pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MWIRSTD: A MWIR Small Target Detection Dataset
Authors: Nikhil Kumar, Avinash Upadhyay, Shreya Sharma, Manoj Sharma, Pravendra Singh
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection

This paper presents a novel mid-wave infrared (MWIR) small target detection dataset (MWIRSTD) comprising 14 video sequences containing approximately 1053 images with annotated targets of three distinct classes of small objects. Captured using cooled MWIR imagers, the dataset offers a unique opportunity for researchers to develop and evaluate state-of-the-art methods for small object detection in realistic MWIR scenes. Unlike existing datasets, which primarily consist of uncooled thermal images or synthetic data with targets superimposed onto the background or vice versa, MWIRSTD provides authentic MWIR data with diverse targets and environments. Extensive experiments on various traditional methods and deep learning-based techniques for small target detection are performed on the proposed dataset, providing valuable insights into their efficacy. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/avinres/MWIRSTD.
3D CBCT Challenge 2024: Improved Cone Beam CT Reconstruction using SwinIR-Based Sinogram and Image Enhancement
Authors: Sasidhar Alavala, Subrahmanyam Gorthi
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: CT Reconstruction, Image Enhancement, Image Reconstruction, Image Restoration

In this paper, we present our approach to the 3D CBCT Challenge 2024, a part of ICASSP SP Grand Challenges 2024. Improvement in Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) reconstruction has been achieved by integrating Swin Image Restoration (SwinIR) based sinogram and image enhancement modules. The proposed methodology uses Nesterov Accelerated Gradient Descent (NAG) to solve the least squares (NAG-LS) problem in CT image reconstruction. The integration of sinogram and image enhancement modules aims to enhance image clarity and preserve fine details, offering a promising solution for both low dose and clinical dose CBCT reconstruction. The averaged mean squared error (MSE) over the validation dataset has decreased significantly, in the case of low dose by one-fifth and clinical dose by one-tenth. Our solution is one of the top 5 approaches in this challenge.
A Robust Pipeline for Classification and Detection of Bleeding Frames in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy using Swin Transformer and RT-DETR
Authors: Sasidhar Alavala, Anil Kumar Vadde, Aparnamala Kancheti, Subrahmanyam Gorthi
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00

In this paper, we present our approach to the Auto WCEBleedGen Challenge V2 2024. Our solution combines the Swin Transformer for the initial classification of bleeding frames and RT-DETR for further detection of bleeding in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE), enhanced by a series of image preprocessing steps. These steps include converting images to Lab colour space, applying Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) for better contrast, and using Gaussian blur to suppress artefacts. The Swin Transformer utilizes a tiered architecture with shifted windows to efficiently manage self-attention calculations, focusing on local windows while enabling cross-window interactions. RT-DETR features an efficient hybrid encoder for fast processing of multi-scale features and an uncertainty-minimal query selection for enhanced accuracy. The class activation maps by Ablation-CAM are plausible to the model's decisions. On the validation set, this approach achieves a classification accuracy of 98.5% (best among the other state-of-the-art models) compared to 91.7% without any pre-processing and an $\text{AP}_{50}$ of 66.7% compared to 65.0% with state-of-the-art YOLOv8. On the test set, this approach achieves a classification accuracy and F1 score of 87.0% and 89.0% respectively.
Adaptively Bypassing Vision Transformer Blocks for Efficient Visual Tracking
Authors: Xiangyang Yang, Dan Zeng, Xucheng Wang, You Wu, Hengzhou Ye, Qijun Zhao, Shuiwang Li
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Tracking

Empowered by transformer-based models, visual tracking has advanced significantly. However, the slow speed of current trackers limits their applicability on devices with constrained computational resources. To address this challenge, we introduce ABTrack, an adaptive computation framework that adaptively bypassing transformer blocks for efficient visual tracking. The rationale behind ABTrack is rooted in the observation that semantic features or relations do not uniformly impact the tracking task across all abstraction levels. Instead, this impact varies based on the characteristics of the target and the scene it occupies. Consequently, disregarding insignificant semantic features or relations at certain abstraction levels may not significantly affect the tracking accuracy. We propose a Bypass Decision Module (BDM) to determine if a transformer block should be bypassed, which adaptively simplifies the architecture of ViTs and thus speeds up the inference process. To counteract the time cost incurred by the BDMs and further enhance the efficiency of ViTs, we introduce a novel ViT pruning method to reduce the dimension of the latent representation of tokens in each transformer block. Extensive experiments on multiple tracking benchmarks validate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is released at: https://github.com/xyyang317/ABTrack.
Deep Learning for Slum Mapping in Remote Sensing Images: A Meta-analysis and Review
Authors: Anjali Raj, Adway Mitra, Manjira Sinha
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00

The major Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2030, set by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), include sustainable cities and communities, no poverty, and reduced inequalities. However, millions of people live in slums or informal settlements with poor living conditions in many major cities around the world, especially in less developed countries. To emancipate these settlements and their inhabitants through government intervention, accurate data about slum location and extent is required. While ground survey data is the most reliable, such surveys are costly and time-consuming. An alternative is remotely sensed data obtained from very high-resolution (VHR) imagery. With the advancement of new technology, remote sensing based mapping of slums has emerged as a prominent research area. The parallel rise of Artificial Intelligence, especially Deep Learning has added a new dimension to this field as it allows automated analysis of satellite imagery to identify complex spatial patterns associated with slums. This article offers a detailed review and meta-analysis of research on slum mapping using remote sensing imagery from 2014 to 2024, with a special focus on deep learning approaches. Our analysis reveals a trend towards increasingly complex neural network architectures, with advancements in data preprocessing and model training techniques significantly enhancing slum identification accuracy. We have attempted to identify key methodologies that are effective across diverse geographic contexts. While acknowledging the transformative impact Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in slum detection, our review underscores the absence of a universally optimal model, suggesting the need for context-specific adaptations. We also identify prevailing challenges in this field, such as data limitations and a lack of model explainability and suggest potential strategies for overcoming these.
Generalizable Disaster Damage Assessment via Change Detection with Vision Foundation Model
Authors: Kyeongjin Ahn, Sungwon Han, Sungwon Park, Jihee Kim, Sangyoon Park, Meeyoung Cha
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters call for rapid and accurate damage assessment. In response, disaster benchmark datasets from high-resolution satellite imagery have been constructed to develop methods for detecting damaged areas. However, these methods face significant challenges when applied to previously unseen regions due to the limited geographical and disaster-type diversity in the existing datasets. We introduce DAVI (Disaster Assessment with VIsion foundation model), a novel approach that addresses domain disparities and detects structural damage at the building level without requiring ground-truth labels for target regions. DAVI combines task-specific knowledge from a model trained on source regions with task-agnostic knowledge from an image segmentation model to generate pseudo labels indicating potential damage in target regions. It then utilizes a two-stage refinement process, which operate at both pixel and image levels, to accurately identify changes in disaster-affected areas. Our evaluation, including a case study on the 2023 T\"urkiye earthquake, demonstrates that our model achieves exceptional performance across diverse terrains (e.g., North America, Asia, and the Middle East) and disaster types (e.g., wildfires, hurricanes, and tsunamis). This confirms its robustness in disaster assessment without dependence on ground-truth labels and highlights its practical applicability.
Asymptotic Unbiased Sample Sampling to Speed Up Sharpness-Aware Minimization
Authors: Jiaxin Deng, Junbiao Pang, Baochang Zhang
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Pose Estimation, Quantization

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising approach for effectively reducing the generalization error. However, SAM incurs twice the computational cost compared to base optimizer (e.g., SGD). We propose Asymptotic Unbiased Sampling with respect to iterations to accelerate SAM (AUSAM), which maintains the model's generalization capacity while significantly enhancing computational efficiency. Concretely, we probabilistically sample a subset of data points beneficial for SAM optimization based on a theoretically guaranteed criterion, i.e., the Gradient Norm of each Sample (GNS). We further approximate the GNS by the difference in loss values before and after perturbation in SAM. As a plug-and-play, architecture-agnostic method, our approach consistently accelerates SAM across a range of tasks and networks, i.e., classification, human pose estimation and network quantization. On CIFAR10/100 and Tiny-ImageNet, AUSAM achieves results comparable to SAM while providing a speedup of over 70%. Compared to recent dynamic data pruning methods, AUSAM is better suited for SAM and excels in maintaining performance. Additionally, AUSAM accelerates optimization in human pose estimation and model quantization without sacrificing performance, demonstrating its broad practicality.
SimSAM: Simple Siamese Representations Based Semantic Affinity Matrix for Unsupervised Image Segmentation
Authors: Chanda Grover Kamra, Indra Deep Mastan, Nitin Kumar, Debayan Gupta
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Image Segmentation

Recent developments in self-supervised learning (SSL) have made it possible to learn data representations without the need for annotations. Inspired by the non-contrastive SSL approach (SimSiam), we introduce a novel framework SIMSAM to compute the Semantic Affinity Matrix, which is significant for unsupervised image segmentation. Given an image, SIMSAM first extracts features using pre-trained DINO-ViT, then projects the features to predict the correlations of dense features in a non-contrastive way. We show applications of the Semantic Affinity Matrix in object segmentation and semantic segmentation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/chandagrover/SimSAM.
Real-world Image Dehazing with Coherence-based Pseudo Labeling and Cooperative Unfolding Network
Authors: Chengyu Fang, Chunming He, Fengyang Xiao, Yulun Zhang, Longxiang Tang, Yuelin Zhang, Kai Li, Xiu Li
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing

Real-world Image Dehazing (RID) aims to alleviate haze-induced degradation in real-world settings. This task remains challenging due to the complexities in accurately modeling real haze distributions and the scarcity of paired real-world data. To address these challenges, we first introduce a cooperative unfolding network that jointly models atmospheric scattering and image scenes, effectively integrating physical knowledge into deep networks to restore haze-contaminated details. Additionally, we propose the first RID-oriented iterative mean-teacher framework, termed the Coherence-based Label Generator, to generate high-quality pseudo labels for network training. Specifically, we provide an optimal label pool to store the best pseudo-labels during network training, leveraging both global and local coherence to select high-quality candidates and assign weights to prioritize haze-free regions. We verify the effectiveness of our method, with experiments demonstrating that it achieves state-of-the-art performance on RID tasks. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/cnyvfang/CORUN-Colabator}.
DemosaicFormer: Coarse-to-Fine Demosaicing Network for HybridEVS Camera
Authors: Senyan Xu, Zhijing Sun, Jiaying Zhu, Yurui Zhu, Xueyang Fu, Zheng-Jun Zha
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Demosaicking, Event-based vision, Image Restoration

Hybrid Event-Based Vision Sensor (HybridEVS) is a novel sensor integrating traditional frame-based and event-based sensors, offering substantial benefits for applications requiring low-light, high dynamic range, and low-latency environments, such as smartphones and wearable devices. Despite its potential, the lack of Image signal processing (ISP) pipeline specifically designed for HybridEVS poses a significant challenge. To address this challenge, in this study, we propose a coarse-to-fine framework named DemosaicFormer which comprises coarse demosaicing and pixel correction. Coarse demosaicing network is designed to produce a preliminary high-quality estimate of the RGB image from the HybridEVS raw data while the pixel correction network enhances the performance of image restoration and mitigates the impact of defective pixels. Our key innovation is the design of a Multi-Scale Gating Module (MSGM) applying the integration of cross-scale features, which allows feature information to flow between different scales. Additionally, the adoption of progressive training and data augmentation strategies further improves model's robustness and effectiveness. Experimental results show superior performance against the existing methods both qualitatively and visually, and our DemosaicFormer achieves the best performance in terms of all the evaluation metrics in the MIPI 2024 challenge on Demosaic for Hybridevs Camera. The code is available at https://github.com/QUEAHREN/DemosaicFormer.
Multi-Teacher Multi-Objective Meta-Learning for Zero-Shot Hyperspectral Band Selection
Authors: Jie Feng, Xiaojian Zhong, Di Li, Weisheng Dong, Ronghua Shang, Licheng Jiao
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Meta-Learning

Band selection plays a crucial role in hyperspectral image classification by removing redundant and noisy bands and retaining discriminative ones. However, most existing deep learning-based methods are aimed at dealing with a specific band selection dataset, and need to retrain parameters for new datasets, which significantly limits their generalizability.To address this issue, a novel multi-teacher multi-objective meta-learning network (M$^3$BS) is proposed for zero-shot hyperspectral band selection. In M$^3$BS, a generalizable graph convolution network (GCN) is constructed to generate dataset-agnostic base, and extract compatible meta-knowledge from multiple band selection tasks. To enhance the ability of meta-knowledge extraction, multiple band selection teachers are introduced to provide diverse high-quality experiences.strategy Finally, subsequent classification tasks are attached and jointly optimized with multi-teacher band selection tasks through multi-objective meta-learning in an end-to-end trainable way. Multi-objective meta-learning guarantees to coordinate diverse optimization objectives automatically and adapt to various datasets simultaneously. Once the optimization is accomplished, the acquired meta-knowledge can be directly transferred to unseen datasets without any retraining or fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method on par with state-of-the-art baselines for zero-shot hyperspectral band selection.
IFTD: Image Feature Triangle Descriptor for Loop Detection in Driving Scenes
Authors: Fengtian Lang, Ruiye Ming, Zikang Yuan, Xin Yang
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

In this work, we propose a fast and robust Image Feature Triangle Descriptor (IFTD) based on the STD method, aimed at improving the efficiency and accuracy of place recognition in driving scenarios. We extract keypoints from BEV projection image of point cloud and construct these keypoints into triangle descriptors. By matching these feature triangles, we achieved precise place recognition and calculated the 4-DOF pose estimation between two keyframes. Furthermore, we employ image similarity inspection to perform the final place recognition. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that our IFTD can achieve greater robustness and accuracy than state-of-the-art methods with low computational overhead.
Emotional Conversation: Empowering Talking Faces with Cohesive Expression, Gaze and Pose Generation
Authors: Jiadong Liang, Feng Lu
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, Self-Supervised Learning, Talking Face Generation

Vivid talking face generation holds immense potential applications across diverse multimedia domains, such as film and game production. While existing methods accurately synchronize lip movements with input audio, they typically ignore crucial alignments between emotion and facial cues, which include expression, gaze, and head pose. These alignments are indispensable for synthesizing realistic videos. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage audio-driven talking face generation framework that employs 3D facial landmarks as intermediate variables. This framework achieves collaborative alignment of expression, gaze, and pose with emotions through self-supervised learning. Specifically, we decompose this task into two key steps, namely speech-to-landmarks synthesis and landmarks-to-face generation. The first step focuses on simultaneously synthesizing emotionally aligned facial cues, including normalized landmarks that represent expressions, gaze, and head pose. These cues are subsequently reassembled into relocated facial landmarks. In the second step, these relocated landmarks are mapped to latent key points using self-supervised learning and then input into a pretrained model to create high-quality face images. Extensive experiments on the MEAD dataset demonstrate that our model significantly advances the state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and emotional alignment.
A Comprehensive Survey on Machine Learning Driven Material Defect Detection
Authors: Jun Bai, Di wu, Tristan Shelley, Peter Schubel, David Twine, John Russell, Xuesen Zeng, Ji Zhang
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection, Survey

Material defects (MD) represent a primary challenge affecting product performance and giving rise to safety issues in related products. The rapid and accurate identification and localization of MD constitute crucial research endeavors in addressing contemporary challenges associated with MD. In recent years, propelled by the swift advancement of machine learning (ML) technologies, particularly exemplified by deep learning, ML has swiftly emerged as the core technology and a prominent research direction for material defect detection (MDD). Through a comprehensive review of the latest literature, we systematically survey the ML techniques applied in MDD into five categories: unsupervised learning, supervised learning, semi-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and generative learning. We provide a detailed analysis of the main principles and techniques used, together with the advantages and potential challenges associated with these techniques. Furthermore, the survey focuses on the techniques for defect detection in composite materials, which are important types of materials enjoying increasingly wide application in various industries such as aerospace, automotive, construction, and renewable energy. Finally, the survey explores potential future directions in MDD utilizing ML technologies. This survey consolidates ML-based MDD literature and provides a foundation for future research and practice.
Robust 3D Face Alignment with Multi-Path Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Zhichao Jiang, Hongsong Wang, Xi Teng, Baopu Li
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Face Alignment, Face Alignment, Face Model, Neural Architecture Search

3D face alignment is a very challenging and fundamental problem in computer vision. Existing deep learning-based methods manually design different networks to regress either parameters of a 3D face model or 3D positions of face vertices. However, designing such networks relies on expert knowledge, and these methods often struggle to produce consistent results across various face poses. To address this limitation, we employ Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to automatically discover the optimal architecture for 3D face alignment. We propose a novel Multi-path One-shot Neural Architecture Search (MONAS) framework that leverages multi-scale features and contextual information to enhance face alignment across various poses. The MONAS comprises two key algorithms: Multi-path Networks Unbiased Sampling Based Training and Simulated Annealing based Multi-path One-shot Search. Experimental results on three popular benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of the MONAS for both sparse alignment and dense alignment.
Controllable Dance Generation with Style-Guided Motion Diffusion
Authors: Hongsong Wang, Ying Zhu, Yang Zhang, JunBo Wang, Xin Geng, Liang Wang
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00

Dance plays an important role as an artistic form and expression in human culture, yet the creation of dance remains a challenging task. Most dance generation methods primarily rely solely on music, seldom taking into consideration intrinsic attributes such as music style or genre. In this work, we introduce Flexible Dance Generation with Style Description Prompts (DGSDP), a diffusion-based framework suitable for diversified tasks of dance generation by fully leveraging the semantics of music style. The core component of this framework is Music-Conditioned Style-Aware Diffusion (MCSAD), which comprises a Transformer-based network and a music Style Modulation module. The MCSAD seemly integrates music conditions and style description prompts into the dance generation framework, ensuring that generated dances are consistent with the music content and style. To facilitate flexible dance generation and accommodate different tasks, a spatial-temporal masking strategy is effectively applied in the backward diffusion process. The proposed framework successfully generates realistic dance sequences that are accurately aligned with music for a variety of tasks such as long-term generation, dance in-betweening, dance inpainting, and etc. We hope that this work has the potential to inspire dance generation and creation, with promising applications in entertainment, art, and education. Code is available on Github: https://github.com/mucunzhuzhu/DGSDP.