pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Proxy Domain Generalizes the Crowd Localization by Better Binary Segmentation
Authors: Junyu Gao, Da Zhang, Xuelong Li
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Domain Generalization

Crowd localization targets on predicting each instance precise location within an image. Current advanced methods propose the pixel-wise binary classification to tackle the congested prediction, in which the pixel-level thresholds binarize the prediction confidence of being the pedestrian head. Since the crowd scenes suffer from extremely varying contents, counts and scales, the confidence-threshold learner is fragile and under-generalized encountering domain knowledge shift. Moreover, at the most time, the target domain is agnostic in training. Hence, it is imperative to exploit how to enhance the generalization of confidence-threshold locator to the latent target domain. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Proxy Domain (DPD) method to generalize the learner under domain shift. Concretely, based on the theoretical analysis to the generalization error risk upper bound on the latent target domain to a binary classifier, we propose to introduce a generated proxy domain to facilitate generalization. Then, based on the theory, we design a DPD algorithm which is composed by a training paradigm and proxy domain generator to enhance the domain generalization of the confidence-threshold learner. Besides, we conduct our method on five kinds of domain shift scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness on generalizing the crowd localization. Our code will be available at https://github.com/zhangda1018/DPD.
RHanDS: Refining Malformed Hands for Generated Images with Decoupled Structure and Style Guidance
Authors: Chengrui Wang, PengFei Liu, Min Zhou, Ming Zeng, Xubin Li, Tiezheng Ge, Bo Zheng
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00

Although diffusion models can generate high-quality human images, their applications are limited by the instability in generating hands with correct structures. Some previous works mitigate the problem by considering hand structure yet struggle to maintain style consistency between refined malformed hands and other image regions. In this paper, we aim to solve the problem of inconsistency regarding hand structure and style. We propose a conditional diffusion-based framework RHanDS to refine the hand region with the help of decoupled structure and style guidance. Specifically, the structure guidance is the hand mesh reconstructed from the malformed hand, serving to correct the hand structure. The style guidance is a hand image, e.g., the malformed hand itself, and is employed to furnish the style reference for hand refining. In order to suppress the structure leakage when referencing hand style and effectively utilize hand data to improve the capability of the model, we build a multi-style hand dataset and introduce a twostage training strategy. In the first stage, we use paired hand images for training to generate hands with the same style as the reference. In the second stage, various hand images generated based on the human mesh are used for training to enable the model to gain control over the hand structure. We evaluate our method and counterparts on the test dataset of the proposed multi-style hand dataset. The experimental results show that RHanDS can effectively refine hands structure- and style- correctly compared with previous methods. The codes and datasets will be available soon.
Structure-Aware Human Body Reshaping with Adaptive Affinity-Graph Network
Authors: Qiwen Deng, Yangcen Liu, Wen Li, Guoqing Wang
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Given a source portrait, the automatic human body reshaping task aims at editing it to an aesthetic body shape. As the technology has been widely used in media, several methods have been proposed mainly focusing on generating optical flow to warp the body shape. However, those previous works only consider the local transformation of different body parts (arms, torso, and legs), ignoring the global affinity, and limiting the capacity to ensure consistency and quality across the entire body. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Affinity-Graph Network (AAGN), which extracts the global affinity between different body parts to enhance the quality of the generated optical flow. Specifically, our AAGN primarily introduces the following designs: (1) we propose an Adaptive Affinity-Graph (AAG) Block that leverages the characteristic of a fully connected graph. AAG represents different body parts as nodes in an adaptive fully connected graph and captures all the affinities between nodes to obtain a global affinity map. The design could better improve the consistency between body parts. (2) Besides, for high-frequency details are crucial for photo aesthetics, a Body Shape Discriminator (BSD) is designed to extract information from both high-frequency and spatial domain. Particularly, an SRM filter is utilized to extract high-frequency details, which are combined with spatial features as input to the BSD. With this design, BSD guides the Flow Generator (FG) to pay attention to various fine details rather than rigid pixel-level fitting. Extensive experiments conducted on the BR-5K dataset demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the aesthetic appeal of reshaped photos, surpassing all previous work to achieve state-of-the-art in all evaluation metrics.
Non-Uniform Exposure Imaging via Neuromorphic Shutter Control
Authors: Mingyuan Lin, Jian Liu, Chi Zhang, Zibo Zhao, Chu He, Lei Yu
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Self-Supervised Learning

By leveraging the blur-noise trade-off, imaging with non-uniform exposures largely extends the image acquisition flexibility in harsh environments. However, the limitation of conventional cameras in perceiving intra-frame dynamic information prevents existing methods from being implemented in the real-world frame acquisition for real-time adaptive camera shutter control. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Neuromorphic Shutter Control (NSC) system to avoid motion blurs and alleviate instant noises, where the extremely low latency of events is leveraged to monitor the real-time motion and facilitate the scene-adaptive exposure. Furthermore, to stabilize the inconsistent Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) caused by the non-uniform exposure times, we propose an event-based image denoising network within a self-supervised learning paradigm, i.e., SEID, exploring the statistics of image noises and inter-frame motion information of events to obtain artificial supervision signals for high-quality imaging in real-world scenes. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed NSC, we implement it in hardware by building a hybrid-camera imaging prototype system, with which we collect a real-world dataset containing well-synchronized frames and events in diverse scenarios with different target scenes and motion patterns. Experiments on the synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches.
360VOTS: Visual Object Tracking and Segmentation in Omnidirectional Videos
Authors: Yinzhe Xu, Huajian Huang, Yingshu Chen, Sai-Kit Yeung
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation, Visual Object Tracking

Visual object tracking and segmentation in omnidirectional videos are challenging due to the wide field-of-view and large spherical distortion brought by 360{\deg} images. To alleviate these problems, we introduce a novel representation, extended bounding field-of-view (eBFoV), for target localization and use it as the foundation of a general 360 tracking framework which is applicable for both omnidirectional visual object tracking and segmentation tasks. Building upon our previous work on omnidirectional visual object tracking (360VOT), we propose a comprehensive dataset and benchmark that incorporates a new component called omnidirectional video object segmentation (360VOS). The 360VOS dataset includes 290 sequences accompanied by dense pixel-wise masks and covers a broader range of target categories. To support both the development and evaluation of algorithms in this domain, we divide the dataset into a training subset with 170 sequences and a testing subset with 120 sequences. Furthermore, we tailor evaluation metrics for both omnidirectional tracking and segmentation to ensure rigorous assessment. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark state-of-the-art approaches and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed 360 tracking framework and training dataset. Homepage: https://360vots.hkustvgd.com/
PeLiCal: Targetless Extrinsic Calibration via Penetrating Lines for RGB-D Cameras with Limited Co-visibility
Authors: Jaeho Shin, Seungsang Yun, Ayoung Kim
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation

RGB-D cameras are crucial in robotic perception, given their ability to produce images augmented with depth data. However, their limited FOV often requires multiple cameras to cover a broader area. In multi-camera RGB-D setups, the goal is typically to reduce camera overlap, optimizing spatial coverage with as few cameras as possible. The extrinsic calibration of these systems introduces additional complexities. Existing methods for extrinsic calibration either necessitate specific tools or highly depend on the accuracy of camera motion estimation. To address these issues, we present PeLiCal, a novel line-based calibration approach for RGB-D camera systems exhibiting limited overlap. Our method leverages long line features from surroundings, and filters out outliers with a novel convergence voting algorithm, achieving targetless, real-time, and outlier-robust performance compared to existing methods. We open source our implementation on https://github.com/joomeok/PeLiCal.git.
Self-Bootstrapped Visual-Language Model for Knowledge Selection and Question Answering
Authors: Dongze Hao, Qunbo Wang, Longteng Guo, Jie Jiang, Jing Liu
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Passage Retrieval, Question Answering, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA), World Knowledge

While large visual-language models (LVLM) have shown promising results on traditional visual question answering benchmarks, it is still challenging for them to answer complex VQA problems which requires diverse world knowledge. Motivated by the research of retrieval-augmented generation in the field of natural language processing, we use Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) to retrieve related knowledge to help the model answer questions. However, DPR conduct retrieving in natural language space, which may not ensure comprehensive acquisition of image information. Thus, the retrieved knowledge is not truly conducive to helping answer the question, affecting the performance of the overall system. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that leverages the visual-language model to select the key knowledge retrieved by DPR and answer questions. The framework consists of two modules: Selector and Answerer, where both are initialized by the LVLM and parameter-efficiently finetuned by self-bootstrapping: find key knowledge in the retrieved knowledge documents using the Selector, and then use them to finetune the Answerer to predict answers; obtain the pseudo-labels of key knowledge documents based on the predictions of the Answerer and weak supervision labels, and then finetune the Selector to select key knowledge; repeat. Our framework significantly enhances the performance of the baseline on the challenging open-domain Knowledge-based VQA benchmark, OK-VQA, achieving a state-of-the-art accuracy of 62.83%. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/haodongze/Self-KSel-QAns.
Gorgeous: Create Your Desired Character Facial Makeup from Any Ideas
Authors: Jia Wei Sii, Chee Seng Chan
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Storytelling

Contemporary makeup transfer methods primarily focus on replicating makeup from one face to another, considerably limiting their use in creating diverse and creative character makeup essential for visual storytelling. Such methods typically fail to address the need for uniqueness and contextual relevance, specifically aligning with character and story settings as they depend heavily on existing facial makeup in reference images. This approach also presents a significant challenge when attempting to source a perfectly matched facial makeup style, further complicating the creation of makeup designs inspired by various story elements, such as theme, background, and props that do not necessarily feature faces. To address these limitations, we introduce $Gorgeous$, a novel diffusion-based makeup application method that goes beyond simple transfer by innovatively crafting unique and thematic facial makeup. Unlike traditional methods, $Gorgeous$ does not require the presence of a face in the reference images. Instead, it draws artistic inspiration from a minimal set of three to five images, which can be of any type, and transforms these elements into practical makeup applications directly on the face. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that $Gorgeous$ can effectively generate distinctive character facial makeup inspired by the chosen thematic reference images. This approach opens up new possibilities for integrating broader story elements into character makeup, thereby enhancing the narrative depth and visual impact in storytelling.
Exploring Kinetic Curves Features for the Classification of Benign and Malignant Breast Lesions in DCE-MRI
Authors: Zixian Li, Yuming Zhong, Yi Wang
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

Breast cancer is the most common malignant tumor among women and the second cause of cancer-related death. Early diagnosis in clinical practice is crucial for timely treatment and prognosis. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) has revealed great usability in the preoperative diagnosis and assessing therapy effects thanks to its capability to reflect the morphology and dynamic characteristics of breast lesions. However, most existing computer-assisted diagnosis algorithms only consider conventional radiomic features when classifying benign and malignant lesions in DCE-MRI. In this study, we propose to fully leverage the dynamic characteristics from the kinetic curves as well as the radiomic features to boost the classification accuracy of benign and malignant breast lesions. The proposed method is a fully automated solution by directly analyzing the 3D features from the DCE-MRI. The proposed method is evaluated on an in-house dataset including 200 DCE-MRI scans with 298 breast tumors (172 benign and 126 malignant tumors), achieving favorable classification accuracy with an area under curve (AUC) of 0.94. By simultaneously considering the dynamic and radiomic features, it is beneficial to effectively distinguish between benign and malignant breast lesions. The algorithm is publicly available at https://github.com/ryandok/JPA.
MaterialSeg3D: Segmenting Dense Materials from 2D Priors for 3D Assets
Authors: Zeyu Li, Ruitong Gan, Chuanchen Luo, Yuxi Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Ziwei Zhu Man Zhang, Qing Li, XuCheng Yin, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Junran Peng
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00

Driven by powerful image diffusion models, recent research has achieved the automatic creation of 3D objects from textual or visual guidance. By performing score distillation sampling (SDS) iteratively across different views, these methods succeed in lifting 2D generative prior to the 3D space. However, such a 2D generative image prior bakes the effect of illumination and shadow into the texture. As a result, material maps optimized by SDS inevitably involve spurious correlated components. The absence of precise material definition makes it infeasible to relight the generated assets reasonably in novel scenes, which limits their application in downstream scenarios. In contrast, humans can effortlessly circumvent this ambiguity by deducing the material of the object from its appearance and semantics. Motivated by this insight, we propose MaterialSeg3D, a 3D asset material generation framework to infer underlying material from the 2D semantic prior. Based on such a prior model, we devise a mechanism to parse material in 3D space. We maintain a UV stack, each map of which is unprojected from a specific viewpoint. After traversing all viewpoints, we fuse the stack through a weighted voting scheme and then employ region unification to ensure the coherence of the object parts. To fuel the learning of semantics prior, we collect a material dataset, named Materialized Individual Objects (MIO), which features abundant images, diverse categories, and accurate annotations. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
NeRF-DetS: Enhanced Adaptive Spatial-wise Sampling and View-wise Fusion Strategies for NeRF-based Indoor Multi-view 3D Object Detection
Authors: Chi Huang, Xinyang Li, Yansong Qu, Changli Wu, Xiaofan Li, Shengchuan Zhang, Liujuan Cao
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, NeRF, Neural Rendering, Novel View Synthesis, object-detection, Object Detection

In indoor scenes, the diverse distribution of object locations and scales makes the visual 3D perception task a big challenge. Previous works (e.g, NeRF-Det) have demonstrated that implicit representation has the capacity to benefit the visual 3D perception task in indoor scenes with high amount of overlap between input images. However, previous works cannot fully utilize the advancement of implicit representation because of fixed sampling and simple multi-view feature fusion. In this paper, inspired by sparse fashion method (e.g, DETR3D), we propose a simple yet effective method, NeRF-DetS, to address above issues. NeRF-DetS includes two modules: Progressive Adaptive Sampling Strategy (PASS) and Depth-Guided Simplified Multi-Head Attention Fusion (DS-MHA). Specifically, (1)PASS can automatically sample features of each layer within a dense 3D detector, using offsets predicted by the previous layer. (2)DS-MHA can not only efficiently fuse multi-view features with strong occlusion awareness but also reduce computational cost. Extensive experiments on ScanNetV2 dataset demonstrate our NeRF-DetS outperforms NeRF-Det, by achieving +5.02% and +5.92% improvement in mAP under IoU25 and IoU50, respectively. Also, NeRF-DetS shows consistent improvements on ARKITScenes.
GlobalBuildingMap -- Unveiling the Mystery of Global Buildings
Authors: Xiao Xiang Zhu, Qingyu Li, Yilei Shi, Yuanyuan Wang, Adam Stewart, Jonathan Prexl
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00

Understanding how buildings are distributed globally is crucial to revealing the human footprint on our home planet. This built environment affects local climate, land surface albedo, resource distribution, and many other key factors that influence well-being and human health. Despite this, quantitative and comprehensive data on the distribution and properties of buildings worldwide is lacking. To this end, by using a big data analytics approach and nearly 800,000 satellite images, we generated the highest resolution and highest accuracy building map ever created: the GlobalBuildingMap (GBM). A joint analysis of building maps and solar potentials indicates that rooftop solar energy can supply the global energy consumption need at a reasonable cost. Specifically, if solar panels were placed on the roofs of all buildings, they could supply 1.1-3.3 times -- depending on the efficiency of the solar device -- the global energy consumption in 2020, which is the year with the highest consumption on record. We also identified a clear geospatial correlation between building areas and key socioeconomic variables, which indicates our global building map can serve as an important input to modeling global socioeconomic needs and drivers.
Deep Regression Representation Learning with Topology
Authors: Shihao Zhang, Kenji Kawaguchi, Angela Yao
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Representation Learning

Most works studying representation learning focus only on classification and neglect regression. Yet, the learning objectives and, therefore, the representation topologies of the two tasks are fundamentally different: classification targets class separation, leading to disconnected representations, whereas regression requires ordinality with respect to the target, leading to continuous representations. We thus wonder how the effectiveness of a regression representation is influenced by its topology, with evaluation based on the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. The IB principle is an important framework that provides principles for learning effective representations. We establish two connections between it and the topology of regression representations. The first connection reveals that a lower intrinsic dimension of the feature space implies a reduced complexity of the representation Z. This complexity can be quantified as the conditional entropy of Z on the target Y, and serves as an upper bound on the generalization error. The second connection suggests a feature space that is topologically similar to the target space will better align with the IB principle. Based on these two connections, we introduce PH-Reg, a regularizer specific to regression that matches the intrinsic dimension and topology of the feature space with the target space. Experiments on synthetic and real-world regression tasks demonstrate the benefits of PH-Reg. Code: https://github.com/needylove/PH-Reg.
Accelerating Image Generation with Sub-path Linear Approximation Model
Authors: Chen Xu, Tianhui Song, Weixin Feng, Xubin Li, Tiezheng Ge, Bo Zheng, LiMin Wang
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, GPU, Image Generation, Video Generation

Diffusion models have significantly advanced the state of the art in image, audio, and video generation tasks. However, their applications in practical scenarios are hindered by slow inference speed. Drawing inspiration from the approximation strategies utilized in consistency models, we propose the Sub-path Linear Approximation Model (SLAM), which accelerates diffusion models while maintaining high-quality image generation. SLAM treats the PF-ODE trajectory as a series of PF-ODE sub-paths divided by sampled points, and harnesses sub-path linear (SL) ODEs to form a progressive and continuous error estimation along each individual PF-ODE sub-path. The optimization on such SL-ODEs allows SLAM to construct denoising mappings with smaller cumulative approximated errors. An efficient distillation method is also developed to facilitate the incorporation of more advanced diffusion models, such as latent diffusion models. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that SLAM achieves an efficient training regimen, requiring only 6 A100 GPU days to produce a high-quality generative model capable of 2 to 4-step generation with high performance. Comprehensive evaluations on LAION, MS COCO 2014, and MS COCO 2017 datasets also illustrate that SLAM surpasses existing acceleration methods in few-step generation tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance both on FID and the quality of the generated images.