Yuan Gao

Jiehong Lin, Xian Shi, Yuan Gao et al.

Point set is arguably the most direct approximation of an object or scene surface, yet its practical acquisition often suffers from the shortcoming of being noisy, sparse, and possibly incomplete, which restricts its use for a high-quality surface recovery. Point set upsampling aims to increase its density and regularity such that a better surface recovery could be achieved. The problem is severely ill-posed and challenging, considering that the upsampling target itself is only an approximation of the underlying surface. Motivated to improve the surface approximation via point set upsampling, we identify the factors that are critical to the objective, by pairing the surface approximation error bounds of the input and output point sets. It suggests that given a fixed budget of points in the upsampling result, more points should be distributed onto the surface regions where local curvatures are relatively high. To implement the motivation, we propose a novel design of Curvature-ADaptive Point set Upsampling network (CAD-PU), the core of which is a module of curvature-adaptive feature expansion. To train CAD-PU, we follow the same motivation and propose geometrically intuitive surrogates that approximate discrete notions of surface curvature for the upsampled point set. We further integrate the proposed surrogates into an adversarial learning based curvature minimization objective, which gives a practically effective learning of CAD-PU. We conduct thorough experiments that show the efficacy of our contributions and the advantages of our method over existing ones. Our implementation codes are publicly available at https://github.com/JiehongLin/CAD-PU.

Xiang Long, Kaipeng Deng, Guanzhong Wang et al.

Object detection is one of the most important areas in computer vision, which plays a key role in various practical scenarios. Due to limitation of hardware, it is often necessary to sacrifice accuracy to ensure the infer speed of the detector in practice. Therefore, the balance between effectiveness and efficiency of object detector must be considered. The goal of this paper is to implement an object detector with relatively balanced effectiveness and efficiency that can be directly applied in actual application scenarios, rather than propose a novel detection model. Considering that YOLOv3 has been widely used in practice, we develop a new object detector based on YOLOv3. We mainly try to combine various existing tricks that almost not increase the number of model parameters and FLOPs, to achieve the goal of improving the accuracy of detector as much as possible while ensuring that the speed is almost unchanged. Since all experiments in this paper are conducted based on PaddlePaddle, we call it PP-YOLO. By combining multiple tricks, PP-YOLO can achieve a better balance between effectiveness (45.2% mAP) and efficiency (72.9 FPS), surpassing the existing state-of-the-art detectors such as EfficientDet and YOLOv4.Source code is at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.

Dong Yang, Wenyu Xu, Yuan Gao et al.

High-quality imaging is crucial for ensuring safety supervision and intelligent deployment in fields like transportation and industry. It enables precise and detailed monitoring of operations, facilitating timely detection of potential hazards and efficient management. However, adverse weather conditions, such as atmospheric haziness and precipitation, can have a significant impact on image quality. When the atmosphere contains dense haze or water droplets, the incident light scatters, leading to degraded captured images. This degradation is evident in the form of image blur and reduced contrast, increasing the likelihood of incorrect assessments and interpretations by intelligent imaging systems (IIS). To address the challenge of restoring degraded images in hazy and rainy conditions, this paper proposes a novel multi-view knowledge-guided scene recovery network (termed MvKSR). Specifically, guided filtering is performed on the degraded image to separate high/low-frequency components. Subsequently, an en-decoder-based multi-view feature coarse extraction module (MCE) is used to coarsely extract features from different views of the degraded image. The multi-view feature fine fusion module (MFF) will learn and infer the restoration of degraded images through mixed supervision under different views. Additionally, we suggest an atrous residual block to handle global restoration and local repair in hazy/rainy/mixed scenes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MvKSR outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency and stability for restoring degraded scenarios in IIS.

Iddo Drori, Darshan Thaker, Arjun Srivatsa et al.

Proteins are the major building blocks of life, and actuators of almost all chemical and biophysical events in living organisms. Their native structures in turn enable their biological functions which have a fundamental role in drug design. This motivates predicting the structure of a protein from its sequence of amino acids, a fundamental problem in computational biology. In this work, we demonstrate state-of-the-art protein structure prediction (PSP) results using embeddings and deep learning models for prediction of backbone atom distance matrices and torsion angles. We recover 3D coordinates of backbone atoms and reconstruct full atom protein by optimization. We create a new gold standard dataset of proteins which is comprehensive and easy to use. Our dataset consists of amino acid sequences, Q8 secondary structures, position specific scoring matrices, multiple sequence alignment co-evolutionary features, backbone atom distance matrices, torsion angles, and 3D coordinates. We evaluate the quality of our structure prediction by RMSD on the latest Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) test data and demonstrate competitive results with the winning teams and AlphaFold in CASP13 and supersede the results of the winning teams in CASP12. We make our data, models, and code publicly available.