pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PE-MVCNet: Multi-view and Cross-modal Fusion Network for Pulmonary Embolism Prediction
Authors: Zhaoxin Guo, Zhipeng Wang, Ruiquan Ge, Jianxun Yu, Feiwei Qin, Yuan Tian, Yuqing Peng, Yonghong Li, Changmiao Wang
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00

The early detection of a pulmonary embolism (PE) is critical for enhancing patient survival rates. Both image-based and non-image-based features are of utmost importance in medical classification tasks. In a clinical setting, physicians tend to rely on the contextual information provided by Electronic Medical Records (EMR) to interpret medical imaging. However, very few models effectively integrate clinical information with imaging data. To address this shortcoming, we suggest a multimodal fusion methodology, termed PE-MVCNet, which capitalizes on Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography imaging and EMR data. This method comprises the Image-only module with an integrated multi-view block, the EMR-only module, and the Cross-modal Attention Fusion (CMAF) module. These modules cooperate to extract comprehensive features that subsequently generate predictions for PE. We conducted experiments using the publicly accessible Stanford University Medical Center dataset, achieving an AUROC of 94.1%, an accuracy rate of 90.2%, and an F1 score of 90.6%. Our proposed model outperforms existing methodologies, corroborating that our multimodal fusion model excels compared to models that use a single data modality. Our source code is available at https://github.com/LeavingStarW/PE-MVCNET.
Lane2Seq: Towards Unified Lane Detection via Sequence Generation
Authors: Kunyang Zhou
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Decoder, Lane Detection

In this paper, we present a novel sequence generation-based framework for lane detection, called Lane2Seq. It unifies various lane detection formats by casting lane detection as a sequence generation task. This is different from previous lane detection methods, which depend on well-designed task-specific head networks and corresponding loss functions. Lane2Seq only adopts a plain transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture with a simple cross-entropy loss. Additionally, we propose a new multi-format model tuning based on reinforcement learning to incorporate the task-specific knowledge into Lane2Seq. Experimental results demonstrate that such a simple sequence generation paradigm not only unifies lane detection but also achieves competitive performance on benchmarks. For example, Lane2Seq gets 97.95\% and 97.42\% F1 score on Tusimple and LLAMAS datasets, establishing a new state-of-the-art result for two benchmarks.
LiveHPS: LiDAR-based Scene-level Human Pose and Shape Estimation in Free Environment
Authors: Yiming Ren, Xiao Han, Chengfeng Zhao, Jingya Wang, Lan Xu, Jingyi Yu, Yuexin Ma
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Scene Understanding

For human-centric large-scale scenes, fine-grained modeling for 3D human global pose and shape is significant for scene understanding and can benefit many real-world applications. In this paper, we present LiveHPS, a novel single-LiDAR-based approach for scene-level human pose and shape estimation without any limitation of light conditions and wearable devices. In particular, we design a distillation mechanism to mitigate the distribution-varying effect of LiDAR point clouds and exploit the temporal-spatial geometric and dynamic information existing in consecutive frames to solve the occlusion and noise disturbance. LiveHPS, with its efficient configuration and high-quality output, is well-suited for real-world applications. Moreover, we propose a huge human motion dataset, named FreeMotion, which is collected in various scenarios with diverse human poses, shapes and translations. It consists of multi-modal and multi-view acquisition data from calibrated and synchronized LiDARs, cameras, and IMUs. Extensive experiments on our new dataset and other public datasets demonstrate the SOTA performance and robustness of our approach. We will release our code and dataset soon.
Deep Umbra: A Generative Approach for Sunlight Access Computation in Urban Spaces
Authors: Kazi Shahrukh Omar, Gustavo Moreira, Daniel Hodczak, Maryam Hosseini, Nicola Colaninno, Marcos Lage, Fabio Miranda
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Sunlight and shadow play critical roles in how urban spaces are utilized, thrive, and grow. While access to sunlight is essential to the success of urban environments, shadows can provide shaded places to stay during the hot seasons, mitigate heat island effect, and increase pedestrian comfort levels. Properly quantifying sunlight access and shadows in large urban environments is key in tackling some of the important challenges facing cities today. In this paper, we propose Deep Umbra, a novel computational framework that enables the quantification of sunlight access and shadows at a global scale. Our framework is based on a conditional generative adversarial network that considers the physical form of cities to compute high-resolution spatial information of accumulated sunlight access for the different seasons of the year. We use data from seven different cities to train our model, and show, through an extensive set of experiments, its low overall RMSE (below 0.1) as well as its extensibility to cities that were not part of the training set. Additionally, we contribute a set of case studies and a comprehensive dataset with sunlight access information for more than 100 cities across six continents of the world. Deep Umbra is available at https://urbantk.org/shadows.
Few-shot adaptation for morphology-independent cell instance segmentation
Authors: Ram J. Zaveri, Voke Brume, Gianfranco Doretto
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Microscopy data collections are becoming larger and more frequent. Accurate and precise quantitative analysis tools like cell instance segmentation are necessary to benefit from them. This is challenging due to the variability in the data, which requires retraining the segmentation model to maintain high accuracy on new collections. This is needed especially for segmenting cells with elongated and non-convex morphology like bacteria. We propose to reduce the amount of annotation and computing power needed for retraining the model by introducing a few-shot domain adaptation approach that requires annotating only one to five cells of the new data to process and that quickly adapts the model to maintain high accuracy. Our results show a significant boost in accuracy after adaptation to very challenging bacteria datasets.
NocPlace: Nocturnal Visual Place Recognition via Generative and Inherited Knowledge Transfer
Authors: Bingxi Liu, Yiqun Wang, Huaqi Tao, Tingjun Huang, Fulin Tang, Yihong Wu, Jinqiang Cui, Hong Zhang
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image-to-Image Translation, Transfer Learning, Translation, Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is crucial in computer vision, aiming to retrieve database images similar to a query image from an extensive collection of known images. However, like many vision tasks, VPR always degrades at night due to the scarcity of nighttime images. Moreover, VPR needs to address the cross-domain problem of night-to-day rather than just the issue of a single nighttime domain. In response to these issues, we present NocPlace, which leverages generative and inherited knowledge transfer to embed resilience against dazzling lights and extreme darkness in the global descriptor. First, we establish a day-night urban scene dataset called NightCities, capturing diverse lighting variations and dark scenarios across 60 cities globally. Then, an image generation network is trained on this dataset and processes a large-scale VPR dataset, obtaining its nighttime version. Finally, VPR models are fine-tuned using descriptors inherited from themselves and night-style images, which builds explicit cross-domain contrastive relationships. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate our contributions and the superiority of NocPlace. Without adding any real-time computing resources, NocPlace improves the performance of Eigenplaces by 7.6% on Tokyo 24/7 Night and 16.8% on SVOX Night.
Efficiently Leveraging Linguistic Priors for Scene Text Spotting
Authors: Nguyen Nguyen, Yapeng Tian, Chenliang Xu
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Text Recognition, Text Detection, Text Spotting

Incorporating linguistic knowledge can improve scene text recognition, but it is questionable whether the same holds for scene text spotting, which typically involves text detection and recognition. This paper proposes a method that leverages linguistic knowledge from a large text corpus to replace the traditional one-hot encoding used in auto-regressive scene text spotting and recognition models. This allows the model to capture the relationship between characters in the same word. Additionally, we introduce a technique to generate text distributions that align well with scene text datasets, removing the need for in-domain fine-tuning. As a result, the newly created text distributions are more informative than pure one-hot encoding, leading to improved spotting and recognition performance. Our method is simple and efficient, and it can easily be integrated into existing auto-regressive-based approaches. Experimental results show that our method not only improves recognition accuracy but also enables more accurate localization of words. It significantly improves both state-of-the-art scene text spotting and recognition pipelines, achieving state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks.
OSCaR: Object State Captioning and State Change Representation
Authors: Nguyen Nguyen, Jing Bi, Ali Vosoughi, Yapeng Tian, Pooyan Fazli, Chenliang Xu
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Object

The capability of intelligent models to extrapolate and comprehend changes in object states is a crucial yet demanding aspect of AI research, particularly through the lens of human interaction in real-world settings. This task involves describing complex visual environments, identifying active objects, and interpreting their changes as conveyed through language. Traditional methods, which isolate object captioning and state change detection, offer a limited view of dynamic environments. Moreover, relying on a small set of symbolic words to represent changes has restricted the expressiveness of the language. To address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce the Object State Captioning and State Change Representation (OSCaR) dataset and benchmark. OSCaR consists of 14,084 annotated video segments with nearly 1,000 unique objects from various egocentric video collections. It sets a new testbed for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our experiments demonstrate that while MLLMs show some skill, they lack a full understanding of object state changes. The benchmark includes a fine-tuned model that, despite initial capabilities, requires significant improvements in accuracy and generalization ability for effective understanding of these changes. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/nguyennm1024/OSCaR.
CharNeRF: 3D Character Generation from Concept Art
Authors: Eddy Chu, Yiyang Chen, Chedy Raissi, Anand Bhojan
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, NeRF

3D modeling holds significant importance in the realms of AR/VR and gaming, allowing for both artistic creativity and practical applications. However, the process is often time-consuming and demands a high level of skill. In this paper, we present a novel approach to create volumetric representations of 3D characters from consistent turnaround concept art, which serves as the standard input in the 3D modeling industry. While Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has been a game-changer in image-based 3D reconstruction, to the best of our knowledge, there is no known research that optimizes the pipeline for concept art. To harness the potential of concept art, with its defined body poses and specific view angles, we propose encoding it as priors for our model. We train the network to make use of these priors for various 3D points through a learnable view-direction-attended multi-head self-attention layer. Additionally, we demonstrate that a combination of ray sampling and surface sampling enhances the inference capabilities of our network. Our model is able to generate high-quality 360-degree views of characters. Subsequently, we provide a simple guideline to better leverage our model to extract the 3D mesh. It is important to note that our model's inferencing capabilities are influenced by the training data's characteristics, primarily focusing on characters with a single head, two arms, and two legs. Nevertheless, our methodology remains versatile and adaptable to concept art from diverse subject matters, without imposing any specific assumptions on the data.
Transparent Image Layer Diffusion using Latent Transparency
Authors: Lvmin Zhang, Maneesh Agrawala
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00

We present LayerDiffuse, an approach enabling large-scale pretrained latent diffusion models to generate transparent images. The method allows generation of single transparent images or of multiple transparent layers. The method learns a "latent transparency" that encodes alpha channel transparency into the latent manifold of a pretrained latent diffusion model. It preserves the production-ready quality of the large diffusion model by regulating the added transparency as a latent offset with minimal changes to the original latent distribution of the pretrained model. In this way, any latent diffusion model can be converted into a transparent image generator by finetuning it with the adjusted latent space. We train the model with 1M transparent image layer pairs collected using a human-in-the-loop collection scheme. We show that latent transparency can be applied to different open source image generators, or be adapted to various conditional control systems to achieve applications like foreground/background-conditioned layer generation, joint layer generation, structural control of layer contents, etc. A user study finds that in most cases (97%) users prefer our natively generated transparent content over previous ad-hoc solutions such as generating and then matting. Users also report the quality of our generated transparent images is comparable to real commercial transparent assets like Adobe Stock.
In Defense and Revival of Bayesian Filtering for Thermal Infrared Object Tracking
Authors: Peng Gao, Shi-Min Li, Feng Gao, Fei Wang, Ru-Yue Yuan, Hamido Fujita
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking, Thermal Infrared Object Tracking

Deep learning-based methods monopolize the latest research in the field of thermal infrared (TIR) object tracking. However, relying solely on deep learning models to obtain better tracking results requires carefully selecting feature information that is beneficial to representing the target object and designing a reasonable template update strategy, which undoubtedly increases the difficulty of model design. Thus, recent TIR tracking methods face many challenges in complex scenarios. This paper introduces a novel Deep Bayesian Filtering (DBF) method to enhance TIR tracking in these challenging situations. DBF is distinctive in its dual-model structure: the system and observation models. The system model leverages motion data to estimate the potential positions of the target object based on two-dimensional Brownian motion, thus generating a prior probability. Following this, the observation model comes into play upon capturing the TIR image. It serves as a classifier and employs infrared information to ascertain the likelihood of these estimated positions, creating a likelihood probability. According to the guidance of the two models, the position of the target object can be determined, and the template can be dynamically updated. Experimental analysis across several benchmark datasets reveals that DBF achieves competitive performance, surpassing most existing TIR tracking methods in complex scenarios.
Structural Teacher-Student Normality Learning for Multi-Class Anomaly Detection and Localization
Authors: Hanqiu Deng, Xingyu Li
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Knowledge Distillation, Multi-class Anomaly Detection

Visual anomaly detection is a challenging open-set task aimed at identifying unknown anomalous patterns while modeling normal data. The knowledge distillation paradigm has shown remarkable performance in one-class anomaly detection by leveraging teacher-student network feature comparisons. However, extending this paradigm to multi-class anomaly detection introduces novel scalability challenges. In this study, we address the significant performance degradation observed in previous teacher-student models when applied to multi-class anomaly detection, which we identify as resulting from cross-class interference. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel approach known as Structural Teacher-Student Normality Learning (SNL): (1) We propose spatial-channel distillation and intra-&inter-affinity distillation techniques to measure structural distance between the teacher and student networks. (2) We introduce a central residual aggregation module (CRAM) to encapsulate the normal representation space of the student network. We evaluate our proposed approach on two anomaly detection datasets, MVTecAD and VisA. Our method surpasses the state-of-the-art distillation-based algorithms by a significant margin of 3.9% and 1.5% on MVTecAD and 1.2% and 2.5% on VisA in the multi-class anomaly detection and localization tasks, respectively. Furthermore, our algorithm outperforms the current state-of-the-art unified models on both MVTecAD and VisA.
Parallelized Spatiotemporal Binding
Authors: Gautam Singh, Yue Wang, Jiawei Yang, Boris Ivanovic, Sungjin Ahn, Marco Pavone, Tong Che
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Object

While modern best practices advocate for scalable architectures that support long-range interactions, object-centric models are yet to fully embrace these architectures. In particular, existing object-centric models for handling sequential inputs, due to their reliance on RNN-based implementation, show poor stability and capacity and are slow to train on long sequences. We introduce Parallelizable Spatiotemporal Binder or PSB, the first temporally-parallelizable slot learning architecture for sequential inputs. Unlike conventional RNN-based approaches, PSB produces object-centric representations, known as slots, for all time-steps in parallel. This is achieved by refining the initial slots across all time-steps through a fixed number of layers equipped with causal attention. By capitalizing on the parallelism induced by our architecture, the proposed model exhibits a significant boost in efficiency. In experiments, we test PSB extensively as an encoder within an auto-encoding framework paired with a wide variety of decoder options. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our architecture demonstrates stable training on longer sequences, achieves parallelization that results in a 60% increase in training speed, and yields performance that is on par with or better on unsupervised 2D and 3D object-centric scene decomposition and understanding.
Asphalt Concrete Characterization Using Digital Image Correlation: A Systematic Review of Best Practices, Applications, and Future Vision
Authors: Siqi Wang, Zehui Zhu, Tao Ma, Jianwei Fan
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00

Digital Image Correlation (DIC) is an optical technique that measures displacement and strain by tracking pattern movement in a sequence of captured images during testing. DIC has gained recognition in asphalt pavement engineering since the early 2000s. However, users often perceive the DIC technique as an out-of-box tool and lack a thorough understanding of its operational and measurement principles. This article presents a state-of-art review of DIC as a crucial tool for laboratory testing of asphalt concrete (AC), primarily focusing on the widely utilized 2D-DIC and 3D-DIC techniques. To address frequently asked questions from users, the review thoroughly examines the optimal methods for preparing speckle patterns, configuring single-camera or dual-camera imaging systems, conducting DIC analyses, and exploring various applications. Furthermore, emerging DIC methodologies such as Digital Volume Correlation and deep-learning-based DIC are introduced, highlighting their potential for future applications in pavement engineering. The article also provides a comprehensive and reliable flowchart for implementing DIC in AC characterization. Finally, critical directions for future research are presented.
HOISDF: Constraining 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation with Global Signed Distance Fields
Authors: Haozhe Qi, Chen Zhao, Mathieu Salzmann, Alexander Mathis
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Hand Pose Estimation, hand-object pose, Object, Pose Estimation

Human hands are highly articulated and versatile at handling objects. Jointly estimating the 3D poses of a hand and the object it manipulates from a monocular camera is challenging due to frequent occlusions. Thus, existing methods often rely on intermediate 3D shape representations to increase performance. These representations are typically explicit, such as 3D point clouds or meshes, and thus provide information in the direct surroundings of the intermediate hand pose estimate. To address this, we introduce HOISDF, a Signed Distance Field (SDF) guided hand-object pose estimation network, which jointly exploits hand and object SDFs to provide a global, implicit representation over the complete reconstruction volume. Specifically, the role of the SDFs is threefold: equip the visual encoder with implicit shape information, help to encode hand-object interactions, and guide the hand and object pose regression via SDF-based sampling and by augmenting the feature representations. We show that HOISDF achieves state-of-the-art results on hand-object pose estimation benchmarks (DexYCB and HO3Dv2). Code is available at https://github.com/amathislab/HOISDF
Offline Writer Identification Using Convolutional Neural Network Activation Features
Authors: Vincent Christlein, David Bernecker, Andreas Maier, Elli Angelopoulou
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently become the state-of-the-art tool for large-scale image classification. In this work we propose the use of activation features from CNNs as local descriptors for writer identification. A global descriptor is then formed by means of GMM supervector encoding, which is further improved by normalization with the KL-Kernel. We evaluate our method on two publicly available datasets: the ICDAR 2013 benchmark database and the CVL dataset. While we perform comparably to the state of the art on CVL, our proposed method yields about 0.21 absolute improvement in terms of mAP on the challenging bilingual ICDAR dataset.