pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Rejection Sampling IMLE: Designing Priors for Better Few-Shot Image Synthesis
Authors: Chirag Vashist, Shichong Peng, Ke Li
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

An emerging area of research aims to learn deep generative models with limited training data. Prior generative models like GANs and diffusion models require a lot of data to perform well, and their performance degrades when they are trained on only a small amount of data. A recent technique called Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE) has been adapted to the few-shot setting, achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, current IMLE-based approaches encounter challenges due to inadequate correspondence between the latent codes selected for training and those drawn during inference. This results in suboptimal test-time performance. We theoretically show a way to address this issue and propose RS-IMLE, a novel approach that changes the prior distribution used for training. This leads to substantially higher quality image generation compared to existing GAN and IMLE-based methods, as validated by comprehensive experiments conducted on nine few-shot image datasets.
HazeSpace2M: A Dataset for Haze Aware Single Image Dehazing
Authors: MD Tanvir Islam, Nasir Rahim, Saeed Anwar, Muhammad Saqib, Sambit Bakshi, Khan Muhammad
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing, SSIM

Reducing the atmospheric haze and enhancing image clarity is crucial for computer vision applications. The lack of real-life hazy ground truth images necessitates synthetic datasets, which often lack diverse haze types, impeding effective haze type classification and dehazing algorithm selection. This research introduces the HazeSpace2M dataset, a collection of over 2 million images designed to enhance dehazing through haze type classification. HazeSpace2M includes diverse scenes with 10 haze intensity levels, featuring Fog, Cloud, and Environmental Haze (EH). Using the dataset, we introduce a technique of haze type classification followed by specialized dehazers to clear hazy images. Unlike conventional methods, our approach classifies haze types before applying type-specific dehazing, improving clarity in real-life hazy images. Benchmarking with state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, ResNet50 and AlexNet achieve 92.75\% and 92.50\% accuracy, respectively, against existing synthetic datasets. However, these models achieve only 80% and 70% accuracy, respectively, against our Real Hazy Testset (RHT), highlighting the challenging nature of our HazeSpace2M dataset. Additional experiments show that haze type classification followed by specialized dehazing improves results by 2.41% in PSNR, 17.14% in SSIM, and 10.2\% in MSE over general dehazers. Moreover, when testing with SOTA dehazing models, we found that applying our proposed framework significantly improves their performance. These results underscore the significance of HazeSpace2M and our proposed framework in addressing atmospheric haze in multimedia processing. Complete code and dataset is available on \href{https://github.com/tanvirnwu/HazeSpace2M} {\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{GitHub}}}.
Optical Lens Attack on Deep Learning Based Monocular Depth Estimation
Authors: Ce Zhou, Qiben Yan, Daniel Kent, Guangjing Wang, Ziqi Zhang, Hayder Radha
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Learning, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation

Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) plays a crucial role in vision-based Autonomous Driving (AD) systems. It utilizes a single-camera image to determine the depth of objects, facilitating driving decisions such as braking a few meters in front of a detected obstacle or changing lanes to avoid collision. In this paper, we investigate the security risks associated with monocular vision-based depth estimation algorithms utilized by AD systems. By exploiting the vulnerabilities of MDE and the principles of optical lenses, we introduce LensAttack, a physical attack that involves strategically placing optical lenses on the camera of an autonomous vehicle to manipulate the perceived object depths. LensAttack encompasses two attack formats: concave lens attack and convex lens attack, each utilizing different optical lenses to induce false depth perception. We begin by constructing a mathematical model of our attack, incorporating various attack parameters. Subsequently, we simulate the attack and evaluate its real-world performance in driving scenarios to demonstrate its effect on state-of-the-art MDE models. The results highlight the significant impact of LensAttack on the accuracy of depth estimation in AD systems.
Improving satellite imagery segmentation using multiple Sentinel-2 revisits
Authors: Kartik Jindgar, Grace W. Lindsay
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Density Estimation

In recent years, analysis of remote sensing data has benefited immensely from borrowing techniques from the broader field of computer vision, such as the use of shared models pre-trained on large and diverse datasets. However, satellite imagery has unique features that are not accounted for in traditional computer vision, such as the existence of multiple revisits of the same location. Here, we explore the best way to use revisits in the framework of fine-tuning pre-trained remote sensing models. We focus on an applied research question of relevance to climate change mitigation -- power substation segmentation -- that is representative of applied uses of pre-trained models more generally. Through extensive tests of different multi-temporal input schemes across diverse model architectures, we find that fusing representations from multiple revisits in the model latent space is superior to other methods of using revisits, including as a form of data augmentation. We also find that a SWIN Transformer-based architecture performs better than U-nets and ViT-based models. We verify the generality of our results on a separate building density estimation task.
A vision-based framework for human behavior understanding in industrial assembly lines
Authors: Konstantinos Papoutsakis, Nikolaos Bakalos, Konstantinos Fragkoulis, Athena Zacharia, Georgia Kapetadimitri, Maria Pateraki
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Analysis

This paper introduces a vision-based framework for capturing and understanding human behavior in industrial assembly lines, focusing on car door manufacturing. The framework leverages advanced computer vision techniques to estimate workers' locations and 3D poses and analyze work postures, actions, and task progress. A key contribution is the introduction of the CarDA dataset, which contains domain-relevant assembly actions captured in a realistic setting to support the analysis of the framework for human pose and action analysis. The dataset comprises time-synchronized multi-camera RGB-D videos, motion capture data recorded in a real car manufacturing environment, and annotations for EAWS-based ergonomic risk scores and assembly activities. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in classifying worker postures and robust performance in monitoring assembly task progress.
SeaSplat: Representing Underwater Scenes with 3D Gaussian Splatting and a Physically Grounded Image Formation Model
Authors: Daniel Yang, John J. Leonard, Yogesh Girdhar
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, NeRF

We introduce SeaSplat, a method to enable real-time rendering of underwater scenes leveraging recent advances in 3D radiance fields. Underwater scenes are challenging visual environments, as rendering through a medium such as water introduces both range and color dependent effects on image capture. We constrain 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a recent advance in radiance fields enabling rapid training and real-time rendering of full 3D scenes, with a physically grounded underwater image formation model. Applying SeaSplat to the real-world scenes from SeaThru-NeRF dataset, a scene collected by an underwater vehicle in the US Virgin Islands, and simulation-degraded real-world scenes, not only do we see increased quantitative performance on rendering novel viewpoints from the scene with the medium present, but are also able to recover the underlying true color of the scene and restore renders to be without the presence of the intervening medium. We show that the underwater image formation helps learn scene structure, with better depth maps, as well as show that our improvements maintain the significant computational improvements afforded by leveraging a 3D Gaussian representation.
Energy-Efficient & Real-Time Computer Vision with Intelligent Skipping via Reconfigurable CMOS Image Sensors
Authors: Md Abdullah-Al Kaiser, Sreetama Sarkar, Peter A. Beerel, Akhilesh R. Jaiswal, Gourav Datta
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Gaze Estimation, object-detection, Object Detection

Current video-based computer vision (CV) applications typically suffer from high energy consumption due to reading and processing all pixels in a frame, regardless of their significance. While previous works have attempted to reduce this energy by skipping input patches or pixels and using feedback from the end task to guide the skipping algorithm, the skipping is not performed during the sensor read phase. As a result, these methods can not optimize the front-end sensor energy. Moreover, they may not be suitable for real-time applications due to the long latency of modern CV networks that are deployed in the back-end. To address this challenge, this paper presents a custom-designed reconfigurable CMOS image sensor (CIS) system that improves energy efficiency by selectively skipping uneventful regions or rows within a frame during the sensor's readout phase, and the subsequent analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) phase. A novel masking algorithm intelligently directs the skipping process in real-time, optimizing both the front-end sensor and back-end neural networks for applications including autonomous driving and augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR). Our system can also operate in standard mode without skipping, depending on application needs. We evaluate our hardware-algorithm co-design framework on object detection based on BDD100K and ImageNetVID, and gaze estimation based on OpenEDS, achieving up to 53% reduction in front-end sensor energy while maintaining state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy.
ChatCam: Empowering Camera Control through Conversational AI
Authors: Xinhang Liu, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00

Cinematographers adeptly capture the essence of the world, crafting compelling visual narratives through intricate camera movements. Witnessing the strides made by large language models in perceiving and interacting with the 3D world, this study explores their capability to control cameras with human language guidance. We introduce ChatCam, a system that navigates camera movements through conversations with users, mimicking a professional cinematographer's workflow. To achieve this, we propose CineGPT, a GPT-based autoregressive model for text-conditioned camera trajectory generation. We also develop an Anchor Determinator to ensure precise camera trajectory placement. ChatCam understands user requests and employs our proposed tools to generate trajectories, which can be used to render high-quality video footage on radiance field representations. Our experiments, including comparisons to state-of-the-art approaches and user studies, demonstrate our approach's ability to interpret and execute complex instructions for camera operation, showing promising applications in real-world production settings.
VL4AD: Vision-Language Models Improve Pixel-wise Anomaly Detection
Authors: Liangyu Zhong, Joachim Sicking, Fabian Hüger, Hanno Gottschalk
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Anomaly Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation networks have achieved significant success under the assumption of independent and identically distributed data. However, these networks often struggle to detect anomalies from unknown semantic classes due to the limited set of visual concepts they are typically trained on. To address this issue, anomaly segmentation often involves fine-tuning on outlier samples, necessitating additional efforts for data collection, labeling, and model retraining. Seeking to avoid this cumbersome work, we take a different approach and propose to incorporate Vision-Language (VL) encoders into existing anomaly detectors to leverage the semantically broad VL pre-training for improved outlier awareness. Additionally, we propose a new scoring function that enables data- and training-free outlier supervision via textual prompts. The resulting VL4AD model, which includes max-logit prompt ensembling and a class-merging strategy, achieves competitive performance on widely used benchmark datasets, thereby demonstrating the potential of vision-language models for pixel-wise anomaly detection.
Bi-TTA: Bidirectional Test-Time Adapter for Remote Physiological Measurement
Authors: Haodong Li, Hao Lu, Ying-Cong Chen
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Test-time Adaptation

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is gaining prominence for its non-invasive approach to monitoring physiological signals using only cameras. Despite its promise, the adaptability of rPPG models to new, unseen domains is hindered due to the environmental sensitivity of physiological signals. To address this, we pioneer the Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) in rPPG, enabling the adaptation of pre-trained models to the target domain during inference, sidestepping the need for annotations or source data due to privacy considerations. Particularly, utilizing only the user's face video stream as the accessible target domain data, the rPPG model is adjusted by tuning on each single instance it encounters. However, 1) TTA algorithms are designed predominantly for classification tasks, ill-suited in regression tasks such as rPPG due to inadequate supervision. 2) Tuning pre-trained models in a single-instance manner introduces variability and instability, posing challenges to effectively filtering domain-relevant from domain-irrelevant features while simultaneously preserving the learned information. To overcome these challenges, we present Bi-TTA, a novel expert knowledge-based Bidirectional Test-Time Adapter framework. Specifically, leveraging two expert-knowledge priors for providing self-supervision, our Bi-TTA primarily comprises two modules: a prospective adaptation (PA) module using sharpness-aware minimization to eliminate domain-irrelevant noise, enhancing the stability and efficacy during the adaptation process, and a retrospective stabilization (RS) module to dynamically reinforce crucial learned model parameters, averting performance degradation caused by overfitting or catastrophic forgetting. To this end, we established a large-scale benchmark for rPPG tasks under TTA protocol. The experimental results demonstrate the significant superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art.
Disco4D: Disentangled 4D Human Generation and Animation from a Single Image
Authors: Hui En Pang, Shuai Liu, Zhongang Cai, Lei Yang, Tianwei Zhang, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: 3D Generation, Human Animation

We present \textbf{Disco4D}, a novel Gaussian Splatting framework for 4D human generation and animation from a single image. Different from existing methods, Disco4D distinctively disentangles clothings (with Gaussian models) from the human body (with SMPL-X model), significantly enhancing the generation details and flexibility. It has the following technical innovations. \textbf{1)} Disco4D learns to efficiently fit the clothing Gaussians over the SMPL-X Gaussians. \textbf{2)} It adopts diffusion models to enhance the 3D generation process, \textit{e.g.}, modeling occluded parts not visible in the input image. \textbf{3)} It learns an identity encoding for each clothing Gaussian to facilitate the separation and extraction of clothing assets. Furthermore, Disco4D naturally supports 4D human animation with vivid dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of Disco4D on 4D human generation and animation tasks. Our visualizations can be found in \url{https://disco-4d.github.io/}.
Targeted Neural Architectures in Multi-Objective Frameworks for Complete Glioma Characterization from Multimodal MRI
Authors: Shravan Venkatraman, Pandiyaraju V, Abeshek A, Aravintakshan S A, Pavan Kumar S, Kannan A, Madhan S
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumors result from abnormal cell growth in brain tissue. If undiagnosed, they cause neurological deficits, including cognitive impairment, motor dysfunction, and sensory loss. As tumors grow, intracranial pressure increases, potentially leading to fatal complications such as brain herniation. Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial to controlling these effects and slowing tumor progression. Deep learning (DL) and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly used to assist doctors in early diagnosis through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Our research proposes targeted neural architectures within multi-objective frameworks that can localize, segment, and classify the grade of these gliomas from multimodal MRI images to solve this critical issue. Our localization framework utilizes a targeted architecture that enhances the LinkNet framework with an encoder inspired by VGG19 for better multimodal feature extraction from the tumor along with spatial and graph attention mechanisms that sharpen feature focus and inter-feature relationships. For the segmentation objective, we deployed a specialized framework using the SeResNet101 CNN model as the encoder backbone integrated into the LinkNet architecture, achieving an IoU Score of 96%. The classification objective is addressed through a distinct framework implemented by combining the SeResNet152 feature extractor with Adaptive Boosting classifier, reaching an accuracy of 98.53%. Our multi-objective approach with targeted neural architectures demonstrated promising results for complete glioma characterization, with the potential to advance medical AI by enabling early diagnosis and providing more accurate treatment options for patients.
AIM 2024 Challenge on Efficient Video Super-Resolution for AV1 Compressed Content
Authors: Marcos V Conde, Zhijun Lei, Wen Li, Christos Bampis, Ioannis Katsavounidis, Radu Timofte
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Super-Resolution, Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution (VSR) is a critical task for enhancing low-bitrate and low-resolution videos, particularly in streaming applications. While numerous solutions have been developed, they often suffer from high computational demands, resulting in low frame rates (FPS) and poor power efficiency, especially on mobile platforms. In this work, we compile different methods to address these challenges, the solutions are end-to-end real-time video super-resolution frameworks optimized for both high performance and low runtime. We also introduce a new test set of high-quality 4K videos to further validate the approaches. The proposed solutions tackle video up-scaling for two applications: 540p to 4K (x4) as a general case, and 360p to 1080p (x3) more tailored towards mobile devices. In both tracks, the solutions have a reduced number of parameters and operations (MACs), allow high FPS, and improve VMAF and PSNR over interpolation baselines. This report gauges some of the most efficient video super-resolution methods to date.
Walker: Self-supervised Multiple Object Tracking by Walking on Temporal Appearance Graphs
Authors: Mattia Segu, Luigi Piccinelli, Siyuan Li, Luc van Gool, Fisher Yu, Bernt Schiele
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple Object Tracking, Object Tracking

The supervision of state-of-the-art multiple object tracking (MOT) methods requires enormous annotation efforts to provide bounding boxes for all frames of all videos, and instance IDs to associate them through time. To this end, we introduce Walker, the first self-supervised tracker that learns from videos with sparse bounding box annotations, and no tracking labels. First, we design a quasi-dense temporal object appearance graph, and propose a novel multi-positive contrastive objective to optimize random walks on the graph and learn instance similarities. Then, we introduce an algorithm to enforce mutually-exclusive connective properties across instances in the graph, optimizing the learned topology for MOT. At inference time, we propose to associate detected instances to tracklets based on the max-likelihood transition state under motion-constrained bi-directional walks. Walker is the first self-supervised tracker to achieve competitive performance on MOT17, DanceTrack, and BDD100K. Remarkably, our proposal outperforms the previous self-supervised trackers even when drastically reducing the annotation requirements by up to 400x.
Neural Network Architecture Search Enabled Wide-Deep Learning (NAS-WD) for Spatially Heterogenous Property Awared Chicken Woody Breast Classification and Hardness Regression
Authors: Chaitanya Pallerla, Yihong Feng, Casey M. Owens, Ramesh Bahadur Bist, Siavash Mahmoudi, Pouya Sohrabipour, Amirreza Davar, Dongyi Wang
Date: 2024-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Due to intensive genetic selection for rapid growth rates and high broiler yields in recent years, the global poultry industry has faced a challenging problem in the form of woody breast (WB) conditions. This condition has caused significant economic losses as high as $200 million annually, and the root cause of WB has yet to be identified. Human palpation is the most common method of distinguishing a WB from others. However, this method is time-consuming and subjective. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) combined with machine learning algorithms can evaluate the WB conditions of fillets in a non-invasive, objective, and high-throughput manner. In this study, 250 raw chicken breast fillet samples (normal, mild, severe) were taken, and spatially heterogeneous hardness distribution was first considered when designing HSI processing models. The study not only classified the WB levels from HSI but also built a regression model to correlate the spectral information with sample hardness data. To achieve a satisfactory classification and regression model, a neural network architecture search (NAS) enabled a wide-deep neural network model named NAS-WD, which was developed. In NAS-WD, NAS was first used to automatically optimize the network architecture and hyperparameters. The classification results show that NAS-WD can classify the three WB levels with an overall accuracy of 95%, outperforming the traditional machine learning model, and the regression correlation between the spectral data and hardness was 0.75, which performs significantly better than traditional regression models.