Improving Referring Image Segmentation using Vision-Aware Text Features

Referring image segmentation is a challenging task that involves generating pixel-wise segmentation masks based on natural language descriptions. Existing methods have relied mostly on visual features to generate the segmentation masks while treating text features as supporting components. This over-reliance on visual features can lead to suboptimal results, especially in complex scenarios where text prompts are ambiguous or context-dependent. To overcome these challenges, we present a novel framework VATEX to improve referring image segmentation by enhancing object and context understanding with Vision-Aware Text Feature. Our method involves using CLIP to derive a CLIP Prior that integrates an object-centric visual heatmap with text description, which can be used as the initial query in DETR-based architecture for the segmentation task. Furthermore, by observing that there are multiple ways to describe an instance in an image, we enforce feature similarity between text variations referring to the same visual input by two components: a novel Contextual Multimodal Decoder that turns text embeddings into vision-aware text features, and a Meaning Consistency Constraint to ensure further the coherent and consistent interpretation of language expressions with the context understanding obtained from the image. Our method achieves a significant performance improvement on three benchmark datasets RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and G-Ref. Code is available at: https://nero1342.github.io/VATEX\_RIS.

Self-supervised Video Object Segmentation with Distillation Learning of Deformable Attention

Video object segmentation is a fundamental research problem in computer vision. Recent techniques have often applied attention mechanism to object representation learning from video sequences. However, due to temporal changes in the video data, attention maps may not well align with the objects of interest across video frames, causing accumulated errors in long-term video processing. In addition, existing techniques have utilised complex architectures, requiring highly computational complexity and hence limiting the ability to integrate video object segmentation into low-powered devices. To address these issues, we propose a new method for self-supervised video object segmentation based on distillation learning of deformable attention. Specifically, we devise a lightweight architecture for video object segmentation that is effectively adapted to temporal changes. This is enabled by deformable attention mechanism, where the keys and values capturing the memory of a video sequence in the attention module have flexible locations updated across frames. The learnt object representations are thus adaptive to both the spatial and temporal dimensions. We train the proposed architecture in a self-supervised fashion through a new knowledge distillation paradigm where deformable attention maps are integrated into the distillation loss. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate our method and compare it with existing methods on benchmark datasets including DAVIS 2016/2017 and YouTube-VOS 2018/2019. Experimental results verify the superiority of our method via its achieved state-of-the-art performance and optimal memory usage.

Leveraging Open-Vocabulary Diffusion to Camouflaged Instance Segmentation

Text-to-image diffusion techniques have shown exceptional capability of producing high-quality images from text descriptions. This indicates that there exists a strong correlation between the visual and textual domains. In addition, text-image discriminative models such as CLIP excel in image labelling from text prompts, thanks to the rich and diverse information available from open concepts. In this paper, we leverage these technical advances to solve a challenging problem in computer vision: camouflaged instance segmentation. Specifically, we propose a method built upon a state-of-the-art diffusion model, empowered by open-vocabulary to learn multi-scale textual-visual features for camouflaged object representations. Such cross-domain representations are desirable in segmenting camouflaged objects where visual cues are subtle to distinguish the objects from the background, especially in segmenting novel objects which are not seen in training. We also develop technically supportive components to effectively fuse cross-domain features and engage relevant features towards respective foreground objects. We validate our method and compare it with existing ones on several benchmark datasets of camouflaged instance segmentation and generic open-vocabulary instance segmentation. Experimental results confirm the advances of our method over existing ones. We will publish our code and pre-trained models to support future research.

DiverseDream: Diverse Text-to-3D Synthesis with Augmented Text Embedding

Text-to-3D synthesis has recently emerged as a new approach to sampling 3D models by adopting pretrained text-to-image models as guiding visual priors. An intriguing but underexplored problem with existing text-to-3D methods is that 3D models obtained from the sampling-by-optimization procedure tend to have mode collapses, and hence poor diversity in their results. In this paper, we provide an analysis and identify potential causes of such a limited diversity, and then devise a new method that considers the joint generation of different 3D models from the same text prompt, where we propose to use augmented text prompts via textual inversion of reference images to diversify the joint generation. We show that our method leads to improved diversity in text-to-3D synthesis qualitatively and quantitatively.

Advances in 3D Neural Stylization: A Survey

Modern artificial intelligence provides a novel way of producing digital art in styles. The expressive power of neural networks enables the realm of visual style transfer methods, which can be used to edit images, videos, and 3D data to make them more artistic and diverse. This paper reports on recent advances in neural stylization for 3D data. We provide a taxonomy for neural stylization by considering several important design choices, including scene representation, guidance data, optimization strategies, and output styles. Building on such taxonomy, our survey first revisits the background of neural stylization on 2D images, and then provides in-depth discussions on recent neural stylization methods for 3D data, where we also provide a mini-benchmark on artistic stylization methods. Based on the insights gained from the survey, we then discuss open challenges, future research, and potential applications and impacts of neural stylization.

Test-Time Augmentation for 3D Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation

Data augmentation is a powerful technique to enhance the performance of a deep learning task but has received less attention in 3D deep learning. It is well known that when 3D shapes are sparsely represented with low point density, the performance of the downstream tasks drops significantly. This work explores test-time augmentation (TTA) for 3D point clouds. We are inspired by the recent revolution of learning implicit representation and point cloud upsampling, which can produce high-quality 3D surface reconstruction and proximity-to-surface, respectively. Our idea is to leverage the implicit field reconstruction or point cloud upsampling techniques as a systematic way to augment point cloud data. Mainly, we test both strategies by sampling points from the reconstructed results and using the sampled point cloud as test-time augmented data. We show that both strategies are effective in improving accuracy. We observed that point cloud upsampling for test-time augmentation can lead to more significant performance improvement on downstream tasks such as object classification and segmentation on the ModelNet40, ShapeNet, ScanObjectNN, and SemanticKITTI datasets, especially for sparse point clouds.

UWA360CAM: A 360$^{\circ}$ 24/7 Real-Time Streaming Camera System for Underwater Applications

Omnidirectional camera is a cost-effective and information-rich sensor highly suitable for many marine applications and the ocean scientific community, encompassing several domains such as augmented reality, mapping, motion estimation, visual surveillance, and simultaneous localization and mapping. However, designing and constructing such a high-quality 360$^{\circ}$ real-time streaming camera system for underwater applications is a challenging problem due to the technical complexity in several aspects including sensor resolution, wide field of view, power supply, optical design, system calibration, and overheating management. This paper presents a novel and comprehensive system that addresses the complexities associated with the design, construction, and implementation of a fully functional 360$^{\circ}$ real-time streaming camera system specifically tailored for underwater environments. Our proposed system, UWA360CAM, can stream video in real time, operate in 24/7, and capture 360$^{\circ}$ underwater panorama images. Notably, our work is the pioneering effort in providing a detailed and replicable account of this system. The experiments provide a comprehensive analysis of our proposed system.

Language-driven Object Fusion into Neural Radiance Fields with Pose-Conditioned Dataset Updates

Neural radiance field is an emerging rendering method that generates high-quality multi-view consistent images from a neural scene representation and volume rendering. Although neural radiance field-based techniques are robust for scene reconstruction, their ability to add or remove objects remains limited. This paper proposes a new language-driven approach for object manipulation with neural radiance fields through dataset updates. Specifically, to insert a new foreground object represented by a set of multi-view images into a background radiance field, we use a text-to-image diffusion model to learn and generate combined images that fuse the object of interest into the given background across views. These combined images are then used for refining the background radiance field so that we can render view-consistent images containing both the object and the background. To ensure view consistency, we propose a dataset updates strategy that prioritizes radiance field training with camera views close to the already-trained views prior to propagating the training to remaining views. We show that under the same dataset updates strategy, we can easily adapt our method for object insertion using data from text-to-3D models as well as object removal. Experimental results show that our method generates photorealistic images of the edited scenes, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 3D reconstruction and neural radiance field blending.