Dynamic Low-Resolution Distillation for Cost-Efficient End-to-End Text Spotting

End-to-end text spotting has attached great attention recently due to its benefits on global optimization and high maintainability for real applications. However, the input scale has always been a tough trade-off since recognizing a small text instance usually requires enlarging the whole image, which brings high computational costs. In this paper, to address this problem, we propose a novel cost-efficient Dynamic Low-resolution Distillation (DLD) text spotting framework, which aims to infer images in different small but recognizable resolutions and achieve a better balance between accuracy and efficiency. Concretely, we adopt a resolution selector to dynamically decide the input resolutions for different images, which is constraint by both inference accuracy and computational cost. Another sequential knowledge distillation strategy is conducted on the text recognition branch, making the low-res input obtains comparable performance to a high-res image. The proposed method can be optimized end-to-end and adopted in any current text spotting framework to improve the practicability. Extensive experiments on several text spotting benchmarks show that the proposed method vastly improves the usability of low-res models. The code is available at https://github.com/hikopensource/DAVAR-Lab-OCR/.

Entropy-driven Sampling and Training Scheme for Conditional Diffusion Generation

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) is able to make flexible conditional image generation from prior noise to real data, by introducing an independent noise-aware classifier to provide conditional gradient guidance at each time step of denoising process. However, due to the ability of classifier to easily discriminate an incompletely generated image only with high-level structure, the gradient, which is a kind of class information guidance, tends to vanish early, leading to the collapse from conditional generation process into the unconditional process. To address this problem, we propose two simple but effective approaches from two perspectives. For sampling procedure, we introduce the entropy of predicted distribution as the measure of guidance vanishing level and propose an entropy-aware scaling method to adaptively recover the conditional semantic guidance. For training stage, we propose the entropy-aware optimization objectives to alleviate the overconfident prediction for noisy data.On ImageNet1000 256x256, with our proposed sampling scheme and trained classifier, the pretrained conditional and unconditional DDPM model can achieve 10.89% (4.59 to 4.09) and 43.5% (12 to 6.78) FID improvement respectively.

Ultra Fast Deep Lane Detection with Hybrid Anchor Driven Ordinal Classification

Modern methods mainly regard lane detection as a problem of pixel-wise segmentation, which is struggling to address the problems of efficiency and challenging scenarios like severe occlusions and extreme lighting conditions. Inspired by human perception, the recognition of lanes under severe occlusions and extreme lighting conditions is mainly based on contextual and global information. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel, simple, yet effective formulation aiming at ultra fast speed and the problem of challenging scenarios. Specifically, we treat the process of lane detection as an anchor-driven ordinal classification problem using global features. First, we represent lanes with sparse coordinates on a series of hybrid (row and column) anchors. With the help of the anchor-driven representation, we then reformulate the lane detection task as an ordinal classification problem to get the coordinates of lanes. Our method could significantly reduce the computational cost with the anchor-driven representation. Using the large receptive field property of the ordinal classification formulation, we could also handle challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments on four lane detection datasets show that our method could achieve state-of-the-art performance in terms of both speed and accuracy. A lightweight version could even achieve 300+ frames per second(FPS). Our code is at https://github.com/cfzd/Ultra-Fast-Lane-Detection-v2.

MonoGround: Detecting Monocular 3D Objects from the Ground

Monocular 3D object detection has attracted great attention for its advantages in simplicity and cost. Due to the ill-posed 2D to 3D mapping essence from the monocular imaging process, monocular 3D object detection suffers from inaccurate depth estimation and thus has poor 3D detection results. To alleviate this problem, we propose to introduce the ground plane as a prior in the monocular 3d object detection. The ground plane prior serves as an additional geometric condition to the ill-posed mapping and an extra source in depth estimation. In this way, we can get a more accurate depth estimation from the ground. Meanwhile, to take full advantage of the ground plane prior, we propose a depth-align training strategy and a precise two-stage depth inference method tailored for the ground plane prior. It is worth noting that the introduced ground plane prior requires no extra data sources like LiDAR, stereo images, and depth information. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark show that our method could achieve state-of-the-art results compared with other methods while maintaining a very fast speed. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/cfzd/MonoGround.

F3A-GAN: Facial Flow for Face Animation with Generative Adversarial Networks

Formulated as a conditional generation problem, face animation aims at synthesizing continuous face images from a single source image driven by a set of conditional face motion. Previous works mainly model the face motion as conditions with 1D or 2D representation (e.g., action units, emotion codes, landmark), which often leads to low-quality results in some complicated scenarios such as continuous generation and largepose transformation. To tackle this problem, the conditions are supposed to meet two requirements, i.e., motion information preserving and geometric continuity. To this end, we propose a novel representation based on a 3D geometric flow, termed facial flow, to represent the natural motion of the human face at any pose. Compared with other previous conditions, the proposed facial flow well controls the continuous changes to the face. After that, in order to utilize the facial flow for face editing, we build a synthesis framework generating continuous images with conditional facial flows. To fully take advantage of the motion information of facial flows, a hierarchical conditional framework is designed to combine the extracted multi-scale appearance features from images and motion features from flows in a hierarchical manner. The framework then decodes multiple fused features back to images progressively. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

D3T-GAN: Data-Dependent Domain Transfer GANs for Few-shot Image Generation

As an important and challenging problem, few-shot image generation aims at generating realistic images through training a GAN model given few samples. A typical solution for few-shot generation is to transfer a well-trained GAN model from a data-rich source domain to the data-deficient target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised transfer scheme termed D3T-GAN, addressing the cross-domain GANs transfer in few-shot image generation. Specifically, we design two individual strategies to transfer knowledge between generators and discriminators, respectively. To transfer knowledge between generators, we conduct a data-dependent transformation, which projects and reconstructs the target samples into the source generator space. Then, we perform knowledge transfer from transformed samples to generated samples. To transfer knowledge between discriminators, we design a multi-level discriminant knowledge distillation from the source discriminator to the target discriminator on both the real and fake samples. Extensive experiments show that our method improve the quality of generated images and achieves the state-of-the-art FID scores on commonly used datasets.

OROS: Orchestrating ROS-driven Collaborative Connected Robots in Mission-Critical Operations

Battery life for collaborative robotics scenarios is a key challenge limiting operational uses and deployment in real life. Mission-Critical tasks are among the most relevant and challenging scenarios. As multiple and heterogeneous on-board sensors are required to explore unknown environments in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) tasks, battery life problems are further exacerbated. Given the time-sensitivity of mission-critical operations, the successful completion of specific tasks in the minimum amount of time is of paramount importance. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of 5G-enabled collaborative robots by enhancing the Robot Operating System (ROS) capabilities with network orchestration features for energy-saving purposes. We propose OROS, a novel orchestration approach that minimizes mission-critical task completion times of 5G-connected robots by jointly optimizing robotic navigation and sensing together with infrastructure resources. Our results show that OROS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in exploration tasks completion times by exploiting 5G orchestration features for battery life extension.

MIPR:Automatic Annotation of Medical Images with Pixel Rearrangement

Most of the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation reported in recent years is based on fully supervised deep learning in the medical domain. How?ever, the high-quality annotated datasets require intense labor and domain knowledge, consuming enormous time and cost. Previous works that adopt semi?supervised and unsupervised learning are proposed to address the lack of anno?tated data through assisted training with unlabeled data and achieve good perfor?mance. Still, these methods can not directly get the image annotation as doctors do. In this paper, inspired by self-training of semi-supervised learning, we pro?pose a novel approach to solve the lack of annotated data from another angle, called medical image pixel rearrangement (short in MIPR). The MIPR combines image-editing and pseudo-label technology to obtain labeled data. As the number of iterations increases, the edited image is similar to the original image, and the labeled result is similar to the doctor annotation. Therefore, the MIPR is to get labeled pairs of data directly from amounts of unlabled data with pixel rearrange?ment, which is implemented with a designed conditional Generative Adversarial Networks and a segmentation network. Experiments on the ISIC18 show that the effect of the data annotated by our method for segmentation task is is equal to or even better than that of doctors annotations

Referring Expression Comprehension via Cross-Level Multi-Modal Fusion

As an important and challenging problem in vision-language tasks, referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to localize the target object specified by a given referring expression. Recently, most of the state-of-the-art REC methods mainly focus on multi-modal fusion while overlooking the inherent hierarchical information contained in visual and language encoders. Considering that REC requires visual and textual hierarchical information for accurate target localization, and encoders inherently extract features in a hierarchical fashion, we propose to effectively utilize the rich hierarchical information contained in different layers of visual and language encoders. To this end, we design a Cross-level Multi-modal Fusion (CMF) framework, which gradually integrates visual and textual features of multi-layer through intra- and inter-modal. Experimental results on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and ReferItGame datasets demonstrate the proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.