CVPR 2022 Papers

Recently, by introducing large-scale dataset and strong transformer network, video-language pre-training has shown great success especially for retrieval. Yet, existing video-language transformer models do not explicitly fine-grained semantic align. In this work, we present Object-aware Transformers, an object-centric approach that extends video-language transformer to incorporate object representations. The key idea is to leverage the bounding boxes and object tags to guide the training process. We evaluate our model on three standard sub-tasks of video-text matching on four widely used benchmarks. We also provide deep analysis and detailed ablation about the proposed method. We show clear improvement in performance across all tasks and datasets considered, demonstrating the value of a model that incorporates object representations into a video-language architecture. The code has been released in https://github.com/FingerRec/OA-Transformer.

Point-based object localization (POL), which pursues high-performance object sensing under low-cost data annotation, has attracted increased attention. However, the point annotation mode inevitably introduces semantic variance for the inconsistency of annotated points. Existing POL methods heavily reply on accurate key-point annotations which are difficult to define. In this study, we propose a POL method using coarse point annotations, relaxing the supervision signals from accurate key points to freely spotted points. To this end, we propose a coarse point refinement (CPR) approach, which to our best knowledge is the first attempt to alleviate semantic variance from the perspective of algorithm. CPR constructs point bags, selects semantic-correlated points, and produces semantic center points through multiple instance learning (MIL). In this way, CPR defines a weakly supervised evolution procedure, which ensures training high-performance object localizer under coarse point supervision. Experimental results on COCO, DOTA and our proposed SeaPerson dataset validate the effectiveness of the CPR approach. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/ucas-vg/PointTinyBenchmark/

Learning how humans manipulate objects requires machines to acquire knowledge from two perspectives: one for understanding object affordances and the other for learning human's interactions based on the affordances. Even though these two knowledge bases are crucial, we find that current databases lack a comprehensive awareness of them. In this work, we propose a multi-modal and rich-annotated knowledge repository, OakInk, for visual and cognitive understanding of hand-object interactions. We start to collect 1,800 common household objects and annotate their affordances to construct the first knowledge base: Oak. Given the affordance, we record rich human interactions with 100 selected objects in Oak. Finally, we transfer the interactions on the 100 recorded objects to their virtual counterparts through a novel method: Tink. The recorded and transferred hand-object interactions constitute the second knowledge base: Ink. As a result, OakInk contains 50,000 distinct affordance-aware and intent-oriented hand-object interactions. We benchmark OakInk on pose estimation and grasp generation tasks. Moreover, we propose two practical applications of OakInk: intent-based interaction generation and handover generation. Our dataset and source code are publicly available at www.oakink.net.

Open-world object detection (OWOD) is a challenging computer vision problem, where the task is to detect a known set of object categories while simultaneously identifying unknown objects. Additionally, the model must incrementally learn new classes that become known in the next training episodes. Distinct from standard object detection, the OWOD setting poses significant challenges for generating quality candidate proposals on potentially unknown objects, separating the unknown objects from the background and detecting diverse unknown objects. Here, we introduce a novel end-to-end transformer-based framework, OW-DETR, for open-world object detection. The proposed OW-DETR comprises three dedicated components namely, attention-driven pseudo-labeling, novelty classification and objectness scoring to explicitly address the aforementioned OWOD challenges. Our OW-DETR explicitly encodes multi-scale contextual information, possesses less inductive bias, enables knowledge transfer from known classes to the unknown class and can better discriminate between unknown objects and background. Comprehensive experiments are performed on two benchmarks: MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC. The extensive ablations reveal the merits of our proposed contributions. Further, our model outperforms the recently introduced OWOD approach, ORE, with absolute gains ranging from 1.8% to 3.3% in terms of unknown recall on MS-COCO. In the case of incremental object detection, OW-DETR outperforms the state-of-the-art for all settings on PASCAL VOC. Our code is available at https://github.com/akshitac8/OW-DETR.

This paper proposes a universal framework, called OVE6D, for model-based 6D object pose estimation from a single depth image and a target object mask. Our model is trained using purely synthetic data rendered from ShapeNet, and, unlike most of the existing methods, it generalizes well on new real-world objects without any fine-tuning. We achieve this by decomposing the 6D pose into viewpoint, in-plane rotation around the camera optical axis and translation, and introducing novel lightweight modules for estimating each component in a cascaded manner. The resulting network contains less than 4M parameters while demonstrating excellent performance on the challenging T-LESS and Occluded LINEMOD datasets without any dataset-specific training. We show that OVE6D outperforms some contemporary deep learning-based pose estimation methods specifically trained for individual objects or datasets with real-world training data.

We address the problem of inferring the anatomic skeleton of a person, in an arbitrary pose, from the 3D surface of the body; i.e. we predict the inside (bones) from the outside (skin). This has many applications in medicine and biomechanics. Existing state-of-the-art biomechanical skeletons are detailed but do not easily generalize to new subjects. Additionally, computer vision and graphics methods that predict skeletons are typically heuristic, not learned from data, do not leverage the full 3D body surface, and are not validated against ground truth. To our knowledge, our system, called OSSO (Obtaining Skeletal Shape from Outside), is the first to learn the mapping from the 3D body surface to the internal skeleton from real data. We do so using 1000 male and 1000 female dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scans. To these, we fit a parametric 3D body shape model (STAR) to capture the body surface and a novel part-based 3D skeleton model to capture the bones. This provides inside/outside training pairs. We model the statistical variation of full skeletons using PCA in a pose-normalized space and train a regressor from body shape parameters to skeleton shape parameters. Given an arbitrary 3D body shape and pose, OSSO predicts a realistic skeleton inside. In contrast to previous work, we evaluate the accuracy of the skeleton shape quantitatively on held out DXA scans, outperforming the state-of-the art. We also show 3D skeleton prediction from varied and challenging 3D bodies. The code to infer a skeleton from a body shape is available at https://osso.is.tue.mpg.de, and the dataset of paired outer surface (skin) and skeleton (bone) meshes is available as a Biobank Returned Dataset. This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank Resource.

We introduce a challenging training scheme of conditional GANs, called open-set semi-supervised image generation, where the training dataset consists of two parts: (i) labeled data and (ii) unlabeled data with samples belonging to one of the labeled data classes, namely, a closed-set, and samples not belonging to any of the labeled data classes, namely, an open-set. Unlike the existing semi-supervised image generation task, where unlabeled data only contain closed-set samples, our task is more general and lowers the data collection cost in practice by allowing open-set samples to appear. Thanks to entropy regularization, the classifier that is trained on labeled data is able to quantify sample-wise importance to the training of cGAN as confidence, allowing us to use all samples in unlabeled data. We design OSSGAN, which provides decision clues to the discriminator on the basis of whether an unlabeled image belongs to one or none of the classes of interest, smoothly integrating labeled and unlabeled data during training. The results of experiments on Tiny ImageNet and ImageNet show notable improvements over supervised BigGAN and semisupervised methods. The code is available at https://github.com/raven38/OSSGAN.

We present a novel one-shot method for object detection and 6 DoF pose estimation, that does not require training on target objects. At test time, it takes as input a target image and a textured 3D query model. The core idea is to represent a 3D model with a number of 2D templates rendered from different viewpoints. This enables CNN-based direct dense feature extraction and matching. The object is first localized in 2D, then its approximate viewpoint is estimated, followed by dense 2D-3D correspondence prediction. The final pose is computed with PnP. We evaluate the method on LineMOD, Occlusion, Homebrewed, YCB-V and TLESS datasets and report very competitive performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods trained on synthetic data, even though our method is not trained on the object models used for testing.

Rotated object detection is a challenging issue in computer vision field. Inadequate rotated representation and the confusion of parametric regression have been the bottleneck for high performance rotated detection. In this paper, we propose an orientation-sensitive keypoint based rotated detector OSKDet. First, we adopt a set of keypoints to represent the target and predict the keypoint heatmap on ROI to get the rotated box. By proposing the orientation-sensitive heatmap, OSKDet could learn the shape and direction of rotated target implicitly and has stronger modeling capabilities for rotated representation, which improves the localization accuracy and acquires high quality detection results. Second, we explore a new unordered keypoint representation paradigm, which could avoid the confusion of keypoint regression caused by rule based ordering. Furthermore, we propose a localization quality uncertainty module to better predict the classification score by the distribution uncertainty of keypoints heatmap. Experimental results on several public benchmarks show the state-of-the-art performance of OSKDet. Specifically, we achieve an AP of 80.91% on DOTA, 89.98% on HRSC2016, 97.27% on UCAS-AOD, and a F-measure of 92.18% on ICDAR2015, 81.43% on ICDAR2017, respectively.

We present ONCE-3DLanes, a real-world autonomous driving dataset with lane layout annotation in 3D space. Conventional 2D lane detection from a monocular image yields poor performance of following planning and control tasks in autonomous driving due to the case of uneven road. Predicting the 3D lane layout is thus necessary and enables effective and safe driving. However, existing 3D lane detection datasets are either unpublished or synthesized from a simulated environment, severely hampering the development of this field. In this paper, we take steps towards addressing these issues. By exploiting the explicit relationship between point clouds and image pixels, a dataset annotation pipeline is designed to automatically generate high-quality 3D lane locations from 2D lane annotations in 211K road scenes. In addition, we present an extrinsic-free, anchor-free method, called SALAD, regressing the 3D coordinates of lanes in image view without converting the feature map into the bird's-eye view (BEV). To facilitate future research on 3D lane detection, we benchmark the dataset and provide a novel evaluation metric, performing extensive experiments of both existing approaches and our proposed method. The aim of our work is to revive the interest of 3D lane detection in a real-world scenario. We believe our work can lead to expected and unexpected innovations in both academia and industry.

Videos incorporate rich semantics as well as redundant information. Seeking a compact yet effective video representation, e.g., sample informative frames from the entire video, is critical to efficient video recognition. There have been works that formulate frame sampling as a sequential decision task by selecting frames one by one according to their importance. In this paper, we present a more efficient framework named OCSampler, which explores such a representation with one short clip. OCSampler designs a new paradigm of learning instance-specific video condensation policies to select frames only in a single step. Rather than picking up frames sequentially like previous methods, we simply process a whole sequence at once. Accordingly, these policies are derived from a light-weighted skim network together with a simple yet effective policy network. Moreover, we extend the proposed method with a frame number budget, enabling the framework to produce correct predictions in high confidence with as few frames as possible. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of OCSampler over previous methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, it achieves 76.9% mAP and 21.7 GFLOPs on ActivityNet with an impressive throughput: 123.9 Video/s on a single TITAN Xp GPU.

We introduce a new setting of Novel Class Discovery in Semantic Segmentation (NCDSS), which aims at segmenting unlabeled images containing new classes given prior knowledge from a labeled set of disjoint classes. In contrast to existing approaches that look at novel class discovery in image classification, we focus on the more challenging semantic segmentation. In NCDSS, we need to distinguish the objects and background, and to handle the existence of multiple classes within an image, which increases the difficulty in using the unlabeled data. To tackle this new setting, we leverage the labeled base data and a saliency model to coarsely cluster novel classes for model training in our basic framework. Additionally, we propose the Entropy-based Uncertainty Modeling and Self-training (EUMS) framework to overcome noisy pseudo-labels, further improving the model performance on the novel classes. Our EUMS utilizes an entropy ranking technique and a dynamic reassignment to distill clean labels, thereby making full use of the noisy data via self-supervised learning. We build the NCDSS benchmark on the PASCAL-5^i dataset and COCO-20^i dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the basic framework (achieving an average mIoU of 49.81% on PASCAL-5^i) and the effectiveness of EUMS framework (outperforming the basic framework by 9.28% mIoU on PASCAL-5^i).

Online class-incremental continual learning aims to learn new classes continually from a never-ending and single-pass data stream, while not forgetting the learned knowledge of old classes. Existing replay-based methods have shown promising performance by storing a subset of old class data. Unfortunately, these methods only focus on selecting samples from the memory bank for replay and ignore the adequate exploration of semantic information in the single-pass data stream, leading to poor classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel yet effective framework for online class-incremental continual learning, which considers not only the selection of stored samples, but also the full exploration of the data stream. Specifically, we propose a gradient-based sample selection strategy, which selects the stored samples whose gradients generated in the network are most interfered by the new incoming samples. We believe such samples are beneficial for updating the neural network based on back gradient propagation. More importantly, we seek to explore the semantic information between two different views of training images by maximizing their mutual information, which is conducive to the improvement of classification accuracy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of benchmark datasets. Our code is available on https://github.com/YananGu/DVC.

Vision transformers have achieved great successes in many computer vision tasks. Most methods generate vision tokens by splitting an image into a regular and fixed grid and treating each cell as a token. However, not all regions are equally important in human-centric vision tasks, e.g., the human body needs a fine representation with many tokens, while the image background can be modeled by a few tokens. To address this problem, we propose a novel Vision Transformer, called Token Clustering Transformer (TCFormer), which merges tokens by progressive clustering, where the tokens can be merged from different locations with flexible shapes and sizes. The tokens in TCFormer can not only focus on important areas but also adjust the token shapes to fit the semantic concept and adopt a fine resolution for regions containing critical details, which is beneficial to capturing detailed information. Extensive experiments show that TCFormer consistently outperforms its counterparts on different challenging humancentric tasks and datasets, including whole-body pose estimation on COCO-WholeBody and 3D human mesh reconstruction on 3DPW. Code is available at https://github.com/ zengwang430521/TCFormer.git.

Scene graph generation (SGG) aims to capture a wide variety of interactions between pairs of objects, which is essential for full scene understanding. Existing SGG methods trained on the entire set of relations fail to acquire complex reasoning about visual and textual correlations due to various biases in training data. Learning on trivial relations that indicate generic spatial configuration like 'on' instead of informative relations such as 'parked on' does not enforce this complex reasoning, harming generalization. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework for SGG training that exploits relation labels based on their informativeness. Our model-agnostic training procedure imputes missing informative relations for less informative samples in the training data and trains a SGG model on the imputed labels along with existing annotations. We show that this approach can successfully be used in conjunction with state-of-the-art SGG methods and improves their performance significantly in multiple metrics on the standard Visual Genome benchmark. Furthermore, we obtain considerable improvements for unseen triplets in a more challenging zero-shot setting.

We study the problem of efficient object detection of 3D LiDAR point clouds. To reduce the memory and computational cost, existing point-based pipelines usually adopt task-agnostic random sampling or farthest point sampling to progressively downsample input point clouds, despite the fact that not all points are equally important to the task of object detection. In particular, the foreground points are inherently more important than background points for object detectors. Motivated by this, we propose a highly-efficient single-stage point-based 3D detector in this paper, termed IA-SSD. The key of our approach is to exploit two learnable, task-oriented, instance-aware downsampling strategies to hierarchically select the foreground points belonging to objects of interest. Additionally, we also introduce a contextual centroid perception module to further estimate precise instance centers. Finally, we build our \nickname following the encoder-only architecture for efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on several large-scale detection benchmarks demonstrate the competitive performance of our IA-SSD. Thanks to the low memory footprint and a high degree of parallelism, it achieves a superior speed of 80+ frames-per-second on the KITTI dataset with a single RTX2080Ti GPU. The code is available at https://github.com/yifanzhang713/IA-SSD.

Deep neural networks have reached high accuracy on object detection but their success hinges on large amounts of labeled data. To reduce the labels dependency, various active learning strategies have been proposed, typically based on the confidence of the detector. However, these methods are biased towards high-performing classes and can lead to acquired datasets that are not good representatives of the testing set data. In this work, we propose a unified framework for active learning, that considers both the uncertainty and the robustness of the detector, ensuring that the network performs well in all classes. Furthermore, our method leverages auto-labeling to suppress a potential distribution drift while boosting the performance of the model. Experiments on PASCAL VOC07+12 and MS-COCO show that our method consistently outperforms a wide range of active learning methods, yielding up to a 7.7% improvement in mAP, or up to 82% reduction in labeling cost. Code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

The nonuniform quantization strategy for compressing neural networks usually achieves better performance than its counterpart, i.e., uniform strategy, due to its superior representational capacity. However, many nonuniform quantization methods overlook the complicated projection process in implementing the nonuniformly quantized weights/activations, which incurs non-negligible time and space overhead in hardware deployment. In this study, we propose Nonuniform-to-Uniform Quantization (N2UQ), a method that can maintain the strong representation ability of nonuniform methods while being hardware-friendly and efficient as the uniform quantization for model inference. We achieve this through learning the flexible in-equidistant input thresholds to better fit the underlying distribution while quantizing these real-valued inputs into equidistant output levels. To train the quantized network with learnable input thresholds, we introduce a generalized straight-through estimator (G-STE) for intractable backward derivative calculation w.r.t. threshold parameters. Additionally, we consider entropy preserving regularization to further reduce information loss in weight quantization. Even under this adverse constraint of imposing uniformly quantized weights and activations, our N2UQ outperforms state-of-the-art nonuniform quantization methods by 0.5 1.7% on ImageNet, demonstrating the contribution of N2UQ design. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/liuzechun/Nonuniform-to-Uniform-Quantization.

Capturing multimodal natures is essential for stochastic pedestrian trajectory prediction, to infer a finite set of future trajectories. The inferred trajectories are based on observation paths and the latent vectors of potential decisions of pedestrians in the inference step. However, stochastic approaches provide varying results for the same data and parameter settings, due to the random sampling of the latent vector. In this paper, we analyze the problem by reconstructing and comparing probabilistic distributions from prediction samples and socially-acceptable paths, respectively. Through this analysis, we observe that the inferences of all stochastic models are biased toward the random sampling, and fail to generate a set of realistic paths from finite samples. The problem cannot be resolved unless an infinite number of samples is available, which is infeasible in practice. We introduce that the Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) method, ensuring uniform coverage on the sampling space, as an alternative to the conventional random sampling. With the same finite number of samples, the QMC improves all the multimodal prediction results. We take an additional step ahead by incorporating a learnable sampling network into the existing networks for trajectory prediction. For this purpose, we propose the Non-Probability Sampling Network (NPSN), a very small network ( 5K parameters) that generates purposive sample sequences using the past paths of pedestrians and their social interactions. Extensive experiments confirm that NPSN can significantly improve both the prediction accuracy (up to 60%) and reliability of the public pedestrian trajectory prediction benchmark. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/inhwanbae/NPSN.