Can our video understanding systems perceive objects when a heavy occlusion exists in a scene? To answer this question, we collect a large scale dataset called OVIS for occluded video instance segmentation, that is, to simultaneously detect, segment, and track instances in occluded scenes. OVIS consists of 296k high-quality instance masks from 25 semantic categories, where object occlusions usually occur. While our human vision systems can understand those occluded instances by contextual reasoning and association, our experiments suggest that current video understanding systems are not satisfying. On the OVIS dataset, the highest AP achieved by state-of-the-art algorithms is only 14.4, which reveals that we are still at a nascent stage for understanding objects, instances, and videos in a real-world scenario. Moreover, to complement missing object cues caused by occlusion, we propose a plug-and-play module called temporal feature calibration. Built upon MaskTrack R-CNN and SipMask, we report an AP of 15.2 and 15.0 respectively. The OVIS dataset is released at http://songbai.site/ovis , and the project code will be available soon.
3D pose estimation is a challenging but important task in computer vision. In this work, we show that standard deep learning approaches to 3D pose estimation are not robust when objects are partially occluded or viewed from a previously unseen pose. Inspired by the robustness of generative vision models to partial occlusion, we propose to integrate deep neural networks with 3D generative representations of objects into a unified neural architecture that we term NeMo. In particular, NeMo learns a generative model of neural feature activations at each vertex on a dense 3D mesh. Using differentiable rendering we estimate the 3D object pose by minimizing the reconstruction error between NeMo and the feature representation of the target image. To avoid local optima in the reconstruction loss, we train the feature extractor to maximize the distance between the individual feature representations on the mesh using contrastive learning. Our extensive experiments on PASCAL3D+, occluded-PASCAL3D+ and ObjectNet3D show that NeMo is much more robust to partial occlusion and unseen pose compared to standard deep networks, while retaining competitive performance on regular data. Interestingly, our experiments also show that NeMo performs reasonably well even when the mesh representation only crudely approximates the true object geometry with a cuboid, hence revealing that the detailed 3D geometry is not needed for accurate 3D pose estimation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Angtian/NeMo.
Few-shot image classification consists of two consecutive learning processes: 1) In the meta-learning stage, the model acquires a knowledge base from a set of training classes. 2) During meta-testing, the acquired knowledge is used to recognize unseen classes from very few examples. Inspired by the compositional representation of objects in humans, we train a neural network architecture that explicitly represents objects as a set of parts and their spatial composition. In particular, during meta-learning, we train a knowledge base that consists of a dictionary of part representations and a dictionary of part activation maps that encode frequent spatial activation patterns of parts. The elements of both dictionaries are shared among the training classes. During meta-testing, the representation of unseen classes is learned using the part representations and the part activation maps from the knowledge base. Finally, an attention mechanism is used to strengthen those parts that are most important for each category. We demonstrate the value of our compositional learning framework for a few-shot classification using miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CIFAR-FS, and FC100, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Compared with common image segmentation tasks targeted at low-resolution images, higher resolution detailed image segmentation receives much less attention. In this paper, we propose and study a task named Meticulous Object Segmentation (MOS), which is focused on segmenting well-defined foreground objects with elaborate shapes in high resolution images (e.g. 2k - 4k). To this end, we propose the MeticulousNet which leverages a dedicated decoder to capture the object boundary details. Specifically, we design a Hierarchical Point-wise Refining (HierPR) block to better delineate object boundaries, and reformulate the decoding process as a recursive coarse to fine refinement of the object mask. To evaluate segmentation quality near object boundaries, we propose the Meticulosity Quality (MQ) score considering both the mask coverage and boundary precision. In addition, we collect a MOS benchmark dataset including 600 high quality images with complex objects. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that MeticulousNet can reveal pixel-accurate segmentation boundaries and is superior to state-of-the-art methods for high resolution object segmentation tasks.
We propose Mask Guided (MG) Matting, a robust matting framework that takes a general coarse mask as guidance. MG Matting leverages a network (PRN) design which encourages the matting model to provide self-guidance to progressively refine the uncertain regions through the decoding process. A series of guidance mask perturbation operations are also introduced in the training to further enhance its robustness to external guidance. We show that PRN can generalize to unseen types of guidance masks such as trimap and low-quality alpha matte, making it suitable for various application pipelines. In addition, we revisit the foreground color prediction problem for matting and propose a surprisingly simple improvement to address the dataset issue. Evaluation on real and synthetic benchmarks shows that MG Matting achieves state-of-the-art performance using various types of guidance inputs. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/yucornetto/MGMatting
In this paper, we present ViP-DeepLab, a unified model attempting to tackle the long-standing and challenging inverse projection problem in vision, which we model as restoring the point clouds from perspective image sequences while providing each point with instance-level semantic interpretations. Solving this problem requires the vision models to predict the spatial location, semantic class, and temporally consistent instance label for each 3D point. ViP-DeepLab approaches it by jointly performing monocular depth estimation and video panoptic segmentation. We name this joint task as Depth-aware Video Panoptic Segmentation, and propose a new evaluation metric along with two derived datasets for it, which will be made available to the public. On the individual sub-tasks, ViP-DeepLab also achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming previous methods by 5.1% VPQ on Cityscapes-VPS, ranking 1st on the KITTI monocular depth estimation benchmark, and 1st on KITTI MOTS pedestrian. The datasets and the evaluation codes are made publicly available.
Analyzing complex scenes with Deep Neural Networks is a challenging task, particularly when images contain multiple objects that partially occlude each other. Existing approaches to image analysis mostly process objects independently and do not take into account the relative occlusion of nearby objects. In this paper, we propose a deep network for multi-object instance segmentation that is robust to occlusion and can be trained from bounding box supervision only. Our work builds on Compositional Networks, which learn a generative model of neural feature activations to locate occluders and to classify objects based on their non-occluded parts. We extend their generative model to include multiple objects and introduce a framework for the efficient inference in challenging occlusion scenarios. In particular, we obtain feed-forward predictions of the object classes and their instance and occluder segmentations. We introduce an Occlusion Reasoning Module (ORM) that locates erroneous segmentations and estimates the occlusion ordering to correct them. The improved segmentation masks are, in turn, integrated into the network in a top-down manner to improve the image classification. Our experiments on the KITTI INStance dataset (KINS) and a synthetic occlusion dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our model at multi-object instance segmentation under occlusion.
We present MaX-DeepLab, the first end-to-end model for panoptic segmentation. Our approach simplifies the current pipeline that depends heavily on surrogate sub-tasks and hand-designed components, such as box detection, non-maximum suppression, thing-stuff merging, etc. Although these sub-tasks are tackled by area experts, they fail to comprehensively solve the target task. By contrast, our MaX-DeepLab directly predicts class-labeled masks with a mask transformer, and is trained with a panoptic quality inspired loss via bipartite matching. Our mask transformer employs a dual-path architecture that introduces a global memory path in addition to a CNN path, allowing direct communication with any CNN layers. As a result, MaX-DeepLab shows a significant 7.1% PQ gain in the box-free regime on the challenging COCO dataset, closing the gap between box-based and box-free methods for the first time. A small variant of MaX-DeepLab improves 3.0% PQ over DETR with similar parameters and M-Adds. Furthermore, MaX-DeepLab, without test time augmentation, achieves new state-of-the-art 51.3% PQ on COCO test-dev set.