Hao Shen

Yuqing Wang, Zhaoliang Xu, Xinlong Wang et al.

Video instance segmentation (VIS) is the task that requires simultaneously classifying, segmenting and tracking object instances of interest in video. Recent methods typically develop sophisticated pipelines to tackle this task. Here, we propose a new video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, termed VisTR, which views the VIS task as a direct end-to-end parallel sequence decoding/prediction problem. Given a video clip consisting of multiple image frames as input, VisTR outputs the sequence of masks for each instance in the video in order directly. At the core is a new, effective instance sequence matching and segmentation strategy, which supervises and segments instances at the sequence level as a whole. VisTR frames the instance segmentation and tracking in the same perspective of similarity learning, thus considerably simplifying the overall pipeline and is significantly different from existing approaches. Without bells and whistles, VisTR achieves the highest speed among all existing VIS models, and achieves the best result among methods using single model on the YouTube-VIS dataset. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and faster video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, achieving competitive accuracy. We hope that VisTR can motivate future research for more video understanding tasks.

Feng Gao, Jincheng Yu, Hao Shen et al.

Learning depth and ego-motion from unlabeled videos via self-supervision from epipolar projection can improve the robustness and accuracy of the 3D perception and localization of vision-based robots. However, the rigid projection computed by ego-motion cannot represent all scene points, such as points on moving objects, leading to false guidance in these regions. To address this problem, we propose an Attentional Separation-and-Aggregation Network (ASANet), which can learn to distinguish and extract the scene's static and dynamic characteristics via the attention mechanism. We further propose a novel MotionNet with an ASANet as the encoder, followed by two separate decoders, to estimate the camera's ego-motion and the scene's dynamic motion field. Then, we introduce an auto-selecting approach to detect the moving objects for dynamic-aware learning automatically. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark.

Yuqing Wang, Zhaoliang Xu, Hao Shen et al.

In this paper, we propose a single-shot instance segmentation method, which is simple, fast and accurate. There are two main challenges for one-stage instance segmentation: object instances differentiation and pixel-wise feature alignment. Accordingly, we decompose the instance segmentation into two parallel subtasks: Local Shape prediction that separates instances even in overlapping conditions, and Global Saliency generation that segments the whole image in a pixel-to-pixel manner. The outputs of the two branches are assembled to form the final instance masks. To realize that, the local shape information is adopted from the representation of object center points. Totally trained from scratch and without any bells and whistles, the proposed CenterMask achieves 34.5 mask AP with a speed of 12.3 fps, using a single-model with single-scale training/testing on the challenging COCO dataset. The accuracy is higher than all other one-stage instance segmentation methods except the 5 times slower TensorMask, which shows the effectiveness of CenterMask. Besides, our method can be easily embedded to other one-stage object detectors such as FCOS and performs well, showing the generalization of CenterMask.

Yinglu Liu, Hailin Shi, Yue Si et al.

Face parsing, which is to assign a semantic label to each pixel in face images, has recently attracted increasing interest due to its huge application potentials. Although many face related fields (e.g., face recognition and face detection) have been well studied for many years, the existing datasets for face parsing are still severely limited in terms of the scale and quality, e.g., the widely used Helen dataset only contains 2,330 images. This is mainly because pixel-level annotation is a high cost and time-consuming work, especially for the facial parts without clear boundaries. The lack of accurate annotated datasets becomes a major obstacle in the progress of face parsing task. It is a feasible way to utilize dense facial landmarks to guide the parsing annotation. However, annotating dense landmarks on human face encounters the same issues as the parsing annotation. To overcome the above problems, in this paper, we develop a high-efficiency framework for face parsing annotation, which considerably simplifies and speeds up the parsing annotation by two consecutive modules. Benefit from the proposed framework, we construct a new Dense Landmark Guided Face Parsing (LaPa) benchmark. It consists of 22,000 face images with large variations in expression, pose, occlusion, etc. Each image is provided with accurate annotation of a 11-category pixel-level label map along with coordinates of 106-point landmarks. To the best of our knowledge, it is currently the largest public dataset for face parsing. To make full use of our LaPa dataset with abundant face shape and boundary priors, we propose a simple yet effective Boundary-Sensitive Parsing Network (BSPNet). Our network is taken as a baseline model on the proposed LaPa dataset, and meanwhile, it achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the Helen dataset without resorting to extra face alignment.

Xian Wei, Hao Shen, Martin Kleinsteuber

Video representation is an important and challenging task in the computer vision community. In this paper, we assume that image frames of a moving scene can be modeled as a Linear Dynamical System. We propose a sparse coding framework, named adaptive video dictionary learning (AVDL), to model a video adaptively. The developed framework is able to capture the dynamics of a moving scene by exploring both sparse properties and the temporal correlations of consecutive video frames. The proposed method is compared with state of the art video processing methods on several benchmark data sequences, which exhibit appearance changes and heavy occlusions.