Masksembles for Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks have amply demonstrated their prowess but estimating the reliability of their predictions remains challenging. Deep Ensembles are widely considered as being one of the best methods for generating uncertainty estimates but are very expensive to train and evaluate. MC-Dropout is another popular alternative, which is less expensive, but also less reliable. Our central intuition is that there is a continuous spectrum of ensemble-like models of which MC-Dropout and Deep Ensembles are extreme examples. The first uses an effectively infinite number of highly correlated models while the second relies on a finite number of independent models. To combine the benefits of both, we introduce Masksembles. Instead of randomly dropping parts of the network as in MC-dropout, Masksemble relies on a fixed number of binary masks, which are parameterized in a way that allows to change correlations between individual models. Namely, by controlling the overlap between the masks and their density one can choose the optimal configuration for the task at hand. This leads to a simple and easy to implement method with performance on par with Ensembles at a fraction of the cost. We experimentally validate Masksembles on two widely used datasets, CIFAR10 and ImageNet.

Self-supervised Human Detection and Segmentation via Multi-view Consensus

Self-supervised detection and segmentation of foreground objects in complex scenes is gaining attention as their fully-supervised counterparts require overly large amounts of annotated data to deliver sufficient accuracy in domain-specific applications. However, existing self-supervised approaches predominantly rely on restrictive assumptions on appearance and motion, which precludes their use in scenes depicting highly dynamic activities or involve camera motion. To mitigate this problem, we propose using a multi-camera framework in which geometric constraints are embedded in the form of multi-view consistency during training via coarse 3D localization in a voxel grid and fine-grained offset regression. In this manner, we learn a joint distribution of proposals over multiple views. At inference time, our method operates on single RGB images. We show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised person detection and segmentation techniques on images that visually depart from those of standard benchmarks, as well as on those of the classical Human3.6M dataset.

Long Term Motion Prediction Using Keyposes

Long term human motion prediction is an essential component in safety-critical applications, such as human-robot interaction and autonomous driving. We argue that, to achieve long term forecasting, predicting human pose at every time instant is unnecessary because human motion follows patterns that are well-represented by a few essential poses in the sequence. We call such poses "keyposes", and approximate complex motions by linearly interpolating between subsequent keyposes. We show that learning the sequence of such keyposes allows us to predict very long term motion, up to 5 seconds in the future. In particular, our predictions are much more realistic and better preserve the motion dynamics than those obtained by the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our approach models the future keyposes probabilistically, which, during inference, lets us generate diverse future motions via sampling.

Unsupervised Learning on Monocular Videos for 3D Human Pose Estimation

In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised feature extraction method that exploits contrastive self-supervised (CSS) learning to extract rich latent vectors from single-view videos. Instead of simply treating the latent features of nearby frames as positive pairs and those of temporally-distant ones as negative pairs as in other CSS approaches, we explicitly separate each latent vector into a time-variant component and a time-invariant one. We then show that applying CSS only to the time-variant features, while also reconstructing the input and encouraging a gradual transition between nearby and away features yields a rich latent space, well-suited for human pose estimation. Our approach outperforms other unsupervised single-view methods and match the performance of multi-view techniques.

Counting People by Estimating People Flows

Modern methods for counting people in crowded scenes rely on deep networks to estimate people densities in individual images. As such, only very few take advantage of temporal consistency in video sequences, and those that do only impose weak smoothness constraints across consecutive frames. In this paper, we advocate estimating people flows across image locations between consecutive images and inferring the people densities from these flows instead of directly regressing them. This enables us to impose much stronger constraints encoding the conservation of the number of people. As a result, it significantly boosts performance without requiring a more complex architecture. Furthermore, it allows us to exploit the correlation between people flow and optical flow to further improve the results. We also show that leveraging people conservation constraints in both a spatial and temporal manner makes it possible to train a deep crowd counting model in an active learning setting with much fewer annotations. This significantly reduces the annotation cost while still leading to similar performance to the full supervision case.

PCLs: Geometry-aware Neural Reconstruction of 3D Pose with Perspective Crop Layers

Local processing is an essential feature of CNNs and other neural network architectures - it is one of the reasons why they work so well on images where relevant information is, to a large extent, local. However, perspective effects stemming from the projection in a conventional camera vary for different global positions in the image. We introduce Perspective Crop Layers (PCLs) - a form of perspective crop of the region of interest based on the camera geometry - and show that accounting for the perspective consistently improves the accuracy of state-of-the-art 3D pose reconstruction methods. PCLs are modular neural network layers, which, when inserted into existing CNN and MLP architectures, deterministically remove the location-dependent perspective effects while leaving end-to-end training and the number of parameters of the underlying neural network unchanged. We demonstrate that PCL leads to improved 3D human pose reconstruction accuracy for CNN architectures that use cropping operations, such as spatial transformer networks (STN), and, somewhat surprisingly, MLPs used for 2D-to-3D keypoint lifting. Our conclusion is that it is important to utilize camera calibration information when available, for classical and deep-learning-based computer vision alike. PCL offers an easy way to improve the accuracy of existing 3D reconstruction networks by making them geometry-aware.

A Closed-Form Solution to Local Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion

A recent trend in Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion (NRSfM) is to express local, differential constraints between pairs of images, from which the surface normal at any point can be obtained by solving a system of polynomial equations. The systems of equations derived in previous work, however, are of high degree, having up to five real solutions, thus requiring a computationally expensive strategy to select a unique solution. Furthermore, they suffer from degeneracies that make the resulting estimates unreliable, without any mechanism to identify this situation. In this paper, we show that, under widely applicable assumptions, we can derive a new system of equation in terms of the surface normals whose two solutions can be obtained in closed-form and can easily be disambiguated locally. Our formalism further allows us to assess how reliable the estimated local normals are and, hence, to discard them if they are not. Our experiments show that our reconstructions, obtained from two or more views, are significantly more accurate than those of state-of-the-art methods, while also being faster.

Deep Active Surface Models

Active Surface Models have a long history of being useful to model complex 3D surfaces but only Active Contours have been used in conjunction with deep networks, and then only to produce the data term as well as meta-parameter maps controlling them. In this paper, we advocate a much tighter integration. We introduce layers that implement them that can be integrated seamlessly into Graph Convolutional Networks to enforce sophisticated smoothness priors at an acceptable computational cost. We will show that the resulting Deep Active Surface Models outperform equivalent architectures that use traditional regularization loss terms to impose smoothness priors for 3D surface reconstruction from 2D images and for 3D volume segmentation.

Self-supervised Segmentation via Background Inpainting

While supervised object detection and segmentation methods achieve impressive accuracy, they generalize poorly to images whose appearance significantly differs from the data they have been trained on. To address this when annotating data is prohibitively expensive, we introduce a self-supervised detection and segmentation approach that can work with single images captured by a potentially moving camera. At the heart of our approach lies the observation that object segmentation and background reconstruction are linked tasks, and that, for structured scenes, background regions can be re-synthesized from their surroundings, whereas regions depicting the moving object cannot. We encode this intuition into a self-supervised loss function that we exploit to train a proposal-based segmentation network. To account for the discrete nature of the proposals, we develop a Monte Carlo-based training strategy that allows the algorithm to explore the large space of object proposals. We apply our method to human detection and segmentation in images that visually depart from those of standard benchmarks and outperform existing self-supervised methods.

Better Patch Stitching for Parametric Surface Reconstruction

Recently, parametric mappings have emerged as highly effective surface representations, yielding low reconstruction error. In particular, the latest works represent the target shape as an atlas of multiple mappings, which can closely encode object parts. Atlas representations, however, suffer from one major drawback: The individual mappings are not guaranteed to be consistent, which results in holes in the reconstructed shape or in jagged surface areas. We introduce an approach that explicitly encourages global consistency of the local mappings. To this end, we introduce two novel loss terms. The first term exploits the surface normals and requires that they remain locally consistent when estimated within and across the individual mappings. The second term further encourages better spatial configuration of the mappings by minimizing novel stitching error. We show on standard benchmarks that the use of normal consistency requirement outperforms the baselines quantitatively while enforcing better stitching leads to much better visual quality of the reconstructed objects as compared to the state-of-the-art.