pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Thermal-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from an Infrared Camera
Authors: Tianxiang Ye, Qi Wu, Junyuan Deng, Guoqing Liu, Liu Liu, Songpengcheng Xia, Liang Pang, Wenxian Yu, Ling Pei
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, 3D Scene Reconstruction, NeRF

In recent years, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated significant potential in encoding highly-detailed 3D geometry and environmental appearance, positioning themselves as a promising alternative to traditional explicit representation for 3D scene reconstruction. However, the predominant reliance on RGB imaging presupposes ideal lighting conditions: a premise frequently unmet in robotic applications plagued by poor lighting or visual obstructions. This limitation overlooks the capabilities of infrared (IR) cameras, which excel in low-light detection and present a robust alternative under such adverse scenarios. To tackle these issues, we introduce Thermal-NeRF, the first method that estimates a volumetric scene representation in the form of a NeRF solely from IR imaging. By leveraging a thermal mapping and structural thermal constraint derived from the thermal characteristics of IR imaging, our method showcasing unparalleled proficiency in recovering NeRFs in visually degraded scenes where RGB-based methods fall short. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that Thermal-NeRF can achieve superior quality compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we contribute a dataset for IR-based NeRF applications, paving the way for future research in IR NeRF reconstruction.
How Powerful Potential of Attention on Image Restoration?
Authors: Cong Wang, Jinshan Pan, Yeying Jin, Liyan Wang, Wei Wang, Gang Fu, Wenqi Ren, Xiaochun Cao
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

Transformers have demonstrated their effectiveness in image restoration tasks. Existing Transformer architectures typically comprise two essential components: multi-head self-attention and feed-forward network (FFN). The former captures long-range pixel dependencies, while the latter enables the model to learn complex patterns and relationships in the data. Previous studies have demonstrated that FFNs are key-value memories \cite{geva2020transformer}, which are vital in modern Transformer architectures. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to explore the potential of attention mechanisms without using FFN and provide novel structures to demonstrate that removing FFN is flexible for image restoration. Specifically, we propose Continuous Scaling Attention (\textbf{CSAttn}), a method that computes attention continuously in three stages without using FFN. To achieve competitive performance, we propose a series of key components within the attention. Our designs provide a closer look at the attention mechanism and reveal that some simple operations can significantly affect the model performance. We apply our \textbf{CSAttn} to several image restoration tasks and show that our model can outperform CNN-based and Transformer-based image restoration approaches.
NECA: Neural Customizable Human Avatar
Authors: Junjin Xiao, Qing Zhang, Zhan Xu, Wei-Shi Zheng
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Human avatar has become a novel type of 3D asset with various applications. Ideally, a human avatar should be fully customizable to accommodate different settings and environments. In this work, we introduce NECA, an approach capable of learning versatile human representation from monocular or sparse-view videos, enabling granular customization across aspects such as pose, shadow, shape, lighting and texture. The core of our approach is to represent humans in complementary dual spaces and predict disentangled neural fields of geometry, albedo, shadow, as well as an external lighting, from which we are able to derive realistic rendering with high-frequency details via volumetric rendering. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantage of our method over the state-of-the-art methods in photorealistic rendering, as well as various editing tasks such as novel pose synthesis and relighting. The code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/NECA.
Uni-SMART: Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer
Authors: Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Lin Yao, Zhifeng Gao, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Mingjun Xu, Changxin Wang, Hongshuai Wang, Yongge Li, Mujie Lin, Yaqi Li, Yuqi Yin, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

In scientific research and its application, scientific literature analysis is crucial as it allows researchers to build on the work of others. However, the fast growth of scientific knowledge has led to a massive increase in scholarly articles, making in-depth literature analysis increasingly challenging and time-consuming. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has offered a new way to address this challenge. Known for their strong abilities in summarizing texts, LLMs are seen as a potential tool to improve the analysis of scientific literature. However, existing LLMs have their own limits. Scientific literature often includes a wide range of multimodal elements, such as tables, charts, and molecule, which are hard for text-focused LLMs to understand and analyze. This issue points to the urgent need for new solutions that can fully understand and analyze multimodal content in scientific literature. To answer this demand, we present \textbf{Uni-SMART} (Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer), an innovative model designed for in-depth understanding of multimodal scientific literature. Through rigorous quantitative evaluation across several domains, Uni-SMART demonstrates superior performance over other text-focused LLMs. Furthermore, our exploration extends to practical applications, including patent infringement detection and nuanced analysis of charts. These applications not only highlight Uni-SMART's adaptability but also its potential to revolutionize how we interact with scientific literature.
Context-Semantic Quality Awareness Network for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
Authors: Qin Xu, Sitong Li, Jiahui Wang, Bo Jiang, Jinhui Tang
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Classification, Fine-Grained Visual Categorization

Exploring and mining subtle yet distinctive features between sub-categories with similar appearances is crucial for fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC). However, less effort has been devoted to assessing the quality of extracted visual representations. Intuitively, the network may struggle to capture discriminative features from low-quality samples, which leads to a significant decline in FGVC performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose a weakly supervised Context-Semantic Quality Awareness Network (CSQA-Net) for FGVC. In this network, to model the spatial contextual relationship between rich part descriptors and global semantics for capturing more discriminative details within the object, we design a novel multi-part and multi-scale cross-attention (MPMSCA) module. Before feeding to the MPMSCA module, the part navigator is developed to address the scale confusion problems and accurately identify the local distinctive regions. Furthermore, we propose a generic multi-level semantic quality evaluation module (MLSQE) to progressively supervise and enhance hierarchical semantics from different levels of the backbone network. Finally, context-aware features from MPMSCA and semantically enhanced features from MLSQE are fed into the corresponding quality probing classifiers to evaluate their quality in real-time, thus boosting the discriminability of feature representations. Comprehensive experiments on four popular and highly competitive FGVC datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed CSQA-Net in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods.
Leveraging Neural Radiance Field in Descriptor Synthesis for Keypoints Scene Coordinate Regression
Authors: Huy-Hoang Bui, Bach-Thuan Bui, Dinh-Tuan Tran, Joo-Ho Lee
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Image Retrieval, NeRF, regression, Visual Localization

Classical structural-based visual localization methods offer high accuracy but face trade-offs in terms of storage, speed, and privacy. A recent innovation, keypoint scene coordinate regression (KSCR) named D2S addresses these issues by leveraging graph attention networks to enhance keypoint relationships and predict their 3D coordinates using a simple multilayer perceptron (MLP). Camera pose is then determined via PnP+RANSAC, using established 2D-3D correspondences. While KSCR achieves competitive results, rivaling state-of-the-art image-retrieval methods like HLoc across multiple benchmarks, its performance is hindered when data samples are limited due to the deep learning model's reliance on extensive data. This paper proposes a solution to this challenge by introducing a pipeline for keypoint descriptor synthesis using Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). By generating novel poses and feeding them into a trained NeRF model to create new views, our approach enhances the KSCR's generalization capabilities in data-scarce environments. The proposed system could significantly improve localization accuracy by up to 50% and cost only a fraction of time for data synthesis. Furthermore, its modular design allows for the integration of multiple NeRFs, offering a versatile and efficient solution for visual localization. The implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/ais-lab/DescriptorSynthesis4Feat2Map.
Deep Learning for Multi-Level Detection and Localization of Myocardial Scars Based on Regional Strain Validated on Virtual Patients
Authors: Müjde Akdeniz, Claudia Alessandra Manetti, Tijmen Koopsen, Hani Nozari Mirar, Sten Roar Snare, Svein Arne Aase, Joost Lumens, Jurica Šprem, Kristin Sarah McLeod
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

How well the heart is functioning can be quantified through measurements of myocardial deformation via echocardiography. Clinical assessment of cardiac function is generally focused on global indices of relative shortening, however, territorial, and segmental strain indices have shown to be abnormal in regions of myocardial disease, such as scar. In this work, we propose a single framework to predict myocardial disease substrates at global, territorial, and segmental levels using regional myocardial strain traces as input to a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based classification algorithm. An anatomically meaningful representation of the input data from the clinically standard bullseye representation to a multi-channel 2D image is proposed, to formulate the task as an image classification problem, thus enabling the use of state-of-the-art neural network configurations. A Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) is trained to detect and localize myocardial scar from regional left ventricular (LV) strain patterns. Simulated regional strain data from a controlled dataset of virtual patients with varying degrees and locations of myocardial scar is used for training and validation. The proposed method successfully detects and localizes the scars on 98% of the 5490 left ventricle (LV) segments of the 305 patients in the test set using strain traces only. Due to the sparse existence of scar, only 10% of the LV segments in the virtual patient cohort have scar. Taking the imbalance into account, the class balanced accuracy is calculated as 95%. The performance is reported on global, territorial, and segmental levels. The proposed method proves successful on the strain traces of the virtual cohort and offers the potential to solve the regional myocardial scar detection problem on the strain traces of the real patient cohorts.
Few-Shot Image Classification and Segmentation as Visual Question Answering Using Vision-Language Models
Authors: Tian Meng, Yang Tao, Ruilin Lyu, Wuliang Yin
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, In-Context Learning, Multiple-choice, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

The task of few-shot image classification and segmentation (FS-CS) involves classifying and segmenting target objects in a query image, given only a few examples of the target classes. We introduce the Vision-Instructed Segmentation and Evaluation (VISE) method that transforms the FS-CS problem into the Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem, utilising Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and addresses it in a training-free manner. By enabling a VLM to interact with off-the-shelf vision models as tools, the proposed method is capable of classifying and segmenting target objects using only image-level labels. Specifically, chain-of-thought prompting and in-context learning guide the VLM to answer multiple-choice questions like a human; vision models such as YOLO and Segment Anything Model (SAM) assist the VLM in completing the task. The modular framework of the proposed method makes it easily extendable. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Pascal-5i and COCO-20i datasets.
Local positional graphs and attentive local features for a data and runtime-efficient hierarchical place recognition pipeline
Authors: Fangming Yuan, Stefan Schubert, Peter Protzel, Peer Neubert
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Reranking, Visual Place Recognition

Large-scale applications of Visual Place Recognition (VPR) require computationally efficient approaches. Further, a well-balanced combination of data-based and training-free approaches can decrease the required amount of training data and effort and can reduce the influence of distribution shifts between the training and application phases. This paper proposes a runtime and data-efficient hierarchical VPR pipeline that extends existing approaches and presents novel ideas. There are three main contributions: First, we propose Local Positional Graphs (LPG), a training-free and runtime-efficient approach to encode spatial context information of local image features. LPG can be combined with existing local feature detectors and descriptors and considerably improves the image-matching quality compared to existing techniques in our experiments. Second, we present Attentive Local SPED (ATLAS), an extension of our previous local features approach with an attention module that improves the feature quality while maintaining high data efficiency. The influence of the proposed modifications is evaluated in an extensive ablation study. Third, we present a hierarchical pipeline that exploits hyperdimensional computing to use the same local features as holistic HDC-descriptors for fast candidate selection and for candidate reranking. We combine all contributions in a runtime and data-efficient VPR pipeline that shows benefits over the state-of-the-art method Patch-NetVLAD on a large collection of standard place recognition datasets with 15$\%$ better performance in VPR accuracy, 54$\times$ faster feature comparison speed, and 55$\times$ less descriptor storage occupancy, making our method promising for real-world high-performance large-scale VPR in changing environments. Code will be made available with publication of this paper.
Learning Spatiotemporal Inconsistency via Thumbnail Layout for Face Deepfake Detection
Authors: Yuting Xu, Jian Liang, Lijun Sheng, Xiao-Yu Zhang
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

The deepfake threats to society and cybersecurity have provoked significant public apprehension, driving intensified efforts within the realm of deepfake video detection. Current video-level methods are mostly based on {3D CNNs} resulting in high computational demands, although have achieved good performance. This paper introduces an elegantly simple yet effective strategy named Thumbnail Layout (TALL), which transforms a video clip into a pre-defined layout to realize the preservation of spatial and temporal dependencies. This transformation process involves sequentially masking frames at the same positions within each frame. These frames are then resized into sub-frames and reorganized into the predetermined layout, forming thumbnails. TALL is model-agnostic and has remarkable simplicity, necessitating only minimal code modifications. Furthermore, we introduce a graph reasoning block (GRB) and semantic consistency (SC) loss to strengthen TALL, culminating in TALL++. GRB enhances interactions between different semantic regions to capture semantic-level inconsistency clues. The semantic consistency loss imposes consistency constraints on semantic features to improve model generalization ability. Extensive experiments on intra-dataset, cross-dataset, diffusion-generated image detection, and deepfake generation method recognition show that TALL++ achieves results surpassing or comparable to the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approaches for various deepfake detection problems. The code is available at https://github.com/rainy-xu/TALL4Deepfake.
Arbitrary-Scale Image Generation and Upsampling using Latent Diffusion Model and Implicit Neural Decoder
Authors: Jinseok Kim, Tae-Kyun Kim
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Decoder, Denoising, Diversity, Image Generation, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Super-resolution (SR) and image generation are important tasks in computer vision and are widely adopted in real-world applications. Most existing methods, however, generate images only at fixed-scale magnification and suffer from over-smoothing and artifacts. Additionally, they do not offer enough diversity of output images nor image consistency at different scales. Most relevant work applied Implicit Neural Representation (INR) to the denoising diffusion model to obtain continuous-resolution yet diverse and high-quality SR results. Since this model operates in the image space, the larger the resolution of image is produced, the more memory and inference time is required, and it also does not maintain scale-specific consistency. We propose a novel pipeline that can super-resolve an input image or generate from a random noise a novel image at arbitrary scales. The method consists of a pretrained auto-encoder, a latent diffusion model, and an implicit neural decoder, and their learning strategies. The proposed method adopts diffusion processes in a latent space, thus efficient, yet aligned with output image space decoded by MLPs at arbitrary scales. More specifically, our arbitrary-scale decoder is designed by the symmetric decoder w/o up-scaling from the pretrained auto-encoder, and Local Implicit Image Function (LIIF) in series. The latent diffusion process is learnt by the denoising and the alignment losses jointly. Errors in output images are backpropagated via the fixed decoder, improving the quality of output images. In the extensive experiments using multiple public benchmarks on the two tasks i.e. image super-resolution and novel image generation at arbitrary scales, the proposed method outperforms relevant methods in metrics of image quality, diversity and scale consistency. It is significantly better than the relevant prior-art in the inference speed and memory usage.
Magic Tokens: Select Diverse Tokens for Multi-modal Object Re-Identification
Authors: Pingping Zhang, Yuhao Wang, Yang Liu, Zhengzheng Tu, Huchuan Lu
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Object

Single-modal object re-identification (ReID) faces great challenges in maintaining robustness within complex visual scenarios. In contrast, multi-modal object ReID utilizes complementary information from diverse modalities, showing great potentials for practical applications. However, previous methods may be easily affected by irrelevant backgrounds and usually ignore the modality gaps. To address above issues, we propose a novel learning framework named \textbf{EDITOR} to select diverse tokens from vision Transformers for multi-modal object ReID. We begin with a shared vision Transformer to extract tokenized features from different input modalities. Then, we introduce a Spatial-Frequency Token Selection (SFTS) module to adaptively select object-centric tokens with both spatial and frequency information. Afterwards, we employ a Hierarchical Masked Aggregation (HMA) module to facilitate feature interactions within and across modalities. Finally, to further reduce the effect of backgrounds, we propose a Background Consistency Constraint (BCC) and an Object-Centric Feature Refinement (OCFR). They are formulated as two new loss functions, which improve the feature discrimination with background suppression. As a result, our framework can generate more discriminative features for multi-modal object ReID. Extensive experiments on three multi-modal ReID benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our methods. The code is available at https://github.com/924973292/EDITOR.
Region-aware Distribution Contrast: A Novel Approach to Multi-Task Partially Supervised Learning
Authors: Meixuan Li, Tianyu Li, Guoqing Wang, Peng Wang, Yang Yang, Heng Tao Shen
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Semantic Segmentation, Surface Normal Estimation

In this study, we address the intricate challenge of multi-task dense prediction, encompassing tasks such as semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and surface normal estimation, particularly when dealing with partially annotated data (MTPSL). The complexity arises from the absence of complete task labels for each training image. Given the inter-related nature of these pixel-wise dense tasks, our focus is on mining and capturing cross-task relationships. Existing solutions typically rely on learning global image representations for global cross-task image matching, imposing constraints that, unfortunately, sacrifice the finer structures within the images. Attempting local matching as a remedy faces hurdles due to the lack of precise region supervision, making local alignment a challenging endeavor. The introduction of Segment Anything Model (SAM) sheds light on addressing local alignment challenges by providing free and high-quality solutions for region detection. Leveraging SAM-detected regions, the subsequent challenge lies in aligning the representations within these regions. Diverging from conventional methods that directly learn a monolithic image representation, our proposal involves modeling region-wise representations using Gaussian Distributions. Aligning these distributions between corresponding regions from different tasks imparts higher flexibility and capacity to capture intra-region structures, accommodating a broader range of tasks. This innovative approach significantly enhances our ability to effectively capture cross-task relationships, resulting in improved overall performance in partially supervised multi-task dense prediction scenarios. Extensive experiments conducted on two widely used benchmarks underscore the superior effectiveness of our proposed method, showcasing state-of-the-art performance even when compared to fully supervised methods.