Zero-shot Building Attribute Extraction from Large-Scale Vision and Language Models

Existing building recognition methods, exemplified by BRAILS, utilize supervised learning to extract information from satellite and street-view images for classification and segmentation. However, each task module requires human-annotated data, hindering the scalability and robustness to regional variations and annotation imbalances. In response, we propose a new zero-shot workflow for building attribute extraction that utilizes large-scale vision and language models to mitigate reliance on external annotations. The proposed workflow contains two key components: image-level captioning and segment-level captioning for the building images based on the vocabularies pertinent to structural and civil engineering. These two components generate descriptive captions by computing feature representations of the image and the vocabularies, and facilitating a semantic match between the visual and textual representations. Consequently, our framework offers a promising avenue to enhance AI-driven captioning for building attribute extraction in the structural and civil engineering domains, ultimately reducing reliance on human annotations while bolstering performance and adaptability.

Neural Matching Fields: Implicit Representation of Matching Fields for Visual Correspondence

Existing pipelines of semantic correspondence commonly include extracting high-level semantic features for the invariance against intra-class variations and background clutters. This architecture, however, inevitably results in a low-resolution matching field that additionally requires an ad-hoc interpolation process as a post-processing for converting it into a high-resolution one, certainly limiting the overall performance of matching results. To overcome this, inspired by recent success of implicit neural representation, we present a novel method for semantic correspondence, called Neural Matching Field (NeMF). However, complicacy and high-dimensionality of a 4D matching field are the major hindrances, which we propose a cost embedding network to process a coarse cost volume to use as a guidance for establishing high-precision matching field through the following fully-connected network. Nevertheless, learning a high-dimensional matching field remains challenging mainly due to computational complexity, since a naive exhaustive inference would require querying from all pixels in the 4D space to infer pixel-wise correspondences. To overcome this, we propose adequate training and inference procedures, which in the training phase, we randomly sample matching candidates and in the inference phase, we iteratively performs PatchMatch-based inference and coordinate optimization at test time. With these combined, competitive results are attained on several standard benchmarks for semantic correspondence. Code and pre-trained weights are available at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/NeMF/.

Unsupervised Scene Sketch to Photo Synthesis

Sketches make an intuitive and powerful visual expression as they are fast executed freehand drawings. We present a method for synthesizing realistic photos from scene sketches. Without the need for sketch and photo pairs, our framework directly learns from readily available large-scale photo datasets in an unsupervised manner. To this end, we introduce a standardization module that provides pseudo sketch-photo pairs during training by converting photos and sketches to a standardized domain, i.e. the edge map. The reduced domain gap between sketch and photo also allows us to disentangle them into two components: holistic scene structures and low-level visual styles such as color and texture. Taking this advantage, we synthesize a photo-realistic image by combining the structure of a sketch and the visual style of a reference photo. Extensive experimental results on perceptual similarity metrics and human perceptual studies show the proposed method could generate realistic photos with high fidelity from scene sketches and outperform state-of-the-art photo synthesis baselines. We also demonstrate that our framework facilitates a controllable manipulation of photo synthesis by editing strokes of corresponding sketches, delivering more fine-grained details than previous approaches that rely on region-level editing.

Semantic Correspondence with Transformers

We propose a novel cost aggregation network, called Cost Aggregation with Transformers (CATs), to find dense correspondences between semantically similar images with additional challenges posed by large intra-class appearance and geometric variations. Compared to previous hand-crafted or CNN-based methods addressing the cost aggregation stage, which either lack robustness to severe deformations or inherit the limitation of CNNs that fail to discriminate incorrect matches due to limited receptive fields, CATs explore global consensus among initial correlation map with the help of some architectural designs that allow us to exploit full potential of self-attention mechanism. Specifically, we include appearance affinity modelling to disambiguate the initial correlation maps and multi-level aggregation to benefit from hierarchical feature representations within Transformer-based aggregator, and combine with swapping self-attention and residual connections not only to enforce consistent matching, but also to ease the learning process. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model over the latest methods and provide extensive ablation studies. Code and trained models will be made available at https://github.com/SunghwanHong/CATs.

Joint Learning of Semantic Alignment and Object Landmark Detection

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based approaches for semantic alignment and object landmark detection have improved their performance significantly. Current efforts for the two tasks focus on addressing the lack of massive training data through weakly- or unsupervised learning frameworks. In this paper, we present a joint learning approach for obtaining dense correspondences and discovering object landmarks from semantically similar images. Based on the key insight that the two tasks can mutually provide supervisions to each other, our networks accomplish this through a joint loss function that alternatively imposes a consistency constraint between the two tasks, thereby boosting the performance and addressing the lack of training data in a principled manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to address the lack of training data for the two tasks through the joint learning. To further improve the robustness of our framework, we introduce a probabilistic learning formulation that allows only reliable matches to be used in the joint learning process. With the proposed method, state-of-the-art performance is attained on several standard benchmarks for semantic matching and landmark detection, including a newly introduced dataset, JLAD, which contains larger number of challenging image pairs than existing datasets.

Semantic Attribute Matching Networks

We present semantic attribute matching networks (SAM-Net) for jointly establishing correspondences and transferring attributes across semantically similar images, which intelligently weaves the advantages of the two tasks while overcoming their limitations. SAM-Net accomplishes this through an iterative process of establishing reliable correspondences by reducing the attribute discrepancy between the images and synthesizing attribute transferred images using the learned correspondences. To learn the networks using weak supervisions in the form of image pairs, we present a semantic attribute matching loss based on the matching similarity between an attribute transferred source feature and a warped target feature. With SAM-Net, the state-of-the-art performance is attained on several benchmarks for semantic matching and attribute transfer.

Recurrent Transformer Networks for Semantic Correspondence

We present recurrent transformer networks (RTNs) for obtaining dense correspondences between semantically similar images. Our networks accomplish this through an iterative process of estimating spatial transformations between the input images and using these transformations to generate aligned convolutional activations. By directly estimating the transformations between an image pair, rather than employing spatial transformer networks to independently normalize each individual image, we show that greater accuracy can be achieved. This process is conducted in a recursive manner to refine both the transformation estimates and the feature representations. In addition, a technique is presented for weakly-supervised training of RTNs that is based on a proposed classification loss. With RTNs, state-of-the-art performance is attained on several benchmarks for semantic correspondence.

PARN: Pyramidal Affine Regression Networks for Dense Semantic Correspondence

This paper presents a deep architecture for dense semantic correspondence, called pyramidal affine regression networks (PARN), that estimates locally-varying affine transformation fields across images. To deal with intra-class appearance and shape variations that commonly exist among different instances within the same object category, we leverage a pyramidal model where affine transformation fields are progressively estimated in a coarse-to-fine manner so that the smoothness constraint is naturally imposed within deep networks. PARN estimates residual affine transformations at each level and composes them to estimate final affine transformations. Furthermore, to overcome the limitations of insufficient training data for semantic correspondence, we propose a novel weakly-supervised training scheme that generates progressive supervisions by leveraging a correspondence consistency across image pairs. Our method is fully learnable in an end-to-end manner and does not require quantizing infinite continuous affine transformation fields. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work that attempts to estimate dense affine transformation fields in a coarse-to-fine manner within deep networks. Experimental results demonstrate that PARN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for dense semantic correspondence on various benchmarks.

FCSS: Fully Convolutional Self-Similarity for Dense Semantic Correspondence

We present a descriptor, called fully convolutional self-similarity (FCSS), for dense semantic correspondence. To robustly match points among different instances within the same object class, we formulate FCSS using local self-similarity (LSS) within a fully convolutional network. In contrast to existing CNN-based descriptors, FCSS is inherently insensitive to intra-class appearance variations because of its LSS-based structure, while maintaining the precise localization ability of deep neural networks. The sampling patterns of local structure and the self-similarity measure are jointly learned within the proposed network in an end-to-end and multi-scale manner. As training data for semantic correspondence is rather limited, we propose to leverage object candidate priors provided in existing image datasets and also correspondence consistency between object pairs to enable weakly-supervised learning. Experiments demonstrate that FCSS outperforms conventional handcrafted descriptors and CNN-based descriptors on various benchmarks.