pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CAD-NeRF: Learning NeRFs from Uncalibrated Few-view Images by CAD Model Retrieval
Authors: Xin Wen, Xuening Zhu, Renjiao Yi, Zhifeng Wang, Chenyang Zhu, Kai Xu
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Pose Retrieval, Retrieval

Reconstructing from multi-view images is a longstanding problem in 3D vision, where neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have shown great potential and get realistic rendered images of novel views. Currently, most NeRF methods either require accurate camera poses or a large number of input images, or even both. Reconstructing NeRF from few-view images without poses is challenging and highly ill-posed. To address this problem, we propose CAD-NeRF, a method reconstructed from less than 10 images without any known poses. Specifically, we build a mini library of several CAD models from ShapeNet and render them from many random views. Given sparse-view input images, we run a model and pose retrieval from the library, to get a model with similar shapes, serving as the density supervision and pose initializations. Here we propose a multi-view pose retrieval method to avoid pose conflicts among views, which is a new and unseen problem in uncalibrated NeRF methods. Then, the geometry of the object is trained by the CAD guidance. The deformation of the density field and camera poses are optimized jointly. Then texture and density are trained and fine-tuned as well. All training phases are in self-supervised manners. Comprehensive evaluations of synthetic and real images show that CAD-NeRF successfully learns accurate densities with a large deformation from retrieved CAD models, showing the generalization abilities.
Exploring Seasonal Variability in the Context of Neural Radiance Fields for 3D Reconstruction on Satellite Imagery
Authors: Liv Kåreborn, Erica Ingerstad, Amanda Berg, Justus Karlsson, Leif Haglund
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, NeRF

In this work, the seasonal predictive capabilities of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) applied to satellite images are investigated. Focusing on the utilization of satellite data, the study explores how Sat-NeRF, a novel approach in computer vision, performs in predicting seasonal variations across different months. Through comprehensive analysis and visualization, the study examines the model's ability to capture and predict seasonal changes, highlighting specific challenges and strengths. Results showcase the impact of the sun direction on predictions, revealing nuanced details in seasonal transitions, such as snow cover, color accuracy, and texture representation in different landscapes. Given these results, we propose Planet-NeRF, an extension to Sat-NeRF capable of incorporating seasonal variability through a set of month embedding vectors. Comparative evaluations reveal that Planet-NeRF outperforms prior models in the case where seasonal changes are present. The extensive evaluation combined with the proposed method offers promising avenues for future research in this domain.
Multi-modal NeRF Self-Supervision for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Xavier Timoneda, Markus Herb, Fabian Duerr, Daniel Goehring, Fisher Yu
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Adaptation, LIDAR Semantic Segmentation, NeRF, Semantic Segmentation

LiDAR Semantic Segmentation is a fundamental task in autonomous driving perception consisting of associating each LiDAR point to a semantic label. Fully-supervised models have widely tackled this task, but they require labels for each scan, which either limits their domain or requires impractical amounts of expensive annotations. Camera images, which are generally recorded alongside LiDAR pointclouds, can be processed by the widely available 2D foundation models, which are generic and dataset-agnostic. However, distilling knowledge from 2D data to improve LiDAR perception raises domain adaptation challenges. For example, the classical perspective projection suffers from the parallax effect produced by the position shift between both sensors at their respective capture times. We propose a Semi-Supervised Learning setup to leverage unlabeled LiDAR pointclouds alongside distilled knowledge from the camera images. To self-supervise our model on the unlabeled scans, we add an auxiliary NeRF head and cast rays from the camera viewpoint over the unlabeled voxel features. The NeRF head predicts densities and semantic logits at each sampled ray location which are used for rendering pixel semantics. Concurrently, we query the Segment-Anything (SAM) foundation model with the camera image to generate a set of unlabeled generic masks. We fuse the masks with the rendered pixel semantics from LiDAR to produce pseudo-labels that supervise the pixel predictions. During inference, we drop the NeRF head and run our model with only LiDAR. We show the effectiveness of our approach in three public LiDAR Semantic Segmentation benchmarks: nuScenes, SemanticKITTI and ScribbleKITTI.
LDPM: Towards undersampled MRI reconstruction with MR-VAE and Latent Diffusion Prior
Authors: Xingjian Tang, Jingwei Guan, Linge Li, Ran Shi, Youmei Zhang, Mengye Lyu, Li Yan
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, MRI Reconstruction

Diffusion models, as powerful generative models, have found a wide range of applications and shown great potential in solving image reconstruction problems. Some works attempted to solve MRI reconstruction with diffusion models, but these methods operate directly in pixel space, leading to higher computational costs for optimization and inference. Latent diffusion models, pre-trained on natural images with rich visual priors, are expected to solve the high computational cost problem in MRI reconstruction by operating in a lower-dimensional latent space. However, direct application to MRI reconstruction faces three key challenges: (1) absence of explicit control mechanisms for medical fidelity, (2) domain gap between natural images and MR physics, and (3) undefined data consistency in latent space. To address these challenges, a novel Latent Diffusion Prior-based undersampled MRI reconstruction (LDPM) method is proposed. Our LDPM framework addresses these challenges by: (1) a sketch-guided pipeline with a two-step reconstruction strategy, which balances perceptual quality and anatomical fidelity, (2) an MRI-optimized VAE (MR-VAE), which achieves an improvement of approximately 3.92 dB in PSNR for undersampled MRI reconstruction compared to that with SD-VAE \cite{sd}, and (3) Dual-Stage Sampler, a modified version of spaced DDPM sampler, which enforces high-fidelity reconstruction in the latent space. Experiments on the fastMRI dataset\cite{fastmri} demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method and its robustness across various scenarios. The effectiveness of each module is also verified through ablation experiments.
Mapping Africa Settlements: High Resolution Urban and Rural Map by Deep Learning and Satellite Imagery
Authors: Mohammad Kakooei, James Bailie, Albin Söderberg, Albin Becevic, Adel Daoud
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Semantic Segmentation

Accurate Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) maps are essential for understanding the drivers of sustainable development, in terms of its complex interrelationships between human activities and natural resources. However, existing LULC maps often lack precise urban and rural classifications, particularly in diverse regions like Africa. This study presents a novel construction of a high-resolution rural-urban map using deep learning techniques and satellite imagery. We developed a deep learning model based on the DeepLabV3 architecture, which was trained on satellite imagery from Landsat-8 and the ESRI LULC dataset, augmented with human settlement data from the GHS-SMOD. The model utilizes semantic segmentation to classify land into detailed categories, including urban and rural areas, at a 10-meter resolution. Our findings demonstrate that incorporating LULC along with urban and rural classifications significantly enhances the model's ability to accurately distinguish between urban, rural, and non-human settlement areas. Therefore, our maps can support more informed decision-making for policymakers, researchers, and stakeholders. We release a continent wide urban-rural map, covering the period 2016 and 2022.
Fried deconvolution
Authors: Jerome Gilles, Stanley Osher
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00

In this paper we present a new approach to deblur the effect of atmospheric turbulence in the case of long range imaging. Our method is based on an analytical formulation, the Fried kernel, of the atmosphere modulation transfer function (MTF) and a framelet based deconvolution algorithm. An important parameter is the refractive index structure which requires specific measurements to be known. Then we propose a method which provides a good estimation of this parameter from the input blurred image. The final algorithms are very easy to implement and show very good results on both simulated blur and real images.
Turbulence stabilization
Authors: Yu Mao, Jerome Gilles
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00

We recently developed a new approach to get a stabilized image from a sequence of frames acquired through atmospheric turbulence. The goal of this algorihtm is to remove the geometric distortions due by the atmosphere movements. This method is based on a variational formulation and is efficiently solved by the use of Bregman iterations and the operator splitting method. In this paper we propose to study the influence of the choice of the regularizing term in the model. Then we proposed to experiment some of the most used regularization constraints available in the litterature.
A Symmetric Dynamic Learning Framework for Diffeomorphic Medical Image Registration
Authors: Jinqiu Deng, Ke Chen, Mingke Li, Daoping Zhang, Chong Chen, Alejandro F. Frangi, Jianping Zhang
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diffeomorphic Medical Image Registration, Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Diffeomorphic image registration is crucial for various medical imaging applications because it can preserve the topology of the transformation. This study introduces DCCNN-LSTM-Reg, a learning framework that evolves dynamically and learns a symmetrical registration path by satisfying a specified control increment system. This framework aims to obtain symmetric diffeomorphic deformations between moving and fixed images. To achieve this, we combine deep learning networks with diffeomorphic mathematical mechanisms to create a continuous and dynamic registration architecture, which consists of multiple Symmetric Registration (SR) modules cascaded on five different scales. Specifically, our method first uses two U-nets with shared parameters to extract multiscale feature pyramids from the images. We then develop an SR-module comprising a sequential CNN-LSTM architecture to progressively correct the forward and reverse multiscale deformation fields using control increment learning and the homotopy continuation technique. Through extensive experiments on three 3D registration tasks, we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
Enhancing Adversarial Robustness via Uncertainty-Aware Distributional Adversarial Training
Authors: Junhao Dong, Xinghua Qu, Z. Jane Wang, Yew-Soon Ong
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Diversity

Despite remarkable achievements in deep learning across various domains, its inherent vulnerability to adversarial examples still remains a critical concern for practical deployment. Adversarial training has emerged as one of the most effective defensive techniques for improving model robustness against such malicious inputs. However, existing adversarial training schemes often lead to limited generalization ability against underlying adversaries with diversity due to their overreliance on a point-by-point augmentation strategy by mapping each clean example to its adversarial counterpart during training. In addition, adversarial examples can induce significant disruptions in the statistical information w.r.t. the target model, thereby introducing substantial uncertainty and challenges to modeling the distribution of adversarial examples. To circumvent these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware distributional adversarial training method, which enforces adversary modeling by leveraging both the statistical information of adversarial examples and its corresponding uncertainty estimation, with the goal of augmenting the diversity of adversaries. Considering the potentially negative impact induced by aligning adversaries to misclassified clean examples, we also refine the alignment reference based on the statistical proximity to clean examples during adversarial training, thereby reframing adversarial training within a distribution-to-distribution matching framework interacted between the clean and adversarial domains. Furthermore, we design an introspective gradient alignment approach via matching input gradients between these domains without introducing external models. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets and various network architectures demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art adversarial robustness and maintains natural performance.
Centerness-based Instance-aware Knowledge Distillation with Task-wise Mutual Lifting for Object Detection on Drone Imagery
Authors: Bowei Du, Zhixuan Liao, Yanan Zhang, Zhi Cai, Jiaxin Chen, Di Huang
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection

Developing accurate and efficient detectors for drone imagery is challenging due to the inherent complexity of aerial scenes. While some existing methods aim to achieve high accuracy by utilizing larger models, their computational cost is prohibitive for drones. Recently, Knowledge Distillation (KD) has shown promising potential for maintaining satisfactory accuracy while significantly compressing models in general object detection. Considering the advantages of KD, this paper presents the first attempt to adapt it to object detection on drone imagery and addresses two intrinsic issues: (1) low foreground-background ratio and (2) small instances and complex backgrounds, which lead to inadequate training, resulting insufficient distillation. Therefore, we propose a task-wise Lightweight Mutual Lifting (Light-ML) module with a Centerness-based Instance-aware Distillation (CID) strategy. The Light-ML module mutually harmonizes the classification and localization branches by channel shuffling and convolution, integrating teacher supervision across different tasks during back-propagation, thus facilitating training the student model. The CID strategy extracts valuable regions surrounding instances through the centerness of proposals, enhancing distillation efficacy. Experiments on the VisDrone, UAVDT, and COCO benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach promotes the accuracies of existing state-of-the-art KD methods with comparable computational requirements. Codes will be available upon acceptance.
Continual Audio-Visual Sound Separation
Authors: Weiguo Pian, Yiyang Nan, Shijian Deng, Shentong Mo, Yunhui Guo, Yapeng Tian
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

In this paper, we introduce a novel continual audio-visual sound separation task, aiming to continuously separate sound sources for new classes while preserving performance on previously learned classes, with the aid of visual guidance. This problem is crucial for practical visually guided auditory perception as it can significantly enhance the adaptability and robustness of audio-visual sound separation models, making them more applicable for real-world scenarios where encountering new sound sources is commonplace. The task is inherently challenging as our models must not only effectively utilize information from both modalities in current tasks but also preserve their cross-modal association in old tasks to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during audio-visual continual learning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach named ContAV-Sep (\textbf{Cont}inual \textbf{A}udio-\textbf{V}isual Sound \textbf{Sep}aration). ContAV-Sep presents a novel Cross-modal Similarity Distillation Constraint (CrossSDC) to uphold the cross-modal semantic similarity through incremental tasks and retain previously acquired knowledge of semantic similarity in old models, mitigating the risk of catastrophic forgetting. The CrossSDC can seamlessly integrate into the training process of different audio-visual sound separation frameworks. Experiments demonstrate that ContAV-Sep can effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting and achieve significantly better performance compared to other continual learning baselines for audio-visual sound separation. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/weiguoPian/ContAV-Sep_NeurIPS2024}.
OLAF: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Enhanced Multi-object Multi-part Scene Parsing
Authors: Pranav Gupta, Rishubh Singh, Pradeep Shenoy, Ravikiran Sarvadevabhatla
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Parsing, Scene Segmentation

Multi-object multi-part scene segmentation is a challenging task whose complexity scales exponentially with part granularity and number of scene objects. To address the task, we propose a plug-and-play approach termed OLAF. First, we augment the input (RGB) with channels containing object-based structural cues (fg/bg mask, boundary edge mask). We propose a weight adaptation technique which enables regular (RGB) pre-trained models to process the augmented (5-channel) input in a stable manner during optimization. In addition, we introduce an encoder module termed LDF to provide low-level dense feature guidance. This assists segmentation, particularly for smaller parts. OLAF enables significant mIoU gains of $\mathbf{3.3}$ (Pascal-Parts-58), $\mathbf{3.5}$ (Pascal-Parts-108) over the SOTA model. On the most challenging variant (Pascal-Parts-201), the gain is $\mathbf{4.0}$. Experimentally, we show that OLAF's broad applicability enables gains across multiple architectures (CNN, U-Net, Transformer) and datasets. The code is available at olafseg.github.io
Analyzing Poverty through Intra-Annual Time-Series: A Wavelet Transform Approach
Authors: Mohammad Kakooei, Klaudia Solska, Adel Daoud
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation, Time Series

Reducing global poverty is a key objective of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Achieving this requires high-frequency, granular data to capture neighborhood-level changes, particularly in data scarce regions such as low- and middle-income countries. To fill in the data gaps, recent computer vision methods combining machine learning (ML) with earth observation (EO) data to improve poverty estimation. However, while much progress have been made, they often omit intra-annual variations, which are crucial for estimating poverty in agriculturally dependent countries. We explored the impact of integrating intra-annual NDVI information with annual multi-spectral data on model accuracy. To evaluate our method, we created a simulated dataset using Landsat imagery and nighttime light data to evaluate EO-ML methods that use intra-annual EO data. Additionally, we evaluated our method against the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) dataset across Africa. Our results indicate that integrating specific NDVI-derived features with multi-spectral data provides valuable insights for poverty analysis, emphasizing the importance of retaining intra-annual information.
Advances in Photoacoustic Imaging Reconstruction and Quantitative Analysis for Biomedical Applications
Authors: Lei Wang, Weiming Zeng, Kai Long, Hongyu Chen, Rongfeng Lan, Li Liu, Wai Ting Siok, Nizhuan Wang
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) represents an innovative biomedical imaging modality that harnesses the advantages of optical resolution and acoustic penetration depth while ensuring enhanced safety. Despite its promising potential across a diverse array of preclinical and clinical applications, the clinical implementation of PAI faces significant challenges, including the trade-off between penetration depth and spatial resolution, as well as the demand for faster imaging speeds. This paper explores the fundamental principles underlying PAI, with a particular emphasis on three primary implementations: photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT), photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), and photoacoustic endoscopy (PAE). We undertake a critical assessment of their respective strengths and practical limitations. Furthermore, recent developments in utilizing conventional or deep learning (DL) methodologies for image reconstruction and artefact mitigation across PACT, PAM, and PAE are outlined, demonstrating considerable potential to enhance image quality and accelerate imaging processes. Furthermore, this paper examines the recent developments in quantitative analysis within PAI, including the quantification of haemoglobin concentration, oxygen saturation, and other physiological parameters within tissues. Finally, our discussion encompasses current trends and future directions in PAI research while emphasizing the transformative impact of deep learning on advancing PAI.
Test-Time Dynamic Image Fusion
Authors: Bing Cao, Yinan Xia, Yi Ding, Changqing Zhang, QinGhua Hu
Date: 2024-11-05 00:00:00

The inherent challenge of image fusion lies in capturing the correlation of multi-source images and comprehensively integrating effective information from different sources. Most existing techniques fail to perform dynamic image fusion while notably lacking theoretical guarantees, leading to potential deployment risks in this field. Is it possible to conduct dynamic image fusion with a clear theoretical justification? In this paper, we give our solution from a generalization perspective. We proceed to reveal the generalized form of image fusion and derive a new test-time dynamic image fusion paradigm. It provably reduces the upper bound of generalization error. Specifically, we decompose the fused image into multiple components corresponding to its source data. The decomposed components represent the effective information from the source data, thus the gap between them reflects the Relative Dominability (RD) of the uni-source data in constructing the fusion image. Theoretically, we prove that the key to reducing generalization error hinges on the negative correlation between the RD-based fusion weight and the uni-source reconstruction loss. Intuitively, RD dynamically highlights the dominant regions of each source and can be naturally converted to the corresponding fusion weight, achieving robust results. Extensive experiments and discussions with in-depth analysis on multiple benchmarks confirm our findings and superiority. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yinan-Xia/TTD.