What Sketch Explainability Really Means for Downstream Tasks

In this paper, we explore the unique modality of sketch for explainability, emphasising the profound impact of human strokes compared to conventional pixel-oriented studies. Beyond explanations of network behavior, we discern the genuine implications of explainability across diverse downstream sketch-related tasks. We propose a lightweight and portable explainability solution -- a seamless plugin that integrates effortlessly with any pre-trained model, eliminating the need for re-training. Demonstrating its adaptability, we present four applications: highly studied retrieval and generation, and completely novel assisted drawing and sketch adversarial attacks. The centrepiece to our solution is a stroke-level attribution map that takes different forms when linked with downstream tasks. By addressing the inherent non-differentiability of rasterisation, we enable explanations at both coarse stroke level (SLA) and partial stroke level (P-SLA), each with its advantages for specific downstream tasks.

SketchINR: A First Look into Sketches as Implicit Neural Representations

We propose SketchINR, to advance the representation of vector sketches with implicit neural models. A variable length vector sketch is compressed into a latent space of fixed dimension that implicitly encodes the underlying shape as a function of time and strokes. The learned function predicts the $xy$ point coordinates in a sketch at each time and stroke. Despite its simplicity, SketchINR outperforms existing representations at multiple tasks: (i) Encoding an entire sketch dataset into a fixed size latent vector, SketchINR gives $60\times$ and $10\times$ data compression over raster and vector sketches, respectively. (ii) SketchINR's auto-decoder provides a much higher-fidelity representation than other learned vector sketch representations, and is uniquely able to scale to complex vector sketches such as FS-COCO. (iii) SketchINR supports parallelisation that can decode/render $\sim$$100\times$ faster than other learned vector representations such as SketchRNN. (iv) SketchINR, for the first time, emulates the human ability to reproduce a sketch with varying abstraction in terms of number and complexity of strokes. As a first look at implicit sketches, SketchINR's compact high-fidelity representation will support future work in modelling long and complex sketches.

Doodle Your 3D: From Abstract Freehand Sketches to Precise 3D Shapes

In this paper, we democratise 3D content creation, enabling precise generation of 3D shapes from abstract sketches while overcoming limitations tied to drawing skills. We introduce a novel part-level modelling and alignment framework that facilitates abstraction modelling and cross-modal correspondence. Leveraging the same part-level decoder, our approach seamlessly extends to sketch modelling by establishing correspondence between CLIPasso edgemaps and projected 3D part regions, eliminating the need for a dataset pairing human sketches and 3D shapes. Additionally, our method introduces a seamless in-position editing process as a byproduct of cross-modal part-aligned modelling. Operating in a low-dimensional implicit space, our approach significantly reduces computational demands and processing time.

Cryo-shift: Reducing domain shift in cryo-electron subtomograms with unsupervised domain adaptation and randomization

Cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) is a 3D imaging technology that enables the visualization of subcellular structures in situ at near-atomic resolution. Cellular cryo-ET images help in resolving the structures of macromolecules and determining their spatial relationship in a single cell, which has broad significance in cell and structural biology. Subtomogram classification and recognition constitute a primary step in the systematic recovery of these macromolecular structures. Supervised deep learning methods have been proven to be highly accurate and efficient for subtomogram classification, but suffer from limited applicability due to scarcity of annotated data. While generating simulated data for training supervised models is a potential solution, a sizeable difference in the image intensity distribution in generated data as compared to real experimental data will cause the trained models to perform poorly in predicting classes on real subtomograms. In this work, we present Cryo-Shift, a fully unsupervised domain adaptation and randomization framework for deep learning-based cross-domain subtomogram classification. We use unsupervised multi-adversarial domain adaption to reduce the domain shift between features of simulated and experimental data. We develop a network-driven domain randomization procedure with `warp' modules to alter the simulated data and help the classifier generalize better on experimental data. We do not use any labeled experimental data to train our model, whereas some of the existing alternative approaches require labeled experimental samples for cross-domain classification. Nevertheless, Cryo-Shift outperforms the existing alternative approaches in cross-domain subtomogram classification in extensive evaluation studies demonstrated herein using both simulated and experimental data.

A distillation based approach for the diagnosis of diseases

Presently, Covid-19 is a serious threat to the world at large. Efforts are being made to reduce disease screening times and in the development of a vaccine to resist this disease, even as thousands succumb to it everyday. We propose a novel method of automated screening of diseases like Covid-19 and pneumonia from Chest X-Ray images with the help of Computer Vision. Unlike computer vision classification algorithms which come with heavy computational costs, we propose a knowledge distillation based approach which allows us to bring down the model depth, while preserving the accuracy. We make use of an augmentation of the standard distillation module with an auxiliary intermediate assistant network that aids in the continuity of the flow of information. Following this approach, we are able to build an extremely light student network, consisting of just 3 convolutional blocks without any compromise on accuracy. We thus propose a method of classification of diseases which can not only lead to faster screening, but can also operate seamlessly on low-end devices.

RectiNet-v2: A stacked network architecture for document image dewarping

With the advent of mobile and hand-held cameras, document images have found their way into almost every domain. Dewarping of these images for the removal of perspective distortions and folds is essential so that they can be understood by document recognition algorithms. For this, we propose an end-to-end CNN architecture that can produce distortion free document images from warped documents it takes as input. We train this model on warped document images simulated synthetically to compensate for lack of enough natural data. Our method is novel in the use of a bifurcated decoder with shared weights to prevent intermingling of grid coordinates, in the use of residual networks in the U-Net skip connections to allow flow of data from different receptive fields in the model, and in the use of a gated network to help the model focus on structure and line level detail of the document image. We evaluate our method on the DocUNet dataset, a benchmark in this domain, and obtain results comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

A Gated and Bifurcated Stacked U-Net Module for Document Image Dewarping

Capturing images of documents is one of the easiest and most used methods of recording them. These images however, being captured with the help of handheld devices, often lead to undesirable distortions that are hard to remove. We propose a supervised Gated and Bifurcated Stacked U-Net module to predict a dewarping grid and create a distortion free image from the input. While the network is trained on synthetically warped document images, results are calculated on the basis of real world images. The novelty in our methods exists not only in a bifurcation of the U-Net to help eliminate the intermingling of the grid coordinates, but also in the use of a gated network which adds boundary and other minute line level details to the model. The end-to-end pipeline proposed by us achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DocUNet dataset after being trained on just 8 percent of the data used in previous methods.