Segment as Points for Efficient Online Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation

Current multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) methods follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm and adopt convolutions for feature extraction. However, as affected by the inherent receptive field, convolution based feature extraction inevitably mixes up the foreground features and the background features, resulting in ambiguities in the subsequent instance association. In this paper, we propose a highly effective method for learning instance embeddings based on segments by converting the compact image representation to un-ordered 2D point cloud representation. Our method generates a new tracking-by-points paradigm where discriminative instance embeddings are learned from randomly selected points rather than images. Furthermore, multiple informative data modalities are converted into point-wise representations to enrich point-wise features. The resulting online MOTS framework, named PointTrack, surpasses all the state-of-the-art methods including 3D tracking methods by large margins (5.4% higher MOTSA and 18 times faster over MOTSFusion) with the near real-time speed (22 FPS). Evaluations across three datasets demonstrate both the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Moreover, based on the observation that current MOTS datasets lack crowded scenes, we build a more challenging MOTS dataset named APOLLO MOTS with higher instance density. Both APOLLO MOTS and our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/detectRecog/PointTrack.

PointTrack++ for Effective Online Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation

Multiple-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) is a novel computer vision task that aims to jointly perform multiple object tracking (MOT) and instance segmentation. In this work, we present PointTrack++, an effective on-line framework for MOTS, which remarkably extends our recently proposed PointTrack framework. To begin with, PointTrack adopts an efficient one-stage framework for instance segmentation, and learns instance embeddings by converting compact image representations to un-ordered 2D point cloud. Compared with PointTrack, our proposed PointTrack++ offers three major improvements. Firstly, in the instance segmentation stage, we adopt a semantic segmentation decoder trained with focal loss to improve the instance selection quality. Secondly, to further boost the segmentation performance, we propose a data augmentation strategy by copy-and-paste instances into training images. Finally, we introduce a better training strategy in the instance association stage to improve the distinguishability of learned instance embeddings. The resulting framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the 5th BMTT MOTChallenge.

ZoomNet: Part-Aware Adaptive Zooming Neural Network for 3D Object Detection

3D object detection is an essential task in autonomous driving and robotics. Though great progress has been made, challenges remain in estimating 3D pose for distant and occluded objects. In this paper, we present a novel framework named ZoomNet for stereo imagery-based 3D detection. The pipeline of ZoomNet begins with an ordinary 2D object detection model which is used to obtain pairs of left-right bounding boxes. To further exploit the abundant texture cues in RGB images for more accurate disparity estimation, we introduce a conceptually straight-forward module -- adaptive zooming, which simultaneously resizes 2D instance bounding boxes to a unified resolution and adjusts the camera intrinsic parameters accordingly. In this way, we are able to estimate higher-quality disparity maps from the resized box images then construct dense point clouds for both nearby and distant objects. Moreover, we introduce to learn part locations as complementary features to improve the resistance against occlusion and put forward the 3D fitting score to better estimate the 3D detection quality. Extensive experiments on the popular KITTI 3D detection dataset indicate ZoomNet surpasses all previous state-of-the-art methods by large margins (improved by 9.4% on APbv (IoU=0.7) over pseudo-LiDAR). Ablation study also demonstrates that our adaptive zooming strategy brings an improvement of over 10% on AP3d (IoU=0.7). In addition, since the official KITTI benchmark lacks fine-grained annotations like pixel-wise part locations, we also present our KFG dataset by augmenting KITTI with detailed instance-wise annotations including pixel-wise part location, pixel-wise disparity, etc.. Both the KFG dataset and our codes will be publicly available at https://github.com/detectRecog/ZoomNet.

Aggregating Votes with Local Differential Privacy: Usefulness, Soundness vs. Indistinguishability

Voting plays a central role in bringing crowd wisdom to collective decision making, meanwhile data privacy has been a common ethical/legal issue in eliciting preferences from individuals. This work studies the problem of aggregating individual's voting data under the local differential privacy setting, where usefulness and soundness of the aggregated scores are of major concern. One naive approach to the problem is adding Laplace random noises, however, it makes aggregated scores extremely fragile to new types of strategic behaviors tailored to the local privacy setting: data amplification attack and view disguise attack. The data amplification attack means an attacker's manipulation power is amplified by the privacy-preserving procedure when contributing a fraud vote. The view disguise attack happens when an attacker could disguise malicious data as valid private views to manipulate the voting result. In this work, after theoretically quantifying the estimation error bound and the manipulating risk bound of the Laplace mechanism, we propose two mechanisms improving the usefulness and soundness simultaneously: the weighted sampling mechanism and the additive mechanism. The former one interprets the score vector as probabilistic data. Compared to the Laplace mechanism for Borda voting rule with $d$ candidates, it reduces the mean squared error bound by half and lowers the maximum magnitude risk bound from $+\infty$ to $O(\frac{d^3}{n\epsilon})$. The latter one randomly outputs a subset of candidates according to their total scores. Its mean squared error bound is optimized from $O(\frac{d^5}{n\epsilon^2})$ to $O(\frac{d^4}{n\epsilon^2})$, and its maximum magnitude risk bound is reduced to $O(\frac{d^2}{n\epsilon})$. Experimental results validate that our proposed approaches averagely reduce estimation error by $50\%$ and are more robust to adversarial attacks.

Personalized Classifier Ensemble Pruning Framework for Mobile Crowdsourcing

Ensemble learning has been widely employed by mobile applications, ranging from environmental sensing to activity recognitions. One of the fundamental issue in ensemble learning is the trade-off between classification accuracy and computational costs, which is the goal of ensemble pruning. During crowdsourcing, the centralized aggregator releases ensemble learning models to a large number of mobile participants for task evaluation or as the crowdsourcing learning results, while different participants may seek for different levels of the accuracy-cost trade-off. However, most of existing ensemble pruning approaches consider only one identical level of such trade-off. In this study, we present an efficient ensemble pruning framework for personalized accuracy-cost trade-offs via multi-objective optimization. Specifically, for the commonly used linear-combination style of the trade-off, we provide an objective-mixture optimization to further reduce the number of ensemble candidates. Experimental results show that our framework is highly efficient for personalized ensemble pruning, and achieves much better pruning performance with objective-mixture optimization when compared to state-of-art approaches.

More than Word Frequencies: Authorship Attribution via Natural Frequency Zoned Word Distribution Analysis

With such increasing popularity and availability of digital text data, authorships of digital texts can not be taken for granted due to the ease of copying and parsing. This paper presents a new text style analysis called natural frequency zoned word distribution analysis (NFZ-WDA), and then a basic authorship attribution scheme and an open authorship attribution scheme for digital texts based on the analysis. NFZ-WDA is based on the observation that all authors leave distinct intrinsic word usage traces on texts written by them and these intrinsic styles can be identified and employed to analyze the authorship. The intrinsic word usage styles can be estimated through the analysis of word distribution within a text, which is more than normal word frequency analysis and can be expressed as: which groups of words are used in the text; how frequently does each group of words occur; how are the occurrences of each group of words distributed in the text. Next, the basic authorship attribution scheme and the open authorship attribution scheme provide solutions for both closed and open authorship attribution problems. Through analysis and extensive experimental studies, this paper demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed method for authorship attribution.