In the field of visual scene understanding, deep neural networks have made impressive advancements in various core tasks like segmentation, tracking, and detection. However, most approaches operate on the close-set assumption, meaning that the model can only identify pre-defined categories that are present in the training set. Recently, open vocabulary settings were proposed due to the rapid progress of vision language pre-training. These new approaches seek to locate and recognize categories beyond the annotated label space. The open vocabulary approach is more general, practical, and effective compared to weakly supervised and zero-shot settings. This paper provides a thorough review of open vocabulary learning, summarizing and analyzing recent developments in the field. In particular, we begin by comparing it to related concepts such as zero-shot learning, open-set recognition, and out-of-distribution detection. Then, we review several closely related tasks in the case of segmentation and detection, including long-tail problems, few-shot, and zero-shot settings. For the method survey, we first present the basic knowledge of detection and segmentation in close-set as the preliminary knowledge. Next, we examine various scenarios in which open vocabulary learning is used, identifying common design elements and core ideas. Then, we compare the recent detection and segmentation approaches in commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we conclude with insights, issues, and discussions regarding future research directions. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive literature review of open vocabulary learning. We keep tracing related works at https://github.com/jianzongwu/Awesome-Open-Vocabulary.
In this technical report, we briefly introduce our solution for the Zero/Few-shot Track of the Visual Anomaly and Novelty Detection (VAND) 2023 Challenge. For industrial visual inspection, building a single model that can be rapidly adapted to numerous categories without or with only a few normal reference images is a promising research direction. This is primarily because of the vast variety of the product types. For the zero-shot track, we propose a solution based on the CLIP model by adding extra linear layers. These layers are used to map the image features to the joint embedding space, so that they can compare with the text features to generate the anomaly maps. Besides, when the reference images are available, we utilize multiple memory banks to store their features and compare them with the features of the test images during the testing phase. In this challenge, our method achieved first place in the zero-shot track, especially excelling in segmentation with an impressive F1 score improvement of 0.0489 over the second-ranked participant. Furthermore, in the few-shot track, we secured the fourth position overall, with our classification F1 score of 0.8687 ranking first among all participating teams.
This paper introduces a novel attention mechanism, called dual attention, which is both efficient and effective. The dual attention mechanism consists of two parallel components: local attention generated by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and long-range attention generated by Vision Transformers (ViTs). To address the high computational complexity and memory footprint of vanilla Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA), we introduce a novel Multi-Head Partition-wise Attention (MHPA) mechanism. The partition-wise attention approach models both intra-partition and inter-partition attention simultaneously. Building on the dual attention block and partition-wise attention mechanism, we present a hierarchical vision backbone called DualFormer. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model on several computer vision tasks, including image classification on ImageNet, object detection on COCO, and semantic segmentation on Cityscapes. Specifically, the proposed DualFormer-XS achieves 81.5\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming the recent state-of-the-art MPViT-XS by 0.6\% top-1 accuracy with much higher throughput.
Image harmonization aims to solve the visual inconsistency problem in composited images by adaptively adjusting the foreground pixels with the background as references. Existing methods employ local color transformation or region matching between foreground and background, which neglects powerful proximity prior and independently distinguishes fore-/back-ground as a whole part for harmonization. As a result, they still show a limited performance across varied foreground objects and scenes. To address this issue, we propose a novel Global-aware Kernel Network (GKNet) to harmonize local regions with comprehensive consideration of long-distance background references. Specifically, GKNet includes two parts, \ie, harmony kernel prediction and harmony kernel modulation branches. The former includes a Long-distance Reference Extractor (LRE) to obtain long-distance context and Kernel Prediction Blocks (KPB) to predict multi-level harmony kernels by fusing global information with local features. To achieve this goal, a novel Selective Correlation Fusion (SCF) module is proposed to better select relevant long-distance background references for local harmonization. The latter employs the predicted kernels to harmonize foreground regions with both local and global awareness. Abundant experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method for image harmonization over state-of-the-art methods, \eg, achieving 39.53dB PSNR that surpasses the best counterpart by +0.78dB $\uparrow$; decreasing fMSE/MSE by 11.5\%$\downarrow$/6.7\%$\downarrow$ compared with the SoTA method. Code will be available at \href{https://github.com/XintianShen/GKNet}{here}.
In this paper, we focus on a recently proposed novel task called Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS), where the fine-grained correspondence between audio stream and image pixels is required to be established. However, learning such correspondence faces two key challenges: (1) audio signals inherently exhibit a high degree of information density, as sounds produced by multiple objects are entangled within the same audio stream; (2) the frequency of audio signals from objects with the same category tends to be similar, which hampers the distinction of target object and consequently leads to ambiguous segmentation results. Toward this end, we propose an Audio Unmixing and Semantic Segmentation Network (AUSS), which encourages unmixing complicated audio signals and distinguishing similar sounds. Technically, our AUSS unmixs the audio signals into a set of audio queries, and interacts them with visual features by masked attention mechanisms. To encourage these audio queries to capture distinctive features embedded within the audio, two self-supervised losses are also introduced as additional supervision at both class and mask levels. Extensive experimental results on the AVSBench benchmark show that our AUSS sets a new state-of-the-art in both single-source and multi-source subsets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our AUSS in bridging the gap between audio and vision modalities.
Multimodal-driven talking face generation refers to animating a portrait with the given pose, expression, and gaze transferred from the driving image and video, or estimated from the text and audio. However, existing methods ignore the potential of text modal, and their generators mainly follow the source-oriented feature rearrange paradigm coupled with unstable GAN frameworks. In this work, we first represent the emotion in the text prompt, which could inherit rich semantics from the CLIP, allowing flexible and generalized emotion control. We further reorganize these tasks as the target-oriented texture transfer and adopt the Diffusion Models. More specifically, given a textured face as the source and the rendered face projected from the desired 3DMM coefficients as the target, our proposed Texture-Geometry-aware Diffusion Model decomposes the complex transfer problem into multi-conditional denoising process, where a Texture Attention-based module accurately models the correspondences between appearance and geometry cues contained in source and target conditions, and incorporate extra implicit information for high-fidelity talking face generation. Additionally, TGDM can be gracefully tailored for face swapping. We derive a novel paradigm free of unstable seesaw-style optimization, resulting in simple, stable, and effective training and inference schemes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Multimodal-driven talking face generation refers to animating a portrait with the given pose, expression, and gaze transferred from the driving image and video, or estimated from the text and audio. However, existing methods ignore the potential of text modal, and their generators mainly follow the source-oriented feature rearrange paradigm coupled with unstable GAN frameworks. In this work, we first represent the emotion in the text prompt, which could inherit rich semantics from the CLIP, allowing flexible and generalized emotion control. We further reorganize these tasks as the target-oriented texture transfer and adopt the Diffusion Models. More specifically, given a textured face as the source and the rendered face projected from the desired 3DMM coefficients as the target, our proposed Texture-Geometry-aware Diffusion Model decomposes the complex transfer problem into multi-conditional denoising process, where a Texture Attention-based module accurately models the correspondences between appearance and geometry cues contained in source and target conditions, and incorporate extra implicit information for high-fidelity talking face generation. Additionally, TGDM can be gracefully tailored for face swapping. We derive a novel paradigm free of unstable seesaw-style optimization, resulting in simple, stable, and effective training and inference schemes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Recently, emotional talking face generation has received considerable attention. However, existing methods only adopt one-hot coding, image, or audio as emotion conditions, thus lacking flexible control in practical applications and failing to handle unseen emotion styles due to limited semantics. They either ignore the one-shot setting or the quality of generated faces. In this paper, we propose a more flexible and generalized framework. Specifically, we supplement the emotion style in text prompts and use an Aligned Multi-modal Emotion encoder to embed the text, image, and audio emotion modality into a unified space, which inherits rich semantic prior from CLIP. Consequently, effective multi-modal emotion space learning helps our method support arbitrary emotion modality during testing and could generalize to unseen emotion styles. Besides, an Emotion-aware Audio-to-3DMM Convertor is proposed to connect the emotion condition and the audio sequence to structural representation. A followed style-based High-fidelity Emotional Face generator is designed to generate arbitrary high-resolution realistic identities. Our texture generator hierarchically learns flow fields and animated faces in a residual manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the flexibility and generalization of our method in emotion control and the effectiveness of high-quality face synthesis.
Most of the existing blind image Super-Resolution (SR) methods assume that the blur kernels are space-invariant. However, the blur involved in real applications are usually space-variant due to object motion, out-of-focus, etc., resulting in severe performance drop of the advanced SR methods. To address this problem, we firstly introduce two new datasets with out-of-focus blur, i.e., NYUv2-BSR and Cityscapes-BSR, to support further researches of blind SR with space-variant blur. Based on the datasets, we design a novel Cross-MOdal fuSion network (CMOS) that estimate both blur and semantics simultaneously, which leads to improved SR results. It involves a feature Grouping Interactive Attention (GIA) module to make the two modalities interact more effectively and avoid inconsistency. GIA can also be used for the interaction of other features because of the universality of its structure. Qualitative and quantitative experiments compared with state-of-the-art methods on above datasets and real-world images demonstrate the superiority of our method, e.g., obtaining PSNR/SSIM by +1.91/+0.0048 on NYUv2-BSR than MANet.