Dongbo Min

Sunghwan Hong, Jisu Nam, Seokju Cho et al. · nvidia, utoronto

Existing pipelines of semantic correspondence commonly include extracting high-level semantic features for the invariance against intra-class variations and background clutters. This architecture, however, inevitably results in a low-resolution matching field that additionally requires an ad-hoc interpolation process as a post-processing for converting it into a high-resolution one, certainly limiting the overall performance of matching results. To overcome this, inspired by recent success of implicit neural representation, we present a novel method for semantic correspondence, called Neural Matching Field (NeMF). However, complicacy and high-dimensionality of a 4D matching field are the major hindrances, which we propose a cost embedding network to process a coarse cost volume to use as a guidance for establishing high-precision matching field through the following fully-connected network. Nevertheless, learning a high-dimensional matching field remains challenging mainly due to computational complexity, since a naive exhaustive inference would require querying from all pixels in the 4D space to infer pixel-wise correspondences. To overcome this, we propose adequate training and inference procedures, which in the training phase, we randomly sample matching candidates and in the inference phase, we iteratively performs PatchMatch-based inference and coordinate optimization at test time. With these combined, competitive results are attained on several standard benchmarks for semantic correspondence. Code and pre-trained weights are available at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/NeMF/.

Jin Kim, Jiyoung Lee, Jungin Park et al.

The rise of deep neural networks has led to several breakthroughs for semantic segmentation. In spite of this, a model trained on source domain often fails to work properly in new challenging domains, that is directly concerned with the generalization capability of the model. In this paper, we present a novel memory-guided domain generalization method for semantic segmentation based on meta-learning framework. Especially, our method abstracts the conceptual knowledge of semantic classes into categorical memory which is constant beyond the domains. Upon the meta-learning concept, we repeatedly train memory-guided networks and simulate virtual test to 1) learn how to memorize a domain-agnostic and distinct information of classes and 2) offer an externally settled memory as a class-guidance to reduce the ambiguity of representation in the test data of arbitrary unseen domain. To this end, we also propose memory divergence and feature cohesion losses, which encourage to learn memory reading and update processes for category-aware domain generalization. Extensive experiments for semantic segmentation demonstrate the superior generalization capability of our method over state-of-the-art works on various benchmarks.

Xu Yin, Dongbo Min, Yuchi Huo et al.

With increasing demands for high-quality semantic segmentation in the industry, hard-distinguishing semantic boundaries have posed a significant threat to existing solutions. Inspired by real-life experience, i.e., combining varied observations contributes to higher visual recognition confidence, we present the equipotential learning (EPL) method. This novel module transfers the predicted/ground-truth semantic labels to a self-defined potential domain to learn and infer decision boundaries along customized directions. The conversion to the potential domain is implemented via a lightweight differentiable anisotropic convolution without incurring any parameter overhead. Besides, the designed two loss functions, the point loss and the equipotential line loss implement anisotropic field regression and category-level contour learning, respectively, enhancing prediction consistencies in the inter/intra-class boundary areas. More importantly, EPL is agnostic to network architectures, and thus it can be plugged into most existing segmentation models. This paper is the first attempt to address the boundary segmentation problem with field regression and contour learning. Meaningful performance improvements on Pascal Voc 2012 and Cityscapes demonstrate that the proposed EPL module can benefit the off-the-shelf fully convolutional network models when recognizing semantic boundary areas. Besides, intensive comparisons and analysis show the favorable merits of EPL for distinguishing semantically-similar and irregular-shaped categories.

Kwonyoung Kim, Jungin Park, Jiyoung Lee et al.

Online stereo adaptation tackles the domain shift problem, caused by different environments between synthetic (training) and real (test) datasets, to promptly adapt stereo models in dynamic real-world applications such as autonomous driving. However, previous methods often fail to counteract particular regions related to dynamic objects with more severe environmental changes. To mitigate this issue, we propose to incorporate an auxiliary point-selective network into a meta-learning framework, called PointFix, to provide a robust initialization of stereo models for online stereo adaptation. In a nutshell, our auxiliary network learns to fix local variants intensively by effectively back-propagating local information through the meta-gradient for the robust initialization of the baseline model. This network is model-agnostic, so can be used in any kind of architectures in a plug-and-play manner. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method under three adaptation settings such as short-, mid-, and long-term sequences. Experimental results show that the proper initialization of the base stereo model by the auxiliary network enables our learning paradigm to achieve state-of-the-art performance at inference.

Sunkyung Kim, Hyesong Choi, Dongbo Min

In multi-task learning (MTL) for visual scene understanding, it is crucial to transfer useful information between multiple tasks with minimal interferences. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture that effectively transfers informative features by applying the attention mechanism to the multi-scale features of the tasks. Since applying the attention module directly to all possible features in terms of scale and task requires a high complexity, we propose to apply the attention module sequentially for the task and scale. The cross-task attention module (CTAM) is first applied to facilitate the exchange of relevant information between the multiple task features of the same scale. The cross-scale attention module (CSAM) then aggregates useful information from feature maps at different resolutions in the same task. Also, we attempt to capture long range dependencies through the self-attention module in the feature extraction network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-Context dataset.

Yerim So, Jiyeong Kim, Jiwon Yoon et al.

Recent Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition (OVAR) methods typically aggregate visual features into a global representation before computing text alignment, a process that obscures local patch information and fine-grained spatio-temporal cues. We propose Similarity Volume Aggregation (SimVA), a framework that constructs a dense 4D spatio-temporal similarity volume from patch-level visual-text similarities. SimVA constructs a spatio-temporal similarity volume over local video tokens and action classes, and employs class sampling to ensure similarity aggregation scalable to large vocabularies. The similarity volume is refined by spatial aggregation, which contextualizes local similarity patterns to improve intra-frame consistency. Motion-aware modulation further injects inter-frame variation cues, highlighting dynamically changing regions. Mamba-based temporal aggregation then models the evolution of class-conditioned similarity patterns across frames. By maintaining dense visual-text correspondence, SimVA effectively transfers CLIP to video action recognition, achieving competitive performance across zero-shot, few-shot, and base-to-novel benchmarks.

Jiyeong Kim, Yerim So, Hyesong Choi et al.

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm that integrates multimodal understanding and generation within a unified modeling framework. However, current generative training paradigms suffer from inherent limitations. We present Semantically-Grounded Supervision (SeGroS), a fine-tuning framework designed to resolve the granularity mismatch and supervisory redundancy in UMMs. At its core, we propose a novel visual grounding map to construct two complementary supervision signals. First, we formulate semantic Visual Hints to compensate for the sparsity of text prompts. Second, we generate a semantically-grounded Corrupted Input to explicitly enhance the supervision of masking-based UMMs by restricting the reconstruction loss to core text-aligned regions. Extensive evaluations on GenEval, DPGBench, and CompBench demonstrate that SeGroS significantly improves generation fidelity and cross-modal alignment across various UMM architectures.

Hayeon Jo, Hyesong Choi, Minhee Cho et al.

Transfer learning based on full fine-tuning (FFT) of the pre-trained encoder and task-specific decoder becomes increasingly complex as deep models grow exponentially. Parameter efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches using adapters consisting of small learnable layers have emerged as an alternative to FFT, achieving comparable performance while maintaining high training efficiency. However, the inflexibility of the adapter with respect to input instances limits its capability of learning task-specific information in diverse downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel PEFT approach, input-Conditioned transFormer, termed iConFormer, that leverages a dynamic adapter conditioned on the input instances. To secure flexible learning ability on input instances in various downstream tasks, we introduce an input-Conditioned Network (iCoN) in the dynamic adapter that enables instance-level feature transformation. To be specific, iCoN generates channel-wise convolutional kernels for each feature and transform it using adaptive convolution process to effectively capture task-specific and fine-grained details tailor to downstream tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that by tuning just 1.6% to 2.8% of the Transformer backbone parameters, iConFormer achieves performance comparable to FFT in monocular depth estimation and semantic segmentation, while outperforming it in image classification and instance segmentation. Also, the proposed method consistently outperforms recent PEFT methods for all the tasks mentioned above.

Jihye Ahn, Hyesong Choi, Soomin Kim et al.

In stereo matching, CNNs have traditionally served as the predominant architectures. Although Transformer-based stereo models have been studied recently, their performance still lags behind CNN-based stereo models due to the inherent data scarcity issue in the stereo matching task. In this paper, we propose Masked Image Modeling Distilled Stereo matching model, termed MaDis-Stereo, that enhances locality inductive bias by leveraging Masked Image Modeling (MIM) in training Transformer-based stereo model. Given randomly masked stereo images as inputs, our method attempts to conduct both image reconstruction and depth prediction tasks. While this strategy is beneficial to resolving the data scarcity issue, the dual challenge of reconstructing masked tokens and subsequently performing stereo matching poses significant challenges, particularly in terms of training stability. To address this, we propose to use an auxiliary network (teacher), updated via Exponential Moving Average (EMA), along with the original stereo model (student), where teacher predictions serve as pseudo supervisory signals to effectively distill knowledge into the student model. State-of-the-arts performance is achieved with the proposed method on several stereo matching such as ETH3D and KITTI 2015. Additionally, to demonstrate that our model effectively leverages locality inductive bias, we provide the attention distance measurement.

Sumin Son, Hyesong Choi, Dongbo Min

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) techniques have redefined the landscape of computer vision, enabling pre-trained models to achieve exceptional performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. Despite their success, the full potential of MIM-based methods in dense prediction tasks, particularly in depth estimation, remains untapped. Existing MIM approaches primarily rely on single-image inputs, which makes it challenging to capture the crucial structured information, leading to suboptimal performance in tasks requiring fine-grained feature representation. To address these limitations, we propose SG-MIM, a novel Structured knowledge Guided Masked Image Modeling framework designed to enhance dense prediction tasks by utilizing structured knowledge alongside images. SG-MIM employs a lightweight relational guidance framework, allowing it to guide structured knowledge individually at the feature level rather than naively combining at the pixel level within the same architecture, as is common in traditional multi-modal pre-training methods. This approach enables the model to efficiently capture essential information while minimizing discrepancies between pre-training and downstream tasks. Furthermore, SG-MIM employs a selective masking strategy to incorporate structured knowledge, maximizing the synergy between general representation learning and structured knowledge-specific learning. Our method requires no additional annotations, making it a versatile and efficient solution for a wide range of applications. Our evaluations on the KITTI, NYU-v2, and ADE20k datasets demonstrate SG-MIM's superiority in monocular depth estimation and semantic segmentation.

Hyejin Park, Dongbo Min

In the realm of Adversarial Distillation (AD), strategic and precise knowledge transfer from an adversarially robust teacher model to a less robust student model is paramount. Our Dynamic Guidance Adversarial Distillation (DGAD) framework directly tackles the challenge of differential sample importance, with a keen focus on rectifying the teacher model's misclassifications. DGAD employs Misclassification-Aware Partitioning (MAP) to dynamically tailor the distillation focus, optimizing the learning process by steering towards the most reliable teacher predictions. Additionally, our Error-corrective Label Swapping (ELS) corrects misclassifications of the teacher on both clean and adversarially perturbed inputs, refining the quality of knowledge transfer. Further, Predictive Consistency Regularization (PCR) guarantees consistent performance of the student model across both clean and adversarial inputs, significantly enhancing its overall robustness. By integrating these methodologies, DGAD significantly improves upon the accuracy of clean data and fortifies the model's defenses against sophisticated adversarial threats. Our experimental validation on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and Tiny ImageNet datasets, employing various model architectures, demonstrates the efficacy of DGAD, establishing it as a promising approach for enhancing both the robustness and accuracy of student models in adversarial settings.

Minhee Cho, Hyesong Choi, Hayeon Jo et al.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) endeavors to bridge the gap between a model trained on a labeled source domain and its deployment in an unlabeled target domain. However, current high-performance models demand significant resources, making deployment costs prohibitive and highlighting the need for compact, yet effective models. For UDA of lightweight models, Knowledge Distillation (KD) leveraging a Teacher-Student framework could be a common approach, but we found that domain shift in UDA leads to a significant increase in non-salient parameters in the teacher model, degrading model's generalization ability and transferring misleading information to the student model. Interestingly, we observed that this phenomenon occurs considerably less in the student model. Driven by this insight, we introduce Collaborative Learning for UDA (CLDA), a method that updates the teacher's non-salient parameters using the student model and at the same time utilizes the updated teacher model to improve UDA performance of the student model. Experiments show consistent performance improvements for both student and teacher models. For example, in semantic segmentation, CLDA achieves an improvement of +0.7% mIoU for the teacher model and +1.4% mIoU for the student model compared to the baseline model in the GTA-to-Cityscapes datasets. In the Synthia-to-Cityscapes dataset, it achieves an improvement of +0.8% mIoU and +2.0% mIoU for the teacher and student models, respectively.

Soomin Kim, Hyesong Choi, Jihye Ahn et al.

Unlike other vision tasks where Transformer-based approaches are becoming increasingly common, stereo depth estimation is still dominated by convolution-based approaches. This is mainly due to the limited availability of real-world ground truth for stereo matching, which is a limiting factor in improving the performance of Transformer-based stereo approaches. In this paper, we propose UniTT-Stereo, a method to maximize the potential of Transformer-based stereo architectures by unifying self-supervised learning used for pre-training with stereo matching framework based on supervised learning. To be specific, we explore the effectiveness of reconstructing features of masked portions in an input image and at the same time predicting corresponding points in another image from the perspective of locality inductive bias, which is crucial in training models with limited training data. Moreover, to address these challenging tasks of reconstruction-and-prediction, we present a new strategy to vary a masking ratio when training the stereo model with stereo-tailored losses. State-of-the-art performance of UniTT-Stereo is validated on various benchmarks such as ETH3D, KITTI 2012, and KITTI 2015 datasets. Lastly, to investigate the advantages of the proposed approach, we provide a frequency analysis of feature maps and the analysis of locality inductive bias based on attention maps.

Jueun Ko, Hyewon Park, Hyesong Choi et al.

Stereo Depth Estimation in real-world environments poses significant challenges due to dynamic domain shifts, sparse or unreliable supervision, and the high cost of acquiring dense ground-truth labels. While recent Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods offer promising solutions, most rely on static target domain assumptions and input-invariant adaptation strategies, limiting their effectiveness under continual shifts. In this paper, we propose RobIA, a novel Robust, Instance-Aware framework for Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) in stereo depth estimation. RobIA integrates two key components: (1) Attend-and-Excite Mixture-of-Experts (AttEx-MoE), a parameter-efficient module that dynamically routes input to frozen experts via lightweight self-attention mechanism tailored to epipolar geometry, and (2) Robust AdaptBN Teacher, a PEFT-based teacher model that provides dense pseudo-supervision by complementing sparse handcrafted labels. This strategy enables input-specific flexibility, broad supervision coverage, improving generalization under domain shift. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RobIA achieves superior adaptation performance across dynamic target domains while maintaining computational efficiency.

Hyewon Park, Hyejin Park, Jueun Ko et al.

Continual Test Time Adaptation (CTTA) has emerged as a critical approach for bridging the domain gap between the controlled training environments and the real-world scenarios, enhancing model adaptability and robustness. Existing CTTA methods, typically categorized into Full-Tuning (FT) and Efficient-Tuning (ET), struggle with effectively addressing domain shifts. To overcome these challenges, we propose Hybrid-TTA, a holistic approach that dynamically selects instance-wise tuning method for optimal adaptation. Our approach introduces the Dynamic Domain Shift Detection (DDSD) strategy, which identifies domain shifts by leveraging temporal correlations in input sequences and dynamically switches between FT and ET to adapt to varying domain shifts effectively. Additionally, the Masked Image Modeling based Adaptation (MIMA) framework is integrated to ensure domain-agnostic robustness with minimal computational overhead. Our Hybrid-TTA achieves a notable 1.6%p improvement in mIoU on the Cityscapes-to-ACDC benchmark dataset, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods and offering a robust solution for real-world continual adaptation challenges.

Hyesong Choi, Hunsang Lee, Seyoung Joung et al.

Driven by the success of Masked Language Modeling (MLM), the realm of self-supervised learning for computer vision has been invigorated by the central role of Masked Image Modeling (MIM) in driving recent breakthroughs. Notwithstanding the achievements of MIM across various downstream tasks, its overall efficiency is occasionally hampered by the lengthy duration of the pre-training phase. This paper presents a perspective that the optimization of masked tokens as a means of addressing the prevailing issue. Initially, we delve into an exploration of the inherent properties that a masked token ought to possess. Within the properties, we principally dedicated to articulating and emphasizing the `data singularity' attribute inherent in masked tokens. Through a comprehensive analysis of the heterogeneity between masked tokens and visible tokens within pre-trained models, we propose a novel approach termed masked token optimization (MTO), specifically designed to improve model efficiency through weight recalibration and the enhancement of the key property of masked tokens. The proposed method serves as an adaptable solution that seamlessly integrates into any MIM approach that leverages masked tokens. As a result, MTO achieves a considerable improvement in pre-training efficiency, resulting in an approximately 50% reduction in pre-training epochs required to attain converged performance of the recent approaches.

Hyesong Choi, Hyejin Park, Kwang Moo Yi et al.

In this paper, we introduce Saliency-Based Adaptive Masking (SBAM), a novel and cost-effective approach that significantly enhances the pre-training performance of Masked Image Modeling (MIM) approaches by prioritizing token salience. Our method provides robustness against variations in masking ratios, effectively mitigating the performance instability issues common in existing methods. This relaxes the sensitivity of MIM-based pre-training to masking ratios, which in turn allows us to propose an adaptive strategy for `tailored' masking ratios for each data sample, which no existing method can provide. Toward this goal, we propose an Adaptive Masking Ratio (AMR) strategy that dynamically adjusts the proportion of masking for the unique content of each image based on token salience. We show that our method significantly improves over the state-of-the-art in mask-based pre-training on the ImageNet-1K dataset.

Seungmin Baek, Soyul Lee, Hayeon Jo et al.

Transfer learning paradigm has driven substantial advancements in various vision tasks. However, as state-of-the-art models continue to grow, classical full fine-tuning often becomes computationally impractical, particularly in multi-task learning (MTL) setup where training complexity increases proportional to the number of tasks. Consequently, recent studies have explored Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) for MTL architectures. Despite some progress, these approaches still exhibit limitations in capturing fine-grained, task-specific features that are crucial to MTL. In this paper, we introduce Task-Adaptive Dynamic transFormer, termed TADFormer, a novel PEFT framework that performs task-aware feature adaptation in the fine-grained manner by dynamically considering task-specific input contexts. TADFormer proposes the parameter-efficient prompting for task adaptation and the Dynamic Task Filter (DTF) to capture task information conditioned on input contexts. Experiments on the PASCAL-Context benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher accuracy in dense scene understanding tasks, while reducing the number of trainable parameters by up to 8.4 times when compared to full fine-tuning of MTL models. TADFormer also demonstrates superior parameter efficiency and accuracy compared to recent PEFT methods.

Hyesong Choi, Daeun Kim, Sungmin Cha et al.

In this work, we dive deep into the impact of additive noise in pre-training deep networks. While various methods have attempted to use additive noise inspired by the success of latent denoising diffusion models, when used in combination with masked image modeling, their gains have been marginal when it comes to recognition tasks. We thus investigate why this would be the case, in an attempt to find effective ways to combine the two ideas. Specifically, we find three critical conditions: corruption and restoration must be applied within the encoder, noise must be introduced in the feature space, and an explicit disentanglement between noised and masked tokens is necessary. By implementing these findings, we demonstrate improved pre-training performance for a wide range of recognition tasks, including those that require fine-grained, high-frequency information to solve.

Soyul Lee, Seungmin Baek, Dongbo Min

Monocular 3D object detection is a cost-effective solution for applications like autonomous driving and robotics, but remains fundamentally ill-posed due to inherently ambiguous depth cues. Recent DETR-based methods attempt to mitigate this through global attention and auxiliary depth prediction, yet they still struggle with inaccurate depth estimates. Moreover, these methods often overlook instance-level detection difficulty, such as occlusion, distance, and truncation, leading to suboptimal detection performance. We propose MonoDLGD, a novel Difficulty-Aware Label-Guided Denoising framework that adaptively perturbs and reconstructs ground-truth labels based on detection uncertainty. Specifically, MonoDLGD applies stronger perturbations to easier instances and weaker ones into harder cases, and then reconstructs them to effectively provide explicit geometric supervision. By jointly optimizing label reconstruction and 3D object detection, MonoDLGD encourages geometry-aware representation learning and improves robustness to varying levels of object complexity. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate that MonoDLGD achieves state-of-the-art performance across all difficulty levels.

Xu Yin, Woobin Im, Dongbo Min et al.

Generating reliable pseudo masks from image-level labels is challenging in the weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) task due to the lack of spatial information. Prevalent class activation map (CAM)-based solutions are challenged to discriminate the foreground (FG) objects from the suspicious background (BG) pixels (a.k.a. co-occurring) and learn the integral object regions. This paper proposes a simple fine-grained background representation (FBR) method to discover and represent diverse BG semantics and address the co-occurring problems. We abandon using the class prototype or pixel-level features for BG representation. Instead, we develop a novel primitive, negative region of interest (NROI), to capture the fine-grained BG semantic information and conduct the pixel-to-NROI contrast to distinguish the confusing BG pixels. We also present an active sampling strategy to mine the FG negatives on-the-fly, enabling efficient pixel-to-pixel intra-foreground contrastive learning to activate the entire object region. Thanks to the simplicity of design and convenience in use, our proposed method can be seamlessly plugged into various models, yielding new state-of-the-art results under various WSSS settings across benchmarks. Leveraging solely image-level (I) labels as supervision, our method achieves 73.2 mIoU and 45.6 mIoU segmentation results on Pascal Voc and MS COCO test sets, respectively. Furthermore, by incorporating saliency maps as an additional supervision signal (I+S), we attain 74.9 mIoU on Pascal Voc test set. Concurrently, our FBR approach demonstrates meaningful performance gains in weakly-supervised instance segmentation (WSIS) tasks, showcasing its robustness and strong generalization capabilities across diverse domains.

Jaehoon Cho, Dongbo Min, Youngjung Kim et al.

This manual is intended to provide a detailed description of the DIML/CVL RGB-D dataset. This dataset is comprised of 2M color images and their corresponding depth maps from a great variety of natural indoor and outdoor scenes. The indoor dataset was constructed using the Microsoft Kinect v2, while the outdoor dataset was built using the stereo cameras (ZED stereo camera and built-in stereo camera). Table I summarizes the details of our dataset, including acquisition, processing, format, and toolbox. Refer to Section II and III for more details.

Jin Kim, Jiyoung Lee, Jungin Park et al.

Domain generalization aims to learn a prediction model on multi-domain source data such that the model can generalize to a target domain with unknown statistics. Most existing approaches have been developed under the assumption that the source data is well-balanced in terms of both domain and class. However, real-world training data collected with different composition biases often exhibits severe distribution gaps for domain and class, leading to substantial performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a self-balanced domain generalization framework that adaptively learns the weights of losses to alleviate the bias caused by different distributions of the multi-domain source data. The self-balanced scheme is based on an auxiliary reweighting network that iteratively updates the weight of loss conditioned on the domain and class information by leveraging balanced meta data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method overwhelming state-of-the-art works for domain generalization.

Matteo Poggi, Seungryong Kim, Fabio Tosi et al.

Stereo matching is one of the most popular techniques to estimate dense depth maps by finding the disparity between matching pixels on two, synchronized and rectified images. Alongside with the development of more accurate algorithms, the research community focused on finding good strategies to estimate the reliability, i.e. the confidence, of estimated disparity maps. This information proves to be a powerful cue to naively find wrong matches as well as to improve the overall effectiveness of a variety of stereo algorithms according to different strategies. In this paper, we review more than ten years of developments in the field of confidence estimation for stereo matching. We extensively discuss and evaluate existing confidence measures and their variants, from hand-crafted ones to the most recent, state-of-the-art learning based methods. We study the different behaviors of each measure when applied to a pool of different stereo algorithms and, for the first time in literature, when paired with a state-of-the-art deep stereo network. Our experiments, carried out on five different standard datasets, provide a comprehensive overview of the field, highlighting in particular both strengths and limitations of learning-based strategies.

Hyesong Choi, Hunsang Lee, Sunkyung Kim et al.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has become an appealing solution to the lack of ground truth labels, but its reconstruction loss often produces over-smoothed results across object boundaries and is incapable of handling occlusion explicitly. In this paper, we propose a new approach to leverage pseudo ground truth depth maps of stereo images generated from self-supervised stereo matching methods. The confidence map of the pseudo ground truth depth map is estimated to mitigate performance degeneration by inaccurate pseudo depth maps. To cope with the prediction error of the confidence map itself, we also leverage the threshold network that learns the threshold dynamically conditioned on the pseudo depth maps. The pseudo depth labels filtered out by the thresholded confidence map are used to supervise the monocular depth network. Furthermore, we propose the probabilistic framework that refines the monocular depth map with the help of its uncertainty map through the pixel-adaptive convolution (PAC) layer. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance to state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods. Lastly, we exhibit that the proposed threshold learning can also be used to improve the performance of existing confidence estimation approaches.

Sangryul Jeon, Dongbo Min, Seungryong Kim et al.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based approaches for semantic alignment and object landmark detection have improved their performance significantly. Current efforts for the two tasks focus on addressing the lack of massive training data through weakly- or unsupervised learning frameworks. In this paper, we present a joint learning approach for obtaining dense correspondences and discovering object landmarks from semantically similar images. Based on the key insight that the two tasks can mutually provide supervisions to each other, our networks accomplish this through a joint loss function that alternatively imposes a consistency constraint between the two tasks, thereby boosting the performance and addressing the lack of training data in a principled manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to address the lack of training data for the two tasks through the joint learning. To further improve the robustness of our framework, we introduce a probabilistic learning formulation that allows only reliable matches to be used in the joint learning process. With the proposed method, state-of-the-art performance is attained on several standard benchmarks for semantic matching and landmark detection, including a newly introduced dataset, JLAD, which contains larger number of challenging image pairs than existing datasets.

Jaehoon Cho, Dongbo Min, Youngjung Kim et al.

Current self-supervised methods for monocular depth estimation are largely based on deeply nested convolutional networks that leverage stereo image pairs or monocular sequences during a training phase. However, they often exhibit inaccurate results around occluded regions and depth boundaries. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach for monocular depth estimation using stereo image pairs. The study aims to propose a student-teacher strategy in which a shallow student network is trained with the auxiliary information obtained from a deeper and more accurate teacher network. Specifically, we first train the stereo teacher network by fully utilizing the binocular perception of 3-D geometry and then use the depth predictions of the teacher network to train the student network for monocular depth inference. This enables us to exploit all available depth data from massive unlabeled stereo pairs. We propose a strategy that involves the use of a data ensemble to merge the multiple depth predictions of the teacher network to improve the training samples by collecting non-trivial knowledge beyond a single prediction. To refine the inaccurate depth estimation that is used when training the student network, we further propose stereo confidence-guided regression loss that handles the unreliable pseudo depth values in occlusion, texture-less region, and repetitive pattern. To complement the existing dataset comprising outdoor driving scenes, we built a novel large-scale dataset consisting of one million outdoor stereo images taken using hand-held stereo cameras. Finally, we demonstrate that the monocular depth estimation network provides feature representations that are suitable for high-level vision tasks. The experimental results for various outdoor scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach, which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Seungryong Kim, Dongbo Min, Somi Jeong et al.

We present semantic attribute matching networks (SAM-Net) for jointly establishing correspondences and transferring attributes across semantically similar images, which intelligently weaves the advantages of the two tasks while overcoming their limitations. SAM-Net accomplishes this through an iterative process of establishing reliable correspondences by reducing the attribute discrepancy between the images and synthesizing attribute transferred images using the learned correspondences. To learn the networks using weak supervisions in the form of image pairs, we present a semantic attribute matching loss based on the matching similarity between an attribute transferred source feature and a warped target feature. With SAM-Net, the state-of-the-art performance is attained on several benchmarks for semantic matching and attribute transfer.

Seungryong Kim, Stephen Lin, Sangryul Jeon et al.

We present recurrent transformer networks (RTNs) for obtaining dense correspondences between semantically similar images. Our networks accomplish this through an iterative process of estimating spatial transformations between the input images and using these transformations to generate aligned convolutional activations. By directly estimating the transformations between an image pair, rather than employing spatial transformer networks to independently normalize each individual image, we show that greater accuracy can be achieved. This process is conducted in a recursive manner to refine both the transformation estimates and the feature representations. In addition, a technique is presented for weakly-supervised training of RTNs that is based on a proposed classification loss. With RTNs, state-of-the-art performance is attained on several benchmarks for semantic correspondence.

Sangryul Jeon, Seungryong Kim, Dongbo Min et al.

This paper presents a deep architecture for dense semantic correspondence, called pyramidal affine regression networks (PARN), that estimates locally-varying affine transformation fields across images. To deal with intra-class appearance and shape variations that commonly exist among different instances within the same object category, we leverage a pyramidal model where affine transformation fields are progressively estimated in a coarse-to-fine manner so that the smoothness constraint is naturally imposed within deep networks. PARN estimates residual affine transformations at each level and composes them to estimate final affine transformations. Furthermore, to overcome the limitations of insufficient training data for semantic correspondence, we propose a novel weakly-supervised training scheme that generates progressive supervisions by leveraging a correspondence consistency across image pairs. Our method is fully learnable in an end-to-end manner and does not require quantizing infinite continuous affine transformation fields. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work that attempts to estimate dense affine transformation fields in a coarse-to-fine manner within deep networks. Experimental results demonstrate that PARN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for dense semantic correspondence on various benchmarks.

Seungryong Kim, Dongbo Min, Stephen Lin et al.

Techniques for dense semantic correspondence have provided limited ability to deal with the geometric variations that commonly exist between semantically similar images. While variations due to scale and rotation have been examined, there lack practical solutions for more complex deformations such as affine transformations because of the tremendous size of the associated solution space. To address this problem, we present a discrete-continuous transformation matching (DCTM) framework where dense affine transformation fields are inferred through a discrete label optimization in which the labels are iteratively updated via continuous regularization. In this way, our approach draws solutions from the continuous space of affine transformations in a manner that can be computed efficiently through constant-time edge-aware filtering and a proposed affine-varying CNN-based descriptor. Experimental results show that this model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for dense semantic correspondence on various benchmarks.

Suhyuk Um, Jaeyoon Kim, Dongbo Min

2-D complex Gabor filtering has found numerous applications in the fields of computer vision and image processing. Especially, in some applications, it is often needed to compute 2-D complex Gabor filter bank consisting of the 2-D complex Gabor filtering outputs at multiple orientations and frequencies. Although several approaches for fast 2-D complex Gabor filtering have been proposed, they primarily focus on reducing the runtime of performing the 2-D complex Gabor filtering once at specific orientation and frequency. To obtain the 2-D complex Gabor filter bank output, existing methods are repeatedly applied with respect to multiple orientations and frequencies. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that efficiently computes the 2-D complex Gabor filter bank by reducing the computational redundancy that arises when performing the Gabor filtering at multiple orientations and frequencies. The proposed method first decomposes the Gabor basis kernels to allow a fast convolution with the Gaussian kernel in a separable manner. This enables reducing the runtime of the 2-D complex Gabor filter bank by reusing intermediate results of the 2-D complex Gabor filtering computed at a specific orientation. Furthermore, we extend this idea into 2-D localized sliding discrete Fourier transform (SDFT) using the Gaussian kernel in the DFT computation, which lends a spatial localization ability as in the 2-D complex Gabor filter. Experimental results demonstrate that our method runs faster than state-of-the-arts methods for fast 2-D complex Gabor filtering, while maintaining similar filtering quality.

Seungryong Kim, Dongbo Min, Bumsub Ham et al.

We present a descriptor, called fully convolutional self-similarity (FCSS), for dense semantic correspondence. To robustly match points among different instances within the same object class, we formulate FCSS using local self-similarity (LSS) within a fully convolutional network. In contrast to existing CNN-based descriptors, FCSS is inherently insensitive to intra-class appearance variations because of its LSS-based structure, while maintaining the precise localization ability of deep neural networks. The sampling patterns of local structure and the self-similarity measure are jointly learned within the proposed network in an end-to-end and multi-scale manner. As training data for semantic correspondence is rather limited, we propose to leverage object candidate priors provided in existing image datasets and also correspondence consistency between object pairs to enable weakly-supervised learning. Experiments demonstrate that FCSS outperforms conventional handcrafted descriptors and CNN-based descriptors on various benchmarks.

Youngjung Kim, Hyungjoo Jung, Dongbo Min et al.

Regularization-based image restoration has remained an active research topic in computer vision and image processing. It often leverages a guidance signal captured in different fields as an additional cue. In this work, we present a general framework for image restoration, called deeply aggregated alternating minimization (DeepAM). We propose to train deep neural network to advance two of the steps in the conventional AM algorithm: proximal mapping and ?- continuation. Both steps are learned from a large dataset in an end-to-end manner. The proposed framework enables the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to operate as a prior or regularizer in the AM algorithm. We show that our learned regularizer via deep aggregation outperforms the recent data-driven approaches as well as the nonlocalbased methods. The flexibility and effectiveness of our framework are demonstrated in several image restoration tasks, including single image denoising, RGB-NIR restoration, and depth super-resolution.

Seungryong Kim, Dongbo Min, Bumsub Ham et al.

Establishing dense correspondences between multiple images is a fundamental task in many applications. However, finding a reliable correspondence in multi-modal or multi-spectral images still remains unsolved due to their challenging photometric and geometric variations. In this paper, we propose a novel dense descriptor, called dense adaptive self-correlation (DASC), to estimate multi-modal and multi-spectral dense correspondences. Based on an observation that self-similarity existing within images is robust to imaging modality variations, we define the descriptor with a series of an adaptive self-correlation similarity measure between patches sampled by a randomized receptive field pooling, in which a sampling pattern is obtained using a discriminative learning. The computational redundancy of dense descriptors is dramatically reduced by applying fast edge-aware filtering. Furthermore, in order to address geometric variations including scale and rotation, we propose a geometry-invariant DASC (GI-DASC) descriptor that effectively leverages the DASC through a superpixel-based representation. For a quantitative evaluation of the GI-DASC, we build a novel multi-modal benchmark as varying photometric and geometric conditions. Experimental results demonstrate the outstanding performance of the DASC and GI-DASC in many cases of multi-modal and multi-spectral dense correspondences.

Youngjung Kim, Dongbo Min, Bumsub Ham et al.

Edge-preserving smoothing (EPS) can be formulated as minimizing an objective function that consists of data and prior terms. This global EPS approach shows better smoothing performance than a local one that typically has a form of weighted averaging, at the price of high computational cost. In this paper, we introduce a highly efficient splitting-based method for global EPS that minimizes the objective function of ${l_2}$ data and prior terms (possibly non-smooth and non-convex) in linear time. Different from previous splitting-based methods that require solving a large linear system, our approach solves an equivalent constrained optimization problem, resulting in a sequence of 1D sub-problems. This enables linear time solvers for weighted-least squares and -total variation problems. Our solver converges quickly, and its runtime is even comparable to state-of-the-art local EPS approaches. We also propose a family of fast iteratively re-weighted algorithms using a non-convex prior term. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach in a range of computer vision and image processing tasks.

Seungryong Kim, Dongbo Min, Stephen Lin et al.

We present a novel descriptor, called deep self-convolutional activations (DeSCA), designed for establishing dense correspondences between images taken under different imaging modalities, such as different spectral ranges or lighting conditions. Motivated by descriptors based on local self-similarity (LSS), we formulate a novel descriptor by leveraging LSS in a deep architecture, leading to better discriminative power and greater robustness to non-rigid image deformations than state-of-the-art cross-modality descriptors. The DeSCA first computes self-convolutions over a local support window for randomly sampled patches, and then builds self-convolution activations by performing an average pooling through a hierarchical formulation within a deep convolutional architecture. Finally, the feature responses on the self-convolution activations are encoded through a spatial pyramid pooling in a circular configuration. In contrast to existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based descriptors, the DeSCA is training-free (i.e., randomly sampled patches are utilized as the convolution kernels), is robust to cross-modal imaging, and can be densely computed in an efficient manner that significantly reduces computational redundancy. The state-of-the-art performance of DeSCA on challenging cases of cross-modal image pairs is demonstrated through extensive experiments.

Kang Zhang, Yuqiang Fang, Dongbo Min et al.

Human beings process stereoscopic correspondence across multiple scales. However, this bio-inspiration is ignored by state-of-the-art cost aggregation methods for dense stereo correspondence. In this paper, a generic cross-scale cost aggregation framework is proposed to allow multi-scale interaction in cost aggregation. We firstly reformulate cost aggregation from a unified optimization perspective and show that different cost aggregation methods essentially differ in the choices of similarity kernels. Then, an inter-scale regularizer is introduced into optimization and solving this new optimization problem leads to the proposed framework. Since the regularization term is independent of the similarity kernel, various cost aggregation methods can be integrated into the proposed general framework. We show that the cross-scale framework is important as it effectively and efficiently expands state-of-the-art cost aggregation methods and leads to significant improvements, when evaluated on Middlebury, KITTI and New Tsukuba datasets.