CVPR 2024 Papers

In the realm of video object tracking auxiliary modalities such as depth thermal or event data have emerged as valuable assets to complement the RGB trackers. In practice most existing RGB trackers learn a single set of parameters to use them across datasets and applications. However a similar single-model unification for multi-modality tracking presents several challenges. These challenges stem from the inherent heterogeneity of inputs -- each with modality-specific representations the scarcity of multi-modal datasets and the absence of all the modalities at all times. In this work we introduce Un-Track a Unified Tracker of a single set of parameters for any modality. To handle any modality our method learns their common latent space through low-rank factorization and reconstruction techniques. More importantly we use only the RGB-X pairs to learn the common latent space. This unique shared representation seamlessly binds all modalities together enabling effective unification and accommodating any missing modality all within a single transformer-based architecture. Our Un-Track achieves +8.1 absolute F-score gain on the DepthTrack dataset by introducing only +2.14 (over 21.50) GFLOPs with +6.6M (over 93M) parameters through a simple yet efficient prompting strategy. Extensive comparisons on five benchmark datasets with different modalities show that Un-Track surpasses both SOTA unified trackers and modality-specific counterparts validating our effectiveness and practicality. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zongwei97/UnTrack.

In this paper we propose a novel concept of path consistency to learn robust object matching without using manual object identity supervision. Our key idea is that to track a object through frames we can obtain multiple different association results from a model by varying the frames it can observe i.e. skipping frames in observation. As the differences in observations do not alter the identities of objects the obtained association results should be consistent. Based on this rationale we generate multiple observation paths each specifying a different set of frames to be skipped and formulate the Path Consistency Loss that enforces the association results are consistent across different observation paths. We use the proposed loss to train our object matching model with only self-supervision. By extensive experiments on three tracking datasets (MOT17 PersonPath22 KITTI) we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing unsupervised methods with consistent margins on various evaluation metrics and even achieves performance close to supervised methods.

Many instruments performing optical and non-optical imaging and sensing such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) Magnetic Resonance Imaging or Fourier-transform spectrometry produce digital signals containing modulations sine-like components which only after Fourier transformation give information about the structure or characteristics of the investigated object. Due to the fundamental physics-related limitations of such methods the distribution of these signal components is often nonlinear and when not properly compensated leads to the resolution precision or quality drop in the final image. Here we propose an innovative approach that has the potential to allow cleaning of the signal from the nonlinearities but most of all it now allows to switch the given order off leaving all others intact. The latter provides a tool for more in-depth analysis of the nonlinearity-inducing properties of the investigated object which can lead to applications in early disease detection or more sensitive sensing of chemical compounds. We consider OCT signals and nonlinearities up to the third order. In our approach we propose two neural networks: one to remove solely the second-order nonlinearity and the other for removing solely the third-order nonlinearity. The input of the networks is a novel two-dimensional data structure with all the information needed for the network to infer a nonlinearity-free signal. We describe the developed networks and present the results for second-order and third-order nonlinearity removal in OCT data representing the images of various objects: a mirror glass and fruits.

Semantic segmentation models while effective for in-distribution categories face challenges in real-world deployment due to encountering out-of-distribution (OoD) objects. Detecting these OoD objects is crucial for safety-critical applications. Existing methods rely on anomaly scores but choosing a suitable threshold for generating masks presents difficulties and can lead to fragmentation and inaccuracy. This paper introduces a method to convert anomaly Score To segmentation Mask called S2M a simple and effective framework for OoD detection in semantic segmentation. Unlike assigning anomaly scores to pixels S2M directly segments the entire OoD object. By transforming anomaly scores into prompts for a promptable segmentation model S2M eliminates the need for threshold selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S2M outperforms the state-of-the-art by approximately 20% in IoU and 40% in mean F1 score on average across various benchmarks including Fishyscapes Segment-Me-If-You-Can and RoadAnomaly datasets.

Monocular 3D detectors achieve remarkable performance on cars and smaller objects. However their performance drops on larger objects leading to fatal accidents. Some attribute the failures to training data scarcity or the receptive field requirements of large objects. In this paper we highlight this understudied problem of generalization to large objects. We find that modern frontal detectors struggle to generalize to large objects even on nearly balanced datasets. We argue that the cause of failure is the sensitivity of depth regression losses to noise of larger objects. To bridge this gap we comprehensively investigate regression and dice losses examining their robustness under varying error levels and object sizes. We mathematically prove that the dice loss leads to superior noise-robustness and model convergence for large objects compared to regression losses for a simplified case. Leveraging our theoretical insights we propose SeaBird (Segmentation in Bird's View) as the first step towards generalizing to large objects. SeaBird effectively integrates BEV segmentation on foreground objects for 3D detection with the segmentation head trained with the dice loss. SeaBird achieves SoTA results on the KITTI-360 leaderboard and improves existing detectors on the nuScenes leaderboard particularly for large objects.

We tackle semi-supervised object detection based on motion cues. Recent results suggest that heuristic-based clustering methods in conjunction with object trackers can be used to pseudo-label instances of moving objects and use these as supervisory signals to train 3D object detectors in Lidar data without manual supervision. We re-think this approach and suggest that both object detection as well as motion-inspired pseudo-labeling can be tackled in a data-driven manner. We leverage recent advances in scene flow estimation to obtain point trajectories from which we extract long-term class-agnostic motion patterns. Revisiting correlation clustering in the context of message passing networks we learn to group those motion patterns to cluster points to object instances. By estimating the full extent of the objects we obtain per-scan 3D bounding boxes that we use to supervise a Lidar object detection network. Our method not only outperforms prior heuristic-based approaches (57.5 AP +14 improvement over prior work) more importantly we show we can pseudo-label and train object detectors across datasets.

While recent Transformer-based approaches have shown impressive performances on event-based object detection tasks their high computational costs still diminish the low power consumption advantage of event cameras. Image-based works attempt to reduce these costs by introducing sparse Transformers. However they display inadequate sparsity and adaptability when applied to event-based object detection since these approaches cannot balance the fine granularity of token-level sparsification and the efficiency of window-based Transformers leading to reduced performance and efficiency. Furthermore they lack scene-specific sparsity optimization resulting in information loss and a lower recall rate. To overcome these limitations we propose the Scene Adaptive Sparse Transformer (SAST). SAST enables window-token co-sparsification significantly enhancing fault tolerance and reducing computational overhead. Leveraging the innovative scoring and selection modules along with the Masked Sparse Window Self-Attention SAST showcases remarkable scene-aware adaptability: It focuses only on important objects and dynamically optimizes sparsity level according to scene complexity maintaining a remarkable balance between performance and computational cost. The evaluation results show that SAST outperforms all other dense and sparse networks in both performance and efficiency on two large-scale event-based object detection datasets (1Mpx and Gen1). Code: https://github.com/Peterande/SAST

DETR-like methods have significantly increased detection performance in an end-to-end manner. The mainstream two-stage frameworks of them perform dense self-attention and select a fraction of queries for sparse cross-attention which is proven effective for improving performance but also introduces a heavy computational burden and high dependence on stable query selection. This paper demonstrates that suboptimal two-stage selection strategies result in scale bias and redundancy due to the mismatch between selected queries and objects in two-stage initialization. To address these issues we propose hierarchical salience filtering refinement which performs transformer encoding only on filtered discriminative queries for a better trade-off between computational efficiency and precision. The filtering process overcomes scale bias through a novel scale-independent salience supervision. To compensate for the semantic misalignment among queries we introduce elaborate query refinement modules for stable two-stage initialization. Based on above improvements the proposed Salience DETR achieves significant improvements of +4.0% AP +0.2% AP +4.4% AP on three challenging task-specific detection datasets as well as 49.2% AP on COCO 2017 with less FLOPs. The code is available at https://github.com/xiuqhou/Salience-DETR.

Unsupervised object-centric learning aims to decompose scenes into interpretable object entities termed slots. Slot-based auto-encoders stand out as a prominent method for this task. Within them crucial aspects include guiding the encoder to generate object-specific slots and ensuring the decoder utilizes them during reconstruction. This work introduces two novel techniques (i) an attention-based self-training approach which distills superior slot-based attention masks from the decoder to the encoder enhancing object segmentation and (ii) an innovative patch-order permutation strategy for autoregressive transformers that strengthens the role of slot vectors in reconstruction. The effectiveness of these strategies is showcased experimentally. The combined approach significantly surpasses prior slot-based autoencoder methods in unsupervised object segmentation especially with complex real-world images. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/gkakogeorgiou/spot .

Misinformation is a prevalent societal issue due to its potential high risks. Out-Of-Context (OOC) misinformation where authentic images are repurposed with false text is one of the easiest and most effective ways to mislead audiences. Current methods focus on assessing image-text consistency but lack convincing explanations for their judgments which are essential for debunking misinformation. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have rich knowledge and innate capability for visual reasoning and explanation generation they still lack sophistication in understanding and discovering the subtle cross-modal differences. In this paper we introduce Sniffer a novel multimodal large language model specifically engineered for OOC misinformation detection and explanation. Sniffer employs two-stage instruction tuning on InstructBLIP. The first stage refines the model's concept alignment of generic objects with news-domain entities and the second stage leverages OOC-specific instruction data generated by language-only GPT-4 to fine-tune the model's discriminatory powers. Enhanced by external tools and retrieval Sniffer not only detects inconsistencies between text and image but also utilizes external knowledge for contextual verification. Our experiments show that Sniffer surpasses the original MLLM by over 40% and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detection accuracy. Sniffer also provides accurate and persuasive explanations as validated by quantitative and human evaluations.

Once only a few-shot annotated samples are available the performance of learning-based object detection would be heavily dropped. Many few-shot object detection (FSOD) methods have been proposed to tackle this issue by adopting image-level augmentations in linear manners. Nevertheless those handcrafted enhancements often suffer from limited diversity and lack of semantic awareness resulting in unsatisfactory performance. To this end we propose a Semantic-guided Non-linear Instance-level Data Augmentation method (SNIDA) for FSOD by decoupling the foreground and background to increase their diversities respectively. We design a semantic awareness enhancement strategy to separate objects from backgrounds. Concretely masks of instances are extracted by an unsupervised semantic segmentation module. Then the diversity of samples would be improved by fusing instances into different backgrounds. Considering the shortcomings of augmenting images in a limited transformation space of existing traditional data augmentation methods we introduce an object reconstruction enhancement module. The aim of this module is to generate sufficient diversity and non-linear training data at the instance level through a semantic-guided masked autoencoder. In this way the potential of data can be fully exploited in various object detection scenarios. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baselines by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results under different shot settings.

Open-vocabulary object detection (OvOD) has transformed detection into a language-guided task empowering users to freely define their class vocabularies of interest during inference. However our initial investigation indicates that existing OvOD detectors exhibit significant variability when dealing with vocabularies across various semantic granularities posing a concern for real-world deployment. To this end we introduce Semantic Hierarchy Nexus (SHiNe) a novel classifier that uses semantic knowledge from class hierarchies. It runs offline in three steps: i) it retrieves relevant super-/sub-categories from a hierarchy for each target class; ii) it integrates these categories into hierarchy-aware sentences; iii) it fuses these sentence embeddings to generate the nexus classifier vector. Our evaluation on various detection benchmarks demonstrates that SHiNe enhances robustness across diverse vocabulary granularities achieving up to +31.9% mAP50 with ground truth hierarchies while retaining improvements using hierarchies generated by large language models. Moreover when applied to open-vocabulary classification on ImageNet-1k SHiNe improves the CLIP zero-shot baseline by +2.8% accuracy. SHiNe is training-free and can be seamlessly integrated with any off-the-shelf OvOD detector without incurring additional computational overhead during inference. The code is open source.

We present SHINOBI an end-to-end framework for the reconstruction of shape material and illumination from object images captured with varying lighting pose and background. Inverse rendering of an object based on unconstrained image collections is a long-standing challenge in computer vision and graphics and requires a joint optimization over shape radiance and pose. We show that an implicit shape representation based on a multi-resolution hash encoding enables faster and robust shape reconstruction with joint camera alignment optimization that outperforms prior work. Further to enable the editing of illumination and object reflectance (i.e. material) we jointly optimize BRDF and illumination together with the object's shape. Our method is class-agnostic and works on in-the-wild image collections of objects to produce relightable 3D assets for several use cases such as AR/VR movies games etc.

Event cameras characterized by high temporal resolution high dynamic range low power consumption and high pixel bandwidth offer unique capabilities for object detection in specialized contexts. Despite these advantages the inherent sparsity and asynchrony of event data pose challenges to existing object detection algorithms. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) inspired by the way the human brain codes and processes information offer a potential solution to these difficulties. However their performance in object detection using event cameras is limited in current implementations. In this paper we propose the Spiking Fusion Object Detector (SFOD) a simple and efficient approach to SNN-based object detection. Specifically we design a Spiking Fusion Module achieving the first-time fusion of feature maps from different scales in SNNs applied to event cameras. Additionally through integrating our analysis and experiments conducted during the pretraining of the backbone network on the NCAR dataset we delve deeply into the impact of spiking decoding strategies and loss functions on model performance. Thereby we establish state-of-the-art classification results based on SNNs achieving 93.7% accuracy on the NCAR dataset. Experimental results on the GEN1 detection dataset demonstrate that the SFOD achieves a state-of-the-art mAP of 32.1% outperforming existing SNN-based approaches. Our research not only underscores the potential of SNNs in object detection with event cameras but also propels the advancement of SNNs. Code is available at https://github.com/yimeng-fan/SFOD.

Multimodal Visual Object Tracking (VOT) has recently gained significant attention due to its robustness. Early research focused on fully fine-tuning RGB-based trackers which was inefficient and lacked generalized representation due to the scarcity of multimodal data. Therefore recent studies have utilized prompt tuning to transfer pre-trained RGB-based trackers to multimodal data. However the modality gap limits pre-trained knowledge recall and the dominance of the RGB modality persists preventing the full utilization of information from other modalities. To address these issues we propose a novel symmetric multimodal tracking framework called SDSTrack. We introduce lightweight adaptation for efficient fine-tuning which directly transfers the feature extraction ability from RGB to other domains with a small number of trainable parameters and integrates multimodal features in a balanced symmetric manner. Furthermore we design a complementary masked patch distillation strategy to enhance the robustness of trackers in complex environments such as extreme weather poor imaging and sensor failure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDSTrack outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various multimodal tracking scenarios including RGB+Depth RGB+Thermal and RGB+Event tracking and exhibits impressive results in extreme conditions. Our source code is available at : https://github.com/hoqolo/SDSTrack.

In the field of class incremental learning (CIL) generative replay has become increasingly prominent as a method to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting alongside the continuous improvements in generative models. However its application in class incremental object detection (CIOD) has been significantly limited primarily due to the complexities of scenes involving multiple labels. In this paper we propose a novel approach called stable diffusion deep generative replay (SDDGR) for CIOD. Our method utilizes a diffusion-based generative model with pre-trained text-to-image diffusion networks to generate realistic and diverse synthetic images. SDDGR incorporates an iterative refinement strategy to produce high-quality images encompassing old classes. Additionally we adopt an L2 knowledge distillation technique to improve the retention of prior knowledge in synthetic images. Furthermore our approach includes pseudo-labeling for old objects within new task images preventing misclassification as background elements. Extensive experiments on the COCO 2017 dataset demonstrate that SDDGR significantly outperforms existing algorithms achieving a new state-of-the-art in various CIOD scenarios.

We introduce SAOR a novel approach for estimating the 3D shape texture and viewpoint of an articulated object from a single image captured in the wild. Unlike prior approaches that rely on pre-defined category-specific 3D templates or tailored 3D skeletons SAOR learns to articulate shapes from single-view image collections with a skeleton-free part-based model without requiring any 3D object shape priors. To prevent ill-posed solutions we propose a cross-instance consistency loss that exploits disentangled object shape deformation and articulation. This is helped by a new silhouette-based sampling mechanism to enhance viewpoint diversity during training. Our method only requires estimated object silhouettes and relative depth maps from off-the-shelf pre-trained networks during training. At inference time given a single-view image it efficiently outputs an explicit mesh representation. We obtain improved qualitative and quantitative results on challenging quadruped animals compared to relevant existing work.

Recently the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has showcased remarkable capabilities of zero-shot segmentation while NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) has gained popularity as a method for various 3D problems beyond novel view synthesis. Though there exist initial attempts to incorporate these two methods into 3D segmentation they face the challenge of accurately and consistently segmenting objects in complex scenarios. In this paper we introduce the Segment Anything for NeRF in High Quality (SANeRF-HQ) to achieve high-quality 3D segmentation of any target object in a given scene. SANeRF-HQ utilizes SAM for open-world object segmentation guided by user-supplied prompts while leveraging NeRF to aggregate information from different viewpoints. To overcome the aforementioned challenges we employ density field and RGB similarity to enhance the accuracy of segmentation boundary during the aggregation. Emphasizing on segmentation accuracy we evaluate our method on multiple NeRF datasets where high-quality ground-truths are available or manually annotated. SANeRF-HQ shows a significant quality improvement over state-of-the-art methods in NeRF object segmentation provides higher flexibility for object localization and enables more consistent object segmentation across multiple views.