Zhiwen Shao

Dasith de Silva Edirimuni, Xuequan Lu, Zhiwen Shao et al.

The quality of point clouds is often limited by noise introduced during their capture process. Consequently, a fundamental 3D vision task is the removal of noise, known as point cloud filtering or denoising. State-of-the-art learning based methods focus on training neural networks to infer filtered displacements and directly shift noisy points onto the underlying clean surfaces. In high noise conditions, they iterate the filtering process. However, this iterative filtering is only done at test time and is less effective at ensuring points converge quickly onto the clean surfaces. We propose IterativePFN (iterative point cloud filtering network), which consists of multiple IterationModules that model the true iterative filtering process internally, within a single network. We train our IterativePFN network using a novel loss function that utilizes an adaptive ground truth target at each iteration to capture the relationship between intermediate filtering results during training. This ensures that the filtered results converge faster to the clean surfaces. Our method is able to obtain better performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/ddsediri/IterativePFN.

Yuchen Su, Zhiwen Shao, Yong Zhou et al.

Arbitrary-shaped scene text detection is a challenging task due to the variety of text changes in font, size, color, and orientation. Most existing regression based methods resort to regress the masks or contour points of text regions to model the text instances. However, regressing the complete masks requires high training complexity, and contour points are not sufficient to capture the details of highly curved texts. To tackle the above limitations, we propose a novel light-weight anchor-free text detection framework called TextDCT, which adopts the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to encode the text masks as compact vectors. Further, considering the imbalanced number of training samples among pyramid layers, we only employ a single-level head for top-down prediction. To model the multi-scale texts in a single-level head, we introduce a novel positive sampling strategy by treating the shrunk text region as positive samples, and design a feature awareness module (FAM) for spatial-awareness and scale-awareness by fusing rich contextual information and focusing on more significant features. Moreover, we propose a segmented non-maximum suppression (S-NMS) method that can filter low-quality mask regressions. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets, which demonstrate our TextDCT obtains competitive performance on both accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, TextDCT achieves F-measure of 85.1 at 17.2 frames per second (FPS) and F-measure of 84.9 at 15.1 FPS for CTW1500 and Total-Text datasets, respectively.

Zhiwen Shao, Yuchen Su, Yong Zhou et al.

Contour based scene text detection methods have rapidly developed recently, but still suffer from inaccurate frontend contour initialization, multi-stage error accumulation, or deficient local information aggregation. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel arbitrary-shaped scene text detection framework named CT-Net by progressive contour regression with contour transformers. Specifically, we first employ a contour initialization module that generates coarse text contours without any post-processing. Then, we adopt contour refinement modules to adaptively refine text contours in an iterative manner, which are beneficial for context information capturing and progressive global contour deformation. Besides, we propose an adaptive training strategy to enable the contour transformers to learn more potential deformation paths, and introduce a re-score mechanism that can effectively suppress false positives. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging datasets, which demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our CT-Net over state-of-the-art methods. Particularly, CT-Net achieves F-measure of 86.1 at 11.2 frames per second (FPS) and F-measure of 87.8 at 10.1 FPS for CTW1500 and Total-Text datasets, respectively.

Tony Cheng Tong, Sirui He, Zhiwen Shao et al.

Evaluation metric of visual captioning is important yet not thoroughly explored. Traditional metrics like BLEU, METEOR, CIDEr, and ROUGE often miss semantic depth, while trained metrics such as CLIP-Score, PAC-S, and Polos are limited in zero-shot scenarios. Advanced Language Model-based metrics also struggle with aligning to nuanced human preferences. To address these issues, we introduce G-VEval, a novel metric inspired by G-Eval and powered by the new GPT-4o. G-VEval uses chain-of-thought reasoning in large multimodal models and supports three modes: reference-free, reference-only, and combined, accommodating both video and image inputs. We also propose MSVD-Eval, a new dataset for video captioning evaluation, to establish a more transparent and consistent framework for both human experts and evaluation metrics. It is designed to address the lack of clear criteria in existing datasets by introducing distinct dimensions of Accuracy, Completeness, Conciseness, and Relevance (ACCR). Extensive results show that G-VEval outperforms existing methods in correlation with human annotations, as measured by Kendall tau-b and Kendall tau-c. This provides a flexible solution for diverse captioning tasks and suggests a straightforward yet effective approach for large language models to understand video content, paving the way for advancements in automated captioning. Codes are available at https://github.com/ztangaj/gveval

Zhiwen Shao, Yifan Cheng, Feiran Li et al.

Facial micro-expression recognition (MER) is a challenging problem, due to transient and subtle micro-expression (ME) actions. Most existing methods depend on hand-crafted features, key frames like onset, apex, and offset frames, or deep networks limited by small-scale and low-diversity datasets. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end micro-action-aware deep learning framework with advantages from transformer, graph convolution, and vanilla convolution. In particular, we propose a novel F5C block composed of fully-connected convolution and channel correspondence convolution to directly extract local-global features from a sequence of raw frames, without the prior knowledge of key frames. The transformer-style fully-connected convolution is proposed to extract local features while maintaining global receptive fields, and the graph-style channel correspondence convolution is introduced to model the correlations among feature patterns. Moreover, MER, optical flow estimation, and facial landmark detection are jointly trained by sharing the local-global features. The two latter tasks contribute to capturing facial subtle action information for MER, which can alleviate the impact of insufficient training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework (i) outperforms the state-of-the-art MER methods on CASME II, SAMM, and SMIC benchmarks, (ii) works well for optical flow estimation and facial landmark detection, and (iii) can capture facial subtle muscle actions in local regions associated with MEs. The code is available at https://github.com/CYF-cuber/MOL.

Shenglan Li, Rui Yao, Yong Zhou et al.

To reduce the reliance on large-scale annotations, self-supervised RGB-T tracking approaches have garnered significant attention. However, the omission of the object region by erroneous pseudo-label or the introduction of background noise affects the efficiency of modality fusion, while pseudo-label noise triggered by similar object noise can further affect the tracking performance. In this paper, we propose GDSTrack, a novel approach that introduces dynamic graph fusion and temporal diffusion to address the above challenges in self-supervised RGB-T tracking. GDSTrack dynamically fuses the modalities of neighboring frames, treats them as distractor noise, and leverages the denoising capability of a generative model. Specifically, by constructing an adjacency matrix via an Adjacency Matrix Generator (AMG), the proposed Modality-guided Dynamic Graph Fusion (MDGF) module uses a dynamic adjacency matrix to guide graph attention, focusing on and fusing the object's coherent regions. Temporal Graph-Informed Diffusion (TGID) models MDGF features from neighboring frames as interference, and thus improving robustness against similar-object noise. Extensive experiments conducted on four public RGB-T tracking datasets demonstrate that GDSTrack outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiShenglana/GDSTrack.

Zhiwen Shao, Yifan Cheng, Fan Zhang et al.

Facial micro-expression recognition (MER) is a challenging task, due to the transience, subtlety, and dynamics of micro-expressions (MEs). Most existing methods resort to hand-crafted features or deep networks, in which the former often additionally requires key frames, and the latter suffers from small-scale and low-diversity training data. In this paper, we develop a novel fine-grained dynamic perception (FDP) framework for MER. We propose to rank frame-level features of a sequence of raw frames in chronological order, in which the rank process encodes the dynamic information of both ME appearances and motions. Specifically, a novel local-global feature-aware transformer is proposed for frame representation learning. A rank scorer is further adopted to calculate rank scores of each frame-level feature. Afterwards, the rank features from rank scorer are pooled in temporal dimension to capture dynamic representation. Finally, the dynamic representation is shared by a MER module and a dynamic image construction module, in which the former predicts the ME category, and the latter uses an encoder-decoder structure to construct the dynamic image. The design of dynamic image construction task is beneficial for capturing facial subtle actions associated with MEs and alleviating the data scarcity issue. Extensive experiments show that our method (i) significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art MER methods, and (ii) works well for dynamic image construction. Particularly, our FDP improves by 4.05%, 2.50%, 7.71%, and 2.11% over the previous best results in terms of F1-score on the CASME II, SAMM, CAS(ME)^2, and CAS(ME)^3 datasets, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/CYF-cuber/FDP.

Zhiwen Shao, Yichen Yuan, Lizhuang Ma et al.

Curvature angle is a quantitative measurement of a curve, in which Cobb angle is customized for spinal curvature. Automatic Cobb angle measurement from X-ray images is crucial for scoliosis screening and diagnosis. However, most existing regression-based and segmentation-based methods struggle with inaccurate spine representations or mask connectivity and fragmentation issues. Besides, landmark-based methods suffer from insufficient training data and annotations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel curvature angle estimation framework named CurvNet including latent contour representation based contour detection and iterative data engine based image self-generation. Specifically, we propose a parameterized spine contour representation in latent space, which enables eigen-spine decomposition and spine contour reconstruction. Latent contour coefficient regression is combined with anchor box classification to solve inaccurate predictions and mask connectivity issues. Moreover, we develop a data engine with image self-generation, automatic annotation, and automatic selection in an iterative manner. By our data engine, we generate a clean dataset named Spinal-AI2024 without privacy leaks, which is the largest released scoliosis X-ray dataset to our knowledge. Extensive experiments on public AASCE2019, our private Spinal2023, and our generated Spinal-AI2024 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art Cobb angle estimation performance. Our code and Spinal-AI2024 dataset are available at https://github.com/Ernestchenchen/CurvNet and https://github.com/Ernestchenchen/Spinal-AI2024, respectively.

Zhiwen Shao, Zhilei Liu, Jianfei Cai et al.

Facial action unit (AU) detection and face alignment are two highly correlated tasks, since facial landmarks can provide precise AU locations to facilitate the extraction of meaningful local features for AU detection. However, most existing AU detection works handle the two tasks independently by treating face alignment as a preprocessing, and often use landmarks to predefine a fixed region or attention for each AU. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning framework for joint AU detection and face alignment, which has not been explored before. In particular, multi-scale shared feature is learned firstly, and high-level feature of face alignment is fed into AU detection. Moreover, to extract precise local features, we propose an adaptive attention learning module to refine the attention map of each AU adaptively. Finally, the assembled local features are integrated with face alignment feature and global feature for AU detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework (i) significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art AU detection methods on the challenging BP4D, DISFA, GFT and BP4D+ benchmarks, (ii) can adaptively capture the irregular region of each AU, (iii) achieves competitive performance for face alignment, and (iv) also works well under partial occlusions and non-frontal poses. The code for our method is available at https://github.com/ZhiwenShao/PyTorch-JAANet.

Zhiwen Shao, Hengliang Zhu, Xin Tan et al.

Facial landmarks are highly correlated with each other since a certain landmark can be estimated by its neighboring landmarks. Most of the existing deep learning methods only use one fully-connected layer called shape prediction layer to estimate the locations of facial landmarks. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework named Multi-Center Learning with multiple shape prediction layers for face alignment. In particular, each shape prediction layer emphasizes on the detection of a certain cluster of semantically relevant landmarks respectively. Challenging landmarks are focused firstly, and each cluster of landmarks is further optimized respectively. Moreover, to reduce the model complexity, we propose a model assembling method to integrate multiple shape prediction layers into one shape prediction layer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is effective for handling complex occlusions and appearance variations with real-time performance. The code for our method is available at https://github.com/ZhiwenShao/MCNet-Extension.

Yiran Song, Qianyu Zhou, Xuequan Lu et al.

Segment anything model (SAM) has demonstrated excellent generalizability in common vision scenarios, yet falling short of the ability to understand specialized data. Recently, several methods have combined parameter-efficient techniques with task-specific designs to fine-tune SAM on particular tasks. However, these methods heavily rely on handcraft, complicated, and task-specific designs, and pre/post-processing to achieve acceptable performances on downstream tasks. As a result, this severely restricts generalizability to other downstream tasks. To address this issue, we present a simple and unified framework, namely SU-SAM, that can easily and efficiently fine-tune the SAM model with parameter-efficient techniques while maintaining excellent generalizability toward various downstream tasks. SU-SAM does not require any task-specific designs and aims to improve the adaptability of SAM-like models significantly toward underperformed scenes. Concretely, we abstract parameter-efficient modules of different methods into basic design elements in our framework. Besides, we propose four variants of SU-SAM, i.e., series, parallel, mixed, and LoRA structures. Comprehensive experiments on nine datasets and six downstream tasks to verify the effectiveness of SU-SAM, including medical image segmentation, camouflage object detection, salient object segmentation, surface defect segmentation, complex object shapes, and shadow masking. Our experimental results demonstrate that SU-SAM achieves competitive or superior accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we provide in-depth analyses highlighting the effectiveness of different parameter-efficient designs within SU-SAM. In addition, we propose a generalized model and benchmark, showcasing SU-SAM's generalizability across all diverse datasets simultaneously.

Xiaojia Zhu, Rui Chen, Xiaoqi Guo et al.

Scoliosis is one of the most common diseases in adolescents. Traditional screening methods for the scoliosis usually use radiographic examination, which requires certified experts with medical instruments and brings the radiation risk. Considering such requirement and inconvenience, we propose to use natural images of the human back for wide-range scoliosis screening, which is a challenging problem. In this paper, we notice that the human back has a certain degree of symmetry, and asymmetrical human backs are usually caused by spinal lesions. Besides, scoliosis severity levels have ordinal relationships. Taking inspiration from this, we propose a dual-path scoliosis detection network with two main modules: symmetric feature matching module (SFMM) and ordinal regression head (ORH). Specifically, we first adopt a backbone to extract features from both the input image and its horizontally flipped image. Then, we feed the two extracted features into the SFMM to capture symmetric relationships. Finally, we use the ORH to transform the ordinal regression problem into a series of binary classification sub-problems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods as well as human performance, which provides a promising and economic solution to wide-range scoliosis screening. In particular, our method achieves accuracies of 95.11% and 81.46% in estimation of general severity level and fine-grained severity level of the scoliosis, respectively.

Habtamu Fanta, Zhiwen Shao, Lizhuang Ma

Abnormality detection is a challenging task due to the dependence on a specific context and the unconstrained variability of practical scenarios. In recent years, it has benefited from the powerful features learnt by deep neural networks, and handcrafted features specialized for abnormality detectors. However, these approaches with large complexity still have limitations in handling long term sequential data (e.g., videos), and their learnt features do not thoroughly capture useful information. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been shown to be capable of robustly dealing with temporal data in long term sequences. In this paper, we propose a novel version of Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), called Single Tunnelled GRU for abnormality detection. Particularly, the Single Tunnelled GRU discards the heavy weighted reset gate from GRU cells that overlooks the importance of past content by only favouring current input to obtain an optimized single gated cell model. Moreover, we substitute the hyperbolic tangent activation in standard GRUs with sigmoid activation, as the former suffers from performance loss in deeper networks. Empirical results show that our proposed optimized GRU model outperforms standard GRU and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks on most metrics for detection and generalization tasks on CUHK Avenue and UCSD datasets. The model is also computationally efficient with reduced training and testing time over standard RNNs.

Yuedong Chen, Guoxian Song, Zhiwen Shao et al.

Automatic facial action unit (AU) recognition has attracted great attention but still remains a challenging task, as subtle changes of local facial muscles are difficult to thoroughly capture. Most existing AU recognition approaches leverage geometry information in a straightforward 2D or 3D manner, which either ignore 3D manifold information or suffer from high computational costs. In this paper, we propose a novel geodesic guided convolution (GeoConv) for AU recognition by embedding 3D manifold information into 2D convolutions. Specifically, the kernel of GeoConv is weighted by our introduced geodesic weights, which are negatively correlated to geodesic distances on a coarsely reconstructed 3D face model. Moreover, based on GeoConv, we further develop an end-to-end trainable framework named GeoCNN for AU recognition. Extensive experiments on BP4D and DISFA benchmarks show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art AU recognition methods.

Zhiwen Shao, Yong Zhou, Jianfei Cai et al.

Facial action unit (AU) detection is challenging due to the difficulty in capturing correlated information from subtle and dynamic AUs. Existing methods often resort to the localization of correlated regions of AUs, in which predefining local AU attentions by correlated facial landmarks often discards essential parts, or learning global attention maps often contains irrelevant areas. Furthermore, existing relational reasoning methods often employ common patterns for all AUs while ignoring the specific way of each AU. To tackle these limitations, we propose a novel adaptive attention and relation (AAR) framework for facial AU detection. Specifically, we propose an adaptive attention regression network to regress the global attention map of each AU under the constraint of attention predefinition and the guidance of AU detection, which is beneficial for capturing both specified dependencies by landmarks in strongly correlated regions and facial globally distributed dependencies in weakly correlated regions. Moreover, considering the diversity and dynamics of AUs, we propose an adaptive spatio-temporal graph convolutional network to simultaneously reason the independent pattern of each AU, the inter-dependencies among AUs, as well as the temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments show that our approach (i) achieves competitive performance on challenging benchmarks including BP4D, DISFA, and GFT in constrained scenarios and Aff-Wild2 in unconstrained scenarios, and (ii) can precisely learn the regional correlation distribution of each AU.

Zhiwen Shao, Shouhong Ding, Yiru Zhao et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel face alignment method that trains deep convolutional network from coarse to fine. It divides given landmarks into principal subset and elaborate subset. We firstly keep a large weight for principal subset to make our network primarily predict their locations while slightly take elaborate subset into account. Next the weight of principal subset is gradually decreased until two subsets have equivalent weights. This process contributes to learn a good initial model and search the optimal model smoothly to avoid missing fairly good intermediate models in subsequent procedures. On the challenging COFW dataset [1], our method achieves 6.33% mean error with a reduction of 21.37% compared with the best previous result [2].