Object Detection in Foggy Scenes by Embedding Depth and Reconstruction into Domain Adaptation

Most existing domain adaptation (DA) methods align the features based on the domain feature distributions and ignore aspects related to fog, background and target objects, rendering suboptimal performance. In our DA framework, we retain the depth and background information during the domain feature alignment. A consistency loss between the generated depth and fog transmission map is introduced to strengthen the retention of the depth information in the aligned features. To address false object features potentially generated during the DA process, we propose an encoder-decoder framework to reconstruct the fog-free background image. This reconstruction loss also reinforces the encoder, i.e., our DA backbone, to minimize false object features.Moreover, we involve our target data in training both our DA module and our detection module in a semi-supervised manner, so that our detection module is also exposed to the unlabeled target data, the type of data used in the testing stage. Using these ideas, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method (47.6 mAP against the 44.3 mAP on the Foggy Cityscapes dataset), and obtains the best performance on multiple real-image public datasets. Code is available at: https://github.com/VIML-CVDL/Object-Detection-in-Foggy-Scenes

Affinity Feature Strengthening for Accurate, Complete and Robust Vessel Segmentation

Vessel segmentation is essential in many medical image applications, such as the detection of coronary stenoses, retinal vessel diseases and brain aneurysms. A high pixel-wise accuracy, complete topology structure and robustness to various contrast variations are three critical aspects of vessel segmentation. However, most existing methods only focus on achieving part of them via dedicated designs while few of them can concurrently achieve the three goals. In this paper, we present a novel affinity feature strengthening network (AFN) which adopts a contrast-insensitive approach based on multiscale affinity to jointly model topology and refine pixel-wise segmentation features. Specifically, for each pixel we derive a multiscale affinity field which captures the semantic relationships of the pixel with its neighbors on the predicted mask image. Such a multiscale affinity field can effectively represent the local topology of a vessel segment of different sizes. Meanwhile, it does not depend on image intensities and hence is robust to various illumination and contrast changes. We further learn spatial- and scale-aware adaptive weights for the corresponding affinity fields to strengthen vessel features. We evaluate our AFN on four different types of vascular datasets: X-ray angiography coronary vessel dataset (XCAD), portal vein dataset (PV), digital subtraction angiography cerebrovascular vessel dataset (DSA) and retinal vessel dataset (DRIVE). Extensive experimental results on the four datasets demonstrate that our AFN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both higher accuracy and topological metrics, and meanwhile is more robust to various contrast changes than existing methods. Codes will be made public.

SR-LIO: LiDAR-Inertial Odometry with Sweep Reconstruction

This paper proposes a novel LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO), named SR-LIO, based on an improved bundle adjustment (BA) framework. The core of our SR-LIO is a novel sweep reconstruction method, which segments and reconstructs raw input sweeps from spinning LiDAR to obtain reconstructed sweeps with higher frequency. Such method can effectively reduce the time interval for each IMU pre-integration, reducing the IMU pre-integration error and enabling the usage of BA based LIO optimization. In order to make all the states during the period of a reconstructed sweep can be equally optimized, we further propose multi-segment joint LIO optimization, which allows the state of each sweep segment to be constrained from both LiDAR and IMU. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that our SR-LIO outperforms all existing state-of-the-art methods on accuracy, and reducing the IMU pre-integration error via the proposed sweep reconstruction is very importance for the success of a BA based LIO framework. The source code of SR-LIO is publicly available for the development of the community.

Bidirectional Semi-supervised Dual-branch CNN for Robust 3D Reconstruction of Stereo Endoscopic Images via Adaptive Cross and Parallel Supervisions

Semi-supervised learning via teacher-student network can train a model effectively on a few labeled samples. It enables a student model to distill knowledge from the teacher's predictions of extra unlabeled data. However, such knowledge flow is typically unidirectional, having the performance vulnerable to the quality of teacher model. In this paper, we seek to robust 3D reconstruction of stereo endoscopic images by proposing a novel fashion of bidirectional learning between two learners, each of which can play both roles of teacher and student concurrently. Specifically, we introduce two self-supervisions, i.e., Adaptive Cross Supervision (ACS) and Adaptive Parallel Supervision (APS), to learn a dual-branch convolutional neural network. The two branches predict two different disparity probability distributions for the same position, and output their expectations as disparity values. The learned knowledge flows across branches along two directions: a cross direction (disparity guides distribution in ACS) and a parallel direction (disparity guides disparity in APS). Moreover, each branch also learns confidences to dynamically refine its provided supervisions. In ACS, the predicted disparity is softened into a unimodal distribution, and the lower the confidence, the smoother the distribution. In APS, the incorrect predictions are suppressed by lowering the weights of those with low confidence. With the adaptive bidirectional learning, the two branches enjoy well-tuned supervisions from each other, and eventually converge on a consistent and more accurate disparity estimation. The extensive and comprehensive experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate our superior performance over the fully-supervised and semi-supervised state-of-the-arts with a decrease of averaged disparity error by 13.95% and 3.90% at least, respectively.

Wider and Higher: Intensive Integration and Global Foreground Perception for Image Matting

This paper reviews recent deep-learning-based matting research and conceives our wider and higher motivation for image matting. Many approaches achieve alpha mattes with complex encoders to extract robust semantics, then resort to the U-net-like decoder to concatenate or fuse encoder features. However, image matting is essentially a pixel-wise regression, and the ideal situation is to perceive the maximum opacity correspondence from the input image. In this paper, we argue that the high-resolution feature representation, perception and communication are more crucial for matting accuracy. Therefore, we propose an Intensive Integration and Global Foreground Perception network (I2GFP) to integrate wider and higher feature streams. Wider means we combine intensive features in each decoder stage, while higher suggests we retain high-resolution intermediate features and perceive large-scale foreground appearance. Our motivation sacrifices model depth for a significant performance promotion. We perform extensive experiments to prove the proposed I2GFP model, and state-of-the-art results can be achieved on different public datasets.

Hierarchical and Progressive Image Matting

Most matting researches resort to advanced semantics to achieve high-quality alpha mattes, and direct low-level features combination is usually explored to complement alpha details. However, we argue that appearance-agnostic integration can only provide biased foreground details and alpha mattes require different-level feature aggregation for better pixel-wise opacity perception. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Hierarchical and Progressive Attention Matting Network (HAttMatting++), which can better predict the opacity of the foreground from single RGB images without additional input. Specifically, we utilize channel-wise attention to distill pyramidal features and employ spatial attention at different levels to filter appearance cues. This progressive attention mechanism can estimate alpha mattes from adaptive semantics and semantics-indicated boundaries. We also introduce a hybrid loss function fusing Structural SIMilarity (SSIM), Mean Square Error (MSE), Adversarial loss, and sentry supervision to guide the network to further improve the overall foreground structure. Besides, we construct a large-scale and challenging image matting dataset comprised of 59, 600 training images and 1000 test images (a total of 646 distinct foreground alpha mattes), which can further improve the robustness of our hierarchical and progressive aggregation model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed HAttMatting++ can capture sophisticated foreground structures and achieve state-of-the-art performance with single RGB images as input.

Explore Contextual Information for 3D Scene Graph Generation

3D scene graph generation (SGG) has been of high interest in computer vision. Although the accuracy of 3D SGG on coarse classification and single relation label has been gradually improved, the performance of existing works is still far from being perfect for fine-grained and multi-label situations. In this paper, we propose a framework fully exploring contextual information for the 3D SGG task, which attempts to satisfy the requirements of fine-grained entity class, multiple relation labels, and high accuracy simultaneously. Our proposed approach is composed of a Graph Feature Extraction module and a Graph Contextual Reasoning module, achieving appropriate information-redundancy feature extraction, structured organization, and hierarchical inferring. Our approach achieves superior or competitive performance over previous methods on the 3DSSG dataset, especially on the relationship prediction sub-task.

Point Cloud Scene Completion with Joint Color and Semantic Estimation from Single RGB-D Image

We present a deep reinforcement learning method of progressive view inpainting for colored semantic point cloud scene completion under volume guidance, achieving high-quality scene reconstruction from only a single RGB-D image with severe occlusion. Our approach is end-to-end, consisting of three modules: 3D scene volume reconstruction, 2D RGB-D and segmentation image inpainting, and multi-view selection for completion. Given a single RGB-D image, our method first predicts its semantic segmentation map and goes through the 3D volume branch to obtain a volumetric scene reconstruction as a guide to the next view inpainting step, which attempts to make up the missing information; the third step involves projecting the volume under the same view of the input, concatenating them to complete the current view RGB-D and segmentation map, and integrating all RGB-D and segmentation maps into the point cloud. Since the occluded areas are unavailable, we resort to a A3C network to glance around and pick the next best view for large hole completion progressively until a scene is adequately reconstructed while guaranteeing validity. All steps are learned jointly to achieve robust and consistent results. We perform qualitative and quantitative evaluations with extensive experiments on the 3D-FUTURE data, obtaining better results than state-of-the-arts.

Dual-distribution discrepancy with self-supervised refinement for anomaly detection in medical images

Medical anomaly detection is a crucial yet challenging task aiming at recognizing abnormal images to assist diagnosis. Due to the high-cost annotations of abnormal images, most methods utilize only known normal images during training and identify samples not conforming to the normal profile as anomalies in the testing phase. A large number of readily available unlabeled images containing anomalies are thus ignored in the training phase, restricting their performance. To solve this problem, we propose the Dual-distribution Discrepancy for Anomaly Detection (DDAD), utilizing both known normal images and unlabeled images. Two modules are designed to model the normative distribution of normal images and the unknown distribution of both normal and unlabeled images, respectively, using ensembles of reconstruction networks. Subsequently, intra-discrepancy of the normative distribution module, and inter-discrepancy between the two modules are designed as anomaly scores. Furthermore, an Anormal Score Refinement Net (ASR-Net) trained via self-supervised learning is proposed to refine the two anomaly scores. For evaluation, five medical datasets including chest X-rays, brain MRIs and retinal fundus images are organized as benchmarks. Experiments on these benchmarks demonstrate our method achieves significant gains and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code and organized benchmarks will be available at https://github.com/caiyu6666/DDAD-ASR

Blinder: End-to-end Privacy Protection in Sensing Systems via Personalized Federated Learning

This paper proposes a sensor data anonymization model that is trained on decentralized data and strikes a desirable trade-off between data utility and privacy, even in heterogeneous settings where the collected sensor data have different underlying distributions. Our anonymization model, dubbed Blinder, is based on a variational autoencoder and discriminator networks trained in an adversarial fashion. We use the model-agnostic meta-learning framework to adapt the anonymization model trained via federated learning to each user's data distribution. We evaluate Blinder under different settings and show that it provides end-to-end privacy protection at the cost of increasing privacy loss by up to 4.00% and decreasing data utility by up to 4.24%, compared to the state-of-the-art anonymization model trained on centralized data. Our experiments confirm that Blinder can obscure multiple private attributes at once, and has sufficiently low power consumption and computational overhead for it to be deployed on edge devices and smartphones to perform real-time anonymization of sensor data.