Yiming Qian

Dong Huo, Jian Wang, Yiming Qian et al.

This paper proposes a new glass segmentation method utilizing paired RGB and thermal images. Due to the large difference between the transmission property of visible light and that of the thermal energy through the glass where most glass is transparent to the visible light but opaque to thermal energy, glass regions of a scene are made more distinguishable with a pair of RGB and thermal images than solely with an RGB image. To exploit such a unique property, we propose a neural network architecture that effectively combines an RGB-thermal image pair with a new multi-modal fusion module based on attention, and integrate CNN and transformer to extract local features and non-local dependencies, respectively. As well, we have collected a new dataset containing 5551 RGB-thermal image pairs with ground-truth segmentation annotations. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on fusing RGB and thermal data for glass segmentation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Dong-Huo/RGB-T-Glass-Segmentation.

Meng Wang, Tian Lin, Lianyu Wang et al.

Failure to recognize samples from the classes unseen during training is a major limitation of artificial intelligence in the real-world implementation for recognition and classification of retinal anomalies. We established an uncertainty-inspired open-set (UIOS) model, which was trained with fundus images of 9 retinal conditions. Besides assessing the probability of each category, UIOS also calculated an uncertainty score to express its confidence. Our UIOS model with thresholding strategy achieved an F1 score of 99.55%, 97.01% and 91.91% for the internal testing set, external target categories (TC)-JSIEC dataset and TC-unseen testing set, respectively, compared to the F1 score of 92.20%, 80.69% and 64.74% by the standard AI model. Furthermore, UIOS correctly predicted high uncertainty scores, which would prompt the need for a manual check in the datasets of non-target categories retinal diseases, low-quality fundus images, and non-fundus images. UIOS provides a robust method for real-world screening of retinal anomalies.

Qing Cai, Yiming Qian, Jinxing Li et al.

Transformer-based architectures start to emerge in single image super resolution (SISR) and have achieved promising performance. Most existing Vision Transformers divide images into the same number of patches with a fixed size, which may not be optimal for restoring patches with different levels of texture richness. This paper presents HIPA, a novel Transformer architecture that progressively recovers the high resolution image using a hierarchical patch partition. Specifically, we build a cascaded model that processes an input image in multiple stages, where we start with tokens with small patch sizes and gradually merge to the full resolution. Such a hierarchical patch mechanism not only explicitly enables feature aggregation at multiple resolutions but also adaptively learns patch-aware features for different image regions, e.g., using a smaller patch for areas with fine details and a larger patch for textureless regions. Meanwhile, a new attention-based position encoding scheme for Transformer is proposed to let the network focus on which tokens should be paid more attention by assigning different weights to different tokens, which is the first time to our best knowledge. Furthermore, we also propose a new multi-reception field attention module to enlarge the convolution reception field from different branches. The experimental results on several public datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed HIPA over previous methods quantitatively and qualitatively.

Meng Wang, Lianyu Wang, Xinxing Xu et al.

Deep learning models have shown promising performance in the field of diabetic retinopathy (DR) staging. However, collaboratively training a DR staging model across multiple institutions remains a challenge due to non-iid data, client reliability, and confidence evaluation of the prediction. To address these issues, we propose a novel federated uncertainty-aware aggregation paradigm (FedUAA), which considers the reliability of each client and produces a confidence estimation for the DR staging. In our FedUAA, an aggregated encoder is shared by all clients for learning a global representation of fundus images, while a novel temperature-warmed uncertainty head (TWEU) is utilized for each client for local personalized staging criteria. Our TWEU employs an evidential deep layer to produce the uncertainty score with the DR staging results for client reliability evaluation. Furthermore, we developed a novel uncertainty-aware weighting module (UAW) to dynamically adjust the weights of model aggregation based on the uncertainty score distribution of each client. In our experiments, we collect five publicly available datasets from different institutions to conduct a dataset for federated DR staging to satisfy the real non-iid condition. The experimental results demonstrate that our FedUAA achieves better DR staging performance with higher reliability compared to other federated learning methods. Our proposed FedUAA paradigm effectively addresses the challenges of collaboratively training DR staging models across multiple institutions, and provides a robust and reliable solution for the deployment of DR diagnosis models in real-world clinical scenarios.

Fenggen Yu, Yiming Qian, Francisca Gil-Ureta et al. · amazon-science

We present the first active learning tool for fine-grained 3D part labeling, a problem which challenges even the most advanced deep learning (DL) methods due to the significant structural variations among the small and intricate parts. For the same reason, the necessary data annotation effort is tremendous, motivating approaches to minimize human involvement. Our labeling tool iteratively verifies or modifies part labels predicted by a deep neural network, with human feedback continually improving the network prediction. To effectively reduce human efforts, we develop two novel features in our tool, hierarchical and symmetry-aware active labeling. Our human-in-the-loop approach, coined HAL3D, achieves 100% accuracy (barring human errors) on any test set with pre-defined hierarchical part labels, with 80% time-saving over manual effort.

Meng Wang, Kai Yu, Chun-Mei Feng et al.

Federated learning (FL), as an effective decentralized distributed learning approach, enables multiple institutions to jointly train a model without sharing their local data. However, the domain feature shift caused by different acquisition devices/clients substantially degrades the performance of the FL model. Furthermore, most existing FL approaches aim to improve accuracy without considering reliability (e.g., confidence or uncertainty). The predictions are thus unreliable when deployed in safety-critical applications. Therefore, aiming at improving the performance of FL in non-Domain feature issues while enabling the model more reliable. In this paper, we propose a novel reliable federated disentangling network, termed RFedDis, which utilizes feature disentangling to enable the ability to capture the global domain-invariant cross-client representation and preserve local client-specific feature learning. Meanwhile, to effectively integrate the decoupled features, an uncertainty-aware decision fusion is also introduced to guide the network for dynamically integrating the decoupled features at the evidence level, while producing a reliable prediction with an estimated uncertainty. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed RFedDis is the first work to develop an FL approach based on evidential uncertainty combined with feature disentangling, which enhances the performance and reliability of FL in non-IID domain features. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed RFedDis provides outstanding performance with a high degree of reliability as compared to other state-of-the-art FL approaches.

Akshay Gadi Patil, Yiming Qian, Shan Yang et al.

The dominant majority of 3D models that appear in gaming, VR/AR, and those we use to train geometric deep learning algorithms are incomplete, since they are modeled as surface meshes and missing their interior structures. We present a learning framework to recover the shape interiors (RoSI) of existing 3D models with only their exteriors from multi-view and multi-articulation images. Given a set of RGB images that capture a target 3D object in different articulated poses, possibly from only few views, our method infers the interior planes that are observable in the input images. Our neural architecture is trained in a category-agnostic manner and it consists of a motion-aware multi-view analysis phase including pose, depth, and motion estimations, followed by interior plane detection in images and 3D space, and finally multi-view plane fusion. In addition, our method also predicts part articulations and is able to realize and even extrapolate the captured motions on the target 3D object. We evaluate our method by quantitative and qualitative comparisons to baselines and alternative solutions, as well as testing on untrained object categories and real image inputs to assess its generalization capabilities.

Yiming Qian, James H. Elder

Linear perspectivecues deriving from regularities of the built environment can be used to recalibrate both intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters online, but these estimates can be unreliable due to irregularities in the scene, uncertainties in line segment estimation and background clutter. Here we address this challenge through four initiatives. First, we use the PanoContext panoramic image dataset [27] to curate a novel and realistic dataset of planar projections over a broad range of scenes, focal lengths and camera poses. Second, we use this novel dataset and the YorkUrbanDB [4] to systematically evaluate the linear perspective deviation measures frequently found in the literature and show that the choice of deviation measure and likelihood model has a huge impact on reliability. Third, we use these findings to create a novel system for online camera calibration we call fR, and show that it outperforms the prior state of the art, substantially reducing error in estimated camera rotation and focal length. Our fourth contribution is a novel and efficient approach to estimating uncertainty that can dramatically improve online reliability for performance-critical applications by strategically selecting which frames to use for recalibration.

Hugo Lemarchant, Liangzi Li, Yiming Qian et al.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are becoming a very popular paradigm for vision tasks as they achieve state-of-the-art performance on image classification. However, although early works implied that this network structure had increased robustness against adversarial attacks, some works argue ViTs are still vulnerable. This paper presents our first attempt toward detecting adversarial attacks during inference time using the network's input and outputs as well as latent features. We design four quantifications (or derivatives) of input, output, and latent vectors of ViT-based models that provide a signature of the inference, which could be beneficial for the attack detection, and empirically study their behavior over clean samples and adversarial samples. The results demonstrate that the quantifications from input (images) and output (posterior probabilities) are promising for distinguishing clean and adversarial samples, while latent vectors offer less discriminative power, though they give some insights on how adversarial perturbations work.

Zhanghao Sun, Yu Zhang, Yicheng Wu et al.

Structured light (SL) systems acquire high-fidelity 3D geometry with active illumination projection. Conventional systems exhibit challenges when working in environments with strong ambient illumination, global illumination and cross-device interference. This paper proposes a general-purposed technique to improve the robustness of SL by projecting redundant optical signals in addition to the native SL patterns. In this way, projected signals become more distinguishable from errors. Thus the geometry information can be more easily recovered using simple signal processing and the ``coding gain" in performance is obtained. We propose three applications using our redundancy codes: (1) Self error-correction for SL imaging under strong ambient light, (2) Error detection for adaptive reconstruction under global illumination, and (3) Interference filtering with device-specific projection sequence encoding, especially for event camera-based SL and light curtain devices. We systematically analyze the design rules and signal processing algorithms in these applications. Corresponding hardware prototypes are built for evaluations on real-world complex scenes. Experimental results on the synthetic and real data demonstrate the significant performance improvements in SL systems with our redundancy codes.

Zhenyu Qian, Yiming Qian, Yuting Song et al.

Handling graph data is one of the most difficult tasks. Traditional techniques, such as those based on geometry and matrix factorization, rely on assumptions about the data relations that become inadequate when handling large and complex graph data. On the other hand, deep learning approaches demonstrate promising results in handling large graph data, but they often fall short of providing interpretable explanations. To equip the graph processing with both high accuracy and explainability, we introduce a novel approach that harnesses the power of a large language model (LLM), enhanced by an uncertainty-aware module to provide a confidence score on the generated answer. We experiment with our approach on two graph processing tasks: few-shot knowledge graph completion and graph classification. Our results demonstrate that through parameter efficient fine-tuning, the LLM surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms by a substantial margin across ten diverse benchmark datasets. Moreover, to address the challenge of explainability, we propose an uncertainty estimation based on perturbation, along with a calibration scheme to quantify the confidence scores of the generated answers. Our confidence measure achieves an AUC of 0.8 or higher on seven out of the ten datasets in predicting the correctness of the answer generated by LLM.

Jiacheng Chen, Yiming Qian, Yasutaka Furukawa

This paper presents a novel attention-based neural network for structured reconstruction, which takes a 2D raster image as an input and reconstructs a planar graph depicting an underlying geometric structure. The approach detects corners and classifies edge candidates between corners in an end-to-end manner. Our contribution is a holistic edge classification architecture, which 1) initializes the feature of an edge candidate by a trigonometric positional encoding of its end-points; 2) fuses image feature to each edge candidate by deformable attention; 3) employs two weight-sharing Transformer decoders to learn holistic structural patterns over the graph edge candidates; and 4) is trained with a masked learning strategy. The corner detector is a variant of the edge classification architecture, adapted to operate on pixels as corner candidates. We conduct experiments on two structured reconstruction tasks: outdoor building architecture and indoor floorplan planar graph reconstruction. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state of the art. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://heat-structured-reconstruction.github.io.

Shihao Zou, Xinxin Zuo, Sen Wang et al.

This paper focuses on a new problem of estimating human pose and shape from single polarization images. Polarization camera is known to be able to capture the polarization of reflected lights that preserves rich geometric cues of an object surface. Inspired by the recent applications in surface normal reconstruction from polarization images, in this paper, we attempt to estimate human pose and shape from single polarization images by leveraging the polarization-induced geometric cues. A dedicated two-stage pipeline is proposed: given a single polarization image, stage one (Polar2Normal) focuses on the fine detailed human body surface normal estimation; stage two (Polar2Shape) then reconstructs clothed human shape from the polarization image and the estimated surface normal. To empirically validate our approach, a dedicated dataset (PHSPD) is constructed, consisting of over 500K frames with accurate pose and parametric shape annotations. Empirical evaluations on this real-world dataset as well as a synthetic dataset, SURREAL, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. It suggests polarization camera as a promising alternative to the more conventional RGB camera for human pose and shape estimation.

James H. Elder, Emilio J. Almazàn, Yiming Qian et al.

Traditional approaches to line segment detection typically involve perceptual grouping in the image domain and/or global accumulation in the Hough domain. Here we propose a probabilistic algorithm that merges the advantages of both approaches. In a first stage lines are detected using a global probabilistic Hough approach. In the second stage each detected line is analyzed in the image domain to localize the line segments that generated the peak in the Hough map. By limiting search to a line, the distribution of segments over the sequence of points on the line can be modeled as a Markov chain, and a probabilistically optimal labelling can be computed exactly using a standard dynamic programming algorithm, in linear time. The Markov assumption also leads to an intuitive ranking method that uses the local marginal posterior probabilities to estimate the expected number of correctly labelled points on a segment. To assess the resulting Markov Chain Marginal Line Segment Detector (MCMLSD) we develop and apply a novel quantitative evaluation methodology that controls for under- and over-segmentation. Evaluation on the YorkUrbanDB and Wireframe datasets shows that the proposed MCMLSD method outperforms prior traditional approaches, as well as more recent deep learning methods.