ICCV 2019 Papers

Heatmap regression-based models have significantly advanced the progress of facial landmark detection. However, the lack of structural constraints always generates inaccurate heatmaps resulting in poor landmark detection performance. While hierarchical structure modeling methods have been proposed to tackle this issue, they all heavily rely on manually designed tree structures. The designed hierarchical structure is likely to be completely corrupted due to the missing or inaccurate prediction of landmarks. To the best of our knowledge, in the context of deep learning, no work before has investigated how to automatically model proper structures for facial landmarks, by discovering their inherent relations. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Structured Landmark Ensemble (HSLE) model for learning robust facial landmark detection, by using it as the structural constraints. Different from existing approaches of manually designing structures, our proposed HSLE model is constructed automatically via discovering the most robust patterns so HSLE has the ability to robustly depict both local and holistic landmark structures simultaneously. Our proposed HSLE can be readily plugged into any existing facial landmark detection baselines for further performance improvement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our approach significantly outperforms the baseline by a large margin to achieve a state-of-the-art performance.

Single-stage object detection methods have received significant attention recently due to their characteristic realtime capabilities and high detection accuracies. Generally, most existing single-stage detectors follow two common practices: they employ a network backbone that is pretrained on ImageNet for the classification task and use a top-down feature pyramid representation for handling scale variations. Contrary to common pre-training strategy, recent works have demonstrated the benefits of training from scratch to reduce the task gap between classification and localization, especially at high overlap thresholds. However, detection models trained from scratch require significantly longer training time compared to their typical finetuning based counterparts. We introduce a single-stage detection framework that combines the advantages of both fine-tuning pretrained models and training from scratch. Our framework constitutes a standard network that uses a pre-trained backbone and a parallel light-weight auxiliary network trained from scratch. Further, we argue that the commonly used top-down pyramid representation only focuses on passing high-level semantics from the top layers to bottom layers. We introduce a bi-directional network that efficiently circulates both low-/mid-level and high-level semantic information in the detection framework. Experiments are performed on MS COCO and UAVDT datasets. Compared to the baseline, our detector achieives an absolute gain of 7.4% and 4.2% in average precision (AP) on MS COCO and UAVDT datasets, respectively using VGG backbone. For a 300x300 input on the MS COCO test set, our detector with ResNet backbone surpasses existing single-stage detection methods for single-scale inference achieving 34.3 AP, while operating at an inference time of 19 milliseconds on a single Titan X GPU. Code is avail- able at https://github.com/vaesl/LRF-Net.

Recognizing 3D object has attracted plenty of attention recently, and view-based methods have achieved best results until now. However, previous view-based methods ignore the region-to-region and view-to-view relationships between different view images, which are crucial for multi-view 3D object representation. To tackle this problem, we propose a Relation Network to effectively connect corresponding regions from different viewpoints, and therefore reinforce the information of individual view image. In addition, the Relation Network exploits the inter-relationships over a group of views, and integrates those views to obtain a discriminative 3D object representation. Systematic experiments conducted on ModelNet dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods for both 3D object recognition and retrieval tasks.

Processing an input signal that contains arbitrary structures, e.g., superpixels and point clouds, remains a big challenge in computer vision. Linear diffusion, an effective model for image processing, has been recently integrated with deep learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose to learn pairwise relations among data points in a global fashion to improve semantic segmentation with arbitrarily-structured data, through spatial generalized propagation networks (SGPN). The network propagates information on a group of graphs, which represent the arbitrarily-structured data, through a learned, linear diffusion process. The module is flexible to be embedded and jointly trained with many types of networks, e.g., CNNs. We experiment with semantic segmentation networks, where we use our propagation module to jointly train on different data -- images, superpixels, and point clouds. We show that SGPN consistently improves the performance of both pixel and point cloud segmentation, compared to networks that do not contain this module. Our method suggests an effective way to model the global pairwise relations for arbitrarily-structured data.

Near-range portrait photographs often contain perspective distortion artifacts that bias human perception and challenge both facial recognition and reconstruction techniques. We present the first deep learning based approach to remove such artifacts from unconstrained portraits. In contrast to the previous state-of-the-art approach [??], our method handles even portraits with extreme perspective distortion, as we avoid the inaccurate and error-prone step of first fitting a 3D face model. Instead, we predict a distortion correction flow map that encodes a per-pixel displacement that removes distortion artifacts when applied to the input image. Our method also automatically infers missing facial features, i.e. occluded ears caused by strong perspective distortion, with coherent details. We demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art both qualitatively and quantitatively, particularly for portraits with extreme perspective distortion or facial expressions. We further show that our technique benefits a number of fundamental tasks, significantly improving the accuracy of both face recognition and 3D reconstruction and enables a novel camera calibration technique from a single portrait. Moreover, we also build the first perspective portrait database with a large diversity in identities, expression and poses.

Environment perception, including object detection and distance estimation, is one of the most crucial tasks for autonomous driving. Many attentions have been paid on the object detection task, but distance estimation only arouse few interests in the computer vision community. Observing that the traditional inverse perspective mapping algorithm performs poorly for objects far away from the camera or on the curved road, in this paper, we address the challenging distance estimation problem by developing the first end-to-end learning-based model to directly predict distances for given objects in the images. Besides the introduction of a learning-based base model, we further design an enhanced model with a keypoint regressor, where a projection loss is defined to enforce a better distance estimation, especially for objects close to the camera. To facilitate the research on this task, we construct the extented KITTI and nuScenes (mini) object detection datasets with a distance for each object. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform alternative approaches (e.g., the traditional IPM, SVR) on object-specific distance estimation, particularly for the challenging cases that objects are on a curved road. Moreover, the performance margin implies the effectiveness of our enhanced method.

Fine-grained action detection is an important task with numerous applications in robotics and human-computer interaction. Existing methods typically utilize a two-stage approach including extraction of local spatio-temporal features followed by temporal modeling to capture long-term dependencies. While most recent papers have focused on the latter (long-temporal modeling), here, we focus on producing features capable of modeling fine-grained motion more efficiently. We propose a novel locally-consistent deformable convolution, which utilizes the change in receptive fields and enforces a local coherency constraint to capture motion information effectively. Our model jointly learns spatio-temporal features (instead of using independent spatial and temporal streams). The temporal component is learned from the feature space instead of pixel space, e.g. optical flow. The produced features can be flexibly used in conjunction with other long-temporal modeling networks, e.g. ST-CNN, DilatedTCN, and ED-TCN. Overall, our proposed approach robustly outperforms the original long-temporal models on two fine-grained action datasets: 50 Salads and GTEA, achieving F1 scores of 80.22% and 75.39% respectively.

Estimating motion and surrounding geometry of a moving camera remains a challenging inference problem. From an information theoretic point of view, estimates should get better as more information is included, such as is done in dense SLAM, but this is strongly dependent on the validity of the underlying models. In the present paper, we use triangular meshes as both compact and dense geometry representation. To allow for simple and fast usage, we propose a view-based formulation for which we predict the in-plane vertex coordinates directly from images and then employ the remaining vertex depth components as free variables. Flexible and continuous integration of information is achieved through the use of a residual based inference technique. This so-called factor graph encodes all information as mapping from free variables to residuals, the squared sum of which is minimised during inference. We propose the use of different types of learnable residuals, which are trained end-to-end to increase their suitability as information bearing models and to enable accurate and reliable estimation. Detailed evaluation of all components is provided on both synthetic and real data which confirms the practicability of the presented approach.

We consider the problem of 3D object pose estimation. While much recent work has focused on the RGB domain, the reliance on accurately annotated images limits generalizability and scalability. On the other hand, the easily available object CAD models are rich sources of data, providing a large number of synthetically rendered images. In this paper, we solve this key problem of existing methods requiring expensive 3D pose annotations by proposing a new method that matches RGB images to CAD models for object pose estimation. Our key innovations compared to existing work include removing the need for either real-world textures for CAD models or explicit 3D pose annotations for RGB images. We achieve this through a series of objectives that learn how to select keypoints and enforce viewpoint and modality invariance across RGB images and CAD model renderings. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can reliably estimate object pose in RGB images and generalize to object instances not seen during training.

The triplet loss is adopted by a variety of learning tasks, such as local feature descriptor learning. However, its standard formulation with a hard margin only leverages part of the training data in each mini-batch. Moreover, the margin is often empirically chosen or determined through computationally expensive validation, and stays unchanged during the entire training session. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective method to overcome the above limitations. The core idea is to replace the hard margin with a non-parametric soft margin, which is dynamically updated. The major observation is that the difficulty of a triplet can be inferred from the cumulative distribution function of the triplets' signed distances to the decision boundary. We demonstrate through experiments on both real-valued and binary local feature descriptors that our method leads to state-of-the-art performance on popular benchmarks, while eliminating the need to determine the best margin.

Training deep models for lane detection is challenging due to the very subtle and sparse supervisory signals inherent in lane annotations. Without learning from much richer context, these models often fail in challenging scenarios, e.g., severe occlusion, ambiguous lanes, and poor lighting conditions. In this paper, we present a novel knowledge distillation approach, i.e., Self Attention Distillation (SAD), which allows a model to learn from itself and gains substantial improvement without any additional supervision or labels. Specifically, we observe that attention maps extracted from a model trained to a reasonable level would encode rich contextual information. The valuable contextual information can be used as a form of 'free' supervision for further representation learning through performing top- down and layer-wise attention distillation within the net- work itself. SAD can be easily incorporated in any feed- forward convolutional neural networks (CNN) and does not increase the inference time. We validate SAD on three popular lane detection benchmarks (TuSimple, CULane and BDD100K) using lightweight models such as ENet, ResNet- 18 and ResNet-34. The lightest model, ENet-SAD, performs comparatively or even surpasses existing algorithms. Notably, ENet-SAD has 20 x fewer parameters and runs 10 x faster compared to the state-of-the-art SCNN, while still achieving compelling performance in all benchmarks.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of depth completion from RGBD data. Towards this goal, we design a simple yet effective neural network block that learns to extract joint 2D and 3D features. Specifically, the block consists of two domain-specific sub-networks that apply 2D convolution on image pixels and continuous convolution on 3D points, with their output features fused in image space. We build the depth completion network simply by stacking the proposed block, which has the advantage of learning hierarchical representations that are fully fused between 2D and 3D spaces at multiple levels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the challenging KITTI depth completion benchmark and show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Perceptual features (PFs) have been used with great success in tasks such as transfer learning, style transfer, and super-resolution. However, the efficacy of PFs as key source of information for learning generative models is not well studied. We investigate here the use of PFs in the context of learning implicit generative models through moment matching (MM). More specifically, we propose a new effective MM approach that learns implicit generative models by performing mean and covariance matching of features extracted from pretrained ConvNets. Our proposed approach improves upon existing MM methods by: (1) breaking away from the problematic min/max game of adversarial learning; (2) avoiding online learning of kernel functions; and (3) being efficient with respect to both number of used moments and required minibatch size. Our experimental results demonstrate that, due to the expressiveness of PFs from pretrained deep ConvNets, our method achieves state-of-the-art results for challenging benchmarks.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have ushered in a revolution in image-to-image translation. The development and proliferation of GANs raises an interesting question: can we train a GAN to remove an object, if present, from an image while otherwise preserving the image? Specifically, can a GAN "virtually heal" anyone by turning his medical image, with an unknown health status (diseased or healthy), into a healthy one, so that diseased regions could be revealed by subtracting those two images? Such a task requires a GAN to identify a minimal subset of target pixels for domain translation, an ability that we call fixed-point translation, which no GAN is equipped with yet. Therefore, we propose a new GAN, called Fixed-Point GAN, trained by (1) supervising same-domain translation through a conditional identity loss, and (2) regularizing cross-domain translation through revised adversarial, domain classification, and cycle consistency loss. Based on fixed-point translation, we further derive a novel framework for disease detection and localization using only image-level annotation. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state of the art in multi-domain image-to-image translation and that it surpasses predominant weakly-supervised localization methods in both disease detection and localization. Implementation is available at https://github.com/jlianglab/Fixed-Point-GAN.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based solutions have achieved state-of-the-art performances for many computer vision tasks, including classification and super-resolution of images. Usually the success of these methods comes with a cost of millions of parameters due to stacking deep convolutional layers. Moreover, quite a large number of filters are also used for a single convolutional layer, which exaggerates the parameter burden of current methods. Thus, in this paper, we try to reduce the number of parameters of CNNs by learning a basis of the filters in convolutional layers. For the forward pass, the learned basis is used to approximate the original filters and then used as parameters for the convolutional layers. We validate our proposed solution for multiple CNN architectures on image classification and image super-resolution benchmarks and compare favorably to the existing state-of-the-art in terms of reduction of parameters and preservation of accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/ofsoundof/learning_filter_basis

We investigate learning feature-to-feature translator networks by alternating back-propagation as a general-purpose solution to zero-shot learning (ZSL) problems. It is a generative model-based ZSL framework. In contrast to models based on generative adversarial networks (GAN) or variational autoencoders (VAE) that require auxiliary networks to assist the training, our model consists of a single conditional generator that maps class-level semantic features and Gaussian white noise vectors accounting for instance-level latent factors to visual features, and is trained by maximum likelihood estimation. The training process is a simple yet effective alternating back-propagation process that iterates the following two steps: (i) the inferential back-propagation to infer the latent noise vector of each observed example, and (ii) the learning back-propagation to update the model parameters. We show that, with slight modifications, our model is capable of learning from incomplete visual features for ZSL. We conduct extensive comparisons with existing generative ZSL methods on five benchmarks, demonstrating the superiority of our method in not only ZSL performance but also convergence speed and computational cost. Specifically, our model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by a remarkable margin up to 3.1% and 4.0% in ZSL and generalized ZSL settings, respectively.

The current strive towards end-to-end trainable computer vision systems imposes major challenges for the task of visual tracking. In contrast to most other vision problems, tracking requires the learning of a robust target-specific appearance model online, during the inference stage. To be end-to-end trainable, the online learning of the target model thus needs to be embedded in the tracking architecture itself. Due to the imposed challenges, the popular Siamese paradigm simply predicts a target feature template, while ignoring the background appearance information during inference. Consequently, the predicted model possesses limited target-background discriminability. We develop an end-to-end tracking architecture, capable of fully exploiting both target and background appearance information for target model prediction. Our architecture is derived from a discriminative learning loss by designing a dedicated optimization process that is capable of predicting a powerful model in only a few iterations. Furthermore, our approach is able to learn key aspects of the discriminative loss itself. The proposed tracker sets a new state-of-the-art on 6 tracking benchmarks, achieving an EAO score of 0.440 on VOT2018, while running at over 40 FPS. The code and models are available at https://github.com/visionml/pytracking.

Image dehazing is a well-known ill-posed problem, which usually requires some image priors to make the problem well-posed. We propose an effective iteration algorithm with deep CNNs to learn haze-relevant priors for image dehazing. We formulate the image dehazing problem as the minimization of a variational model with favorable data fidelity terms and prior terms to regularize the model. We solve the variational model based on the classical gradient descent method with built-in deep CNNs so that iteration-wise image priors for the atmospheric light, transmission map and clear image can be well estimated. Our method combines the properties of both the physical formation of image dehazing as well as deep learning approaches. We show that it is able to generate clear images as well as accurate atmospheric light and transmission maps. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods in both benchmark datasets and real-world images.

One of the key limitations of modern deep learning approaches lies in the amount of data required to train them. Humans, by contrast, can learn to recognize novel categories from just a few examples. Instrumental to this rapid learning ability is the compositional structure of concept representations in the human brain --- something that deep learning models are lacking. In this work, we make a step towards bridging this gap between human and machine learning by introducing a simple regularization technique that allows the learned representation to be decomposable into parts. Our method uses category-level attribute annotations to disentangle the feature space of a network into subspaces corresponding to the attributes. These attributes can be either purely visual, like object parts, or more abstract, like openness and symmetry. We demonstrate the value of compositional representations on three datasets: CUB-200-2011, SUN397, and ImageNet, and show that they require fewer examples to learn classifiers for novel categories.