Tae‐Kyun Kim

Pedro Castro, Tae-Kyun Kim

Learning based 6D object pose estimation methods rely on computing large intermediate pose representations and/or iteratively refining an initial estimation with a slow render-compare pipeline. This paper introduces a novel method we call Cascaded Pose Refinement Transformers, or CRT-6D. We replace the commonly used dense intermediate representation with a sparse set of features sampled from the feature pyramid we call OSKFs(Object Surface Keypoint Features) where each element corresponds to an object keypoint. We employ lightweight deformable transformers and chain them together to iteratively refine proposed poses over the sampled OSKFs. We achieve inference runtimes 2x faster than the closest real-time state of the art methods while supporting up to 21 objects on a single model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CRT-6D by performing extensive experiments on the LM-O and YCBV datasets. Compared to real-time methods, we achieve state of the art on LM-O and YCB-V, falling slightly behind methods with inference runtimes one order of magnitude higher. The source code is available at: https://github.com/PedroCastro/CRT-6D

Tao Wang, Kaihao Zhang, Ziqian Shao et al.

Current deep learning methods for low-light image enhancement (LLIE) typically rely on pixel-wise mapping learned from paired data. However, these methods often overlook the importance of considering degradation representations, which can lead to sub-optimal outcomes. In this paper, we address this limitation by proposing a degradation-aware learning scheme for LLIE using diffusion models, which effectively integrates degradation and image priors into the diffusion process, resulting in improved image enhancement. Our proposed degradation-aware learning scheme is based on the understanding that degradation representations play a crucial role in accurately modeling and capturing the specific degradation patterns present in low-light images. To this end, First, a joint learning framework for both image generation and image enhancement is presented to learn the degradation representations. Second, to leverage the learned degradation representations, we develop a Low-Light Diffusion model (LLDiffusion) with a well-designed dynamic diffusion module. This module takes into account both the color map and the latent degradation representations to guide the diffusion process. By incorporating these conditioning factors, the proposed LLDiffusion can effectively enhance low-light images, considering both the inherent degradation patterns and the desired color fidelity. Finally, we evaluate our proposed method on several well-known benchmark datasets, including synthetic and real-world unpaired datasets. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that our LLDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art LLIE methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/TaoWangzj/LLDiffusion.

Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung, Honggyu Choi et al.

We present Implicit Two Hands (Im2Hands), the first neural implicit representation of two interacting hands. Unlike existing methods on two-hand reconstruction that rely on a parametric hand model and/or low-resolution meshes, Im2Hands can produce fine-grained geometry of two hands with high hand-to-hand and hand-to-image coherency. To handle the shape complexity and interaction context between two hands, Im2Hands models the occupancy volume of two hands - conditioned on an RGB image and coarse 3D keypoints - by two novel attention-based modules responsible for (1) initial occupancy estimation and (2) context-aware occupancy refinement, respectively. Im2Hands first learns per-hand neural articulated occupancy in the canonical space designed for each hand using query-image attention. It then refines the initial two-hand occupancy in the posed space to enhance the coherency between the two hand shapes using query-anchor attention. In addition, we introduce an optional keypoint refinement module to enable robust two-hand shape estimation from predicted hand keypoints in a single-image reconstruction scenario. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of Im2Hands on two-hand reconstruction in comparison to related methods, where ours achieves state-of-the-art results. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jyunlee/Im2Hands.

Pedro Castro, Tae-Kyun Kim

Estimating the pose of an unseen object is the goal of the challenging one-shot pose estimation task. Previous methods have heavily relied on feature matching with great success. However, these methods are often inefficient and limited by their reliance on pre-trained models that have not be designed specifically for pose estimation. In this paper we propose PoseMatcher, an accurate model free one-shot object pose estimator that overcomes these limitations. We create a new training pipeline for object to image matching based on a three-view system: a query with a positive and negative templates. This simple yet effective approach emulates test time scenarios by cheaply constructing an approximation of the full object point cloud during training. To enable PoseMatcher to attend to distinct input modalities, an image and a pointcloud, we introduce IO-Layer, a new attention layer that efficiently accommodates self and cross attention between the inputs. Moreover, we propose a pruning strategy where we iteratively remove redundant regions of the target object to further reduce the complexity and noise of the network while maintaining accuracy. Finally we redesign commonly used pose refinement strategies, zoom and 2D offset refinements, and adapt them to the one-shot paradigm. We outperform all prior one-shot pose estimation methods on the Linemod and YCB-V datasets as well achieve results rivaling recent instance-level methods. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/PedroCastro/PoseMatcher.

Razvan Caramalau, Binod Bhattarai, Danail Stoyanov et al.

Active learning(AL) has recently gained popularity for deep learning(DL) models. This is due to efficient and informative sampling, especially when the learner requires large-scale labelled datasets. Commonly, the sampling and training happen in stages while more batches are added. One main bottleneck in this strategy is the narrow representation learned by the model that affects the overall AL selection. We present MoBYv2AL, a novel self-supervised active learning framework for image classification. Our contribution lies in lifting MoBY, one of the most successful self-supervised learning algorithms, to the AL pipeline. Thus, we add the downstream task-aware objective function and optimize it jointly with contrastive loss. Further, we derive a data-distribution selection function from labelling the new examples. Finally, we test and study our pipeline robustness and performance for image classification tasks. We successfully achieved state-of-the-art results when compared to recent AL methods. Code available: https://github.com/razvancaramalau/MoBYv2AL

Junbong Jang, Kwonmoo Lee, Tae-Kyun Kim

Analyzing the dynamic changes of cellular morphology is important for understanding the various functions and characteristics of live cells, including stem cells and metastatic cancer cells. To this end, we need to track all points on the highly deformable cellular contour in every frame of live cell video. Local shapes and textures on the contour are not evident, and their motions are complex, often with expansion and contraction of local contour features. The prior arts for optical flow or deep point set tracking are unsuited due to the fluidity of cells, and previous deep contour tracking does not consider point correspondence. We propose the first deep learning-based tracking of cellular (or more generally viscoelastic materials) contours with point correspondence by fusing dense representation between two contours with cross attention. Since it is impractical to manually label dense tracking points on the contour, unsupervised learning comprised of the mechanical and cyclical consistency losses is proposed to train our contour tracker. The mechanical loss forcing the points to move perpendicular to the contour effectively helps out. For quantitative evaluation, we labeled sparse tracking points along the contour of live cells from two live cell datasets taken with phase contrast and confocal fluorescence microscopes. Our contour tracker quantitatively outperforms compared methods and produces qualitatively more favorable results. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/JunbongJang/contour-tracking/

Jihyun Lee, Junbong Jang, Donghwan Kim et al.

Recent 4D shape representations model continuous temporal evolution of implicit shapes by (1) learning query flows without leveraging shape and articulation priors or (2) decoding shape occupancies separately for each time value. Thus, they do not effectively capture implicit correspondences between articulated shapes or regularize jittery temporal deformations. In this work, we present FourierHandFlow, which is a spatio-temporally continuous representation for human hands that combines a 3D occupancy field with articulation-aware query flows represented as Fourier series. Given an input RGB sequence, we aim to learn a fixed number of Fourier coefficients for each query flow to guarantee smooth and continuous temporal shape dynamics. To effectively model spatio-temporal deformations of articulated hands, we compose our 4D representation based on two types of Fourier query flow: (1) pose flow that models query dynamics influenced by hand articulation changes via implicit linear blend skinning and (2) shape flow that models query-wise displacement flow. In the experiments, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on video-based 4D reconstruction while being computationally more efficient than the existing 3D/4D implicit shape representations. We additionally show our results on motion inter- and extrapolation and texture transfer using the learned correspondences of implicit shapes. To the best of our knowledge, FourierHandFlow is the first neural 4D continuous hand representation learned from RGB videos. The code will be publicly accessible.

Honggyu Choi, Zhixiang Chen, Xuepeng Shi et al.

Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) aims to boost detection performance by leveraging extra unlabeled data. The teacher-student framework has been shown to be promising for SSOD, in which a teacher network generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled data to assist the training of a student network. Since the pseudo-labels are noisy, filtering the pseudo-labels is crucial to exploit the potential of such framework. Unlike existing suboptimal methods, we propose a two-step pseudo-label filtering for the classification and regression heads in a teacher-student framework. For the classification head, OCL (Object-wise Contrastive Learning) regularizes the object representation learning that utilizes unlabeled data to improve pseudo-label filtering by enhancing the discriminativeness of the classification score. This is designed to pull together objects in the same class and push away objects from different classes. For the regression head, we further propose RUPL (Regression-Uncertainty-guided Pseudo-Labeling) to learn the aleatoric uncertainty of object localization for label filtering. By jointly filtering the pseudo-labels for the classification and regression heads, the student network receives better guidance from the teacher network for object detection task. Experimental results on Pascal VOC and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method with competitive performance compared to existing methods.

Xuanxi Chen, Tao Wang, Ziqian Shao et al.

Images or videos captured by the Under-Display Camera (UDC) suffer from severe degradation, such as saturation degeneration and color shift. While restoration for UDC has been a critical task, existing works of UDC restoration focus only on images. UDC video restoration (UDC-VR) has not been explored in the community. In this work, we first propose a GAN-based generation pipeline to simulate the realistic UDC degradation process. With the pipeline, we build the first large-scale UDC video restoration dataset called PexelsUDC, which includes two subsets named PexelsUDC-T and PexelsUDC-P corresponding to different displays for UDC. Using the proposed dataset, we conduct extensive benchmark studies on existing video restoration methods and observe their limitations on the UDC-VR task. To this end, we propose a novel transformer-based baseline method that adaptively enhances degraded videos. The key components of the method are a spatial branch with local-aware transformers, a temporal branch embedded temporal transformers, and a spatial-temporal fusion module. These components drive the model to fully exploit spatial and temporal information for UDC-VR. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on PexelsUDC. The benchmark and the baseline method are expected to promote the progress of UDC-VR in the community, which will be made public.

Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung, Hyunjin Kim et al.

We propose a framework that can deform an object in a 2D image as it exists in 3D space. Most existing methods for 3D-aware image manipulation are limited to (1) only changing the global scene information or depth, or (2) manipulating an object of specific categories. In this paper, we present a 3D-aware image deformation method with minimal restrictions on shape category and deformation type. While our framework leverages 2D-to-3D reconstruction, we argue that reconstruction is not sufficient for realistic deformations due to the vulnerability to topological errors. Thus, we propose to take a supervised learning-based approach to predict the shape Laplacian of the underlying volume of a 3D reconstruction represented as a point cloud. Given the deformation energy calculated using the predicted shape Laplacian and user-defined deformation handles (e.g., keypoints), we obtain bounded biharmonic weights to model plausible handle-based image deformation. In the experiments, we present our results of deforming 2D character and clothed human images. We also quantitatively show that our approach can produce more accurate deformation weights compared to alternative methods (i.e., mesh reconstruction and point cloud Laplacian methods).

Jiaze Sun, Zhixiang Chen, Tae-Kyun Kim

3D pose transfer is a challenging generation task that aims to transfer the pose of a source geometry onto a target geometry with the target identity preserved. Many prior methods require keypoint annotations to find correspondence between the source and target. Current pose transfer methods allow end-to-end correspondence learning but require the desired final output as ground truth for supervision. Unsupervised methods have been proposed for graph convolutional models but they require ground truth correspondence between the source and target inputs. We present a novel self-supervised framework for 3D pose transfer which can be trained in unsupervised, semi-supervised, or fully supervised settings without any correspondence labels. We introduce two contrastive learning constraints in the latent space: a mesh-level loss for disentangling global patterns including pose and identity, and a point-level loss for discriminating local semantics. We demonstrate quantitatively and qualitatively that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in supervised 3D pose transfer, with comparable results in unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. Our method is also generalisable to unseen human and animal data with complex topologies.

Dafni Antotsiou, Carlo Ciliberto, Tae-Kyun Kim

Deep imitation learning requires many expert demonstrations, which can be hard to obtain, especially when many tasks are involved. However, different tasks often share similarities, so learning them jointly can greatly benefit them and alleviate the need for many demonstrations. But, joint multi-task learning often suffers from negative transfer, sharing information that should be task-specific. In this work, we introduce a method to perform multi-task imitation while allowing for task-specific features. This is done by using proto-policies as modules to divide the tasks into simple sub-behaviours that can be shared. The proto-policies operate in parallel and are adaptively chosen by a selector mechanism that is jointly trained with the modules. Experiments on different sets of tasks show that our method improves upon the accuracy of single agents, task-conditioned and multi-headed multi-task agents, as well as state-of-the-art meta learning agents. We also demonstrate its ability to autonomously divide the tasks into both shared and task-specific sub-behaviours.

Luiz Felipe Vecchietti, Minji Lee, Begench Hangeldiyev et al.

Recent advancements in machine learning (ML) are transforming the field of structural biology. For example, AlphaFold, a groundbreaking neural network for protein structure prediction, has been widely adopted by researchers. The availability of easy-to-use interfaces and interpretable outcomes from the neural network architecture, such as the confidence scores used to color the predicted structures, have made AlphaFold accessible even to non-ML experts. In this paper, we present various methods for representing protein 3D structures from low- to high-resolution, and show how interpretable ML methods can support tasks such as predicting protein structures, protein function, and protein-protein interactions. This survey also emphasizes the significance of interpreting and visualizing ML-based inference for structure-based protein representations that enhance interpretability and knowledge discovery. Developing such interpretable approaches promises to further accelerate fields including drug development and protein design.

Minje Kim, Tae-Kyun Kim

Creating personalized hand avatars is important to offer a realistic experience to users on AR / VR platforms. While most prior studies focused on reconstructing 3D hand shapes, some recent work has tackled the reconstruction of hand textures on top of shapes. However, these methods are often limited to capturing pixels on the visible side of a hand, requiring diverse views of the hand in a video or multiple images as input. In this paper, we propose a novel method, BiTT(Bi-directional Texture reconstruction of Two hands), which is the first end-to-end trainable method for relightable, pose-free texture reconstruction of two interacting hands taking only a single RGB image, by three novel components: 1) bi-directional (left $\leftrightarrow$ right) texture reconstruction using the texture symmetry of left / right hands, 2) utilizing a texture parametric model for hand texture recovery, and 3) the overall coarse-to-fine stage pipeline for reconstructing personalized texture of two interacting hands. BiTT first estimates the scene light condition and albedo image from an input image, then reconstructs the texture of both hands through the texture parametric model and bi-directional texture reconstructor. In experiments using InterHand2.6M and RGB2Hands datasets, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art hand texture reconstruction methods quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/yunminjin2/BiTT

Tao Wang, Kaihao Zhang, Ziqian Shao et al.

Image restoration in adverse weather conditions is a difficult task in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based framework called GridFormer which serves as a backbone for image restoration under adverse weather conditions. GridFormer is designed in a grid structure using a residual dense transformer block, and it introduces two core designs. First, it uses an enhanced attention mechanism in the transformer layer. The mechanism includes stages of the sampler and compact self-attention to improve efficiency, and a local enhancement stage to strengthen local information. Second, we introduce a residual dense transformer block (RDTB) as the final GridFormer layer. This design further improves the network's ability to learn effective features from both preceding and current local features. The GridFormer framework achieves state-of-the-art results on five diverse image restoration tasks in adverse weather conditions, including image deraining, dehazing, deraining \& dehazing, desnowing, and multi-weather restoration. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/TaoWangzj/GridFormer.

Razvan Caramalau, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim

Pool-based sampling in active learning (AL) represents a key framework for an-notating informative data when dealing with deep learning models. In this paper, we present a novel pipeline for pool-based Active Learning. Unlike most previous works, our method exploits accessible unlabelled examples during training to estimate their co-relation with the labelled examples. Another contribution of this paper is to adapt Visual Transformer as a sampler in the AL pipeline. Visual Transformer models non-local visual concept dependency between labelled and unlabelled examples, which is crucial to identifying the influencing unlabelled examples. Also, compared to existing methods where the learner and the sampler are trained in a multi-stage manner, we propose to train them in a task-aware jointly manner which enables transforming the latent space into two separate tasks: one that classifies the labelled examples; the other that distinguishes the labelling direction. We evaluated our work on four different challenging benchmarks of classification and detection tasks viz. CIFAR10, CIFAR100,FashionMNIST, RaFD, and Pascal VOC 2007. Our extensive empirical and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to the existing methods. Code available: https://github.com/razvancaramalau/Visual-Transformer-for-Task-aware-Active-Learning

Jianhong Wang, Yuan Zhang, Yunjie Gu et al.

Value factorisation is a useful technique for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in global reward game, however its underlying mechanism is not yet fully understood. This paper studies a theoretical framework for value factorisation with interpretability via Shapley value theory. We generalise Shapley value to Markov convex game called Markov Shapley value (MSV) and apply it as a value factorisation method in global reward game, which is obtained by the equivalence between the two games. Based on the properties of MSV, we derive Shapley-Bellman optimality equation (SBOE) to evaluate the optimal MSV, which corresponds to an optimal joint deterministic policy. Furthermore, we propose Shapley-Bellman operator (SBO) that is proved to solve SBOE. With a stochastic approximation and some transformations, a new MARL algorithm called Shapley Q-learning (SHAQ) is established, the implementation of which is guided by the theoretical results of SBO and MSV. We also discuss the relationship between SHAQ and relevant value factorisation methods. In the experiments, SHAQ exhibits not only superior performances on all tasks but also the interpretability that agrees with the theoretical analysis. The implementation of this paper is on https://github.com/hsvgbkhgbv/shapley-q-learning.

Razvan Caramalau, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim

We propose a Bayesian approximation to a deep learning architecture for 3D hand pose estimation. Through this framework, we explore and analyse the two types of uncertainties that are influenced either by data or by the learning capability. Furthermore, we draw comparisons against the standard estimator over three popular benchmarks. The first contribution lies in outperforming the baseline while in the second part we address the active learning application. We also show that with a newly proposed acquisition function, our Bayesian 3D hand pose estimator obtains lowest errors with the least amount of data. The underlying code is publicly available at https://github.com/razvancaramalau/al_bhpe.

Razvan Caramalau, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim

We propose a novel pool-based Active Learning framework constructed on a sequential Graph Convolution Network (GCN). Each image's feature from a pool of data represents a node in the graph and the edges encode their similarities. With a small number of randomly sampled images as seed labelled examples, we learn the parameters of the graph to distinguish labelled vs unlabelled nodes by minimising the binary cross-entropy loss. GCN performs message-passing operations between the nodes, and hence, induces similar representations of the strongly associated nodes. We exploit these characteristics of GCN to select the unlabelled examples which are sufficiently different from labelled ones. To this end, we utilise the graph node embeddings and their confidence scores and adapt sampling techniques such as CoreSet and uncertainty-based methods to query the nodes. We flip the label of newly queried nodes from unlabelled to labelled, re-train the learner to optimise the downstream task and the graph to minimise its modified objective. We continue this process within a fixed budget. We evaluate our method on 6 different benchmarks:4 real image classification, 1 depth-based hand pose estimation and 1 synthetic RGB image classification datasets. Our method outperforms several competitive baselines such as VAAL, Learning Loss, CoreSet and attains the new state-of-the-art performance on multiple applications The implementations can be found here: https://github.com/razvancaramalau/Sequential-GCN-for-Active-Learning

Taeyun Woo, Tae-Kyun Kim, Jinah Park

Estimating the poses of both a hand and an object has become an important area of research due to the growing need for advanced vision computing. The primary challenge involves understanding and reconstructing how hands and objects interact, such as contact and physical plausibility. Existing approaches often adopt a graph neural network to incorporate spatial information of hand and object meshes. However, these approaches have not fully exploited the potential of graphs without modification of edges within and between hand- and object-graphs. We propose a graph-based refinement method that incorporates an interaction-aware graph-attention mechanism to account for hand-object interactions. Using edges, we establish connections among closely correlated nodes, both within individual graphs and across different graphs. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method with notable improvements in the realm of physical plausibility.

Jihyun Lee, Shunsuke Saito, Giljoo Nam et al.

We present InterHandGen, a novel framework that learns the generative prior of two-hand interaction. Sampling from our model yields plausible and diverse two-hand shapes in close interaction with or without an object. Our prior can be incorporated into any optimization or learning methods to reduce ambiguity in an ill-posed setup. Our key observation is that directly modeling the joint distribution of multiple instances imposes high learning complexity due to its combinatorial nature. Thus, we propose to decompose the modeling of joint distribution into the modeling of factored unconditional and conditional single instance distribution. In particular, we introduce a diffusion model that learns the single-hand distribution unconditional and conditional to another hand via conditioning dropout. For sampling, we combine anti-penetration and classifier-free guidance to enable plausible generation. Furthermore, we establish the rigorous evaluation protocol of two-hand synthesis, where our method significantly outperforms baseline generative models in terms of plausibility and diversity. We also demonstrate that our diffusion prior can boost the performance of two-hand reconstruction from monocular in-the-wild images, achieving new state-of-the-art accuracy.

Jinseok Kim, Tae-Kyun Kim

Super-resolution (SR) and image generation are important tasks in computer vision and are widely adopted in real-world applications. Most existing methods, however, generate images only at fixed-scale magnification and suffer from over-smoothing and artifacts. Additionally, they do not offer enough diversity of output images nor image consistency at different scales. Most relevant work applied Implicit Neural Representation (INR) to the denoising diffusion model to obtain continuous-resolution yet diverse and high-quality SR results. Since this model operates in the image space, the larger the resolution of image is produced, the more memory and inference time is required, and it also does not maintain scale-specific consistency. We propose a novel pipeline that can super-resolve an input image or generate from a random noise a novel image at arbitrary scales. The method consists of a pretrained auto-encoder, a latent diffusion model, and an implicit neural decoder, and their learning strategies. The proposed method adopts diffusion processes in a latent space, thus efficient, yet aligned with output image space decoded by MLPs at arbitrary scales. More specifically, our arbitrary-scale decoder is designed by the symmetric decoder w/o up-scaling from the pretrained auto-encoder, and Local Implicit Image Function (LIIF) in series. The latent diffusion process is learnt by the denoising and the alignment losses jointly. Errors in output images are backpropagated via the fixed decoder, improving the quality of output images. In the extensive experiments using multiple public benchmarks on the two tasks i.e. image super-resolution and novel image generation at arbitrary scales, the proposed method outperforms relevant methods in metrics of image quality, diversity and scale consistency. It is significantly better than the relevant prior-art in the inference speed and memory usage.

Ruochen Li, Stamos Katsigiannis, Tae-Kyun Kim et al.

Trajectory prediction allows better decision-making in applications of autonomous vehicles or surveillance by predicting the short-term future movement of traffic agents. It is classified into pedestrian or heterogeneous trajectory prediction. The former exploits the relatively consistent behavior of pedestrians, but is limited in real-world scenarios with heterogeneous traffic agents such as cyclists and vehicles. The latter typically relies on extra class label information to distinguish the heterogeneous agents, but such labels are costly to annotate and cannot be generalized to represent different behaviors within the same class of agents. In this work, we introduce the behavioral pseudo-labels that effectively capture the behavior distributions of pedestrians and heterogeneous agents solely based on their motion features, significantly improving the accuracy of trajectory prediction. To implement the framework, we propose the Behavioral Pseudo-Label Informed Sparse Graph Convolution Network (BP-SGCN) that learns pseudo-labels and informs to a trajectory predictor. For optimization, we propose a cascaded training scheme, in which we first learn the pseudo-labels in an unsupervised manner, and then perform end-to-end fine-tuning on the labels in the direction of increasing the trajectory prediction accuracy. Experiments show that our pseudo-labels effectively model different behavior clusters and improve trajectory prediction. Our proposed BP-SGCN outperforms existing methods using both pedestrian (ETH/UCY, pedestrian-only SDD) and heterogeneous agent datasets (SDD, Argoverse 1).

Jihyun Lee, Weipeng Xu, Alexander Richard et al.

We present REWIND (Real-Time Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Diffusion), a one-step diffusion model for real-time, high-fidelity human motion estimation from egocentric image inputs. While an existing method for egocentric whole-body (i.e., body and hands) motion estimation is non-real-time and acausal due to diffusion-based iterative motion refinement to capture correlations between body and hand poses, REWIND operates in a fully causal and real-time manner. To enable real-time inference, we introduce (1) cascaded body-hand denoising diffusion, which effectively models the correlation between egocentric body and hand motions in a fast, feed-forward manner, and (2) diffusion distillation, which enables high-quality motion estimation with a single denoising step. Our denoising diffusion model is based on a modified Transformer architecture, designed to causally model output motions while enhancing generalizability to unseen motion lengths. Additionally, REWIND optionally supports identity-conditioned motion estimation when identity prior is available. To this end, we propose a novel identity conditioning method based on a small set of pose exemplars of the target identity, which further enhances motion estimation quality. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that REWIND significantly outperforms the existing baselines both with and without exemplar-based identity conditioning.

Rumeysa Bodur, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim

Text-guided image editing finds applications in various creative and practical fields. While recent studies in image generation have advanced the field, they often struggle with the dual challenges of coherent image transformation and context preservation. In response, our work introduces prompt augmentation, a method amplifying a single input prompt into several target prompts, strengthening textual context and enabling localised image editing. Specifically, we use the augmented prompts to delineate the intended manipulation area. We propose a Contrastive Loss tailored to driving effective image editing by displacing edited areas and drawing preserved regions closer. Acknowledging the continuous nature of image manipulations, we further refine our approach by incorporating the similarity concept, creating a Soft Contrastive Loss. The new losses are incorporated to the diffusion model, demonstrating improved or competitive image editing results on public datasets and generated images over state-of-the-art approaches.

Minje Kim, Tae-Kyun Kim

Reconstructing detailed hand avatars plays a crucial role in various applications. While prior works have focused on capturing high-fidelity hand geometry, they heavily rely on high-resolution multi-view image inputs and struggle to generalize on low-resolution images. Multi-view image super-resolution methods have been proposed to enforce 3D view consistency. These methods, however, are limited to static objects/scenes with fixed resolutions and are not applicable to articulated deformable hands. In this paper, we propose SRHand (Super-Resolution Hand), the method for reconstructing detailed 3D geometry as well as textured images of hands from low-resolution images. SRHand leverages the advantages of implicit image representation with explicit hand meshes. Specifically, we introduce a geometric-aware implicit image function (GIIF) that learns detailed hand prior by upsampling the coarse input images. By jointly optimizing the implicit image function and explicit 3D hand shapes, our method preserves multi-view and pose consistency among upsampled hand images, and achieves fine-detailed 3D reconstruction (wrinkles, nails). In experiments using the InterHand2.6M and Goliath datasets, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art image upsampling methods adapted to hand datasets, and 3D hand reconstruction methods, quantitatively and qualitatively. Project page: https://yunminjin2.github.io/projects/srhand

Jinjing Zhu, Zhedong Hu, Tae-Kyun Kim et al.

Recent endeavors have been made to leverage self-supervised depth estimation as guidance in unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation. Prior arts, however, overlook the discrepancy between semantic and depth features, as well as the reliability of feature fusion, thus leading to suboptimal segmentation performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel UDA framework called SMART (croSs doMain semAntic segmentation based on eneRgy esTimation) that utilizes Energy-Based Models (EBMs) to obtain task-adaptive features and achieve reliable feature fusion for semantic segmentation with self-supervised depth estimates. Our framework incorporates two novel components: energy-based feature fusion (EB2F) and energy-based reliable fusion Assessment (RFA) modules. The EB2F module produces task-adaptive semantic and depth features by explicitly measuring and reducing their discrepancy using Hopfield energy for better feature fusion. The RFA module evaluates the reliability of the feature fusion using an energy score to improve the effectiveness of depth guidance. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance gains over prior works, validating the effectiveness of our energy-based learning approach.

Taehyeon Eum, Jieun Choi, Tae-Kyun Kim

Diffusion-based methods have achieved significant successes in T2I generation, providing realistic images from text prompts. Despite their capabilities, these models face persistent challenges in generating realistic human hands, often producing images with incorrect finger counts and structurally deformed hands. MGHanD addresses this challenge by applying multi-modal guidance during the inference process. For visual guidance, we employ a discriminator trained on a dataset comprising paired real and generated images with captions, derived from various hand-in-the-wild datasets. We also employ textual guidance with LoRA adapter, which learns the direction from `hands' towards more detailed prompts such as `natural hands', and `anatomically correct fingers' at the latent level. A cumulative hand mask which is gradually enlarged in the assigned time step is applied to the added guidance, allowing the hand to be refined while maintaining the rich generative capabilities of the pre-trained model. In the experiments, our method achieves superior hand generation qualities, without any specific conditions or priors. We carry out both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, along with user studies, to showcase the benefits of our approach in producing high-quality hand images.

Seunghyun Lee, Tae-Kyun Kim

Latest diffusion models have shown promising results in category-level 6D object pose estimation by modeling the conditional pose distribution with depth image input. The existing methods, however, suffer from slow convergence during training, learning its encoder with the diffusion denoising network in end-to-end fashion, and require an additional network that evaluates sampled pose hypotheses to filter out low-quality pose candidates. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline that tackles these limitations by two key components. First, the proposed method pretrains the encoder with the direct pose regression head, and jointly learns the networks via the regression head and the denoising diffusion head, significantly accelerating training convergence while achieving higher accuracy. Second, sampling guidance via time-dependent score scaling is proposed s.t. the exploration-exploitation trade-off is effectively taken, eliminating the need for the additional evaluation network. The sampling guidance maintains multi-modal characteristics of symmetric objects at early denoising steps while ensuring high-quality pose generation at final steps. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks including REAL275, HouseCat6D, and ROPE, demonstrate that the proposed method, simple yet effective, achieves state-of-the-art accuracies even with single-pose inference, while being more efficient in both training and inference.

Taeyun Woo, Jinah Park, Tae-Kyun Kim

Deterministic models for 3D hand pose reconstruction, whether single-staged or cascaded, struggle with pose ambiguities caused by self-occlusions and complex hand articulations. Existing cascaded approaches refine predictions in a coarse-to-fine manner but remain deterministic and cannot capture pose uncertainties. Recent probabilistic methods model pose distributions yet are restricted to single-stage estimation, which often fails to produce accurate 3D reconstructions without refinement. To address these limitations, we propose a coarse-to-fine cascaded diffusion framework that combines probabilistic modeling with cascaded refinement. The first stage is a joint diffusion model that samples diverse 3D joint hypotheses, and the second stage is a Mesh Latent Diffusion Model (Mesh LDM) that reconstructs a 3D hand mesh conditioned on a joint sample. By training Mesh LDM with diverse joint hypotheses in a learned latent space, our framework learns distribution-aware joint-mesh relationships and robust hand priors. Furthermore, the cascaded design mitigates the difficulty of directly mapping 2D images to dense 3D poses, enhancing accuracy through sequential refinement. Experiments on FreiHAND and HO3Dv2 demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while effectively modeling pose distributions.

Hangil Park, Yongmin Seo, Tae-Kyun Kim

Anomaly detection (AD) plays an important role in various real-world applications. Recent advancements in AD, however, are often biased towards industrial inspection, struggle to generalize to broader tasks like semantic anomaly detection and vice versa. Although recent methods have attempted to address general anomaly detection, their performance remains sensitive to dataset-specific settings and single-class tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-model ensemble approach based on knowledge distillation (KD) to bridge this gap. Our framework consists of a teacher and two student models: an Encoder-Decoder model, specialized in detecting patch-level minor defects for industrial AD and an Encoder-Encoder model, optimized for semantic AD. Both models leverage a shared pre-trained encoder (DINOv2) to extract high-quality feature representations. The dual models are jointly learned using the Noisy-OR objective, and the final anomaly score is obtained using the joint probability via local and semantic anomaly scores derived from the respective models. We evaluate our method on eight public benchmarks under both single-class and multi-class settings: MVTec-AD, MVTec-LOCO, VisA and Real-IAD for industrial inspection and CIFAR-10/100, FMNIST and View for semantic anomaly detection. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art accuracies in both domains, in multi-class as well as single-class settings, demonstrating generalization across multiple domains of anomaly detection. Our model achieved an image-level AUROC of 99.7% on MVTec-AD and 97.8% on CIFAR-10, which is significantly better than the prior general AD models in multi-class settings and even higher than the best specialist models on individual benchmarks.

Hao Ai, Zidong Cao, Haonan Lu et al.

360 images, with a field-of-view (FoV) of 180x360, provide immersive and realistic environments for emerging virtual reality (VR) applications, such as virtual tourism, where users desire to create diverse panoramic scenes from a narrow FoV photo they take from a viewpoint via portable devices. It thus brings us to a technical challenge: `How to allow the users to freely create diverse and immersive virtual scenes from a narrow FoV image with a specified viewport?' To this end, we propose a transformer-based 360 image outpainting framework called Dream360, which can generate diverse, high-fidelity, and high-resolution panoramas from user-selected viewports, considering the spherical properties of 360 images. Compared with existing methods, e.g., [3], which primarily focus on inputs with rectangular masks and central locations while overlooking the spherical property of 360 images, our Dream360 offers higher outpainting flexibility and fidelity based on the spherical representation. Dream360 comprises two key learning stages: (I) codebook-based panorama outpainting via Spherical-VQGAN (S-VQGAN), and (II) frequency-aware refinement with a novel frequency-aware consistency loss. Specifically, S-VQGAN learns a sphere-specific codebook from spherical harmonic (SH) values, providing a better representation of spherical data distribution for scene modeling. The frequency-aware refinement matches the resolution and further improves the semantic consistency and visual fidelity of the generated results. Our Dream360 achieves significantly lower Frechet Inception Distance (FID) scores and better visual fidelity than existing methods. We also conducted a user study involving 15 participants to interactively evaluate the quality of the generated results in VR, demonstrating the flexibility and superiority of our Dream360 framework.

Rumeysa Bodur, Erhan Gundogdu, Binod Bhattarai et al.

Diffusion models (DMs) can generate realistic images with text guidance using large-scale datasets. However, they demonstrate limited controllability in the output space of the generated images. We propose a novel learning method for text-guided image editing, namely \texttt{iEdit}, that generates images conditioned on a source image and a textual edit prompt. As a fully-annotated dataset with target images does not exist, previous approaches perform subject-specific fine-tuning at test time or adopt contrastive learning without a target image, leading to issues on preserving the fidelity of the source image. We propose to automatically construct a dataset derived from LAION-5B, containing pseudo-target images with their descriptive edit prompts given input image-caption pairs. This dataset gives us the flexibility of introducing a weakly-supervised loss function to generate the pseudo-target image from the latent noise of the source image conditioned on the edit prompt. To encourage localised editing and preserve or modify spatial structures in the image, we propose a loss function that uses segmentation masks to guide the editing during training and optionally at inference. Our model is trained on the constructed dataset with 200K samples and constrained GPU resources. It shows favourable results against its counterparts in terms of image fidelity, CLIP alignment score and qualitatively for editing both generated and real images.

Rumeysa Bodur, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim

Editing facial expressions by only changing what we want is a long-standing research problem in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for image manipulation. Most of the existing methods that rely only on a global generator usually suffer from changing unwanted attributes along with the target attributes. Recently, hierarchical networks that consist of both a global network dealing with the whole image and multiple local networks focusing on local parts are showing success. However, these methods extract local regions by bounding boxes centred around the sparse facial key points which are non-differentiable, inaccurate and unrealistic. Hence, the solution becomes sub-optimal, introduces unwanted artefacts degrading the overall quality of the synthetic images. Moreover, a recent study has shown strong correlation between facial attributes and local semantic regions. To exploit this relationship, we designed a unified architecture of semantic segmentation and hierarchical GANs. A unique advantage of our framework is that on forward pass the semantic segmentation network conditions the generative model, and on backward pass gradients from hierarchical GANs are propagated to the semantic segmentation network, which makes our framework an end-to-end differentiable architecture. This allows both architectures to benefit from each other. To demonstrate its advantages, we evaluate our method on two challenging facial expression translation benchmarks, AffectNet and RaFD, and a semantic segmentation benchmark, CelebAMask-HQ across two popular architectures, BiSeNet and UNet. Our extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on both face semantic segmentation and face expression manipulation tasks validate the effectiveness of our work over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Lin Wang, Yujeong Chae, Sung-Hoon Yoon et al.

Event cameras sense per-pixel intensity changes and produce asynchronous event streams with high dynamic range and less motion blur, showing advantages over conventional cameras. A hurdle of training event-based models is the lack of large qualitative labeled data. Prior works learning end-tasks mostly rely on labeled or pseudo-labeled datasets obtained from the active pixel sensor (APS) frames; however, such datasets' quality is far from rivaling those based on the canonical images. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called \textbf{EvDistill}, to learn a student network on the unlabeled and unpaired event data (target modality) via knowledge distillation (KD) from a teacher network trained with large-scale, labeled image data (source modality). To enable KD across the unpaired modalities, we first propose a bidirectional modality reconstruction (BMR) module to bridge both modalities and simultaneously exploit them to distill knowledge via the crafted pairs, causing no extra computation in the inference. The BMR is improved by the end-tasks and KD losses in an end-to-end manner. Second, we leverage the structural similarities of both modalities and adapt the knowledge by matching their distributions. Moreover, as most prior feature KD methods are uni-modality and less applicable to our problem, we propose to leverage an affinity graph KD loss to boost the distillation. Our extensive experiments on semantic segmentation and object recognition demonstrate that EvDistill achieves significantly better results than the prior works and KD with only events and APS frames.

Jiaze Sun, Binod Bhattarai, Zhixiang Chen et al.

Semantically guided conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) have become a popular approach for face editing in recent years. However, most existing methods introduce semantic masks as direct conditional inputs to the generator and often require the target masks to perform the corresponding translation in the RGB space. We propose SeCGAN, a novel label-guided cGAN for editing face images utilising semantic information without the need to specify target semantic masks. During training, SeCGAN has two branches of generators and discriminators operating in parallel, with one trained to translate RGB images and the other for semantic masks. To bridge the two branches in a mutually beneficial manner, we introduce a semantic consistency loss which constrains both branches to have consistent semantic outputs. Whilst both branches are required during training, the RGB branch is our primary network and the semantic branch is not needed for inference. Our results on CelebA and CelebA-HQ demonstrate that our approach is able to generate facial images with more accurate attributes, outperforming competitive baselines in terms of Target Attribute Recognition Rate whilst maintaining quality metrics such as self-supervised Fréchet Inception Distance and Inception Score.

Suman Sapkota, Bidur Khanal, Binod Bhattarai et al.

Multi-domain image-to-image translation with conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can generate highly photo realistic images with desired target classes, yet these synthetic images have not always been helpful to improve downstream supervised tasks such as image classification. Improving downstream tasks with synthetic examples requires generating images with high fidelity to the unknown conditional distribution of the target class, which many labeled conditional GANs attempt to achieve by adding soft-max cross-entropy loss based auxiliary classifier in the discriminator. As recent studies suggest that the soft-max loss in Euclidean space of deep feature does not leverage their intrinsic angular distribution, we propose to replace this loss in auxiliary classifier with an additive angular margin (AAM) loss that takes benefit of the intrinsic angular distribution, and promotes intra-class compactness and inter-class separation to help generator synthesize high fidelity images. We validate our method on RaFD and CIFAR-100, two challenging face expression and natural image classification data set. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in several different evaluation criteria including recently proposed GAN-train and GAN-test metrics designed to assess the impact of synthetic data on downstream classification task, assessing the usefulness in data augmentation for supervised tasks with prediction accuracy score and average confidence score, and the well known FID metric.

Zhixiang Chen, Tae-Kyun Kim

3D morphable models are widely used for the shape representation of an object class in computer vision and graphics applications. In this work, we focus on deep 3D morphable models that directly apply deep learning on 3D mesh data with a hierarchical structure to capture information at multiple scales. While great efforts have been made to design the convolution operator, how to best aggregate vertex features across hierarchical levels deserves further attention. In contrast to resorting to mesh decimation, we propose an attention based module to learn mapping matrices for better feature aggregation across hierarchical levels. Specifically, the mapping matrices are generated by a compatibility function of the keys and queries. The keys and queries are trainable variables, learned by optimizing the target objective, and shared by all data samples of the same object class. Our proposed module can be used as a train-only drop-in replacement for the feature aggregation in existing architectures for both downsampling and upsampling. Our experiments show that through the end-to-end training of the mapping matrices, we achieve state-of-the-art results on a variety of 3D shape datasets in comparison to existing morphable models.

Xuepeng Shi, Qi Ye, Xiaozhi Chen et al.

Monocular 3D object detection is of great significance for autonomous driving but remains challenging. The core challenge is to predict the distance of objects in the absence of explicit depth information. Unlike regressing the distance as a single variable in most existing methods, we propose a novel geometry-based distance decomposition to recover the distance by its factors. The decomposition factors the distance of objects into the most representative and stable variables, i.e. the physical height and the projected visual height in the image plane. Moreover, the decomposition maintains the self-consistency between the two heights, leading to robust distance prediction when both predicted heights are inaccurate. The decomposition also enables us to trace the causes of the distance uncertainty for different scenarios. Such decomposition makes the distance prediction interpretable, accurate, and robust. Our method directly predicts 3D bounding boxes from RGB images with a compact architecture, making the training and inference simple and efficient. The experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the monocular 3D Object Detection and Birds Eye View tasks of the KITTI dataset, and can generalize to images with different camera intrinsics.

Dafni Antotsiou, Carlo Ciliberto, Tae-Kyun Kim

Deep Imitation Learning requires a large number of expert demonstrations, which are not always easy to obtain, especially for complex tasks. A way to overcome this shortage of labels is through data augmentation. However, this cannot be easily applied to control tasks due to the sequential nature of the problem. In this work, we introduce a novel augmentation method which preserves the success of the augmented trajectories. To achieve this, we introduce a semi-supervised correction network that aims to correct distorted expert actions. To adequately test the abilities of the correction network, we develop an adversarial data augmented imitation architecture to train an imitation agent using synthetic experts. Additionally, we introduce a metric to measure diversity in trajectory datasets. Experiments show that our data augmentation strategy can improve accuracy and convergence time of adversarial imitation while preserving the diversity between the generated and real trajectories.

Rumeysa Bodur, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim

Manipulating facial expressions is a challenging task due to fine-grained shape changes produced by facial muscles and the lack of input-output pairs for supervised learning. Unlike previous methods using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), which rely on cycle-consistency loss or sparse geometry (landmarks) loss for expression synthesis, we propose a novel GAN framework to exploit 3D dense (depth and surface normals) information for expression manipulation. However, a large-scale dataset containing RGB images with expression annotations and their corresponding depth maps is not available. To this end, we propose to use an off-the-shelf state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction model to estimate the depth and create a large-scale RGB-Depth dataset after a manual data clean-up process. We utilise this dataset to minimise the novel depth consistency loss via adversarial learning (note we do not have ground truth depth maps for generated face images) and the depth categorical loss of synthetic data on the discriminator. In addition, to improve the generalisation and lower the bias of the depth parameters, we propose to use a novel confidence regulariser on the discriminator side of the framework. We extensively performed both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on two publicly available challenging facial expression benchmarks: AffectNet and RaFD. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the competitive baseline and existing arts by a large margin.

Guillermo Garcia-Hernando, Edward Johns, Tae-Kyun Kim

Dexterous manipulation of objects in virtual environments with our bare hands, by using only a depth sensor and a state-of-the-art 3D hand pose estimator (HPE), is challenging. While virtual environments are ruled by physics, e.g. object weights and surface frictions, the absence of force feedback makes the task challenging, as even slight inaccuracies on finger tips or contact points from HPE may make the interactions fail. Prior arts simply generate contact forces in the direction of the fingers' closures, when finger joints penetrate virtual objects. Although useful for simple grasping scenarios, they cannot be applied to dexterous manipulations such as in-hand manipulation. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL) approaches train agents that learn skills by using task-specific rewards, without considering any online user input. In this work, we propose to learn a model that maps noisy input hand poses to target virtual poses, which introduces the needed contacts to accomplish the tasks on a physics simulator. The agent is trained in a residual setting by using a model-free hybrid RL+IL approach. A 3D hand pose estimation reward is introduced leading to an improvement on HPE accuracy when the physics-guided corrected target poses are remapped to the input space. As the model corrects HPE errors by applying minor but crucial joint displacements for contacts, this helps to keep the generated motion visually close to the user input. Since HPE sequences performing successful virtual interactions do not exist, a data generation scheme to train and evaluate the system is proposed. We test our framework in two applications that use hand pose estimates for dexterous manipulations: hand-object interactions in VR and hand-object motion reconstruction in-the-wild.

Jianhong Wang, Yuan Zhang, Tae-Kyun Kim et al.

Designing task-oriented dialogue systems is a challenging research topic, since it needs not only to generate utterances fulfilling user requests but also to guarantee the comprehensibility. Many previous works trained end-to-end (E2E) models with supervised learning (SL), however, the bias in annotated system utterances remains as a bottleneck. Reinforcement learning (RL) deals with the problem through using non-differentiable evaluation metrics (e.g., the success rate) as rewards. Nonetheless, existing works with RL showed that the comprehensibility of generated system utterances could be corrupted when improving the performance on fulfilling user requests. In our work, we (1) propose modelling the hierarchical structure between dialogue policy and natural language generator (NLG) with the option framework, called HDNO, where the latent dialogue act is applied to avoid designing specific dialogue act representations; (2) train HDNO via hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL), as well as suggest the asynchronous updates between dialogue policy and NLG during training to theoretically guarantee their convergence to a local maximizer; and (3) propose using a discriminator modelled with language models as an additional reward to further improve the comprehensibility. We test HDNO on MultiWoz 2.0 and MultiWoz 2.1, the datasets on multi-domain dialogues, in comparison with word-level E2E model trained with RL, LaRL and HDSA, showing improvements on the performance evaluated by automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate the semantic meanings of latent dialogue acts to show the explanability for HDNO.

Jiaze Sun, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim

We present a novel self-supervised learning approach for conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) under a semi-supervised setting. Unlike prior self-supervised approaches which often involve geometric augmentations on the image space such as predicting rotation angles, our pretext task leverages the label space. We perform augmentation by randomly sampling sensible labels from the label space of the few labelled examples available and assigning them as target labels to the abundant unlabelled examples from the same distribution as that of the labelled ones. The images are then translated and grouped into positive and negative pairs by their target labels, acting as training examples for our pretext task which involves optimising an auxiliary match loss on the discriminator's side. We tested our method on two challenging benchmarks, CelebA and RaFD, and evaluated the results using standard metrics including Fréchet Inception Distance, Inception Score, and Attribute Classification Rate. Extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method over competitive baselines and existing arts. In particular, our method surpasses the baseline with only 20% of the labelled examples used to train the baseline.

Anil Armagan, Guillermo Garcia-Hernando, Seungryul Baek et al.

We study how well different types of approaches generalise in the task of 3D hand pose estimation under single hand scenarios and hand-object interaction. We show that the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods can drop, and that they fail mostly on poses absent from the training set. Unfortunately, since the space of hand poses is highly dimensional, it is inherently not feasible to cover the whole space densely, despite recent efforts in collecting large-scale training datasets. This sampling problem is even more severe when hands are interacting with objects and/or inputs are RGB rather than depth images, as RGB images also vary with lighting conditions and colors. To address these issues, we designed a public challenge (HANDS'19) to evaluate the abilities of current 3D hand pose estimators (HPEs) to interpolate and extrapolate the poses of a training set. More exactly, HANDS'19 is designed (a) to evaluate the influence of both depth and color modalities on 3D hand pose estimation, under the presence or absence of objects; (b) to assess the generalisation abilities w.r.t. four main axes: shapes, articulations, viewpoints, and objects; (c) to explore the use of a synthetic hand model to fill the gaps of current datasets. Through the challenge, the overall accuracy has dramatically improved over the baseline, especially on extrapolation tasks, from 27mm to 13mm mean joint error. Our analyses highlight the impacts of: Data pre-processing, ensemble approaches, the use of a parametric 3D hand model (MANO), and different HPE methods/backbones.

Juil Sock, Guillermo Garcia-Hernando, Anil Armagan et al.

Most successful approaches to estimate the 6D pose of an object typically train a neural network by supervising the learning with annotated poses in real world images. These annotations are generally expensive to obtain and a common workaround is to generate and train on synthetic scenes, with the drawback of limited generalisation when the model is deployed in the real world. In this work, a two-stage 6D object pose estimator framework that can be applied on top of existing neural-network-based approaches and that does not require pose annotations on real images is proposed. The first self-supervised stage enforces the pose consistency between rendered predictions and real input images, narrowing the gap between the two domains. The second stage fine-tunes the previously trained model by enforcing the photometric consistency between pairs of different object views, where one image is warped and aligned to match the view of the other and thus enabling their comparison. In the absence of both real image annotations and depth information, applying the proposed framework on top of two recent approaches results in state-of-the-art performance when compared to methods trained only on synthetic data, domain adaptation baselines and a concurrent self-supervised approach on LINEMOD, LINEMOD OCCLUSION and HomebrewedDB datasets.

Sharib Ali, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim et al.

Endoscopy is a widely used imaging modality to diagnose and treat diseases in hollow organs as for example the gastrointestinal tract, the kidney and the liver. However, due to varied modalities and use of different imaging protocols at various clinical centers impose significant challenges when generalising deep learning models. Moreover, the assembly of large datasets from different clinical centers can introduce a huge label bias that renders any learnt model unusable. Also, when using new modality or presence of images with rare patterns, a bulk amount of similar image data and their corresponding labels are required for training these models. In this work, we propose to use a few-shot learning approach that requires less training data and can be used to predict label classes of test samples from an unseen dataset. We propose a novel additive angular margin metric in the framework of prototypical network in few-shot learning setting. We compare our approach to the several established methods on a large cohort of multi-center, multi-organ, and multi-modal endoscopy data. The proposed algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Lin Wang, Tae-Kyun Kim, Kuk-Jin Yoon

Event cameras sense intensity changes and have many advantages over conventional cameras. To take advantage of event cameras, some methods have been proposed to reconstruct intensity images from event streams. However, the outputs are still in low resolution (LR), noisy, and unrealistic. The low-quality outputs stem broader applications of event cameras, where high spatial resolution (HR) is needed as well as high temporal resolution, dynamic range, and no motion blur. We consider the problem of reconstructing and super-resolving intensity images from LR events, when no ground truth (GT) HR images and down-sampling kernels are available. To tackle the challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end pipeline that reconstructs LR images from event streams, enhances the image qualities and upsamples the enhanced images, called EventSR. For the absence of real GT images, our method is primarily unsupervised, deploying adversarial learning. To train EventSR, we create an open dataset including both real-world and simulated scenes. The use of both datasets boosts up the network performance, and the network architectures and various loss functions in each phase help improve the image qualities. The whole pipeline is trained in three phases. While each phase is mainly for one of the three tasks, the networks in earlier phases are fine-tuned by respective loss functions in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that EventSR reconstructs high-quality SR images from events for both simulated and real-world data.

Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim

Conditional GANs are widely used in translating an image from one category to another. Meaningful conditions to GANs provide greater flexibility and control over the nature of the target domain synthetic data. Existing conditional GANs commonly encode target domain label information as hard-coded categorical vectors in the form of 0s and 1s. The major drawbacks of such representations are inability to encode the high-order semantic information of target categories and their relative dependencies. We propose a novel end-to-end learning framework with Graph Convolutional Networks to learn the attribute representations to condition on the generator. The GAN losses, i.e. the discriminator and attribute classification losses, are fed back to the Graph resulting in the synthetic images that are more natural and clearer in attributes. Moreover, prior-arts are given priorities to condition on the generator side, not on the discriminator side of GANs. We apply the conditions to the discriminator side as well via multi-task learning. We enhanced the four state-of-the art cGANs architectures: Stargan, Stargan-JNT, AttGAN and STGAN. Our extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on challenging face attributes manipulation data set, CelebA, LFWA, and RaFD, show that the cGANs enhanced by our methods outperform by a large margin, compared to their counter-parts and other conditioning methods, in terms of both target attributes recognition rates and quality measures such as PSNR and SSIM.

Caner Sahin, Guillermo Garcia-Hernando, Juil Sock et al.

Object pose recovery has gained increasing attention in the computer vision field as it has become an important problem in rapidly evolving technological areas related to autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. Existing review-related studies have addressed the problem at visual level in 2D, going through the methods which produce 2D bounding boxes of objects of interest in RGB images. The 2D search space is enlarged either using the geometry information available in the 3D space along with RGB (Mono/Stereo) images, or utilizing depth data from LIDAR sensors and/or RGB-D cameras. 3D bounding box detectors, producing category-level amodal 3D bounding boxes, are evaluated on gravity aligned images, while full 6D object pose estimators are mostly tested at instance-level on the images where the alignment constraint is removed. Recently, 6D object pose estimation is tackled at the level of categories. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive and most recent review of the methods on object pose recovery, from 3D bounding box detectors to full 6D pose estimators. The methods mathematically model the problem as a classification, regression, classification & regression, template matching, and point-pair feature matching task. Based on this, a mathematical-model-based categorization of the methods is established. Datasets used for evaluating the methods are investigated with respect to the challenges, and evaluation metrics are studied. Quantitative results of experiments in the literature are analyzed to show which category of methods best performs across what types of challenges. The analyses are further extended comparing two methods, which are our own implementations, so that the outcomes from the public results are further solidified. Current position of the field is summarized regarding object pose recovery, and possible research directions are identified.