 480px, 640px, 800px, 960px). The results highlight the trade-offs between inference time and detection accuracy, providing valuable insights for selecting the most suitable model for real-time weed detection. This study aims to guide the development of efficient and effective smart spraying systems, enhancing agricultural productivity through precise weed management.
T$^3$-S2S: Training-free Triplet Tuning for Sketch to Scene Generation
Authors: Zhenhong Sun, Yifu Wang, Yonhon Ng, Yunfei Duan, Daoyi Dong, Hongdong Li, Pan Ji
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Generation, Triplet

Scene generation is crucial to many computer graphics applications. Recent advances in generative AI have streamlined sketch-to-image workflows, easing the workload for artists and designers in creating scene concept art. However, these methods often struggle for complex scenes with multiple detailed objects, sometimes missing small or uncommon instances. In this paper, we propose a Training-free Triplet Tuning for Sketch-to-Scene (T3-S2S) generation after reviewing the entire cross-attention mechanism. This scheme revitalizes the existing ControlNet model, enabling effective handling of multi-instance generations, involving prompt balance, characteristics prominence, and dense tuning. Specifically, this approach enhances keyword representation via the prompt balance module, reducing the risk of missing critical instances. It also includes a characteristics prominence module that highlights TopK indices in each channel, ensuring essential features are better represented based on token sketches. Additionally, it employs dense tuning to refine contour details in the attention map, compensating for instance-related regions. Experiments validate that our triplet tuning approach substantially improves the performance of existing sketch-to-image models. It consistently generates detailed, multi-instance 2D images, closely adhering to the input prompts and enhancing visual quality in complex multi-instance scenes. Code is available at https://github.com/chaos-sun/t3s2s.git.
Real-time One-Step Diffusion-based Expressive Portrait Videos Generation
Authors: Hanzhong Guo, Hongwei Yi, Daquan Zhou, Alexander William Bergman, Michael Lingelbach, Yizhou Yu
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

Latent diffusion models have made great strides in generating expressive portrait videos with accurate lip-sync and natural motion from a single reference image and audio input. However, these models are far from real-time, often requiring many sampling steps that take minutes to generate even one second of video-significantly limiting practical use. We introduce OSA-LCM (One-Step Avatar Latent Consistency Model), paving the way for real-time diffusion-based avatars. Our method achieves comparable video quality to existing methods but requires only one sampling step, making it more than 10x faster. To accomplish this, we propose a novel avatar discriminator design that guides lip-audio consistency and motion expressiveness to enhance video quality in limited sampling steps. Additionally, we employ a second-stage training architecture using an editing fine-tuned method (EFT), transforming video generation into an editing task during training to effectively address the temporal gap challenge in single-step generation. Experiments demonstrate that OSA-LCM outperforms existing open-source portrait video generation models while operating more efficiently with a single sampling step.
Enabling Region-Specific Control via Lassos in Point-Based Colorization
Authors: Sanghyeon Lee, Jooyeol Yun, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Colorization

Point-based interactive colorization techniques allow users to effortlessly colorize grayscale images using user-provided color hints. However, point-based methods often face challenges when different colors are given to semantically similar areas, leading to color intermingling and unsatisfactory results-an issue we refer to as color collapse. The fundamental cause of color collapse is the inadequacy of points for defining the boundaries for each color. To mitigate color collapse, we introduce a lasso tool that can control the scope of each color hint. Additionally, we design a framework that leverages the user-provided lassos to localize the attention masks. The experimental results show that using a single lasso is as effective as applying 4.18 individual color hints and can achieve the desired outcomes in 30% less time than using points alone.
DarkIR: Robust Low-Light Image Restoration
Authors: Daniel Feijoo, Juan C. Benito, Alvaro Garcia, Marcos V. Conde
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Enhancement, Image Restoration, Low-Light Image Enhancement

Photography during night or in dark conditions typically suffers from noise, low light and blurring issues due to the dim environment and the common use of long exposure. Although Deblurring and Low-light Image Enhancement (LLIE) are related under these conditions, most approaches in image restoration solve these tasks separately. In this paper, we present an efficient and robust neural network for multi-task low-light image restoration. Instead of following the current tendency of Transformer-based models, we propose new attention mechanisms to enhance the receptive field of efficient CNNs. Our method reduces the computational costs in terms of parameters and MAC operations compared to previous methods. Our model, DarkIR, achieves new state-of-the-art results on the popular LOLBlur, LOLv2 and Real-LOLBlur datasets, being able to generalize on real-world night and dark images. Code and models at https://github.com/cidautai/DarkIR
Exploring Transformer-Augmented LSTM for Temporal and Spatial Feature Learning in Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Chandra Raskoti, Weizi Li
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Accurate vehicle trajectory prediction is crucial for ensuring safe and efficient autonomous driving. This work explores the integration of Transformer based model with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based technique to enhance spatial and temporal feature learning in vehicle trajectory prediction. Here, a hybrid model that combines LSTMs for temporal encoding with a Transformer encoder for capturing complex interactions between vehicles is proposed. Spatial trajectory features of the neighboring vehicles are processed and goes through a masked scatter mechanism in a grid based environment, which is then combined with temporal trajectory of the vehicles. This combined trajectory data are learned by sequential LSTM encoding and Transformer based attention layers. The proposed model is benchmarked against predecessor LSTM based methods, including STA-LSTM, SA-LSTM, CS-LSTM, and NaiveLSTM. Our results, while not outperforming it's predecessor, demonstrate the potential of integrating Transformers with LSTM based technique to build interpretable trajectory prediction model. Future work will explore alternative architectures using Transformer applications to further enhance performance. This study provides a promising direction for improving trajectory prediction models by leveraging transformer based architectures, paving the way for more robust and interpretable vehicle trajectory prediction system.
Marigold-DC: Zero-Shot Monocular Depth Completion with Guided Diffusion
Authors: Massimiliano Viola, Kevin Qu, Nando Metzger, Bingxin Ke, Alexander Becker, Konrad Schindler, Anton Obukhov
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Depth Completion, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Zero-shot Generalization

Depth completion upgrades sparse depth measurements into dense depth maps guided by a conventional image. Existing methods for this highly ill-posed task operate in tightly constrained settings and tend to struggle when applied to images outside the training domain or when the available depth measurements are sparse, irregularly distributed, or of varying density. Inspired by recent advances in monocular depth estimation, we reframe depth completion as an image-conditional depth map generation guided by sparse measurements. Our method, Marigold-DC, builds on a pretrained latent diffusion model for monocular depth estimation and injects the depth observations as test-time guidance via an optimization scheme that runs in tandem with the iterative inference of denoising diffusion. The method exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization across a diverse range of environments and handles even extremely sparse guidance effectively. Our results suggest that contemporary monocular depth priors greatly robustify depth completion: it may be better to view the task as recovering dense depth from (dense) image pixels, guided by sparse depth; rather than as inpainting (sparse) depth, guided by an image. Project website: https://MarigoldDepthCompletion.github.io/
Bringing Multimodality to Amazon Visual Search System
Authors: Xinliang Zhu, Michael Huang, Han Ding, Jinyu Yang, Kelvin Chen, Tao Zhou, Tal Neiman, Ouye Xie, Son Tran, Benjamin Yao, Doug Gray, Anuj Bindal, Arnab Dhua
Date: 2024-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning

Image to image matching has been well studied in the computer vision community. Previous studies mainly focus on training a deep metric learning model matching visual patterns between the query image and gallery images. In this study, we show that pure image-to-image matching suffers from false positives caused by matching to local visual patterns. To alleviate this issue, we propose to leverage recent advances in vision-language pretraining research. Specifically, we introduce additional image-text alignment losses into deep metric learning, which serve as constraints to the image-to-image matching loss. With additional alignments between the text (e.g., product title) and image pairs, the model can learn concepts from both modalities explicitly, which avoids matching low-level visual features. We progressively develop two variants, a 3-tower and a 4-tower model, where the latter takes one more short text query input. Through extensive experiments, we show that this change leads to a substantial improvement to the image to image matching problem. We further leveraged this model for multimodal search, which takes both image and reformulation text queries to improve search quality. Both offline and online experiments show strong improvements on the main metrics. Specifically, we see 4.95% relative improvement on image matching click through rate with the 3-tower model and 1.13% further improvement from the 4-tower model.
Visual Deformation Detection Using Soft Material Simulation for Pre-training of Condition Assessment Models
Authors: Joel Sol, Amir M. Soufi Enayati, Homayoun Najjaran
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00

This paper addresses the challenge of geometric quality assurance in manufacturing, particularly when human assessment is required. It proposes using Blender, an open-source simulation tool, to create synthetic datasets for machine learning (ML) models. The process involves translating expert information into shape key parameters to simulate deformations, generating images for both deformed and non-deformed objects. The study explores the impact of discrepancies between real and simulated environments on ML model performance and investigates the effect of different simulation backgrounds on model sensitivity. Additionally, the study aims to enhance the model's robustness to camera positioning by generating datasets with a variety of randomized viewpoints. The entire process, from data synthesis to model training and testing, is implemented using a Python API interfacing with Blender. An experiment with a soda can object validates the accuracy of the proposed pipeline.
Image registration is a geometric deep learning task
Authors: Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa, Nil Stolt-Ansó, Martin Menten, Huaqi Qiu, Julian McGinnis, Daniel Rueckert
Date: 2024-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Registration

Data-driven deformable image registration methods predominantly rely on operations that process grid-like inputs. However, applying deformable transformations to an image results in a warped space that deviates from a rigid grid structure. Consequently, data-driven approaches with sequential deformations have to apply grid resampling operations between each deformation step. While artifacts caused by resampling are negligible in high-resolution images, the resampling of sparse, high-dimensional feature grids introduces errors that affect the deformation modeling process. Taking inspiration from Lagrangian reference frames of deformation fields, our work introduces a novel paradigm for data-driven deformable image registration that utilizes geometric deep-learning principles to model deformations without grid requirements. Specifically, we model image features as a set of nodes that freely move in Euclidean space, update their coordinates under graph operations, and dynamically readjust their local neighborhoods. We employ this formulation to construct a multi-resolution deformable registration model, where deformation layers iteratively refine the overall transformation at each resolution without intermediate resampling operations on the feature grids. We investigate our method's ability to fully deformably capture large deformations across a number of medical imaging registration tasks. In particular, we apply our approach (GeoReg) to the registration of inter-subject brain MR images and inhale-exhale lung CT images, showing on par performance with the current state-of-the-art methods. We believe our contribution open up avenues of research to reduce the black-box nature of current learned registration paradigms by explicitly modeling the transformation within the architecture.
CompactFlowNet: Efficient Real-time Optical Flow Estimation on Mobile Devices
Authors: Andrei Znobishchev, Valerii Filev, Oleg Kudashev, Nikita Orlov, Humphrey Shi
Date: 2024-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Motion Estimation, Object Tracking, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Generation, Video Restoration, Video Stabilization

We present CompactFlowNet, the first real-time mobile neural network for optical flow prediction, which involves determining the displacement of each pixel in an initial frame relative to the corresponding pixel in a subsequent frame. Optical flow serves as a fundamental building block for various video-related tasks, such as video restoration, motion estimation, video stabilization, object tracking, action recognition, and video generation. While current state-of-the-art methods prioritize accuracy, they often overlook constraints regarding speed and memory usage. Existing light models typically focus on reducing size but still exhibit high latency, compromise significantly on quality, or are optimized for high-performance GPUs, resulting in sub-optimal performance on mobile devices. This study aims to develop a mobile-optimized optical flow model by proposing a novel mobile device-compatible architecture, as well as enhancements to the training pipeline, which optimize the model for reduced weight, low memory utilization, and increased speed while maintaining minimal error. Our approach demonstrates superior or comparable performance to the state-of-the-art lightweight models on the challenging KITTI and Sintel benchmarks. Furthermore, it attains a significantly accelerated inference speed, thereby yielding real-time operational efficiency on the iPhone 8, while surpassing real-time performance levels on more advanced mobile devices.