Fast Segment Anything

The recently proposed segment anything model (SAM) has made a significant influence in many computer vision tasks. It is becoming a foundation step for many high-level tasks, like image segmentation, image caption, and image editing. However, its huge computation costs prevent it from wider applications in industry scenarios. The computation mainly comes from the Transformer architecture at high-resolution inputs. In this paper, we propose a speed-up alternative method for this fundamental task with comparable performance. By reformulating the task as segments-generation and prompting, we find that a regular CNN detector with an instance segmentation branch can also accomplish this task well. Specifically, we convert this task to the well-studied instance segmentation task and directly train the existing instance segmentation method using only 1/50 of the SA-1B dataset published by SAM authors. With our method, we achieve a comparable performance with the SAM method at 50 times higher run-time speed. We give sufficient experimental results to demonstrate its effectiveness. The codes and demos will be released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FastSAM.

FreConv: Frequency Branch-and-Integration Convolutional Networks

Recent researches indicate that utilizing the frequency information of input data can enhance the performance of networks. However, the existing popular convolutional structure is not designed specifically for utilizing the frequency information contained in datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective module, named FreConv (frequency branch-and-integration convolution), to replace the vanilla convolution. FreConv adopts a dual-branch architecture to extract and integrate high- and low-frequency information. In the high-frequency branch, a derivative-filter-like architecture is designed to extract the high-frequency information while a light extractor is employed in the low-frequency branch because the low-frequency information is usually redundant. FreConv is able to exploit the frequency information of input data in a more reasonable way to enhance feature representation ability and reduce the memory and computational cost significantly. Without any bells and whistles, experimental results on various tasks demonstrate that FreConv-equipped networks consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines.

ZBS: Zero-shot Background Subtraction via Instance-level Background Modeling and Foreground Selection

Background subtraction (BGS) aims to extract all moving objects in the video frames to obtain binary foreground segmentation masks. Deep learning has been widely used in this field. Compared with supervised-based BGS methods, unsupervised methods have better generalization. However, previous unsupervised deep learning BGS algorithms perform poorly in sophisticated scenarios such as shadows or night lights, and they cannot detect objects outside the pre-defined categories. In this work, we propose an unsupervised BGS algorithm based on zero-shot object detection called Zero-shot Background Subtraction (ZBS). The proposed method fully utilizes the advantages of zero-shot object detection to build the open-vocabulary instance-level background model. Based on it, the foreground can be effectively extracted by comparing the detection results of new frames with the background model. ZBS performs well for sophisticated scenarios, and it has rich and extensible categories. Furthermore, our method can easily generalize to other tasks, such as abandoned object detection in unseen environments. We experimentally show that ZBS surpasses state-of-the-art unsupervised BGS methods by 4.70% F-Measure on the CDnet 2014 dataset. The code is released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/ZBS.

Efficient Masked Autoencoders with Self-Consistency

Inspired by masked language modeling (MLM) in natural language processing, masked image modeling (MIM) has been recognized as a strong and popular self-supervised pre-training method in computer vision. However, its high random mask ratio would result in two serious problems: 1) the data are not efficiently exploited, which brings inefficient pre-training (\eg, 1600 epochs for MAE $vs.$ 300 epochs for the supervised), and 2) the high uncertainty and inconsistency of the pre-trained model, \ie, the prediction of the same patch may be inconsistent under different mask rounds. To tackle these problems, we propose efficient masked autoencoders with self-consistency (EMAE), to improve the pre-training efficiency and increase the consistency of MIM. In particular, we progressively divide the image into K non-overlapping parts, each of which is generated by a random mask and has the same mask ratio. Then the MIM task is conducted parallelly on all parts in an iteration and generates predictions. Besides, we design a self-consistency module to further maintain the consistency of predictions of overlapping masked patches among parts. Overall, the proposed method is able to exploit the data more efficiently and obtains reliable representations. Experiments on ImageNet show that EMAE achieves even higher results with only 300 pre-training epochs under ViT-Base than MAE (1600 epochs). EMAE also consistently obtains state-of-the-art transfer performance on various downstream tasks, like object detection, and semantic segmentation.

Deep Learning for Human Parsing: A Survey

Human parsing is a key topic in image processing with many applications, such as surveillance analysis, human-robot interaction, person search, and clothing category classification, among many others. Recently, due to the success of deep learning in computer vision, there are a number of works aimed at developing human parsing algorithms using deep learning models. As methods have been proposed, a comprehensive survey of this topic is of great importance. In this survey, we provide an analysis of state-of-the-art human parsing methods, covering a broad spectrum of pioneering works for semantic human parsing. We introduce five insightful categories: (1) structure-driven architectures exploit the relationship of different human parts and the inherent hierarchical structure of a human body, (2) graph-based networks capture the global information to achieve an efficient and complete human body analysis, (3) context-aware networks explore useful contexts across all pixel to characterize a pixel of the corresponding class, (4) LSTM-based methods can combine short-distance and long-distance spatial dependencies to better exploit abundant local and global contexts, and (5) combined auxiliary information approaches use related tasks or supervision to improve network performance. We also discuss the advantages/disadvantages of the methods in each category and the relationships between methods in different categories, examine the most widely used datasets, report performances, and discuss promising future research directions in this area.

Obj2Seq: Formatting Objects as Sequences with Class Prompt for Visual Tasks

Visual tasks vary a lot in their output formats and concerned contents, therefore it is hard to process them with an identical structure. One main obstacle lies in the high-dimensional outputs in object-level visual tasks. In this paper, we propose an object-centric vision framework, Obj2Seq. Obj2Seq takes objects as basic units, and regards most object-level visual tasks as sequence generation problems of objects. Therefore, these visual tasks can be decoupled into two steps. First recognize objects of given categories, and then generate a sequence for each of these objects. The definition of the output sequences varies for different tasks, and the model is supervised by matching these sequences with ground-truth targets. Obj2Seq is able to flexibly determine input categories to satisfy customized requirements, and be easily extended to different visual tasks. When experimenting on MS COCO, Obj2Seq achieves 45.7% AP on object detection, 89.0% AP on multi-label classification and 65.0% AP on human pose estimation. These results demonstrate its potential to be generally applied to different visual tasks. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/Obj2Seq.

Transfering Low-Frequency Features for Domain Adaptation

Previous unsupervised domain adaptation methods did not handle the cross-domain problem from the perspective of frequency for computer vision. The images or feature maps of different domains can be decomposed into the low-frequency component and high-frequency component. This paper proposes the assumption that low-frequency information is more domain-invariant while the high-frequency information contains domain-related information. Hence, we introduce an approach, named low-frequency module (LFM), to extract domain-invariant feature representations. The LFM is constructed with the digital Gaussian low-pass filter. Our method is easy to implement and introduces no extra hyperparameter. We design two effective ways to utilize the LFM for domain adaptation, and our method is complementary to other existing methods and formulated as a plug-and-play unit that can be combined with these methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our LFM outperforms state-of-the-art methods for various computer vision tasks, including image classification and object detection.

Plug-and-Play Pseudo Label Correction Network for Unsupervised Person Re-identification

Clustering-based methods, which alternate between the generation of pseudo labels and the optimization of the feature extraction network, play a dominant role in both unsupervised learning (USL) and unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) person re-identification (Re-ID). To alleviate the adverse effect of noisy pseudo labels, the existing methods either abandon unreliable labels or refine the pseudo labels via mutual learning or label propagation. However, a great many erroneous labels are still accumulated because these methods mostly adopt traditional unsupervised clustering algorithms which rely on certain assumptions on data distribution and fail to capture the distribution of complex real-world data. In this paper, we propose the plug-and-play graph-based pseudo label correction network (GLC) to refine the pseudo labels in the manner of supervised clustering. GLC is trained to perceive the varying data distribution at each epoch of the self-training with the supervision of initial pseudo labels generated by any clustering method. It can learn to rectify the initial noisy labels by means of the relationship constraints between samples on the k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) graph and early-stop training strategy. Specifically, GLC learns to aggregate node features from neighbors and predict whether the nodes should be linked on the graph. Besides, GLC is optimized with 'early stop' before the noisy labels are severely memorized to prevent overfitting to noisy pseudo labels. Consequently, GLC improves the quality of pseudo labels though the supervision signals contain some noise, leading to better Re-ID performance. Extensive experiments in USL and UDA person Re-ID on Market-1501 and MSMT17 show that our method is widely compatible with various clustering-based methods and promotes the state-of-the-art performance consistently.

UniVIP: A Unified Framework for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-training

Self-supervised learning (SSL) holds promise in leveraging large amounts of unlabeled data. However, the success of popular SSL methods has limited on single-centric-object images like those in ImageNet and ignores the correlation among the scene and instances, as well as the semantic difference of instances in the scene. To address the above problems, we propose a Unified Self-supervised Visual Pre-training (UniVIP), a novel self-supervised framework to learn versatile visual representations on either single-centric-object or non-iconic dataset. The framework takes into account the representation learning at three levels: 1) the similarity of scene-scene, 2) the correlation of scene-instance, 3) the discrimination of instance-instance. During the learning, we adopt the optimal transport algorithm to automatically measure the discrimination of instances. Massive experiments show that UniVIP pre-trained on non-iconic COCO achieves state-of-the-art transfer performance on a variety of downstream tasks, such as image classification, semi-supervised learning, object detection and segmentation. Furthermore, our method can also exploit single-centric-object dataset such as ImageNet and outperforms BYOL by 2.5% with the same pre-training epochs in linear probing, and surpass current self-supervised object detection methods on COCO dataset, demonstrating its universality and potential.

Beyond the Limitation of Pulse Width in Optical Time-domain Reflectometry

Optical time-domain reflectometry (OTDR) is the basis for distributed time-domain optical fiber sensing techniques. By injecting pulse light into an optical fiber, the distance information of an event can be obtained based on the time of light flight. The minimum distinguishable event separation along the fiber length is called the spatial resolution, which is determined by the optical pulse width. By reducing the pulse width, the spatial resolution can be improved. However, at the same time, the signal-to-noise ratio of the system is degraded, and higher speed equipment is required. To solve this problem, data processing methods such as iterative subdivision, deconvolution, and neural networks have been proposed. However, they all have some shortcomings and thus have not been widely applied. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate an OTDR deconvolution neural network based on deep convolutional neural networks. A simplified OTDR model is built to generate a large amount of training data. By optimizing the network structure and training data, an effective OTDR deconvolution is achieved. The simulation and experimental results show that the proposed neural network can achieve more accurate deconvolution than the conventional deconvolution algorithm with a higher signal-to-noise ratio.