CVPR 2023 Papers

Rising concerns about privacy and anonymity preservation of deep learning models have facilitated research in data-free learning. Primarily based on data-free knowledge distillation, models developed in this area so far have only been able to operate in a single modality, performing the same kind of task as that of the teacher. For the first time, we propose Data-Free Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (DF-SBIR), a cross-modal data-free learning setting, where teachers trained for classification in a single modality have to be leveraged by students to learn a cross-modal metric-space for retrieval. The widespread availability of pre-trained classification models, along with the difficulty in acquiring paired photo-sketch datasets for SBIR justify the practicality of this setting. We present a methodology for DF-SBIR, which can leverage knowledge from models independently trained to perform classification on photos and sketches. We evaluate our model on the Sketchy, TU-Berlin, and QuickDraw benchmarks, designing a variety of baselines based on existing data-free learning literature, and observe that our method surpasses all of them by significant margins. Our method also achieves mAPs competitive with data-dependent approaches, all the while requiring no training data. Implementation is available at https://github.com/abhrac/data-free-sbir.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has exhibited outstanding three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction quality via the novel view synthesis from multi-view images and paired calibrated camera parameters. However, previous NeRF-based systems have been demonstrated under strictly controlled settings, with little attention paid to less ideal scenarios, including with the presence of noise such as exposure, illumination changes, and blur. In particular, though blur frequently occurs in real situations, NeRF that can handle blurred images has received little attention. The few studies that have investigated NeRF for blurred images have not considered geometric and appearance consistency in 3D space, which is one of the most important factors in 3D reconstruction. This leads to inconsistency and the degradation of the perceptual quality of the constructed scene. Hence, this paper proposes a DP-NeRF, a novel clean NeRF framework for blurred images, which is constrained with two physical priors. These priors are derived from the actual blurring process during image acquisition by the camera. DP-NeRF proposes rigid blurring kernel to impose 3D consistency utilizing the physical priors and adaptive weight proposal to refine the color composition error in consideration of the relationship between depth and blur. We present extensive experimental results for synthetic and real scenes with two types of blur: camera motion blur and defocus blur. The results demonstrate that DP-NeRF successfully improves the perceptual quality of the constructed NeRF ensuring 3D geometric and appearance consistency. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with comprehensive ablation analysis.

With the rapid development of virtual reality, 360deg images have gained increasing popularity. Their wide field of view necessitates high resolution to ensure image quality. This, however, makes it harder to acquire, store and even process such 360deg images. To alleviate this issue, we propose the first attempt at 360deg image rescaling, which refers to downscaling a 360deg image to a visually valid low-resolution (LR) counterpart and then upscaling to a high-resolution (HR) 360deg image given the LR variant. Specifically, we first analyze two 360deg image datasets and observe several findings that characterize how 360deg images typically change along their latitudes. Inspired by these findings, we propose a novel deformable invertible neural network (INN), named DINN360, for latitude-aware 360deg image rescaling. In DINN360, a deformable INN is designed to downscale the LR image, and project the high-frequency (HF) component to the latent space by adaptively handling various deformations occurring at different latitude regions. Given the downscaled LR image, the high-quality HR image is then reconstructed in a conditional latitude-aware manner by recovering the structure-related HF component from the latent space. Extensive experiments over four public datasets show that our DINN360 method performs considerably better than other state-of-the-art methods for 2x, 4x and 8x 360deg image rescaling.

We present Depth-aware Image-based NEural Radiance fields (DINER). Given a sparse set of RGB input views, we predict depth and feature maps to guide the reconstruction of a volumetric scene representation that allows us to render 3D objects under novel views. Specifically, we propose novel techniques to incorporate depth information into feature fusion and efficient scene sampling. In comparison to the previous state of the art, DINER achieves higher synthesis quality and can process input views with greater disparity. This allows us to capture scenes more completely without changing capturing hardware requirements and ultimately enables larger viewpoint changes during novel view synthesis. We evaluate our method by synthesizing novel views, both for human heads and for general objects, and observe significantly improved qualitative results and increased perceptual metrics compared to the previous state of the art.

Generating synthetic datasets for training face recognition models is challenging because dataset generation entails more than creating high fidelity images. It involves generating multiple images of same subjects under different factors (e.g., variations in pose, illumination, expression, aging and occlusion) which follows the real image conditional distribution. Previous works have studied the generation of synthetic datasets using GAN or 3D models. In this work, we approach the problem from the aspect of combining subject appearance (ID) and external factor (style) conditions. These two conditions provide a direct way to control the inter-class and intra-class variations. To this end, we propose a Dual Condition Face Generator (DCFace) based on a diffusion model. Our novel Patch-wise style extractor and Time-step dependent ID loss enables DCFace to consistently produce face images of the same subject under different styles with precise control. Face recognition models trained on synthetic images from the proposed DCFace provide higher verification accuracies compared to previous works by 6.11% on average in 4 out of 5 test datasets, LFW, CFP-FP, CPLFW, AgeDB and CALFW. Model, code, and synthetic dataset are available at https://github.com/mk-minchul/dcface

Data augmentation (DA) is an efficient strategy for improving the performance of deep neural networks. Recent DA strategies have demonstrated utility in single image super-resolution (SR). Little research has, however, focused on the DA strategy for light field SR, in which multi-view information utilization is required. For the first time in light field SR, we propose a potent DA strategy called CutMIB to improve the performance of existing light field SR networks while keeping their structures unchanged. Specifically, CutMIB first cuts low-resolution (LR) patches from each view at the same location. Then CutMIB blends all LR patches to generate the blended patch and finally pastes the blended patch to the corresponding regions of high-resolution light field views, and vice versa. By doing so, CutMIB enables light field SR networks to learn from implicit geometric information during the training stage. Experimental results demonstrate that CutMIB can improve the reconstruction performance and the angular consistency of existing light field SR networks. We further verify the effectiveness of CutMIB on real-world light field SR and light field denoising. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/zeyuxiao1997/CutMIB.

Considering the ill-posed nature, contrastive regularization has been developed for single image dehazing, introducing the information from negative images as a lower bound. However, the contrastive samples are nonconsensual, as the negatives are usually represented distantly from the clear (i.e., positive) image, leaving the solution space still under-constricted. Moreover, the interpretability of deep dehazing models is underexplored towards the physics of the hazing process. In this paper, we propose a novel curricular contrastive regularization targeted at a consensual contrastive space as opposed to a non-consensual one. Our negatives, which provide better lower-bound constraints, can be assembled from 1) the hazy image, and 2) corresponding restorations by other existing methods. Further, due to the different similarities between the embeddings of the clear image and negatives, the learning difficulty of the multiple components is intrinsically imbalanced. To tackle this issue, we customize a curriculum learning strategy to reweight the importance of different negatives. In addition, to improve the interpretability in the feature space, we build a physics-aware dual-branch unit according to the atmospheric scattering model. With the unit, as well as curricular contrastive regularization, we establish our dehazing network, named C2PNet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our C2PNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with extreme PSNR boosts of 3.94dB and 1.50dB, respectively, on SOTS-indoor and SOTS-outdoor datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/YuZheng9/C2PNet.

Image-based multi-person reconstruction in wide-field large scenes is critical for crowd analysis and security alert. However, existing methods cannot deal with large scenes containing hundreds of people, which encounter the challenges of large number of people, large variations in human scale, and complex spatial distribution. In this paper, we propose Crowd3D, the first framework to reconstruct the 3D poses, shapes and locations of hundreds of people with global consistency from a single large-scene image. The core of our approach is to convert the problem of complex crowd localization into pixel localization with the help of our newly defined concept, Human-scene Virtual Interaction Point (HVIP). To reconstruct the crowd with global consistency, we propose a progressive reconstruction network based on HVIP by pre-estimating a scene-level camera and a ground plane. To deal with a large number of persons and various human sizes, we also design an adaptive human-centric cropping scheme. Besides, we contribute a benchmark dataset, LargeCrowd, for crowd reconstruction in a large scene. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code and the dataset are available at http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/Crowd3D.

Existing image captioning methods are under the assumption that the training and testing data are from the same domain or that the data from the target domain (i.e., the domain that testing data lie in) are accessible. However, this assumption is invalid in real-world applications where the data from the target domain is inaccessible. In this paper, we introduce a new setting called Domain Generalization for Image Captioning (DGIC), where the data from the target domain is unseen in the learning process. We first construct a benchmark dataset for DGIC, which helps us to investigate models' domain generalization (DG) ability on unseen domains. With the support of the new benchmark, we further propose a new framework called language-guided semantic metric learning (LSML) for the DGIC setting. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the challenge of the task and the effectiveness of our newly proposed benchmark and LSML framework.

Text-to-image person retrieval aims to identify the target person based on a given textual description query. The primary challenge is to learn the mapping of visual and textual modalities into a common latent space. Prior works have attempted to address this challenge by leveraging separately pre-trained unimodal models to extract visual and textual features. However, these approaches lack the necessary underlying alignment capabilities required to match multimodal data effectively. Besides, these works use prior information to explore explicit part alignments, which may lead to the distortion of intra-modality information. To alleviate these issues, we present IRRA: a cross-modal Implicit Relation Reasoning and Aligning framework that learns relations between local visual-textual tokens and enhances global image-text matching without requiring additional prior supervision. Specifically, we first design an Implicit Relation Reasoning module in a masked language modeling paradigm. This achieves cross-modal interaction by integrating the visual cues into the textual tokens with a cross-modal multimodal interaction encoder. Secondly, to globally align the visual and textual embeddings, Similarity Distribution Matching is proposed to minimize the KL divergence between image-text similarity distributions and the normalized label matching distributions. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on all three public datasets, with a notable margin of about 3%-9% for Rank-1 accuracy compared to prior methods.

Learning compact image embeddings that yield semantic similarities between images and that generalize to unseen test classes, is at the core of deep metric learning (DML). Finding a mapping from a rich, localized image feature map onto a compact embedding vector is challenging: Although similarity emerges between tuples of images, DML approaches marginalize out information in an individual image before considering another image to which similarity is to be computed. Instead, we propose during training to condition the embedding of an image on the image we want to compare it to. Rather than embedding by a simple pooling as in standard DML, we use cross-attention so that one image can identify relevant features in the other image. Consequently, the attention mechanism establishes a hierarchy of conditional embeddings that gradually incorporates information about the tuple to steer the representation of an individual image. The cross-attention layers bridge the gap between the original unconditional embedding and the final similarity and allow backpropagtion to update encodings more directly than through a lossy pooling layer. At test time we use the resulting improved unconditional embeddings, thus requiring no additional parameters or computational overhead. Experiments on established DML benchmarks show that our cross-attention conditional embedding during training improves the underlying standard DML pipeline significantly so that it outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Novel View Synthesis (NVS) aims at synthesizing an image from an arbitrary viewpoint using multi-view images and camera poses. Among the methods for NVS, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is capable of NVS for an arbitrary resolution as it learns a continuous volumetric representation. However, radiance fields rely heavily on the spectral characteristics of coordinate-based networks. Thus, there is a limit to improving the performance of high-resolution novel view synthesis (HRNVS). To solve this problem, we propose a novel framework using cross-guided optimization of the single-image super-resolution (SISR) and radiance fields. We perform multi-view image super-resolution (MVSR) on train-view images during the radiance fields optimization process. It derives the updated SR result by fusing the feature map obtained from SISR and voxel-based uncertainty fields generated by integrated errors of train-view images. By repeating the updates during radiance fields optimization, train-view images for radiance fields optimization have multi-view consistency and high-frequency details simultaneously, ultimately improving the performance of HRNVS. Experiments of HRNVS and MVSR on various benchmark datasets show that the proposed method significantly surpasses existing methods.

Neural captioners are typically trained to mimic human-generated references without optimizing for any specific communication goal, leading to problems such as the generation of vague captions. In this paper, we show that fine-tuning an out-of-the-box neural captioner with a self-supervised discriminative communication objective helps to recover a plain, visually descriptive language that is more informative about image contents. Given a target image, the system must learn to produce a description that enables an out-of-the-box text-conditioned image retriever to identify such image among a set of candidates. We experiment with the popular ClipCap captioner, also replicating the main results with BLIP. In terms of similarity to ground-truth human descriptions, the captions emerging from discriminative finetuning lag slightly behind those generated by the non-finetuned model, when the latter is trained and tested on the same caption dataset. However, when the model is used without further tuning to generate captions for out-of-domain datasets, our discriminatively-finetuned captioner generates descriptions that resemble human references more than those produced by the same captioner without finetuning. We further show that, on the Conceptual Captions dataset, discriminatively finetuned captions are more helpful than either vanilla ClipCap captions or ground-truth captions for human annotators tasked with an image discrimination task.

Edit fidelity is a significant issue in open-world controllable generative image editing. Recently, CLIP-based approaches have traded off simplicity to alleviate these problems by introducing spatial attention in a handpicked layer of a StyleGAN. In this paper, we propose CoralStyleCLIP, which incorporates a multi-layer attention-guided blending strategy in the feature space of StyleGAN2 for obtaining high-fidelity edits. We propose multiple forms of our co-optimized region and layer selection strategy to demonstrate the variation of time complexity with the quality of edits over different architectural intricacies while preserving simplicity. We conduct extensive experimental analysis and benchmark our method against state-of-the-art CLIP-based methods. Our findings suggest that CoralStyleCLIP results in high-quality edits while preserving the ease of use.

Mesh generation is of great value in various applications involving computer graphics and virtual content, yet designing generative models for meshes is challenging due to their irregular data structure and inconsistent topology of meshes in the same category. In this work, we design a novel sparse latent point diffusion model for mesh generation. Our key insight is to regard point clouds as an intermediate representation of meshes, and model the distribution of point clouds instead. While meshes can be generated from point clouds via techniques like Shape as Points (SAP), the challenges of directly generating meshes can be effectively avoided. To boost the efficiency and controllability of our mesh generation method, we propose to further encode point clouds to a set of sparse latent points with point-wise semantic meaningful features, where two DDPMs are trained in the space of sparse latent points to respectively model the distribution of the latent point positions and features at these latent points. We find that sampling in this latent space is faster than directly sampling dense point clouds. Moreover, the sparse latent points also enable us to explicitly control both the overall structures and local details of the generated meshes. Extensive experiments are conducted on the ShapeNet dataset, where our proposed sparse latent point diffusion model achieves superior performance in terms of generation quality and controllability when compared to existing methods.

Despite the remarkable achievement of recent underwater image restoration techniques, the lack of labeled data has become a major hurdle for further progress. In this work, we propose a mean-teacher based Semi-supervised Underwater Image Restoration (Semi-UIR) framework to incorporate the unlabeled data into network training. However, the naive mean-teacher method suffers from two main problems: (1) The consistency loss used in training might become ineffective when the teacher's prediction is wrong. (2) Using L1 distance may cause the network to overfit wrong labels, resulting in confirmation bias. To address the above problems, we first introduce a reliable bank to store the "best-ever" outputs as pseudo ground truth. To assess the quality of outputs, we conduct an empirical analysis based on the monotonicity property to select the most trustworthy NR-IQA method. Besides, in view of the confirmation bias problem, we incorporate contrastive regularization to prevent the overfitting on wrong labels. Experimental results on both full-reference and non-reference underwater benchmarks demonstrate that our algorithm has obvious improvement over SOTA methods quantitatively and qualitatively. Code has been released at https://github.com/Huang-ShiRui/Semi-UIR.

Trit-plane coding enables deep progressive image compression, but it cannot use autoregressive context models. In this paper, we propose the context-based trit-plane coding (CTC) algorithm to achieve progressive compression more compactly. First, we develop the context-based rate reduction module to estimate trit probabilities of latent elements accurately and thus encode the trit-planes compactly. Second, we develop the context-based distortion reduction module to refine partial latent tensors from the trit-planes and improve the reconstructed image quality. Third, we propose a retraining scheme for the decoder to attain better rate-distortion tradeoffs. Extensive experiments show that CTC outperforms the baseline trit-plane codec significantly, e.g. by -14.84% in BD-rate on the Kodak lossless dataset, while increasing the time complexity only marginally. The source codes are available at https://github.com/seungminjeon-github/CTC.

In this paper, we study Blind Image Decomposition (BID), which is to uniformly remove multiple types of degradation at once without foreknowing the noise type. There remain two practical challenges: (1) Existing methods typically require massive data supervision, making them infeasible to real-world scenarios. (2) The conventional paradigm usually focuses on mining the abnormal pattern of a superimposed image to separate the noise, which de facto conflicts with the primary image restoration task. Therefore, such a pipeline compromises repairing efficiency and authenticity. In an attempt to solve the two challenges in one go, we propose an efficient and simplified paradigm, called Context-aware Pretraining (CP), with two pretext tasks: mixed image separation and masked image reconstruction. Such a paradigm reduces the annotation demands and explicitly facilitates context-aware feature learning. Assuming the restoration process follows a structure-to-texture manner, we also introduce a Context-aware Pretrained network (CPNet). In particular, CPNet contains two transformer-based parallel encoders, one information fusion module, and one multi-head prediction module. The information fusion module explicitly utilizes the mutual correlation in the spatial-channel dimension, while the multi-head prediction module facilitates texture-guided appearance flow. Moreover, a new sampling loss along with an attribute label constraint is also deployed to make use of the spatial context, leading to high-fidelity image restoration. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic benchmarks show that our method achieves competitive performance for various BID tasks.

Current text recognition systems, including those for handwritten scripts and scene text, have relied heavily on image synthesis and augmentation, since it is difficult to realize real-world complexity and diversity through collecting and annotating enough real text images. In this paper, we explore the problem of text image generation, by taking advantage of the powerful abilities of Diffusion Models in generating photo-realistic and diverse image samples with given conditions, and propose a method called Conditional Text Image Generation with Diffusion Models (CTIG-DM for short). To conform to the characteristics of text images, we devise three conditions: image condition, text condition, and style condition, which can be used to control the attributes, contents, and styles of the samples in the image generation process. Specifically, four text image generation modes, namely: (1) synthesis mode, (2) augmentation mode, (3) recovery mode, and (4) imitation mode, can be derived by combining and configuring these three conditions. Extensive experiments on both handwritten and scene text demonstrate that the proposed CTIG-DM is able to produce image samples that simulate real-world complexity and diversity, and thus can boost the performance of existing text recognizers. Besides, CTIG-DM shows its appealing potential in domain adaptation and generating images containing Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words.