pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
YOLOv8-ResCBAM: YOLOv8 Based on An Effective Attention Module for Pediatric Wrist Fracture Detection
Authors: Rui-Yang Ju, Chun-Tse Chien, Jen-Shiun Chiang
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Fracture detection

Wrist trauma and even fractures occur frequently in daily life, particularly among children who account for a significant proportion of fracture cases. Before performing surgery, surgeons often request patients to undergo X-ray imaging first, and prepare for the surgery based on the analysis of the X-ray images. With the development of neural networks, You Only Look Once (YOLO) series models have been widely used in fracture detection for Computer-Assisted Diagnosis, where the YOLOv8 model has obtained the satisfactory results. Applying the attention modules to neural networks is one of the effective methods to improve the model performance. This paper proposes YOLOv8-ResCBAM, which incorporates Convolutional Block Attention Module integrated with resblock (ResCBAM) into the original YOLOv8 network architecture. The experimental results on the GRAZPEDWRI-DX dataset demonstrate that the mean Average Precision calculated at Intersection over Union threshold of 0.5 (mAP 50) of the proposed model increased from 63.6% of the original YOLOv8 model to 65.8%, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/RuiyangJu/Fracture_Detection_Improved_YOLOv8.
EyeTrAES: Fine-grained, Low-Latency Eye Tracking via Adaptive Event Slicing
Authors: Argha Sen, Nuwan Bandara, Ila Gokarn, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Pupil Tracking

Eye-tracking technology has gained significant attention in recent years due to its wide range of applications in human-computer interaction, virtual and augmented reality, and wearable health. Traditional RGB camera-based eye-tracking systems often struggle with poor temporal resolution and computational constraints, limiting their effectiveness in capturing rapid eye movements. To address these limitations, we propose EyeTrAES, a novel approach using neuromorphic event cameras for high-fidelity tracking of natural pupillary movement that shows significant kinematic variance. One of EyeTrAES's highlights is the use of a novel adaptive windowing/slicing algorithm that ensures just the right amount of descriptive asynchronous event data accumulation within an event frame, across a wide range of eye movement patterns. EyeTrAES then applies lightweight image processing functions over accumulated event frames from just a single eye to perform pupil segmentation and tracking. We show that these methods boost pupil tracking fidelity by 6+%, achieving IoU~=92%, while incurring at least 3x lower latency than competing pure event-based eye tracking alternatives [38]. We additionally demonstrate that the microscopic pupillary motion captured by EyeTrAES exhibits distinctive variations across individuals and can thus serve as a biometric fingerprint. For robust user authentication, we train a lightweight per-user Random Forest classifier using a novel feature vector of short-term pupillary kinematics, comprising a sliding window of pupil (location, velocity, acceleration) triples. Experimental studies with two different datasets demonstrate that the EyeTrAES-based authentication technique can simultaneously achieve high authentication accuracy (~=0.82) and low processing latency (~=12ms), and significantly outperform multiple state-of-the-art competitive baselines.
MiniVLN: Efficient Vision-and-Language Navigation by Progressive Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Junyou Zhu, Yanyuan Qiao, Siqi Zhang, Xingjian He, Qi Wu, Jing Liu
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Vision and Language Navigation

In recent years, Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) has advanced rapidly, yet the increasing size of models conflicts with the limited computational capabilities of Embodied AI platforms. To address this challenge, we aim to achieve both high model performance and practical deployability. Specifically, we focus on Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN), a core task in Embodied AI. This paper introduces a two-stage knowledge distillation framework, producing a student model, MiniVLN, and showcasing the significant potential of distillation techniques in developing lightweight models. The proposed method aims to capture fine-grained knowledge during the pretraining phase and navigation-specific knowledge during the fine-tuning phase. Our findings indicate that the two-stage distillation approach is more effective in narrowing the performance gap between the teacher model and the student model compared to single-stage distillation. On the public R2R and REVERIE benchmarks, MiniVLN achieves performance on par with the teacher model while having only about 12% of the teacher model's parameter count.
Open-Nav: Exploring Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environment with Open-Source LLMs
Authors: Yanyuan Qiao, Wenqi Lyu, Hui Wang, Zixu Wang, Zerui Li, Yuan Zhang, Mingkui Tan, Qi Wu
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Navigate, Vision and Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks require an agent to follow textual instructions to navigate through 3D environments. Traditional approaches use supervised learning methods, relying heavily on domain-specific datasets to train VLN models. Recent methods try to utilize closed-source large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 to solve VLN tasks in zero-shot manners, but face challenges related to expensive token costs and potential data breaches in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce Open-Nav, a novel study that explores open-source LLMs for zero-shot VLN in the continuous environment. Open-Nav employs a spatial-temporal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning approach to break down tasks into instruction comprehension, progress estimation, and decision-making. It enhances scene perceptions with fine-grained object and spatial knowledge to improve LLM's reasoning in navigation. Our extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that Open-Nav achieves competitive performance compared to using closed-source LLMs.
Excavating in the Wild: The GOOSE-Ex Dataset for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Raphael Hagmanns, Peter Mortimer, Miguel Granero, Thorsten Luettel, Janko Petereit
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

The successful deployment of deep learning-based techniques for autonomous systems is highly dependent on the data availability for the respective system in its deployment environment. Especially for unstructured outdoor environments, very few datasets exist for even fewer robotic platforms and scenarios. In an earlier work, we presented the German Outdoor and Offroad Dataset (GOOSE) framework along with 10000 multimodal frames from an offroad vehicle to enhance the perception capabilities in unstructured environments. In this work, we address the generalizability of the GOOSE framework. To accomplish this, we open-source the GOOSE-Ex dataset, which contains additional 5000 labeled multimodal frames from various completely different environments, recorded on a robotic excavator and a quadruped platform. We perform a comprehensive analysis of the semantic segmentation performance on different platforms and sensor modalities in unseen environments. In addition, we demonstrate how the combined datasets can be utilized for different downstream applications or competitions such as offroad navigation, object manipulation or scene completion. The dataset, its platform documentation and pre-trained state-of-the-art models for offroad perception will be made available on https://goose-dataset.de/. \
Student-Oriented Teacher Knowledge Refinement for Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Chaomin Shen, Yaomin Huang, Haokun Zhu, Jinsong Fan, Guixu Zhang
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

Knowledge distillation has become widely recognized for its ability to transfer knowledge from a large teacher network to a compact and more streamlined student network. Traditional knowledge distillation methods primarily follow a teacher-oriented paradigm that imposes the task of learning the teacher's complex knowledge onto the student network. However, significant disparities in model capacity and architectural design hinder the student's comprehension of the complex knowledge imparted by the teacher, resulting in sub-optimal performance. This paper introduces a novel perspective emphasizing student-oriented and refining the teacher's knowledge to better align with the student's needs, thereby improving knowledge transfer effectiveness. Specifically, we present the Student-Oriented Knowledge Distillation (SoKD), which incorporates a learnable feature augmentation strategy during training to refine the teacher's knowledge of the student dynamically. Furthermore, we deploy the Distinctive Area Detection Module (DAM) to identify areas of mutual interest between the teacher and student, concentrating knowledge transfer within these critical areas to avoid transferring irrelevant information. This customized module ensures a more focused and effective knowledge distillation process. Our approach, functioning as a plug-in, could be integrated with various knowledge distillation methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and generalizability of our method.
DualDn: Dual-domain Denoising via Differentiable ISP
Authors: Ruikang Li, Yujin Wang, Shiqi Chen, Fan Zhang, Jinwei Gu, Tianfan Xue
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Image denoising is a critical component in a camera's Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline. There are two typical ways to inject a denoiser into the ISP pipeline: applying a denoiser directly to captured raw frames (raw domain) or to the ISP's output sRGB images (sRGB domain). However, both approaches have their limitations. Residual noise from raw-domain denoising can be amplified by the subsequent ISP processing, and the sRGB domain struggles to handle spatially varying noise since it only sees noise distorted by the ISP. Consequently, most raw or sRGB domain denoising works only for specific noise distributions and ISP configurations. To address these challenges, we propose DualDn, a novel learning-based dual-domain denoising. Unlike previous single-domain denoising, DualDn consists of two denoising networks: one in the raw domain and one in the sRGB domain. The raw domain denoising adapts to sensor-specific noise as well as spatially varying noise levels, while the sRGB domain denoising adapts to ISP variations and removes residual noise amplified by the ISP. Both denoising networks are connected with a differentiable ISP, which is trained end-to-end and discarded during the inference stage. With this design, DualDn achieves greater generalizability compared to most learning-based denoising methods, as it can adapt to different unseen noises, ISP parameters, and even novel ISP pipelines. Experiments show that DualDn achieves state-of-the-art performance and can adapt to different denoising architectures. Moreover, DualDn can be used as a plug-and-play denoising module with real cameras without retraining, and still demonstrate better performance than commercial on-camera denoising. The project website is available at: https://openimaginglab.github.io/DualDn/
Relighting from a Single Image: Datasets and Deep Intrinsic-based Architecture
Authors: Yixiong Yang, Hassan Ahmed Sial, Ramon Baldrich, Maria Vanrell
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00

Single image scene relighting aims to generate a realistic new version of an input image so that it appears to be illuminated by a new target light condition. Although existing works have explored this problem from various perspectives, generating relit images under arbitrary light conditions remains highly challenging, and related datasets are scarce. Our work addresses this problem from both the dataset and methodological perspectives. We propose two new datasets: a synthetic dataset with the ground truth of intrinsic components and a real dataset collected under laboratory conditions. These datasets alleviate the scarcity of existing datasets. To incorporate physical consistency in the relighting pipeline, we establish a two-stage network based on intrinsic decomposition, giving outputs at intermediate steps, thereby introducing physical constraints. When the training set lacks ground truth for intrinsic decomposition, we introduce an unsupervised module to ensure that the intrinsic outputs are satisfactory. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in performance, as tested on both existing datasets and our newly developed datasets. Furthermore, pretraining our method or other prior methods using our synthetic dataset can enhance their performance on other datasets. Since our method can accommodate any light conditions, it is capable of producing animated results. The dataset, method, and videos are publicly available.
Charting the Future: Using Chart Question-Answering for Scalable Evaluation of LLM-Driven Data Visualizations
Authors: James Ford, Xingmeng Zhao, Dan Schumacher, Anthony Rios
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Chart Question Answering, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

We propose a novel framework that leverages Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to automate the evaluation of LLM-generated data visualizations. Traditional evaluation methods often rely on human judgment, which is costly and unscalable, or focus solely on data accuracy, neglecting the effectiveness of visual communication. By employing VQA models, we assess data representation quality and the general communicative clarity of charts. Experiments were conducted using two leading VQA benchmark datasets, ChartQA and PlotQA, with visualizations generated by OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo and Meta's Llama 3.1 70B-Instruct models. Our results indicate that LLM-generated charts do not match the accuracy of the original non-LLM-generated charts based on VQA performance measures. Moreover, while our results demonstrate that few-shot prompting significantly boosts the accuracy of chart generation, considerable progress remains to be made before LLMs can fully match the precision of human-generated graphs. This underscores the importance of our work, which expedites the research process by enabling rapid iteration without the need for human annotation, thus accelerating advancements in this field.
Enhancing Explainability in Multimodal Large Language Models Using Ontological Context
Authors: Jihen Amara, Birgitta König-Ries, Sheeba Samuel
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Recently, there has been a growing interest in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to their remarkable potential in various tasks integrating different modalities, such as image and text, as well as applications such as image captioning and visual question answering. However, such models still face challenges in accurately captioning and interpreting specific visual concepts and classes, particularly in domain-specific applications. We argue that integrating domain knowledge in the form of an ontology can significantly address these issues. In this work, as a proof of concept, we propose a new framework that combines ontology with MLLMs to classify images of plant diseases. Our method uses concepts about plant diseases from an existing disease ontology to query MLLMs and extract relevant visual concepts from images. Then, we use the reasoning capabilities of the ontology to classify the disease according to the identified concepts. Ensuring that the model accurately uses the concepts describing the disease is crucial in domain-specific applications. By employing an ontology, we can assist in verifying this alignment. Additionally, using the ontology's inference capabilities increases transparency, explainability, and trust in the decision-making process while serving as a judge by checking if the annotations of the concepts by MLLMs are aligned with those in the ontology and displaying the rationales behind their errors. Our framework offers a new direction for synergizing ontologies and MLLMs, supported by an empirical study using different well-known MLLMs.
Effectiveness of learning-based image codecs on fingerprint storage
Authors: Daniele Mari, Saverio Cavasin, Simone Milani, Mauro Conti
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00

The success of learning-based coding techniques and the development of learning-based image coding standards, such as JPEG-AI, point towards the adoption of such solutions in different fields, including the storage of biometric data, like fingerprints. However, the peculiar nature of learning-based compression artifacts poses several issues concerning their impact and effectiveness on extracting biometric features and landmarks, e.g., minutiae. This problem is utterly stressed by the fact that most models are trained on natural color images, whose characteristics are very different from usual biometric images, e.g, fingerprint or iris pictures. As a matter of fact, these issues are deemed to be accurately questioned and investigated, being such analysis still largely unexplored. This study represents the first investigation about the adaptability of learning-based image codecs in the storage of fingerprint images by measuring its impact on the extraction and characterization of minutiae. Experimental results show that at a fixed rate point, learned solutions considerably outperform previous fingerprint coding standards, like JPEG2000, both in terms of distortion and minutiae preservation. Indeed, experimental results prove that the peculiarities of learned compression artifacts do not prevent automatic fingerprint identification (since minutiae types and locations are not significantly altered), nor do compromise image quality for human visual inspection (as they gain in terms of BD rate and PSNR of 47.8% and +3.97dB respectively).
A Generalized Tensor Formulation for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution Under General Spatial Blurring
Authors: Yinjian Wang, Wei Li, Yuanyuan Gui, Qian Du, James E. Fowler
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Hyperspectral super-resolution is commonly accomplished by the fusing of a hyperspectral imaging of low spatial resolution with a multispectral image of high spatial resolution, and many tensor-based approaches to this task have been recently proposed. Yet, it is assumed in such tensor-based methods that the spatial-blurring operation that creates the observed hyperspectral image from the desired super-resolved image is separable into independent horizontal and vertical blurring. Recent work has argued that such separable spatial degradation is ill-equipped to model the operation of real sensors which may exhibit, for example, anisotropic blurring. To accommodate this fact, a generalized tensor formulation based on a Kronecker decomposition is proposed to handle any general spatial-degradation matrix, including those that are not separable as previously assumed. Analysis of the generalized formulation reveals conditions under which exact recovery of the desired super-resolved image is guaranteed, and a practical algorithm for such recovery, driven by a blockwise-group-sparsity regularization, is proposed. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed generalized tensor approach outperforms not only traditional matrix-based techniques but also state-of-the-art tensor-based methods; the gains with respect to the latter are especially significant in cases of anisotropic spatial blurring.
3DPX: Single Panoramic X-ray Analysis Guided by 3D Oral Structure Reconstruction
Authors: Xiaoshuang Li, Zimo Huang, Mingyuan Meng, Eduardo Delamare, Dagan Feng, Lei Bi, Bin Sheng, Lingyong Jiang, Bo Li, Jinman Kim
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Lesion Segmentation

Panoramic X-ray (PX) is a prevalent modality in dentistry practice owing to its wide availability and low cost. However, as a 2D projection of a 3D structure, PX suffers from anatomical information loss and PX diagnosis is limited compared to that with 3D imaging modalities. 2D-to-3D reconstruction methods have been explored for the ability to synthesize the absent 3D anatomical information from 2D PX for use in PX image analysis. However, there are challenges in leveraging such 3D synthesized reconstructions. First, inferring 3D depth from 2D images remains a challenging task with limited accuracy. The second challenge is the joint analysis of 2D PX with its 3D synthesized counterpart, with the aim to maximize the 2D-3D synergy while minimizing the errors arising from the synthesized image. In this study, we propose a new method termed 3DPX - PX image analysis guided by 2D-to-3D reconstruction, to overcome these challenges. 3DPX consists of (i) a novel progressive reconstruction network to improve 2D-to-3D reconstruction and, (ii) a contrastive-guided bidirectional multimodality alignment module for 3D-guided 2D PX classification and segmentation tasks. The reconstruction network progressively reconstructs 3D images with knowledge imposed on the intermediate reconstructions at multiple pyramid levels and incorporates Multilayer Perceptrons to improve semantic understanding. The downstream networks leverage the reconstructed images as 3D anatomical guidance to the PX analysis through feature alignment, which increases the 2D-3D synergy with bidirectional feature projection and decease the impact of potential errors with contrastive guidance. Extensive experiments on two oral datasets involving 464 studies demonstrate that 3DPX outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in various tasks including 2D-to-3D reconstruction, PX classification and lesion segmentation.
A Novel Unified Architecture for Low-Shot Counting by Detection and Segmentation
Authors: Jer Pelhan, Alan Lukežič, Vitjan Zavrtanik, Matej Kristan
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Exemplar-Free Counting, Few-shot Object Counting and Detection, Object, Object Counting, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Localization

Low-shot object counters estimate the number of objects in an image using few or no annotated exemplars. Objects are localized by matching them to prototypes, which are constructed by unsupervised image-wide object appearance aggregation. Due to potentially diverse object appearances, the existing approaches often lead to overgeneralization and false positive detections. Furthermore, the best-performing methods train object localization by a surrogate loss, that predicts a unit Gaussian at each object center. This loss is sensitive to annotation error, hyperparameters and does not directly optimize the detection task, leading to suboptimal counts. We introduce GeCo, a novel low-shot counter that achieves accurate object detection, segmentation, and count estimation in a unified architecture. GeCo robustly generalizes the prototypes across objects appearances through a novel dense object query formulation. In addition, a novel counting loss is proposed, that directly optimizes the detection task and avoids the issues of the standard surrogate loss. GeCo surpasses the leading few-shot detection-based counters by $\sim$25\% in the total count MAE, achieves superior detection accuracy and sets a new solid state-of-the-art result across all low-shot counting setups.