End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Soft Teacher

This paper presents an end-to-end semi-supervised object detection approach, in contrast to previous more complex multi-stage methods. The end-to-end training gradually improves pseudo label qualities during the curriculum, and the more and more accurate pseudo labels in turn benefit object detection training. We also propose two simple yet effective techniques within this framework: a soft teacher mechanism where the classification loss of each unlabeled bounding box is weighed by the classification score produced by the teacher network; a box jittering approach to select reliable pseudo boxes for the learning of box regression. On COCO benchmark, the proposed approach outperforms previous methods by a large margin under various labeling ratios, i.e. 1\%, 5\% and 10\%. Moreover, our approach proves to perform also well when the amount of labeled data is relatively large. For example, it can improve a 40.9 mAP baseline detector trained using the full COCO training set by +3.6 mAP, reaching 44.5 mAP, by leveraging the 123K unlabeled images of COCO. On the state-of-the-art Swin Transformer-based object detector (58.9 mAP on test-dev), it can still significantly improve the detection accuracy by +1.5 mAP, reaching 60.4 mAP, and improve the instance segmentation accuracy by +1.2 mAP, reaching 52.4 mAP, pushing the new state-of-the-art.

TransCrowd: Weakly-Supervised Crowd Counting with Transformer

The mainstream crowd counting methods usually utilize the convolution neural network (CNN) to regress a density map, requiring point-level annotations. However, annotating each person with a point is an expensive and laborious process. During the testing phase, the point-level annotations are not considered to evaluate the counting accuracy, which means the point-level annotations are redundant. Hence, it is desirable to develop weakly-supervised counting methods that just rely on count level annotations, a more economical way of labeling. Current weakly-supervised counting methods adopt the CNN to regress a total count of the crowd by an image-to-count paradigm. However, having limited receptive fields for context modeling is an intrinsic limitation of these weakly-supervised CNN-based methods. These methods thus can not achieve satisfactory performance, limited applications in the real-word. The Transformer is a popular sequence-to-sequence prediction model in NLP, which contains a global receptive field. In this paper, we propose TransCrowd, which reformulates the weakly-supervised crowd counting problem from the perspective of sequence-to-count based on Transformer. We observe that the proposed TransCrowd can effectively extract the semantic crowd information by using the self-attention mechanism of Transformer. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to adopt a pure Transformer for crowd counting research. Experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed TransCrowd achieves superior performance compared with all the weakly-supervised CNN-based counting methods and gains highly competitive counting performance compared with some popular fully-supervised counting methods. Code is available at https://github.com/dk-liang/TransCrowd.

MOST: A Multi-Oriented Scene Text Detector with Localization Refinement

Over the past few years, the field of scene text detection has progressed rapidly that modern text detectors are able to hunt text in various challenging scenarios. However, they might still fall short when handling text instances of extreme aspect ratios and varying scales. To tackle such difficulties, we propose in this paper a new algorithm for scene text detection, which puts forward a set of strategies to significantly improve the quality of text localization. Specifically, a Text Feature Alignment Module (TFAM) is proposed to dynamically adjust the receptive fields of features based on initial raw detections; a Position-Aware Non-Maximum Suppression (PA-NMS) module is devised to selectively concentrate on reliable raw detections and exclude unreliable ones; besides, we propose an Instance-wise IoU loss for balanced training to deal with text instances of different scales. An extensive ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed strategies. The resulting text detection system, which integrates the proposed strategies with a leading scene text detector EAST, achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on various standard benchmarks for text detection while keeping a fast running speed.

Scene Text Retrieval via Joint Text Detection and Similarity Learning

Scene text retrieval aims to localize and search all text instances from an image gallery, which are the same or similar to a given query text. Such a task is usually realized by matching a query text to the recognized words, outputted by an end-to-end scene text spotter. In this paper, we address this problem by directly learning a cross-modal similarity between a query text and each text instance from natural images. Specifically, we establish an end-to-end trainable network, jointly optimizing the procedures of scene text detection and cross-modal similarity learning. In this way, scene text retrieval can be simply performed by ranking the detected text instances with the learned similarity. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art scene text spotting/retrieval approaches. In particular, the proposed framework of joint detection and similarity learning achieves significantly better performance than separated methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/lanfeng4659/STR-TDSL.

InsertGNN: Can Graph Neural Networks Outperform Humans in TOEFL Sentence Insertion Problem?

Sentence insertion is a delicate but fundamental NLP problem. Current approaches in sentence ordering, text coherence, and question answering (QA) are neither suitable nor good at solving it. In this paper, We propose InsertGNN, a simple yet effective model that represents the problem as a graph and adopts the graph Neural Network (GNN) to learn the connection between sentences. It is also supervised by both the local and global information that the local interactions of neighboring sentences can be considered. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first recorded attempt to apply a supervised graph-structured model in sentence insertion. We evaluate our method in our newly collected TOEFL dataset and further verify its effectiveness on the larger arXivdataset using cross-domain learning. The experiments show that InsertGNN outperforms the unsupervised text coherence method, the topological sentence ordering approach, and the QA architecture. Specifically, It achieves an accuracy of 70%, rivaling the average human test scores.

Progressive and Aligned Pose Attention Transfer for Person Image Generation

This paper proposes a new generative adversarial network for pose transfer, i.e., transferring the pose of a given person to a target pose. We design a progressive generator which comprises a sequence of transfer blocks. Each block performs an intermediate transfer step by modeling the relationship between the condition and the target poses with attention mechanism. Two types of blocks are introduced, namely Pose-Attentional Transfer Block (PATB) and Aligned Pose-Attentional Transfer Bloc ~(APATB). Compared with previous works, our model generates more photorealistic person images that retain better appearance consistency and shape consistency compared with input images. We verify the efficacy of the model on the Market-1501 and DeepFashion datasets, using quantitative and qualitative measures. Furthermore, we show that our method can be used for data augmentation for the person re-identification task, alleviating the issue of data insufficiency. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/tengteng95/Pose-Transfer.git.

ICDAR2019 Competition on Scanned Receipt OCR and Information Extraction

Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction (SROIE) represent the processeses of recognizing text from scanned receipts and extracting key texts from them and save the extracted tests to structured documents. SROIE plays critical roles for many document analysis applications and holds great commercial potentials, but very little research works and advances have been published in this area. In recognition of the technical challenges, importance and huge commercial potentials of SROIE, we organized the ICDAR 2019 competition on SROIE. In this competition, we set up three tasks, namely, Scanned Receipt Text Localisation (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). A new dataset with 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations is created for the competition. In this report we will presents the motivation, competition datasets, task definition, evaluation protocol, submission statistics, performance of submitted methods and results analysis.

Object Detection in Aerial Images: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Challenges

In the past decade, object detection has achieved significant progress in natural images but not in aerial images, due to the massive variations in the scale and orientation of objects caused by the bird's-eye view of aerial images. More importantly, the lack of large-scale benchmarks becomes a major obstacle to the development of object detection in aerial images (ODAI). In this paper, we present a large-scale Dataset of Object deTection in Aerial images (DOTA) and comprehensive baselines for ODAI. The proposed DOTA dataset contains 1,793,658 object instances of 18 categories of oriented-bounding-box annotations collected from 11,268 aerial images. Based on this large-scale and well-annotated dataset, we build baselines covering 10 state-of-the-art algorithms with over 70 configurations, where the speed and accuracy performances of each model have been evaluated. Furthermore, we provide a uniform code library for ODAI and build a website for testing and evaluating different algorithms. Previous challenges run on DOTA have attracted more than 1300 teams worldwide. We believe that the expanded large-scale DOTA dataset, the extensive baselines, the code library and the challenges can facilitate the designs of robust algorithms and reproducible research on the problem of object detection in aerial images.

FaceController: Controllable Attribute Editing for Face in the Wild

Face attribute editing aims to generate faces with one or multiple desired face attributes manipulated while other details are preserved. Unlike prior works such as GAN inversion, which has an expensive reverse mapping process, we propose a simple feed-forward network to generate high-fidelity manipulated faces. By simply employing some existing and easy-obtainable prior information, our method can control, transfer, and edit diverse attributes of faces in the wild. The proposed method can consequently be applied to various applications such as face swapping, face relighting, and makeup transfer. In our method, we decouple identity, expression, pose, and illumination using 3D priors; separate texture and colors by using region-wise style codes. All the information is embedded into adversarial learning by our identity-style normalization module. Disentanglement losses are proposed to enhance the generator to extract information independently from each attribute. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations have been conducted. In a single framework, our method achieves the best or competitive scores on a variety of face applications.

Occluded Video Instance Segmentation

Can our video understanding systems perceive objects when a heavy occlusion exists in a scene? To answer this question, we collect a large scale dataset called OVIS for occluded video instance segmentation, that is, to simultaneously detect, segment, and track instances in occluded scenes. OVIS consists of 296k high-quality instance masks from 25 semantic categories, where object occlusions usually occur. While our human vision systems can understand those occluded instances by contextual reasoning and association, our experiments suggest that current video understanding systems are not satisfying. On the OVIS dataset, the highest AP achieved by state-of-the-art algorithms is only 14.4, which reveals that we are still at a nascent stage for understanding objects, instances, and videos in a real-world scenario. Moreover, to complement missing object cues caused by occlusion, we propose a plug-and-play module called temporal feature calibration. Built upon MaskTrack R-CNN and SipMask, we report an AP of 15.2 and 15.0 respectively. The OVIS dataset is released at http://songbai.site/ovis , and the project code will be available soon.