pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Super-resolution of biomedical volumes with 2D supervision
Authors: Cheng Jiang, Alexander Gedeon, Yiwei Lyu, Eric Landgraf, Yufeng Zhang, Xinhai Hou, Akhil Kondepudi, Asadur Chowdury, Honglak Lee, Todd Hollon
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Super-Resolution

Volumetric biomedical microscopy has the potential to increase the diagnostic information extracted from clinical tissue specimens and improve the diagnostic accuracy of both human pathologists and computational pathology models. Unfortunately, barriers to integrating 3-dimensional (3D) volumetric microscopy into clinical medicine include long imaging times, poor depth / z-axis resolution, and an insufficient amount of high-quality volumetric data. Leveraging the abundance of high-resolution 2D microscopy data, we introduce masked slice diffusion for super-resolution (MSDSR), which exploits the inherent equivalence in the data-generating distribution across all spatial dimensions of biological specimens. This intrinsic characteristic allows for super-resolution models trained on high-resolution images from one plane (e.g., XY) to effectively generalize to others (XZ, YZ), overcoming the traditional dependency on orientation. We focus on the application of MSDSR to stimulated Raman histology (SRH), an optical imaging modality for biological specimen analysis and intraoperative diagnosis, characterized by its rapid acquisition of high-resolution 2D images but slow and costly optical z-sectioning. To evaluate MSDSR's efficacy, we introduce a new performance metric, SliceFID, and demonstrate MSDSR's superior performance over baseline models through extensive evaluations. Our findings reveal that MSDSR not only significantly enhances the quality and resolution of 3D volumetric data, but also addresses major obstacles hindering the broader application of 3D volumetric microscopy in clinical diagnostics and biomedical research.
A Review on Machine Learning Algorithms for Dust Aerosol Detection using Satellite Data
Authors: Nurul Rafi, Pablo Rivas
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00

Dust storms are associated with certain respiratory illnesses across different areas in the world. Researchers have devoted time and resources to study the elements surrounding dust storm phenomena. This paper reviews the efforts of those who have investigated dust aerosols using sensors onboard of satellites using machine learning-based approaches. We have reviewed the most common issues revolving dust aerosol modeling using different datasets and different sensors from a historical perspective. Our findings suggest that multi-spectral approaches based on linear and non-linear combinations of spectral bands are some of the most successful for visualization and quantitative analysis; however, when researchers have leveraged machine learning, performance has been improved and new opportunities to solve unique problems arise.
DeferredGS: Decoupled and Editable Gaussian Splatting with Deferred Shading
Authors: Tong Wu, Jia-Mu Sun, Yu-Kun Lai, Yuewen Ma, Leif Kobbelt, Lin Gao
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis

Reconstructing and editing 3D objects and scenes both play crucial roles in computer graphics and computer vision. Neural radiance fields (NeRFs) can achieve realistic reconstruction and editing results but suffer from inefficiency in rendering. Gaussian splatting significantly accelerates rendering by rasterizing Gaussian ellipsoids. However, Gaussian splatting utilizes a single Spherical Harmonic (SH) function to model both texture and lighting, limiting independent editing capabilities of these components. Recently, attempts have been made to decouple texture and lighting with the Gaussian splatting representation but may fail to produce plausible geometry and decomposition results on reflective scenes. Additionally, the forward shading technique they employ introduces noticeable blending artifacts during relighting, as the geometry attributes of Gaussians are optimized under the original illumination and may not be suitable for novel lighting conditions. To address these issues, we introduce DeferredGS, a method for decoupling and editing the Gaussian splatting representation using deferred shading. To achieve successful decoupling, we model the illumination with a learnable environment map and define additional attributes such as texture parameters and normal direction on Gaussians, where the normal is distilled from a jointly trained signed distance function. More importantly, we apply deferred shading, resulting in more realistic relighting effects compared to previous methods. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superior performance of DeferredGS in novel view synthesis and editing tasks.
Human-in-the-Loop Segmentation of Multi-species Coral Imagery
Authors: Scarlett Raine, Ross Marchant, Brano Kusy, Frederic Maire, Niko Suenderhauf, Tobias Fischer
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Marine surveys by robotic underwater and surface vehicles result in substantial quantities of coral reef imagery, however labeling these images is expensive and time-consuming for domain experts. Point label propagation is a technique that uses existing images labeled with sparse points to create augmented ground truth data, which can be used to train a semantic segmentation model. In this work, we show that recent advances in large foundation models facilitate the creation of augmented ground truth masks using only features extracted by the denoised version of the DINOv2 foundation model and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), without any pre-training. For images with extremely sparse labels, we present a labeling method based on human-in-the-loop principles, which greatly enhances annotation efficiency: in the case that there are 5 point labels per image, our human-in-the-loop method outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by 14.2% for pixel accuracy and 19.7% for mIoU; and by 8.9% and 18.3% if there are 10 point labels. When human-in-the-loop labeling is not available, using the denoised DINOv2 features with a KNN still improves on the prior state-of-the-art by 2.7% for pixel accuracy and 5.8% for mIoU (5 grid points). On the semantic segmentation task, we outperform the prior state-of-the-art by 8.8% for pixel accuracy and by 13.5% for mIoU when only 5 point labels are used for point label propagation. Additionally, we perform a comprehensive study into the impacts of the point label placement style and the number of points on the point label propagation quality, and make several recommendations for improving the efficiency of labeling images with points.
Masked and Shuffled Blind Spot Denoising for Real-World Images
Authors: Hamadi Chihaoui, Paolo Favaro
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

We introduce a novel approach to single image denoising based on the Blind Spot Denoising principle, which we call MAsked and SHuffled Blind Spot Denoising (MASH). We focus on the case of correlated noise, which often plagues real images. MASH is the result of a careful analysis to determine the relationships between the level of blindness (masking) of the input and the (unknown) noise correlation. Moreover, we introduce a shuffling technique to weaken the local correlation of noise, which in turn yields an additional denoising performance improvement. We evaluate MASH via extensive experiments on real-world noisy image datasets. We demonstrate on par or better results compared to existing self-supervised denoising methods.
Orientation-conditioned Facial Texture Mapping for Video-based Facial Remote Photoplethysmography Estimation
Authors: Sam Cantrill, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Lars Petersson, Hanna Suominen, Mohammad Ali Armin
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00

Camera-based remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contactless measurement of important physiological signals such as pulse rate (PR). However, dynamic and unconstrained subject motion introduces significant variability into the facial appearance in video, confounding the ability of video-based methods to accurately extract the rPPG signal. In this study, we leverage the 3D facial surface to construct a novel orientation-conditioned facial texture video representation which improves the motion robustness of existing video-based facial rPPG estimation methods. Our proposed method achieves a significant 18.2% performance improvement in cross-dataset testing on MMPD over our baseline using the PhysNet model trained on PURE, highlighting the efficacy and generalization benefits of our designed video representation. We demonstrate significant performance improvements of up to 29.6% in all tested motion scenarios in cross-dataset testing on MMPD, even in the presence of dynamic and unconstrained subject motion, emphasizing the benefits of disentangling motion through modeling the 3D facial surface for motion robust facial rPPG estimation. We validate the efficacy of our design decisions and the impact of different video processing steps through an ablation study. Our findings illustrate the potential strengths of exploiting the 3D facial surface as a general strategy for addressing dynamic and unconstrained subject motion in videos. The code is available at https://samcantrill.github.io/orientation-uv-rppg/.
$\textit{sweet}$- An Open Source Modular Platform for Contactless Hand Vascular Biometric Experiments
Authors: David Geissbühler, Sushil Bhattacharjee, Ketan Kotwal, Guillaume Clivaz, Sébastien Marcel
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Finger Vein Recognition

Current finger-vein or palm-vein recognition systems usually require direct contact of the subject with the apparatus. This can be problematic in environments where hygiene is of primary importance. In this work we present a contactless vascular biometrics sensor platform named \sweet which can be used for hand vascular biometrics studies (wrist, palm, and finger-vein) and surface features such as palmprint. It supports several acquisition modalities such as multi-spectral Near-Infrared (NIR), RGB-color, Stereo Vision (SV) and Photometric Stereo (PS). Using this platform we collect a dataset consisting of the fingers, palm and wrist vascular data of 120 subjects and develop a powerful 3D pipeline for the pre-processing of this data. We then present biometric experimental results, focusing on Finger-Vein Recognition (FVR). Finally, we discuss fusion of multiple modalities, such palm-vein combined with palm-print biometrics. The acquisition software, parts of the hardware design, the new FV dataset, as well as source-code for our experiments are publicly available for research purposes.
Adversarial Robustness Limits via Scaling-Law and Human-Alignment Studies
Authors: Brian R. Bartoldson, James Diffenderfer, Konstantinos Parasyris, Bhavya Kailkhura
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

This paper revisits the simple, long-studied, yet still unsolved problem of making image classifiers robust to imperceptible perturbations. Taking CIFAR10 as an example, SOTA clean accuracy is about $100$%, but SOTA robustness to $\ell_{\infty}$-norm bounded perturbations barely exceeds $70$%. To understand this gap, we analyze how model size, dataset size, and synthetic data quality affect robustness by developing the first scaling laws for adversarial training. Our scaling laws reveal inefficiencies in prior art and provide actionable feedback to advance the field. For instance, we discovered that SOTA methods diverge notably from compute-optimal setups, using excess compute for their level of robustness. Leveraging a compute-efficient setup, we surpass the prior SOTA with $20$% ($70$%) fewer training (inference) FLOPs. We trained various compute-efficient models, with our best achieving $74$% AutoAttack accuracy ($+3$% gain). However, our scaling laws also predict robustness slowly grows then plateaus at $90$%: dwarfing our new SOTA by scaling is impractical, and perfect robustness is impossible. To better understand this predicted limit, we carry out a small-scale human evaluation on the AutoAttack data that fools our top-performing model. Concerningly, we estimate that human performance also plateaus near $90$%, which we show to be attributable to $\ell_{\infty}$-constrained attacks' generation of invalid images not consistent with their original labels. Having characterized limiting roadblocks, we outline promising paths for future research.
Face-voice Association in Multilingual Environments (FAME) Challenge 2024 Evaluation Plan
Authors: Muhammad Saad Saeed, Shah Nawaz, Muhammad Salman Tahir, Rohan Kumar Das, Muhammad Zaigham Zaheer, Marta Moscati, Markus Schedl, Muhammad Haris Khan, Karthik Nandakumar, Muhammad Haroon Yousaf
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00

The advancements of technology have led to the use of multimodal systems in various real-world applications. Among them, the audio-visual systems are one of the widely used multimodal systems. In the recent years, associating face and voice of a person has gained attention due to presence of unique correlation between them. The Face-voice Association in Multilingual Environments (FAME) Challenge 2024 focuses on exploring face-voice association under a unique condition of multilingual scenario. This condition is inspired from the fact that half of the world's population is bilingual and most often people communicate under multilingual scenario. The challenge uses a dataset namely, Multilingual Audio-Visual (MAV-Celeb) for exploring face-voice association in multilingual environments. This report provides the details of the challenge, dataset, baselines and task details for the FAME Challenge.
In My Perspective, In My Hands: Accurate Egocentric 2D Hand Pose and Action Recognition
Authors: Wiktor Mucha, Martin Kampel
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Hand Pose Estimation, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Video Understanding

Action recognition is essential for egocentric video understanding, allowing automatic and continuous monitoring of Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) without user effort. Existing literature focuses on 3D hand pose input, which requires computationally intensive depth estimation networks or wearing an uncomfortable depth sensor. In contrast, there has been insufficient research in understanding 2D hand pose for egocentric action recognition, despite the availability of user-friendly smart glasses in the market capable of capturing a single RGB image. Our study aims to fill this research gap by exploring the field of 2D hand pose estimation for egocentric action recognition, making two contributions. Firstly, we introduce two novel approaches for 2D hand pose estimation, namely EffHandNet for single-hand estimation and EffHandEgoNet, tailored for an egocentric perspective, capturing interactions between hands and objects. Both methods outperform state-of-the-art models on H2O and FPHA public benchmarks. Secondly, we present a robust action recognition architecture from 2D hand and object poses. This method incorporates EffHandEgoNet, and a transformer-based action recognition method. Evaluated on H2O and FPHA datasets, our architecture has a faster inference time and achieves an accuracy of 91.32% and 94.43%, respectively, surpassing state of the art, including 3D-based methods. Our work demonstrates that using 2D skeletal data is a robust approach for egocentric action understanding. Extensive evaluation and ablation studies show the impact of the hand pose estimation approach, and how each input affects the overall performance.
A Simple Strategy for Body Estimation from Partial-View Images
Authors: Yafei Mao, Xuelu Li, Brandon Smith, Jinjin Li, Raja Bala
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Virtual Try-on

Virtual try-on and product personalization have become increasingly important in modern online shopping, highlighting the need for accurate body measurement estimation. Although previous research has advanced in estimating 3D body shapes from RGB images, the task is inherently ambiguous as the observed scale of human subjects in the images depends on two unknown factors: capture distance and body dimensions. This ambiguity is particularly pronounced in partial-view scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a modular and simple height normalization solution. This solution relocates the subject skeleton to the desired position, thereby normalizing the scale and disentangling the relationship between the two variables. Our experimental results demonstrate that integrating this technique into state-of-the-art human mesh reconstruction models significantly enhances partial body measurement estimation. Additionally, we illustrate the applicability of this approach to multi-view settings, showcasing its versatility.
A Novel State Space Model with Local Enhancement and State Sharing for Image Fusion
Authors: ZiHan Cao, Xiao Wu, Liang-Jian Deng, Yu Zhong
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Mamba, Pansharpening

In image fusion tasks, images from different sources possess distinct characteristics. This has driven the development of numerous methods to explore better ways of fusing them while preserving their respective characteristics.Mamba, as a state space model, has emerged in the field of natural language processing. Recently, many studies have attempted to extend Mamba to vision tasks. However, due to the nature of images different from causal language sequences, the limited state capacity of Mamba weakens its ability to model image information. Additionally, the sequence modeling ability of Mamba is only capable of spatial information and cannot effectively capture the rich spectral information in images. Motivated by these challenges, we customize and improve the vision Mamba network designed for the image fusion task. Specifically, we propose the local-enhanced vision Mamba block, dubbed as LEVM. The LEVM block can improve local information perception of the network and simultaneously learn local and global spatial information. Furthermore, we propose the state sharing technique to enhance spatial details and integrate spatial and spectral information. Finally, the overall network is a multi-scale structure based on vision Mamba, called LE-Mamba. Extensive experiments show the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art results on multispectral pansharpening and multispectral and hyperspectral image fusion datasets, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Codes can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/294coder/Efficient-MIF}.
RoofDiffusion: Constructing Roofs from Severely Corrupted Point Data via Diffusion
Authors: Kyle Shih-Huang Lo, Jörg Peters, Eric Spellman
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Data Augmentation, Denoising, Depth Completion

Accurate completion and denoising of roof height maps are crucial to reconstructing high-quality 3D buildings. Repairing sparse points can enhance low-cost sensor use and reduce UAV flight overlap. RoofDiffusion is a new end-to-end self-supervised diffusion technique for robustly completing, in particular difficult, roof height maps. RoofDiffusion leverages widely-available curated footprints and can so handle up to 99\% point sparsity and 80\% roof area occlusion (regional incompleteness). A variant, No-FP RoofDiffusion, simultaneously predicts building footprints and heights. Both quantitatively outperform state-of-the-art unguided depth completion and representative inpainting methods for Digital Elevation Models (DEM), on both a roof-specific benchmark and the BuildingNet dataset. Qualitative assessments show the effectiveness of RoofDiffusion for datasets with real-world scans including AHN3, Dales3D, and USGS 3DEP LiDAR. Tested with the leading City3D algorithm, preprocessing height maps with RoofDiffusion noticeably improves 3D building reconstruction. RoofDiffusion is complemented by a new dataset of 13k complex roof geometries, focusing on long-tail issues in remote sensing; a novel simulation of tree occlusion; and a wide variety of large-area roof cut-outs for data augmentation and benchmarking.
SyntStereo2Real: Edge-Aware GAN for Remote Sensing Image-to-Image Translation while Maintaining Stereo Constraint
Authors: Vasudha Venkatesan, Daniel Panangian, Mario Fuentes Reyes, Ksenia Bittner
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Generalization, Image-to-Image Translation, Stereo Matching, Translation

In the field of remote sensing, the scarcity of stereo-matched and particularly lack of accurate ground truth data often hinders the training of deep neural networks. The use of synthetically generated images as an alternative, alleviates this problem but suffers from the problem of domain generalization. Unifying the capabilities of image-to-image translation and stereo-matching presents an effective solution to address the issue of domain generalization. Current methods involve combining two networks, an unpaired image-to-image translation network and a stereo-matching network, while jointly optimizing them. We propose an edge-aware GAN-based network that effectively tackles both tasks simultaneously. We obtain edge maps of input images from the Sobel operator and use it as an additional input to the encoder in the generator to enforce geometric consistency during translation. We additionally include a warping loss calculated from the translated images to maintain the stereo consistency. We demonstrate that our model produces qualitatively and quantitatively superior results than existing models, and its applicability extends to diverse domains, including autonomous driving.
VRS-NeRF: Visual Relocalization with Sparse Neural Radiance Field
Authors: Fei Xue, Ignas Budvytis, Daniel Olmeda Reino, Roberto Cipolla
Date: 2024-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, NeRF, regression

Visual relocalization is a key technique to autonomous driving, robotics, and virtual/augmented reality. After decades of explorations, absolute pose regression (APR), scene coordinate regression (SCR), and hierarchical methods (HMs) have become the most popular frameworks. However, in spite of high efficiency, APRs and SCRs have limited accuracy especially in large-scale outdoor scenes; HMs are accurate but need to store a large number of 2D descriptors for matching, resulting in poor efficiency. In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate framework, called VRS-NeRF, for visual relocalization with sparse neural radiance field. Precisely, we introduce an explicit geometric map (EGM) for 3D map representation and an implicit learning map (ILM) for sparse patches rendering. In this localization process, EGP provides priors of spare 2D points and ILM utilizes these sparse points to render patches with sparse NeRFs for matching. This allows us to discard a large number of 2D descriptors so as to reduce the map size. Moreover, rendering patches only for useful points rather than all pixels in the whole image reduces the rendering time significantly. This framework inherits the accuracy of HMs and discards their low efficiency. Experiments on 7Scenes, CambridgeLandmarks, and Aachen datasets show that our method gives much better accuracy than APRs and SCRs, and close performance to HMs but is much more efficient.