Improving Multi-Person Pose Tracking with A Confidence Network

Human pose estimation and tracking are fundamental tasks for understanding human behaviors in videos. Existing top-down framework-based methods usually perform three-stage tasks: human detection, pose estimation and tracking. Although promising results have been achieved, these methods rely heavily on high-performance detectors and may fail to track persons who are occluded or miss-detected. To overcome these problems, in this paper, we develop a novel keypoint confidence network and a tracking pipeline to improve human detection and pose estimation in top-down approaches. Specifically, the keypoint confidence network is designed to determine whether each keypoint is occluded, and it is incorporated into the pose estimation module. In the tracking pipeline, we propose the Bbox-revision module to reduce missing detection and the ID-retrieve module to correct lost trajectories, improving the performance of the detection stage. Experimental results show that our approach is universal in human detection and pose estimation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both PoseTrack 2017 and 2018 datasets.

D$^{\bf{3}}$: Duplicate Detection Decontaminator for Multi-Athlete Tracking in Sports Videos

Tracking multiple athletes in sports videos is a very challenging Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) task, since athletes often have the same appearance and are intimately covered with each other, making a common occlusion problem becomes an abhorrent duplicate detection. In this paper, the duplicate detection is newly and precisely defined as occlusion misreporting on the same athlete by multiple detection boxes in one frame. To address this problem, we meticulously design a novel transformer-based Duplicate Detection Decontaminator (D$^3$) for training, and a specific algorithm Rally-Hungarian (RH) for matching. Once duplicate detection occurs, D$^3$ immediately modifies the procedure by generating enhanced boxes losses. RH, triggered by the team sports substitution rules, is exceedingly suitable for sports videos. Moreover, to complement the tracking dataset that without shot changes, we release a new dataset based on sports video named RallyTrack. Extensive experiments on RallyTrack show that combining D$^3$ and RH can dramatically improve the tracking performance with 9.2 in MOTA and 4.5 in HOTA. Meanwhile, experiments on MOT-series and DanceTrack discover that D$^3$ can accelerate convergence during training, especially save up to 80 percent of the original training time on MOT17. Finally, our model, which is trained only with volleyball videos, can be applied directly to basketball and soccer videos for MAT, which shows priority of our method. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/heruihr/rallytrack.

Learning from Future: A Novel Self-Training Framework for Semantic Segmentation

Self-training has shown great potential in semi-supervised learning. Its core idea is to use the model learned on labeled data to generate pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, and in turn teach itself. To obtain valid supervision, active attempts typically employ a momentum teacher for pseudo-label prediction yet observe the confirmation bias issue, where the incorrect predictions may provide wrong supervision signals and get accumulated in the training process. The primary cause of such a drawback is that the prevailing self-training framework acts as guiding the current state with previous knowledge, because the teacher is updated with the past student only. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel self-training strategy, which allows the model to learn from the future. Concretely, at each training step, we first virtually optimize the student (i.e., caching the gradients without applying them to the model weights), then update the teacher with the virtual future student, and finally ask the teacher to produce pseudo-labels for the current student as the guidance. In this way, we manage to improve the quality of pseudo-labels and thus boost the performance. We also develop two variants of our future-self-training (FST) framework through peeping at the future both deeply (FST-D) and widely (FST-W). Taking the tasks of unsupervised domain adaptive semantic segmentation and semi-supervised semantic segmentation as the instances, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach under a wide range of settings. Code will be made publicly available.

SparseTT: Visual Tracking with Sparse Transformers

Transformers have been successfully applied to the visual tracking task and significantly promote tracking performance. The self-attention mechanism designed to model long-range dependencies is the key to the success of Transformers. However, self-attention lacks focusing on the most relevant information in the search regions, making it easy to be distracted by background. In this paper, we relieve this issue with a sparse attention mechanism by focusing the most relevant information in the search regions, which enables a much accurate tracking. Furthermore, we introduce a double-head predictor to boost the accuracy of foreground-background classification and regression of target bounding boxes, which further improve the tracking performance. Extensive experiments show that, without bells and whistles, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on LaSOT, GOT-10k, TrackingNet, and UAV123, while running at 40 FPS. Notably, the training time of our method is reduced by 75% compared to that of TransT. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/fzh0917/SparseTT.

Segmentation-Reconstruction-Guided Facial Image De-occlusion

Occlusions are very common in face images in the wild, leading to the degraded performance of face-related tasks. Although much effort has been devoted to removing occlusions from face images, the varying shapes and textures of occlusions still challenge the robustness of current methods. As a result, current methods either rely on manual occlusion masks or only apply to specific occlusions. This paper proposes a novel face de-occlusion model based on face segmentation and 3D face reconstruction, which automatically removes all kinds of face occlusions with even blurred boundaries,e.g., hairs. The proposed model consists of a 3D face reconstruction module, a face segmentation module, and an image generation module. With the face prior and the occlusion mask predicted by the first two, respectively, the image generation module can faithfully recover the missing facial textures. To supervise the training, we further build a large occlusion dataset, with both manually labeled and synthetic occlusions. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Pixel-to-Prototype Contrast

Though image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) has achieved great progress with Class Activation Map (CAM) as the cornerstone, the large supervision gap between classification and segmentation still hampers the model to generate more complete and precise pseudo masks for segmentation. In this study, we explore two implicit but intuitive constraints, i.e., cross-view feature semantic consistency and intra(inter)-class compactness(dispersion), to narrow the supervision gap. To this end, we propose two novel pixel-to-prototype contrast regularization terms that are conducted cross different views and within per single view of an image, respectively. Besides, we adopt two sample mining strategies, named semi-hard prototype mining and hard pixel sampling, to better leverage hard examples while reducing incorrect contrasts caused due to the absence of precise pixel-wise labels. Our method can be seamlessly incorporated into existing WSSS models without any changes to the base network and does not incur any extra inference burden. Experiments on standard benchmark show that our method consistently improves two strong baselines by large margins, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Specifically, built on top of SEAM, we improve the initial seed mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012 from 55.4% to 61.5%. Moreover, armed with our method, we increase the segmentation mIoU of EPS from 70.8% to 73.6%, achieving new state-of-the-art.

Weakly-Supervised Photo-realistic Texture Generation for 3D Face Reconstruction

Although much progress has been made recently in 3D face reconstruction, most previous work has been devoted to predicting accurate and fine-grained 3D shapes. In contrast, relatively little work has focused on generating high-fidelity face textures. Compared with the prosperity of photo-realistic 2D face image generation, high-fidelity 3D face texture generation has yet to be studied. In this paper, we proposed a novel UV map generation model that predicts the UV map from a single face image. The model consists of a UV sampler and a UV generator. By selectively sampling the input face image's pixels and adjusting their relative locations, the UV sampler generates an incomplete UV map that could faithfully reconstruct the original face. Missing textures in the incomplete UV map are further full-filled by the UV generator. The training is based on pseudo ground truth blended by the 3DMM texture and the input face texture, thus weakly supervised. To deal with the artifacts in the imperfect pseudo UV map, multiple partial UV map discriminators are leveraged.

Pixel Sampling for Style Preserving Face Pose Editing

The existing auto-encoder based face pose editing methods primarily focus on modeling the identity preserving ability during pose synthesis, but are less able to preserve the image style properly, which refers to the color, brightness, saturation, etc. In this paper, we take advantage of the well-known frontal/profile optical illusion and present a novel two-stage approach to solve the aforementioned dilemma, where the task of face pose manipulation is cast into face inpainting. By selectively sampling pixels from the input face and slightly adjust their relative locations with the proposed ``Pixel Attention Sampling" module, the face editing result faithfully keeps the identity information as well as the image style unchanged. By leveraging high-dimensional embedding at the inpainting stage, finer details are generated. Further, with the 3D facial landmarks as guidance, our method is able to manipulate face pose in three degrees of freedom, i.e., yaw, pitch, and roll, resulting in more flexible face pose editing than merely controlling the yaw angle as usually achieved by the current state-of-the-art. Both the qualitative and quantitative evaluations validate the superiority of the proposed approach.

Visual Grounding with Transformers

In this paper, we propose a transformer based approach for visual grounding. Unlike previous proposal-and-rank frameworks that rely heavily on pretrained object detectors or proposal-free frameworks that upgrade an off-the-shelf one-stage detector by fusing textual embeddings, our approach is built on top of a transformer encoder-decoder and is independent of any pretrained detectors or word embedding models. Termed VGTR -- Visual Grounding with TRansformers, our approach is designed to learn semantic-discriminative visual features under the guidance of the textual description without harming their location ability. This information flow enables our VGTR to have a strong capability in capturing context-level semantics of both vision and language modalities, rendering us to aggregate accurate visual clues implied by the description to locate the interested object instance. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art proposal-free approaches by a considerable margin on five benchmarks while maintaining fast inference speed.

STMTrack: Template-free Visual Tracking with Space-time Memory Networks

Boosting performance of the offline trained siamese trackers is getting harder nowadays since the fixed information of the template cropped from the first frame has been almost thoroughly mined, but they are poorly capable of resisting target appearance changes. Existing trackers with template updating mechanisms rely on time-consuming numerical optimization and complex hand-designed strategies to achieve competitive performance, hindering them from real-time tracking and practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel tracking framework built on top of a space-time memory network that is competent to make full use of historical information related to the target for better adapting to appearance variations during tracking. Specifically, a novel memory mechanism is introduced, which stores the historical information of the target to guide the tracker to focus on the most informative regions in the current frame. Furthermore, the pixel-level similarity computation of the memory network enables our tracker to generate much more accurate bounding boxes of the target. Extensive experiments and comparisons with many competitive trackers on challenging large-scale benchmarks, OTB-2015, TrackingNet, GOT-10k, LaSOT, UAV123, and VOT2018, show that, without bells and whistles, our tracker outperforms all previous state-of-the-art real-time methods while running at 37 FPS. The code is available at https://github.com/fzh0917/STMTrack.