ECCV 2024 Papers

"Imperceptible watermarks are essential in safeguarding the content authenticity and the rights of creators in imagery. Recently, several leading approaches, notably zero-bit watermarking, have demonstrated impressive imperceptibility and robustness in image watermarking. However, these methods have security weaknesses, e.g., the risk of counterfeiting and the ease of erasing an existing watermark with another watermark, while also lacking a statistical guarantee regarding the detection performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework to train a secret key network (SKN), which serves as a non-duplicable safeguard for securing the embedded watermark. The SKN is trained so that natural images’ output obeys a standard multi-variate normal distribution. To embed a watermark, we apply an adversarial attack (a modified PGD attack) on the image such that the SKN produces a secret key signature (SKS) with a longer length. We then derive two hypothesis tests to detect the presence of the watermark in an image via the SKN response magnitude and the SKS angle, which offer a statistical guarantee of the false positive rate. Our extensive empirical study demonstrates that our framework maintains robustness comparable to existing methods and excels in security and imperceptibility."

"Endoscopic Ultrasound (EUS) is advantageous in perceiving hierarchical changes in the esophageal tract wall for diagnosing submucosal tumors. However, the lesions often disrupt the structural integrity and fine-grained texture information of the esophageal layer, impeding the accurate diagnosis. Moreover, the lesions can appear in any radial position due to the characteristics of EUS imaging, further increasing the difficulty of diagnosis. In this study, we advance an automatic classification model by equipping the Vision Transformer (ViT), a state-of-the-art(SOTA) model, with a novel statistical rotation-invariant reinforcement mechanism dubbed SRRM. Mainly, we adaptively select crucial regions to avoid interference from irrelevant information in the image. Also, this model integrates histogram statistical features with rotation invariance into the self-attention mechanism, achieving bias-free capture of fine-grained information of lesions at arbitrary radial positions. Validated by in-house clinical and public data, SRRM-ViT has demonstrated remarkable performance improvements, suggesting our approach’s efficacy and potential in EUS image classification.The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tianyiliu-lab/SRRM-ViT/."

"Several variants of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have significantly improved the accuracy of synthesized images and surface reconstruction of 3D scenes/objects. In all of these methods, a key characteristic is that none can train the neural network with every possible input data, specifically, every pixel and potential 3D point along the projection rays due to scalability issues. While vanilla NeRFs uniformly sample both the image pixels and 3D points along the projection rays, some variants focus only on guiding the sampling of the 3D points along the projection rays. In this paper, we leverage the implicit surface representation of the foreground scene and model a probability density function in a 3D image projection space to achieve a more targeted sampling of the rays toward regions of interest, resulting in improved rendering. Additionally, a new surface reconstruction loss is proposed for improved performance. This new loss fully explores the proposed 3D image projection space model and incorporates near-to-surface and empty space components. By integrating our novel sampling strategy and novel loss into current state-of-the-art neural implicit surface renderers, we achieve more accurate and detailed 3D reconstructions and improved image rendering, especially for the regions of interest in any given scene. Project page: https://merl.com/research/highlights/ps-neus."

"Recent Blind Image Super-Resolution (BSR) methods have shown proficiency in general images. However, we find that the efficacy of recent methods obviously diminishes when employed on image data with blur, while image data with intentional blur constitute a substantial proportion of general data. To further investigate and address this issue, we developed a new super-resolution dataset specifically tailored for blur images, named the Real-world Blur-kept Super-Resolution (ReBlurSR) dataset, which consists of nearly 3000 defocus and motion blur image samples with diverse blur sizes and varying blur intensities. Furthermore, we propose a new BSR framework for blur images called Perceptual-Blur-adaptive Super-Resolution (PBaSR), which comprises two main modules: the Cross Disentanglement Module (CDM) and the Cross Fusion Module (CFM). The CDM utilizes a dual-branch parallelism to isolate conflicting blur and general data during optimization. The CFM fuses the well-optimized prior from these distinct domains cost-effectively and efficiently based on model interpolation. By integrating these two modules, PBaSR achieves commendable performance on both general and blur data without any additional inference and deployment cost and is generalizable across multiple model architectures. Rich experiments show that PBaSR achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics without incurring extra inference costs. Within the widely adopted LPIPS metrics, PBaSR achieves an improvement range of approximately 0.02-0.10 with diverse anchor methods and blur types, across both the ReBlurSR and multiple common general BSR benchmarks. Code here."

"While conversational generative AI has shown considerable potential in enhancing decision-making for agricultural professionals, its exploration has predominantly been anchored in text-based interactions. The evolution of multimodal conversational AI, leveraging vast amounts of image-text data from diverse sources, marks a significant stride forward. However, the application of such advanced vision-language models in the agricultural domain, particularly for crop disease diagnosis, remains underexplored. In this work, we present the crop disease domain multimodal (CDDM) dataset, a pioneering resource designed to advance the field of agricultural research through the application of multimodal learning techniques. The dataset comprises 137,000 images of various crop diseases, accompanied by 1 million question-answer pairs that span a broad spectrum of agricultural knowledge, from disease identification to management practices. By integrating visual and textual data, CDDM facilitates the development of sophisticated question-answering systems capable of providing precise, useful advice to farmers and agricultural professionals. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset by finetuning state-of-the-art multimodal models, showcasing significant improvements in crop disease diagnosis. Specifically, we employed a novel finetuning strategy that utilizes low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to finetune the visual encoder, adapter and language model simultaneously. Our contributions include not only the dataset but also a finetuning strategy and a benchmark to stimulate further research in agricultural technology, aiming to bridge the gap between advanced AI techniques and practical agricultural applications. The dataset is available at https://github. com/UnicomAI/UnicomBenchmark/tree/main/CDDMBench."

"Traditional 2D pose estimation models are limited by their category-specific design, making them suitable only for predefined object categories. This restriction becomes particularly challenging when dealing with novel objects due to the lack of relevant training data. To address this limitation, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) was introduced. CAPE aims to enable keypoint localization for arbitrary object categories using a few-shot single model, requiring minimal support images with annotated keypoints. We present a significant departure from conventional CAPE techniques, which treat keypoints as isolated entities, by treating the input pose data as a graph. We leverage the inherent geometrical relations between keypoints through a graph-based network to break symmetry, preserve structure, and better handle occlusions. We validate our approach on the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 20,000 images spanning over 100 categories. Our solution boosts performance by 0.98% under a 1-shot setting, achieving a new state-of-the-art for CAPE. Additionally, we enhance the dataset with skeleton annotations. Our code and data are publicly available."

"Virtual interventions enable the physics-based simulation of device deployment within coronary arteries. This framework allows for counterfactual reasoning by deploying the same device in different arterial anatomies. However, current methods to create such counterfactual arteries face a trade-off between controllability and realism. In this study, we investigate how Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) can custom synthesize coronary anatomy for virtual intervention studies based on mid-level anatomic constraints such as topological validity, local morphological shape, and global skeletal structure. We also extend diffusion model guidance strategies to the context of morpho-skeletal conditioning and propose a novel guidance method for continuous attributes that adaptively updates the negative guiding condition throughout sampling. Our framework enables the generation and editing of coronary anatomy in a controllable manner, allowing device designers to derive mechanistic insights regarding anatomic variation and simulated device deployment. Our code is available at https://github.com/kkadry/Morphoskel-Diffusion."

"While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced significant advancement in visual understanding and reasoning, their potential to serve as powerful, flexible, interpretable, and text-driven models for Image Quality Assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic study of prompting MLLMs for IQA. We first investigate nine prompting systems for MLLMs as the combinations of three standardized testing procedures in psychophysics (, the single-stimulus, double-stimulus, and multiple-stimulus methods) and three popular prompting strategies in natural language processing (, the standard, in-context, and chain-of-thought prompting). We then present a difficult sample selection procedure, taking into account sample diversity and uncertainty, to further challenge MLLMs equipped with the respective optimal prompting systems. We assess three open-source and one closed-source MLLMs on several visual attributes of image quality (, structural and textural distortions, geometric transformations, and color differences) in both full-reference and no-reference scenarios. Experimental results show that only the closed-source GPT-4V provides a reasonable account for human perception of image quality, but is weak at discriminating fine-grained quality variations (, color differences) and at comparing visual quality of multiple images, tasks humans can perform effortlessly."

"Despite the significant progress made by deep models in various image restoration tasks, existing image restoration networks still face challenges in terms of task generality. An intuitive manifestation is that networks which excel in certain tasks often fail to deliver satisfactory results in others. To illustrate this point, we select five representative networks and conduct a comparative study on five classic image restoration tasks. First, we provide a detailed explanation of the characteristics of different image restoration tasks and backbone networks. Following this, we present the benchmark results and analyze the reasons behind the performance disparity of different models across various tasks. Drawing from this comparative study, we propose that a general image restoration backbone network needs to meet the functional requirements of diverse tasks. Based on this principle, we design a new general image restoration backbone network, X-Restormer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Restormer possesses good task generality and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a variety of tasks."

"3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown remarkable success in synthesizing novel views given multiple views of a static scene. Yet, 3DGS faces challenges when applied to dynamic scenes because 3D Gaussian parameters need to be updated per timestep, requiring a large amount of memory and at least a dozen observations per timestep. To address these limitations, we present a compact dynamic 3D Gaussian representation that models positions and rotations as functions of time with a few parameter approximations while keeping other properties of 3DGS including scale, color, and opacity invariant. Our method can dramatically reduce memory usage and relax a strict multi-view assumption. In our experiments on monocular and multi-view scenarios, we show that our method not only matches state-of-the-art methods, often linked with slower rendering speeds, in terms of high rendering quality, but also significantly surpasses them by achieving a rendering speed of 118 frames per second at a resolution of 1,352×1,014 on a single GPU."

"Accurate detection of cephalometric landmarks is crucial for orthodontic diagnosis and treatment planning. Current methods rely on a cascading form of multiple models to achieve higher accuracy, which greatly complicates both training and deployment processes. In this paper, we introduce a novel regression paradigm capable of simultaneously detecting all cephalometric landmarks in high-resolution X-ray images. Our approach only utilizes the encoder module from the transformer to design a dual-encoder architecture, enabling precise detection of cephalometric landmark positions from coarse to fine. Specifically, the entire model architecture comprises three main components: a feature extractor module, a reference encoder module, and a finetune encoder module. These components are respectively responsible for feature extraction and fusion for X-ray images, coarse localization of cephalometric landmark, and fine-tuning of cephalometric landmark positioning. Notably, our framework is fully end-to-end differentiable and innately learns to exploit the interdependencies among cephalometric landmarks. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses the current state-of-the-art methods in Mean Radical Error (MRE) and the 2mm Success Detection Rate (SDR) metrics, while also reducing computational resource consumption. The code is available at https://github.com/huang229/D-CeLR"

"This study addresses the nuanced challenge of estimating head translations within the context of six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) head pose estimation, placing emphasis on this aspect over the more commonly studied head rotations. Identifying a gap in existing methodologies, we recognized the underutilized potential synergy between facial geometry and head translation. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel approach called the head Translation, Rotation, and face Geometry network (TRG), which stands out for its explicit bidirectional interaction structure. This structure has been carefully designed to leverage the complementary relationship between face geometry and head translation, marking a significant advancement in the field of head pose estimation. Our contributions also include the development of a strategy for estimating bounding box correction parameters and a technique for aligning landmarks to image. Both of these innovations demonstrate superior performance in 6DoF head pose estimation tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on ARKitFace and BIWI datasets confirm that the proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques. Codes are released at https://github. com/asw91666/TRG-Release."

"We propose to estimate the camera pose of a target RGB image given a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model representing the scene. avoids the iterative process typical of analysis-by-synthesis methods (iNeRF) that also require an initialization of the camera pose in order to converge. Instead, our method estimates a 6DoF pose by inverting the 3DGS rendering process. Starting from the object surface, we define a radiant that uniformly generates rays departing from each ellipsoid that parameterize the 3DGS model. Each ray is associated with the rendering parameters of each ellipsoid, which in turn is used to obtain the best bindings between the target image pixels and the cast rays. These pixel-ray bindings are then ranked to select the best scoring bundle of rays, which their intersection provides the camera center and, in turn, the camera rotation. The proposed solution obviates the necessity of an “a priori” pose for initialization, and it solves 6DoF pose estimation in closed form, without the need for iterations. Moreover, compared to the existing Novel View Synthesis (NVS) baselines for pose estimation, can improve the overall average rotational accuracy by 12% and translation accuracy by 22% on real scenes, despite not requiring any initialization pose. At the same time, our method operates near real-time, reaching 15f ps on consumer hardware. Project page: https://mbortolon97.github.io/6dgs/ Corresponding author: mbortolon@fbk.eu"

"We present , a 3D-aware diffusion model addressing the exo-to-ego viewpoint translation task — generating first-person (egocentric) view images from the corresponding third-person (exocentric) images. Building on the diffusion model’s ability to generate photorealistic images, we propose a transformer-based diffusion model that incorporates geometry priors through two mechanisms: (i) egocentric point cloud rasterization and (ii) 3D-aware rotary cross-attention. Egocentric point cloud rasterization converts the input exocentric image into an egocentric layout, which is subsequently used by a diffusion image transformer. As a component of the diffusion transformer’s denoiser block, the 3D-aware rotary cross-attention further incorporates 3D information and semantic features from the source exocentric view. Our achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging and diverse Ego-Exo4D multiview dataset and exhibits robust generalization to novel environments not encountered during training. Our code, processed data, and pretrained models are publicly available at https://klauscc.github.io/ 4diff."

"In the realm of autonomous driving, accurate 3D perception is the foundation. However, developing such models relies on extensive human annotations – a process that is both costly and labor-intensive. To address this challenge from a data representation learning perspective, we introduce SuperFlow, a novel framework designed to harness consecutive LiDAR-camera pairs for establishing spatiotemporal pretraining objectives. SuperFlow stands out by integrating two key designs: 1) a dense-to-sparse consistency regularization, which promotes insensitivity to point cloud density variations during feature learning, and 2) a flow-based contrastive learning module, carefully crafted to extract meaningful temporal cues from readily available sensor calibrations. To further boost learning efficiency, we incorporate a plug-and-play view consistency module that enhances the alignment of the knowledge distilled from camera views. Extensive comparative and ablation studies across 11 heterogeneous LiDAR datasets validate our effectiveness and superiority. Additionally, we observe several interesting emerging properties by scaling up the 2D and 3D backbones during pretraining, shedding light on the future research of 3D foundation models for LiDAR-based perception. Code is publicly available at https: //github.com/Xiangxu-0103/SuperFlow."

"3D object part segmentation is essential in computer vision applications. While substantial progress has been made in 2D object part segmentation, the 3D counterpart has received less attention, in part due to the scarcity of annotated 3D datasets, which are expensive to collect. In this work, we propose to leverage a few annotated 3D shapes or richly annotated 2D datasets to perform 3D object part segmentation. We present our novel approach, termed 3-By-2 that achieves SOTA performance on different benchmarks with various granularity levels. By using features from pretrained foundation models and exploiting semantic and geometric correspondences, we are able to overcome the challenges of limited 3D annotations. Our approach leverages available 2D labels, enabling effective 3D object part segmentation. Our method 3-By-2 can accommodate various part taxonomies and granularities, demonstrating part label transfer ability across different object categories. Project website: https://ngailapdi.github.io/projects/3by2/."

"The use of 3D Gaussians as representation of radiance fields has enabled high quality novel view synthesis at real-time rendering speed. However, the choice of optimising the outgoing radiance of each Gaussian independently as spherical harmonics results in unsatisfactory view dependent effects. In response to these limitations, our work, Factorised Tensorial Illumination for 3D Gaussian Splatting, or 3iGS, improves upon 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) rendering quality. Instead of optimising a single outgoing radiance parameter, 3iGS enhances 3DGS view-dependent effects by expressing the outgoing radiance as a function of a local illumination field and Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) features. We optimise a continuous incident illumination field through a Tensorial Factorisation representation, while separately fine-tuning the BRDF features of each 3D Gaussian relative to this illumination field. Our methodology significantly enhances the rendering quality of specular view-dependent effects of 3DGS, while maintaining rapid training and rendering speeds."

"The consumption of a video requires a considerable amount of energy during the various stages of its life-cycle. With a billion hours of video consumed daily, this contributes significantly to the ghg emission. Therefore, reducing the end-to-end carbon footprint of the video chain, while preserving the quality of experience at the user side, is of high importance. To contribute in an impactful manner, we propose 3R-INN, a single invertible network that does three tasks at once: given a hr grainy image, it Rescales it to a lower resolution, Removes film grain and Reduces its power consumption when displayed. Providing such a minimum viable quality content contributes to reducing the energy consumption during encoding, transmission, decoding and display. 3R-INN also offers the possibility to restore either the hr grainy original image or a grain-free version, thanks to its invertibility and the disentanglement of the high frequency, and without transmitting auxiliary data. Experiments show that, 3R-INN enables significant energy savings for encoding (78%), decoding (77%) and rendering (5% to 20%), while outperforming state-of-the-art film grain removal and synthesis, energy-aware and downscaling methods on different test-sets."

"In this study, we introduce the 3D space attention module (3DSA) as a novel approach to address the drawback of multi-view 3D human pose estimation methods, which fail to recognize the object’s significance from diverse viewpoints. Specifically, we utilize the 3D space subdivision algorithm to divide the feature volume into multiple regions. Predicted 3D space attention scores are assigned to the different regions to construct the feature volume with space attention. The purpose of the 3D space attention module is to distinguish the significance of individual regions within the feature volume by applying weighted attention adjustments derived from corresponding viewpoints. We conduct experiments on existing voxel-based methods, VoxelPose and Faster VoxelPose. By incorporating the space attention module, both achieve state-of-the-art performance on the CMU Panoptic Studio dataset."