pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Object-Centric Representation via Reverse Hierarchy Guidance
Authors: Junhong Zou, Xiangyu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Zhen Lei
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Object

Object-Centric Learning (OCL) seeks to enable Neural Networks to identify individual objects in visual scenes, which is crucial for interpretable visual comprehension and reasoning. Most existing OCL models adopt auto-encoding structures and learn to decompose visual scenes through specially designed inductive bias, which causes the model to miss small objects during reconstruction. Reverse hierarchy theory proposes that human vision corrects perception errors through a top-down visual pathway that returns to bottom-level neurons and acquires more detailed information, inspired by which we propose Reverse Hierarchy Guided Network (RHGNet) that introduces a top-down pathway that works in different ways in the training and inference processes. This pathway allows for guiding bottom-level features with top-level object representations during training, as well as encompassing information from bottom-level features into perception during inference. Our model achieves SOTA performance on several commonly used datasets including CLEVR, CLEVRTex and MOVi-C. We demonstrate with experiments that our method promotes the discovery of small objects and also generalizes well on complex real-world scenes. Code will be available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RHGNet-6CEF.
GEOcc: Geometrically Enhanced 3D Occupancy Network with Implicit-Explicit Depth Fusion and Contextual Self-Supervision
Authors: Xin Tan, Wenbin Wu, Zhiwei Zhang, Chaojie Fan, Yong Peng, Zhizhong Zhang, Yuan Xie, Lizhuang Ma
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decoder, Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Image Reconstruction

3D occupancy perception holds a pivotal role in recent vision-centric autonomous driving systems by converting surround-view images into integrated geometric and semantic representations within dense 3D grids. Nevertheless, current models still encounter two main challenges: modeling depth accurately in the 2D-3D view transformation stage, and overcoming the lack of generalizability issues due to sparse LiDAR supervision. To address these issues, this paper presents GEOcc, a Geometric-Enhanced Occupancy network tailored for vision-only surround-view perception. Our approach is three-fold: 1) Integration of explicit lift-based depth prediction and implicit projection-based transformers for depth modeling, enhancing the density and robustness of view transformation. 2) Utilization of mask-based encoder-decoder architecture for fine-grained semantic predictions; 3) Adoption of context-aware self-training loss functions in the pertaining stage to complement LiDAR supervision, involving the re-rendering of 2D depth maps from 3D occupancy features and leveraging image reconstruction loss to obtain denser depth supervision besides sparse LiDAR ground-truths. Our approach achieves State-Of-The-Art performance on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset with the least image resolution needed and the most weightless image backbone compared with current models, marking an improvement of 3.3% due to our proposed contributions. Comprehensive experimentation also demonstrates the consistent superiority of our method over baselines and alternative approaches.
DuoSpaceNet: Leveraging Both Bird's-Eye-View and Perspective View Representations for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Zhe Huang, Yizhe Zhao, Hao Xiao, Chenyan Wu, Lingting Ge
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Decoder, object-detection, Object Detection

Multi-view camera-only 3D object detection largely follows two primary paradigms: exploiting bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations or focusing on perspective-view (PV) features, each with distinct advantages. Although several recent approaches explore combining BEV and PV, many rely on partial fusion or maintain separate detection heads. In this paper, we propose DuoSpaceNet, a novel framework that fully unifies BEV and PV feature spaces within a single detection pipeline for comprehensive 3D perception. Our design includes a decoder to integrate BEV and PV features into unified detection queries, as well as a feature enhancement strategy that enriches different feature representations. In addition, DuoSpaceNet can be extended to handle multi-frame inputs, enabling more robust temporal analysis. Extensive experiments on nuScenes dataset show that DuoSpaceNet surpasses both BEV-based baselines (e.g., BEVFormer) and PV-based baselines (e.g., Sparse4D) in 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation, verifying the effectiveness of our proposed design.
Accurate Training Data for Occupancy Map Prediction in Automated Driving Using Evidence Theory
Authors: Jonas Kälble, Sascha Wirges, Maxim Tatarchenko, Eddy Ilg
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Automated driving fundamentally requires knowledge about the surrounding geometry of the scene. Modern approaches use only captured images to predict occupancy maps that represent the geometry. Training these approaches requires accurate data that may be acquired with the help of LiDAR scanners. We show that the techniques used for current benchmarks and training datasets to convert LiDAR scans into occupancy grid maps yield very low quality, and subsequently present a novel approach using evidence theory that yields more accurate reconstructions. We demonstrate that these are superior by a large margin, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and that we additionally obtain meaningful uncertainty estimates. When converting the occupancy maps back to depth estimates and comparing them with the raw LiDAR measurements, our method yields a MAE improvement of 30% to 52% on nuScenes and 53% on Waymo over other occupancy ground-truth data. Finally, we use the improved occupancy maps to train a state-of-the-art occupancy prediction method and demonstrate that it improves the MAE by 25% on nuScenes.
Team Samsung-RAL: Technical Report for 2024 RoboDrive Challenge-Robust Map Segmentation Track
Authors: Xiaoshuai Hao, Yifan Yang, HUI ZHANG, Mengchuan Wei, Yi Zhou, Haimei Zhao, Jing Zhang
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, Segmentation

In this report, we describe the technical details of our submission to the 2024 RoboDrive Challenge Robust Map Segmentation Track. The Robust Map Segmentation track focuses on the segmentation of complex driving scene elements in BEV maps under varied driving conditions. Semantic map segmentation provides abundant and precise static environmental information crucial for autonomous driving systems' planning and navigation. While current methods excel in ideal circumstances, e.g., clear daytime conditions and fully functional sensors, their resilience to real-world challenges like adverse weather and sensor failures remains unclear, raising concerns about system safety. In this paper, we explored several methods to improve the robustness of the map segmentation task. The details are as follows: 1) Robustness analysis of utilizing temporal information; 2) Robustness analysis of utilizing different backbones; and 3) Data Augmentation to boost corruption robustness. Based on the evaluation results, we draw several important findings including 1) The temporal fusion module is effective in improving the robustness of the map segmentation model; 2) A strong backbone is effective for improving the corruption robustness; and 3) Some data augmentation methods are effective in improving the robustness of map segmentation models. These novel findings allowed us to achieve promising results in the 2024 RoboDrive Challenge-Robust Map Segmentation Track.
Infrared Image Super-Resolution via Lightweight Information Split Network
Authors: Shijie Liu, Kang Yan, Feiwei Qin, Changmiao Wang, Ruiquan Ge, Kai Zhang, Jie Huang, Yong Peng, Jin Cao
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Image Super-Resolution, Infrared image super-resolution, Super-Resolution

Single image super-resolution (SR) is an established pixel-level vision task aimed at reconstructing a high-resolution image from its degraded low-resolution counterpart. Despite the notable advancements achieved by leveraging deep neural networks for SR, most existing deep learning architectures feature an extensive number of layers, leading to high computational complexity and substantial memory demands. These issues become particularly pronounced in the context of infrared image SR, where infrared devices often have stringent storage and computational constraints. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a novel, efficient, and precise single infrared image SR model, termed the Lightweight Information Split Network (LISN). The LISN comprises four main components: shallow feature extraction, deep feature extraction, dense feature fusion, and high-resolution infrared image reconstruction. A key innovation within this model is the introduction of the Lightweight Information Split Block (LISB) for deep feature extraction. The LISB employs a sequential process to extract hierarchical features, which are then aggregated based on the relevance of the features under consideration. By integrating channel splitting and shift operations, the LISB successfully strikes an optimal balance between enhanced SR performance and a lightweight framework. Comprehensive experimental evaluations reveal that the proposed LISN achieves superior performance over contemporary state-of-the-art methods in terms of both SR quality and model complexity, affirming its efficacy for practical deployment in resource-constrained infrared imaging applications.
Resolving Symmetry Ambiguity in Correspondence-based Methods for Instance-level Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Yongliang Lin, Yongzhi Su, Sandeep Inuganti, Yan Di, Naeem Ajilforoushan, Hanqing Yang, Yu Zhang, Jason Rambach
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Pose Estimation

Estimating the 6D pose of an object from a single RGB image is a critical task that becomes additionally challenging when dealing with symmetric objects. Recent approaches typically establish one-to-one correspondences between image pixels and 3D object surface vertices. However, the utilization of one-to-one correspondences introduces ambiguity for symmetric objects. To address this, we propose SymCode, a symmetry-aware surface encoding that encodes the object surface vertices based on one-to-many correspondences, eliminating the problem of one-to-one correspondence ambiguity. We also introduce SymNet, a fast end-to-end network that directly regresses the 6D pose parameters without solving a PnP problem. We demonstrate faster runtime and comparable accuracy achieved by our method on the T-LESS and IC-BIN benchmarks of mostly symmetric objects. Our source code will be released upon acceptance.
NeRO: Neural Road Surface Reconstruction
Authors: Ruibo Wang, Song Zhang, Ping Huang, Donghai Zhang, Haoyu Chen
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Position, Surface Reconstruction

Accurately reconstructing road surfaces is pivotal for various applications especially in autonomous driving. This paper introduces a position encoding Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) framework to reconstruct road surfaces, with input as world coordinates x and y, and output as height, color, and semantic information. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated through its compatibility with a variety of road height sources like vehicle camera poses, LiDAR point clouds, and SFM point clouds, robust to the semantic noise of images like sparse labels and noise semantic prediction, and fast training speed, which indicates a promising application for rendering road surfaces with semantics, particularly in applications demanding visualization of road surface, 4D labeling, and semantic groupings.
LighTDiff: Surgical Endoscopic Image Low-Light Enhancement with T-Diffusion
Authors: Tong Chen, Qingcheng Lyu, Long Bai, Erjian Guo, Huxin Gao, Xiaoxiao Yang, Hongliang Ren, Luping Zhou
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Denoising, Image Enhancement, Low-Light Image Enhancement

Advances in endoscopy use in surgeries face challenges like inadequate lighting. Deep learning, notably the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), holds promise for low-light image enhancement in the medical field. However, DDPMs are computationally demanding and slow, limiting their practical medical applications. To bridge this gap, we propose a lightweight DDPM, dubbed LighTDiff. It adopts a T-shape model architecture to capture global structural information using low-resolution images and gradually recover the details in subsequent denoising steps. We further prone the model to significantly reduce the model size while retaining performance. While discarding certain downsampling operations to save parameters leads to instability and low efficiency in convergence during the training, we introduce a Temporal Light Unit (TLU), a plug-and-play module, for more stable training and better performance. TLU associates time steps with denoised image features, establishing temporal dependencies of the denoising steps and improving denoising outcomes. Moreover, while recovering images using the diffusion model, potential spectral shifts were noted. We further introduce a Chroma Balancer (CB) to mitigate this issue. Our LighTDiff outperforms many competitive LLIE methods with exceptional computational efficiency.
Nonparametric Teaching of Implicit Neural Representations
Authors: Chen Zhang, Steven Tin Sui Luo, Jason Chun Lok Li, Yik-Chung Wu, Ngai Wong
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00

We investigate the learning of implicit neural representation (INR) using an overparameterized multilayer perceptron (MLP) via a novel nonparametric teaching perspective. The latter offers an efficient example selection framework for teaching nonparametrically defined (viz. non-closed-form) target functions, such as image functions defined by 2D grids of pixels. To address the costly training of INRs, we propose a paradigm called Implicit Neural Teaching (INT) that treats INR learning as a nonparametric teaching problem, where the given signal being fitted serves as the target function. The teacher then selects signal fragments for iterative training of the MLP to achieve fast convergence. By establishing a connection between MLP evolution through parameter-based gradient descent and that of function evolution through functional gradient descent in nonparametric teaching, we show for the first time that teaching an overparameterized MLP is consistent with teaching a nonparametric learner. This new discovery readily permits a convenient drop-in of nonparametric teaching algorithms to broadly enhance INR training efficiency, demonstrating 30%+ training time savings across various input modalities.
CM-UNet: Hybrid CNN-Mamba UNet for Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Mushui Liu, Jun Dan, Ziqian Lu, Yunlong Yu, Yingming Li, Xi Li
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Mamba, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Due to the large-scale image size and object variations, current CNN-based and Transformer-based approaches for remote sensing image semantic segmentation are suboptimal for capturing the long-range dependency or limited to the complex computational complexity. In this paper, we propose CM-UNet, comprising a CNN-based encoder for extracting local image features and a Mamba-based decoder for aggregating and integrating global information, facilitating efficient semantic segmentation of remote sensing images. Specifically, a CSMamba block is introduced to build the core segmentation decoder, which employs channel and spatial attention as the gate activation condition of the vanilla Mamba to enhance the feature interaction and global-local information fusion. Moreover, to further refine the output features from the CNN encoder, a Multi-Scale Attention Aggregation (MSAA) module is employed to merge the different scale features. By integrating the CSMamba block and MSAA module, CM-UNet effectively captures the long-range dependencies and multi-scale global contextual information of large-scale remote-sensing images. Experimental results obtained on three benchmarks indicate that the proposed CM-UNet outperforms existing methods in various performance metrics. The codes are available at https://github.com/XiaoBuL/CM-UNet.
Enhancing Perception Quality in Remote Sensing Image Compression via Invertible Neural Network
Authors: Junhui Li, Xingsong Hou
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Quantization

Decoding remote sensing images to achieve high perceptual quality, particularly at low bitrates, remains a significant challenge. To address this problem, we propose the invertible neural network-based remote sensing image compression (INN-RSIC) method. Specifically, we capture compression distortion from an existing image compression algorithm and encode it as a set of Gaussian-distributed latent variables via INN. This ensures that the compression distortion in the decoded image becomes independent of the ground truth. Therefore, by leveraging the inverse mapping of INN, we can input the decoded image along with a set of randomly resampled Gaussian distributed variables into the inverse network, effectively generating enhanced images with better perception quality. To effectively learn compression distortion, channel expansion, Haar transformation, and invertible blocks are employed to construct the INN. Additionally, we introduce a quantization module (QM) to mitigate the impact of format conversion, thus enhancing the framework's generalization and improving the perceptual quality of enhanced images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our INN-RSIC significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art traditional and deep learning-based image compression methods in terms of perception quality.
ART3D: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Text-Guided Artistic Scenes Generation
Authors: Pengzhi Li, Chengshuai Tang, QInxuan Huang, Zhiheng Li
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Generation

In this paper, we explore the existing challenges in 3D artistic scene generation by introducing ART3D, a novel framework that combines diffusion models and 3D Gaussian splatting techniques. Our method effectively bridges the gap between artistic and realistic images through an innovative image semantic transfer algorithm. By leveraging depth information and an initial artistic image, we generate a point cloud map, addressing domain differences. Additionally, we propose a depth consistency module to enhance 3D scene consistency. Finally, the 3D scene serves as initial points for optimizing Gaussian splats. Experimental results demonstrate ART3D's superior performance in both content and structural consistency metrics when compared to existing methods. ART3D significantly advances the field of AI in art creation by providing an innovative solution for generating high-quality 3D artistic scenes.
Multi-scale Semantic Prior Features Guided Deep Neural Network for Urban Street-view Image
Authors: Jianshun Zeng, Wang Li, Yanjie Lv, Shuai Gao, YuChu Qin
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Inpainting

Street-view image has been widely applied as a crucial mobile mapping data source. The inpainting of street-view images is a critical step for street-view image processing, not only for the privacy protection, but also for the urban environment mapping applications. This paper presents a novel Deep Neural Network (DNN), multi-scale semantic prior Feature guided image inpainting Network (MFN) for inpainting street-view images, which generate static street-view images without moving objects (e.g., pedestrians, vehicles). To enhance global context understanding, a semantic prior prompter is introduced to learn rich semantic priors from large pre-trained model. We design the prompter by stacking multiple Semantic Pyramid Aggregation (SPA) modules, capturing a broad range of visual feature patterns. A semantic-enhanced image generator with a decoder is proposed that incorporates a novel cascaded Learnable Prior Transferring (LPT) module at each scale level. For each decoder block, an attention transfer mechanism is applied to capture long-term dependencies, and the semantic prior features are fused with the image features to restore plausible structure in an adaptive manner. Additionally, a background-aware data processing scheme is adopted to prevent the generation of hallucinated objects within holes. Experiments on Apolloscapes and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate better performance than state-of-the-art methods, with MAE, and LPIPS showing improvements of about 9.5% and 41.07% respectively. Visual comparison survey among multi-group person is also conducted to provide performance evaluation, and the results suggest that the proposed MFN offers a promising solution for privacy protection and generate more reliable scene for urban applications with street-view images.
MixCut:A Data Augmentation Method for Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Jiaxiang Yu, Yiyang Liu, Ruiyang Fan, Guobing Sun
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Facial Expression Recognition

In the facial expression recognition task, researchers always get low accuracy of expression classification due to a small amount of training samples. In order to solve this kind of problem, we proposes a new data augmentation method named MixCut. In this method, we firstly interpolate the two original training samples at the pixel level in a random ratio to generate new samples. Then, pixel removal is performed in random square regions on the new samples to generate the final training samples. We evaluated the MixCut method on Fer2013Plus and RAF-DB. With MixCut, we achieved 85.63% accuracy in eight-label classification on Fer2013Plus and 87.88% accuracy in seven-label classification on RAF-DB, effectively improving the classification accuracy of facial expression image recognition. Meanwhile, on Fer2013Plus, MixCut achieved performance improvements of +0.59%, +0.36%, and +0.39% compared to the other three data augmentation methods: CutOut, Mixup, and CutMix, respectively. MixCut improves classification accuracy on RAF-DB by +0.22%, +0.65%, and +0.5% over these three data augmentation methods.
Region-level labels in ice charts can produce pixel-level segmentation for Sea Ice types
Authors: Muhammed Patel, Xinwei Chen, Linlin Xu, Yuhao Chen, K Andrea Scott, David A. Clausi
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Weakly-supervised Learning

Fully supervised deep learning approaches have demonstrated impressive accuracy in sea ice classification, but their dependence on high-resolution labels presents a significant challenge due to the difficulty of obtaining such data. In response, our weakly supervised learning method provides a compelling alternative by utilizing lower-resolution regional labels from expert-annotated ice charts. This approach achieves exceptional pixel-level classification performance by introducing regional loss representations during training to measure the disparity between predicted and ice chart-derived sea ice type distributions. Leveraging the AI4Arctic Sea Ice Challenge Dataset, our method outperforms the fully supervised U-Net benchmark, the top solution of the AutoIce challenge, in both mapping resolution and class-wise accuracy, marking a significant advancement in automated operational sea ice mapping.