Learning Self-Supervised Low-Rank Network for Single-Stage Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation with limited annotations, such as weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) and semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSSS), is a challenging task that has attracted much attention recently. Most leading WSSS methods employ a sophisticated multi-stage training strategy to estimate pseudo-labels as precise as possible, but they suffer from high model complexity. In contrast, there exists another research line that trains a single network with image-level labels in one training cycle. However, such a single-stage strategy often performs poorly because of the compounding effect caused by inaccurate pseudo-label estimation. To address this issue, this paper presents a Self-supervised Low-Rank Network (SLRNet) for single-stage WSSS and SSSS. The SLRNet uses cross-view self-supervision, that is, it simultaneously predicts several complementary attentive LR representations from different views of an image to learn precise pseudo-labels. Specifically, we reformulate the LR representation learning as a collective matrix factorization problem and optimize it jointly with the network learning in an end-to-end manner. The resulting LR representation deprecates noisy information while capturing stable semantics across different views, making it robust to the input variations, thereby reducing overfitting to self-supervision errors. The SLRNet can provide a unified single-stage framework for various label-efficient semantic segmentation settings: 1) WSSS with image-level labeled data, 2) SSSS with a few pixel-level labeled data, and 3) SSSS with a few pixel-level labeled data and many image-level labeled data. Extensive experiments on the Pascal VOC 2012, COCO, and L2ID datasets demonstrate that our SLRNet outperforms both state-of-the-art WSSS and SSSS methods with a variety of different settings, proving its good generalizability and efficacy.

Colar: Effective and Efficient Online Action Detection by Consulting Exemplars

Online action detection has attracted increasing research interests in recent years. Current works model historical dependencies and anticipate future to perceive the action evolution within a video segment and improve the detection accuracy. However, the existing paradigm ignores category-level modeling and does not pay sufficient attention to efficiency. Considering a category, its representative frames exhibit various characteristics. Thus, the category-level modeling can provide complementary guidance to the temporal dependencies modeling. In this paper, we develop an effective exemplar-consultation mechanism that first measures the similarity between a frame and exemplary frames, and then aggregates exemplary features based on the similarity weights. This is also an efficient mechanism as both similarity measurement and feature aggregation require limited computations. Based on the exemplar-consultation mechanism, the long-term dependencies can be captured by regarding historical frames as exemplars, and the category-level modeling can be achieved by regarding representative frames from a category as exemplars. Due to the complementarity from the category-level modeling, our method employs a lightweight architecture but achieves new high performance on three benchmarks. In addition, using a spatio-temporal network to tackle video frames, our method spends 9.8 seconds to dispose of a one-minute video and achieves comparable performance.

Cross-Modality Deep Feature Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Recent advances in machine learning and prevalence of digital medical images have opened up an opportunity to address the challenging brain tumor segmentation (BTS) task by using deep convolutional neural networks. However, different from the RGB image data that are very widespread, the medical image data used in brain tumor segmentation are relatively scarce in terms of the data scale but contain the richer information in terms of the modality property. To this end, this paper proposes a novel cross-modality deep feature learning framework to segment brain tumors from the multi-modality MRI data. The core idea is to mine rich patterns across the multi-modality data to make up for the insufficient data scale. The proposed cross-modality deep feature learning framework consists of two learning processes: the cross-modality feature transition (CMFT) process and the cross-modality feature fusion (CMFF) process, which aims at learning rich feature representations by transiting knowledge across different modality data and fusing knowledge from different modality data, respectively. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on the BraTS benchmarks, which show that the proposed cross-modality deep feature learning framework can effectively improve the brain tumor segmentation performance when compared with the baseline methods and state-of-the-art methods.

Robust Region Feature Synthesizer for Zero-Shot Object Detection

Zero-shot object detection aims at incorporating class semantic vectors to realize the detection of (both seen and) unseen classes given an unconstrained test image. In this study, we reveal the core challenges in this research area: how to synthesize robust region features (for unseen objects) that are as intra-class diverse and inter-class separable as the real samples, so that strong unseen object detectors can be trained upon them. To address these challenges, we build a novel zero-shot object detection framework that contains an Intra-class Semantic Diverging component and an Inter-class Structure Preserving component. The former is used to realize the one-to-more mapping to obtain diverse visual features from each class semantic vector, preventing miss-classifying the real unseen objects as image backgrounds. While the latter is used to avoid the synthesized features too scattered to mix up the inter-class and foreground-background relationship. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, comprehensive experiments on PASCAL VOC, COCO, and DIOR datasets are conducted. Notably, our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL VOC and COCO and it is the first study to carry out zero-shot object detection in remote sensing imagery.

Incremental Cross-view Mutual Distillation for Self-supervised Medical CT Synthesis

Due to the constraints of the imaging device and high cost in operation time, computer tomography (CT) scans are usually acquired with low intra-slice resolution. Improving the intra-slice resolution is beneficial to the disease diagnosis for both human experts and computer-aided systems. To this end, this paper builds a novel medical slice synthesis to increase the between-slice resolution. Considering that the ground-truth intermediate medical slices are always absent in clinical practice, we introduce the incremental cross-view mutual distillation strategy to accomplish this task in the self-supervised learning manner. Specifically, we model this problem from three different views: slice-wise interpolation from axial view and pixel-wise interpolation from coronal and sagittal views. Under this circumstance, the models learned from different views can distill valuable knowledge to guide the learning processes of each other. We can repeat this process to make the models synthesize intermediate slice data with increasing inter-slice resolution. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments on a large-scale CT dataset. Quantitative and qualitative comparison results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by clear margins.

Pixel Distillation: A New Knowledge Distillation Scheme for Low-Resolution Image Recognition

The great success of deep learning is mainly due to the large-scale network architecture and the high-quality training data. However, it is still challenging to deploy recent deep models on portable devices with limited memory and imaging ability. Some existing works have engaged to compress the model via knowledge distillation. Unfortunately, these methods cannot deal with images with reduced image quality, such as the low-resolution (LR) images. To this end, we make a pioneering effort to distill helpful knowledge from a heavy network model learned from high-resolution (HR) images to a compact network model that will handle LR images, thus advancing the current knowledge distillation technique with the novel pixel distillation. To achieve this goal, we propose a Teacher-Assistant-Student (TAS) framework, which disentangles knowledge distillation into the model compression stage and the high resolution representation transfer stage. By equipping a novel Feature Super Resolution (FSR) module, our approach can learn lightweight network model that can achieve similar accuracy as the heavy teacher model but with much fewer parameters, faster inference speed, and lower-resolution inputs. Comprehensive experiments on three widely-used benchmarks, \ie, CUB-200-2011, PASCAL VOC 2007, and ImageNetSub, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Alternative Self-Dual Teaching

Current weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) frameworks usually contain the separated mask-refinement model and the main semantic region mining model. These approaches would contain redundant feature extraction backbones and biased learning objectives, making them computational complex yet sub-optimal to addressing the WSSS task. To solve this problem, this paper establishes a compact learning framework that embeds the classification and mask-refinement components into a unified deep model. With the shared feature extraction backbone, our model is able to facilitate knowledge sharing between the two components while preserving a low computational complexity. To encourage high-quality knowledge interaction, we propose a novel alternative self-dual teaching (ASDT) mechanism. Unlike the conventional distillation strategy, the knowledge of the two teacher branches in our model is alternatively distilled to the student branch by a Pulse Width Modulation (PWM), which generates PW wave-like selection signal to guide the knowledge distillation process. In this way, the student branch can help prevent the model from falling into local minimum solutions caused by the imperfect knowledge provided of either teacher branch. Comprehensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO-Stuff 10K demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed alternative self-dual teaching mechanism as well as the new state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

Background-Click Supervision for Temporal Action Localization

Weakly supervised temporal action localization aims at learning the instance-level action pattern from the video-level labels, where a significant challenge is action-context confusion. To overcome this challenge, one recent work builds an action-click supervision framework. It requires similar annotation costs but can steadily improve the localization performance when compared to the conventional weakly supervised methods. In this paper, by revealing that the performance bottleneck of the existing approaches mainly comes from the background errors, we find that a stronger action localizer can be trained with labels on the background video frames rather than those on the action frames. To this end, we convert the action-click supervision to the background-click supervision and develop a novel method, called BackTAL. Specifically, BackTAL implements two-fold modeling on the background video frames, i.e. the position modeling and the feature modeling. In position modeling, we not only conduct supervised learning on the annotated video frames but also design a score separation module to enlarge the score differences between the potential action frames and backgrounds. In feature modeling, we propose an affinity module to measure frame-specific similarities among neighboring frames and dynamically attend to informative neighbors when calculating temporal convolution. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks are conducted, which demonstrate the high performance of the established BackTAL and the rationality of the proposed background-click supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/VividLe/BackTAL.

Light Field Saliency Detection with Dual Local Graph Learning andReciprocative Guidance

The application of light field data in salient object de-tection is becoming increasingly popular recently. The diffi-culty lies in how to effectively fuse the features within the fo-cal stack and how to cooperate them with the feature of theall-focus image. Previous methods usually fuse focal stackfeatures via convolution or ConvLSTM, which are both lesseffective and ill-posed. In this paper, we model the infor-mation fusion within focal stack via graph networks. Theyintroduce powerful context propagation from neighbouringnodes and also avoid ill-posed implementations. On the onehand, we construct local graph connections thus avoidingprohibitive computational costs of traditional graph net-works. On the other hand, instead of processing the twokinds of data separately, we build a novel dual graph modelto guide the focal stack fusion process using all-focus pat-terns. To handle the second difficulty, previous methods usu-ally implement one-shot fusion for focal stack and all-focusfeatures, hence lacking a thorough exploration of their sup-plements. We introduce a reciprocative guidance schemeand enable mutual guidance between these two kinds of in-formation at multiple steps. As such, both kinds of featurescan be enhanced iteratively, finally benefiting the saliencyprediction. Extensive experimental results show that theproposed models are all beneficial and we achieve signif-icantly better results than state-of-the-art methods.

Single Image Dehazing with An Independent Detail-Recovery Network

Single image dehazing is a prerequisite which affects the performance of many computer vision tasks and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, most existing dehazing methods emphasize more on haze removal but less on the detail recovery of the dehazed images. In this paper, we propose a single image dehazing method with an independent Detail Recovery Network (DRN), which considers capturing the details from the input image over a separate network and then integrates them into a coarse dehazed image. The overall network consists of two independent networks, named DRN and the dehazing network respectively. Specifically, the DRN aims to recover the dehazed image details through local and global branches respectively. The local branch can obtain local detail information through the convolution layer and the global branch can capture more global information by the Smooth Dilated Convolution (SDC). The detail feature map is fused into the coarse dehazed image to obtain the dehazed image with rich image details. Besides, we integrate the DRN, the physical-model-based dehazing network and the reconstruction loss into an end-to-end joint learning framework. Extensive experiments on the public image dehazing datasets (RESIDE-Indoor, RESIDE-Outdoor and the TrainA-TestA) illustrate the effectiveness of the modules in the proposed method and show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art dehazing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is released in https://github.com/YanLi-LY/Dehazing-DRN.