ICCV 2019 Papers

Multi-modality perception is essential to develop interactive intelligence. In this work, we consider a new task of visual information-infused audio inpainting, i.e., synthesizing missing audio segments that correspond to their accompanying videos. We identify two key aspects for a successful inpainter: (1) It is desirable to operate on spectrograms instead of raw audios. Recent advances in deep semantic image inpainting could be leveraged to go beyond the limitations of traditional audio inpainting. (2) To synthesize visually indicated audio, a visual-audio joint feature space needs to be learned with synchronization of audio and video. To facilitate a large-scale study, we collect a new multi-modality instrument-playing dataset called MUSIC-Extra-Solo (MUSICES) by enriching MUSIC dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework is capable of inpainting realistic and varying audio segments with or without visual contexts. More importantly, our synthesized audio segments are coherent with their video counterparts, showing the effectiveness of our proposed Vision-Infused Audio Inpainter (VIAI).

We tackle the problem of synthesizing a video of multiple moving people as seen from a novel view, given only an input video and depth information or human poses of the novel view as prior. This problem requires a model that learns to transform input features into target features while maintaining temporal consistency. To this end, we learn an invariant feature from the input video that is shared across all viewpoints of the same scene and a view-dependent feature obtained using the target priors. The proposed approach, View-LSTM, is a recurrent neural network structure that accounts for the temporal consistency and target feature approximation constraints. We validate View-LSTM by designing an end-to-end generator for novel-view video synthesis. Experiments on a large multi-view action recognition dataset validate the proposed model.

How to aggregate multi-view representations of a 3D object into an informative and discriminative one remains a key challenge for multi-view 3D object retrieval. Existing methods either use view-wise pooling strategies which neglect the spatial information across different views or employ recurrent neural networks which may face the efficiency problem. To address these issues, we propose an effective and efficient framework called View N-gram Network (VNN). Inspired by n-gram models in natural language processing, VNN divides the view sequence into a set of visual n-grams, which involve overlapping consecutive view sub-sequences. By doing so, spatial information across multiple views is captured, which helps to learn a discriminative global embedding for each 3D object. Experiments on 3D shape retrieval benchmarks, including ModelNet10, ModelNet40 and ShapeNetCore55 datasets, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

Person re-identification is an important task in video surveillance that aims to associate people across camera views at different locations and time. View variability is always a challenging problem seriously degrading person re-identification performance. Most of the existing methods either focus on how to learn view invariant feature or how to combine viewwise features. In this paper, we mainly focus on how to learn view-independent features by getting rid of view specific information through a view confusion learning mechanism. Specifically, we propose an end-to-end trainable framework, called View Confusion Feature Learning (VCFL), for person Re-ID across cameras. To the best of our knowledge, VCFL is originally proposed to learn view-independent identity-wise features, and it's a kind of combination of view-generic and view-specific methods. Furthermore, we extract sift-guided features by using bag-of-words model to help supervise the training of deep networks and enhance the view invariance of features. In experiments, our approach is validated on three benchmark datasets including CUHK01, CUHK03, and MARKET1501, which show the superiority of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art approaches.

Humans share a strong tendency to memorize/forget some of the visual information they encounter. This paper focuses on understanding the intrinsic memorability of visual content. To address this challenge, we introduce a large scale dataset (VideoMem) composed of 10,000 videos with memorability scores. In contrast to previous work on image memorability -- where memorability was measured a few minutes after memorization -- memory performance is measured twice: a few minutes and again 24-72 hours after memorization. Hence, the dataset comes with short-term and long-term memorability annotations. After an in-depth analysis of the dataset, we investigate various deep neural network-based models for the prediction of video memorability. Our best model using a ranking loss achieves a Spearman's rank correlation of 0.494 (respectively 0.256) for short-term (resp. long-term) memorability prediction, while our model with attention mechanism provides insights of what makes a content memorable. The VideoMem dataset with pre-extracted features is publicly available.

Self-supervised learning has become increasingly important to leverage the abundance of unlabeled data available on platforms like YouTube. Whereas most existing approaches learn low-level representations, we propose a joint visual-linguistic model to learn high-level features without any explicit supervision. In particular, inspired by its recent success in language modeling, we build upon the BERT model to learn bidirectional joint distributions over sequences of visual and linguistic tokens, derived from vector quantization of video data and off-the-shelf speech recognition outputs, respectively. We use VideoBERT in numerous tasks, including action classification and video captioning. We show that it can be applied directly to open-vocabulary classification, and confirm that large amounts of training data and cross-modal information are critical to performance. Furthermore, we outperform the state-of-the-art on video captioning, and quantitative results verify that the model learns high-level semantic features.

In this paper we present a new computer vision task, named video instance segmentation. The goal of this new task is simultaneous detection, segmentation and tracking of instances in videos. In words, it is the first time that the image instance segmentation problem is extended to the video domain. To facilitate research on this new task, we propose a large-scale benchmark called YouTube-VIS, which consists of 2,883 high-resolution YouTube videos, a 40-category label set and 131k high-quality instance masks. In addition, we propose a novel algorithm called MaskTrack R-CNN for this task. Our new method introduces a new tracking branch to Mask R-CNN to jointly perform the detection, segmentation and tracking tasks simultaneously. Finally, we evaluate the proposed method and several strong baselines on our new dataset. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the advantages of the proposed algorithm and reveal insight for future improvement. We believe the video instance segmentation task will motivate the community along the line of research for video understanding.

Understanding videos such as TV series and movies requires analyzing who the characters are and what they are doing. We address the challenging problem of clustering face tracks based on their identity. Different from previous work in this area, we choose to operate in a realistic and difficult setting where: (i) the number of characters is not known a priori; and (ii) face tracks belonging to minor or background characters are not discarded. To this end, we propose Ball Cluster Learning (BCL), a supervised approach to carve the embedding space into balls of equal size, one for each cluster. The learned ball radius is easily translated to a stopping criterion for iterative merging algorithms. This gives BCL the ability to estimate the number of clusters as well as their assignment, achieving promising results on commonly used datasets. We also present a thorough discussion of how existing metric learning literature can be adapted for this task.

In this paper we present a a deep generative model for lossy video compression. We employ a model that consists of a 3D autoencoder with a discrete latent space and an autoregressive prior used for entropy coding. Both autoencoder and prior are trained jointly to minimize a rate-distortion loss, which is closely related to the ELBO used in variational autoencoders. Despite its simplicity, we find that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art learned video compression networks based on motion compensation or interpolation. We systematically evaluate various design choices, such as the use of frame-based or spatio-temporal autoencoders, and the type of autoregressive prior. In addition, we present three extensions of the basic method that demonstrate the benefits over classical approaches to compression. First, we introduce semantic compression, where the model is trained to allocate more bits to objects of interest. Second, we study adaptive compression, where the model is adapted to a domain with limited variability, e.g. videos taken from an autonomous car, to achieve superior compression on that domain. Finally, we introduce multimodal compression, where we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in joint compression of multiple modalities captured by non-standard imaging sensors, such as quad cameras. We believe that this opens up novel video compression applications, which have not been feasible with classical codecs.

Group convolution has been shown to offer great computational savings in various 2D convolutional architectures for image classification. It is natural to ask: 1) if group convolution can help to alleviate the high computational cost of video classification networks; 2) what factors matter the most in 3D group convolutional networks; and 3) what are good computation/accuracy trade-offs with 3D group convolutional networks. This paper studies the effects of different design choices in 3D group convolutional networks for video classification. We empirically demonstrate that the amount of channel interactions plays an important role in the accuracy of 3D group convolutional networks. Our experiments suggest two main findings. First, it is a good practice to factorize 3D convolutions by separating channel interactions and spatiotemporal interactions as this leads to improved accuracy and lower computational cost. Second, 3D channel-separated convolutions provide a form of regularization, yielding lower training accuracy but higher test accuracy compared to 3D convolutions. These two empirical findings lead us to design an architecture -- Channel-Separated Convolutional Network (CSN) -- which is simple, efficient, yet accurate. On Sports1M and Kinetics, our CSNs are comparable with or better than the state-of-the-art while being 2-3 times more efficient.

We propose to learn word embeddings from visual co-occurrences. Two words co-occur visually if both words apply to the same image or image region. Specifically, we extract four types of visual co-occurrences between object and attribute words from large-scale, textually-annotated visual databases like VisualGenome and ImageNet. We then train a multi-task log-bilinear model that compactly encodes word "meanings" represented by each co-occurrence type into a single visual word-vector. Through unsupervised clustering, supervised partitioning, and a zero-shot-like generalization analysis we show that our word embeddings complement text-only embeddings like GloVe by better representing similarities and differences between visual concepts that are difficult to obtain from text corpora alone. We further evaluate our embeddings on five downstream applications, four of which are vision-language tasks. Augmenting GloVe with our embeddings yields gains on all tasks. We also find that random embeddings perform comparably to learned embeddings on all supervised vision-language tasks, contrary to conventional wisdom.

Comparing to image inpainting, image outpainting receives less attention due to two challenges in it. The first challenge is how to keep the spatial and content consistency between generated images and original input. The second challenge is how to maintain high quality in generated results, especially for multi-step generations in which generated regions are spatially far away from the initial input. To solve the two problems, we devise some innovative modules, named Skip Horizontal Connection and Recurrent Content Transfer, and integrate them into our designed encoder-decoder structure. By this design, our network can generate highly realistic outpainting prediction effectively and efficiently. Other than that, our method can generate new images with very long sizes while keeping the same style and semantic content as the given input. To test the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, we collect a new scenery dataset with diverse, complicated natural scenes. The experimental results on this dataset have demonstrated the efficacy of our proposed network.

In this work, we construct a large-scale dataset for vehicle re-identification (ReID), which contains 137k images of 13k vehicle instances captured by UAV-mounted cameras. To our knowledge, it is the largest UAV-based vehicle ReID dataset. To increase intra-class variation, each vehicle is captured by at least two UAVs at different locations, with diverse view-angles and flight-altitudes. We manually label a variety of vehicle attributes, including vehicle type, color, skylight, bumper, spare tire and luggage rack. Furthermore, for each vehicle image, the annotator is also required to mark the discriminative parts that helps them to distinguish this particular vehicle from others. Besides the dataset, we also design a specific vehicle ReID algorithm to make full use of the rich annotation information. It is capable of explicitly detecting discriminative parts for each specific vehicle and significantly outperforming the evaluated baselines and state-of-the-art vehicle ReID approaches.

This paper considers vehicle re-identification (re-ID) problem. The extreme viewpoint variation (up to 180 degrees) poses great challenges for existing approaches. Inspired by the behavior in human's recognition process, we propose a novel viewpoint-aware metric learning approach. It learns two metrics for similar viewpoints and different viewpoints in two feature spaces, respectively, giving rise to viewpoint-aware network (VANet). During training, two types of constraints are applied jointly. During inference, viewpoint is firstly estimated and the corresponding metric is used. Experimental results confirm that VANet significantly improves re-ID accuracy, especially when the pair is observed from different viewpoints. Our method establishes the new state-of-the-art on two benchmarks.

Photometric stereo (PS) techniques nowadays remain constrained to an ideal laboratory setup where modeling and calibration of lighting is amenable. To eliminate such restrictions, we propose an efficient principled variational approach to uncalibrated PS under general illumination. To this end, the Lambertian reflectance model is approximated through a spherical harmonic expansion, which preserves the spatial invariance of the lighting. The joint recovery of shape, reflectance and illumination is then formulated as a single variational problem. There the shape estimation is carried out directly in terms of the underlying perspective depth map, thus implicitly ensuring integrability and bypassing the need for a subsequent normal integration. To tackle the resulting nonconvex problem numerically, we undertake a two-phase procedure to initialize a balloon-like perspective depth map, followed by a "lagged" block coordinate descent scheme. The experiments validate efficiency and robustness of this approach. Across a variety of evaluations, we are able to reduce the mean angular error consistently by a factor of 2-3 compared to the state-of-the-art.

We propose a variational Bayesian framework for enhancing few-shot learning performance. This idea is motivated by the fact that single point based metric learning approaches are inherently noise-vulnerable and easy-to-be-biased. In a nutshell, stochastic variational inference is invoked to approximate bias-eliminated class specific sample distributions. In the meantime, a classifier-free prediction is attained by leveraging the distribution statistics on novel samples. Extensive experimental results on several benchmarks well demonstrate the effectiveness of our distribution-driven few-shot learning framework over previous point estimates based methods, in terms of superior classification accuracy and robustness.

We present a novel algorithm for point cloud segmentation.Our approach transforms unstructured point clouds into regular voxel grids, and further uses a kernel-based interpolated variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture to encode the local geometry within each voxel.Traditionally, the voxel representation only comprises Boolean occupancy information, which fails to capture the sparsely distributed points within voxels in a compact manner. In order to handle sparse distributions of points, we further employ radial basis functions (RBF) to compute a local, continuous representation within each voxel. Our approach results in a good volumetric representation that effectively tackles noisy point cloud datasets and is more robust for learning. Moreover, we further introduce group equivariant CNN to 3D, by defining the convolution operator on a symmetry group acting on Z ^3 and its isomorphic sets. This improves the expressive capacity without increasing parameters, leading to more robust segmentation results.We highlight the performance on standard benchmarks and show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms on the ShapeNet and S3DIS datasets.

Image-based virtual try-on systems with the goal of transferring a desired clothing item onto the corresponding region of a person have made great strides recently, but challenges remain in generating realistic looking images that preserve both body and clothing details. Here we present a new virtual try-on network, called VTNFP, to synthesize photo-realistic images given the images of a clothed person and a target clothing item. In order to better preserve clothing and body features, VTNFP follows a three-stage design strategy. First, it transforms the target clothing into a warped form compatible with the pose of the given person. Next, it predicts a body segmentation map of the person wearing the target clothing, delineating body parts as well as clothing regions. Finally, the warped clothing, body segmentation map and given person image are fused together for fine-scale image synthesis. A key innovation of VTNFP is the body segmentation map prediction module, which provides critical information to guide image synthesis in regions where body parts and clothing intersects, and is very beneficial for preventing blurry pictures and preserving clothing and body part details. Experiments on a fashion dataset demonstrate that VTNFP generates substantially better results than state-of-the-art methods.

We introduce UprightNet, a learning-based approach for estimating 2DoF camera orientation from a single RGB image of an indoor scene. Unlike recent methods that leverage deep learning to perform black-box regression from image to orientation parameters, we propose an end-to-end framework that incorporates explicit geometric reasoning. In particular, we design a network that predicts two representations of scene geometry, in both the local camera and global reference coordinate systems, and solves for the camera orientation as the rotation that best aligns these two predictions via a differentiable least squares module. This network can be trained end-to-end, and can be supervised with both ground truth camera poses and intermediate representations of surface geometry. We evaluate UprightNet on the single-image camera orientation task on synthetic and real datasets, and show significant improvements over prior state-of-the-art approaches.