Improving LiDAR 3D Object Detection via Range-based Point Cloud Density Optimization

In recent years, much progress has been made in LiDAR-based 3D object detection mainly due to advances in detector architecture designs and availability of large-scale LiDAR datasets. Existing 3D object detectors tend to perform well on the point cloud regions closer to the LiDAR sensor as opposed to on regions that are farther away. In this paper, we investigate this problem from the data perspective instead of detector architecture design. We observe that there is a learning bias in detection models towards the dense objects near the sensor and show that the detection performance can be improved by simply manipulating the input point cloud density at different distance ranges without modifying the detector architecture and without data augmentation. We propose a model-free point cloud density adjustment pre-processing mechanism that uses iterative MCMC optimization to estimate optimal parameters for altering the point density at different distance ranges. We conduct experiments using four state-of-the-art LiDAR 3D object detectors on two public LiDAR datasets, namely Waymo and ONCE. Our results demonstrate that our range-based point cloud density manipulation technique can improve the performance of the existing detectors, which in turn could potentially inspire future detector designs.

Domain Adaptation in 3D Object Detection with Gradual Batch Alternation Training

We consider the problem of domain adaptation in LiDAR-based 3D object detection. Towards this, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy called Gradual Batch Alternation that can adapt from a large labeled source domain to an insufficiently labeled target domain. The idea is to initiate the training with the batch of samples from the source and target domain data in an alternate fashion, but then gradually reduce the amount of the source domain data over time as the training progresses. This way the model slowly shifts towards the target domain and eventually better adapt to it. The domain adaptation experiments for 3D object detection on four benchmark autonomous driving datasets, namely ONCE, PandaSet, Waymo, and nuScenes, demonstrate significant performance gains over prior arts and strong baselines.

HYLDA: End-to-end Hybrid Learning Domain Adaptation for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

In this paper we address the problem of training a LiDAR semantic segmentation network using a fully-labeled source dataset and a target dataset that only has a small number of labels. To this end, we develop a novel image-to-image translation engine, and couple it with a LiDAR semantic segmentation network, resulting in an integrated domain adaptation architecture we call HYLDA. To train the system end-to-end, we adopt a diverse set of learning paradigms, including 1) self-supervision on a simple auxiliary reconstruction task, 2) semi-supervised training using a few available labeled target domain frames, and 3) unsupervised training on the fake translated images generated by the image-to-image translation stage, together with the labeled frames from the source domain. In the latter case, the semantic segmentation network participates in the updating of the image-to-image translation engine. We demonstrate experimentally that HYLDA effectively addresses the challenging problem of improving generalization on validation data from the target domain when only a few target labeled frames are available for training. We perform an extensive evaluation where we compare HYLDA against strong baseline methods using two publicly available LiDAR semantic segmentation datasets.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in LiDAR Semantic Segmentation with Self-Supervision and Gated Adapters

In this paper, we focus on a less explored, but more realistic and complex problem of domain adaptation in LiDAR semantic segmentation. There is a significant drop in performance of an existing segmentation model when training (source domain) and testing (target domain) data originate from different LiDAR sensors. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation framework that leverages unlabeled target domain data for self-supervision, coupled with an unpaired mask transfer strategy to mitigate the impact of domain shifts. Furthermore, we introduce gated adapter modules with a small number of parameters into the network to account for target domain-specific information. Experiments adapting from both real-to-real and synthetic-to-real LiDAR semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the significant improvement over prior arts.

Referring Segmentation in Images and Videos with Cross-Modal Self-Attention Network

We consider the problem of referring segmentation in images and videos with natural language. Given an input image (or video) and a referring expression, the goal is to segment the entity referred by the expression in the image or video. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal self-attention (CMSA) module to utilize fine details of individual words and the input image or video, which effectively captures the long-range dependencies between linguistic and visual features. Our model can adaptively focus on informative words in the referring expression and important regions in the visual input. We further propose a gated multi-level fusion (GMLF) module to selectively integrate self-attentive cross-modal features corresponding to different levels of visual features. This module controls the feature fusion of information flow of features at different levels with high-level and low-level semantic information related to different attentive words. Besides, we introduce cross-frame self-attention (CFSA) module to effectively integrate temporal information in consecutive frames which extends our method in the case of referring segmentation in videos. Experiments on benchmark datasets of four referring image datasets and two actor and action video segmentation datasets consistently demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

AdaCrowd: Unlabeled Scene Adaptation for Crowd Counting

We address the problem of image-based crowd counting. In particular, we propose a new problem called unlabeled scene adaptive crowd counting. Given a new target scene, we would like to have a crowd counting model specifically adapted to this particular scene based on the target data that capture some information about the new scene. In this paper, we propose to use one or more unlabeled images from the target scene to perform the adaptation. In comparison with the existing problem setups (e.g. fully supervised), our proposed problem setup is closer to the real-world applications of crowd counting systems. We introduce a novel AdaCrowd framework to solve this problem. Our framework consists of a crowd counting network and a guiding network. The guiding network predicts some parameters in the crowd counting network based on the unlabeled images from a particular scene. This allows our model to adapt to different target scenes. The experimental results on several challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared with other alternative methods.

Sentence Guided Temporal Modulation for Dynamic Video Thumbnail Generation

We consider the problem of sentence specified dynamic video thumbnail generation. Given an input video and a user query sentence, the goal is to generate a video thumbnail that not only provides the preview of the video content, but also semantically corresponds to the sentence. In this paper, we propose a sentence guided temporal modulation (SGTM) mechanism that utilizes the sentence embedding to modulate the normalized temporal activations of the video thumbnail generation network. Unlike the existing state-of-the-art method that uses recurrent architectures, we propose a non-recurrent framework that is simple and allows much more parallelization. Extensive experiments and analysis on a large-scale dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Adaptive Video Highlight Detection by Learning from User History

Recently, there is an increasing interest in highlight detection research where the goal is to create a short duration video from a longer video by extracting its interesting moments. However, most existing methods ignore the fact that the definition of video highlight is highly subjective. Different users may have different preferences of highlight for the same input video. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework that learns to adapt highlight detection to a user by exploiting the user's history in the form of highlights that the user has previously created. Our framework consists of two sub-networks: a fully temporal convolutional highlight detection network $H$ that predicts highlight for an input video and a history encoder network $M$ for user history. We introduce a newly designed temporal-adaptive instance normalization (T-AIN) layer to $H$ where the two sub-networks interact with each other. T-AIN has affine parameters that are predicted from $M$ based on the user history and is responsible for the user-adaptive signal to $H$. Extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset show that our framework can make more accurate and user-specific highlight predictions.

Few-Shot Scene Adaptive Crowd Counting Using Meta-Learning

We consider the problem of few-shot scene adaptive crowd counting. Given a target camera scene, our goal is to adapt a model to this specific scene with only a few labeled images of that scene. The solution to this problem has potential applications in numerous real-world scenarios, where we ideally like to deploy a crowd counting model specially adapted to a target camera. We accomplish this challenge by taking inspiration from the recently introduced learning-to-learn paradigm in the context of few-shot regime. In training, our method learns the model parameters in a way that facilitates the fast adaptation to the target scene. At test time, given a target scene with a small number of labeled data, our method quickly adapts to that scene with a few gradient updates to the learned parameters. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms other alternatives in few-shot scene adaptive crowd counting.

Convolutional Temporal Attention Model for Video-based Person Re-identification

The goal of video-based person re-identification is to match two input videos, so that the distance of the two videos is small if two videos contain the same person. A common approach for person re-identification is to first extract image features for all frames in the video, then aggregate all the features to form a video-level feature. The video-level features of two videos can then be used to calculate the distance of the two videos. In this paper, we propose a temporal attention approach for aggregating frame-level features into a video-level feature vector for re-identification. Our method is motivated by the fact that not all frames in a video are equally informative. We propose a fully convolutional temporal attention model for generating the attention scores. Fully convolutional network (FCN) has been widely used in semantic segmentation for generating 2D output maps. In this paper, we formulate video based person re-identification as a sequence labeling problem like semantic segmentation. We establish a connection between them and modify FCN to generate attention scores to represent the importance of each frame. Extensive experiments on three different benchmark datasets (i.e. iLIDS-VID, PRID-2011 and SDU-VID) show that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.