Parallel Pre-trained Transformers (PPT) for Synthetic Data-based Instance Segmentation

Recently, Synthetic data-based Instance Segmentation has become an exceedingly favorable optimization paradigm since it leverages simulation rendering and physics to generate high-quality image-annotation pairs. In this paper, we propose a Parallel Pre-trained Transformers (PPT) framework to accomplish the synthetic data-based Instance Segmentation task. Specifically, we leverage the off-the-shelf pre-trained vision Transformers to alleviate the gap between natural and synthetic data, which helps to provide good generalization in the downstream synthetic data scene with few samples. Swin-B-based CBNet V2, SwinL-based CBNet V2 and Swin-L-based Uniformer are employed for parallel feature learning, and the results of these three models are fused by pixel-level Non-maximum Suppression (NMS) algorithm to obtain more robust results. The experimental results reveal that PPT ranks first in the CVPR2022 AVA Accessibility Vision and Autonomy Challenge, with a 65.155% mAP.

GCoNet+: A Stronger Group Collaborative Co-Salient Object Detector

In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end group collaborative learning network, termed GCoNet+, which can effectively and efficiently (250 fps) identify co-salient objects in natural scenes. The proposed GCoNet+ achieves the new state-of-the-art performance for co-salient object detection (CoSOD) through mining consensus representations based on the following two essential criteria: 1) intra-group compactness to better formulate the consistency among co-salient objects by capturing their inherent shared attributes using our novel group affinity module (GAM); 2) inter-group separability to effectively suppress the influence of noisy objects on the output by introducing our new group collaborating module (GCM) conditioning on the inconsistent consensus. To further improve the accuracy, we design a series of simple yet effective components as follows: i) a recurrent auxiliary classification module (RACM) promoting the model learning at the semantic level; ii) a confidence enhancement module (CEM) helping the model to improve the quality of the final predictions; and iii) a group-based symmetric triplet (GST) loss guiding the model to learn more discriminative features. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks, i.e., CoCA, CoSOD3k, and CoSal2015, demonstrate that our GCoNet+ outperforms the existing 12 cutting-edge models. Code has been released at https://github.com/ZhengPeng7/GCoNet_plus.

RangeUDF: Semantic Surface Reconstruction from 3D Point Clouds

We present RangeUDF, a new implicit representation based framework to recover the geometry and semantics of continuous 3D scene surfaces from point clouds. Unlike occupancy fields or signed distance fields which can only model closed 3D surfaces, our approach is not restricted to any type of topology. Being different from the existing unsigned distance fields, our framework does not suffer from any surface ambiguity. In addition, our RangeUDF can jointly estimate precise semantics for continuous surfaces. The key to our approach is a range-aware unsigned distance function together with a surface-oriented semantic segmentation module. Extensive experiments show that RangeUDF clearly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for surface reconstruction on four point cloud datasets. Moreover, RangeUDF demonstrates superior generalization capability across multiple unseen datasets, which is nearly impossible for all existing approaches.

ACGNet: Action Complement Graph Network for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization

Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) in untrimmed videos has emerged as a practical but challenging task since only video-level labels are available. Existing approaches typically leverage off-the-shelf segment-level features, which suffer from spatial incompleteness and temporal incoherence, thus limiting their performance. In this paper, we tackle this problem from a new perspective by enhancing segment-level representations with a simple yet effective graph convolutional network, namely action complement graph network (ACGNet). It facilitates the current video segment to perceive spatial-temporal dependencies from others that potentially convey complementary clues, implicitly mitigating the negative effects caused by the two issues above. By this means, the segment-level features are more discriminative and robust to spatial-temporal variations, contributing to higher localization accuracies. More importantly, the proposed ACGNet works as a universal module that can be flexibly plugged into different WTAL frameworks, while maintaining the end-to-end training fashion. Extensive experiments are conducted on the THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet1.2 benchmarks, where the state-of-the-art results clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach.

Activation Modulation and Recalibration Scheme for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task facilitating scene understanding and automatic driving. Most existing methods resort to classification-based Class Activation Maps (CAMs) to play as the initial pseudo labels, which tend to focus on the discriminative image regions and lack customized characteristics for the segmentation task. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel activation modulation and recalibration (AMR) scheme, which leverages a spotlight branch and a compensation branch to obtain weighted CAMs that can provide recalibration supervision and task-specific concepts. Specifically, an attention modulation module (AMM) is employed to rearrange the distribution of feature importance from the channel-spatial sequential perspective, which helps to explicitly model channel-wise interdependencies and spatial encodings to adaptively modulate segmentation-oriented activation responses. Furthermore, we introduce a cross pseudo supervision for dual branches, which can be regarded as a semantic similar regularization to mutually refine two branches. Extensive experiments show that AMR establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, surpassing not only current methods trained with the image-level of supervision but also some methods relying on stronger supervision, such as saliency label. Experiments also reveal that our scheme is plug-and-play and can be incorporated with other approaches to boost their performance.

Global-Local Context Network for Person Search

Person search aims to jointly localize and identify a query person from natural, uncropped images, which has been actively studied in the computer vision community over the past few years. In this paper, we delve into the rich context information globally and locally surrounding the target person, which we refer to scene and group context, respectively. Unlike previous works that treat the two types of context individually, we exploit them in a unified global-local context network (GLCNet) with the intuitive aim of feature enhancement. Specifically, re-ID embeddings and context features are enhanced simultaneously in a multi-stage fashion, ultimately leading to enhanced, discriminative features for person search. We conduct the experiments on two person search benchmarks (i.e., CUHK-SYSU and PRW) as well as extend our approach to a more challenging setting (i.e., character search on MovieNet). Extensive experimental results demonstrate the consistent improvement of the proposed GLCNet over the state-of-the-art methods on the three datasets. Our source codes, pre-trained models, and the new setting for character search are available at: https://github.com/ZhengPeng7/GLCNet.

TAL: Two-stream Adaptive Learning for Generalizable Person Re-identification

Domain generalizable person re-identification aims to apply a trained model to unseen domains. Prior works either combine the data in all the training domains to capture domain-invariant features, or adopt a mixture of experts to investigate domain-specific information. In this work, we argue that both domain-specific and domain-invariant features are crucial for improving the generalization ability of re-id models. To this end, we design a novel framework, which we name two-stream adaptive learning (TAL), to simultaneously model these two kinds of information. Specifically, a domain-specific stream is proposed to capture training domain statistics with batch normalization (BN) parameters, while an adaptive matching layer is designed to dynamically aggregate domain-level information. In the meantime, we design an adaptive BN layer in the domain-invariant stream, to approximate the statistics of various unseen domains. These two streams work adaptively and collaboratively to learn generalizable re-id features. Our framework can be applied to both single-source and multi-source domain generalization tasks, where experimental results show that our framework notably outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Efficient Person Search: An Anchor-Free Approach

Person search aims to simultaneously localize and identify a query person from realistic, uncropped images. To achieve this goal, state-of-the-art models typically add a re-id branch upon two-stage detectors like Faster R-CNN. Owing to the ROI-Align operation, this pipeline yields promising accuracy as re-id features are explicitly aligned with the corresponding object regions, but in the meantime, it introduces high computational overhead due to dense object anchors. In this work, we present an anchor-free approach to efficiently tackling this challenging task, by introducing the following dedicated designs. First, we select an anchor-free detector (i.e., FCOS) as the prototype of our framework. Due to the lack of dense object anchors, it exhibits significantly higher efficiency compared with existing person search models. Second, when directly accommodating this anchor-free detector for person search, there exist several major challenges in learning robust re-id features, which we summarize as the misalignment issues in different levels (i.e., scale, region, and task). To address these issues, we propose an aligned feature aggregation module to generate more discriminative and robust feature embeddings. Accordingly, we name our model as Feature-Aligned Person Search Network (AlignPS). Third, by investigating the advantages of both anchor-based and anchor-free models, we further augment AlignPS with an ROI-Align head, which significantly improves the robustness of re-id features while still keeping our model highly efficient. Extensive experiments conducted on two challenging benchmarks (i.e., CUHK-SYSU and PRW) demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance, while displaying higher efficiency. All the source codes, data, and trained models are available at: https://github.com/daodaofr/alignps.

Identity-aware Graph Memory Network for Action Detection

Action detection plays an important role in high-level video understanding and media interpretation. Many existing studies fulfill this spatio-temporal localization by modeling the context, capturing the relationship of actors, objects, and scenes conveyed in the video. However, they often universally treat all the actors without considering the consistency and distinctness between individuals, leaving much room for improvement. In this paper, we explicitly highlight the identity information of the actors in terms of both long-term and short-term context through a graph memory network, namely identity-aware graph memory network (IGMN). Specifically, we propose the hierarchical graph neural network (HGNN) to comprehensively conduct long-term relation modeling within the same identity as well as between different ones. Regarding short-term context, we develop a dual attention module (DAM) to generate identity-aware constraint to reduce the influence of interference by the actors of different identities. Extensive experiments on the challenging AVA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves state-of-the-art results on AVA v2.1 and v2.2.

Exploring Visual Context for Weakly Supervised Person Search

Person search has recently emerged as a challenging task that jointly addresses pedestrian detection and person re-identification. Existing approaches follow a fully supervised setting where both bounding box and identity annotations are available. However, annotating identities is labor-intensive, limiting the practicability and scalability of current frameworks. This paper inventively considers weakly supervised person search with only bounding box annotations. We proposed the first framework to address this novel task, namely Context-Guided Person Search (CGPS), by investigating three levels of context clues (i.e., detection, memory and scene) in unconstrained natural images. The first two are employed to promote local and global discriminative capabilities, while the latter enhances clustering accuracy. Despite its simple design, our CGPS boosts the baseline model by 8.3% in mAP on CUHK-SYSU. Surprisingly, it even achieves comparable performance to two-step person search models, while displaying higher efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/ljpadam/CGPS.