Abstract: Pan-sharpening is a process of merging a high-resolution (HR) panchromatic (PAN) image and its corresponding low-resolution (LR) multi-spectral (MS) image to create an HR-MS and pan-sharpened image. However, due to the different sensors' locations, characteristics and acquisition time, PAN and MS image pairs often tend to have various amounts of misalignment. Conventional deep-learning-based methods that were trained with such misaligned PAN-MS image pairs suffer from diverse artifacts such as double-edge and blur artifacts in the resultant PAN-sharpened images. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called shift-invariant pan-sharpening with moving object alignment (SIPSA-Net) which is the first method to take into account such large misalignment of moving object regions for PAN sharpening. The SISPA-Net has a feature alignment module (FAM) that can adjust one feature to be aligned to another feature, even between the two different PAN and MS domains. For better alignment in pan-sharpened images, a shift-invariant spectral loss is newly designed, which ignores the inherent misalignment in the original MS input, thereby having the same effect as optimizing the spectral loss with a well-aligned MS image. Extensive experimental results show that our SIPSA-Net can generate pan-sharpened images with remarkable improvements in terms of visual quality and alignment, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

@InProceedings{Lee_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Lee, Jaehyup and Seo, Soomin and Kim, Munchurl},
    title     = {SIPSA-Net: Shift-Invariant Pan Sharpening With Moving Object Alignment for Satellite Imagery},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10166-10174}
}


Irtiza Hasan, Shengcai Liao, Jinpeng Li, Saad Ullah Akram, Ling Shao

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is used in many vision based applications ranging from video surveillance to autonomous driving. Despite achieving high performance, it is still largely unknown how well existing detectors generalize to unseen data. This is important because a practical detector should be ready to use in various scenarios in applications. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive study in this paper, using a general principle of direct cross-dataset evaluation. Through this study, we find that existing state-of-the-art pedestrian detectors, though perform quite well when trained and tested on the same dataset, generalize poorly in cross dataset evaluation. We demonstrate that there are two reasons for this trend. Firstly, their designs (e.g. anchor settings) may be biased towards popular benchmarks in the traditional single-dataset training and test pipeline, but as a result largely limit their generalization capability. Secondly, the training source is generally not dense in pedestrians and diverse in scenarios. Under direct cross-dataset evaluation, surprisingly, we find that a general purpose object detector, without pedestrian-tailored adaptation in design, generalizes much better compared to existing state-of-the-art pedestrian detectors. Furthermore, we illustrate that diverse and dense datasets, collected by crawling the web, serve to be an efficient source of pre-training for pedestrian detection. Accordingly, we propose a progressive training pipeline and find that it works well for autonomous-driving oriented pedestrian detection. Consequently, the study conducted in this paper suggests that more emphasis should be put on cross-dataset evaluation for the future design of generalizable pedestrian detectors. Code and models can be accessed at https://github.com/hasanirtiza/Pedestron.

@InProceedings{Hasan_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Hasan, Irtiza and Liao, Shengcai and Li, Jinpeng and Akram, Saad Ullah and Shao, Ling},
    title     = {Generalizable Pedestrian Detection: The Elephant in the Room},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {11328-11337}
}


Zongyong Deng, Hao Liu, Yaoxing Wang, Chenyang Wang, Zekuan Yu, Xuehong Sun

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a progressive margin loss (PML) approach for unconstrained facial age classification. Conventional methods make strong assumption on that each class owns adequate instances to outline its data distribution, likely leading to bias prediction where the training samples are sparse across age classes. Instead, our PML aims to adaptively refine the age label pattern by enforcing a couple of margins, which fully takes in the in-between discrepancy of the intra-class variance, inter-class variance and class-center. Our PML typically incorporates with the ordinal margin and the variational margin, simultaneously plugging in the globally-tuned deep neural network paradigm. More specifically, the ordinal margin learns to exploit the correlated relationship of the real-world age labels. Accordingly, the variational margin is leveraged to minimize the influence of head classes that misleads the prediction of tailed samples. Moreover, our optimization carefully seeks a series of indicator curricula to achieve robust and efficient model training. Extensive experimental results on three face aging datasets demonstrate that our PML achieves compelling performance compared to state of the arts. Code will be made publicly.

@InProceedings{Deng_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Deng, Zongyong and Liu, Hao and Wang, Yaoxing and Wang, Chenyang and Yu, Zekuan and Sun, Xuehong},
    title     = {PML: Progressive Margin Loss for Long-Tailed Age Classification},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10503-10512}
}


Michael Ramamonjisoa, Michael Firman, Jamie Watson, Vincent Lepetit, Daniyar Turmukhambetov

Abstract: We present a novel method for predicting accurate depths from monocular images with high efficiency. This optimal efficiency is achieved by exploiting wavelet decomposition, which is integrated in a fully differentiable encoder-decoder architecture. We demonstrate that we can reconstruct high-fidelity depth maps by predicting sparse wavelet coefficients. In contrast with previous works, we show that wavelet coefficients can be learned without direct supervision on coefficients. Instead we supervise only the final depth image that is reconstructed through the inverse wavelet transform. We additionally show that wavelet coefficients can be learned in fully self-supervised scenarios, without access to ground-truth depth. Finally, we apply our method to different state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models, in each case giving similar or better results compared to the original model, while requiring less than half the multiply-adds in the decoder network.

@InProceedings{Ramamonjisoa_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Ramamonjisoa, Michael and Firman, Michael and Watson, Jamie and Lepetit, Vincent and Turmukhambetov, Daniyar},
    title     = {Single Image Depth Prediction With Wavelet Decomposition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {11089-11098}
}


Yaxuan Zhu, Ruiqi Gao, Siyuan Huang, Song-Chun Zhu, Ying Nian Wu

Abstract: How to efficiently represent camera pose is an essential problem in 3D computer vision, especially in tasks like camera pose regression and novel view synthesis. Traditionally, 3D position of the camera is represented by Cartesian coordinate and the orientation is represented by Euler angle or quaternions. These representations are manually designed, which may not be the most efficient representation for downstream tasks. In this work, we propose an approach to learn neural representations of camera poses and 3D scenes, coupled with neural representations of local camera movements. Specifically, the camera pose and 3D scene are represented as vectors and the local camera movement is represented as a matrix operating on the vector of the camera pose. We demonstrate that the camera movement can further be parametrized as a matrix Lie algebra that underlies a rotation system in the neural space. The vector representations are then concatenated and generate the posed 2D image through a decoder network. The model is learned from only posed 2D images and corresponding camera poses, without access to depth or shape. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets. The results show that compared with other camera pose representations, our learned representation is more robust to noise in novel view synthesis and more effective in camera pose regression.

@InProceedings{Zhu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhu, Yaxuan and Gao, Ruiqi and Huang, Siyuan and Zhu, Song-Chun and Wu, Ying Nian},
    title     = {Learning Neural Representation of Camera Pose with Matrix Representation of Pose Shift via View Synthesis},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9959-9968}
}


Abstract: Blind super-resolution (SR) methods aim to generate a high quality high resolution image from a low resolution image containing unknown degradations. However, natural images contain various types and amounts of blur: some may be due to the inherent degradation characteristics of the camera, but some may even be intentional, for aesthetic purposes (e.g. Bokeh effect). In the case of the latter, it becomes highly difficult for SR methods to disentangle the blur to remove, and that to leave as is. In this paper, we propose a novel blind SR framework based on kernel-oriented adaptive local adjustment (KOALA) of SR features, called KOALAnet, which jointly learns spatially-variant degradation and restoration kernels in order to adapt to the spatially-variant blur characteristics in real images. Our KOALAnet outperforms recent blind SR methods for synthesized LR images obtained with randomized degradations, and we further show that the proposed KOALAnet produces the most natural results for artistic photographs with intentional blur, which are not over-sharpened, by effectively handling images mixed with in-focus and out-of-focus areas.

@InProceedings{Kim_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Kim, Soo Ye and Sim, Hyeonjun and Kim, Munchurl},
    title     = {KOALAnet: Blind Super-Resolution Using Kernel-Oriented Adaptive Local Adjustment},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10611-10620}
}


Jinxing Zhou, Liang Zheng, Yiran Zhong, Shijie Hao, Meng Wang

Abstract: Visual and audio signals often coexist in natural environments, forming audio-visual events (AVEs). Given a video, we aim to localize video segments containing an AVE and identify its category. In order to learn discriminative features for a classifier, it is pivotal to identify the helpful (or positive) audio-visual segment pairs while filtering out the irrelevant ones, regardless whether they are synchronized or not. To this end, we propose a new positive sample propagation (PSP) module to discover and exploit the closely related audio-visual pairs by evaluating the relationship within every possible pair. It can be done by constructing an all-pair similarity map between each audio and visual segment, and only aggregating the features from the pairs with high similarity scores. To encourage the network to extract high correlated features for positive samples, a new audio-visual pair similarity loss is proposed. We also propose a new weighting branch to better exploit the temporal correlations in weakly supervised setting. We perform extensive experiments on the public AVE dataset and achieve new state-of-the-art accuracy in both fully and weakly supervised settings, thus verifying the effectiveness of our method.

@InProceedings{Zhou_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhou, Jinxing and Zheng, Liang and Zhong, Yiran and Hao, Shijie and Wang, Meng},
    title     = {Positive Sample Propagation Along the Audio-Visual Event Line},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8436-8444}
}


Shanchuan Lin, Andrey Ryabtsev, Soumyadip Sengupta, Brian L. Curless, Steven M. Seitz, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman

Abstract: We introduce a real-time, high-resolution background replacement technique which operates at 30fps in 4K resolution, and 60fps for HD on a modern GPU. Our technique is based on background matting, where an additional frame of the background is captured and used to inform the alpha matte and the foreground layer. The main challenge is to compute a high-quality alpha matte, preserving strand-level hair details, while processing high-resolution images in real-time. To achieve this goal, we employ two neural networks; the base network computes a low-resolution result which is refined by a second network operating at high-resolution on selective patches. We introduce two large-scale video and image matting datasets: VideoMatte240K and PhotoMatte13K/85. Our approach yields higher quality results compared to the previous state-of-the-art in background matting, while simultaneously yielding a dramatic boost in both speed and resolution.

@InProceedings{Lin_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Lin, Shanchuan and Ryabtsev, Andrey and Sengupta, Soumyadip and Curless, Brian L. and Seitz, Steven M. and Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, Ira},
    title     = {Real-Time High-Resolution Background Matting},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8762-8771}
}


Metadata Normalization

Mandy Lu, Qingyu Zhao, Jiequan Zhang, Kilian M. Pohl, Li Fei-Fei, Juan Carlos Niebles, Ehsan Adeli

Abstract: Batch Normalization (BN) and its variants have delivered tremendous success in combating the covariate shift induced by the training step of deep learning methods. While these techniques normalize the feature distribution by standardizing with batch statistics, they do not correct the influence on features from extraneous variables or multiple distributions. Such extra variables, referred to as metadata here, may create bias or confounding effects (e.g., race when classifying gender from face images). We introduce the Metadata Normalization (MDN) layer, a new batch-level operation which can be used end-to-end within the training framework, to correct the influence of metadata on the feature distribution. MDN adopts a regression analysis technique traditionally used for preprocessing to remove (regress out) the metadata effects on model features during training. We utilize a metric based on distance correlation to quantify the distribution bias from the metadata and demonstrate that our method successfully removes metadata effects on four diverse settings: one synthetic, one 2D image, one video, and one 3D medical image dataset.

@InProceedings{Lu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Lu, Mandy and Zhao, Qingyu and Zhang, Jiequan and Pohl, Kilian M. and Fei-Fei, Li and Niebles, Juan Carlos and Adeli, Ehsan},
    title     = {Metadata Normalization},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10917-10927}
}


Chanho Kim, Li Fuxin, Mazen Alotaibi, James M. Rehg

Abstract: In multi-object tracking, the tracker maintains in its memory the appearance and motion information for each object in the scene. This memory is utilized for finding matches between tracks and detections, and is updated based on the matching. Many approaches model each target in isolation and lack the ability to use all the targets in the scene to jointly update the memory. This can be problematic when there are similarly looking objects in the scene. In this paper, we solve the problem of simultaneously considering all tracks during memory updating, with only a small spatial overhead, via a novel multi-track pooling module. We additionally propose a training strategy adapted to multi-track pooling which generates hard tracking episodes online. We show that the combination of these innovations results in a strong discriminative appearance model under the bilinear LSTM tracking framework, enabling the use of greedy data association to achieve online tracking performance. Our experiments demonstrate real-time, state-of-the-art online tracking performance on public multi-object tracking (MOT) datasets.

@InProceedings{Kim_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Kim, Chanho and Fuxin, Li and Alotaibi, Mazen and Rehg, James M.},
    title     = {Discriminative Appearance Modeling With Multi-Track Pooling for Real-Time Multi-Object Tracking},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9553-9562}
}


Zhongwen Zhang, Dmitrii Marin, Maria Drangova, Yuri Boykov

Abstract: We are interested in unsupervised reconstruction of complex near-capillary vasculature with thousands of bifurcations where supervision and learning are infeasible. Unsupervised methods can use many structural constraints, e.g. topology, geometry, physics. Common techniques use variants of MST on geodesic "tubular graphs" minimizing symmetric pairwise costs, i.e. distances. We show limitations of such standard undirected tubular graphs producing typical errors at bifurcations where flow "directedness" is critical. We introduce a new general concept of "confluence" for continuous oriented curves forming vessel trees and show how to enforce it on discrete tubular graphs. While confluence is a high-order property, we present an efficient practical algorithm for reconstructing confluent vessel trees using minimum arborescence on a directed graph enforcing confluence via simple flow-extrapolating arc construction. Empirical tests on large near-capillary sub-voxel vasculature volumes demonstrate significantly improved reconstruction accuracy at bifurcations. Our code has also been made publicly available.

@InProceedings{Zhang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhang, Zhongwen and Marin, Dmitrii and Drangova, Maria and Boykov, Yuri},
    title     = {Confluent Vessel Trees With Accurate Bifurcations},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9573-9582}
}


Daizong Liu, Xiaoye Qu, Jianfeng Dong, Pan Zhou, Yu Cheng, Wei Wei, Zichuan Xu, Yulai Xie

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of temporal sentence grounding (TSG), which aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. Previous works either compare pre-defined candidate segments with the query and select the best one by ranking, or directly regress the boundary timestamps of the target segment. In this paper, we propose a novel localization framework that scores all pairs of start and end indices within the video simultaneously with a biaffine mechanism. In particular, we present a Context-aware Biaffine Localizing Network (CBLN) which incorporates both local and global contexts into features of each start/end position for biaffine-based localization. The local contexts from the adjacent frames help distinguish the visually similar appearance, and the global contexts from the entire video contribute to reasoning the temporal relation. Besides, we also develop a multi-modal self-attention module to provide fine-grained query-guided video representation for this biaffine strategy. Extensive experiments show that our CBLN significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts on three public datasets (ActivityNet Captions, TACoS, and Charades-STA), demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed localization framework.

@InProceedings{Liu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Liu, Daizong and Qu, Xiaoye and Dong, Jianfeng and Zhou, Pan and Cheng, Yu and Wei, Wei and Xu, Zichuan and Xie, Yulai},
    title     = {Context-Aware Biaffine Localizing Network for Temporal Sentence Grounding},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {11235-11244}
}


Lan Fu, Changqing Zhou, Qing Guo, Felix Juefei-Xu, Hongkai Yu, Wei Feng, Yang Liu, Song Wang

Abstract: Shadow removal is still a challenging task due to its inherent background-dependent and spatial-variant properties, leading to unknown and diverse shadow patterns. Even powerful deep neural networks could hardly recover traceless shadow-removed background. This paper proposes a new solution for this task by formulating it as an exposure fusion problem to address the challenges. Intuitively, we first estimate multiple over-exposure images w.r.t. the input image to let the shadow regions in these images have the same color with shadow-free areas in the input image. Then, we fuse the original input with the over-exposure images to generate the final shadow-free counterpart. Nevertheless, the spatial-variant property of the shadow requires the fusion to be sufficiently `smart', that is, it should automatically select proper over-exposure pixels from different images to make the final output natural. To address this challenge, we propose the shadow-aware FusionNet that takes the shadow image as input to generate fusion weight maps across all the over-exposure images. Moreover, we propose the boundary-aware RefineNet to eliminate the remaining shadow trace further. We conduct extensive experiments on the ISTD, ISTD+, and SRD datasets to validate our method's effectiveness and show better performance in shadow regions and comparable performance in non-shadow regions over the state-of-the-art methods. We release the code in https://github.com/tsingqguo/exposure-fusion-shadow-removal.

@InProceedings{Fu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Fu, Lan and Zhou, Changqing and Guo, Qing and Juefei-Xu, Felix and Yu, Hongkai and Feng, Wei and Liu, Yang and Wang, Song},
    title     = {Auto-Exposure Fusion for Single-Image Shadow Removal},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10571-10580}
}


Xingjian Zhen, Rudrasis Chakraborty, Vikas Singh

Abstract: One strategy for adversarially training a robust model is to maximize its certified radius -- the neighborhood around a given training sample for which the model's prediction remains unchanged. The scheme typically involves analyzing a "smoothed" classifier where one estimates the prediction corresponding to Gaussian samples in the neighborhood of each sample in the mini-batch, accomplished in practice by Monte Carlo sampling. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that this sampling bottleneck can potentially be mitigated by identifying ways to directly propagate the covariance matrix of the smoothed distribution through the network. To this end, we find that other than certain adjustments to the network, propagating the covariances must also be accompanied by additional accounting that keeps track of how the distributional moments transform and interact at each stage in the network. We show how satisfying these criteria yields an algorithm for maximizing the certified radius on datasets including Cifar-10, ImageNet, and Places365 while offering runtime savings on networks with moderate depth, with a small compromise in overall accuracy. We describe the details of the key modifications that enable practical use. Via various experiments, we evaluate when our simplifications are sensible, and what the key benefits and limitations are.

@InProceedings{Zhen_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhen, Xingjian and Chakraborty, Rudrasis and Singh, Vikas},
    title     = {Simpler Certified Radius Maximization by Propagating Covariances},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7292-7301}
}


Dongxu Li, Chenchen Xu, Kaihao Zhang, Xin Yu, Yiran Zhong, Wenqi Ren, Hanna Suominen, Hongdong Li

Abstract: Video deblurring models exploit consecutive frames to remove blurs from camera shakes and object motions. In order to utilize neighboring sharp patches, typical methods rely mainly on homography or optical flows to spatially align neighboring blurry frames. However, such explicit approaches are less effective in the presence of fast motions with large pixel displacements. In this work, we propose a novel implicit method to learn spatial correspondence among blurry frames in the feature space. To construct distant pixel correspondences, our model builds a correlation volume pyramid among all the pixel-pairs between neighboring frames. To enhance the features of the reference frame, we design a correlative aggregation module that maximizes the pixel-pair correlations with its neighbors based on the volume pyramid. Finally, we feed the aggregated features into a reconstruction module to obtain the restored frame. We design a generative adversarial paradigm to optimize the model progressively. Our proposed method is evaluated on the widely-adopted DVD dataset, along with a newly collected High-Frame-Rate (1000 fps) Dataset for Video Deblurring (HFR-DVD). Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our model performs favorably on both datasets against previous state-of-the-art methods, confirming the benefit of modeling all-range spatial correspondence for video deblurring.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Li, Dongxu and Xu, Chenchen and Zhang, Kaihao and Yu, Xin and Zhong, Yiran and Ren, Wenqi and Suominen, Hanna and Li, Hongdong},
    title     = {ARVo: Learning All-Range Volumetric Correspondence for Video Deblurring},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7721-7731}
}


Shiyu Tan, Yicheng Wu, Shoou-I Yu, Ashok Veeraraghavan

Abstract: Conventional stereo suffers from a fundamental trade-off between imaging volume and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) -- due to the conflicting impact of aperture size on both these variables. Inspired by the extended depth of field cameras, we propose a novel end-to-end learning-based technique to overcome this limitation, by introducing a phase mask at the aperture plane of the cameras in a stereo imaging system. The phase mask creates a depth-dependent point spread function, allowing us to recover sharp image texture and stereo correspondence over a significantly extended depth of field (EDOF) than conventional stereo. The phase mask pattern, the EDOF image reconstruction, and the stereo disparity estimation are all trained together using an end-to-end learned deep neural network. We perform theoretical analysis and characterization of the proposed approach and show a 6x increase in volume that can be imaged in simulation. We also build an experimental prototype and validate the approach using real-world results acquired using this prototype system.

@InProceedings{Tan_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Tan, Shiyu and Wu, Yicheng and Yu, Shoou-I and Veeraraghavan, Ashok},
    title     = {CodedStereo: Learned Phase Masks for Large Depth-of-Field Stereo},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7170-7179}
}


Risheng Liu, Long Ma, Jiaao Zhang, Xin Fan, Zhongxuan Luo

Abstract: Low-light image enhancement plays very important roles in low-level vision areas. Recent works have built a great deal of deep learning models to address this task. However, these approaches mostly rely on significant architecture engineering and suffer from high computational burden. In this paper, we propose a new method, named Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Architecture Search (RUAS), to construct lightweight yet effective enhancement network for low-light images in real-world scenario. Specifically, building upon Retinex rule, RUAS first establishes models to characterize the intrinsic underexposed structure of low-light images and unroll their optimization processes to construct our holistic propagation structure. Then by designing a cooperative reference-free learning strategy to discover low-light prior architectures from a compact search space, RUAS is able to obtain a top-performing image enhancement network, which is with fast speed and requires few computational resources. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of our RUAS framework against recently proposed state-of-the-art methods. The project page is available at http://dutmedia.org/RUAS/.

@InProceedings{Liu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Liu, Risheng and Ma, Long and Zhang, Jiaao and Fan, Xin and Luo, Zhongxuan},
    title     = {Retinex-Inspired Unrolling With Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-Light Image Enhancement},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10561-10570}
}


Lingzhi He, Hongguang Zhu, Feng Li, Huihui Bai, Runmin Cong, Chunjie Zhang, Chunyu Lin, Meiqin Liu, Yao Zhao

Abstract: Depth maps obtained by commercial depth sensors are always in low-resolution, making it difficult to be used in various computer vision tasks. Thus, depth map super-resolution (SR) is a practical and valuable task, which upscales the depth map into high-resolution (HR) space. However, limited by the lack of real-world paired low-resolution (LR) and HR depth maps, most existing methods use downsampling to obtain paired training samples. To this end, we first construct a large-scale dataset named "RGB-D-D", which can greatly promote the study of depth map SR and even more depth-related real-world tasks. The "D-D" in our dataset represents the paired LR and HR depth maps captured from mobile phone and Lucid Helios respectively ranging from indoor scenes to challenging outdoor scenes. Besides, we provide a fast depth map super-resolution (FDSR) baseline, in which the high-frequency component adaptively decomposed from RGB image to guide the depth map SR. Extensive experiments on existing public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our network compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, for the real-world LR depth maps, our algorithm can produce more accurate HR depth maps with clearer boundaries and to some extent correct the depth value errors.

@InProceedings{He_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {He, Lingzhi and Zhu, Hongguang and Li, Feng and Bai, Huihui and Cong, Runmin and Zhang, Chunjie and Lin, Chunyu and Liu, Meiqin and Zhao, Yao},
    title     = {Towards Fast and Accurate Real-World Depth Super-Resolution: Benchmark Dataset and Baseline},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9229-9238}
}


Jiahui Huang, Shi-Sheng Huang, Haoxuan Song, Shi-Min Hu

Abstract: Previous online 3D dense reconstruction methods struggle to achieve the balance between memory storage and surface quality, largely due to the usage of stagnant underlying geometry representation, such as TSDF (truncated signed distance functions) or surfels, without any knowledge of the scene priors. In this paper, we present DI-Fusion (Deep Implicit Fusion), based on a novel 3D representation, i.e. Probabilistic Local Implicit Voxels (PLIVoxs), for online 3D reconstruction with a commodity RGB-D camera. Our PLIVox encodes scene priors considering both the local geometry and uncertainty parameterized by a deep neural network. With such deep priors, we are able to perform online implicit 3D reconstruction achieving state-of-the-art camera trajectory estimation accuracy and mapping quality, while achieving better storage efficiency compared with previous online 3D reconstruction approaches.

@InProceedings{Huang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Huang, Jiahui and Huang, Shi-Sheng and Song, Haoxuan and Hu, Shi-Min},
    title     = {DI-Fusion: Online Implicit 3D Reconstruction With Deep Priors},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8932-8941}
}


Jiaming Zhou, Kun-Yu Lin, Haoxin Li, Wei-Shi Zheng

Abstract: Long-term actions involve many important visual concepts, e.g., objects, motions, and sub-actions, and there are various relations among these concepts, which we call basic relations. These basic relations will jointly affect each other during the temporal evolution of long-term actions, which forms the high-order relations that are essential for long-term action recognition. In this paper, we propose a Graph-based High-order Relation Modeling (GHRM) module to exploit the high-order relations in the long-term actions for long-term action recognition. In GHRM, each basic relation in the long-term actions will be modeled by a graph, where each node represents a segment in a long video. Moreover, when modeling each basic relation, the information from all the other basic relations will be incorporated by GHRM, and thus the high-order relations in the long-term actions can be well exploited. To better exploit the high-order relations along the time dimension, we design a GHRM-layer consisting of a Temporal-GHRM branch and a Semantic-GHRM branch, which aims to model the local temporal high-order relations and global semantic high-order relations. The experimental results on three long-term action recognition datasets, namely, Breakfast, Charades, and MultiThumos, demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

@InProceedings{Zhou_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhou, Jiaming and Lin, Kun-Yu and Li, Haoxin and Zheng, Wei-Shi},
    title     = {Graph-Based High-Order Relation Modeling for Long-Term Action Recognition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8984-8993}
}


Vitor Albiero, Xingyu Chen, Xi Yin, Guan Pang, Tal Hassner

Abstract: We propose real-time, six degrees of freedom (6DoF), 3D face pose estimation without face detection or landmark localization. We observe that estimating the 6DoF rigid transformation of a face is a simpler problem than facial landmark detection, often used for 3D face alignment. In addition, 6DoF offers more information than face bounding box labels. We leverage these observations to make multiple contributions: (a) We describe an easily trained, efficient, Faster R-CNN-based model which regresses 6DoF pose for all faces in the photo, without preliminary face detection. (b) We explain how pose is converted and kept consistent between the input photo and arbitrary crops created while training and evaluating our model. (c) Finally, we show how face poses can replace detection bounding box training labels. Tests on AFLW2000-3D and BIWI show that our method runs at real-time and outperforms state of the art (SotA) face pose estimators. Remarkably, our method also surpasses SotA models of comparable complexity on the WIDER FACE detection benchmark, despite not been optimized on bounding box labels.

@InProceedings{Albiero_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Albiero, Vitor and Chen, Xingyu and Yin, Xi and Pang, Guan and Hassner, Tal},
    title     = {img2pose: Face Alignment and Detection via 6DoF, Face Pose Estimation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7617-7627}
}


Marvin Eisenberger, David Novotny, Gael Kerchenbaum, Patrick Labatut, Natalia Neverova, Daniel Cremers, Andrea Vedaldi

Abstract: We present NeuroMorph, a new neural network architecture that takes as input two 3D shapes and produces in one go, i.e. in a single feed forward pass, a smooth interpolation and point-to-point correspondences between them. The interpolation, expressed as a deformation field, changes the pose of the source shape to resemble the target, but leaves the object identity unchanged. NeuroMorph uses an elegant architecture combining graph convolutions with global feature pooling to extract local features. During training, the model is incentivized to create realistic deformations by approximating geodesics on the underlying shape space manifold. This strong geometric prior allows to train our model end-to-end and in a fully unsupervised manner without requiring any manual correspondence annotations. NeuroMorph works well for a large variety of input shapes, including non-isometric pairs from different object categories. It obtains state-of-the-art results for both shape correspondence and interpolation tasks, matching or surpassing the performance of recent unsupervised and supervised methods on multiple benchmarks.

@InProceedings{Eisenberger_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Eisenberger, Marvin and Novotny, David and Kerchenbaum, Gael and Labatut, Patrick and Neverova, Natalia and Cremers, Daniel and Vedaldi, Andrea},
    title     = {NeuroMorph: Unsupervised Shape Interpolation and Correspondence in One Go},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7473-7483}
}


Pengwen Dai, Sanyi Zhang, Hua Zhang, Xiaochun Cao

Abstract: State-of-the-art scene text detection methods usually model the text instance with local pixels or components from the bottom-up perspective and, therefore, are sensitive to noises and dependent on the complicated heuristic post-processing especially for arbitrary-shape texts. To relieve these two issues, instead, we propose to progressively evolve the initial text proposal to arbitrarily shaped text contours in a top-down manner. The initial horizontal text proposals are generated by estimating the center and size of texts. To reduce the range of regression, the first stage of the evolution predicts the corner points of oriented text proposals from the initial horizontal ones. In the second stage, the contours of the oriented text proposals are iteratively regressed to arbitrarily shaped ones. In the last iteration of this stage, we rescore the confidence of the final localized text by utilizing the cues from multiple contour points, rather than the single cue from the initial horizontal proposal center that may be out of arbitrary-shape text regions. Moreover, to facilitate the progressive contour evolution, we design a contour information aggregation mechanism to enrich the feature representation on text contours by considering both the circular topology and semantic context. Experiments conducted on CTW1500, Total-Text, ArT, and TD500 have demonstrated that the proposed method especially excels in line-level arbitrary-shape texts. Code is available at http://github.com/dpengwen/PCR.

@InProceedings{Dai_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Dai, Pengwen and Zhang, Sanyi and Zhang, Hua and Cao, Xiaochun},
    title     = {Progressive Contour Regression for Arbitrary-Shape Scene Text Detection},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7393-7402}
}


Julian Tachella, Junqi Tang, Mike Davies

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are now a well-established tool for solving computational imaging problems. Modern CNN-based algorithms obtain state-of-the-art performance in diverse image restoration problems. Furthermore, it has been recently shown that, despite being highly overparameterized, networks trained with a single corrupted image can still perform as well as fully trained networks. We introduce a formal link between such networks through their neural tangent kernel (NTK), and well-known non-local filtering techniques, such as non-local means or BM3D. The filtering function associated with a given network architecture can be obtained in closed form without need to train the network, being fully characterized by the random initialization of the network weights. While the NTK theory accurately predicts the filter associated with networks trained using standard gradient descent, our analysis shows that it falls short to explain the behaviour of networks trained using the popular Adam optimizer. The latter achieves a larger change of weights in hidden layers, adapting the non-local filtering function during training. We evaluate our findings via extensive image denoising experiments.

@InProceedings{Tachella_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Tachella, Julian and Tang, Junqi and Davies, Mike},
    title     = {The Neural Tangent Link Between CNN Denoisers and Non-Local Filters},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8618-8627}
}


Dynamic Slimmable Network

Changlin Li, Guangrun Wang, Bing Wang, Xiaodan Liang, Zhihui Li, Xiaojun Chang

Abstract: Current dynamic networks and dynamic pruning methods have shown their promising capability in reducing theoretical computation complexity. However, dynamic sparse patterns on convolutional filters fail to achieve actual acceleration in real-world implementation, due to the extra burden of indexing, weight-copying, or zero-masking. Here, we explore a dynamic network slimming regime, named Dynamic Slimmable Network (DS-Net), which aims to achieve good hardware-efficiency via dynamically adjusting filter numbers of networks at test time with respect to different inputs, while keeping filters stored statically and contiguously in hardware to prevent the extra burden. Our DS-Net is empowered with the ability of dynamic inference by the proposed double-headed dynamic gate that comprises an attention head and a slimming head to predictively adjust network width with negligible extra computation cost. To ensure generality of each candidate architecture and the fairness of gate, we propose a disentangled two-stage training scheme inspired by one-shot NAS. In the first stage, a novel training technique for weight-sharing networks named In-place Ensemble Bootstrapping is proposed to improve the supernet training efficacy. In the second stage, Sandwich Gate Sparsification is proposed to assist the gate training by identifying easy and hard samples in an online way. Extensive experiments demonstrate our DS-Net consistently outperforms its static counterparts as well as state-of-the-art static and dynamic model compression methods by a large margin (up to 5.9%). Typically, DS-Net achieves 2-4x computation reduction and 1.62x real-world acceleration over ResNet-50 and MobileNet with minimal accuracy drops on ImageNet.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Li, Changlin and Wang, Guangrun and Wang, Bing and Liang, Xiaodan and Li, Zhihui and Chang, Xiaojun},
    title     = {Dynamic Slimmable Network},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8607-8617}
}


Bindita Chaudhuri, Nikolaos Sarafianos, Linda Shapiro, Tony Tung

Abstract: We introduce a novel approach to generate diverse high fidelity texture maps for 3D human meshes in a semi-supervised setup. Given a segmentation mask defining the layout of the semantic regions in the texture map, our network generates high-resolution textures with a variety of styles, that are then used for rendering purposes. To accomplish this task, we propose a Region-adaptive Adversarial Variational AutoEncoder (ReAVAE) that learns the probability distribution of the style of each region individually so that the style of the generated texture can be controlled by sampling from the region-specific distributions. In addition, we introduce a data generation technique to augment our training set with data lifted from single-view RGB inputs. Our training strategy allows the mixing of reference image styles with arbitrary styles for different regions, a property which can be valuable for virtual try-on AR/VR applications. Experimental results show that our method synthesizes better texture maps compared to prior work while enabling independent layout and style controllability.

@InProceedings{Chaudhuri_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Chaudhuri, Bindita and Sarafianos, Nikolaos and Shapiro, Linda and Tung, Tony},
    title     = {Semi-Supervised Synthesis of High-Resolution Editable Textures for 3D Humans},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7991-8000}
}


Abstract: Traditional methods for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) targeting semantic segmentation exploit information common to the source and target domains, using both labeled source data and unlabeled target data. In this paper, we investigate a setting where the source data is unavailable, but the classifier trained on the source data is; hence named ""model adaptation"". Such a scenario arises when data sharing is prohibited, for instance, because of privacy, or Intellectual Property (IP) issues. To tackle this problem, we propose a method that reduces the uncertainty of predictions on the target domain data. We accomplish this in two ways: minimizing the entropy of the predicted posterior, and maximizing the noise robustness of the feature representation. We show the efficacy of our method on the transfer of segmentation from computer generated images to real-world driving images, and transfer between data collected in different cities, and surprisingly reach performance competitive with that of the methods that have access to source data.

@InProceedings{S_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {S, Prabhu Teja and Fleuret, Francois},
    title     = {Uncertainty Reduction for Model Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9613-9623}
}


Antoine Miech, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Ivan Laptev, Josef Sivic, Andrew Zisserman

Abstract: Our objective is language-based search of large-scale image and video datasets. For this task, the approach that consists of independently mapping text and vision to a joint embedding space, a.k.a. dual encoders, is attractive as retrieval scales and is efficient for billions of images using approximate nearest neighbour search. An alternative approach of using vision-text transformers with cross-attention gives considerable improvements in accuracy over the joint embeddings, but is often inapplicable in practice for large-scale retrieval given the cost of the cross-attention mechanisms required for each sample at test time. This work combines the best of both worlds. We make the following three contributions. First, we equip transformer-based models with a new fine-grained cross-attention architecture, providing significant improvements in retrieval accuracy whilst preserving scalability. Second, we introduce a generic approach for combining a Fast dual encoder model with our Slow but accurate transformer-based model via distillation and re-ranking. Finally, we validate our approach on the Flickr30K image dataset where we show an increase in inference speed by several orders of magnitude while having results competitive to the state of the art. We also extend our method to the video domain, improving the state of the art on the VATEX dataset.

@InProceedings{Miech_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Miech, Antoine and Alayrac, Jean-Baptiste and Laptev, Ivan and Sivic, Josef and Zisserman, Andrew},
    title     = {Thinking Fast and Slow: Efficient Text-to-Visual Retrieval With Transformers},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9826-9836}
}


Lifeng Fan, Shuwen Qiu, Zilong Zheng, Tao Gao, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu

Abstract: Humans possess a unique social cognition capability; nonverbal communication can convey rich social information among agents. In contrast, such crucial social characteristics are mostly missing in the existing scene understanding literature. In this paper, we incorporate different nonverbal communication cues (e.g., gaze, human poses, and gestures) to represent, model, learn, and infer agents' mental states from pure visual inputs. Crucially, such a mental representation takes the agent's belief into account so that it represents what the true world state is and infers the beliefs in each agent's mental state, which may differ from the true world states. By aggregating different beliefs and true world states, our model essentially forms "five minds" during the interactions between two agents. This "five minds" model differs from prior works that infer beliefs in an infinite recursion; instead, agents' beliefs are converged into a "common mind". Based on this representation, we further devise a hierarchical energy-based model that jointly tracks and predicts all five minds. From this new perspective, a social event is interpreted by a series of nonverbal communication and belief dynamics, which transcends the classic keyframe video summary. In the experiments, we demonstrate that using such a social account provides a better video summary on videos with rich social interactions compared with state-of-the-art keyframe video summary methods.

@InProceedings{Fan_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Fan, Lifeng and Qiu, Shuwen and Zheng, Zilong and Gao, Tao and Zhu, Song-Chun and Zhu, Yixin},
    title     = {Learning Triadic Belief Dynamics in Nonverbal Communication From Videos},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7312-7321}
}


Gen Li, Varun Jampani, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Deqing Sun, Jonghyun Kim, Joongkyu Kim

Abstract: Prototype learning is extensively used for few-shot segmentation. Typically, a single prototype is obtained from the support feature by averaging the global object information. However, using one prototype to represent all the information may lead to ambiguities. In this paper, we propose two novel modules, named superpixel-guided clustering (SGC) and guided prototype allocation (GPA), for multiple prototype extraction and allocation. Specifically, SGC is a parameter-free and training-free approach, which extracts more representative prototypes by aggregating similar feature vectors, while GPA is able to select matched prototypes to provide more accurate guidance. By integrating the SGC and GPA together, we propose the Adaptive Superpixel-guided Network (ASGNet), which is a lightweight model and adapts to object scale and shape variation. In addition, our network can easily generalize to k-shot segmentation with substantial improvement and no additional computational cost. In particular, our evaluations on COCO demonstrate that ASGNet surpasses the state-of-the-art method by 5% in 5-shot segmentation.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Li, Gen and Jampani, Varun and Sevilla-Lara, Laura and Sun, Deqing and Kim, Jonghyun and Kim, Joongkyu},
    title     = {Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8334-8343}
}


Pradyumna Reddy, Michael Gharbi, Michal Lukac, Niloy J. Mitra

Abstract: Vector graphics are widely used to represent fonts, logos, digital artworks, and graphic designs. But, while a vast body of work has focused on generative algorithms for raster images, only a handful of options exists for vector graphics. One can always rasterize the input graphic and resort to image-based generative approaches, but this negates the advantages of the vector representation. The current alternative is to use specialized models that require explicit supervision on the vector graphics representation at training time. This is not ideal because large-scale high-quality vector-graphics datasets are difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the vector representation for a given design is not unique, so models that supervise on the vector representation are unnecessarily constrained. Instead, we propose a new neural network that can generate complex vector graphics with varying topologies, and only requires in-direct supervision from readily-available raster training images (i.e., with no vector counterparts). To enable this, we use a differentiable rasterization pipeline that renders the generated vector shapes and composites them together onto a raster canvas. We demonstrate our method on a range of datasets, and provide comparison with state-of-the-art SVG-VAE and DeepSVG, both of which require explicit vector graphics supervision. Finally, we also demonstrate our approach on the MNIST dataset, for which no groundtruth vector representation is available.

@InProceedings{Reddy_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Reddy, Pradyumna and Gharbi, Michael and Lukac, Michal and Mitra, Niloy J.},
    title     = {Im2Vec: Synthesizing Vector Graphics Without Vector Supervision},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7342-7351}
}


Shilong Liu, Lei Zhang, Xiao Yang, Hang Su, Jun Zhu

Abstract: We study the problem of unsupervised discovery and segmentation of object parts, which, as an intermediate local representation, are capable of finding intrinsic object structure and providing more explainable recognition results. Recent unsupervised methods have greatly relaxed the dependency on annotated data which are costly to obtain, but still rely on additional information such as object segmentation masks or saliency map. To remove such a dependency and further improve the part segmentation performance, we develop a novel approach by disentangling the appearance and shape representations of object parts followed with reconstruction losses without using additional object mask information. To avoid degenerated solutions, a bottleneck block is designed to squeeze and expand the appearance representation, leading to a more effective disentanglement between geometry and appearance. Combined with a self-supervised part classification loss and an improved geometry concentration constraint, we can segment more consistent parts with semantic meanings. Comprehensive experiments on a wide variety of objects such as face, bird, and PASCAL VOC objects demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

@InProceedings{Liu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Liu, Shilong and Zhang, Lei and Yang, Xiao and Su, Hang and Zhu, Jun},
    title     = {Unsupervised Part Segmentation Through Disentangling Appearance and Shape},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8355-8364}
}


Enrique Sanchez, Mani Kumar Tellamekala, Michel Valstar, Georgios Tzimiropoulos

Abstract: Temporal context is key to the recognition of expressions of emotion. Existing methods, that rely on recurrent or self-attention models to enforce temporal consistency, work on the feature level, ignoring the task-specific temporal dependencies, and fail to model context uncertainty. To alleviate these issues, we build upon the framework of Neural Processes to propose a method for apparent emotion recognition with three key novel components: (a) probabilistic contextual representation with a global latent variable model; (b) temporal context modelling using task-specific predictions in addition to features; and (c) smart temporal context selection. We validate our approach on four databases, two for Valence and Arousal estimation (SEWA and AffWild2), and two for Action Unit intensity estimation (DISFA and BP4D). Results show a consistent improvement over a series of strong baselines as well as over state-of-the-art methods.

@InProceedings{Sanchez_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Sanchez, Enrique and Tellamekala, Mani Kumar and Valstar, Michel and Tzimiropoulos, Georgios},
    title     = {Affective Processes: Stochastic Modelling of Temporal Context for Emotion and Facial Expression Recognition},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9074-9084}
}


Abstract: View synthesis is usually done by an autoencoder, in which the encoder maps a source view image into a latent content code, and the decoder transforms it into a target view image according to the condition. However, the source contents are often not well kept in this setting, which leads to unnecessary changes during the view translation. Although adding skipped connections, like Unet, alleviates the problem, but it often causes the failure on the view conformity. This paper proposes a new architecture by performing the source-to-target deformation in an iterative way. Instead of simply incorporating the features from multiple layers of the encoder, we design soft and hard deformation modules, which warp the encoder features to the target view at different resolutions, and give results to the decoder to complement the details. Particularly, the current warping flow is not only used to align the feature of the same resolution, but also as an approximation to coarsely deform the high resolution feature. Then the residual flow is estimated and applied in the high resolution, so that the deformation is built up in the coarse-to-fine fashion. To better constrain the model, we synthesize a rough target view image based on the intermediate flows and their warped features. The extensive ablation studies and the final results on two different data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed model.

@InProceedings{Yin_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Yin, Mingyu and Sun, Li and Li, Qingli},
    title     = {ID-Unet: Iterative Soft and Hard Deformation for View Synthesis},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7220-7229}
}


Ilya Chugunov, Seung-Hwan Baek, Qiang Fu, Wolfgang Heidrich, Felix Heide

Abstract: We introduce Mask-ToF, a method to reduce flying pixels (FP) in time-of-flight (ToF) depth captures. FPs are pervasive artifacts which occur around depth edges, where light paths from both an object and its background are integrated over the aperture. This light mixes at a sensor pixel to produce erroneous depth estimates, which can adversely affect downstream 3D vision tasks. Mask-ToF starts at the source of these FPs, learning a microlens-level occlusion mask which effectively creates a custom-shaped sub-aperture for each sensor pixel. This modulates the selection of foreground and background light mixtures on a per-pixel basis and thereby encodes scene geometric information directly into the ToF measurements. We develop a differentiable ToF simulator to jointly train a convolutional neural network to decode this information and produce high-fidelity, low-FP depth reconstructions. We test the effectiveness of Mask-ToF on a simulated light field dataset and validate the method with an experimental prototype. To this end, we manufacture the learned amplitude mask and design an optical relay system to virtually place it on a high-resolution ToF sensor. We find that Mask-ToF generalizes well to real data without retraining, cutting FP counts in half.

@InProceedings{Chugunov_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Chugunov, Ilya and Baek, Seung-Hwan and Fu, Qiang and Heidrich, Wolfgang and Heide, Felix},
    title     = {Mask-ToF: Learning Microlens Masks for Flying Pixel Correction in Time-of-Flight Imaging},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9116-9126}
}


Vladimir Kryzhanovskiy, Gleb Balitskiy, Nikolay Kozyrskiy, Aleksandr Zuruev

Abstract: Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) cannot be effectively used in mobile and embedded devices due to strict requirements for computational complexity, memory, and power consumption. The quantization of weights and feature maps (activations) is a popular approach to solve this problem. Training-aware quantization often shows excellent results but requires a full dataset, which is not always available. Post-training quantization methods, in turn, are applied without fine-tuning but still work well for many classes of tasks like classification, segmentation, and so on. However, they either imply a big overhead for quantization parameters (QPs) calculation at runtime (dynamic methods) or lead to an accuracy drop if pre-computed static QPs are used (static methods). Moreover, most inference frameworks don't support dynamic quantization. Thus we propose a novel quantization approach called QPP: quantization parameter prediction. With a small subset of a training dataset or unlabeled data from the same domain, we find the predictor that can accurately estimate QPs of activations given only the NN's input data. Such a predictor allows us to avoid complex calculation of precise values of QPs while maintaining the quality of the model. To illustrate our method's efficiency, we added QPP into two dynamic approaches: 1) Dense+Sparse quantization, where the predetermined percentage of activations are not quantized, 2) standard quantization with equal quantization steps. We provide experiments on a wide set of tasks including super-resolution, facial landmark, segmentation, and classification.

@InProceedings{Kryzhanovskiy_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Kryzhanovskiy, Vladimir and Balitskiy, Gleb and Kozyrskiy, Nikolay and Zuruev, Aleksandr},
    title     = {QPP: Real-Time Quantization Parameter Prediction for Deep Neural Networks},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10684-10692}
}


Chen Wei, Kihyuk Sohn, Clayton Mellina, Alan Yuille, Fan Yang

Abstract: Semi-supervised learning on class-imbalanced data, although a realistic problem, has been under studied. While existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods are known to perform poorly on minority classes, we find that they still generate high precision pseudo-labels on minority classes. By exploiting this property, in this work, we propose Class-Rebalancing Self-Training (CReST), a simple yet effective framework to improve existing SSL methods on class-imbalanced data. CReST iteratively retrains a baseline SSL model with a labeled set expanded by adding pseudo-labeled samples from an unlabeled set, where pseudo-labeled samples from minority classes are selected more frequently according to an estimated class distribution. We also propose a progressive distribution alignment to adaptively adjust the rebalancing strength dubbed CReST+. We show that CReST and CReST+ improve state-of-the-art SSL algorithms on various class-imbalanced datasets and consistently outperform other popular rebalancing methods. Code has been made available at https://github.com/google-research/crest.

@InProceedings{Wei_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Wei, Chen and Sohn, Kihyuk and Mellina, Clayton and Yuille, Alan and Yang, Fan},
    title     = {CReST: A Class-Rebalancing Self-Training Framework for Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Learning},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10857-10866}
}


Abstract: Video paragraph captioning aims to describe multiple events in untrimmed videos with descriptive paragraphs. Existing approaches mainly solve the problem in two steps: event detection and then event captioning. Such two-step manner makes the quality of generated paragraphs highly dependent on the accuracy of event proposal detection which is already a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a paragraph captioning model which eschews the problematic event detection stage and directly generates paragraphs for untrimmed videos. To describe coherent and diverse events, we propose to enhance the conventional temporal attention with dynamic video memories, which progressively exposes new video features and suppresses over-accessed video contents to control visual focuses of the model. In addition, a diversity-driven training strategy is proposed to improve diversity of paragraph on the language perspective. Considering that untrimmed videos generally contain massive but redundant frames, we further augment the video encoder with keyframe awareness to improve efficiency. Experimental results on the ActivityNet and Charades datasets show that our proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art performance on both accuracy and diversity metrics without using any event boundary annotations. Code will be released at https://github.com/syuqings/video-paragraph.

@InProceedings{Song_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Song, Yuqing and Chen, Shizhe and Jin, Qin},
    title     = {Towards Diverse Paragraph Captioning for Untrimmed Videos},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {11245-11254}
}


Pranjal Awasthi, George Yu, Chun-Sung Ferng, Andrew Tomkins, Da-Cheng Juan

Abstract: Adversarial robustness corresponds to the susceptibility of deep neural networks to imperceptible perturbations made at test time. In the context of image tasks, many algorithms have been proposed to make neural networks robust to adversarial perturbations made to the input pixels. These perturbations are typically measured in an l_p norm. However, robustness often holds only for the specific attack used for training. In this work we extend the above setting to consider the problem of training of deep neural networks that can be made simultaneously robust to perturbations applied in multiple natural representations spaces. For the case of image data, examples include the standard pixel representation as well as the representation in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) basis. We design a theoretically sound algorithm with formal guarantees for the above problem. Furthermore, our guarantees also hold when the goal is to require robustness with respect to multiple l_p norm based attacks. We then derive an efficient practical implementation and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on standard datasets for image classification.

@InProceedings{Awasthi_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Awasthi, Pranjal and Yu, George and Ferng, Chun-Sung and Tomkins, Andrew and Juan, Da-Cheng},
    title     = {Adversarial Robustness Across Representation Spaces},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {7608-7616}
}


Zhikai Chen, Lingxi Xie, Shanmin Pang, Yong He, Bo Zhang

Abstract: Deepfakes raised serious concerns on the authenticity of visual contents. Prior works revealed the possibility to disrupt deepfakes by adding adversarial perturbations to the source data, but we argue that the threat has not been eliminated yet. This paper presents MagDR, a mask-guided detection and reconstruction pipeline for defending deepfakes from adversarial attacks. MagDR starts with a detection module that defines a few criteria to judge the abnormality of the output of deepfakes, and then uses it to guide an learnable reconstruction procedure. Adaptive masks are extracted to capture the change in local facial regions. In experiments, MagDR defends three main tasks of deepfakes, and the learned reconstruction pipeline transfers across input data, showing promising performance in defending both black-box and white-box attacks.

@InProceedings{Chen_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Chen, Zhikai and Xie, Lingxi and Pang, Shanmin and He, Yong and Zhang, Bo},
    title     = {MagDR: Mask-Guided Detection and Reconstruction for Defending Deepfakes},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9014-9023}
}


Junxuan Li, Hongdong Li, Yasuyuki Matsushita

Abstract: We propose a method for estimating high-definition spatially-varying lighting, reflectance, and geometry of a scene from 360deg stereo images. Our model takes advantage of the 360deg input to observe the entire scene with geometric detail, then jointly estimates the scene's properties with physical constraints. We first reconstruct a near-field environment light for predicting the lighting at any 3D location within the scene. Then we present a deep learning model that leverages the stereo information to infer the reflectance and surface normal. Lastly, we incorporate the physical constraints between lighting and geometry to refine the reflectance of the scene. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method, benefiting from the 360deg observation of the scene, outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods and enables more augmented reality applications such as mirror-objects insertion.

@InProceedings{Li_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Li, Junxuan and Li, Hongdong and Matsushita, Yasuyuki},
    title     = {Lighting, Reflectance and Geometry Estimation From 360deg Panoramic Stereo},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10591-10600}
}


Suttisak Wizadwongsa, Pakkapon Phongthawee, Jiraphon Yenphraphai, Supasorn Suwajanakorn

Abstract: We present NeX, a new approach to novel view synthesis based on enhancements of multiplane image (MPI) that can reproduce next-level view-dependent effects--in real time. Unlike traditional MPI that uses a set of simple RGBa planes, our technique models view-dependent effects by instead parameterizing each pixel as a linear combination of basis functions learned from a neural network. Moreover, we propose a hybrid implicit-explicit modeling strategy that improves upon fine detail and produces state-of-the-art results. Our method is evaluated on benchmark forward-facing datasets as well as our newly-introduced dataset designed to test the limit of view-dependent modeling with significantly more challenging effects such as the rainbow reflections on a CD. Our method achieves the best overall scores across all major metrics on these datasets with more than 1000x faster rendering time than the state of the art. For real-time demos, visit https://nex-mpi.github.io/

@InProceedings{Wizadwongsa_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Wizadwongsa, Suttisak and Phongthawee, Pakkapon and Yenphraphai, Jiraphon and Suwajanakorn, Supasorn},
    title     = {NeX: Real-Time View Synthesis With Neural Basis Expansion},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8534-8543}
}


Zonghao Guo, Chang Liu, Xiaosong Zhang, Jianbin Jiao, Xiangyang Ji, Qixiang Ye

Abstract: Detecting oriented and densely packed objects remains challenging for spatial feature aliasing caused by the intersection of reception fields between objects. In this paper, we propose a convex-hull feature adaptation (CFA) approach for configuring convolutional features in accordance with oriented and densely packed object layouts. CFA is rooted in convex-hull feature representation, which defines a set of dynamically predicted feature points guided by the convex intersection over union (CIoU) to bound the extent of objects. CFA pursues optimal feature assignment by constructing convex-hull sets and dynamically splitting positive or negative convex-hulls. By simultaneously considering overlapping convex-hulls and objects and penalizing convex-hulls shared by multiple objects, CFA alleviates spatial feature aliasing towards optimal feature adaptation. Experiments on DOTA and SKU110K-R datasets show that CFA significantly outperforms the baseline approach, achieving new state-of-the-art detection performance.

@InProceedings{Guo_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Guo, Zonghao and Liu, Chang and Zhang, Xiaosong and Jiao, Jianbin and Ji, Xiangyang and Ye, Qixiang},
    title     = {Beyond Bounding-Box: Convex-Hull Feature Adaptation for Oriented and Densely Packed Object Detection},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8792-8801}
}


Yuying Ge, Yibing Song, Ruimao Zhang, Chongjian Ge, Wei Liu, Ping Luo

Abstract: Image virtual try-on aims to fit a garment image (target clothes) to a person image. Prior methods are heavily based on human parsing. However, slightly-wrong segmentation results would lead to unrealistic try-on images with large artifacts. Inaccurate parsing misleads parser-based methods to produce visually unrealistic results where artifacts usually occur. A recent pioneering work employed knowledge distillation to reduce the dependency of human parsing, where the try-on images produced by a parser-based method are used as supervisions to train a "student" network without relying on segmentation, making the student mimic the try-on ability of the parser-based model. However, the image quality of the student is bounded by the parser-based model. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach, "teacher-tutor-student" knowledge distillation, which is able to produce highly photo-realistic images without human parsing, possessing several appealing advantages compared to prior arts. (1) Unlike existing work, our approach treats the fake images produced by the parser-based method as "tutor knowledge", where the artifacts can be corrected by real "teacher knowledge", which is extracted from the real person images in a self-supervised way. (2) Other than using real images as supervisions, we formulate knowledge distillation in the try-on problem as distilling the appearance flows between the person image and the garment image, enabling us to find accurate dense correspondences between them to produce high-quality results. (3) Extensive evaluations show large superiority of our method (see Fig. 1).

@InProceedings{Ge_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Ge, Yuying and Song, Yibing and Zhang, Ruimao and Ge, Chongjian and Liu, Wei and Luo, Ping},
    title     = {Parser-Free Virtual Try-On via Distilling Appearance Flows},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8485-8493}
}


Xinyi Zhang, Hang Dong, Jinshan Pan, Chao Zhu, Ying Tai, Chengjie Wang, Jilin Li, Feiyue Huang, Fei Wang

Abstract: Most of the existing deep learning-based dehazing methods are trained and evaluated on the image dehazing datasets, where the dehazed images are generated by only exploiting the information from the corresponding hazy ones. On the other hand, the video dehazing algorithms, which can acquire more satisfying dehazing results by exploiting the temporal redundancy from neighborhood hazy frames, receive less attention due to the absence of the video dehazing datasets. Therefore, we propose the first REal-world VIdeo DEhazing (REVIDE) dataset which can be used for the supervised learning of the video dehazing algorithms. By utilizing a well-designed video acquisition system, we can capture paired real-world hazy and haze-free videos that are perfectly aligned by recording the same scene (with or without haze) twice. Considering the challenge of exploiting temporal redundancy among the hazy frames, we also develop a Confidence Guided and Improved Deformable Network (CG-IDN) for video dehazing. The experiments demonstrate that the hazy scenes in the REVIDE dataset are more realistic than the synthetic datasets and the proposed algorithm also performs favorably against state-of-the-art dehazing methods.

@InProceedings{Zhang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhang, Xinyi and Dong, Hang and Pan, Jinshan and Zhu, Chao and Tai, Ying and Wang, Chengjie and Li, Jilin and Huang, Feiyue and Wang, Fei},
    title     = {Learning To Restore Hazy Video: A New Real-World Dataset and a New Method},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9239-9248}
}


Mingyuan Fan, Shenqi Lai, Junshi Huang, Xiaoming Wei, Zhenhua Chai, Junfeng Luo, Xiaolin Wei

Abstract: BiSeNet has been proved to be a popular two-stream network for real-time segmentation. However, its principle of adding an extra path to encode spatial information is time-consuming, and the backbones borrowed from pretrained tasks, e.g., image classification, may be inefficient for image segmentation due to the deficiency of task-specific design. To handle these problems, we propose a novel and efficient structure named Short-Term Dense Concatenate network (STDC network) by removing structure redundancy. Specifically, we gradually reduce the dimension of feature maps and use the aggregation of them for image representation, which forms the basic module of STDC network. In the decoder, we propose a Detail Aggregation module by integrating the learning of spatial information into low-level layers in single-stream manner. Finally, the low-level features and deep features are fused to predict the final segmentation results. Extensive experiments on Cityscapes and CamVid dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by achieving promising trade-off between segmentation accuracy and inference speed. On Cityscapes, we achieve 71.9% mIoU on the test set with a speed of 250.4 FPS on NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti, which is 45.2% faster than the latest methods, and achieve 76.8% mIoU with 97.0 FPS while inferring on higher resolution images.

@InProceedings{Fan_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Fan, Mingyuan and Lai, Shenqi and Huang, Junshi and Wei, Xiaoming and Chai, Zhenhua and Luo, Junfeng and Wei, Xiaolin},
    title     = {Rethinking BiSeNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9716-9725}
}


Abstract: Advanced tensor decomposition, such as Tensor train (TT) and Tensor ring (TR), has been widely studied for deep neural network (DNN) model compression, especially for recurrent neural networks (RNNs). However, compressing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using TT/TR always suffers significant accuracy loss. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework for tensor decomposition-based model compression using Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). By formulating TT decomposition-based model compression to an optimization problem with constraints on tensor ranks, we leverage ADMM technique to systemically solve this optimization problem in an iterative way. During this procedure, the entire DNN model is trained in the original structure instead of TT format, but gradually enjoys the desired low tensor rank characteristics. We then decompose this uncompressed model to TT format and fine-tune it to finally obtain a high-accuracy TT-format DNN model. Our framework is very general, and it works for both CNNs and RNNs, and can be easily modified to fit other tensor decomposition approaches. We evaluate our proposed framework on different DNN models for image classification and video recognition tasks. Experimental results show that our ADMM-based TT-format models demonstrate very high compression performance with high accuracy. Notably, on CIFAR-100, with 2.3X and 2.4X compression ratios, our models have 1.96% and 2.21% higher top-1 accuracy than the original ResNet-20 and ResNet-32, respectively. For compressing ResNet-18 on ImageNet, our model achieves 2.47X FLOPs reduction without accuracy loss.

@InProceedings{Yin_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Yin, Miao and Sui, Yang and Liao, Siyu and Yuan, Bo},
    title     = {Towards Efficient Tensor Decomposition-Based DNN Model Compression With Optimization Framework},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10674-10683}
}


Lvmin Zhang, Chengze Li, Edgar Simo-Serra, Yi Ji, Tien-Tsin Wong, Chunping Liu

Abstract: Flat filling is a critical step in digital artistic content creation with the objective of filling line arts with flat colors. We present a deep learning framework for user-guided line art flat filling that can compute the "influence areas" of the user color scribbles, i.e., the areas where the user scribbles should propagate and influence. This framework explicitly controls such scribble influence areas for artists to manipulate the colors of image details and avoid color leakage/contamination between scribbles, and simultaneously, leverages data-driven color generation to facilitate content creation. This framework is based on a Split Filling Mechanism (SFM), which first splits the user scribbles into individual groups and then independently processes the colors and influence areas of each group with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Learned from more than a million illustrations, the framework can estimate the scribble influence areas in a content-aware manner, and can smartly generate visually pleasing colors to assist the daily works of artists. We show that our proposed framework is easy to use, allowing even amateurs to obtain professional-quality results on a wide variety of line arts.

@InProceedings{Zhang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhang, Lvmin and Li, Chengze and Simo-Serra, Edgar and Ji, Yi and Wong, Tien-Tsin and Liu, Chunping},
    title     = {User-Guided Line Art Flat Filling With Split Filling Mechanism},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9889-9898}
}


Hongyu Liu, Ziyu Wan, Wei Huang, Yibing Song, Xintong Han, Jing Liao, Bin Jiang, Wei Liu

Abstract: User-intended visual content fills the hole regions of an input image in the image editing scenario. The coarse lowlevel inputs, which typically consist of sparse sketch lines and color dots, convey user intentions for content creation (i.e., free-form editing). While existing methods combine an input image and these low-level controls for CNN inputs, the corresponding feature representations are not sufficient to convey user intentions, leading to unfaithfully generated content. In this paper, we propose DeFLOCNet which is based on a deep encoder-decoder CNN to retain the guidance of these controls in the deep feature representations. In each skip connection layer, we design a structure generation block. Instead of attaching low-level controls to an input image, we inject these controls directly into each structure generation block for sketch line refinement and color propagation in the CNN feature space. We then concatenate the modulated features with the original decoder features for structure generation. Meanwhile, DeFLOCNet involves another decoder branch for texture generation and detail enhancement. Both structures and textures are rendered in the decoder, leading to user-intended editing results. Experiments on benchmarks indicate that DeFLOCNet effectively transforms different user intentions to create visually pleasing content.

@InProceedings{Liu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Liu, Hongyu and Wan, Ziyu and Huang, Wei and Song, Yibing and Han, Xintong and Liao, Jing and Jiang, Bin and Liu, Wei},
    title     = {DeFLOCNet: Deep Image Editing via Flexible Low-Level Controls},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10765-10774}
}


Lei Huang, Yi Zhou, Li Liu, Fan Zhu, Ling Shao

Abstract: Batch normalization (BN) is an important technique commonly incorporated into deep learning models to perform standardization within mini-batches. The merits of BN in improving a model's learning efficiency can be further amplified by applying whitening, while its drawbacks in estimating population statistics for inference can be avoided through group normalization (GN). This paper proposes group whitening (GW), which exploits the advantages of the whitening operation and avoids the disadvantages of normalization within mini-batches. In addition, we analyze the constraints imposed on features by normalization, and show how the batch size (group number) affects the performance of batch (group) normalized networks, from the perspective of model's representational capacity. This analysis provides theoretical guidance for applying GW in practice. Finally, we apply the proposed GW to ResNet and ResNeXt architectures and conduct experiments on the ImageNet and COCO benchmarks. Results show that GW consistently improves the performance of different architectures, with absolute gains of 1.02%  1.49% in top-1 accuracy on ImageNet and 1.82% 3.21% in bounding box AP on COCO.

@InProceedings{Huang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Huang, Lei and Zhou, Yi and Liu, Li and Zhu, Fan and Shao, Ling},
    title     = {Group Whitening: Balancing Learning Efficiency and Representational Capacity},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9512-9521}
}


Kento Nishi, Yi Ding, Alex Rich, Tobias Hollerer

Abstract: Imperfect labels are ubiquitous in real-world datasets. Several recent successful methods for training deep neural networks (DNNs) robust to label noise have used two primary techniques: filtering samples based on loss during a warm-up phase to curate an initial set of cleanly labeled samples, and using the output of a network as a pseudo-label for subsequent loss calculations. In this paper, we evaluate different augmentation strategies for algorithms tackling the ""learning with noisy labels"" problem. We propose and examine multiple augmentation strategies and evaluate them using synthetic datasets based on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, as well as on the real-world dataset Clothing1M. Due to several commonalities in these algorithms, we find that using one set of augmentations for loss modeling tasks and another set for learning is the most effective, improving results on the state-of-the-art and other previous methods. Furthermore, we find that applying augmentation during the warm-up period can negatively impact the loss convergence behavior of correctly versus incorrectly labeled samples. We introduce this augmentation strategy to the state-of-the-art technique and demonstrate that we can improve performance across all evaluated noise levels. In particular, we improve accuracy on the CIFAR-10 benchmark at 90% symmetric noise by more than 15% in absolute accuracy, and we also improve performance on the Clothing1M dataset.

@InProceedings{Nishi_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Nishi, Kento and Ding, Yi and Rich, Alex and Hollerer, Tobias},
    title     = {Augmentation Strategies for Learning With Noisy Labels},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8022-8031}
}


Tong Wu, Ziwei Liu, Qingqiu Huang, Yu Wang, Dahua Lin

Abstract: Adversarial robustness has attracted extensive studies recently by revealing the vulnerability and intrinsic characteristics of deep networks. However, existing works on adversarial robustness mainly focus on balanced datasets, while real-world data usually exhibits a long-tailed distribution. To push adversarial robustness towards more realistic scenarios, in this work we investigate the adversarial vulnerability as well as defense under long-tailed distributions. In particular, we first reveal the negative impacts induced by imbalanced data on both recognition performance and adversarial robustness, uncovering the intrinsic challenges of this problem. We then perform a systematic study on existing long-tailed recognition methods in conjunction with the adversarial training framework. Several valuable observations are obtained: 1) natural accuracy is relatively easy to improve, 2) fake gain of robust accuracy exists under unreliable evaluation, and 3) boundary error limits the promotion of robustness. Inspired by these observations, we propose a clean yet effective framework, RoBal, which consists of two dedicated modules, a scale-invariant classifier and data re-balancing via both margin engineering at training stage and boundary adjustment during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over other state-of-the-art defense methods. To our best knowledge, we are the first to tackle adversarial robustness under long-tailed distributions, which we believe would be a significant step towards real-world robustness. Our code is available at: https://github.com/wutong16/Adversarial_Long-Tail.

@InProceedings{Wu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Wu, Tong and Liu, Ziwei and Huang, Qingqiu and Wang, Yu and Lin, Dahua},
    title     = {Adversarial Robustness Under Long-Tailed Distribution},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8659-8668}
}


Xiao Song, Guorun Yang, Xinge Zhu, Hui Zhou, Zhe Wang, Jianping Shi

Abstract: Recently, records on stereo matching benchmarks are constantly broken by end-to-end disparity networks. However, the domain adaptation ability of these deep models is quite poor. Addressing such problem, we present a novel domain-adaptive pipeline called AdaStereo that aims to align multi-level representations for deep stereo matching networks. Compared to previous methods for adaptive stereo matching, our AdaStereo realizes a more standard, complete and effective domain adaptation pipeline. Firstly, we propose a non-adversarial progressive color transfer algorithm for input image-level alignment. Secondly, we design an efficient parameter-free cost normalization layer for internal feature-level alignment. Lastly, a highly related auxiliary task, self-supervised occlusion-aware reconstruction is presented to narrow down the gaps in output space. Our AdaStereo models achieve state-of-the-art cross-domain performance on multiple stereo benchmarks, including KITTI, Middlebury, ETH3D, and DrivingStereo, even outperforming disparity networks finetuned with target-domain ground-truths.

@InProceedings{Song_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Song, Xiao and Yang, Guorun and Zhu, Xinge and Zhou, Hui and Wang, Zhe and Shi, Jianping},
    title     = {AdaStereo: A Simple and Efficient Approach for Adaptive Stereo Matching},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10328-10337}
}


Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new framework for point cloud instance segmentation. Our framework has two steps: an embedding step and a clustering step. In the embedding step, our main contribution is to propose a probabilistic embedding space for point cloud embedding. Specifically, each point is represented as a tri-variate normal distribution. In the clustering step, we propose a novel loss function, which benefits both the semantic segmentation and the clustering. Our experimental results show important improvements to the SOTA, i.e., 3.1% increased average per-category mAP on the PartNet dataset.

@InProceedings{Zhang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhang, Biao and Wonka, Peter},
    title     = {Point Cloud Instance Segmentation Using Probabilistic Embeddings},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {8883-8892}
}


Shao-Ping Lu, Rong Wang, Tao Zhong, Paul L. Rosin

Abstract: Many attempts have been made to hide information in images, where the main challenge is how to increase the payload capacity without the container image being detected as containing a message. In this paper, we propose a large-capacity Invertible Steganography Network (ISN) for image steganography. We take steganography and the recovery of hidden images as a pair of inverse problems on image domain transformation, and then introduce the forward and backward propagation operations of a single invertible network to leverage the image embedding and extracting problems. Sharing all parameters of our single ISN architecture enables us to efficiently generate both the container image and the revealed hidden image(s) with high quality. Moreover, in our architecture the capacity of image steganography is significantly improved by naturally increasing the number of channels of the hidden image branch. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that with this significant improvement of the steganography capacity, our ISN achieves state-of-the-art in both visual and quantitative comparisons.

@InProceedings{Lu_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Lu, Shao-Ping and Wang, Rong and Zhong, Tao and Rosin, Paul L.},
    title     = {Large-Capacity Image Steganography Based on Invertible Neural Networks},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {10816-10825}
}


Chaoyi Zhang, Jianhui Yu, Yang Song, Weidong Cai

Abstract: Scene understanding is a critical problem in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a 3D point-based scene graph generation (SGGpoint) framework to effectively bridge perception and reasoning to achieve scene understanding via three sequential stages, namely scene graph construction, reasoning, and inference. Within the reasoning stage, an EDGE-oriented Graph Convolutional Network (EdgeGCN) is created to exploit multi-dimensional edge features for explicit relationship modeling, together with the exploration of two associated twinning interaction mechanisms between nodes and edges for the independent evolution of scene graph representations. Overall, our integrated SGGpoint framework is established to seek and infer scene structures of interest from both real-world and synthetic 3D point-based scenes. Our experimental results show promising edge-oriented reasoning effects on scene graph generation studies. We also demonstrate our method advantage on several traditional graph representation learning benchmark datasets, including the node-wise classification on citation networks and whole-graph recognition problems for molecular analysis.

@InProceedings{Zhang_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Zhang, Chaoyi and Yu, Jianhui and Song, Yang and Cai, Weidong},
    title     = {Exploiting Edge-Oriented Reasoning for 3D Point-Based Scene Graph Analysis},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9705-9715}
}


Simon Reiss, Constantin Seibold, Alexander Freytag, Erik Rodner, Rainer Stiefelhagen

Abstract: Pixel-wise segmentation is one of the most data and annotation hungry tasks in our field. Providing representative and accurate annotations is often mission-critical especially for challenging medical applications. In this paper, we propose a semi-weakly supervised segmentation algorithm to overcome this barrier. Our approach is based on a new formulation of deep supervision and student-teacher model and allows for easy integration of different supervision signals. In contrast to previous work, we show that care has to be taken how deep supervision is integrated in lower layers and we present multi-label deep supervision as the most important secret ingredient for success. With our novel training regime for segmentation that flexibly makes use of images that are either fully labeled, marked with bounding boxes, just global labels, or not at all, we are able to cut the requirement for expensive labels by 94.22% - narrowing the gap to the best fully supervised baseline to only 5% mean IoU. Our approach is validated by extensive experiments on retinal fluid segmentation and we provide an in-depth analysis of the anticipated effect each annotation type can have in boosting segmentation performance.

@InProceedings{Reiss_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Reiss, Simon and Seibold, Constantin and Freytag, Alexander and Rodner, Erik and Stiefelhagen, Rainer},
    title     = {Every Annotation Counts: Multi-Label Deep Supervision for Medical Image Segmentation},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {9532-9542}
}


Abstract: This paper is about few-shot instance segmentation, where training and test image sets do not share the same object classes. We specify and evaluate a new few-shot anchor-free part-based instance segmenter (FAPIS). Our key novelty is in explicit modeling of latent object parts shared across training object classes, which is expected to facilitate our few-shot learning on new classes in testing. We specify a new anchor-free object detector aimed at scoring and regressing locations of foreground bounding boxes, as well as estimating relative importance of latent parts within each box. Also, we specify a new network for delineating and weighting latent parts for the final instance segmentation within every detected bounding box. Our evaluation on the benchmark COCO-20i dataset demonstrates that we significantly outperform the state of the art.

@InProceedings{Nguyen_2021_CVPR,
    author    = {Nguyen, Khoi and Todorovic, Sinisa},
    title     = {FAPIS: A Few-Shot Anchor-Free Part-Based Instance Segmenter},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
    month     = {June},
    year      = {2021},
    pages     = {11099-11108}
}