pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring AI-based Anonymization of Industrial Image and Video Data in the Context of Feature Preservation
Authors: Sabrina Cynthia Triess, Timo Leitritz, Christian Jauch
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Full-body anonymization, Pose Estimation

With rising technologies, the protection of privacy-sensitive information is becoming increasingly important. In industry and production facilities, image or video recordings are beneficial for documentation, tracing production errors or coordinating workflows. Individuals in images or videos need to be anonymized. However, the anonymized data should be reusable for further applications. In this work, we apply the Deep Learning-based full-body anonymization framework DeepPrivacy2, which generates artificial identities, to industrial image and video data. We compare its performance with conventional anonymization techniques. Therefore, we consider the quality of identity generation, temporal consistency, and the applicability of pose estimation and action recognition.
ACCSAMS: Automatic Conversion of Exam Documents to Accessible Learning Material for Blind and Visually Impaired
Authors: David Wilkening, Omar Moured, Thorsten Schwarz, Karin Muller, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00

Exam documents are essential educational materials for exam preparation. However, they pose a significant academic barrier for blind and visually impaired students, as they are often created without accessibility considerations. Typically, these documents are incompatible with screen readers, contain excessive white space, and lack alternative text for visual elements. This situation frequently requires intervention by experienced sighted individuals to modify the format and content for accessibility. We propose ACCSAMS, a semi-automatic system designed to enhance the accessibility of exam documents. Our system offers three key contributions: (1) creating an accessible layout and removing unnecessary white space, (2) adding navigational structures, and (3) incorporating alternative text for visual elements that were previously missing. Additionally, we present the first multilingual manually annotated dataset, comprising 1,293 German and 900 English exam documents which could serve as a good training source for deep learning models.
ChartFormer: A Large Vision Language Model for Converting Chart Images into Tactile Accessible SVGs
Authors: Omar Moured, Sara Alzalabny, Anas Osman, Thorsten Schwarz, Karin Muller, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Vector Graphics

Visualizations, such as charts, are crucial for interpreting complex data. However, they are often provided as raster images, which are not compatible with assistive technologies for people with blindness and visual impairments, such as embossed papers or tactile displays. At the same time, creating accessible vector graphics requires a skilled sighted person and is time-intensive. In this work, we leverage advancements in the field of chart analysis to generate tactile charts in an end-to-end manner. Our three key contributions are as follows: (1) introducing the ChartFormer model trained to convert raster chart images into tactile-accessible SVGs, (2) training this model on the Chart2Tactile dataset, a synthetic chart dataset we created following accessibility standards, and (3) evaluating the effectiveness of our SVGs through a pilot user study with an refreshable two-dimensional tactile display. Our work is publicly available at https://github.com/nsothman/ChartFormer .
Reconstructing Interpretable Features in Computational Super-Resolution microscopy via Regularized Latent Search
Authors: Marzieh Gheisari, Auguste Genovesio
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Supervised deep learning approaches can artificially increase the resolution of microscopy images by learning a mapping between two image resolutions or modalities. However, such methods often require a large set of hard-to-get low-res/high-res image pairs and produce synthetic images with a moderate increase in resolution. Conversely, recent methods based on GAN latent search offered a drastic increase in resolution without the need of paired images. However, they offer limited reconstruction of the high-resolution image interpretable features. Here, we propose a robust super-resolution method based on regularized latent search~(RLS) that offers an actionable balance between fidelity to the ground-truth and realism of the recovered image given a distribution prior. The latter allows to split the analysis of a low-resolution image into a computational super-resolution task performed by deep learning followed by a quantification task performed by a handcrafted algorithm and based on interpretable biological features. This two-step process holds potential for various applications such as diagnostics on mobile devices, where the main aim is not to recover the high-resolution details of a specific sample but rather to obtain high-resolution images that preserve explainable and quantifiable differences between conditions.
Alt4Blind: A User Interface to Simplify Charts Alt-Text Creation
Authors: Omar Moured, Shahid Ali Farooqui, Karin Muller, Sharifeh Fadaeijouybari, Thorsten Schwarz, Mohammed Javed, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Alternative Texts (Alt-Text) for chart images are essential for making graphics accessible to people with blindness and visual impairments. Traditionally, Alt-Text is manually written by authors but often encounters issues such as oversimplification or complication. Recent trends have seen the use of AI for Alt-Text generation. However, existing models are susceptible to producing inaccurate or misleading information. We address this challenge by retrieving high-quality alt-texts from similar chart images, serving as a reference for the user when creating alt-texts. Our three contributions are as follows: (1) we introduce a new benchmark comprising 5,000 real images with semantically labeled high-quality Alt-Texts, collected from Human Computer Interaction venues. (2) We developed a deep learning-based model to rank and retrieve similar chart images that share the same visual and textual semantics. (3) We designed a user interface (UI) to facilitate the alt-text creation process. Our preliminary interviews and investigations highlight the usability of our UI. For the dataset and further details, please refer to our project page: https://moured.github.io/alt4blind/.
Enhancing Zero-Shot Facial Expression Recognition by LLM Knowledge Transfer
Authors: Zengqun Zhao, Yu Cao, Shaogang Gong, Ioannis Patras
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER), Transfer Learning, Zero-Shot Facial Expression Recognition

Current facial expression recognition (FER) models are often designed in a supervised learning manner and thus are constrained by the lack of large-scale facial expression images with high-quality annotations. Consequently, these models often fail to generalize well, performing poorly on unseen images in inference. Vision-language-based zero-shot models demonstrate a promising potential for addressing such challenges. However, these models lack task-specific knowledge and therefore are not optimized for the nuances of recognizing facial expressions. To bridge this gap, this work proposes a novel method, Exp-CLIP, to enhance zero-shot FER by transferring the task knowledge from large language models (LLMs). Specifically, based on the pre-trained vision-language encoders, we incorporate a projection head designed to map the initial joint vision-language space into a space that captures representations of facial actions. To train this projection head for subsequent zero-shot predictions, we propose to align the projected visual representations with task-specific semantic meanings derived from the LLM encoder, and the text instruction-based strategy is employed to customize the LLM knowledge. Given unlabelled facial data and efficient training of the projection head, Exp-CLIP achieves superior zero-shot results to the CLIP models and several other large vision-language models (LVLMs) on seven in-the-wild FER datasets. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/zengqunzhao/Exp-CLIP.
A study of why we need to reassess full reference image quality assessment with medical images
Authors: Anna Breger, Ander Biguri, Malena Sabaté Landman, Ian Selby, Nicole Amberg, Elisabeth Brunner, Janek Gröhl, Sepideh Hatamikia, Clemens Karner, Lipeng Ning, Sören Dittmer, Michael Roberts, AIX-COVNET Collaboration, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Full reference image quality assessment, Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment, Image Quality Assessment, SSIM

Image quality assessment (IQA) is indispensable in clinical practice to ensure high standards, as well as in the development stage of machine learning algorithms that operate on medical images. The popular full reference (FR) IQA measures PSNR and SSIM are known and tested for working successfully in many natural imaging tasks, but discrepancies in medical scenarios have been reported in the literature, highlighting the gap between development and actual clinical application. Such inconsistencies are not surprising, as medical images have very different properties than natural images, and PSNR and SSIM have neither been targeted nor properly tested for medical images. This may cause unforeseen problems in clinical applications due to wrong judgment of novel methods. This paper provides a structured and comprehensive overview of examples where PSNR and SSIM prove to be unsuitable for the assessment of novel algorithms using different kinds of medical images, including real-world MRI, CT, OCT, X-Ray, digital pathology and photoacoustic imaging data. Therefore, improvement is urgently needed in particular in this era of AI to increase reliability and explainability in machine learning for medical imaging and beyond. Lastly, we will provide ideas for future research as well as suggesting guidelines for the usage of FR-IQA measures applied to medical images.
Benchmarking and Improving Detail Image Caption
Authors: Hongyuan Dong, Jiawen Li, Bohong Wu, Jiacong Wang, Yuan Zhang, Haoyuan Guo
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Image Captioning, Language Modelling

Image captioning has long been regarded as a fundamental task in visual understanding. Recently, however, few large vision-language model (LVLM) research discusses model's image captioning performance because of the outdated short-caption benchmarks and unreliable evaluation metrics. In this work, we propose to benchmark detail image caption task by curating high-quality evaluation datasets annotated by human experts, GPT-4V and Gemini-1.5-Pro. We also design a more reliable caption evaluation metric called CAPTURE (CAPtion evaluation by exTracting and coUpling coRE information). CAPTURE extracts visual elements, e.g., objects, attributes and relations from captions, and then matches these elements through three stages, achieving the highest consistency with expert judgements over other rule-based or model-based caption metrics. The proposed benchmark and metric provide reliable evaluation for LVLM's detailed image captioning ability. Guided by this evaluation, we further explore to unleash LVLM's detail caption capabilities by synthesizing high-quality data through a five-stage data construction pipeline. Our pipeline only uses a given LVLM itself and other open-source tools, without any human or GPT-4V annotation in the loop. Experiments show that the proposed data construction strategy significantly improves model-generated detail caption data quality for LVLMs with leading performance, and the data quality can be further improved in a self-looping paradigm. All code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/foundation-multimodal-models/CAPTURE.
Cracking the Code of Juxtaposition: Can AI Models Understand the Humorous Contradictions
Authors: Zhe Hu, Tuo Liang, Jing Li, Yiren Lu, Yunlai Zhou, Yiran Qiao, Jing Ma, Yu Yin
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00

Recent advancements in large multimodal language models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across a wide range of tasks. Yet, these models still struggle with understanding the nuances of human humor through juxtaposition, particularly when it involves nonlinear narratives that underpin many jokes and humor cues. This paper investigates this challenge by focusing on comics with contradictory narratives, where each comic consists of two panels that create a humorous contradiction. We introduce the YesBut benchmark, which comprises tasks of varying difficulty aimed at assessing AI's capabilities in recognizing and interpreting these comics, ranging from literal content comprehension to deep narrative reasoning. Through extensive experimentation and analysis of recent commercial or open-sourced large (vision) language models, we assess their capability to comprehend the complex interplay of the narrative humor inherent in these comics. Our results show that even state-of-the-art models still lag behind human performance on this task. Our findings offer insights into the current limitations and potential improvements for AI in understanding human creative expressions.
Uniform vs. Lognormal Kinematics in Robots: Perceptual Preferences for Robotic Movements
Authors: Jose J. Quintana, Miguel A. Ferrer, Moises Diaz, Jose J. Feo, Adam Wolniakowski, Konstantsin Miatliuk
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Industrial Robots

Collaborative robots or cobots interact with humans in a common work environment. In cobots, one under investigated but important issue is related to their movement and how it is perceived by humans. This paper tries to analyze whether humans prefer a robot moving in a human or in a robotic fashion. To this end, the present work lays out what differentiates the movement performed by an industrial robotic arm from that performed by a human one. The main difference lies in the fact that the robotic movement has a trapezoidal speed profile, while for the human arm, the speed profile is bell-shaped and during complex movements, it can be considered as a sum of superimposed bell-shaped movements. Based on the lognormality principle, a procedure was developed for a robotic arm to perform human-like movements. Both speed profiles were implemented in two industrial robots, namely, an ABB IRB 120 and a Universal Robot UR3. Three tests were used to study the subjects' preference when seeing both movements and another analyzed the same when interacting with the robot by touching its ends with their fingers.
On the Influence of Smoothness Constraints in Computed Tomography Motion Compensation
Authors: Mareike Thies, Fabian Wagner, Noah Maul, Siyuan Mei, Mingxuan Gu, Laura Pfaff, Nastassia Vysotskaya, Haijun Yu, Andreas Maier
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Computed Tomography (CT), Motion Compensation

Computed tomography (CT) relies on precise patient immobilization during image acquisition. Nevertheless, motion artifacts in the reconstructed images can persist. Motion compensation methods aim to correct such artifacts post-acquisition, often incorporating temporal smoothness constraints on the estimated motion patterns. This study analyzes the influence of a spline-based motion model within an existing rigid motion compensation algorithm for cone-beam CT on the recoverable motion frequencies. Results demonstrate that the choice of motion model crucially influences recoverable frequencies. The optimization-based motion compensation algorithm is able to accurately fit the spline nodes for frequencies almost up to the node-dependent theoretical limit according to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem. Notably, a higher node count does not compromise reconstruction performance for slow motion patterns, but can extend the range of recoverable high frequencies for the investigated algorithm. Eventually, the optimal motion model is dependent on the imaged anatomy, clinical use case, and scanning protocol and should be tailored carefully to the expected motion frequency spectrum to ensure accurate motion compensation.
Cephalo: Multi-Modal Vision-Language Models for Bio-Inspired Materials Analysis and Design
Authors: Markus J. Buehler
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation, Image to text, Natural Language Understanding, Text to 3D

We present Cephalo, a series of multimodal vision large language models (V-LLMs) designed for materials science applications, integrating visual and linguistic data for enhanced understanding. A key innovation of Cephalo is its advanced dataset generation method. Cephalo is trained on integrated image and text data from thousands of scientific papers and science-focused Wikipedia data demonstrates can interpret complex visual scenes, generate precise language descriptions, and answer queries about images effectively. The combination of a vision encoder with an autoregressive transformer supports multimodal natural language understanding, which can be coupled with other generative methods to create an image-to-text-to-3D pipeline. To develop more capable models from smaller ones, we report both mixture-of-expert methods and model merging. We examine the models in diverse use cases that incorporate biological materials, fracture and engineering analysis, protein biophysics, and bio-inspired design based on insect behavior. Generative applications include bio-inspired designs, including pollen-inspired architected materials, as well as the synthesis of bio-inspired material microstructures from a photograph of a solar eclipse. Additional model fine-tuning with a series of molecular dynamics results demonstrate Cephalo's enhanced capabilities to accurately predict statistical features of stress and atomic energy distributions, as well as crack dynamics and damage in materials.
FUSU: A Multi-temporal-source Land Use Change Segmentation Dataset for Fine-grained Urban Semantic Understanding
Authors: Shuai Yuan, Guancong Lin, Lixian Zhang, Runmin Dong, Jinxiao Zhang, Shuang Chen, Juepeng Zheng, Jie Wang, Haohuan Fu
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Segmentation, Time Series

Fine urban change segmentation using multi-temporal remote sensing images is essential for understanding human-environment interactions in urban areas. Although there have been advances in high-quality land cover datasets that reveal the physical features of urban landscapes, the lack of fine-grained land use datasets hinders a deeper understanding of how human activities are distributed across the landscape and the impact of these activities on the environment, thus constraining proper technique development. To address this, we introduce FUSU, the first fine-grained land use change segmentation dataset for Fine-grained Urban Semantic Understanding. FUSU features the most detailed land use classification system to date, with 17 classes and 30 billion pixels of annotations. It includes bi-temporal high-resolution satellite images with 0.2-0.5 m ground sample distance and monthly optical and radar satellite time series, covering 847 km^2 across five urban areas in the southern and northern of China with different geographical features. The fine-grained land use pixel-wise annotations and high spatial-temporal resolution data provide a robust foundation for developing proper deep learning models to provide contextual insights on human activities and urbanization. To fully leverage FUSU, we propose a unified time-series architecture for both change detection and segmentation. We benchmark FUSU on various methods for several tasks. Dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/yuanshuai0914/FUSU.
A Good Foundation is Worth Many Labels: Label-Efficient Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Niclas Vödisch, Kürsat Petek, Markus Käppeler, Abhinav Valada, Wolfram Burgard
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Boundary Detection, Descriptive, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

A key challenge for the widespread application of learning-based models for robotic perception is to significantly reduce the required amount of annotated training data while achieving accurate predictions. This is essential not only to decrease operating costs but also to speed up deployment time. In this work, we address this challenge for PAnoptic SegmenTation with fEw Labels (PASTEL) by exploiting the groundwork paved by visual foundation models. We leverage descriptive image features from such a model to train two lightweight network heads for semantic segmentation and object boundary detection, using very few annotated training samples. We then merge their predictions via a novel fusion module that yields panoptic maps based on normalized cut. To further enhance the performance, we utilize self-training on unlabeled images selected by a feature-driven similarity scheme. We underline the relevance of our approach by employing PASTEL to important robot perception use cases from autonomous driving and agricultural robotics. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate that PASTEL significantly outperforms previous methods for label-efficient segmentation even when using fewer annotations. The code of our work is publicly available at http://pastel.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
Enhancing Vision-Language Model with Unmasked Token Alignment
Authors: Jihao Liu, Jinliang Zheng, Boxiao Liu, Yu Liu, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Self-Supervised Learning

Contrastive pre-training on image-text pairs, exemplified by CLIP, becomes a standard technique for learning multi-modal visual-language representations. Although CLIP has demonstrated remarkable performance, training it from scratch on noisy web-scale datasets is computationally demanding. On the other hand, mask-then-predict pre-training approaches, like Masked Image Modeling (MIM), offer efficient self-supervised learning for single-modal representations. This paper introduces Unmasked Token Alignment (UTA), a method that leverages existing CLIP models to further enhance its vision-language representations. UTA trains a Vision Transformer (ViT) by aligning unmasked visual tokens to the corresponding image tokens from a frozen CLIP vision encoder, which automatically aligns the ViT model with the CLIP text encoder. The pre-trained ViT can be directly applied for zero-shot evaluation even without training on image-text pairs. Compared to MIM approaches, UTA does not suffer from training-finetuning inconsistency and is much more training-efficient by avoiding using the extra [MASK] tokens. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that UTA can enhance CLIP models and outperform existing MIM methods on various uni- and multi-modal benchmarks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/jihaonew/UTA.