pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BroadTrack: Broadcast Camera Tracking for Soccer
Authors: Floriane Magera, Thomas Hoyoux, Olivier Barnich, Marc Van Droogenbroeck
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration

Camera calibration and localization, sometimes simply named camera calibration, enables many applications in the context of soccer broadcasting, for instance regarding the interpretation and analysis of the game, or the insertion of augmented reality graphics for storytelling or refereeing purposes. To contribute to such applications, the research community has typically focused on single-view calibration methods, leveraging the near-omnipresence of soccer field markings in wide-angle broadcast views, but leaving all temporal aspects, if considered at all, to general-purpose tracking or filtering techniques. Only a few contributions have been made to leverage any domain-specific knowledge for this tracking task, and, as a result, there lacks a truly performant and off-the-shelf camera tracking system tailored for soccer broadcasting, specifically for elevated tripod-mounted cameras around the stadium. In this work, we present such a system capable of addressing the task of soccer broadcast camera tracking efficiently, robustly, and accurately, outperforming by far the most precise methods of the state-of-the-art. By combining the available open-source soccer field detectors with carefully designed camera and tripod models, our tracking system, BroadTrack, halves the mean reprojection error rate and gains more than 15% in terms of Jaccard index for camera calibration on the SoccerNet dataset. Furthermore, as the SoccerNet dataset videos are relatively short (30 seconds), we also present qualitative results on a 20-minute broadcast clip to showcase the robustness and the soundness of our system.
LamRA: Large Multimodal Model as Your Advanced Retrieval Assistant
Authors: Yikun Liu, Pingan Chen, Jiayin Cai, XiaoLong Jiang, Yao Hu, Jiangchao Yao, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Information Retrieval, Reranking, Retrieval

With the rapid advancement of multimodal information retrieval, increasingly complex retrieval tasks have emerged. Existing methods predominately rely on task-specific fine-tuning of vision-language models, often those trained with image-text contrastive learning. In this paper, we explore the possibility of re-purposing generative Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for retrieval. This approach enables unifying all retrieval tasks under the same formulation and, more importantly, allows for extrapolation towards unseen retrieval tasks without additional training. Our contributions can be summarised in the following aspects: (i) We introduce LamRA, a versatile framework designed to empower LMMs with sophisticated retrieval and reranking capabilities. (ii) For retrieval, we adopt a two-stage training strategy comprising language-only pre-training and multimodal instruction tuning to progressively enhance LMM's retrieval performance. (iii) For reranking, we employ joint training for both pointwise and listwise reranking, offering two distinct ways to further boost the retrieval performance. (iv) Extensive experimental results underscore the efficacy of our method in handling more than ten retrieval tasks, demonstrating robust performance in both supervised and zero-shot settings, including scenarios involving previously unseen retrieval tasks.
HUGSIM: A Real-Time, Photo-Realistic and Closed-Loop Simulator for Autonomous Driving
Authors: HongYu Zhou, Longzhong Lin, Jiabao Wang, Yichong Lu, Dongfeng Bai, Bingbing Liu, Yue Wang, Andreas Geiger, Yiyi Liao
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Novel View Synthesis

In the past few decades, autonomous driving algorithms have made significant progress in perception, planning, and control. However, evaluating individual components does not fully reflect the performance of entire systems, highlighting the need for more holistic assessment methods. This motivates the development of HUGSIM, a closed-loop, photo-realistic, and real-time simulator for evaluating autonomous driving algorithms. We achieve this by lifting captured 2D RGB images into the 3D space via 3D Gaussian Splatting, improving the rendering quality for closed-loop scenarios, and building the closed-loop environment. In terms of rendering, We tackle challenges of novel view synthesis in closed-loop scenarios, including viewpoint extrapolation and 360-degree vehicle rendering. Beyond novel view synthesis, HUGSIM further enables the full closed simulation loop, dynamically updating the ego and actor states and observations based on control commands. Moreover, HUGSIM offers a comprehensive benchmark across more than 70 sequences from KITTI-360, Waymo, nuScenes, and PandaSet, along with over 400 varying scenarios, providing a fair and realistic evaluation platform for existing autonomous driving algorithms. HUGSIM not only serves as an intuitive evaluation benchmark but also unlocks the potential for fine-tuning autonomous driving algorithms in a photorealistic closed-loop setting.
Driving Scene Synthesis on Free-form Trajectories with Generative Prior
Authors: Zeyu Yang, Zijie Pan, Yuankun Yang, Xiatian Zhu, Li Zhang
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Novel View Synthesis

Driving scene synthesis along free-form trajectories is essential for driving simulations to enable closed-loop evaluation of end-to-end driving policies. While existing methods excel at novel view synthesis on recorded trajectories, they face challenges with novel trajectories due to limited views of driving videos and the vastness of driving environments. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel free-form driving view synthesis approach, dubbed DriveX, by leveraging video generative prior to optimize a 3D model across a variety of trajectories. Concretely, we crafted an inverse problem that enables a video diffusion model to be utilized as a prior for many-trajectory optimization of a parametric 3D model (e.g., Gaussian splatting). To seamlessly use the generative prior, we iteratively conduct this process during optimization. Our resulting model can produce high-fidelity virtual driving environments outside the recorded trajectory, enabling free-form trajectory driving simulation. Beyond real driving scenes, DriveX can also be utilized to simulate virtual driving worlds from AI-generated videos.
FathomVerse: A community science dataset for ocean animal discovery
Authors: Genevieve Patterson, Joost Daniels, Benjamin Woodward, Kevin Barnard, Giovanna Sainz, Lonny Lundsten, Kakani Katija
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Can computer vision help us explore the ocean? The ultimate challenge for computer vision is to recognize any visual phenomena, more than only the objects and animals humans encounter in their terrestrial lives. Previous datasets have explored everyday objects and fine-grained categories humans see frequently. We present the FathomVerse v0 detection dataset to push the limits of our field by exploring animals that rarely come in contact with people in the deep sea. These animals present a novel vision challenge. The FathomVerse v0 dataset consists of 3843 images with 8092 bounding boxes from 12 distinct morphological groups recorded at two locations on the deep seafloor that are new to computer vision. It features visually perplexing scenarios such as an octopus intertwined with a sea star, and confounding categories like vampire squids and sea spiders. This dataset can push forward research on topics like fine-grained transfer learning, novel category discovery, species distribution modeling, and carbon cycle analysis, all of which are important to the care and husbandry of our planet.
Unlocking Video-LLM via Agent-of-Thoughts Distillation
Authors: Yudi Shi, Shangzhe Di, Qirui Chen, Weidi Xie
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multiple-choice, Question Answering, Video Question Answering

This paper tackles the problem of video question answering (VideoQA), a task that often requires multi-step reasoning and a profound understanding of spatial-temporal dynamics. While large video-language models perform well on benchmarks, they often lack explainability and spatial-temporal grounding. In this paper, we propose Agent-of-Thoughts Distillation (AoTD), a method that enhances models by incorporating automatically generated Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) into the instruction-tuning process. Specifically, we leverage an agent-based system to decompose complex questions into sub-tasks, and address them with specialized vision models, the intermediate results are then treated as reasoning chains. We also introduce a verification mechanism using a large language model (LLM) to ensure the reliability of generated CoTs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AoTD improves the performance on multiple-choice and open-ended benchmarks.
Gen-SIS: Generative Self-augmentation Improves Self-supervised Learning
Authors: Varun Belagali, Srikar Yellapragada, Alexandros Graikos, Saarthak Kapse, Zilinghan Li, Tarak Nath Nandi, Ravi K Madduri, Prateek Prasanna, Joel Saltz, Dimitris Samaras
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have emerged as strong visual representation learners by training an image encoder to maximize similarity between features of different views of the same image. To perform this view-invariance task, current SSL algorithms rely on hand-crafted augmentations such as random cropping and color jittering to create multiple views of an image. Recently, generative diffusion models have been shown to improve SSL by providing a wider range of data augmentations. However, these diffusion models require pre-training on large-scale image-text datasets, which might not be available for many specialized domains like histopathology. In this work, we introduce Gen-SIS, a diffusion-based augmentation technique trained exclusively on unlabeled image data, eliminating any reliance on external sources of supervision such as text captions. We first train an initial SSL encoder on a dataset using only hand-crafted augmentations. We then train a diffusion model conditioned on embeddings from that SSL encoder. Following training, given an embedding of the source image, this diffusion model can synthesize its diverse views. We show that these `self-augmentations', i.e. generative augmentations based on the vanilla SSL encoder embeddings, facilitate the training of a stronger SSL encoder. Furthermore, based on the ability to interpolate between images in the encoder latent space, we introduce the novel pretext task of disentangling the two source images of an interpolated synthetic image. We validate Gen-SIS's effectiveness by demonstrating performance improvements across various downstream tasks in both natural images, which are generally object-centric, as well as digital histopathology images, which are typically context-based.
Robust and Transferable Backdoor Attacks Against Deep Image Compression With Selective Frequency Prior
Authors: Yi Yu, YuFei Wang, Wenhan Yang, Lanqing Guo, Shijian Lu, Ling-Yu Duan, Yap-Peng Tan, Alex C. Kot
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Image Compression, Semantic Segmentation

Recent advancements in deep learning-based compression techniques have surpassed traditional methods. However, deep neural networks remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where pre-defined triggers induce malicious behaviors. This paper introduces a novel frequency-based trigger injection model for launching backdoor attacks with multiple triggers on learned image compression models. Inspired by the widely used DCT in compression codecs, triggers are embedded in the DCT domain. We design attack objectives tailored to diverse scenarios, including: 1) degrading compression quality in terms of bit-rate and reconstruction accuracy; 2) targeting task-driven measures like face recognition and semantic segmentation. To improve training efficiency, we propose a dynamic loss function that balances loss terms with fewer hyper-parameters, optimizing attack objectives effectively. For advanced scenarios, we evaluate the attack's resistance to defensive preprocessing and propose a two-stage training schedule with robust frequency selection to enhance resilience. To improve cross-model and cross-domain transferability for downstream tasks, we adjust the classification boundary in the attack loss during training. Experiments show that our trigger injection models, combined with minor modifications to encoder parameters, successfully inject multiple backdoors and their triggers into a single compression model, demonstrating strong performance and versatility. (*Due to the notification of arXiv "The Abstract field cannot be longer than 1,920 characters", the appeared Abstract is shortened. For the full Abstract, please download the Article.)
AVS-Net: Audio-Visual Scale Net for Self-supervised Monocular Metric Depth Estimation
Authors: Xiaohu Liu, Sascha Hornauer, Fabien Moutarde, Jialiang Lu
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Prediction

Metric depth prediction from monocular videos suffers from bad generalization between datasets and requires supervised depth data for scale-correct training. Self-supervised training using multi-view reconstruction can benefit from large scale natural videos but not provide correct scale, limiting its benefits. Recently, reflecting audible Echoes off objects is investigated for improved depth prediction and was shown to be sufficient to reconstruct objects at scale even without a visual signal. Because Echoes travel at fixed speed, they have the potential to resolve ambiguities in object scale and appearance. However, predicting depth end-to-end from sound and vision cannot benefit from unsupervised depth prediction approaches, which can process large scale data without sound annotation. In this work we show how Echoes can benefit depth prediction in two ways: When learning metric depth learned from supervised data and as supervisory signal for scale-correct self-supervised training. We show how we can improve the predictions of several state-of-the-art approaches and how the method can scale-correct a self-supervised depth approach.
CRAYM: Neural Field Optimization via Camera RAY Matching
Authors: Liqiang Lin, Wenpeng Wu, Chi-Wing Fu, Hao Zhang, Hui Huang
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Novel View Synthesis

We introduce camera ray matching (CRAYM) into the joint optimization of camera poses and neural fields from multi-view images. The optimized field, referred to as a feature volume, can be "probed" by the camera rays for novel view synthesis (NVS) and 3D geometry reconstruction. One key reason for matching camera rays, instead of pixels as in prior works, is that the camera rays can be parameterized by the feature volume to carry both geometric and photometric information. Multi-view consistencies involving the camera rays and scene rendering can be naturally integrated into the joint optimization and network training, to impose physically meaningful constraints to improve the final quality of both the geometric reconstruction and photorealistic rendering. We formulate our per-ray optimization and matched ray coherence by focusing on camera rays passing through keypoints in the input images to elevate both the efficiency and accuracy of scene correspondences. Accumulated ray features along the feature volume provide a means to discount the coherence constraint amid erroneous ray matching. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CRAYM for both NVS and geometry reconstruction, over dense- or sparse-view settings, with qualitative and quantitative comparisons to state-of-the-art alternatives.
OmniGuard: Hybrid Manipulation Localization via Augmented Versatile Deep Image Watermarking
Authors: Xuanyu Zhang, Zecheng Tang, Zhipei Xu, Runyi Li, Youmin Xu, Bin Chen, Feng Gao, Jian Zhang
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

With the rapid growth of generative AI and its widespread application in image editing, new risks have emerged regarding the authenticity and integrity of digital content. Existing versatile watermarking approaches suffer from trade-offs between tamper localization precision and visual quality. Constrained by the limited flexibility of previous framework, their localized watermark must remain fixed across all images. Under AIGC-editing, their copyright extraction accuracy is also unsatisfactory. To address these challenges, we propose OmniGuard, a novel augmented versatile watermarking approach that integrates proactive embedding with passive, blind extraction for robust copyright protection and tamper localization. OmniGuard employs a hybrid forensic framework that enables flexible localization watermark selection and introduces a degradation-aware tamper extraction network for precise localization under challenging conditions. Additionally, a lightweight AIGC-editing simulation layer is designed to enhance robustness across global and local editing. Extensive experiments show that OmniGuard achieves superior fidelity, robustness, and flexibility. Compared to the recent state-of-the-art approach EditGuard, our method outperforms it by 4.25dB in PSNR of the container image, 20.7% in F1-Score under noisy conditions, and 14.8% in average bit accuracy.
Arabic Handwritten Document OCR Solution with Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion Detection
Authors: Alhossien Waly, Bassant Tarek, Ali Feteha, Rewan Yehia, Gasser Amr, Ahmed Fares
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The problem of converting images of text into plain text is a widely researched topic in both academia and industry. Arabic handwritten Text Recognation (AHTR) poses additional challenges due to diverse handwriting styles and limited labeled data. In this paper we present a complete OCR pipeline that starts with line segmentation using Differentiable Binarization and Adaptive Scale Fusion techniques to ensure accurate detection of text lines. Following segmentation, a CNN-BiLSTM-CTC architecture is applied to recognize characters. Our system, trained on the Arabic Multi-Fonts Dataset (AMFDS), achieves a Character Recognition Rate (CRR) of 99.20% and a Word Recognition Rate (WRR) of 93.75% on single-word samples containing 7 to 10 characters, along with a CRR of 83.76% for sentences. These results demonstrate the system's strong performance in handling Arabic scripts, establishing a new benchmark for AHTR systems.
FEVER-OOD: Free Energy Vulnerability Elimination for Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Brian K. S. Isaac-Medina, Mauricio Che, Yona F. A. Gaus, Samet Akcay, Toby P. Breckon
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Out-of-Distribution Detection

Modern machine learning models, that excel on computer vision tasks such as classification and object detection, are often overconfident in their predictions for Out-of-Distribution (OOD) examples, resulting in unpredictable behaviour for open-set environments. Recent works have demonstrated that the free energy score is an effective measure of uncertainty for OOD detection given its close relationship to the data distribution. However, despite free energy-based methods representing a significant empirical advance in OOD detection, our theoretical analysis reveals previously unexplored and inherent vulnerabilities within the free energy score formulation such that in-distribution and OOD instances can have distinct feature representations yet identical free energy scores. This phenomenon occurs when the vector direction representing the feature space difference between the in-distribution and OOD sample lies within the null space of the last layer of a neural-based classifier. To mitigate these issues, we explore lower-dimensional feature spaces to reduce the null space footprint and introduce novel regularisation to maximize the least singular value of the final linear layer, hence enhancing inter-sample free energy separation. We refer to these techniques as Free Energy Vulnerability Elimination for Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection (FEVER-OOD). Our experiments show that FEVER-OOD techniques achieve state of the art OOD detection in Imagenet-100, with average OOD false positive rate (at 95% true positive rate) of 35.83% when used with the baseline Dream-OOD model.
Epipolar Attention Field Transformers for Bird's Eye View Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Christian Witte, Jens Behley, Cyrill Stachniss, Marvin Raaijmakers
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Bird's-Eye View Semantic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Spatial understanding of the semantics of the surroundings is a key capability needed by autonomous cars to enable safe driving decisions. Recently, purely vision-based solutions have gained increasing research interest. In particular, approaches extracting a bird's eye view (BEV) from multiple cameras have demonstrated great performance for spatial understanding. This paper addresses the dependency on learned positional encodings to correlate image and BEV feature map elements for transformer-based methods. We propose leveraging epipolar geometric constraints to model the relationship between cameras and the BEV by Epipolar Attention Fields. They are incorporated into the attention mechanism as a novel attribution term, serving as an alternative to learned positional encodings. Experiments show that our method EAFormer outperforms previous BEV approaches by 2% mIoU for map semantic segmentation and exhibits superior generalization capabilities compared to implicitly learning the camera configuration.
3DSceneEditor: Controllable 3D Scene Editing with Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Ziyang Yan, Lei LI, Yihua Shao, Siyu Chen, Zongkai Wu, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Hao Zhao, Fabio Remondino
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D scene Editing, Image to 3D, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Text to 3D

The creation of 3D scenes has traditionally been both labor-intensive and costly, requiring designers to meticulously configure 3D assets and environments. Recent advancements in generative AI, including text-to-3D and image-to-3D methods, have dramatically reduced the complexity and cost of this process. However, current techniques for editing complex 3D scenes continue to rely on generally interactive multi-step, 2D-to-3D projection methods and diffusion-based techniques, which often lack precision in control and hamper real-time performance. In this work, we propose 3DSceneEditor, a fully 3D-based paradigm for real-time, precise editing of intricate 3D scenes using Gaussian Splatting. Unlike conventional methods, 3DSceneEditor operates through a streamlined 3D pipeline, enabling direct manipulation of Gaussians for efficient, high-quality edits based on input prompts.The proposed framework (i) integrates a pre-trained instance segmentation model for semantic labeling; (ii) employs a zero-shot grounding approach with CLIP to align target objects with user prompts; and (iii) applies scene modifications, such as object addition, repositioning, recoloring, replacing, and deletion directly on Gaussians. Extensive experimental results show that 3DSceneEditor achieves superior editing precision and speed with respect to current SOTA 3D scene editing approaches, establishing a new benchmark for efficient and interactive 3D scene customization.