ACM MM 2024 Papers

Recent advancements in deep learning have greatly advanced the field of infrared small object detection (IRSTD). Despite their remarkable success, a notable gap persists between these IRSTD methods and generic segmentation approaches in natural image domains. This gap primarily arises from the significant modality differences and the limited availability of infrared data. In this study, we aim to bridge this divergence by investigating the adaptation of generic segmentation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), to IRSTD tasks. Our investigation reveals that many generic segmentation models can achieve comparable performance to state-of-the-art IRSTD methods. However, their full potential in IRSTD remains untapped. To address this, we propose a simple, lightweight, yet effective baseline model for segmenting small infrared objects. Through appropriate distillation strategies, we empower smaller student models to outperform state-of-the-art methods, even surpassing fine-tuned teacher results. Furthermore, we enhance the model's performance by introducing a novel query design comprising dense and sparse queries to effectively encode multi-scale features. Through extensive experimentation across four popular IRSTD datasets, our model demonstrates significantly improved performance in both accuracy and throughput compared to existing approaches, surpassing SAM and Semantic-SAM by over 14 IoU on NUDT and 4 IoU on IRSTD1k. The source code and models will be released at https://github.com/O937-blip/SimIR.

In this paper, we propose a simple but effective illumination distribution prior (IDP) for images to illuminate the darkness. The illumination distribution prior is the product of a statistical approach to low-light images. It is based on a key factor - the mean value and standard deviation of images are positively correlated with the illumination. Using IDP in combination with the dual-domain feature fusion network (DFFN), we can obtain images that are more consistent with the ground truth distribution. DFFN inserts the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) into the transformer architecture, aiming to recover the detailed texture of the image through local high-frequency information and global spatial information. We have conducted extensive experiments on five widely used low-light image enhancement datasets and the experimental results show the superior performance of our proposed network (IDP-Net) compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been proposed to improve the recommendation accuracy in the target domain (the sparser dataset) by benefiting from the auxiliary information transferred or the knowledge learned from one or many source domains (the denser datasets). However, most of the existing CDR approaches still suffer from the problem of negative transfer caused by undifferentiated knowledge transfer, and thus the recommendation accuracy in some domains, especially in the sparser domains, is still too low, which is not practical in real application scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a novel Active Masked Attention framework, i.e., AMA-CDR, for many-to-many CDR scenarios. Our AMA-CDR pursues a higher goal for CDR approaches, i.e., improving the recommendation performance in the target domain to achieve a practically usable level, which is meaningful and challenging in real CDR systems. Specifically, AMA-CDR adopts an end-to-end graph embedding to reduce the objective distortion between graph embedding and embedding combination. More importantly, we propose an active mask for the embedding combination to ease negative transfer, which leverages both the prior knowledge, i.e., data density, and the posterior knowledge, i.e., sample uncertainty. Extensive experiments conducted on two public datasets demonstrate that our proposed AMA-CDR models significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches and achieve the new goal.

Most existing NAS-based multi-modal classification (MMC-NAS) methods are optimized using the classification accuracy.They can not simultaneously provide multiple models with diverse perferences such as model complex and classification performance for meeting different users' demands. Combining NAS-MMC with multi-objective optimization is a nature way for this issue. However, the challenge problem of this solution is the high computation cost. For multi-objective optimization, the computing bottleneck is pareto front search. Some higher-quality MMC models (namely core structures, CSs) consisting of high-quality features and fusion operators are easier to identify. We find that CSs have a close relation with the pareto front (PF), i.e., the individuals lying in PF contain the CSs. Based on the finding, we propose an efficient multi-objective neural architecture search for multi-modal classification by applying CSs to guide the PF search (CoMO-NAS). In conclusion, experimental results thoroughly demonstrate the effectiveness of our CoMO-NAS. Compared to state-of-the-art competitors on benchmark multi-modal tasks, we achieve comparable performance with lower model complexity in shorter search time.

In the task of image dehazing, it has been proven that high-quality codebook priors can be used to compensate for the distribution differences between real-world hazy images and synthetic hazy images, thereby helping the model improve its performance. However, because the concentration and distribution of haze in the image are irregular, the manners those simply replacing or blending the prior information in the codebook with the original image features are inconsistent with this irregularity, which leads to a non-ideal dehazing performance. To this end, we propose a haze concentration aware network (HcaNet), its haze-concentration-aware module (HcaM) can reduce the information loss in the vector quantization stage and achieve an adaptive domain transfer for regions with different degrees of degradation. To further capture the detailed texture information, we develop a frequency selective fusion module (FSFM) to facilitate the transmission of shallow information retained in haze areas to deeper layers, thereby enhancing the fusion with high-quality feature priors. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model can be merely trained on synthetic hazy-clean pairs and effectively generalize to real-world data. Several experimental results confirm that the proposed dehazing model outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly on real-world images.

In practical data collection processes, certain views may become partially unavailable due to sensor failures or equipment issues, leading to the problem of incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC). While some IMVC methods employing prototype completion achieve satisfactory performance, almost all of them implicitly assume correct alignment of prototypes across all views. However, during prototype generation, different networks could generate different cluster centers, thereby leading to the produced prototypes from different views may be misaligned, \ie prototype noisy correspondence. To address this issue, we propose Robust Prototype Completion for Incomplete Multi-view Clustering (RPCIC), which mitigates the impact of noisy correspondence in prototypes. Specifically, RPCIC initially utilizes cross-view contrastive learning module to obtain consistent feature representations across different views. Subsequently, we devise robust contrastive loss for the produced prototypes, aiming to alleviate the influence of noisy correspondence within them. Finally, we employ prototype fusion-based strategy to complete the missing data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RPCIC outperforms 11 state-of-the-art methods in terms of both performance and robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/hl-yuan/RPCIC.

Camera calibration is crucial in computer vision tasks and applications, e.g., autonomous driving (AD). However, prevailing camera calibration models pose a time-consuming and labor-intensive off-board process in mass production settings, while simultaneously lacking exploration of real-world AD scenarios. To this end, inspired by recent advancements in bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception models, this paper proposes a novel multi-camera Calibration method via Reversed BEV representations for AD, termed CalibRBEV. Specifically, the proposed CalibRBEV model primarily comprises two stages. Initially, we innovatively reverse the BEV perception pipeline, reconstructing bounding boxes through an attention auto-encoder module to fully extract the latent reversed BEV representations. Subsequently, the obtained representations from encoder are interacted with the surrounding multi-view image features for further refinement and calibration parameters prediction. Extensive experimental results on nuScenes and Waymo datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Reducing the atmospheric haze and enhancing image clarity is crucial for computer vision applications. The lack of real-life hazy ground truth images necessitates synthetic datasets, which often lack diverse haze types, impeding effective haze type classification and dehazing algorithm selection. This research introduces the HazeSpace2M dataset, a collection of over 2 million images designed to enhance dehazing through haze type classification. HazeSpace2M includes diverse scenes with 10 haze intensity levels, featuring Fog, Cloud, and Environmental Haze (EH). Using the dataset, we introduce a technique of haze type classification followed by specialized dehazers to clear hazy images. Unlike conventional methods, our approach classifies haze types before applying type-specific dehazing, improving clarity in real-life hazy images. Benchmarking with state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, ResNet50 and AlexNet achieve 92.75\% and 92.50\% accuracy, respectively, against existing synthetic datasets. However, these models achieve only 80% and 70% accuracy, respectively, against our Real Hazy Testset (RHT), highlighting the challenging nature of our HazeSpace2M dataset. Additional experiments show that haze type classification followed by specialized dehazing improves results by 2.41% in PSNR, 17.14% in SSIM, and 10.2\% in MSE over general dehazers. Moreover, when testing with SOTA dehazing models, we found that applying our proposed framework significantly improves their performance. These results underscore the significance of HazeSpace2M and our proposed framework in addressing atmospheric haze in multimedia processing. Complete code and dataset is available on \href{https://github.com/tanvirnwu/HazeSpace2M} {\textcolor{blue}{\textbf{GitHub}}}.

Graph Fourier Transform (GFT) has demonstrated significant effectiveness in point cloud attribute compression task. However, existing graph modeling methods are based on the geometric relationships of the points, which leads to reduced efficiency of graph transforms in cases where the correlation between attributes and geometry is weak. In this paper, we propose a novel graph modeling method based on attribute prediction values. Specifically, we utilize Gaussian priors to model prediction values, then use maximum a posteriori estimation to learn the Laplacian matrix that best fits the prediction values in order to conduct separate graph transforms on prediction values and ground truth values to derive residuals, and subsequently perform quantization and entropy coding on these residuals. Additionally, since the partitioning of point clouds directly affects the coding performance, We design an adaptive block partitioning method based on ternary search, which selects reference points using distance threshold r and performs block partitioning and non-reference point attribute prediction based on these reference points. By conducting ternary search on distance threshold r, we rapidly identify the optimal block partitioning strategy. Moreover, we introduce an efficient residual encoding method based on Morton codes for the attributes of reference points while the prediction attributes of non-reference points are modeled using the proposed graph-based modeling approach. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms two attribute compression methods employed by Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) in lossless geometry based attribute compression tasks, with an average of 30.57% BD-rate gain compared to Predictive Lifting Transform (PLT), and an average of 33.54% BD-rate gain compared to Region-Adaptive Hierarchical Transform (RAHT), which exhibits significantly improved rate-distortion performance over the current state-of-the-art method based on GFT.

In recent years, neural field-based methods for synthesizing novel views have gained popularity due to their exceptional rendering quality and fast training speed. However, the computational cost of volumetric rendering has significantly increased with the advancement of camera technology and the subsequent rise in average camera resolution. Despite extensive efforts to accelerate the training process, the training duration remains unacceptable for high-resolution inputs. Therefore, it's crucial to develop efficient sampling methods to optimize the learning process of neural fields from large inputs. In this paper, we present a new technique called Superpixel-based Efficient Sampling (SES) to improve the learning efficiency of neural fields. Our approach optimizes pixel-level ray sampling by segmenting the error map into multiple superpixels and dynamically updating their errors during training to increase ray sampling in superpixel areas with higher rendering errors. Compared with other methods, our approach leverages the flexibility of superpixels, effectively reducing redundant sampling while considering local information. Our method not only speeds up the learning process but also enhances the rendering quality learned from large inputs. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method across several baselines and datasets. The code will be released.

Image-text retrieval stands as a pivotal task within information retrieval, gaining increasing importance with the rapid advancements in Visual-Language Pretraining models. However, current benchmarks for evaluating these models face limitations, exemplified by instances such as BLIP2 achieving near-perfect performance on existing benchmarks. In response, this paper advocates for a more robust evaluation benchmark for image-text retrieval, one that embraces several essential characteristics. Firstly, a comprehensive benchmark should cover a diverse range of tasks in both perception and cognition-based retrieval. Recognizing this need, we introduce ReCoS, a novel benchmark specifically designed for cross-modal image-text retrieval in complex real-life scenarios. Unlike existing benchmarks, ReCoS encompasses 12 retrieval tasks, with a particular focus on three cognition-based tasks, providing a more holistic assessment of model capabilities. To ensure the novelty of the benchmark, we emphasize the use of original data sources, steering clear of reliance on existing publicly available datasets to minimize the risk of data leakage. Additionally, to strike a balance between the complexity of the real world and benchmark usability, ReCoS includes text descriptions that are neither overly detailed, making retrieval overly simplistic, nor under-detailed to the point where retrieval becomes impossible. Our evaluation results shed light on the challenges faced by existing methods, especially in cognition-based retrieval tasks within ReCoS. This underscores the necessity for innovative approaches in addressing the complexities of image-text retrieval in real-world scenarios. Our code and benchmark datasets are available for further research and development in this field https://github.com/Bruce-XJChen/ReCos

Few-shot fine-grained image classification aims to use only few labelled samples to successfully recognize subtle sub-classes within the same parent class. This task is extremely challenging, due to the co-occurrence of large inter-class similarity, low intra-class similarity, and only few labelled samples. In this paper, to address these challenges, we propose a new Channel-Spatial Cross-Attention Module (CSCAM), which can effectively drive a model to extract discriminative fine-grained feature representations with only few shots. CSCAM collaboratively integrates a channel cross-attention module and a spatial cross-attention module, for the attentions across support and query samples. In addition, to fit for the characteristics of fine-grained images, a support averaging method is proposed in CSCAM to reduce the intra-class distance and increase the inter-class distance. Extensive experiments on four few-shot fine-grained classification datasets validate the effectiveness of CSCAM. Furthermore, CSCAM is a plug-and-play module, conveniently enabling effective improvement of state-of-the-art methods for few-shot fine-grained image classification.

Multi-view clustering has proven to be highly effective in exploring consistency information across multiple views/modalities when dealing with large-scale unlabeled data. However, in the real world, multi-view data is often distributed across multiple entities, and due to privacy concerns, federated multi-view clustering solutions have emerged. Existing federated multi-view clustering algorithms often result in misalignment in feature representations among clients, difficulty in integrating information across multiple views, and poor performance in heterogeneous scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose HFMVC, a heterogeneity-aware federated deep multi-view clustering method. Specifically, HFMVC adaptively perceives the degree of heterogeneity in the environment and employs contrastive learning to explore consistency and complementarity information across clients' multi-view data. Besides, we seek consensus among clients where local data originates from the same view, incorporating a contrastive loss between local models and the global model during local training to adjust consistency among local models. Furthermore, we elucidate the sample representation logic for local clustering in different heterogeneous environments, identifying the degree of heterogeneity by computing the within-cluster sum of squares (WCSS) and the average inter-cluster distance (AICD). Extensive experiments verify the superior performance of HFMVC across both IID and Non-IID settings.

Novel View Synthesis plays a crucial role by generating new 2D renderings from multi-view images of 3D scenes. However, capturing high-speed scenes with conventional cameras often leads to motion blur, hindering the effectiveness of 3D reconstruction. To address this challenge, high-frame-rate dense 3D reconstruction emerges as a vital technique, enabling detailed and accurate modeling of real-world objects or scenes in various fields, including Virtual Reality or embodied AI. Spike cameras, a novel type of neuromorphic sensor, continuously record scenes with an ultra-high temporal resolution, showing potential for accurate 3D reconstruction. Despite their promise, existing approaches, such as applying Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to spike cameras, encounter challenges due to the time-consuming rendering process. To address this issue, we make the first attempt to introduce the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into spike cameras in high-speed capture, providing 3DGS as dense and continuous clues of views, then constructing SpikeGS. Specifically, to train SpikeGS, we establish computational equations between the rendering process of 3DGS and the processes of instantaneous imaging and exposing-like imaging of the continuous spike stream. Besides, we build a very lightweight but effective mapping process from spikes to instant images to support training. Furthermore, we introduced a new spike-based 3D rendering dataset for validation. Extensive experiments have demonstrated our method possesses the high quality of novel view rendering, proving the tremendous potential of spike cameras in modeling 3D scenes.

Point cloud analysis is challenging due to its unique characteristics of unorderness, sparsity and irregularity. Prior works attempt to capture local relationships by convolution operations or attention mechanisms, exploiting geometric information from coordinates implicitly. These methods, however, are insufficient to describe the explicit local geometry, e.g., curvature and orientation. In this paper, we propose On-the-fly Point Feature Representation (OPFR), which captures abundant geometric information explicitly through Curve Feature Generator module. This is inspired by Point Feature Histogram (PFH) from computer vision community. However, the utilization of vanilla PFH encounters great difficulties when applied to large datasets and dense point clouds, as it demands considerable time for feature generation. In contrast, we introduce the Local Reference Constructor module, which approximates the local coordinate systems based on triangle sets. Owing to this, our OPFR only requires extra 1.56ms for inference (65X faster than vanilla PFH) and 0.012M more parameters, and it can serve as a versatile plug-and-play module for various backbones, particularly MLP-based and Transformer-based backbones examined in this study. Additionally, we introduce the novel Hierarchical Sampling module aimed at enhancing the quality of triangle sets, thereby ensuring robustness of the obtained geometric features. Our proposed method improves overall accuracy (OA) on ModelNet40 from 90.7% to 94.5% (+3.8%) for classification, and OA on S3DIS Area-5 from 86.4% to 90.0% (+3.6%) for semantic segmentation, respectively, building upon PointNet++ backbone. When integrated with Point Transformer backbone, we achieve state-of-the-art results on both tasks: 94.8% OA on ModelNet40 and 91.7% OA on S3DIS Area-5.

The emergence of virtual reality technology has made stereoscopic omnidirectional images (SOI) easily accessible and prompted the need to evaluate their perceptual quality. At present, most stereoscopic omnidirectional image quality assessment (SOIQA) methods rely on one of the projection formats, i.e., Equirectangular Projection (ERP) or CubeMap Projection (CMP). However, while ERP provides global information and the less distorted CMP complements it by providing local structural guidance, research on leveraging both ERP and CMP in SOIQA remains limited, hindering a comprehensive understanding of both global and local visual cues. Motivated by this gap, our study introduces a novel dual-stream perception-driven network for blind quality assessment of stereoscopic omnidirectional images. By integrating both ERP and CMP, our method effectively captures both global and local information, marking the first attempt to bridge this gap in SOIQA, particularly through deep learning methodologies. We employ an inter-intra feature fusion module, which considers both the inter-complementarity between ERP and CMP and the intra-relationships within CMP images. This module dynamically and complementarily adjusts the contributions of features from both projections and effectively integrates them to achieve a more comprehensive perception. Besides, deformable convolution is employed to extract the local region of interest, simulating the orientation selectivity of the primary visual cortex. Finally, with the features of left and right views of SOI, a stereo cross attention module that simulates the binocular fusion mechanism is proposed to predict the quality score. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate our model and the state-of-the-art competitors, demonstrating that our model has achieved the best performance on the databases of LIVE 3D VR, SOLID, and NBU.

Video moment localization (VML) aims to identify the temporal boundary semantically matching the given query. Point-supervised VML balances localization accuracy and annotation cost but is still immature due to granularity alignment and scale perception issues. To this end, we propose a Semantic Granularity and Scale Correspondence Integration (SG-SCI) framework aimed at leveraging limited single-frame annotation for correspondence learning. It explicitly models semantic relations of different feature granularities and adaptively mines the implicit semantic scale, thereby enhancing feature representations of varying granularities and scales. SG-SCI uses granularity correspondence alignment to align semantics via latent prior knowledge and a scale correspondence learning to identify and address semantic scale differences. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets have demonstrated the promising performance of our model over several state-of-the-art competitors.

Subject-driven image generation, aimed at customizing user-specified subjects, has experienced rapid progress. However, most of them focus on transferring the customized appearance of subjects. In this work, we consider a novel concept customization task, that is, capturing the interaction between subjects in exemplar images and transferring the learned concept of interaction to achieve customized text-to-image generation. Intrinsically, the interaction between subjects is diverse and is difficult to describe in only a few words. In addition, typical exemplar images are about the interaction between humans, which further intensifies the challenge of interaction-driven image generation with various categories of subjects. To address this task, we adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy and propose a two-stage interaction inversion framework. The framework begins by learning a pseudo-word for a single pose of each subject in the interaction. This is then employed to promote the learning of the concept for the interaction. In addition, language prior and cross-attention loss are incorporated into the optimization process to encourage the modeling of interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods are able to effectively invert the interactive pose from exemplar images and apply it to the customized generation with user-specified interaction.