Joon‐Young Lee

Ho Kei Cheng, Seoung Wug Oh, Brian Price et al.

Training data for video segmentation are expensive to annotate. This impedes extensions of end-to-end algorithms to new video segmentation tasks, especially in large-vocabulary settings. To 'track anything' without training on video data for every individual task, we develop a decoupled video segmentation approach (DEVA), composed of task-specific image-level segmentation and class/task-agnostic bi-directional temporal propagation. Due to this design, we only need an image-level model for the target task (which is cheaper to train) and a universal temporal propagation model which is trained once and generalizes across tasks. To effectively combine these two modules, we use bi-directional propagation for (semi-)online fusion of segmentation hypotheses from different frames to generate a coherent segmentation. We show that this decoupled formulation compares favorably to end-to-end approaches in several data-scarce tasks including large-vocabulary video panoptic segmentation, open-world video segmentation, referring video segmentation, and unsupervised video object segmentation. Code is available at: https://hkchengrex.github.io/Tracking-Anything-with-DEVA

Miran Heo, Sukjun Hwang, Seoung Wug Oh et al.

We introduce a novel paradigm for offline Video Instance Segmentation (VIS), based on the hypothesis that explicit object-oriented information can be a strong clue for understanding the context of the entire sequence. To this end, we propose VITA, a simple structure built on top of an off-the-shelf Transformer-based image instance segmentation model. Specifically, we use an image object detector as a means of distilling object-specific contexts into object tokens. VITA accomplishes video-level understanding by associating frame-level object tokens without using spatio-temporal backbone features. By effectively building relationships between objects using the condensed information, VITA achieves the state-of-the-art on VIS benchmarks with a ResNet-50 backbone: 49.8 AP, 45.7 AP on YouTube-VIS 2019 & 2021, and 19.6 AP on OVIS. Moreover, thanks to its object token-based structure that is disjoint from the backbone features, VITA shows several practical advantages that previous offline VIS methods have not explored - handling long and high-resolution videos with a common GPU, and freezing a frame-level detector trained on image domain. Code is available at https://github.com/sukjunhwang/VITA.

Ho Kei Cheng, Seoung Wug Oh, Brian Price et al.

We present Cutie, a video object segmentation (VOS) network with object-level memory reading, which puts the object representation from memory back into the video object segmentation result. Recent works on VOS employ bottom-up pixel-level memory reading which struggles due to matching noise, especially in the presence of distractors, resulting in lower performance in more challenging data. In contrast, Cutie performs top-down object-level memory reading by adapting a small set of object queries. Via those, it interacts with the bottom-up pixel features iteratively with a query-based object transformer (qt, hence Cutie). The object queries act as a high-level summary of the target object, while high-resolution feature maps are retained for accurate segmentation. Together with foreground-background masked attention, Cutie cleanly separates the semantics of the foreground object from the background. On the challenging MOSE dataset, Cutie improves by 8.7 J&F over XMem with a similar running time and improves by 4.2 J&F over DeAOT while being three times faster. Code is available at: https://hkchengrex.github.io/Cutie

Hongje Seong, Seoung Wug Oh, Brian Price et al.

Recent studies made great progress in video matting by extending the success of trimap-based image matting to the video domain. In this paper, we push this task toward a more practical setting and propose One-Trimap Video Matting network (OTVM) that performs video matting robustly using only one user-annotated trimap. A key of OTVM is the joint modeling of trimap propagation and alpha prediction. Starting from baseline trimap propagation and alpha prediction networks, our OTVM combines the two networks with an alpha-trimap refinement module to facilitate information flow. We also present an end-to-end training strategy to take full advantage of the joint model. Our joint modeling greatly improves the temporal stability of trimap propagation compared to the previous decoupled methods. We evaluate our model on two latest video matting benchmarks, Deep Video Matting and VideoMatting108, and outperform state-of-the-art by significant margins (MSE improvements of 56.4% and 56.7%, respectively). The source code and model are available online: https://github.com/Hongje/OTVM.

Miran Heo, Sukjun Hwang, Jeongseok Hyun et al.

The handling of long videos with complex and occluded sequences has recently emerged as a new challenge in the video instance segmentation (VIS) community. However, existing methods have limitations in addressing this challenge. We argue that the biggest bottleneck in current approaches is the discrepancy between training and inference. To effectively bridge this gap, we propose a Generalized framework for VIS, namely GenVIS, that achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks without designing complicated architectures or requiring extra post-processing. The key contribution of GenVIS is the learning strategy, which includes a query-based training pipeline for sequential learning with a novel target label assignment. Additionally, we introduce a memory that effectively acquires information from previous states. Thanks to the new perspective, which focuses on building relationships between separate frames or clips, GenVIS can be flexibly executed in both online and semi-online manner. We evaluate our approach on popular VIS benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021/2022 and Occluded VIS (OVIS). Notably, we greatly outperform the state-of-the-art on the long VIS benchmark (OVIS), improving 5.6 AP with ResNet-50 backbone. Code is available at https://github.com/miranheo/GenVIS.

David Chuan-En Lin, Fabian Caba Heilbron, Joon-Young Lee et al. · cmu

Video editing is a creative and complex endeavor and we believe that there is potential for reimagining a new video editing interface to better support the creative and exploratory nature of video editing. We take inspiration from latent space exploration tools that help users find patterns and connections within complex datasets. We present VideoMap, a proof-of-concept video editing interface that operates on video frames projected onto a latent space. We support intuitive navigation through map-inspired navigational elements and facilitate transitioning between different latent spaces through swappable lenses. We built three VideoMap components to support editors in three common video tasks. In a user study with both professionals and non-professionals, editors found that VideoMap helps reduce grunt work, offers a user-friendly experience, provides an inspirational way of editing, and effectively supports the exploratory nature of video editing. We further demonstrate the versatility of VideoMap by implementing three extended applications. For interactive examples, we invite you to visit our project page: https://humanvideointeraction.github.io/videomap.

David Chuan-En Lin, Fabian Caba Heilbron, Joon-Young Lee et al. · cmu

This paper investigates the challenge of extracting highlight moments from videos. To perform this task, we need to understand what constitutes a highlight for arbitrary video domains while at the same time being able to scale across different domains. Our key insight is that photographs taken by photographers tend to capture the most remarkable or photogenic moments of an activity. Drawing on this insight, we present Videogenic, a technique capable of creating domain-specific highlight videos for a diverse range of domains. In a human evaluation study (N=50), we show that a high-quality photograph collection combined with CLIP-based retrieval (which uses a neural network with semantic knowledge of images) can serve as an excellent prior for finding video highlights. In a within-subjects expert study (N=12), we demonstrate the usefulness of Videogenic in helping video editors create highlight videos with lighter workload, shorter task completion time, and better usability.

Sanghyun Woo, Kwanyong Park, Seoung Wug Oh et al.

The tracking-by-detection paradigm today has become the dominant method for multi-object tracking and works by detecting objects in each frame and then performing data association across frames. However, its sequential frame-wise matching property fundamentally suffers from the intermediate interruptions in a video, such as object occlusions, fast camera movements, and abrupt light changes. Moreover, it typically overlooks temporal information beyond the two frames for matching. In this paper, we investigate an alternative by treating object association as clip-wise matching. Our new perspective views a single long video sequence as multiple short clips, and then the tracking is performed both within and between the clips. The benefits of this new approach are two folds. First, our method is robust to tracking error accumulation or propagation, as the video chunking allows bypassing the interrupted frames, and the short clip tracking avoids the conventional error-prone long-term track memory management. Second, the multiple frame information is aggregated during the clip-wise matching, resulting in a more accurate long-range track association than the current frame-wise matching. Given the state-of-the-art tracking-by-detection tracker, QDTrack, we showcase how the tracking performance improves with our new tracking formulation. We evaluate our proposals on two tracking benchmarks, TAO and MOT17 that have complementary characteristics and challenges each other.

Kwanyong Park, Sanghyun Woo, Seoung Wug Oh et al.

Recently, memory-based approaches show promising results on semi-supervised video object segmentation. These methods predict object masks frame-by-frame with the help of frequently updated memory of the previous mask. Different from this per-frame inference, we investigate an alternative perspective by treating video object segmentation as clip-wise mask propagation. In this per-clip inference scheme, we update the memory with an interval and simultaneously process a set of consecutive frames (i.e. clip) between the memory updates. The scheme provides two potential benefits: accuracy gain by clip-level optimization and efficiency gain by parallel computation of multiple frames. To this end, we propose a new method tailored for the per-clip inference. Specifically, we first introduce a clip-wise operation to refine the features based on intra-clip correlation. In addition, we employ a progressive matching mechanism for efficient information-passing within a clip. With the synergy of two modules and a newly proposed per-clip based training, our network achieves state-of-the-art performance on Youtube-VOS 2018/2019 val (84.6% and 84.6%) and DAVIS 2016/2017 val (91.9% and 86.1%). Furthermore, our model shows a great speed-accuracy trade-off with varying memory update intervals, which leads to huge flexibility.

Jiahui Huang, Leonid Sigal, Kwang Moo Yi et al.

We present Interactive Neural Video Editing (INVE), a real-time video editing solution, which can assist the video editing process by consistently propagating sparse frame edits to the entire video clip. Our method is inspired by the recent work on Layered Neural Atlas (LNA). LNA, however, suffers from two major drawbacks: (1) the method is too slow for interactive editing, and (2) it offers insufficient support for some editing use cases, including direct frame editing and rigid texture tracking. To address these challenges we leverage and adopt highly efficient network architectures, powered by hash-grids encoding, to substantially improve processing speed. In addition, we learn bi-directional functions between image-atlas and introduce vectorized editing, which collectively enables a much greater variety of edits in both the atlas and the frames directly. Compared to LNA, our INVE reduces the learning and inference time by a factor of 5, and supports various video editing operations that LNA cannot. We showcase the superiority of INVE over LNA in interactive video editing through a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, highlighting its numerous advantages and improved performance. For video results, please see https://gabriel-huang.github.io/inve/

Sanghyun Woo, Kwanyong Park, Seoung Wug Oh et al.

Scaling object taxonomies is one of the important steps toward a robust real-world deployment of recognition systems. We have faced remarkable progress in images since the introduction of the LVIS benchmark. To continue this success in videos, a new video benchmark, TAO, was recently presented. Given the recent encouraging results from both detection and tracking communities, we are interested in marrying those two advances and building a strong large vocabulary video tracker. However, supervisions in LVIS and TAO are inherently sparse or even missing, posing two new challenges for training the large vocabulary trackers. First, no tracking supervisions are in LVIS, which leads to inconsistent learning of detection (with LVIS and TAO) and tracking (only with TAO). Second, the detection supervisions in TAO are partial, which results in catastrophic forgetting of absent LVIS categories during video fine-tuning. To resolve these challenges, we present a simple but effective learning framework that takes full advantage of all available training data to learn detection and tracking while not losing any LVIS categories to recognize. With this new learning scheme, we show that consistent improvements of various large vocabulary trackers are capable, setting strong baseline results on the challenging TAO benchmarks.

Dawit Mureja Argaw, Fabian Caba Heilbron, Joon-Young Lee et al.

Machine learning is transforming the video editing industry. Recent advances in computer vision have leveled-up video editing tasks such as intelligent reframing, rotoscoping, color grading, or applying digital makeups. However, most of the solutions have focused on video manipulation and VFX. This work introduces the Anatomy of Video Editing, a dataset, and benchmark, to foster research in AI-assisted video editing. Our benchmark suite focuses on video editing tasks, beyond visual effects, such as automatic footage organization and assisted video assembling. To enable research on these fronts, we annotate more than 1.5M tags, with relevant concepts to cinematography, from 196176 shots sampled from movie scenes. We establish competitive baseline methods and detailed analyses for each of the tasks. We hope our work sparks innovative research towards underexplored areas of AI-assisted video editing.

Dawit Mureja Argaw, Joon-Young Lee, Markus Woodson et al.

Learning computer vision models from (and for) movies has a long-standing history. While great progress has been attained, there is still a need for a pretrained multimodal model that can perform well in the ever-growing set of movie understanding tasks the community has been establishing. In this work, we introduce Long-range Multimodal Pretraining, a strategy, and a model that leverages movie data to train transferable multimodal and cross-modal encoders. Our key idea is to learn from all modalities in a movie by observing and extracting relationships over a long-range. After pretraining, we run ablation studies on the LVU benchmark and validate our modeling choices and the importance of learning from long-range time spans. Our model achieves state-of-the-art on several LVU tasks while being much more data efficient than previous works. Finally, we evaluate our model's transferability by setting a new state-of-the-art in five different benchmarks.

Maksym Bekuzarov, Ariana Bermudez, Joon-Young Lee et al.

Despite advancements in user-guided video segmentation, extracting complex objects consistently for highly complex scenes is still a labor-intensive task, especially for production. It is not uncommon that a majority of frames need to be annotated. We introduce a novel semi-supervised video object segmentation (SSVOS) model, XMem++, that improves existing memory-based models, with a permanent memory module. Most existing methods focus on single frame annotations, while our approach can effectively handle multiple user-selected frames with varying appearances of the same object or region. Our method can extract highly consistent results while keeping the required number of frame annotations low. We further introduce an iterative and attention-based frame suggestion mechanism, which computes the next best frame for annotation. Our method is real-time and does not require retraining after each user input. We also introduce a new dataset, PUMaVOS, which covers new challenging use cases not found in previous benchmarks. We demonstrate SOTA performance on challenging (partial and multi-class) segmentation scenarios as well as long videos, while ensuring significantly fewer frame annotations than any existing method. Project page: https://max810.github.io/xmem2-project-page/

Seokju Cho, Jiahui Huang, Jisu Nam et al.

We introduce LocoTrack, a highly accurate and efficient model designed for the task of tracking any point (TAP) across video sequences. Previous approaches in this task often rely on local 2D correlation maps to establish correspondences from a point in the query image to a local region in the target image, which often struggle with homogeneous regions or repetitive features, leading to matching ambiguities. LocoTrack overcomes this challenge with a novel approach that utilizes all-pair correspondences across regions, i.e., local 4D correlation, to establish precise correspondences, with bidirectional correspondence and matching smoothness significantly enhancing robustness against ambiguities. We also incorporate a lightweight correlation encoder to enhance computational efficiency, and a compact Transformer architecture to integrate long-term temporal information. LocoTrack achieves unmatched accuracy on all TAP-Vid benchmarks and operates at a speed almost 6 times faster than the current state-of-the-art.

Seunghyun Shin, Dongmin Shin, Jisu Shin et al.

Different from color correction and transfer, color grading involves adjusting colors for artistic or storytelling purposes in a video, which is used to establish a specific look or mood. However, due to the complexity of the process and the need for specialized editing skills, video color grading remains primarily the domain of professional colorists. In this paper, we present a reference-based video color grading framework. Our key idea is explicitly generating a look-up table (LUT) for color attribute alignment between reference scenes and input video via a diffusion model. As a training objective, we enforce that high-level features of the reference scenes like look, mood, and emotion should be similar to that of the input video. Our LUT-based approach allows for color grading without any loss of structural details in the whole video frames as well as achieving fast inference. We further build a pipeline to incorporate a user-preference via text prompts for low-level feature enhancement such as contrast and brightness, etc. Experimental results, including extensive user studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for video color grading. Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/seunghyuns98/VideoColorGrading.

Yao-Chih Lee, Zhoutong Zhang, Jiahui Huang et al.

Camera and object motions are central to a video's narrative. However, precisely editing these captured motions remains a significant challenge, especially under complex object movements. Current motion-controlled image-to-video (I2V) approaches often lack full-scene context for consistent video editing, while video-to-video (V2V) methods provide viewpoint changes or basic object translation, but offer limited control over fine-grained object motion. We present a track-conditioned V2V framework that enables joint editing of camera and object motion. We achieve this by conditioning a video generation model on a source video and paired 3D point tracks representing source and target motions. These 3D tracks establish sparse correspondences that transfer rich context from the source video to new motions while preserving spatiotemporal coherence. Crucially, compared to 2D tracks, 3D tracks provide explicit depth cues, allowing the model to resolve depth order and handle occlusions for precise motion editing. Trained in two stages on synthetic and real data, our model supports diverse motion edits, including joint camera/object manipulation, motion transfer, and non-rigid deformation, unlocking new creative potential in video editing.

Hongje Seong, Seoung Wug Oh, Joon-Young Lee et al.

We present Hierarchical Memory Matching Network (HMMN) for semi-supervised video object segmentation. Based on a recent memory-based method [33], we propose two advanced memory read modules that enable us to perform memory reading in multiple scales while exploiting temporal smoothness. We first propose a kernel guided memory matching module that replaces the non-local dense memory read, commonly adopted in previous memory-based methods. The module imposes the temporal smoothness constraint in the memory read, leading to accurate memory retrieval. More importantly, we introduce a hierarchical memory matching scheme and propose a top-k guided memory matching module in which memory read on a fine-scale is guided by that on a coarse-scale. With the module, we perform memory read in multiple scales efficiently and leverage both high-level semantic and low-level fine-grained memory features to predict detailed object masks. Our network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the validation sets of DAVIS 2016/2017 (90.8% and 84.7%) and YouTube-VOS 2018/2019 (82.6% and 82.5%), and test-dev set of DAVIS 2017 (78.6%). The source code and model are available online: https://github.com/Hongje/HMMN.

Juan Leon Alcazar, Long Mai, Federico Perazzi et al.

Humans are arguably one of the most important subjects in video streams, many real-world applications such as video summarization or video editing workflows often require the automatic search and retrieval of a person of interest. Despite tremendous efforts in the person reidentification and retrieval domains, few works have developed audiovisual search strategies. In this paper, we present the Audiovisual Person Search dataset (APES), a new dataset composed of untrimmed videos whose audio (voices) and visual (faces) streams are densely annotated. APES contains over 1.9K identities labeled along 36 hours of video, making it the largest dataset available for untrimmed audiovisual person search. A key property of APES is that it includes dense temporal annotations that link faces to speech segments of the same identity. To showcase the potential of our new dataset, we propose an audiovisual baseline and benchmark for person retrieval. Our study shows that modeling audiovisual cues benefits the recognition of people's identities. To enable reproducibility and promote future research, the dataset annotations and baseline code are available at: https://github.com/fuankarion/audiovisual-person-search

Gihyun Kwon, Simon Jenni, Dingzeyu Li et al.

While there has been significant progress in customizing text-to-image generation models, generating images that combine multiple personalized concepts remains challenging. In this work, we introduce Concept Weaver, a method for composing customized text-to-image diffusion models at inference time. Specifically, the method breaks the process into two steps: creating a template image aligned with the semantics of input prompts, and then personalizing the template using a concept fusion strategy. The fusion strategy incorporates the appearance of the target concepts into the template image while retaining its structural details. The results indicate that our method can generate multiple custom concepts with higher identity fidelity compared to alternative approaches. Furthermore, the method is shown to seamlessly handle more than two concepts and closely follow the semantic meaning of the input prompt without blending appearances across different subjects.

Shaoteng Liu, Tianyu Wang, Jui-Hsien Wang et al.

Large-scale video generation models have the inherent ability to realistically model natural scenes. In this paper, we demonstrate that through a careful design of a generative video propagation framework, various video tasks can be addressed in a unified way by leveraging the generative power of such models. Specifically, our framework, GenProp, encodes the original video with a selective content encoder and propagates the changes made to the first frame using an image-to-video generation model. We propose a data generation scheme to cover multiple video tasks based on instance-level video segmentation datasets. Our model is trained by incorporating a mask prediction decoder head and optimizing a region-aware loss to aid the encoder to preserve the original content while the generation model propagates the modified region. This novel design opens up new possibilities: In editing scenarios, GenProp allows substantial changes to an object's shape; for insertion, the inserted objects can exhibit independent motion; for removal, GenProp effectively removes effects like shadows and reflections from the whole video; for tracking, GenProp is capable of tracking objects and their associated effects together. Experiment results demonstrate the leading performance of our model in various video tasks, and we further provide in-depth analyses of the proposed framework.

Jeongseok Hyun, Sukjun Hwang, Su Ho Han et al.

Video large language models (LLMs) achieve strong video understanding by leveraging a large number of spatio-temporal tokens, but suffer from quadratic computational scaling with token count. To address this, we propose a training-free spatio-temporal token merging method, named STTM. Our key insight is to exploit local spatial and temporal redundancy in video data which has been overlooked in prior work. STTM first transforms each frame into multi-granular spatial tokens using a coarse-to-fine search over a quadtree structure, then performs directed pairwise merging across the temporal dimension. This decomposed merging approach outperforms existing token reduction methods across six video QA benchmarks. Notably, STTM achieves a 2$\times$ speed-up with only a 0.5% accuracy drop under a 50% token budget, and a 3$\times$ speed-up with just a 2% drop under a 30% budget. Moreover, STTM is query-agnostic, allowing KV cache reuse across different questions for the same video. The project page is available at https://www.jshyun.me/projects/sttm.

Inès Hyeonsu Kim, Seokju Cho, Jiahui Huang et al.

Point tracking in videos is a fundamental task with applications in robotics, video editing, and more. While many vision tasks benefit from pre-trained feature backbones to improve generalizability, point tracking has primarily relied on simpler backbones trained from scratch on synthetic data, which may limit robustness in real-world scenarios. Additionally, point tracking requires temporal awareness to ensure coherence across frames, but using temporally-aware features is still underexplored. Most current methods often employ a two-stage process: an initial coarse prediction followed by a refinement stage to inject temporal information and correct errors from the coarse stage. These approach, however, is computationally expensive and potentially redundant if the feature backbone itself captures sufficient temporal information. In this work, we introduce Chrono, a feature backbone specifically designed for point tracking with built-in temporal awareness. Leveraging pre-trained representations from self-supervised learner DINOv2 and enhanced with a temporal adapter, Chrono effectively captures long-term temporal context, enabling precise prediction even without the refinement stage. Experimental results demonstrate that Chrono achieves state-of-the-art performance in a refiner-free setting on the TAP-Vid-DAVIS and TAP-Vid-Kinetics datasets, among common feature backbones used in point tracking as well as DINOv2, with exceptional efficiency. Project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/Chrono/

Inès Hyeonsu Kim, Seokju Cho, Jahyeok Koo et al.

Human motion, with its inherent complexities, such as non-rigid deformations, articulated movements, clothing distortions, and frequent occlusions caused by limbs or other individuals, provides a rich and challenging source of supervision that is crucial for training robust and generalizable point trackers. Despite the suitability of human motion, acquiring extensive training data for point tracking remains difficult due to laborious manual annotation. Our proposed pipeline, AnthroTAP, addresses this by proposing an automated pipeline to generate pseudo-labeled training data, leveraging the Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) model. We first fit the SMPL model to detected humans in video frames, project the resulting 3D mesh vertices onto 2D image planes to generate pseudo-trajectories, handle occlusions using ray-casting, and filter out unreliable tracks based on optical flow consistency. A point tracking model trained on AnthroTAP annotated dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance on the TAP-Vid benchmark, surpassing other models trained on real videos while using 10,000 times less data and only 1 day in 4 GPUs, compared to 256 GPUs used in recent state-of-the-art.

Suhwan Cho, Seoung Wug Oh, Sangyoun Lee et al.

Video inpainting (VI) is a challenging task that requires effective propagation of observable content across frames while simultaneously generating new content not present in the original video. In this study, we propose a robust and practical VI framework that leverages a large generative model for reference generation in combination with an advanced pixel propagation algorithm. Powered by a strong generative model, our method not only significantly enhances frame-level quality for object removal but also synthesizes new content in the missing areas based on user-provided text prompts. For pixel propagation, we introduce a one-shot pixel pulling method that effectively avoids error accumulation from repeated sampling while maintaining sub-pixel precision. To evaluate various VI methods in realistic scenarios, we also propose a high-quality VI benchmark, HQVI, comprising carefully generated videos using alpha matte composition. On public benchmarks and the HQVI dataset, our method demonstrates significantly higher visual quality and metric scores compared to existing solutions. Furthermore, it can process high-resolution videos exceeding 2K resolution with ease, underscoring its superiority for real-world applications.

Subin Kim, Seoung Wug Oh, Jui-Hsien Wang et al.

While recent advancements in text-to-video diffusion models enable high-quality short video generation from a single prompt, generating real-world long videos in a single pass remains challenging due to limited data and high computational costs. To address this, several works propose tuning-free approaches, i.e., extending existing models for long video generation, specifically using multiple prompts to allow for dynamic and controlled content changes. However, these methods primarily focus on ensuring smooth transitions between adjacent frames, often leading to content drift and a gradual loss of semantic coherence over longer sequences. To tackle such an issue, we propose Synchronized Coupled Sampling (SynCoS), a novel inference framework that synchronizes denoising paths across the entire video, ensuring long-range consistency across both adjacent and distant frames. Our approach combines two complementary sampling strategies: reverse and optimization-based sampling, which ensure seamless local transitions and enforce global coherence, respectively. However, directly alternating between these samplings misaligns denoising trajectories, disrupting prompt guidance and introducing unintended content changes as they operate independently. To resolve this, SynCoS synchronizes them through a grounded timestep and a fixed baseline noise, ensuring fully coupled sampling with aligned denoising paths. Extensive experiments show that SynCoS significantly improves multi-event long video generation, achieving smoother transitions and superior long-range coherence, outperforming previous approaches both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Seonguk Seo, Joon-Young Lee, Bohyung Han

We propose an information-theoretic bias measurement technique through a causal interpretation of spurious correlation, which is effective to identify the feature-level algorithmic bias by taking advantage of conditional mutual information. Although several bias measurement methods have been proposed and widely investigated to achieve algorithmic fairness in various tasks such as face recognition, their accuracy- or logit-based metrics are susceptible to leading to trivial prediction score adjustment rather than fundamental bias reduction. Hence, we design a novel debiasing framework against the algorithmic bias, which incorporates a bias regularization loss derived by the proposed information-theoretic bias measurement approach. In addition, we present a simple yet effective unsupervised debiasing technique based on stochastic label noise, which does not require the explicit supervision of bias information. The proposed bias measurement and debiasing approaches are validated in diverse realistic scenarios through extensive experiments on multiple standard benchmarks.

Adrit Rao, Jongchan Park, Sanghyun Woo et al.

When the trained physician interprets medical images, they understand the clinical importance of visual features. By applying cognitive attention, they apply greater focus onto clinically relevant regions while disregarding unnecessary features. The use of computer vision to automate the classification of medical images is widely studied. However, the standard convolutional neural network (CNN) does not necessarily employ subconscious feature relevancy evaluation techniques similar to the trained medical specialist and evaluates features more generally. Self-attention mechanisms enable CNNs to focus more on semantically important regions or aggregated relevant context with long-range dependencies. By using attention, medical image analysis systems can potentially become more robust by focusing on more important clinical feature regions. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive comparison of various state-of-the-art self-attention mechanisms across multiple medical image analysis tasks. Through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations along with a clinical user-centric survey study, we aim to provide a deeper understanding of the effects of self-attention in medical computer vision tasks.

Seonguk Seo, Joon-Young Lee, Bohyung Han

Dataset bias is a critical challenge in machine learning since it often leads to a negative impact on a model due to the unintended decision rules captured by spurious correlations. Although existing works often handle this issue based on human supervision, the availability of the proper annotations is impractical and even unrealistic. To better tackle the limitation, we propose a simple but effective unsupervised debiasing technique. Specifically, we first identify pseudo-attributes based on the results from clustering performed in the feature embedding space even without an explicit bias attribute supervision. Then, we employ a novel cluster-wise reweighting scheme to learn debiased representation; the proposed method prevents minority groups from being discounted for minimizing the overall loss, which is desirable for worst-case generalization. The extensive experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of our approach on multiple standard benchmarks, even achieving the competitive accuracy to the supervised counterpart.

Sanghyun Woo, Dahun Kim, Joon-Young Lee et al.

Temporal correspondence - linking pixels or objects across frames - is a fundamental supervisory signal for the video models. For the panoptic understanding of dynamic scenes, we further extend this concept to every segment. Specifically, we aim to learn coarse segment-level matching and fine pixel-level matching together. We implement this idea by designing two novel learning objectives. To validate our proposals, we adopt a deep siamese model and train the model to learn the temporal correspondence on two different levels (i.e., segment and pixel) along with the target task. At inference time, the model processes each frame independently without any extra computation and post-processing. We show that our per-frame inference model can achieve new state-of-the-art results on Cityscapes-VPS and VIPER datasets. Moreover, due to its high efficiency, the model runs in a fraction of time (3x) compared to the previous state-of-the-art approach.

Gunhee Nam, Miran Heo, Seoung Wug Oh et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based polygonal point set tracking method. Compared to existing video object segmentation~(VOS) methods that propagate pixel-wise object mask information, we propagate a polygonal point set over frames. Specifically, the set is defined as a subset of points in the target contour, and our goal is to track corresponding points on the target contour. Those outputs enable us to apply various visual effects such as motion tracking, part deformation, and texture mapping. To this end, we propose a new method to track the corresponding points between frames by the global-local alignment with delicately designed losses and regularization terms. We also introduce a novel learning strategy using synthetic and VOS datasets that makes it possible to tackle the problem without developing the point correspondence dataset. Since the existing datasets are not suitable to validate our method, we build a new polygonal point set tracking dataset and demonstrate the superior performance of our method over the baselines and existing contour-based VOS methods. In addition, we present visual-effects applications of our method on part distortion and text mapping.

Jaedong Hwang, Seoung Wug Oh, Joon-Young Lee et al.

We extend panoptic segmentation to the open-world and introduce an open-set panoptic segmentation (OPS) task. This task requires performing panoptic segmentation for not only known classes but also unknown ones that have not been acknowledged during training. We investigate the practical challenges of the task and construct a benchmark on top of an existing dataset, COCO. In addition, we propose a novel exemplar-based open-set panoptic segmentation network (EOPSN) inspired by exemplar theory. Our approach identifies a new class based on exemplars, which are identified by clustering and employed as pseudo-ground-truths. The size of each class increases by mining new exemplars based on the similarities to the existing ones associated with the class. We evaluate EOPSN on the proposed benchmark and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposals. The primary goal of our work is to draw the attention of the community to the recognition in the open-world scenarios. The implementation of our algorithm is available on the project webpage: https://cv.snu.ac.kr/research/EOPSN.

Dahun Kim, Sanghyun Woo, Joon-Young Lee et al.

Panoptic segmentation has become a new standard of visual recognition task by unifying previous semantic segmentation and instance segmentation tasks in concert. In this paper, we propose and explore a new video extension of this task, called video panoptic segmentation. The task requires generating consistent panoptic segmentation as well as an association of instance ids across video frames. To invigorate research on this new task, we present two types of video panoptic datasets. The first is a re-organization of the synthetic VIPER dataset into the video panoptic format to exploit its large-scale pixel annotations. The second is a temporal extension on the Cityscapes val. set, by providing new video panoptic annotations (Cityscapes-VPS). Moreover, we propose a novel video panoptic segmentation network (VPSNet) which jointly predicts object classes, bounding boxes, masks, instance id tracking, and semantic segmentation in video frames. To provide appropriate metrics for this task, we propose a video panoptic quality (VPQ) metric and evaluate our method and several other baselines. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented two datasets. We achieve state-of-the-art results in image PQ on Cityscapes and also in VPQ on Cityscapes-VPS and VIPER datasets. The datasets and code are made publicly available.

Juan Leon Alcazar, Fabian Caba Heilbron, Long Mai et al.

Current methods for active speak er detection focus on modeling short-term audiovisual information from a single speaker. Although this strategy can be enough for addressing single-speaker scenarios, it prevents accurate detection when the task is to identify who of many candidate speakers are talking. This paper introduces the Active Speaker Context, a novel representation that models relationships between multiple speakers over long time horizons. Our Active Speaker Context is designed to learn pairwise and temporal relations from an structured ensemble of audio-visual observations. Our experiments show that a structured feature ensemble already benefits the active speaker detection performance. Moreover, we find that the proposed Active Speaker Context improves the state-of-the-art on the AVA-ActiveSpeaker dataset achieving a mAP of 87.1%. We present ablation studies that verify that this result is a direct consequence of our long-term multi-speaker analysis.

Shubham Agarwal, Trung Bui, Joon-Young Lee et al.

Visual Dialog involves "understanding" the dialog history (what has been discussed previously) and the current question (what is asked), in addition to grounding information in the image, to generate the correct response. In this paper, we show that co-attention models which explicitly encode dialog history outperform models that don't, achieving state-of-the-art performance (72 % NDCG on val set). However, we also expose shortcomings of the crowd-sourcing dataset collection procedure by showing that history is indeed only required for a small amount of the data and that the current evaluation metric encourages generic replies. To that end, we propose a challenging subset (VisDialConv) of the VisDial val set and provide a benchmark of 63% NDCG.

Gunhee Nam, Seoung Wug Oh, Joon-Young Lee et al.

We propose a novel memory-based tracker via part-level dense memory and voting-based retrieval, called DMV. Since deep learning techniques have been introduced to the tracking field, Siamese trackers have attracted many researchers due to the balance between speed and accuracy. However, most of them are based on a single template matching, which limits the performance as it restricts the accessible in-formation to the initial target features. In this paper, we relieve this limitation by maintaining an external memory that saves the tracking record. Part-level retrieval from the memory also liberates the information from the template and allows our tracker to better handle the challenges such as appearance changes and occlusions. By updating the memory during tracking, the representative power for the target object can be enhanced without online learning. We also propose a novel voting mechanism for the memory reading to filter out unreliable information in the memory. We comprehensively evaluate our tracker on OTB-100,TrackingNet, GOT-10k, LaSOT, and UAV123, which show that our method yields comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods.

Seoung Wug Oh, Sungho Lee, Joon-Young Lee et al.

We propose the onion-peel networks for video completion. Given a set of reference images and a target image with holes, our network fills the hole by referring the contents in the reference images. Our onion-peel network progressively fills the hole from the hole boundary enabling it to exploit richer contextual information for the missing regions every step. Given a sufficient number of recurrences, even a large hole can be inpainted successfully. To attend to the missing information visible in the reference images, we propose an asymmetric attention block that computes similarities between the hole boundary pixels in the target and the non-hole pixels in the references in a non-local manner. With our attention block, our network can have an unlimited spatial-temporal window size and fill the holes with globally coherent contents. In addition, our framework is applicable to the image completion guided by the reference images without any modification, which is difficult to do with the previous methods. We validate that our method produces visually pleasing image and video inpainting results in realistic test cases.

Sanghyun Woo, Dahun Kim, KwanYong Park et al.

We propose a novel feed-forward network for video inpainting. We use a set of sampled video frames as the reference to take visible contents to fill the hole of a target frame. Our video inpainting network consists of two stages. The first stage is an alignment module that uses computed homographies between the reference frames and the target frame. The visible patches are then aggregated based on the frame similarity to fill in the target holes roughly. The second stage is a non-local attention module that matches the generated patches with known reference patches (in space and time) to refine the previous global alignment stage. Both stages consist of large spatial-temporal window size for the reference and thus enable modeling long-range correlations between distant information and the hole regions. Therefore, even challenging scenes with large or slowly moving holes can be handled, which have been hardly modeled by existing flow-based approach. Our network is also designed with a recurrent propagation stream to encourage temporal consistency in video results. Experiments on video object removal demonstrate that our method inpaints the holes with globally and locally coherent contents.

Xingyu Liu, Joon-Young Lee, Hailin Jin

Correspondences between frames encode rich information about dynamic content in videos. However, it is challenging to effectively capture and learn those due to their irregular structure and complex dynamics. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network that learns video representations by aggregating information from potential correspondences. This network, named $CPNet$, can learn evolving 2D fields with temporal consistency. In particular, it can effectively learn representations for videos by mixing appearance and long-range motion with an RGB-only input. We provide extensive ablation experiments to validate our model. CPNet shows stronger performance than existing methods on Kinetics and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on Something-Something and Jester. We provide analysis towards the behavior of our model and show its robustness to errors in proposals.

Dahun Kim, Sanghyun Woo, Joon-Young Lee et al.

Blind video decaptioning is a problem of automatically removing text overlays and inpainting the occluded parts in videos without any input masks. While recent deep learning based inpainting methods deal with a single image and mostly assume that the positions of the corrupted pixels are known, we aim at automatic text removal in video sequences without mask information. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework for fast blind video decaptioning. We construct an encoder-decoder model, where the encoder takes multiple source frames that can provide visible pixels revealed from the scene dynamics. These hints are aggregated and fed into the decoder. We apply a residual connection from the input frame to the decoder output to enforce our network to focus on the corrupted regions only. Our proposed model was ranked in the first place in the ECCV Chalearn 2018 LAP Inpainting Competition Track2: Video decaptioning. In addition, we further improve this strong model by applying a recurrent feedback. The recurrent feedback not only enforces temporal coherence but also provides strong clues on where the corrupted pixels are. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our full model produces accurate and temporally consistent video results in real time (50+ fps).

Dahun Kim, Sanghyun Woo, Joon-Young Lee et al.

Video inpainting aims to fill spatio-temporal holes with plausible content in a video. Despite tremendous progress of deep neural networks for image inpainting, it is challenging to extend these methods to the video domain due to the additional time dimension. In this work, we propose a novel deep network architecture for fast video inpainting. Built upon an image-based encoder-decoder model, our framework is designed to collect and refine information from neighbor frames and synthesize still-unknown regions. At the same time, the output is enforced to be temporally consistent by a recurrent feedback and a temporal memory module. Compared with the state-of-the-art image inpainting algorithm, our method produces videos that are much more semantically correct and temporally smooth. In contrast to the prior video completion method which relies on time-consuming optimization, our method runs in near real-time while generating competitive video results. Finally, we applied our framework to video retargeting task, and obtain visually pleasing results.

Seoung Wug Oh, Joon-Young Lee, Ning Xu et al.

We present a deep learning method for the interactive video object segmentation. Our method is built upon two core operations, interaction and propagation, and each operation is conducted by Convolutional Neural Networks. The two networks are connected both internally and externally so that the networks are trained jointly and interact with each other to solve the complex video object segmentation problem. We propose a new multi-round training scheme for the interactive video object segmentation so that the networks can learn how to understand the user's intention and update incorrect estimations during the training. At the testing time, our method produces high-quality results and also runs fast enough to work with users interactively. We evaluated the proposed method quantitatively on the interactive track benchmark at the DAVIS Challenge 2018. We outperformed other competing methods by a significant margin in both the speed and the accuracy. We also demonstrated that our method works well with real user interactions.

Seoung Wug Oh, Joon-Young Lee, Ning Xu et al.

We propose a novel solution for semi-supervised video object segmentation. By the nature of the problem, available cues (e.g. video frame(s) with object masks) become richer with the intermediate predictions. However, the existing methods are unable to fully exploit this rich source of information. We resolve the issue by leveraging memory networks and learn to read relevant information from all available sources. In our framework, the past frames with object masks form an external memory, and the current frame as the query is segmented using the mask information in the memory. Specifically, the query and the memory are densely matched in the feature space, covering all the space-time pixel locations in a feed-forward fashion. Contrast to the previous approaches, the abundant use of the guidance information allows us to better handle the challenges such as appearance changes and occlussions. We validate our method on the latest benchmark sets and achieved the state-of-the-art performance (overall score of 79.4 on Youtube-VOS val set, J of 88.7 and 79.2 on DAVIS 2016/2017 val set respectively) while having a fast runtime (0.16 second/frame on DAVIS 2016 val set).

Xin Ye, Zhe Lin, Joon-Young Lee et al.

We study the problem of learning a generalizable action policy for an intelligent agent to actively approach an object of interest in an indoor environment solely from its visual inputs. While scene-driven or recognition-driven visual navigation has been widely studied, prior efforts suffer severely from the limited generalization capability. In this paper, we first argue the object searching task is environment dependent while the approaching ability is general. To learn a generalizable approaching policy, we present a novel solution dubbed as GAPLE which adopts two channels of visual features: depth and semantic segmentation, as the inputs to the policy learning module. The empirical studies conducted on the House3D dataset as well as on a physical platform in a real world scenario validate our hypothesis, and we further provide in-depth qualitative analysis.

Rameswar Panda, Jianming Zhang, Haoxiang Li et al.

While machine learning approaches to visual emotion recognition offer great promise, current methods consider training and testing models on small scale datasets covering limited visual emotion concepts. Our analysis identifies an important but long overlooked issue of existing visual emotion benchmarks in the form of dataset biases. We design a series of tests to show and measure how such dataset biases obstruct learning a generalizable emotion recognition model. Based on our analysis, we propose a webly supervised approach by leveraging a large quantity of stock image data. Our approach uses a simple yet effective curriculum guided training strategy for learning discriminative emotion features. We discover that the models learned using our large scale stock image dataset exhibit significantly better generalization ability than the existing datasets without the manual collection of even a single label. Moreover, visual representation learned using our approach holds a lot of promise across a variety of tasks on different image and video datasets.

Sanghyun Woo, Jongchan Park, Joon-Young Lee et al.

We propose Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), a simple yet effective attention module for feed-forward convolutional neural networks. Given an intermediate feature map, our module sequentially infers attention maps along two separate dimensions, channel and spatial, then the attention maps are multiplied to the input feature map for adaptive feature refinement. Because CBAM is a lightweight and general module, it can be integrated into any CNN architectures seamlessly with negligible overheads and is end-to-end trainable along with base CNNs. We validate our CBAM through extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, MS~COCO detection, and VOC~2007 detection datasets. Our experiments show consistent improvements in classification and detection performances with various models, demonstrating the wide applicability of CBAM. The code and models will be publicly available.

Jongchan Park, Sanghyun Woo, Joon-Young Lee et al.

Recent advances in deep neural networks have been developed via architecture search for stronger representational power. In this work, we focus on the effect of attention in general deep neural networks. We propose a simple and effective attention module, named Bottleneck Attention Module (BAM), that can be integrated with any feed-forward convolutional neural networks. Our module infers an attention map along two separate pathways, channel and spatial. We place our module at each bottleneck of models where the downsampling of feature maps occurs. Our module constructs a hierarchical attention at bottlenecks with a number of parameters and it is trainable in an end-to-end manner jointly with any feed-forward models. We validate our BAM through extensive experiments on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1K, VOC 2007 and MS COCO benchmarks. Our experiments show consistent improvement in classification and detection performances with various models, demonstrating the wide applicability of BAM. The code and models will be publicly available.

Jongchan Park, Joon-Young Lee, Donggeun Yoo et al.

Learning-based color enhancement approaches typically learn to map from input images to retouched images. Most of existing methods require expensive pairs of input-retouched images or produce results in a non-interpretable way. In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based method for color enhancement to explicitly model the step-wise nature of human retouching process. We cast a color enhancement process as a Markov Decision Process where actions are defined as global color adjustment operations. Then we train our agent to learn the optimal global enhancement sequence of the actions. In addition, we present a 'distort-and-recover' training scheme which only requires high-quality reference images for training instead of input and retouched image pairs. Given high-quality reference images, we distort the images' color distribution and form distorted-reference image pairs for training. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method produces decent enhancement results and our DRL approach is more suitable for the 'distort-and-recover' training scheme than previous supervised approaches. Supplementary material and code are available at https://sites.google.com/view/distort-and-recover/

Kaichun Mo, Haoxiang Li, Zhe Lin et al.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) demonstrates its potential in learning a model-free navigation policy for robot visual navigation. However, the data-demanding algorithm relies on a large number of navigation trajectories in training. Existing datasets supporting training such robot navigation algorithms consist of either 3D synthetic scenes or reconstructed scenes. Synthetic data suffers from domain gap to the real-world scenes while visual inputs rendered from 3D reconstructed scenes have undesired holes and artifacts. In this paper, we present a new dataset collected in real-world to facilitate the research in DRL based visual navigation. Our dataset includes 3D reconstruction for real-world scenes as well as densely captured real 2D images from the scenes. It provides high-quality visual inputs with real-world scene complexity to the robot at dense grid locations. We further study and benchmark one recent DRL based navigation algorithm and present our attempts and thoughts on improving its generalizability to unseen test targets in the scenes.

Inwook Shim, Tae-Hyun Oh, Joon-Young Lee et al.

We introduce a novel method to automatically adjust camera exposure for image processing and computer vision applications on mobile robot platforms. Because most image processing algorithms rely heavily on low-level image features that are based mainly on local gradient information, we consider that gradient quantity can determine the proper exposure level, allowing a camera to capture the important image features in a manner robust to illumination conditions. We then extend this concept to a multi-camera system and present a new control algorithm to achieve both brightness consistency between adjacent cameras and a proper exposure level for each camera. We implement our prototype system with off-the-shelf machine-vision cameras and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on practical applications, including pedestrian detection, visual odometry, surround-view imaging, panoramic imaging and stereo matching.