Optical Non-Line-of-Sight Physics-based 3D Human Pose Estimation

We describe a method for 3D human pose estimation from transient images (i.e., a 3D spatio-temporal histogram of photons) acquired by an optical non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging system. Our method can perceive 3D human pose by `looking around corners' through the use of light indirectly reflected by the environment. We bring together a diverse set of technologies from NLOS imaging, human pose estimation and deep reinforcement learning to construct an end-to-end data processing pipeline that converts a raw stream of photon measurements into a full 3D human pose sequence estimate. Our contributions are the design of data representation process which includes (1) a learnable inverse point spread function (PSF) to convert raw transient images into a deep feature vector; (2) a neural humanoid control policy conditioned on the transient image feature and learned from interactions with a physics simulator; and (3) a data synthesis and augmentation strategy based on depth data that can be transferred to a real-world NLOS imaging system. Our preliminary experiments suggest that our method is able to generalize to real-world NLOS measurement to estimate physically-valid 3D human poses.

BoostTree and BoostForest for Ensemble Learning

Bootstrap aggregation (Bagging) and boosting are two popular ensemble learning approaches, which combine multiple base learners to generate a composite learner. This article proposes BoostForest, which is an ensemble learning approach using BoostTree as base learners and can be used for both classification and regression. BoostTree constructs a tree by gradient boosting, which trains a linear or nonlinear model at each node. When a new sample comes in, BoostTree first sorts it down to a leaf, then computes the final prediction by summing up the outputs of all models along the path from the root node to that leaf. BoostTree achieves high randomness (diversity) by sampling its parameters randomly from a parameter pool, and selecting a subset of features randomly at node splitting. BoostForest further increases the randomness by bootstrapping the training data in constructing different BoostTrees. BoostForest is compared with four classical ensemble learning approaches on 30 classification and regression datasets, demonstrating that it can generate more accurate and more robust composite learners.

DLow: Diversifying Latent Flows for Diverse Human Motion Prediction

Deep generative models are often used for human motion prediction as they are able to model multi-modal data distributions and characterize diverse human behavior. While much care has been taken into designing and learning deep generative models, how to efficiently produce diverse samples from a deep generative model after it has been trained is still an under-explored problem. To obtain samples from a pretrained generative model, most existing generative human motion prediction methods draw a set of independent Gaussian latent codes and convert them to motion samples. Clearly, this random sampling strategy is not guaranteed to produce diverse samples for two reasons: (1) The independent sampling cannot force the samples to be diverse; (2) The sampling is based solely on likelihood which may only produce samples that correspond to the major modes of the data distribution. To address these problems, we propose a novel sampling method, Diversifying Latent Flows (DLow), to produce a diverse set of samples from a pretrained deep generative model. Unlike random (independent) sampling, the proposed DLow sampling method samples a single random variable and then maps it with a set of learnable mapping functions to a set of correlated latent codes. The correlated latent codes are then decoded into a set of correlated samples. During training, DLow uses a diversity-promoting prior over samples as an objective to optimize the latent mappings to improve sample diversity. The design of the prior is highly flexible and can be customized to generate diverse motions with common features (e.g., similar leg motion but diverse upper-body motion). Our experiments demonstrate that DLow outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of sample diversity and accuracy. Video: https://youtu.be/64OEdSadb00.

Joint 3D Tracking and Forecasting with Graph Neural Network and Diversity Sampling

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) and trajectory forecasting are two critical components in modern 3D perception systems that require accurate modeling of multi-agent interaction. We hypothesize that it is beneficial to unify both tasks under one framework in order to learn a shared feature representation of agent interaction. To evaluate this hypothesis, we propose a unified solution for 3D MOT and trajectory forecasting which also incorporates two additional novel computational units. First, we propose a feature interaction technique by introducing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to capture the way in which multiple agents interact with one another. The GNN is able to model complex hierarchical interactions, improve the discriminative feature learning for MOT association, and provide socially-aware context for trajectory forecasting. Second, we use a diversity sampling function to improve the quality and diversity of our forecasted trajectories. The learned sampling function is trained to efficiently extract a variety of outcomes from a generative trajectory distribution and helps avoid the problem of generating many duplicate trajectory samples. We evaluate on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets, showing that our unified method with feature interaction and diversity sampling achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both 3D MOT and trajectory forecasting. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/xinshuoweng/GNNTrkForecast.

Uncertainty Quantification for Deep Context-Aware Mobile Activity Recognition and Unknown Context Discovery

Activity recognition in wearable computing faces two key challenges: i) activity characteristics may be context-dependent and change under different contexts or situations; ii) unknown contexts and activities may occur from time to time, requiring flexibility and adaptability of the algorithm. We develop a context-aware mixture of deep models termed the {\alpha}-\b{eta} network coupled with uncertainty quantification (UQ) based upon maximum entropy to enhance human activity recognition performance. We improve accuracy and F score by 10% by identifying high-level contexts in a data-driven way to guide model development. In order to ensure training stability, we have used a clustering-based pre-training in both public and in-house datasets, demonstrating improved accuracy through unknown context discovery.

State-Aware Tracker for Real-Time Video Object Segmentation

In this work, we address the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation(VOS) and explore how to make efficient use of video property to tackle the challenge of semi-supervision. We propose a novel pipeline called State-Aware Tracker(SAT), which can produce accurate segmentation results with real-time speed. For higher efficiency, SAT takes advantage of the inter-frame consistency and deals with each target object as a tracklet. For more stable and robust performance over video sequences, SAT gets awareness for each state and makes self-adaptation via two feedback loops. One loop assists SAT in generating more stable tracklets. The other loop helps to construct a more robust and holistic target representation. SAT achieves a promising result of 72.3% J&F mean with 39 FPS on DAVIS2017-Val dataset, which shows a decent trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. Code will be released at github.com/MegviiDetection/video_analyst.

In Defense of the Triplet Loss Again: Learning Robust Person Re-Identification with Fast Approximated Triplet Loss and Label Distillation

The comparative losses (typically, triplet loss) are appealing choices for learning person re-identification (ReID) features. However, the triplet loss is computationally much more expensive than the (practically more popular) classification loss, limiting their wider usage in massive datasets. Moreover, the abundance of label noise and outliers in ReID datasets may also put the margin-based loss in jeopardy. This work addresses the above two shortcomings of triplet loss, extending its effectiveness to large-scale ReID datasets with potentially noisy labels. We propose a fast-approximated triplet (FAT) loss, which provably converts the point-wise triplet loss into its upper bound form, consisting of a point-to-set loss term plus cluster compactness regularization. It preserves the effectiveness of triplet loss, while leading to linear complexity to the training set size. A label distillation strategy is further designed to learn refined soft-labels in place of the potentially noisy labels, from only an identified subset of confident examples, through teacher-student networks. We conduct extensive experiments on three most popular ReID benchmarks (Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and MSMT17), and demonstrate that FAT loss with distilled labels lead to ReID features with remarkable accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and direct transferability to unseen datasets.

A Practical Solution for SAR Despeckling with Only Single Speckled Images

In this letter, we aim to address synthetic aperture radar (SAR) despeckling problem with the necessity of neither clean (speckle-free) SAR images nor independent speckled image pairs from the same scene, a practical solution for SAR despeckling (PSD) is proposed. Firstly, to generate speckled-to-speckled (S2S) image pairs from the same scene in the situation of only single speckled SAR images are available, an adversarial learning framework is designed. Then, the S2S SAR image pairs are employed to train a modified despeckling Nested-UNet model using the Noise2Noise (N2N) strategy. Moreover, an iterative version of the PSD method (PSDi) is also proposed. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated by both synthetic speckled and real SAR data. SAR block-matching 3-D algorithm (SAR-BM3D) and SAR dilated residual network (SAR-DRN) are used in the visual and quantitative comparison. Experimental results show that the proposed methods can reach a good tradeoff between speckle suppression and edge preservation.

Calibrated Domain-Invariant Learning for Highly Generalizable Large Scale Re-Identification

Many real-world applications, such as city-scale traffic monitoring and control, requires large-scale re-identification. However, previous ReID methods often failed to address two limitations in existing ReID benchmarks, i.e., low spatiotemporal coverage and sample imbalance. Notwithstanding their demonstrated success in every single benchmark, they have difficulties in generalizing to unseen environments. As a result, these methods are less applicable in a large-scale setting due to poor generalization. In seek for a highly generalizable large-scale ReID method, we present an adversarial domain invariant feature learning framework (ADIN) that explicitly learns to separate identity-related features from challenging variations, where for the first time "free" annotations in ReID data such as video timestamp and camera index are utilized. Furthermore, we find that the imbalance of nuisance classes jeopardizes the adversarial training, and for mitigation we propose a calibrated adversarial loss that is attentive to nuisance distribution. Experiments on existing large-scale person vehicle ReID datasets demonstrate that ADIN learns more robust and generalizable representations, as evidenced by its outstanding direct transfer performance across datasets, which is a criterion that can better measure the generalizability of large-scale ReID methods/